AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE
THE DAY OF
You know how I found out? I saw them. That’s how stupid my husband is. One snowy April night, I felt so lonely. I was drinking warm amaretto with Bleecker and reading, lying on the floor as the snow came down, listening to old scratchy albums, like Nick and I used to (that entry was true). I had a burst of romantic cheer: I’d surprise him at The Bar, and we’d have a few drinks and wander through the empty streets together, hand in mitten. We would walk around the hushed downtown and he would press me against a wall and kiss me in the snow that looked like sugar clouds. That’s right, I wanted him back so badly that I was willing to re-create that moment. I was willing to pretend to be someone else again. I remember thinking: We can still find a way to make this work. Faith! I followed him all the way to Missouri, because I still believed he’d love me again somehow, love me that intense, thick way he did, the way that made everything good. Faith!
I got there just in time to see him leaving with her. I was in the goddamn parking lot, twenty feet behind him, and he didn’t even register me, I was a ghost. He didn’t have his hands on her, not yet, but I knew. I could tell because he was so aware of her. I followed them, and suddenly, he pressed her up against a tree – in the middle of town – and kissed her. Nick is cheating, I thought dumbly, and before I could make myself say anything, they were going up to her apartment. I waited for an hour, sitting on the doorstep, then got too cold – blue fingernails, chattering teeth – and went home. He never even knew I knew.
I had a new persona, not of my choosing. I was Average Dumb Woman Married to Average Shitty Man. He had single-handedly de-amazed Amazing Amy.
I know women whose entire personas are woven from a benign mediocrity. Their lives are a list of shortcomings: the unappreciative boyfriend, the extra ten pounds, the dismissive boss, the conniving sister, the straying husband. I’ve always hovered above their stories, nodding in sympathy and thinking how foolish they are, these women, to let these things happen, how undisciplined. And now to be one of them! One of the women with the endless stories that make people nod sympathetically and think: Poor dumb bitch.
I could hear the tale, how everyone would love telling it: how Amazing Amy, the girl who never did wrong, let herself be dragged, penniless, to the middle of the country, where her husband threw her over for a younger woman. How predictable, how perfectly average, how amusing. And her husband? He ended up happier than ever. No. I couldn’t allow that. No. Never. Never. He doesn’t get to do this to me and still fucking win. No.
I changed my name for that piece of shit. Historical records have been altered – Amy Elliott to Amy Dunne – like it’s nothing. No, he does not get to win.
So I began to think of a different story, a better story, that would destroy Nick for doing this to me. A story that would restore my perfection. It would make me the hero, flawless and adored.
Because everyone loves the Dead Girl.
It’s rather extreme, framing your husband for your murder. I want you to know I know that. All the tut-tutters out there will say: She should have just left, bundled up what remained of her dignity. Take the high road! Two wrongs don’t make a right! All those things that spineless women say, confusing their weakness with morality.
I won’t divorce him because that’s exactly what he’d like. And I won’t forgive him because I don’t feel like turning the other cheek. Can I make it any more clear? I won’t find that a satisfactory ending. The bad guy wins? Fuck him.
For over a year now, I’ve smelled her twat on his fingertips as he slipped into bed next to me. I’ve watched him ogle himself in the mirror, grooming himself like a horny baboon for their dates. I’ve listened to his lies, lies, lies – from simplistic child’s fibs to elaborate Rube Goldbergian contraptions. I’ve tasted butterscotch on his dry-kiss lips, a cloying flavor that was never there before. I’ve felt the stubble on his cheeks that he knows I don’t like but apparently she does. I’ve suffered betrayal with all five senses. For over a year.
So I may have gone a bit mad. I do know that framing your husband for your murder is beyond the pale of what an average woman might do.
But it’s so very necessary. Nick must be taught a lesson. He’s never been taught a lesson! He glides through life with that charming-Nicky grin, his beloved-child entitlement, his fibs and shirkings, his shortcomings and selfishness, and no one calls him on anything. I think this experience will make him a better person. Or at least a sorrier one. Fucker.
I’ve always thought I could commit the perfect murder. People who get caught get caught because they don’t have patience; they refuse to plan. I smile again as I shift my crappy getaway car into fifth gear (Carthage now seventy-eight miles in the dust) and brace myself for a speeding truck – the car seems ready to take flight every time a semi passes. But I do smile, because this car shows just how smart I am: purchased for twelve hundred dollars cash from a Craigslist posting. Five months ago, so the memory wouldn’t be fresh in anyone’s mind. A 1992 Ford Festiva, the tiniest, most forgettable car in the world. I met the sellers at night, in the parking lot of a WalMart in Jonesboro, Arkansas. I took the train down with a bundle of cash in my purse – eight hours each way, while Nick was on a boys’ trip. (And by boys’ trip, I mean fucking the slut.) I ate in the train’s dining car, a clump of lettuce with two cherry tomatoes that the menu described as a salad. I was seated with a melancholy farmer returning home after visiting his baby granddaughter for the first time.
The couple selling the Ford seemed as interested in discretion as I. The woman remained in the car the whole time, a pacifiered toddler in her arms, watching her husband and me trade cash for keys. (That is the correct grammar, you know: her husband and me.) Then she got out and I got in. That quick. In the rearview mirror, I saw the couple strolling into WalMart with their money. I’ve been parking it in long-term lots in St. Louis. I go down twice a month and park it somewhere new. Pay cash. Wear a baseball cap. Easy enough.
So that’s just an example. Of patience, planning, and ingenuity. I am pleased with myself; I have three hours more until I reach the thick of the Missouri Ozarks and my destination, a small archipelago of cabins in the woods that accepts cash for weekly rentals and has cable TV, a must. I plan to hole up there the first week or two; I don’t want to be on the road when the news hits, and it’s the last place Nick would think I’d hide once he realizes I’m hiding.
This stretch of highway is particularly ugly. Middle-America blight. After another twenty miles, I see, up on the off-ramp, the remains of a lonesome family gas station, vacant but not boarded up, and when I pull to the side, I see the women’s restroom door swung wide. I enter – no electricity, but there’s a warped metal mirror and the water is still on. In the afternoon sunlight and the sauna heat, I remove from my purse a pair of metal scissors and bunny-brown hair dye. I shear off large chunks of my hair. All the blond goes into a plastic bag. Air hits the back of my neck, and my head feels light, like a balloon – I roll it around a few times to enjoy. I apply the color, check my watch, and linger in the doorway, looking out over miles of flatland pocked with fast-food restaurants and motel chains. I can feel an Indian crying. (Nick would hate that joke. Derivative! And then he’d add, ‘although the word derivative as a criticism is itself derivative.’ I’ve got to get him out of my head – he still steps on my lines from a hundred miles away.) I wash my hair in the sink, the warm water making me sweat, and then back in the car with my bag of hair and trash. I put on a pair of outdated wire-rim glasses and look in the rearview mirror and smile again. Nick and I would never have married if I had looked like this when we met. All this could have been avoided if I were less pretty.
Item 34: Change look. Check.
I’m not sure, exactly, how to be Dead Amy. I’m trying to figure out what that means for me, what I become for the next few months. Anyone, I suppose, except people I’ve already been: Amazing Amy. Preppy ’80s Girl. Ultimate-Frisbee Granola and Blushing Ingenue and Witty Hepburnian Sophisticate. Brainy Ironic Girl and Boho Babe (the latest version of Frisbee Granola). Cool Girl and Loved Wife and Unloved Wife and Vengeful Scorned Wife. Diary Amy.
I hope you liked Diary Amy. She was meant to be likable. Meant for someone like you to like her. She’s easy to like. I’ve never understood why that’s considered a compliment – that just anyone could like you. No matter. I thought the entries turned out nicely, and it wasn’t simple. I had to maintain an affable if somewhat naive persona, a woman who loved her husband and could see some of his flaws (otherwise she’d be too much of a sap) but was sincerely devoted to him – all the while leading the reader (in this case, the cops, I am so eager for them to find it) toward the conclusion that Nick was indeed planning to kill me. So many clues to unpack, so many surprises ahead!
Nick always mocked my endless lists. (‘It’s like you make sure you’re never satisfied, that there’s always something else to be perfected, instead of just enjoying the moment.’) But who wins here? I win, because my list, the master list entitled Fuck Nick Dunne, was exacting – it was the most complete, fastidious list that has ever been created. On my list was Write Diary Entries for 2005 to 2012. Seven years of diary entries, not every day, but twice monthly, at least. Do you know how much discipline that takes? Would Cool Girl Amy be able to do that? To research each week’s current events, to cross-consult with my old daily planners to make sure I forgot nothing important, then to reconstruct how Diary Amy would react to each event? It was fun, mostly. I’d wait for Nick to leave for The Bar, or to go meet his mistress, the ever-texting, gum-chewing, vapid mistress with her acrylic nails and the sweatpants with logos across the butt (she isn’t like this, exactly, but she might as well be), and I’d pour some coffee or open a bottle of wine, pick one of my thirty-two different pens, and rewrite my life a little.
It is true that I sometimes hated Nick less while I was doing this. A giddy Cool Girl perspective will do that. Sometimes Nick would come home, stinking of beer or of the hand sanitizer he wiped on his body post-mistress-coitus (never entirely erased the stink, though – she must have one rank *), and smile guiltily at me, be all sweet and hangdog with me, and I’d almost think: I won’t go through with this. And then I’d picture him with her, in her stripper thong, letting him degrade her because she was pretending to be Cool Girl, she was pretending to love blow jobs and football and getting wasted. And I’d think, I am married to an imbecile. I’m married to a man who will always choose that, and when he gets bored with this dumb twat, he’ll just find another girl who is pretending to be that girl, and he’ll never have to do anything hard in his life.
Resolve stiffened.
One hundred and fifty-two entries total, and I don’t think I ever lose her voice. I wrote her very carefully, Diary Amy. She is designed to appeal to the cops, to appeal to the public should portions be released. They have to read this diary like it’s some sort of Gothic tragedy. A wonderful, good-hearted woman – whole life ahead of her, everything going for her, whatever else they say about women who die – chooses the wrong mate and pays the ultimate price. They have to like me. Her.
My parents are worried, of course, but how can I feel sorry for them, since they made me this way and then deserted me? They never, ever fully appreciated the fact that they were earning money from my existence, that I should have been getting royalties. Then, after they siphoned off my money, my ‘feminist’ parents let Nick bundle me off to Missouri like I was some piece of chattel, some mail-order bride, some property exchange. Gave me a fucking cuckoo clock to remember them by. Thanks for thirty-six years of service! They deserve to think I’m dead, because that’s practically the state they consigned me to: no money, no home, no friends. They deserve to suffer too. If you can’t take care of me while I’m alive, you have made me dead anyway. Just like Nick, who destroyed and rejected the real me a piece at a time – you’re too serious, Amy, you’re too uptight, Amy, you overthink things, you analyze too much, you’re no fun anymore, you make me feel useless, Amy, you make me feel bad, Amy. He took away chunks of me with blase′ swipes: my independence, my pride, my esteem. I gave, and he took and took. He Giving Treed me out of existence.
That whore, he picked that little whore over me. He killed my soul, which should be a crime. Actually, it is a crime. According to me, at least.