Gone Girl

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 all they’ve 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