Gone Girl

bed, just perched nearby with broth and juice and a gently starched voice. Poor darling .
    Now he is here, dashing in a white midsummer suit (Desi changes wardrobes monthly – what was appropriate for June would not work for July – I’ve always admired the discipline, the precision of the Collings’s costuming). He looks good. I don’t. I am too aware of my humid glasses, the extra roll of flesh at my waist.
    ‘Amy.’ He touches my cheek, then pulls me in for an embrace.
    Not a hug, Desi doesn’t hug, it’s more like being encased by something tailored just to you. ‘Sweetheart. You can’t imagine. That call. I thought I’d gone insane. I thought I was making you up! I’d daydreamed about it, that somehow you were alive, and then. That call. Are you okay?’
    ‘I am now,’ I say. ‘I feel safe now. It’s been awful.’ And then I burst into tears, actual tears, which hadn’t been the plan, but theyfeel so relieving, and they fit the moment so perfectly, that I let myself unravel entirely. The stress drips off me: the nerve of enacting the plan, the fear of being caught, the loss of my money, the betrayal, the manhandling, the pure wildness of being on my own for the first time in my life.
    I look quite pretty after a cry of about two minutes – longer than that and the nose goes runny, the puffiness sets in, but up to that, my lips gets fuller, my eyes bigger, my cheeks flushed. I count as I cry into Desi’s crisp shoulder, one Mississippi, two Mississippi – that river again – and I curb the tears at one minute and forty-eight seconds.
    ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t get here earlier, sweetheart,’ Desi says.
    ‘I know how full Jacqueline keeps your schedule,’ I demur. Desi’s mom is a touchy subject in our relationship.
    He studies me. ‘You look very … different,’ he says. ‘So full in the face, especially. And your poor hair is—’ He catches himself. ‘Amy. I just never thought I could be so grateful for anything. Tell me what’s happened.’
    I tell a Gothic tale of possessiveness and rage, of Midwest steak-and-potato brutality, barefoot pregnancy, animalistic dominance. Of rape and pills and liquor and fists. Pointed cowboy boots in the ribs, fear and betrayal, parental apathy, isolation, and Nick’s final telling words: ‘You can never leave me. I will kill you. I will find you no matter what. You are mine.’
    How I had to disappear for my own safety and the safety of my unborn child, and how I needed Desi’s help. My savior. My story would satisfy Desi’s craving for ruined women – I was now the most damaged of them all. Long ago, back in boarding school, I’d told him about my father’s nightly visits to my bedroom, me in a ruffly pink nightgown, staring at the ceiling until he was done. Desi has loved me ever since the lie, I know he pictures making love to me, how gentle and reassuring he would be as he plunged into me, stroking my hair. I know he pictures me crying softly as I give myself to him.
    ‘I can’t ever go back to my old life, Desi. Nick will kill me. I’ll never feel safe. But I can’t let him go to prison. I just wanted to disappear. I didn’t realize the police would think he did it.’
    I glance prettily toward the band onstage, where a skeletal septuagenarian is singing about love. Not far from our table, a straight-backed guy with a trim mustache tosses his cup toward a trash can near us and bricks (a term I learned from Nick). I wish I’d picked a more picturesque spot. And now the guy is looking at me, tiltinghis head toward the side, in exaggerated confusion. If he were a cartoon, he’d scratch his head, and it would make a rubbery wiik-wiik sound. For some reason, I think: He looks like a cop . I turn my back to him.
    ‘Nick is the last thing for you to worry about,’ Desi said. ‘Give that worry to me and I’ll take care of it.’ He holds out his hand, an old gesture. He is my worry-keeper; it is a ritual game we played as teens. I pretend to place something in his palm and he closes his fingers over it and I actually feel better.
    ‘No, I won’t take care of it. I do hope Nick dies for what he did to you,’ he said. ‘In a sane society, he would.’
    ‘Well, we’re in an insane society, so I need to stay hidden,’ I said. ‘Do you think that’s horrible of me?’ I already know the answer.
    ‘Sweetheart, of course not. You are doing what you’ve been forced to do. It would be madness to do anything else.’
    He