Gone Girl

wide and Sharon Schieber entered, as smooth as if she were being borne by a team of swans. She was a beautiful woman, a woman who had probably never looked girlish. A woman whose nose probably never sweated. She had thick dark hair and giant brown eyes that could look doelike or wicked.
    ‘It’s Sharon!’ Go said, a thrilled whisper to imitate our mom.
    Sharon turned to Go and nodded majestically, came over to greet us. ‘I’m Sharon,’ she said in a warm, deep voice, taking both of Go’s hands.
    ‘Our mother loved you,’ Go said.
    ‘I’m so glad,’ Sharon said, managing to sound warm. She turned to me and was about to speak when her producer clicked up onhigh heels and whispered in her ear. Then waited for Sharon’s reaction, then whispered again.
    ‘Oh. Oh my God,’ Sharon said. When she turned back to me, she wasn’t smiling at all.

AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE
    TEN DAYS GONE
    I have made a call: to make a call. The meeting can’t happen until this evening – there are predictable complications – so I kill the day by primping and prepping.
    I clean myself in a McDonald’s bathroom – green gel on wet paper towels – and change into a cheap, papery sundress. I think about what I’ll say. I am surprisingly eager. The shithole life was wearing on me: the communal washing machine with someone’s wet underwear always stuck in the rungs at the top, to be peeled out by hesitant pincered fingers; the corner of my cabin rug that was forever mysteriously damp; the dripping faucet in the bathroom.
    At 5 o’clock, I begin driving north to the meeting spot, a river casino called Horseshoe Alley. It appears out of nowhere, a blinking neon clump in the middle of a scrawny forest. I roll in on fumes – a cliché I’ve never put to practice – park the car, and take in the view: a migration of the elderly, scuttling like broken insects on walkers and canes, jerking oxygen tanks toward the bright lights. Sliding in and out of the groups of octogenarians are hustling, overdressed boys who’ve watched too many Vegas movies and don’t know how poignant they are, trying to imitate Rat Pack cool in cheap suits in the Missouri woods.
    I enter under a glowing billboard promoting – for two nights only – the reunion of a ’50s doo-wop group. Inside, the casino is frigid and close. The penny slots clink and clang, joyful electronic chirps that don’t match the dull, drooping faces of the people sitting in front of the machines, smoking cigarettes above dangling oxygen masks. Penny in penny in penny in penny in penny in ding-ding-ding! penny in penny in. The money that they waste goes to the underfunded public schools that their bored, blinking grandchildren attend. Penny in penny in. A group of wasted boys stumble past, a bachelor party, the boys’ lips wet from shots; they don’t even notice me, husky and Hamill-haired. They are talking about girls, get ussome girls , but besides me, the only girls I see are golden. The boys will drink away their disappointment and try not to kill fellow motorists on the way home.
    I wait in a pocket bar to the far left of the casino entrance, as planned, and watch the aged boy band sing to a large snowy-haired audience, snapping and clapping along, shuffling gnarled fingers through bowls of complimentary peanuts. The skeletal singers, withered beneath bedazzled tuxes, spin slowly, carefully, on replaced hips, the dance of the moribund.
    The casino seemed like a good idea at first – right off the highway, filled with drunks and elderly, neither of whom are known for eyesight. But I am feeling crowded and fidgety, aware of the cameras in every corner, the doors that could snap shut.
    I am about to leave when he ambles up.
    ‘Amy.’
    I’ve called devoted Desi to my aid (and abet). Desi, with whom I’ve never entirely lost touch, and who – despite what I’ve told Nick, my parents – doesn’t unnerve me in the slightest. Desi, another man along the Mississippi. I always knew he might come in handy. It’s good to have at least one man you can use for anything. Desi is a white-knight type. He loves troubled women. Over the years, after Wickshire, when we’d talk, I’d ask after his latest girlfriend, and no matter the girl, he would always say: ‘Oh, she’s not doing very well, unfortunately.’ But I know it is fortunate for Desi – the eating disorders, the painkiller addictions, the crippling depressions. He is never happier than when he’s at a bedside. Not in