Gone Girl

return to me. I already pictured this sweet and mediocre girl saying something uninteresting like Oh, nooooo, oh my God , and I already knew part of me would be looking at her and thinking: You’ve never murdered for me. You’ve never framed me. You wouldn’t even know how to begin to do what Amy did. You could never possibly care that much . The indulged mama’s boy in me wouldn’t be able to find peace with this normal woman, and pretty soon she wouldn’t just be normal, she’d be substandard, and then my father’s voice – dumb bitch – would rise up and take it from there.
    Amy was exactly right.
    So maybe there was no good end for me.
    Amy was toxic, yet I couldn’t imagine a world without her entirely. Who would I be with Amy just gone? There were no options that interested me anymore. But she had to be brought to heel. Amy in prison, that was a good ending for her. Tucked away in a box where she couldn’t inflict herself on me but where I could visit her from time to time. Or at least imagine her. A pulse, my pulse, left out there somewhere.
    It had to be me who put her there. It was my responsibility. Just as Amy took the credit for making me my best self, I had to take the blame for bringing the madness to bloom in Amy. There were a million men who would have loved, honored, and obeyed Amy and considered themselves lucky to do so. Confident, self-assured, real men who wouldn’t have forced her to pretend to be anything but her own perfect, rigid, demanding, brilliant, creative, fascinating, rapacious, megalomaniac self.
    Men capable of being uxorious.
    Men capable of keeping her sane.
    Amy’s story could have gone a million other ways, but she met me, and bad things happened. So it was up to me to stop her.
    Not kill her but stop her.
    Put her in one of her boxes.

AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE
    FIVE DAYS AFTER THE RETURN
    I know, I know for sure now, that I need to be more careful about Nick. He’s not as tame as he used to be. Something in him is electric; a switch has turned on. I like it. But I need to take precautions.
    I need one more spectacular precaution.
    It will take some time to put in place, this precaution. But I’ve done it before, the planning. In the meantime, we can work on our rebuilding. Start with the facade. We will have a happy marriage if it kills him.
    ‘You’re going to have to try again to love me,’ I told him. The morning after he almost killed me. It happened to be Nick’s thirty-fifth birthday, but he didn’t mention it. My husband has had enough of my gifts.
    ‘I forgive you for last night,’ I said. ‘We were both under a lot of stress. But now you’re going to have to try again.’
    ‘I know.’
    ‘Things will have to be different,’ I said.
    ‘I know,’ he said.
    He doesn’t really know. But he will.
    My parents have visited daily. Rand and Marybeth and Nick lavish me with attention. Pillows. Everyone wants to offer me pillows: We are all laboring under a mass psychosis that my rape and miscarriage have left me forever achy and delicate. I have a permanent case of sparrow’s bones – I must be held gently in the palm, lest I break. So I prop my feet on the infamous ottoman, and I tread delicately over the kitchen floor where I bled. We must take good care of me.
    Yet I find it strangely tense to watch Nick with anyone but me. He seems on the edge of blurting all the time – as if his lungs are bursting with words about me, damning words.
    I need Nick, I realize. I actually need him to back my story. To stop his accusations and denials and admit that it was him: thecredit cards, the goodies in the woodshed, the bump in insurance. Otherwise I will carry that waft of uncertainty forever. I have only a few loose ends, and those loose ends are people. The police, the FBI, they are sifting through my story. Boney, I know, would love to arrest me. But they botched everything so badly before – they look like such fools – that they can’t touch me unless they have proof. And they don’t have proof. They have Nick, who swears he didn’t do the things I swear he did, and that’s not much, but it’s more than I’d like.
    I’ve even prepared in case my Ozarks friends Jeff and Greta show up, nosing around for acclaim or cash. I’ve already told the police: Desi didn’t drive us straight to his home. He kept me blindfolded and gagged and drugged for several days – I think it was several days – in some room, maybe a motel room? Maybe an apartment? I