Gone Girl: A Novel (40 page)

“Our clients aren’t exactly Big Brother types,” she said. “Not that they’re criminals, but they don’t usually like to be on the radar.”

No, they don’t seem like they’d appreciate that. There’s my friend Jeff, who keeps his odd hours and returns with suspicious amounts of undocumented fish that he stores in massive ice chests. He is literally fishy. At the far cabin is a couple who are probably in their forties, but meth-weathered, so they look at least sixty. They stay inside most of the time, aside from occasional wild-eyed treks to the laundry room—darting across the gravel parking lot with their clothes in trash bags, some sort of tweaky spring cleaning. Hellohello, they say, always twice with two head nods, then continue on their way. The man sometimes has a boa constrictor wrapped around his neck, though the snake is never acknowledged, by me or him. In addition
to these regulars, a goodly amount of single women straggle through, usually with bruises. Some seem embarrassed, others horribly sad.

One moved in yesterday, a blond girl, very young, with brown eyes and a split lip. She sat on her front porch—the cabin next to mine—smoking a cigarette, and when we caught each other’s eye, she sat up straight, proud, her chin jutted out. No apology in her. I thought:
I need to be like her. I will make a study of her: She is who I can be for a bit—the abused tough girl hiding out until the storm passes over
.

After a few hours of morning TV—scanning for any news on the Amy Elliott Dunne case—I slip into my clammy bikini. I’ll go to the pool. Float a bit, take a vacation from my harpy brain. The pregnancy news was gratifying, but there is still so much I don’t know. I planned so hard, but there are things beyond my control, spoiling my vision of how this should go. Andie hasn’t done her part. The diary may need some help being found. The police haven’t made a move to arrest Nick. I don’t know what they’ve all discovered, and I don’t like it. I’m tempted to make a call, a tip-line call, to nudge them in the right direction. I’ll wait a few more days. I have a calendar on my wall, and I mark three days from now with the words
CALL TODAY
. So I know that’s how long I’ve agreed to wait. Once they find the diary, things will move quickly.

Outside, it’s jungle-hot once again, the cicadas closing in. My inflatable raft is pink with mermaids on it and too small for me—my calves dangle in the water—but it keeps me floating aimlessly for a good hour, which is something I’ve learned “I” like to do.

I can see a blond head bobbing across the parking lot, and then the girl with the split lip comes through the chain-link gate with one of the bath towels from the cabins, no bigger than a tea towel, and a pack of Merits and a book and SPF 120. Lung cancer but not skin. She settles herself and applies the lotion carefully, which is different from the other beat-up women who come here—they slather themselves in baby oil, leave greasy shadows on the lawn chairs.

The girl nods to me, the nod men give each other when they sit down at a bar. She is reading
The Martian Chronicles
by Ray Bradbury. A sci-fi girl. Abused women like escapism, of course.

“Good book,” I toss over to her, a harmless conversational beach ball.

“Someone left it in my cabin. It was this or
Black Beauty
.” She puts on fat, cheap sunglasses.

“Not bad either.
Black Stallion
’s better, though.”

She looks up at me with sunglasses still on. Two black bee-eyed discs. “Hunh.”

She turns back to her book, the pointed
I am now reading
gesture usually seen on crowded airplanes. And I am the annoying busybody next to her who hogs the armrest and says things like “Business or pleasure?”

“I’m Nancy,” I say. A new name—not Lydia—which isn’t smart in these cramped quarters, but it comes out. My brain sometimes goes too fast for my own good. I was thinking of the girl’s split lip, her sad, pre-owned vibe, and then I was thinking of abuse and prostitution, and then I was thinking of
Oliver!
, my favorite musical as a child, and the doomed hooker Nancy, who loved her violent man right until he killed her, and then I was wondering why my feminist mother and I ever watched
Oliver!
, considering “As Long as He Needs Me” is basically a lilting paean to domestic violence, and then I was thinking that Diary Amy was also killed by her man, she was actually a lot like—

“I’m Nancy,” I say.

“Greta.”

Sounds made up.

“Nice to meet you, Greta.”

I float away. Behind me I hear the shwick of Greta’s lighter, and then smoke wafts overhead like spindrifts.

Forty minutes later, Greta sits down on the edge of the pool, dangles her legs in the water. “It’s hot,” she says. “The water.” She has a husky, hardy voice, cigarettes and prairie dirt.

“Like bathwater.”

“It’s not very refreshing.”

“The lake’s not much cooler.”

“I can’t swim anyway,” she says.

I’ve never met anyone who can’t swim. “I can just barely,” I lie. “Dog paddle.”

She ruffles her legs, the waves gently rocking my raft. “So what’s it like here?” she asks.

“Nice. Quiet.”

“Good, that’s what I need.”

I turn to look at her. She has two gold necklaces, a perfectly round bruise the size of a plum near her left breast, and a shamrock tattoo just above her bikini line. Her swimsuit is brand-new, cherry-red, cheap. From the marina convenience store where I bought my raft.

“You on your own?” I ask.

“Very.”

I am unsure what to ask next. Is there some sort of code that abused women use with each other, a language I don’t know?

“Guy trouble?”

She twitches an eyebrow at me that seems to be a yes. “Me too,” I say.

“It’s not like we weren’t warned,” she says. She cups her hand into the water, lets it dribble down her front. “My mom, one of the first things she ever told me, going to school the first day:
Stay away from boys. They’ll either throw rocks or look up your skirt
.”

“You should make a T-shirt that says that.”

She laughs. “It’s true, though. It’s always true. My mom lives in a lesbian village down in Texas. I keep thinking I should join her. Everyone seems happy there.”

“A lesbian village?”

“Like a, a whaddayacallit. A commune. Bunch of lesbians bought land, started their own society, sort of. No men allowed. Sounds just freakin’ great to me, world without men.” She cups another handful of water, pulls up her sunglasses, and wets her face. “Too bad I don’t like pussy.”

She laughs, an old woman’s angry-bark laugh. “So, are there any asshole guys here I can start dating?” she says. “That’s my, like, pattern. Run away from one, bump into the next.”

“It’s half empty most of the time. There’s Jeff, the guy with the beard, he’s actually really nice,” I say. “He’s been here longer than me.”

“How long are you staying?” she asks.

I pause. It’s odd, I don’t know the exact amount of time I will be here. I had planned on staying until Nick was arrested, but I have no idea if he will be arrested soon.

“Till he stops looking for you, huh?” Greta guesses.

“Something like that.”

She examines me closely, frowns. My stomach tightens. I wait for her to say it: You look familiar.

“Never go back to a man with fresh bruises. Don’t give him the satisfaction,” Greta intones. She stands up, gathers her things. Dries her legs on the tiny towel.

“Good day killed,” she says.

For some reason, I give a thumbs-up, which I’ve never done in my life.

“Come to my cabin when you get out, if you want to,” she says. “We can watch TV.”

I bring a fresh tomato from Dorothy, held in my palm like a shiny housewarming gift. Greta comes to the door and barely acknowledges me, as if I’ve been dropping over for years. She plucks the tomato from my hand.

“Perfect, I was just making sandwiches,” she says. “Grab a seat.” She points toward the bed—we have no sitting rooms here—and moves into her kitchenette, which has the same plastic cutting board, the same dull knife, as mine. She slices the tomato. A plastic disc of lunch meat sits on the counter, the stomachy-sweet smell filling the room. She sets two slippery sandwiches on paper plates, along with handfuls of goldfish crackers, and marches them into the bedroom area, her hand already on the remote, flipping from noise to noise. We sit on the edge of the bed, side by side, watching the TV.

“Stop me if you see something,” Greta says.

I take a bite of my sandwich. My tomato slips out the side and onto my thigh.

The Beverly Hillbillies, Suddenly Susan, Armageddon
.

Ellen Abbott Live
. A photo of me fills the screen. I am the lead story. Again. I look great.

“You seen this?” Greta asked, not looking at me, talking as if my disappearance were a rerun of a decent TV show. “This woman vanishes on her five-year wedding anniversary. Husband acts real weird from the start, all smiley and shit. Turns out he bumped up her life insurance, and they just found out the wife was
pregnant
. And the guy didn’t want it.”

The screen cuts to another photo of me juxtaposed with
Amazing Amy
.

Greta turns to me. “You remember those books?”

“Of course!”

“You
like
those books?”

“Everyone likes those books, they’re so cute,” I say.

Greta snorts. “They’re so fake.” Close-up of me.

I wait for her to say how beautiful I am.

“She’s not bad, huh, for, like, her age,” she says. “I hope I look that good when I’m forty.”

Ellen is filling the audience in on my story; my photo lingers on the screen.

“Sounds to me like she was a spoiled rich girl,” Greta says. “High-maintenance. Bitchy.”

That is simply unfair. I’d left no evidence for anyone to conclude that. Since I’d moved to Missouri—well, since I’d come up with my plan—I’d been careful to be low-maintenance, easygoing, cheerful, all those things people want women to be. I waved to neighbors, I ran errands for Mo’s friends, I once brought cola to the ever-soiled Stucks Buckley. I visited Nick’s dad so that all the nurses could testify to how nice I was, so I could whisper over and over into Bill Dunne’s spiderweb brain:
I love you, come live with us, I love you, come live with us
. Just to see if it would catch. Nick’s dad is what the people of Comfort Hill call a roamer—he is always wandering off. I love the idea of Bill Dunne, the living totem of everything Nick fears he could become, the object of Nick’s most profound despair, showing up over and over and over on our doorstep.

“How does she seem bitchy?” I ask.

She shrugs. The TV goes to a commercial for air freshener. A woman is spraying air freshener so her family will be happy. Then to a commercial for very thin panty liners so a woman can wear a dress and dance and meet the man she will later spray air freshener for.

Clean and bleed. Bleed and clean.

“You can just tell,” Greta says. “She just sounds like a rich, bored bitch. Like those rich bitches who use their husbands’ money to start, like,
cupcake
companies and
card shops
and shit.
Boutiques
.”

In New York, I had friends with all those kinds of businesses—they liked to be able to say they worked, even though they only did the little stuff that was fun: Name the cupcake, order the stationery, wear the adorable dress that was from
their very own
store.

“She’s definitely one of those,” Greta said. “Rich bitch putting on airs.”

Greta leaves to go to the bathroom, and I tiptoe into her kitchen, go into her fridge, and spit in her milk, her orange juice, and a container of potato salad, then tiptoe back to the bed.

Flush. Greta returns. “I mean, all that doesn’t mean it’s okay that he
killed
her. She’s just another woman, made a very bad choice in her man.”

She is looking right at me, and I wait for her to say, “Hey, wait a minute …”

But she turns back to the TV, rearranges herself so she is lying on her stomach like a child, her chin in her hands, her face directed at my image on the screen.

“Oh, shit, here it goes,” Greta says. “People are hatin’ on this guy.”

The show gets underway, and I feel a bit better. It is the apotheosis of Amy.

Campbell MacIntosh, childhood friend: “Amy is just a nurturing, motherly type of woman. She loved being a wife. And I know she would have been a great mother. But Nick—you just knew Nick was wrong somehow. Cold and aloof and really calculating—you got the feeling that he was definitely aware of how much money Amy had.”

(Campbell is lying: She got all googly around Nick, she absolutely adored him. But I’m sure she liked the idea that he only married me for my money.)

Shawna Kelly, North Carthage resident: “I found it really, really strange how totally unconcerned he was at the search for his wife. He was just, you know, chatting, passing the time. Flirting around with me, who he didn’t know from Adam. I’d try to turn the conversation to Amy, and he would just—just no interest.”

(I’m sure this desperate old slut absolutely did not try to turn the conversation toward me.)

Steven “Stucks” Buckley, longtime friend of Nick Dunne: “She was a sweetheart. Sweet. Heart. And Nick? He just didn’t seem that worried about Amy being gone. The guy was always like that: self-centered. Stuck-up a little. Like he’d made it all big in New York and we should all bow down.”

(I despise Stucks Buckley, and what the fuck kind of name is that?)

Noelle Hawthorne, looking like she just got new highlights: “I think he killed her. No one will say it, but I will. He abused her, and he bullied her, and he finally killed her.”

(Good dog.)

Greta glances sideways at me, her cheeks smushed up under her hands, her face flickering in the TV glow.

“I hope that’s not true,” she says. “That he killed her. It’d be nice to think that maybe she just got away, just ran away from him, and she’s hiding out all safe and sound.”

She kicks her legs back and forth like a lazy swimmer. I can’t tell if she’s fucking with me.