Gone Girl(95)
“ ‘The reflex is an only child,’ ” Go said, nodding.
“ ‘He’s waiting by the park,’ ” I muttered back automatically.
“So if this is it, what does it mean?” Go said, turning to me, studying my eyes. “It’s a song about a handyman. Someone who might have access to your house, to fix things. Or rig things. Who would be paid in cash so there’s no record.”
“Someone who installed video cameras?” I asked. “Amy went out of town a few times during the—the affair. Maybe she thought she’d catch us on tape.”
Go shot a question at me.
“No, never, never at our house.”
“Could it be some secret door?” Go suggested. “Some secret false panel Amy put in where she’s hidden something that will … I don’t know, exonerate you?”
“I think that’s it. Yes, Amy is using a Madness song to give me a clue to my own freedom, if only I can decipher their wily, ska-infused codes.”
Go laughed then too. “Jesus, maybe we’re the ones who are bat-shit crazy. I mean, are we? Is this totally insane?”
“It’s not insane. She set me up. There is no other way to explain the warehouse of stuff in your backyard. And it’s very Amy to drag you into it, smudge you a little bit with my filth. No, this is Amy. The gift, the fucking giddy, sly note I’m supposed to understand. No, and it has to come back to the puppets. Try the quote with the word marionettes.”
I collapsed on the couch, my body a dull throb. Go played secretary. “Oh my God. Duh! They’re Punch and Judy dolls. Nick! We’re idiots. That line, that’s Punch’s trademark. That’s the way to do it!”
“Okay. The old puppet show—it’s really violent, right?” I asked.
“This is so fucked up.”
“Go, it’s violent, right?”
“Yeah. Violent. God, she’s fucking crazy.”
“He beats her, right?”
“I’m reading … okay. Punch kills their baby.” She looked up at me. “And then when Judy confronts him, he beats her. To death.”
My throat got wet with saliva.
“And each time he does something awful and gets away with it, he says, ‘That’s the way to do it!’ ” She grabbed Punch and placed him in her lap, her fingers grasping the wooden hands as if she were holding an infant. “He’s glib, even as he murders his wife and child.”
I looked at the puppets. “So she’s giving me the narrative of my frame-up.”
“I can’t even wrap my brain around this. Fucking psycho.”
“Go?”
“Yeah, right: You didn’t want her to be pregnant, you got angry and killed her and the unborn baby.”
“Feels anticlimactic somehow,” I said.
“The climax is when you are taught the lesson that Punch never learns, and you are caught and charged with murder.”
“And Missouri has the death penalty,” I said. “Fun game.”
AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE
THE DAY OF
You know how I found out? I saw them. That’s how stupid my husband is. One snowy April night, I felt so lonely. I was drinking warm amaretto with Bleecker and reading, lying on the floor as the snow came down, listening to old scratchy albums, like Nick and I used to (that entry was true). I had a burst of romantic cheer: I’d surprise him at The Bar, and we’d have a few drinks and wander through the empty streets together, hand in mitten. We would walk around the hushed downtown and he would press me against a wall and kiss me in the snow that looked like sugar clouds. That’s right, I wanted him back so badly that I was willing to re-create that moment. I was willing to pretend to be someone else again. I remember thinking: We can still find a way to make this work. Faith! I followed him all the way to Missouri, because I still believed he’d love me again somehow, love me that intense, thick way he did, the way that made everything good. Faith!
I got there just in time to see him leaving with her. I was in the goddamn parking lot, twenty feet behind him, and he didn’t even register me, I was a ghost. He didn’t have his hands on her, not yet, but I knew. I could tell because he was so aware of her. I followed them, and suddenly, he pressed her up against a tree—in the middle of town—and kissed her. Nick is cheating, I thought dumbly, and before I could make myself say anything, they were going up to her apartment. I waited for an hour, sitting on the doorstep, then got too cold—blue fingernails, chattering teeth—and went home. He never even knew I knew.
I had a new persona, not of my choosing. I was Average Dumb Woman Married to Average Shitty Man. He had single-handedly de-amazed Amazing Amy.