Woooonk-woooonk-woooonk!
It was exactly the wrong tone—smug, petulant, utterly unconcerned—and exactly the wrong question, because I didn’t know the answer, which infuriated me. No matter how many clues I solved, I’d be faced with some Amy trivia to unman me.
“Look, this is Nick Dunne, this is my dad’s house, this account was set up by me,” I snapped. “So it doesn’t really fucking matter what my wife’s first pet’s name was.”
Woooonk-woooonk-woooonk!
“Please don’t take that tone with me, sir.”
“Look, I just came in to grab one thing from my dad’s house, and now I’m leaving, okay?”
“I have to notify the police immediately.”
“Can you just turn off the goddamn alarm so I can think?”
Woooonk-woooonk-woooonk!
“The alarm’s off.”
“The alarm is not off.”
“Sir, I warned you once, do not take that tone with me.”
You fucking bitch.
“You know what? Fuck it, fuck it, fuck it.”
I hung up just as I remembered Amy’s cat’s name, the very first one: Stuart.
I called back, got a different operator, a reasonable operator, who turned off the alarm and, God bless her, called off the police. I really wasn’t in the mood to explain myself.
I sat on the thin, cheap carpet and made myself breathe, my heart clattering. After a minute, after my shoulders untensed and my jaw unclenched and my hands unfisted and my heart returned to normal, I stood up and momentarily debated just leaving, as if that would teach Amy a lesson. But as I stood up, I saw a blue envelope left on the kitchen counter like a Dear John note.
I took a deep breath, blew it out—new attitude—and opened the envelope, pulled out the letter marked with a heart.
Hi Darling,
So we both have things we want to work on. For me, it’d be my perfectionism, my occasional (wishful thinking?) self-righteousness. For you? I know you worry that you’re sometimes too distant, too removed, unable to be tender or nurturing. Well, I want to tell you—here in your father’s house—that isn’t true. You are not your father. You need to know that you are a good man, you are a sweet man, you are kind. I’ve punished you for not being able to read my mind sometimes, for not being able to act in exactly the way I wanted you to act right at exactly that moment. I punished you for being a real, breathing man. I ordered you around instead of trusting you to find your way. I didn’t give you the benefit of the doubt: that no matter how much you and I blunder, you always love me and want me to be happy. And that should be enough for any girl, right? I worry I’ve said things about you that aren’t actually true, and that you’ve come to believe them. So I am here to say now: You are WARM. You are my sun.
If Amy were with me, as she’d planned on being, she would have nuzzled into me the way she used to do, her face in the crook of my neck, and she would have kissed me and smiled and said, You are, you know. My sun. My throat tight, I took a final look around my father’s house and left, closing the door on the heat. In my car, I fumbled open the envelope marked fourth clue. We had to be near the end.
Picture me: I’m a girl who is very bad
I need to be punished, and by punished, I mean had
It’s where you store goodies for anniversary five
Pardon me if this is getting contrived!
A good time was had here right at sunny midday
Then out for a cocktail, all so terribly gay.
So run there right now, full of sweet sighs,
And open the door for your big surprise.
My stomach seized. I didn’t know what this one meant. I reread it. I couldn’t even guess. Amy had stopped taking it easy on me. I wasn’t going to finish the treasure hunt after all.
I felt a surge of angst. What a fucking day. Boney was out to get me, Noelle was insane, Shawna was pissed, Hilary was resentful, the woman at the security company was a bitch, and my wife had stumped me finally. It was time to end this goddamn day. There was only one woman I could stand to be around right now.
Go took one look at me—rattled, tight-lipped, and heat-exhausted from my dad’s—and parked me on the couch, announced she’d make some late dinner. Five minutes later, she was stepping carefully toward me, balancing my meal on an ancient TV tray. An old Dunne standby: grilled cheese and BBQ chips, a plastic cup of …
“It’s not Kool-Aid,” Go said. “It’s beer. Kool-Aid seemed a little too regressive.”
“This is very nurturing and strange of you, Go.”
“You’re cooking tomorrow.”
“Hope you like canned soup.”
She sat down on the couch next to me, stole a chip from my plate, and asked, too casually: “Any thoughts on why the cops would ask me if Amy was still a size two?”