Gone Girl

here, and after the initial flurry of meet-and-greets, those manic first months, Amy had no one she regularly saw. She had my mom, who was now dead, and me – and our main form of conversation was attack and rebuttal. When we’d been back home for a year, I’d asked her faux gallantly: ‘And how are you liking North Carthage, Mrs Dunne?’ ‘ New Carthage, you mean?’ she’d replied. I refused to ask her the reference, but I knew it was an insult.
    ‘She has a few good friends, but they’re mostly back east.’
    ‘Her folks?’
    ‘They live in New York. City.’
    ‘And you still haven’t called any of these people?’ Boney asked, a bemused smile on her face.
    ‘I’ve been doing everything else you’ve been asking me to do. I haven’t had a chance.’ I’d signed away permission to trace credit cards and ATMs and track Amy’s cell phone, I’d handed over Go’s cell number and the name of Sue, the widow at The Bar, who could presumably attest to the time I arrived.
    ‘Baby of the family.’ She shook her head. ‘You really do remind me of my little brother.’ A beat. ‘That’s a compliment, I swear.’
    ‘She dotes on him,’ Gilpin said, scribbling in a notebook. ‘Okay, so you left the house at about seven-thirty a.m., and you showed up at The Bar at about noon, and in between, you were at the beach.’
    There’s a beachhead about ten miles north of our house, a not overly pleasant collection of sand and silt and beer-bottle shards. Trash barrels overflowing with Styrofoam cups and dirty diapers. But there is a picnic table upwind that gets nice sun, and if you stare directly at the river, you can ignore the other crap.
    ‘I sometimes bring my coffee and the paper and just sit. Gotta make the most of summer.’
    No, I hadn’t talked to anyone at the beach. No, no one saw me.
    ‘It’s a quiet place midweek,’ Gilpin allowed.
    If the police talked to anyone who knew me, they’d quickly learn that I rarely went to the beach and that I never sometimes brought my coffee to just enjoy the morning. I have Irish-white skin and an impatience for navel-gazing: A beach boy I am not. I told the police that because it had been Amy’s idea, for me to go sit in the spot where I could be alone and watch the river I loved and ponder our life together. She’d said this to me this morning, after we’d eaten her crepes. She leaned forward on the table and said, ‘I know we are having a tough time. I still love you so much, Nick, and I know I have a lot of things to work on. I want to be a good wife to you, and I want you to be my husband and be happy. But you need to decide what you want.’
    She’d clearly been practicing the speech; she smiled proudly as she said it. And even as my wife was offering me this kindness, I was thinking, Of course she has to stage-manage this. She wants the image of me and the wild running river, my hair ruffling in the breeze as I look out onto the horizon and ponder our life together. I can’t just go to Dunkin’ Donuts .
    You need to decide what you want . Unfortunately for Amy, I had decided already.
    Boney looked up brightly from her notes: ‘Can you tell me what your wife’s blood type is?’ she asked.
    ‘Uh, no, I don’t know.’
    ‘You don’t know your wife’s blood type?’
    ‘Maybe O?’ I guessed.
    Boney frowned, then made a drawn-out yoga-like sound. ‘Okay, Nick, here are the things we are doing to help.’ She listed them: Amy’s cell was being monitored, her photo circulated, her credit cards tracked. Known sex offenders in the area were being interviewed. Our sparse neighborhood was being canvassed. Our home phone was tapped, in case any ransom calls came in.
    I wasn’t sure what to say now. I raked my memory for the lines: What does the husband say at this point in the movie? Depends on whether he’s guilty or innocent.
    ‘I can’t say that reassures me. Are you – is this an abduction, or a missing persons case, or what exactly is going on?’ I knew the statistics, knew them from the same TV show I was starring in: If the first forty-eight hours didn’t turn up something in a case, it was likely to go unsolved. The first forty-eight hours were crucial. ‘I mean, my wife is gone. My wife: is gone !’ I realized it was the first time I’d said it the way it should have been said: panicked andangry. My dad was a man of infinite varieties of bitterness, rage, distaste. In my lifelong struggle to avoid becoming him, I’d