Gone Girl(107)

Dorothy has one of those ’70s kitten-in-a-tree posters—Hang in There! She posts her poster with all sincerity. I like to picture her running into some self-impressed Williamsburg bitch, all Bettie Page bangs and pointy glasses, who owns the same poster ironically. I’d like to listen to them try to negotiate each other. Ironic people always dissolve when confronted with earnestness, it’s their kryptonite. Dorothy has another gem taped to the wall by the soda machine, showing a toddler asleep on the toilet—Too Tired to Tinkle. I’ve been thinking about stealing this one, a fingernail under the old yellow tape, while I distract-chat with Dorothy. I bet I could get some decent cash for it on eBay—I’d like to keep some cash coming in—but I can’t do it, because that would create an electronic trail, and I’ve read plenty about those from my myriad true-crime books. Electronic trails are bad: Don’t use a cell phone that’s registered to you, because the cell towers can ping your location. Don’t use your ATM or credit card. Use only public computers, well trafficked. Beware of the number of cameras that can be on any given street, especially near a bank or a busy intersection or bodegas. Not that there are any bodegas down here. There are no cameras either, in our cabin complex. I know—I asked Dorothy, pretending it was a safety issue.

“Our clients aren’t exactly Big Brother types,” she said. “Not that they’re criminals, but they don’t usually like to be on the radar.”

No, they don’t seem like they’d appreciate that. There’s my friend Jeff, who keeps his odd hours and returns with suspicious amounts of undocumented fish that he stores in massive ice chests. He is literally fishy. At the far cabin is a couple who are probably in their forties, but meth-weathered, so they look at least sixty. They stay inside most of the time, aside from occasional wild-eyed treks to the laundry room—darting across the gravel parking lot with their clothes in trash bags, some sort of tweaky spring cleaning. Hellohello, they say, always twice with two head nods, then continue on their way. The man sometimes has a boa constrictor wrapped around his neck, though the snake is never acknowledged, by me or him. In addition to these regulars, a goodly amount of single women straggle through, usually with bruises. Some seem embarrassed, others horribly sad.

One moved in yesterday, a blond girl, very young, with brown eyes and a split lip. She sat on her front porch—the cabin next to mine—smoking a cigarette, and when we caught each other’s eye, she sat up straight, proud, her chin jutted out. No apology in her. I thought: I need to be like her. I will make a study of her: She is who I can be for a bit—the abused tough girl hiding out until the storm passes over.

After a few hours of morning TV—scanning for any news on the Amy Elliott Dunne case—I slip into my clammy bikini. I’ll go to the pool. Float a bit, take a vacation from my harpy brain. The pregnancy news was gratifying, but there is still so much I don’t know. I planned so hard, but there are things beyond my control, spoiling my vision of how this should go. Andie hasn’t done her part. The diary may need some help being found. The police haven’t made a move to arrest Nick. I don’t know what they’ve all discovered, and I don’t like it. I’m tempted to make a call, a tip-line call, to nudge them in the right direction. I’ll wait a few more days. I have a calendar on my wall, and I mark three days from now with the words CALL TODAY. So I know that’s how long I’ve agreed to wait. Once they find the diary, things will move quickly.

Outside, it’s jungle-hot once again, the cicadas closing in. My inflatable raft is pink with mermaids on it and too small for me—my calves dangle in the water—but it keeps me floating aimlessly for a good hour, which is something I’ve learned “I” like to do.

I can see a blond head bobbing across the parking lot, and then the girl with the split lip comes through the chain-link gate with one of the bath towels from the cabins, no bigger than a tea towel, and a pack of Merits and a book and SPF 120. Lung cancer but not skin. She settles herself and applies the lotion carefully, which is different from the other beat-up women who come here—they slather themselves in baby oil, leave greasy shadows on the lawn chairs.

The girl nods to me, the nod men give each other when they sit down at a bar. She is reading The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury. A sci-fi girl. Abused women like escapism, of course.

“Good book,” I toss over to her, a harmless conversational beach ball.

“Someone left it in my cabin. It was this or Black Beauty.” She puts on fat, cheap sunglasses.