Authors: Gillian Flynn
‘What is all this, Nick?’
‘For job interviews. If anyone ever starts hiring again.’
‘You needed so much?’
‘We
do
have the money.’ He smiles at me grimly, his arms crossed.
‘Do you at least want to hang them up?’ Several of the plastic
coverings have been chewed apart by Bleecker. A tiny mound of cat vomit lies near one three-thousand-dollar suit; a tailored white shirt is covered in orange fur where the cat has napped.
‘Not really, nope,’ he says. He grins at me.
I have never been a nag. I have always been rather proud of my un-nagginess. So it pisses me off, that Nick is forcing me to nag. I am willing to live with a certain amount of sloppiness, of laziness, of the lackadaisical life. I realize that I am more type A than Nick, and I try to be careful not to inflict my neat-freaky, to-do-list nature on him. Nick is not the kind of guy who is going to think to vacuum or clean out the fridge. He truly doesn’t
see
that kind of stuff. Fine. Really. But I do like a certain standard of living – I think it’s fair to say the garbage shouldn’t literally overflow, and the plates shouldn’t sit in the sink for a week with smears of bean burrito dried on them. That’s just being a good grown-up roommate. And Nick’s not doing anything anymore, so I have to nag, and it pisses me off:
You are turning me into what I never have been and never wanted to be, a nag, because you are not living up to your end of a very basic compact. Don’t do that, it’s not okay to do
.
I know, I know, I
know
that losing a job is incredibly stressful, and particularly for a man, they say it can be like a death in the family, and especially for a man like Nick, who has always worked, so I take a giant breath, roll my anger up into a red rubber ball, and mentally kick it out into space. ‘Well, do you mind if I hang these up? Just so they stay nice for you?’
‘Knock yourself out.’
His-and-her layoffs, isn’t that sweet? I know we are luckier than most: I go online and check my trust fund whenever I get nervous. I never called it a trust fund before Nick did; it’s actually not that grand. I mean, it’s nice, it’s great – $785,404 that I have in savings thanks to my parents. But it’s not the kind of money that allows you to stop working forever, especially not in New York. My parents’ whole point was to make me feel secure enough so I didn’t need to make choices based on money – in schooling, in career – but not so well off that I could be tempted to check out. Nick makes fun, but I think it’s a great gesture for parents to make. (And appropriate, considering they plagiarized my childhood for the books.)
But I’m still feeling sick about the layoff,
our layoffs
, when my dad calls and asks if he and Mom can stop by. They need to talk with us. This afternoon, now, actually, if it’s okay. Of course it’s okay, I say, and in my head, I think,
Cancer cancer cancer
.
My parents appear at the door, looking like they’ve put up an effort. My father is thoroughly pressed and tucked and shined, impeccable except for the grooves beneath his eyes. My mother is in one of her bright purple dresses that she always wore to speeches and ceremonies, back when she got those invitations. She says the color demands confidence of the wearer.
They look great, but they seem ashamed. I usher them to the sofa, and we all sit silently for a second.
‘Kids, your mother and I, we seem to have—’ my father finally starts, then stops to cough. He places his hands on his knees; his big knuckles pale. ‘Well, we seem to have gotten ourselves into a hell of a financial mess.’
I don’t know what my reaction is supposed to be: shocked, consoling, disappointed? My parents have never confessed any troubles to me. I don’t think they’ve had many troubles.
‘The fact of the matter is, we’ve been irresponsible,’ Marybeth continues. ‘We’ve been living the past decade like we were making the same kind of money we did for the previous two decades, and we weren’t. We haven’t made half that, but we were in denial. We were …
optimistic
may be a kind way to put it. We just kept thinking the next
Amy
book would do the trick. But that hasn’t happened. And we kept making bad decisions. We invested foolishly. We spent foolishly. And now.’
‘We’re basically broke,’ Rand says. ‘Our house, as well as
this
house, it’s all underwater.’
I’d thought – assumed – they’d bought this house for us outright. I had no idea they were making payments on it. I feel a sting of embarrassment that I am as sheltered as Nick says.
‘Like I said, we made some serious judgment errors,’ Marybeth says. ‘We should write a book:
Amazing Amy and the Adjustable Rate Mortgage
. We would flunk every quiz. We’d be the cautionary tale. Amy’s friend, Wendy Want It Now.’
‘Harry Head in the Sand,’ Rand adds.
‘So what happens next?’ I ask.
‘That is entirely up to you,’ my dad says. My mom fishes out a homemade pamphlet from her purse and sets it on the table in front of us – bars and graphs and pie charts created on their home computer. It kills me to picture my parents squinting over the user’s manual, trying to make their proposition look pretty for me.
Marybeth starts the pitch: ‘We wanted to ask if we could borrow some money from your trust while we figure out what to do with the rest of our lives.’
My parents sit in front of us like two eager college kids hoping for their first internship. My father’s knee jiggles until my mother places a gentle fingertip on it.
‘Well, the trust fund is your money, so of course you can borrow from it,’ I say. I just want this to be over; the hopeful look on my parents’ faces, I can’t stand it. ‘How much do you think you need, to pay everything off and feel comfortable for a while?’
My father looks at his shoes. My mother takes a deep breath. ‘Six hundred and fifty thousand,’ she says.
‘Oh.’ It is all I can say. It is almost everything we have.
‘Amy, maybe you and I should discuss—’ Nick begins.
‘No, no, we can do this,’ I say. ‘I’ll just go grab my checkbook.’
‘Actually,’ Marybeth says, ‘if you could wire it to our account tomorrow, that would be best. Otherwise there’s a ten-day waiting period.’
That’s when I know they are in serious trouble.
I
woke up on the pullout couch in the Elliotts’ suite, exhausted. They’d insisted I stay over – my home had not yet been reopened to me – insisted with the same urgency they once applied to snapping up the check at dinner: hospitality as ferocious force of nature.
You must let us do this for you
. So I did. I spent the night listening to their snores through the bedroom door, one steady and deep – a hearty lumberjack of a snore – the other gaspy and arrhythmic, as if the sleeper were dreaming of drowning.
I could always turn myself off like a light.
I’m going to sleep
, I’d say, my hands in prayer position against my cheek,
Zzzzzz
, the deep sleep of a NyQuiled child – while my insomniac wife fussed in bed next to me. Last night, though, I felt like Amy, my brain still going, my body on edge. I was, most of the time, a man who was literally comfortable in his own skin. Amy and I would sit on the couch to watch TV, and I’d turn to melted wax, my wife twitching and shifting constantly next to me. I asked her once if she might have restless leg syndrome – an ad for the disease was running, the actors’ faces all furrowed in distress as they shook their calves and rubbed their thighs – and Amy said,
I have restless everything syndrome
.
I watched the ceiling of the hotel room turn gray then pink then yellow and finally pulled myself up to see the sun blaring right at me, across the river, again, a solar third degree. Then the names popped in my head – bing! Hilary Handy. Such an adorable name to be accused of such disturbing acts. Desi Collings, a former obsessive who lived an hour away. I had claimed them both as mine. It is a do-it-yourself era: health care, real estate, police investigation. Go online and fucking figure it out for yourself because everyone’s overworked and understaffed. I was a
journalist
. I spent over ten years interviewing people for a living and getting them to reveal themselves. I was up to the task, and Marybeth and Rand believed
so too. I was thankful they let me know I was still in their trust, the husband under a wispy cloud of suspicion. Or do I fool myself to use the word
wispy
?
The Days Inn had donated an underused ballroom to serve as the Find Amy Dunne headquarters. It was unseemly – a place of brown stains and canned smells – but just after dawn, Marybeth set about pygmalioning it, vacuuming and sani-wiping, arranging bulletin boards and phone banks, hanging a large headshot of Amy on one wall. The poster – with Amy’s cool, confident gaze, those eyes that followed you – looked like something from a presidential campaign. In fact, by the time Marybeth was done, the whole room buzzed with efficiency – the urgent hopefulness of a seriously underdog politician with a lot of true believers refusing to give up.
Just after ten a.m., Boney arrived, talking into her cell phone. She patted me on the shoulder and began fiddling with a printer. The volunteers arrived in bunches: Go and a half dozen of our late mother’s friends. Five forty-something women, all in capri pants, like they were rehearsing a dance show: two of them – slender and blond and tanned – vying for the lead, the others cheerfully resigned to second string. A group of loudmouthed white-haired old ladies, each trying to talk over the next, a few of them texting, the kind of elderly people who have a baffling amount of energy, so much youthful vigor you had to wonder if they were trying to rub it in. Only one man showed up, a good-looking guy about my age, well dressed, alone, failing to realize that his presence could use some explaining. I watched Loner Guy as he sniffed around the pastries, sneaking glances at the poster of Amy.
Boney finished setting up the printer, grabbed a branny-looking muffin, and came to stand by me.
‘Do you guys keep an eye on everyone who reports to volunteer?’ I asked. ‘I mean, in case it’s someone—’
‘Someone who seems to have a suspicious amount of interest? Absolutely.’ She broke off the edges of the muffin and popped them in her mouth. She dropped her voice. ‘But to tell the truth, serial killers watch the same TV shows we do. They know that
we
know they like to—’
‘Insert themselves into the investigation.’
‘That’s it, yup.’ She nodded. ‘So they’re more careful about that kind of thing now. But yeah, we sift through all the kinda-weirdos to make sure they’re just, you know, kinda-weirdos.’
I raised an eyebrow.
‘Like, Gilpin and I were lead detectives on the Kayla Holman case few years back. Kayla Holman?’
I shook my head: no bell.
‘Anyway, you’ll find some ghouls get attracted to stuff like this. And watch out for those two—’ Boney pointed toward the two pretty forty-something women. ‘Because they look like the type. To get a little too interested in consoling the worried husband.’
‘Oh, come on—’
‘You’d be surprised. Handsome guy like you. It happens.’
Just then one of the women, the blonder and tanner, looked over at us, made eye contact, and smiled the gentlest, shyest smile at me, then ducked her head like a cat waiting to be petted.
‘She’ll work hard, though; she’ll be Little Miss Involved,’ Boney said. ‘So that’s good.’
‘How’d the Kayla Holman case turn out?’ I asked.
She shook her head:
no
.
Four more women filed in, passing a bottle of sunblock among themselves, slathering it on bare arms and shoulders and noses. The room smelled like coconuts.
‘By the way, Nick,’ Boney said. ‘Remember when I asked if Amy had friends in town – what about Noelle Hawthorne? You didn’t mention her.’ She left us two messages.
I gave her a blank stare.
‘Noelle in your complex? Mother of triplets?’
‘No, they aren’t friends.’
‘Oh, funny. She definitely seems to think they are.’
‘That happens to Amy a lot,’ I said. ‘She talks to people once, and they latch on. It’s creepy.’
‘That’s what her parents said.’
I debated asking Boney directly about Hilary Handy and Desi Collings. Then I decided not to; I’d look better if I were the one leading the charge. I wanted Rand and Marybeth to see me in action-hero mode. I couldn’t shake the look Marybeth had given me:
The police definitely seem to think it’s … close to home
.
‘People think they know her because they read the books growing up,’ I said.
‘I can see that,’ Boney said, nodding. ‘People want to believe they know other people. Parents want to believe they know their kids. Wives want to believe they know their husbands.’
Another hour and the volunteer center began feeling like a family picnic. A few of my old girlfriends dropped by to say hello, introduce
their kids. One of my mom’s best friends, Vicky, came by with three of her granddaughters, bashful tweens all in pink.
Grandkids. My mom had talked about grandkids a lot, as if it were doubtlessly going to happen – whenever she bought a new piece of furniture, she’d explain she favored that particular style because ‘it’ll work for when there’s grandkids.’ She wanted to live to see some grandkids. All her friends had some to spare. Amy and I once had my mom and Go over for dinner to mark The Bar’s biggest week ever. I’d announced that we had reason to celebrate, and Mom had leapt from her seat, burst into tears, and hugged Amy, who also began weeping, murmuring from beneath my mom’s smothering nuzzle, ‘He’s talking about The Bar, he’s just talking about The Bar.’ And then my mom tried hard to pretend she was just as excited about that. ‘
Plenty
of time for babies,’ she’d said in her most consoling voice, a voice that just made Amy start to cry again. Which was strange, since Amy had decided she didn’t want kids, and she’d reiterated this fact several times, but the tears gave me a perverse wedge of hope that maybe she was changing her mind. Because there wasn’t really plenty of time. Amy was thirty-seven when we moved to Carthage. She’d be thirty-nine in October.