“She’s sending me up the river.”
“Fuck her. Open the box.”
I knelt down and nudged off the lid with my fingertips, as if expecting an explosion. Silence. I peered inside. At the bottom of the box lay two wooden puppets, side by side. They seemed to be husband and wife. The male was dressed in motley and grinning rabidly, holding a cane or a stick. I pulled the husband figure out, his limbs bouncing around excitedly, a dancer limbering up. The wife was prettier, more delicate, and stiffer. Her face looked shocked, as if she’d seen something alarming. Beneath her was a tiny baby that could be attached to her by a ribbon. The puppets were ancient, heavy, and large, almost as big as ventriloquist dummies. I picked up the male, gripped the thick, clublike handle used to move him, and his arms and legs twitched manically.
“Creepy,” Go said. “Stop.”
Beneath them lay a piece of buttery blue paper folded over once. Amy’s broken-kite handwriting, all triangles and points. It read:
The beginning of a wonderful new story, Nick! “That’s the way to do it!”
Enjoy.
On our mom’s kitchen table, we spread all of Amy’s treasure-hunt clues and the box containing the puppets. We stared at the objects as if we were assembling a jigsaw puzzle.
“Why bother with a treasure hunt if she was planning … her plan,” Go said.
Her plan had become immediate shorthand for faking her disappearance and framing you for murder. It sounded less insane.
“Keep me distracted, for one thing. Make me believe she still loved me. I’m chasing her little clues all over Christendom, believing my wife was wanting to make amends, wanting to jump-start our marriage …”
The moony, girlish state her notes had left me in, it sickened me. It embarrassed me. Marrow-deep embarrassment, the kind that becomes part of your DNA, that changes you. After all these years, Amy could still play me. She could write a few notes and get me back completely. I was her little puppet on a string.
I will find you, Amy. Lovesick words, hateful intentions.
“So I don’t stop to think: Hey, it sure looks like I murdered my wife, I wonder why?”
“And the police would have found it strange—you would have found it strange—if she didn’t do the treasure hunt, this tradition,” Go reasoned. “It would look as if she knew she was going to disappear.”
“This worries me though,” I said, pointing at the puppets. “They’re unusual enough that they have to mean something. I mean, if she just wanted to keep me distracted for a while, the final gift could have been anything wooden.”
Go ran a finger across the male’s motley uniform. “They’re clearly very old. Vintage.” She flipped their clothing upside down to reveal the club handle of the male. The female had only a square-shaped gap at her head. “Is this supposed to be sexual? The male has this giant wooden handle, like a dick. And the female is missing hers. She just has the hole.”
“It’s a fairly obvious statement: Men have penises and women have vaginas?”
Go put a finger inside the female puppet’s gap, swept around to make sure there was nothing hidden. “So what is Amy saying?”
“When I first saw them, I thought: She bought children’s toys. Mom, dad, baby. Because she was pregnant.”
“Is she even pregnant?”
A sense of despair washed over me. Or rather, the opposite. Not a wave coming in, rolling over me, but the ebb of the sea returning: a sense of something pulling away, and me with it. I could no longer hope my wife was pregnant, but I couldn’t bring myself to hope she wasn’t either.
Go pulled out the male doll, scrunched her nose, then lightbulb-popped. “You’re a puppet on a string.”
I laughed. “I literally thought those exact words too. But why a male and female? Amy clearly isn’t a puppet on a string, she’s the puppetmaster.”
“And what’s: That’s the way to do it? To do what?”
“Fuck me for life?”
“It’s not a phrase Amy used to say? Or some quote from the Amy books, or …” She hurried over to her computer and searched for That’s the way to do it. Up came lyrics for “That’s the Way to Do It” by Madness. “Oh, I remember them,” Go said. “Awesome ska band.”
“Ska,” I said, swerving toward delirious laughter. “Great.”
The lyrics were about a handyman who could do many types of home-improvement jobs—including electrical and plumbing—and who preferred to be paid in cash.
“God, I fucking hate the eighties,” I said. “No lyrics ever made sense.”