have ever met, and I specialize in fucked-up people.’
‘What’s going on with the police?’
He sighed. ‘She foolproofed everything. It’s ludicrous, her story, but no more ludicrous than our story. Amy’s basically exploiting the sociopath’s most reliable maxim.’
‘What’s that?’
‘The bigger the lie, the more they believe it.’
‘Come on, Tanner, there’s got to be something.’
I paced over to the staircase to make sure Amy was nowhere nearby. We were whispering, but still. I had to be careful now.
‘For now we need to toe the line, Nick. She left you looking fairly bad: Everything in the diary was true, she says. All the stuff in the woodshed was you. You bought the stuff with those credit cards, and you’re too embarrassed to admit it. She’s just a sheltered little rich girl, what would she know about acquiring secret credit cards in her husband’s name? And my goodness, that pornography!’
‘She told me there was never a baby, she faked it with Noelle Hawthorne’s pee.’
‘Why didn’t you say—That’s huge! We’ll lean on Noelle Hawthorne.’
‘Noelle didn’t know.’
I heard a deep sigh on the other end. He didn’t even bother asking how. ‘We’ll keep thinking, we’ll keep looking,’ he said. ‘Something will break.’
‘I can’t stay in this house with that thing. She’s threatening me with—’
‘Attempted murder … the antifreeze. Yeah, I heard that was in the mix.’
‘They can’t arrest me on that, can they? She says she still has some vomit. Evidence. But can they really—’
‘Let’s not push it for now, okay, Nick?’ he said. ‘For now, play nice. I hate to say it, I hate to, but that’s my best legal advice for you right now: Play nice.’
‘Play nice? That’s your advice? My one-man legal dream team: Play nice? Fuck you.’
I hung up in full fury.
I’ll kill her, I thought. I will fucking kill the bitch.
I plunged into the dark daydream I’d indulged over the past few years when Amy had made me feel my smallest: I daydreamed of hitting her with a hammer, smashing her head in until she stopped talking, finally, stopped with the words she suctioned to me: average, boring, mediocre, unsurprising, unsatisfying, unimpressive. Un, basically. In my mind, I whaled on her with the hammer until she was like a broken toy, muttering un, un, un until she sputtered to a stop. And then it wasn’t enough, so I restored her to perfection and began killing her again: I wrapped my fingers around her neck – she always did crave intimacy – and then I squeezed and squeezed, her pulse—
‘Nick?’
I turned around, and Amy was on the bottom stair in her nightgown, her head tilted to one side.
‘Play nice, Nick.’
AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE
THE NIGHT OF THE RETURN
He turns around, and when he sees me standing there, he looks scared. That’s something useful. Because I’m not going to let him go. He may think he was lying when he said all those nice things to lure me home. But I know different. I know Nick can’t lie like that. I know that as he recited those words, he realized the truth. Ping! Because you can’t be as in love as we were and not have it invade your bone marrow. Our kind of love can go into remission, but it’s always waiting to return. Like the world’s sweetest cancer.
You don’t buy it? Then how about this? He did lie. He didn’t mean a fucking thing he said. Well, then, screw him, he did too good a job, because I want him, exactly like that. The man he was pretending to be – women love that guy. I love that guy. That’s the man I want for my husband. That’s the man I signed up for. That’s the man I deserve.
So he can choose to truly love me the way he once did, or I will bring him to heel and make him be the man I married. I’m sick of dealing with his bullshit.
‘Play nice,’ I say.
He looks like a child, a furious child. He bunches his fists.
‘No, Amy.’
‘I can ruin you, Nick.’
‘You already did, Amy.’ I see the rage flash over him, a shiver. ‘Why in God’s name do you even want to be with me? I’m boring, average, uninteresting, uninspiring. I’m not up to par. You spent the last few years telling me this.’
‘Only because you stopped trying,’ I say. ‘You were so perfect, with me. We were so perfect when we started, and then you stopped trying. Why would you do that?’
‘I stopped loving you.’
‘Why?’
‘You stopped loving me. We’re a sick, fucking toxic Möbius strip, Amy. We weren’t ourselves when we fell in love, and when we became ourselves – surprise! – we were poison. We complete each other in the nastiest, ugliest possible way. You don’t really love me, Amy. You don’t even like me. Divorce me. Divorce me, and let’s try to be happy.’
‘I won’t divorce you, Nick. I won’t. And I swear to you, if you try to leave, I will devote my life to making your life as awful as I can. And you know I can make it awful.’
He begins pacing like a caged bear. ‘Think about it, Amy, how bad we are for each other: the two most needful human beings in the world stuck with each other. I’ll divorce you if you don’t divorce me.’
‘Really?’
‘I will divorce you. But you should divorce me. Because I know what you’re thinking already, Amy. You’re thinking it won’t make a good story: Amazing Amy finally kills her crazed-rapist captor and returns home to … a boring old divorce. You’re thinking it’s not triumphant.’
It’s not triumphant.
‘But think of it this way: Your story is not some drippy, earnest survivor story. TV movie circa 1992. It’s not. You are a tough, vibrant, independent woman, Amy. You killed your kidnapper, and then you kept on cleaning house: You got rid of your idiot cheat of a husband. Women would cheer you. You’re not a scared little girl. You’re a badass, take-no-prisoners woman. Think about it. You know I’m right: The era of forgiveness is over. It’s passé. Think of all the women – the politicians’ wives, the actresses – every woman in the public who’s been cheated on, they don’t stay with the cheat these days. It’s not stand by your man anymore, it’s divorce the fucker.’
I feel a rush of hate toward him, that he’s still trying to wriggle out of our marriage even though I’ve told him – three times now – that he can’t. He still thinks he has power.
‘And if I don’t divorce you, you’ll divorce me?’ I ask.
‘I don’t want to be married to a woman like you. I want to be married to a normal person.’
Piece of shit.
‘I see. You want to revert to your lame, limp loser self? You want to just walk away? No! You don’t get to go be some boring-ass middle American with some boring-ass girl next door. You tried it already – remember, baby? Even if you wanted to, you couldn’t do that now. You’ll be known as the philandering asshole who left his kidnapped, raped wife. You think any nice woman will touch you? You’ll only get—’
‘Psychos? Crazy psycho bitches?’ He’s pointing at me, jabbing the air.
‘Don’t call me that.’
‘Psycho bitch?’
It’d be so easy, for him to write me off that way. He’d love that, to be able to dismiss me so simply.
‘Everything I do, I do for a reason, Nick,’ I say. ‘Everything I do takes planning and precision and discipline.’
‘You are a petty, selfish, manipulative, disciplined psycho bitch—’
‘You are a man,’ I say. ‘You are an average, lazy, boring, cowardly, woman-fearing man. Without me, that’s what you would have kept on being, ad nauseum. But I made you into something. You were the best man you’ve ever been with me. And you know it. The only time in your life you’ve ever liked yourself was pretending to be someone I might like. Without me? You’re just your dad.’
‘Don’t say that, Amy.’ He balls up his fists.
‘You think he wasn’t hurt by a woman, too, just like you?’ I say it in my most patronizing voice, as if I’m talking to a puppy. ‘You think he didn’t believe he deserved better than he got, just like you? You really think your mom was his first choice? Why do you think he hated you all so much?’
He moves toward me. ‘Shut up, Amy.’
‘Think, Nick, you know I’m right: Even if you found a nice, regular girl, you’d be thinking of me every day. Tell me you wouldn’t.’
‘I wouldn’t.’
‘How quickly did you forget little Able Andie once you thought I loved you again?’ I say it in my poor-baby voice. I even stick out my lower lip. ‘One love note, sweetie? Did one love note do it? Two? Two notes with me swearing I loved you and I wanted you back, and I thought you were just great after all – was that it for you? You are WITTY, you are WARM, you are BRILLIANT. You’re so pathetic. You think you can ever be a normal man again? You’ll find a nice girl, and you’ll still think of me, and you’ll be so completely dissatisfied, trapped in your boring, normal life with your regular wife and your two average kids. You’ll think of me and then you’ll look at your wife, and you’ll think: Dumb bitch.’
‘Shut up, Amy. I mean it.’
‘Just like your dad. We’re all bitches in the end, aren’t we, Nick? Dumb bitch, psycho bitch.’
He grabs me by the arm and shakes me hard.
‘I’m the bitch who makes you better, Nick.’
He stops talking then. He is using all his energy to keep his hands at his side. His eyes are wet with tears. He is shaking.
‘I’m the bitch who makes you a man.’
Then his hands are on my neck.
NICK DUNNE
THE NIGHT OF THE RETURN
Her pulse was finally throbbing beneath my fingers, the way I’d imagined. I pressed tighter and brought her to the ground. She made wet clucking noises and scratched at my wrists. We were both kneeling, in face-to-face prayer for ten seconds.
You fucking crazy bitch.
A tear fell from my chin and hit the floor.
You murdering, mind-fucking, evil, crazy bitch.
Amy’s bright blue eyes were staring into mine, unblinking.
And then the strangest thought of all clattered drunkenly from the back of my brain to the front and blinded me: If I kill Amy, who will I be?
I saw a bright white flash. I dropped my wife as if she were burning iron.
She sat hard on the ground, gasped, coughed. When her breath came back, it was in jagged rasps, with a strange, almost erotic squeak at the end.
Who will I be then? The question wasn’t recriminatory. It wasn’t like the answer was the pious: Then you’ll be a killer, Nick. You’ll be as bad as Amy. You’ll be what everyone thought you were. No. The question was frighteningly soulful and literal: Who would I be without Amy to react to? Because she was right: As a man, I had been my most impressive when I loved her – and I was my next best self when I hated her. I had known Amy only seven years, but I couldn’t go back to life without her. Because she was right: I couldn’t return to an average life. I’d known it before she’d said a word. I’d already pictured myself with a regular woman – a sweet, normal girl next door – and I’d already pictured telling this regular woman the story of Amy, the lengths she had gone to – to punish me and to return to me. I already pictured this sweet and mediocre girl saying something uninteresting like Oh, nooooo, oh my God, and I already knew part of me would be looking at her and thinking: You’ve never murdered for me. You’ve never framed me. You wouldn’t even know how to begin to do what Amy did. You could never possibly care that much. The indulged mama’s boy in me wouldn’t be able to find peace with this normal woman, and pretty soon she wouldn’t just be normal, she’d be substandard, and then my father’s voice – dumb bitch – would rise up and take it from there.
Amy was exactly right.
So maybe there was no good end for me.
Amy was toxic, yet I couldn’t imagine a world without her entirely. Who would I be with Amy just gone? There were no options that interested me anymore. But she had to be brought to heel. Amy in prison, that was a good ending for her. Tucked away in a box where she couldn’t inflict herself on me but where I could visit her from time to time. Or at least imagine her. A pulse, my pulse, left out there somewhere.
It had to be me who put her there. It was my responsibility. Just as Amy took the credit for making me my best self, I had to take the blame for bringing the madness to bloom in Amy. There were a million men who would have loved, honored, and obeyed Amy and considered themselves lucky to do so. Confident, self-assured, real men who wouldn’t have forced her to pretend to be anything but her own perfect, rigid, demanding, brilliant, creative, fascinating, rapacious, megalomaniac self.
Men capable of being uxorious.
Men capable of keeping her sane.
Amy’s story could have gone a million other ways, but she met me, and bad things happened. So it was up to me to stop her.
Not kill her but stop her.
Put her in one of her boxes.
AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE
FIVE DAYS AFTER THE RETURN
I know, I know for sure now, that I need to be more careful about Nick. He’s not as tame as he used to be. Something in him is electric; a switch has turned on. I like it. But I need to take precautions.
I need one more spectacular precaution.
It will take some time to put in place, this precaution. But I’ve done it before, the planning. In the meantime, we can work on our rebuilding. Start with the facade. We will have a happy marriage if it kills him.
‘You’re going to have to try again to love me,’ I told him. The morning after he almost killed me. It happened to be Nick’s thirty-fifth birthday, but he didn’t mention it. My husband has had enough of my gifts.
‘I forgive you for last night,’ I said. ‘We were both under a lot of stress. But now you’re going to have to try again.’
‘I know.’
‘Things will have to be different,’ I said.
‘I know,’ he said.
He doesn’t really know. But he will.
My parents have visited daily. Rand and Marybeth and Nick lavish me with attention. Pillows. Everyone wants to offer me pillows: We are all laboring under a mass psychosis that my rape and miscarriage have left me forever achy and delicate. I have a permanent case of sparrow’s bones – I must be held gently in the palm, lest I break. So I prop my feet on the infamous ottoman, and I tread delicately over the kitchen floor where I bled. We must take good care of me.
Yet I find it strangely tense to watch Nick with anyone but me. He seems on the edge of blurting all the time – as if his lungs are bursting with words about me, damning words.
I need Nick, I realize. I actually need him to back my story. To stop his accusations and denials and admit that it was him: the credit cards, the goodies in the woodshed, the bump in insurance. Otherwise I will carry that waft of uncertainty forever. I have only a few loose ends, and those loose ends are people. The police, the FBI, they are sifting through my story. Boney, I know, would love to arrest me. But they botched everything so badly before – they look like such fools – that they can’t touch me unless they have proof. And they don’t have proof. They have Nick, who swears he didn’t do the things I swear he did, and that’s not much, but it’s more than I’d like.
I’ve even prepared in case my Ozarks friends Jeff and Greta show up, nosing around for acclaim or cash. I’ve already told the police: Desi didn’t drive us straight to his home. He kept me blindfolded and gagged and drugged for several days – I think it was several days – in some room, maybe a motel room? Maybe an apartment? I can’t be sure, it’s all such a blur. I was so frightened, you know, and the sleeping pills. If Jeff and Greta show their pointy, lowdown faces and somehow convince the cops to send a tech team down to the Hide-A-Way, and one of my fingerprints or a hair is found, that simply solves part of the puzzle. The rest is them telling lies.
So Nick is really the only issue, and soon I’ll return him to my side. I was smart, I left no other evidence. The police may not entirely believe me, but they won’t do anything. I know from the petulant tone in Boney’s voice – she will live in permanent exasperation from now on, and the more annoyed she gets, the more people will dismiss her. She already has the righteous, eye-rolling cadence of a conspiracy crackpot. She might as well wrap her head in foil.
Yes, the investigation is winding down. But for Amazing Amy, it’s quite the opposite. My parents’ publisher placed an abashed plea for another Amazing Amy book, and they acquiesced for a lovely fat sum. Once again they are squatting on my psyche, earning money for themselves. They left Carthage this morning. They say it’s important for Nick and me (the correct grammar) to have some time alone and heal. But I know the truth. They want to get to work. They tell me they are trying to ‘find the right tone.’ A tone that says: Our daughter was kidnapped and repeatedly raped by a monster she had to stab in the neck … but this is in no way a cash grab.
I don’t care about the rebuilding of their pathetic empire, because every day I get calls to tell my story. My story: mine, mine, mine. I just need to pick the very best deal and start writing. I just need to get Nick on the same page so that we both agree how this story will end. Happily.
I know Nick isn’t in love with me yet, but he will be. I do have faith in that. Fake it until you make it, isn’t that an expression? For now he acts like the old Nick, and I act like the old Amy. Back when we were happy. When we didn’t know each other as well as we do now. Yesterday I stood on the back porch and watched the sun come up over the river, a strangely cool August morning, and when I turned around, Nick was studying me from the kitchen window, and he held up a mug of coffee with a question: You want a cup? I nodded, and soon he was standing beside me, the air smelling of grass, and we were drinking our coffee together and watching the water, and it felt normal and good.
He won’t sleep with me yet. He sleeps in the downstairs guest room with the door locked. But one day I will wear him down, I will catch him off guard, and he will lose the energy for the nightly battle, and he will get in bed with me. In the middle of the night, I’ll turn to face him and press myself against him. I’ll hold myself to him like a climbing, coiling vine until I have invaded every part of him and made him mine.
NICK DUNNE
THIRTY DAYS AFTER THE RETURN
Amy thinks she’s in control, but she’s very wrong. Or: She will be very wrong.
Boney and Go and I are working together. The cops, the FBI, no one else is showing much interest anymore. But yesterday Boney called out of the blue. She didn’t identify herself when I picked up, just started in like an old friend: Take you for a cup of coffee? I grabbed Go, and we met Boney back at the Pancake House. She was already at the booth when we arrived, and she stood and smiled somewhat weakly. She’d been getting pummeled in the press. We did an awkward, group-wide hug-or-handshake shuffle. Boney settled for a nod.
First thing she said to me once we got our food: ‘I have one daughter. Thirteen years old. Mia. For Mia Hamm. She was born the day we won the World Cup. So, that’s my daughter.’
I raised my eyebrows: How interesting. Tell me more.
‘You asked that one day, and I didn’t … I was rude. I’d been sure you were innocent, and then … everything said you weren’t, so I was pissed. That I could be that fooled. So I didn’t even want to say my daughter’s name around you.’ She poured us out coffee from the thermos.
‘So, it’s Mia,’ she said.
‘Well, thank you,’ I said.
‘No, I mean … Crap.’ She exhaled upward, a hard gust that fluttered her bangs. ‘I mean: I know Amy framed you. I know she murdered Desi Collings. I know it. I just can’t prove it.’
‘What is everyone else doing while you’re actually working the case?’ Go asked.
‘There is no case. They’re moving on. Gilpin is totally checked out. I basically got the word from on high: Shut this shit down. Shut it down. We look like giant, rube, redneck jackasses in the national media. I can’t do anything unless I get something from you, Nick. You got anything?’
I shrugged. ‘I got everything you got. She confessed to me, but—’