Gone Girl

clue. We had to be near the end.
    Picture me: I’m a girl who is very bad
    I need to be punished, and by punished, I mean had
    It’s where you store goodies for anniversary five
    Pardon me if this is getting contrived!
    A good time was had here right at sunny midday
    Then out for a cocktail, all so terribly gay .
    So run there right now, full of sweet sighs ,
    And open the door for your big surprise .
    My stomach seized. I didn’t know what this one meant. I reread it. I couldn’t even guess. Amy had stopped taking it easy on me. I wasn’t going to finish the treasure hunt after all.
    I felt a surge of angst. What a fucking day. Boney was out to getme, Noelle was insane, Shawna was pissed, Hilary was resentful, the woman at the security company was a bitch, and my wife had stumped me finally. It was time to end this goddamn day. There was only one woman I could stand to be around right now.
    Go took one look at me – rattled, tight-lipped, and heat-exhausted from my dad’s – and parked me on the couch, announced she’d make some late dinner. Five minutes later, she was stepping carefully toward me, balancing my meal on an ancient TV tray. An old Dunne standby: grilled cheese and BBQ chips, a plastic cup of …
    ‘It’s not Kool-Aid,’ Go said. ‘It’s beer. Kool-Aid seemed a little too regressive.’
    ‘This is very nurturing and strange of you, Go.’
    ‘You’re cooking tomorrow.’
    ‘Hope you like canned soup.’
    She sat down on the couch next to me, stole a chip from my plate, and asked, too casually: ‘Any thoughts on why the cops would ask me if Amy was still a size two?’
    ‘Jesus, they won’t fucking let that go,’ I said.
    ‘Doesn’t it freak you out? Like, they found her clothes or something?’
    ‘They’d have asked me to identify them. Right?’
    She thought about that a second, her face pinched. ‘That makes sense,’ she said. Her face remained pinched until she caught me looking, then she smiled. ‘I taped the ball game, wanna watch? You okay?’
    ‘I’m okay.’ I felt awful, my stomach greasy, my psyche crackling. Maybe it was the clue I couldn’t figure out, but I suddenly felt like I’d overlooked something. I’d made some huge mistake, and my error would be disastrous. Maybe it was my conscience, scratching back to the surface from its secret oubliette.
    Go pulled up the game and, for the next ten minutes, remarked on the game only, and only between sips of her beer. Go didn’t like grilled cheese; she was scooping peanut butter out of the jar onto saltines. When a commercial break came on, she paused and said, ‘If I had a dick, I would fuck this peanut butter,’ deliberately spraying cracker bits toward me.
    ‘I think if you had a dick, all sorts of bad things would happen.’
    She fast-forwarded through a nothing inning. Cards trailing by five. When it was time for the next commercial break, Go paused, said, ‘So I called to change my cell-phone plan today, and the hold song was Lionel Richie – do you ever listen to Lionel Richie? I like“Penny Lover,” but the song wasn’t “Penny Lover,” but anyway, then a woman came on the line, and she said the customer-service reps are all based in Baton Rouge, which was strange because she didn’t have an accent, but she said she grew up in New Orleans, and it’s a little-known fact that – what do you call someone from New Orleans, a New Orleansean? – anyway, that they don’t have much of an accent. So she said for my package, package A …’
    Go and I had a game inspired by our mom, who had a habit of telling such outrageously mundane, endless stories that Go was positive she had to be secretly fucking with us. For about ten years now, whenever Go and I hit a conversation lull, one of us would break in with a story about appliance repair or coupon fulfillment. Go had more stamina than I did, though. Her stories could drone on, seamlessly, forever – they went on so long that they became genuinely annoying and then swung back around to hilarious.
    Go was moving on to a story about her refrigerator light and showed no signs of faltering. Filled with a sudden, heavy gratefulness, I leaned across the couch and kissed her on the cheek.
    ‘What’s that for?’
    ‘Just, thanks.’ I felt my eyes get full with tears. I looked away for a second to blink them off, and Go said, ‘So I needed a triple-A battery, which, as it turns out, is different from a transistor battery, so I had to find the receipt