Gone Girl

sleep amid the little packets of chips and candies he bought from the vending machine down the hall. Dinner. He is angry at me for not being a good sport. I thought I was putting up a convincing front – hurray, a new adventure! – but I guess not.
    Now that I look back, it was like we were waiting for something to happen. Like Nick and I were sitting under a giant soundproof, windproof jar, and then the jar fell over and – there was something to do.
    Two weeks ago, we are in our usual unemployed state: partly dressed, thick with boredom, getting ready to eat a silent breakfast that we’ll stretch over the reading of the newspaper in its entirety. We even read the auto supplement now.
    Nick’s cell phone rings at ten a.m., and I can tell by his voice that it is Go. He sounds springy, boyish, the way he always does when he talks to her. The way he used to sound with me.
    He heads into the bedroom and shuts the door, leaving me holding two freshly made eggs Benedicts quivering on the plates. I place his on the table and sit opposite, wondering if I should wait to eat. If it were me, I think, I would come back out and tell him to eat, or else I’d raise a finger: Just one minute . I’d be aware of the other person, my spouse, left in the kitchen with plates of eggs. I feel bad that I was thinking that. Because soon I can hear worried murmursand upset exclamations and gentle reassurances from behind the door, and I begin wondering if Go is having some back-home boy troubles. Go has a lot of breakups. Even the ones that she instigates require much handholding and goo-gawing from Nick.
    So I have my usual Poor Go face on when Nick emerges, the eggs hardened on the plate. I see him and know this isn’t just a Go problem.
    ‘My mom,’ he starts, and sits down. ‘Shit. My mom has cancer. Stage four, and it’s spread to the liver and bones. Which is bad, which is …’
    He puts his face in his hands, and I go over and put my arms around him. When he looks up, he is dry-eyed. Calm. I’ve never seen my husband cry.
    ‘It’s too much for Go, on top of my dad’s Alzheimer’s.’
    ‘Alzheimer’s? Alzheimer’s? Since when?’
    ‘Well, a while. At first they thought it was some sort of early dementia. But it’s more, it’s worse.’
    I think, immediately, that there is something wrong with us, perhaps unfixable, if my husband wouldn’t think to tell me this. Sometimes I feel it’s his personal game, that he’s in some sort of undeclared contest for impenetrability. ‘Why didn’t you say anything to me?’
    ‘My dad isn’t someone I like to talk about that much.’
    ‘But still—’
    ‘Amy. Please.’ He has that look, like I am being unreasonable, like he is so sure I am being unreasonable that I wonder if I am.
    ‘But now. Go says with my mom, she’ll need chemo but … she’ll be really, really sick. She’ll need help.’
    ‘Should we start looking for in-home care for her? A nurse?’
    ‘She doesn’t have that kind of insurance.’
    He stares at me, arms crossed, and I know what he is daring: daring me to offer to pay, and we can’t pay, because I’ve given my money to my parents.
    ‘Okay, then, babe,’ I say. ‘What do you want to do?’
    We stand across from each other, a showdown, as if we are in a fight and I haven’t been informed. I reach out to touch him, and he just looks at my hand.
    ‘We have to move back.’ He glares at me, opening his eyes wide. He flicks his fingers out as if he is trying to rid himself of something sticky. ‘We’ll take a year and we’ll go do the right thing. We have no jobs, we have no money, there’s nothing holding us here. Even you have to admit that.’
    ‘Even I have to?’ As if I am already being resistant. I feel a burst of anger that I swallow.
    ‘This is what we’re going to do. We are going to do the right thing. We are going to help my parents for once.’
    Of course that’s what we have to do, and of course if he had presented the problem to me like I wasn’t his enemy, that’s what I would have said. But he came out of the door already treating me like a problem that needed to be dealt with. I was the bitter voice that needed to be squelched.
    My husband is the most loyal man on the planet until he’s not. I’ve seen his eyes literally turn a shade darker when he’s felt betrayed by a friend, even a dear longtime friend, and then the friend is never mentioned again. He looked at me then like I was an object to be