Of course you’re fine with ending it, Go would say. It got hard.
But there was a better reason: Amy was blooming large in my mind. She was gone, and yet she was more present than anyone else. I’d fallen in love with Amy because I was the ultimate Nick with her. Loving her made me superhuman, it made me feel alive. At her easiest, she was hard, because her brain was always working, working, working—I had to exert myself just to keep pace with her. I’d spend an hour crafting a casual e-mail to her, I became a student of arcana so I could keep her interested: the Lake poets, the code duello, the French Revolution. Her mind was both wide and deep, and I got smarter being with her. And more considerate, and more active, and more alive, and almost electric, because for Amy, love was like drugs or booze or porn: There was no plateau. Each exposure needed to be more intense than the last to achieve the same result.
Amy made me believe I was exceptional, that I was up to her level of play. That was both our making and undoing. Because I couldn’t handle the demands of greatness. I began craving ease and average-ness, and I hated myself for it, and ultimately, I realized, I punished her for it. I turned her into the brittle, prickly thing she became. I had pretended to be one kind of man and revealed myself to be quite another. Worse, I convinced myself our tragedy was entirely her making. I spent years working myself into the very thing I swore she was: a righteous ball of hate.
On the flight home, I’d looked at Clue 4 for so long, I’d memorized it. I wanted to torture myself. No wonder her notes were so different this time: My wife was pregnant, she wanted to start over, return us to our dazzling, happy aliveness. I could picture her running around town to hide those sweet notes, eager as a schoolgirl for me to get to the end—the announcement that she was pregnant with my child. Wood. It had to be an old-fashioned cradle. I knew my wife: It had to be an antique cradle. Although the clue wasn’t quite in an expectant-mother tone.
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.
I was almost home when I figured it out. Store goodies for anniversary five: Goodies would be something made of wood. To punish is to take someone to the woodshed. It was the woodshed behind my sister’s house—a place to stow lawn-mower parts and rusty tools—a decrepit old outbuilding, like something from a slasher movie where campers are slowly killed off. Go never went back there; she’d often joked of burning it down since she moved into the house. Instead, she’d let it get even more overgrown and cobwebbed. We’d always joked that it would be a good place to bury a body.
It couldn’t be.
I drove across town, my face numb, my hands cold. Go’s car was in the driveway, but I slipped past the glowing living-room window and down the steep downhill slope, and I was soon out of her sight range, out of sight of anyone. Very private.
Back to the far back of the yard, on the edge of the tree line, there was the shed.
I opened the door.
Nonononono.
part two
BOY MEETS GIRL
AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE
THE DAY OF
I’m so much happier now that I’m dead.
Technically, missing. Soon to be presumed dead. But as shorthand, we’ll say dead. It’s been only a matter of hours, but I feel better already: loose joints, wavy muscles. At one point this morning, I realized my face felt strange, different. I looked in the rearview mirror—dread Carthage forty-three miles behind me, my smug husband lounging around his sticky bar as mayhem dangled on a thin piano wire just above his shitty, oblivious head—and I realized I was smiling. Ha! That’s new.
My checklist for today—one of many checklists I’ve made over the past year—sits beside me in the passenger seat, a spot of blood right next to Item 22: Cut myself. But Amy is afraid of blood, the diary readers will say. (The diary, yes! We’ll get to my brilliant diary.) No, I’m not, not a bit, but for the past year I’ve been saying I am. I told Nick probably half a dozen times how afraid I am of blood, and when he said, “I don’t remember you being so afraid of blood,” I replied, “I’ve told you, I’ve told you so many times!” Nick has such a careless memory for other people’s problems, he just assumed it was true. Swooning at the plasma center, that was a nice touch. I really did that, I didn’t just write that I did. (Don’t fret, we’ll sort this out: the true and the not true and the might as well be true.)