I pulled up in front of my dad’s house just after ten p.m. It was a tidy little place, a good starter home (or ender home). Two bedrooms, two baths, dining room, dated but decent kitchen. A for-sale sign rusted in the front yard. One year and not a bite.
I entered the stuffy house, the heat rolling over me. The budget alarm system we installed after the third break-in began beeping, like a bomb countdown. I input the code, the one that drove Amy insane because it went against every rule about codes. It was my birthday: 81577.
Code rejected. I tried again. Code rejected. A bead of sweat rolled down my back. Amy had always threatened to change the code. She said it was pointless to have one that was so guessable, but I knew the real reason. She resented that it was my birthday and not our anniversary: Once again I’d chosen me over us. My semi-sweet nostalgia for Amy disappeared. I stabbed my finger at the numbers again, growing more panicked as the alarm beeped and beeped and beeped its countdown – until it went into full intruder blare.
Woooonk-woooonk-woooonk!
My cell phone was supposed to ring so I could give the all-clear: Just me, the idiot. But it didn’t. I waited a full minute, the alarm reminding me of a torpedoed-submarine movie. The canned heat of a closed house in July shimmered over me. My shirt back was already soaked. Goddammit, Amy. I scanned the alarm for the company’s number and found nothing. I pulled over a chair and began yanking at the alarm; I had it off the wall, hanging by the cords, when my phone finally rang. A bitchy voice on the other end demanded Amy’s first pet’s name.
Woooonk-woooonk-woooonk!
It was exactly the wrong tone – smug, petulant, utterly unconcerned – and exactly the wrong question, because I didn’t know the answer, which infuriated me. No matter how many clues I solved, I’d be faced with some Amy trivia to unman me.
‘Look, this is Nick Dunne, this is my dad’s house, this account was set up by me,’ I snapped. ‘So it doesn’t really fucking matter what my wife’s first pet’s name was.’
Woooonk-woooonk-woooonk!
‘Please don’t take that tone with me, sir.’
‘Look, I just came in to grab one thing from my dad’s house, and now I’m leaving, okay?’
‘I have to notify the police immediately.’
‘Can you just turn off the goddamn alarm so I can think?’
Woooonk-woooonk-woooonk!
‘The alarm’s off.’
‘The alarm is not off.’
‘Sir, I warned you once, do not take that tone with me.’
You fucking bitch.
‘You know what? Fuck it, fuck it, fuck it.’
I hung up just as I remembered Amy’s cat’s name, the very first one: Stuart.
I called back, got a different operator, a reasonable operator, who turned off the alarm and, God bless her, called off the police. I really wasn’t in the mood to explain myself.
I sat on the thin, cheap carpet and made myself breathe, my heart clattering. After a minute, after my shoulders untensed and my jaw unclenched and my hands unfisted and my heart returned to normal, I stood up and momentarily debated just leaving, as if that would teach Amy a lesson. But as I stood up, I saw a blue envelope left on the kitchen counter like a Dear John note.
I took a deep breath, blew it out – new attitude – and opened the envelope, pulled out the letter marked with a heart.
Hi Darling,
So we both have things we want to work on. For me, it’d be my perfectionism, my occasional (wishful thinking?) self-righteousness. For you? I know you worry that you’re sometimes too distant, too removed, unable to be tender or nurturing. Well, I want to tell you – here in your father’s house – that isn’t true. You are not your father. You need to know that you are a good man, you are a sweet man, you are kind. I’ve punished you for not being able to read my mind sometimes, for not being able to act in exactly the way I wanted you to act right at exactly that moment. I punished you for being a real, breathing man. I ordered you around instead of trusting you to find your way. I didn’t give you the benefit of the doubt: that no matter how much you and I blunder, you always love me and want me to be happy. And that should be enough for any girl, right? I worry I’ve said things about you that aren’t actually true, and that you’ve come to believe them. So I am here to say now: You are WARM. You are my sun.
If Amy were with me, as she’d planned on being, she would have nuzzled into me the way she used to do, her face in the crook of my neck, and she would have kissed me and smiled and said, You are, you know. My sun. My throat tight, I took a final look around my father’s house and left, closing the door on the heat. In my car, I fumbled open the envelope marked fourth 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 get me, 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 to return the transistor battery …’
We finished watching the game. Cards lost. When it was over, Go switched the TV to mute. ‘You want to talk, or you want more distraction? Whatever you need.’
‘You go on to bed, Go. I’m just going to flip around. Probably sleep. I need to sleep.’
‘You want an Ambien?’ My twin was a staunch believer in the easiest way. No relaxation tapes or whale noises for her; pop a pill, get unconscious.
‘Nah.’
‘They’re in the medicine cabinet if you change your mind. If there was ever a time for assisted sleep …’ She hovered over me for just a few seconds, then, Go-like, trotted down the hall, clearly not sleepy, and closed her door, knowing the kindest thing was to leave me alone.
A lot of people lacked that gift: knowing when to fuck off. People love talking, and I have never been a huge talker. I carry on an inner monologue, but the words often don’t reach my lips. She looks nice today, I’d think, but somehow it wouldn’t occur to me to say it out loud. My mom talked, my sister talked. I’d been raised to listen. So, sitting on the couch by myself, not talking, felt decadent. I leafed through one of Go’s magazines, flipped through TV channels, finally alighting on an old black-and-white show, men in fedoras scribbling notes while a pretty housewife explained that her husband was away in Fresno, which made the two cops look at each other significantly and nod. I thought of Gilpin and Boney and my stomach lurched.
In my pocket, my disposable cell phone made a mini-jackpot sound that meant I had a text:
im outside open the door