Gone Girl

took three big strides toward me, and as I braced myself for a punch, he hugged me desperately hard.
    ‘How are you holding up?’ he whispered into my neck, and began rocking. Finally, he gave a high-pitched gulp, a swallowed sob, and gripped me by the arms. ‘We’re going to find Amy, Nick. It can’t go any other way. Believe that, okay?’ Rand Elliott held me in his blue stare for a few more seconds, then broke up again – three girlish gasps burst from him like hiccups – and Marybeth moved into the huddle, buried her face in her husband’s armpit.
    When we parted, she looked up at me with giant stunned eyes. ‘It’s just a – just a goddamn night mare,’ she said. ‘How are you, Nick?’
    When Marybeth asked How are you , it wasn’t a courtesy, it was an existential question. She studied my face, and I was sure she was studying me, and would continue to note my every thought and action. The Elliotts believed that every trait should be considered, judged, categorized. It all means something, it can all be used. Mom, Dad, Baby, they were three advanced people with three advanced degrees in psychology – they thought more before nine a.m. than most people thought all month. I remember once declining cherrypie at dinner, and Rand cocked his head and said, ‘Ahh! Iconoclast. Disdains the easy, symbolic patriotism.’ And when I tried to laugh it off and said, well, I didn’t like cherry cobbler either, Marybeth touched Rand’s arm: ‘Because of the divorce. All those comfort foods, the desserts a family eats together, those are just bad memories for Nick.’
    It was silly but incredibly sweet, these people spending so much energy trying to figure me out. The answer: I don’t like cherries.
    By eleven-thirty, the station was a rolling boil of noise. Phones were ringing, people were yelling across the room. A woman whose name I never caught, whom I registered only as a chattering bobblehead of hair, suddenly made her presence known at my side. I had no idea how long she’d been there: ‘… and the main point of this, Nick, is just to get people looking for Amy and knowing she has a family who loves her and wants her back. This will be very controlled. Nick, you will need to – Nick?’
    ‘Yep.’
    ‘People will want to hear a quick statement from her husband.’
    From across the room, Go was darting toward me. She’d dropped me at the station, then run by The Bar to take care of bar things for thirty minutes, and now she was back, acting like she’d abandoned me for a week, zigzagging between desks, ignoring the young officer who’d clearly been assigned to usher her in, neatly, in a hushed, dignified manner.
    ‘Okay so far?’ Go said, squeezing me with one arm, the dude hug. The Dunne kids don’t perform hugs well. Go’s thumb landed on my right nipple. ‘I wish Mom was here,’ she whispered, which was what I’d been thinking. ‘No news?’ she asked when she pulled away.
    ‘Nothing, fucking nothing—’
    ‘You look like you feel awful.’
    ‘I feel like fucking shit.’ I was about to say what an idiot I was, not listening to her about the booze.
    ‘I would have finished the bottle, too.’ She patted my back.
    ‘It’s almost time,’ the PR woman said, again appearing magically.
    ‘It’s not a bad turnout for a July fourth weekend.’ She started herding us all toward a dismal conference room – aluminum blinds and folding chairs and a clutch of bored reporters – and up onto the platform. I felt like a third-tier speaker at a mediocre convention, me in my business-casual blues, addressing a captive audience of jet-lagged people daydreaming about what they’d eat for lunch. ButI could see the journalists perk up when they caught sight of me – let’s say it: a young, decent-looking guy – and then the PR woman placed a cardboard poster on a nearby easel, and it was a blown-up photo of Amy at her most stunning, that face that made you keep double-checking: She can’t be that good-looking, can she? She could, she was, and I stared at the photo of my wife as the cameras snapped photos of me staring at the photo. I thought of that day in New York when I found her again: the blond hair, the back of her head, was all I could see, but I knew it was her, and I saw it as a sign. How many millions of heads had I seen in my life, but I knew this was Amy’s pretty skull floating down Seventh Avenue in front of me. I knew it was her, and that we would be together.
    Cameras