Gone Girl(84)

“Dad? What are you doing here? Everyone’s worried.”

He looked at me with dark brown eyes, sharp eyes, not the glazed-milk color some elderly acquire. It would have been less disconcerting if they’d been milky.

“She told me to come,” he snapped. “She told me to come. This is my house, I can come whenever I want.”

“You walked all the way here?”

“I can come here anytime. You may hate me, but she loves me.” I almost laughed. Even my father was reinventing a relationship with Amy.

A few photographers on my front lawn began shooting. I had to get my dad back to the home. I could picture the article they’d have to cook up to go along with this exclusive footage: What kind of father was Bill Dunne, what kind of man did he raise? Good God, if my dad started in on one of his harangues against the bitches … I dialed Comfort Hill, and after some finagling, they sent an orderly to retrieve him. I made a display of walking him gently to the sedan, murmuring reassuringly as the photographers got their shots.

My dad. I smiled as he left. I tried to make it seem very proud-son. The reporters asked me if I killed my wife. I was retreating to the house when a cop car pulled up.

It was Boney who came to my home, braving the paparazzi, to tell me. She did it kindly, in a gentle-fingertip voice.

Amy was pregnant.

My wife was gone with my baby inside her. Boney watched me, waiting for my reaction—make it part of the police report—so I told myself, Act correctly, don’t blow it, act the way a man acts when he hears this news. I ducked my head into my hands and muttered, Oh God, oh God, and while I was doing it, I saw my wife on the floor of our kitchen, her hands around her belly and her head bashed in.





AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE

JUNE 26, 2012


DIARY ENTRY

I have never felt more alive in my life. It is a bright, blue-sky day, the birds are lunatic with the warmth, the river outside is gushing past, and I am utterly alive. Scared, thrilled, but alive.

This morning when I woke up, Nick was gone. I sat in bed staring at the ceiling, watching the sun golden it a foot at a time, the bluebirds singing right outside our window, and I wanted to vomit. My throat was clenching and unclenching like a heart. I told myself I would not throw up, then I ran to the bathroom and threw up: bile and warm water and one small bobbing pea. As my stomach was seizing and my eyes were tearing and I was gasping for breath, I started doing the only kind of math a woman does, huddled over a toilet. I’m on the pill, but I’d also forgotten a day or two—what does it matter, I’m thirty-eight, I’ve been on the pill for almost two decades. I’m not going to accidentally get pregnant.

I found the tests behind a locked sheet of glass. I had to track down a harried, mustached woman to unlock the case, and point out one I wanted while she waited impatiently. She handed it to me with a clinical stare and said, “Good luck.”

I didn’t know what would be good luck: plus sign or minus sign. I drove home and read the directions three times, and I held the stick at the right angle for the right number of seconds, and then I set it on the edge of the sink and ran away like it was a bomb. Three minutes, so I turned on the radio and of course it was a Tom Petty song—is there ever a time you turn on the radio and don’t hear a Tom Petty song?—so I sang every word to “American Girl” and then I crept back into the bathroom like the test was something I had to sneak up on, my heart beating more frantically than it should, and I was pregnant.

I was suddenly running across the summer lawn and down the street, banging on Noelle’s door, and when she opened it, I burst into tears and showed her the stick and yelled, “I’m pregnant!”

And then someone else besides me knew, and so I was scared.

Once I got back home, I had two thoughts.

One: Our anniversary is coming next week. I will use the clues as love letters, a beautiful antique wooden cradle waiting at the end. I will convince him we belong together. As a family.

Two: I wish I’d been able to get that gun.

I get frightened now, sometimes, when my husband gets home. A few weeks ago, Nick asked me to go out on the raft with him, float along in the current under a blue sky. I actually wrapped my hands around our newel post when he asked me this, I clung to it. Because I had an image of him wobbling the raft—teasing at first, laughing at my panic, and then his face going tight, determined, and me falling into the water, that muddy brown water, scratchy with sticks and sand, and him on top of me, holding me under with one strong arm, until I stopped struggling.

I can’t help it. Nick married me when I was a young, rich, beautiful woman, and now I am poor, jobless, closer to forty than thirty; I’m not just pretty anymore, I am pretty for my age. It is the truth: My value has decreased. I can tell by the way Nick looks at me. But it’s not the look of a guy who took a tumble on an honest bet. It’s the look of a man who feels swindled. Soon it may be the look of a man who is trapped. He might have been able to divorce me before the baby. But he would never do that now, not Good Guy Nick. He couldn’t bear to have everyone in this family-values town believe he’s the kind of guy who’d abandon his wife and child. He’d rather stay and suffer with me. Suffer and resent and rage.