Gone Girl

you pass out, get discovered hours later in a kiddie pool of red with a lot of explaining to do. I held a box cutter to my wrist first, but looking at that crisscross of veins, I felt like a bomb technician in an action movie: Snip the wrong line and you die. I ended up cutting into the inside of my upper arm, gnawing on a rag so I wouldn’t scream. One long, deepgood one. I sat cross-legged on my kitchen floor for ten minutes, letting the blood drizzle steadily until I’d made a nice thick puddle. Then I cleaned it up as poorly as Nick would have done after he bashed my head in. I want the house to tell a story of conflict between true and false. The living room looks staged, yet the blood has been cleaned up: It can’t be Amy!
    So the self-mutilation was worth it. Still, hours later, the slice burns under my sleeves, under the tourniquet. (Item 30: Carefully dress wound, ensuring no blood has dripped where it shouldn’t be present. Wrap box cutter and tuck away in pocket for later disposal.)
    Item 18: Stage the living room. Tip ottoman. Check.
    Item 12: Wrap the First Clue in its box and tuck it just out of the way so the police will find it before dazed husband thinks to look for it. It has to be part of the police record. I want him to be forced to start the treasure hunt (his ego will make him finish it). Check.
    Item 32: Change into generic clothes, tuck hair in hat, climb down the banks of the river, and scuttle along the edge, the water lapping inches below, until you reach the edge of the complex. Do this even though you know the Teverers, the only neighbors with a view of the river, will be at church. Do this because you never know. You always take the extra step that others don’t, that’s who you are.
    Item 29: Say goodbye to Bleecker. Smell his little stinky cat breath one last time. Fill his kibble dish in case people forget to feed him once everything starts.
    Item 33: Get the fuck out of Dodge.
    Check, check, check.
    I can tell you more about how I did everything, but I’d like you to know me first. Not Diary Amy, who is a work of fiction (and Nick said I wasn’t really a writer, and why did I ever listen to him?), but me, Actual Amy. What kind of woman would do such a thing? Let me tell you a story, a true story, so you can begin to understand.
    To start: I should never have been born.
    My mother had five miscarriages and two stillbirths before me. One a year, in the fall, as if it were a seasonal duty, like crop rotation. They were all girls; they were all named Hope. I’m sure it was my father’s suggestion – his optimistic impulse, his tie-dyed earnestness: We can’t give up hope, Marybeth . But give up Hope is exactly what they did, over and over again.
    The doctors ordered my parents to stop trying; they refused. They are not quitters. They tried and tried, and finally came me. Mymother didn’t count on my being alive, couldn’t bear to think of me as an actual baby, a living child, a girl who would get to come home. I would have been Hope 8, if things had gone badly. But I entered the world hollering – an electric, neon pink. My parents were so surprised, they realized they’d never discussed a name, not a real one, for a real child. For my first two days in the hospital, they didn’t name me. Each morning my mother would hear the door to her room open and feel the nurse lingering in the doorway (I always pictured her vintage, with swaying white skirts and one of those folded caps like a Chinese take-out box). The nurse would linger, and my mother would ask without even looking up, ‘Is she still alive?’
    When I remained alive, they named me Amy, because it was a regular girl’s name, a popular girl’s name, a name a thousand other baby girls were given that year, so maybe the Gods wouldn’t notice this little baby nestled among the others. Marybeth said if she were to do it again, she’d name me Lydia.
    I grew up feeling special, proud. I was the girl who battled oblivion and won. The chances were about 1 percent, but I did it. I ruined my mother’s womb in the process – my own prenatal Sherman’s March. Marybeth would never have another baby. As a child, I got a vibrant pleasure out of this: just me, just me, only me.
    My mother would sip hot tea on the days of the Hopes’ birth-deaths, sit in a rocker with a blanket, and say she was just ‘taking a little time for myself.’ Nothing dramatic, my mother is too sensible to sing dirges, but she would get pensive,