Gone Girl(19)

She’d clearly been practicing the speech; she smiled proudly as she said it. And even as my wife was offering me this kindness, I was thinking, Of course she has to stage-manage this. She wants the image of me and the wild running river, my hair ruffling in the breeze as I look out onto the horizon and ponder our life together. I can’t just go to Dunkin’ Donuts.

You need to decide what you want. Unfortunately for Amy, I had decided already.

Boney looked up brightly from her notes: “Can you tell me what your wife’s blood type is?” she asked.

“Uh, no, I don’t know.”

“You don’t know your wife’s blood type?”

“Maybe O?” I guessed.

Boney frowned, then made a drawn-out yoga-like sound. “Okay, Nick, here are the things we are doing to help.” She listed them: Amy’s cell was being monitored, her photo circulated, her credit cards tracked. Known sex offenders in the area were being interviewed. Our sparse neighborhood was being canvassed. Our home phone was tapped, in case any ransom calls came in.

I wasn’t sure what to say now. I raked my memory for the lines: What does the husband say at this point in the movie? Depends on whether he’s guilty or innocent.

“I can’t say that reassures me. Are you—is this an abduction, or a missing persons case, or what exactly is going on?” I knew the statistics, knew them from the same TV show I was starring in: If the first forty-eight hours didn’t turn up something in a case, it was likely to go unsolved. The first forty-eight hours were crucial. “I mean, my wife is gone. My wife is gone!” I realized it was the first time I’d said it the way it should have been said: panicked and angry. My dad was a man of infinite varieties of bitterness, rage, distaste. In my lifelong struggle to avoid becoming him, I’d developed an inability to demonstrate much negative emotion at all. It was another thing that made me seem like a dick—my stomach could be all oiled eels, and you would get nothing from my face and less from my words. It was a constant problem: too much control or no control at all.

“Nick, we are taking this extremely seriously,” Boney said. “The lab guys are over at your place as we speak, and that will give us more information to go on. Right now, the more you can tell us about your wife, the better. What is she like?”

The usual husband phrases came into my mind: She’s sweet, she’s great, she’s nice, she’s supportive.

“What is she like how?” I asked.

“Give me an idea of her personality,” Boney prompted. “Like, what did you get her for your anniversary? Jewelry?”

“I hadn’t gotten anything quite yet,” I said. “I was going to do it this afternoon.” I waited for her to laugh and say “baby of the family” again, but she didn’t.

“Okay. Well, then, tell me about her. Is she outgoing? Is she—I don’t know how to say this—is she New Yorky? Like what might come off to some as rude? Might rub people the wrong way?”

“I don’t know. She’s not a never-met-a-stranger kind of person, but she’s not—not abrasive enough to make someone … hurt her.”

This was my eleventh lie. The Amy of today was abrasive enough to want to hurt, sometimes. I speak specifically of the Amy of today, who was only remotely like the woman I fell in love with. It had been an awful fairy-tale reverse transformation. Over just a few years, the old Amy, the girl of the big laugh and the easy ways, literally shed herself, a pile of skin and soul on the floor, and out stepped this new, brittle, bitter Amy. My wife was no longer my wife but a razor-wire knot daring me to unloop her, and I was not up to the job with my thick, numb, nervous fingers. Country fingers. Flyover fingers untrained in the intricate, dangerous work of solving Amy. When I’d hold up the bloody stumps, she’d sigh and turn to her secret mental notebook on which she tallied all my deficiencies, forever noting disappointments, frailties, shortcomings. My old Amy, damn, she was fun. She was funny. She made me laugh. I’d forgotten that. And she laughed. From the bottom of her throat, from right behind that small finger-shaped hollow, which is the best place to laugh from. She released her grievances like handfuls of birdseed: They are there, and they are gone.

She was not the thing she became, the thing I feared most: an angry woman. I was not good with angry women. They brought something out in me that was unsavory.

“She bossy?” Gilpin asked. “Take-charge?”

I thought of Amy’s calendar, the one that went three years into the future, and if you looked a year ahead, you would actually find appointments: dermatologist, dentist, vet. “She’s a planner—she doesn’t, you know, wing anything. She likes to make lists and check things off. Get things done. That’s why this doesn’t make sense—”