Gone Girl

I’ve been daydreaming of is Nick, in those early days. I thought I would daydream more about Nick getting ass-raped in prison, but I haven’t so much, not so much, lately. I think about those early, early days, when we would lie in bed next to each other, naked flesh on cool cotton, and he would just stare at me, one finger tracing my jaw from my chin to my ear, making me wriggle, that light tickling on my lobe, and then through all the seashell curves of my ear and into my hairline, and then he’d take hold of one lock of hair, like he did that very first time we kissed, and pull it all the way to the end and tug twice, gently, like he was ringing a bell. And he’d say, ‘You are better than any storybook, you are better than anything anyone could make up.’
    Nick fastened me to the earth. Nick wasn’t like Desi, who brought me things I wanted (tulips, wine) to make me do the things he wanted (love him). Nick just wanted me to be happy, that’s all, very pure. Maybe I mistook that for laziness. I just want you to be happy, Amy . How many times did he say that and I took it to mean: I just want you to be happy, Amy, because that’s less work for me . But maybe I was unfair. Well, not unfair but confused. No one I’ve loved has ever not had an agenda. So how could I know?
    It really is true. It took this awful situation for us to realize it. Nick and I fit together. I am a little too much, and he is a little too little. I am a thornbush, bristling from the overattention of my parents, and he is a man of a million little fatherly stab wounds, and my thorns fit perfectly into them.
    I need to get home to him.

NICK DUNNE
    FOURTEEN DAYS GONE
    I woke up on my sister’s couch with a raging hangover and an urge to kill my wife. This was fairly common in the days after the Diary Interview with the police. I’d imagine finding Amy tucked away in some spa on the West Coast, sipping pineapple juice on a divan, her cares floating way, far away, above a perfect blue sky, and me, dirty, smelly from an urgent cross-country drive, standing in front of her, blocking the sun until she looks up, and then my hands around her perfect throat, with its cords and hollows and the pulse thumping first urgently and then slowly as we look into each other’s eyes and at last have some understanding.
    I was going to be arrested. If not today, tomorrow; if not tomorrow, the next day. I had taken the fact that they let me walk out of the station as a good sign, but Tanner had shut me down: ‘Without a body, a conviction is incredibly tough. They’re just dotting the I’s, crossing the T’s. Spend these days doing whatever you need to do, because once the arrest happens, we’ll be busy.’
    Just outside the window, I could hear the rumbling of camera crews – men greeting each other good morning, as if they were clocking in at the factory. Cameras click-click-clicked like restless locusts, shooting the front of Go’s house. Someone had leaked the discovery of my ‘man cave’ of goods on my sister’s property, my imminent arrest. Neither of us had dared to so much as flick at a curtain.
    Go walked into the room in flannel boxers and her high school Butthole Surfers T-shirt, her laptop in the crook of an arm. ‘Every one hates you again,’ she said.
    ‘Fickle fucks.’
    ‘Last night someone leaked the information about the shed, about Amy’s purse and the diary. Now it’s all: Nick Is a Liar, Nick Is a Killer, Nick Is a Lying Killer . Sharon Schieber just released a statement saying she was very shocked and disappointed with thedirection the case was taking. Oh, and everyone knows all about the porn – Kill the Bitches .’
    ‘ Hurt the Bitch .’
    ‘Oh, excuse me,’ she said. ‘Hurt the Bitch . So Nick Is a Lying Killer-slash-Sexual Sadist . Ellen Abbott is going to go fucking rabid. She’s crazy anti-porn lady.’
    ‘Of course she is,’ I said. ‘I’m sure Amy is very aware of that.’
    ‘Nick?’ she said in her wake up voice. ‘This is bad.’
    ‘Go, it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks, we need to remember that,’ I said. ‘What matters right now is what Amy is thinking. If she’s softening toward me.’
    ‘Nick. You really think she can go that fast from hating you so much to falling in love with you again?’
    It was the fifth anniversary of our conversation on this topic.
    ‘Go, yeah, I do. Amy was never a person with any sort of bullshit detector. If you said she looked beautiful, she