Gone Girl

Part One: Boy Loses Girl Chapter Twenty-Two

AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE

AUGUST 17, 2011

-  Diary entry  -

I know this sounds the stuff of moony teenage girls, but I've been tracking Nick's moods. Toward me. Just to make sure I'm not crazy. I've got a calendar, and I put hearts on any day Nick seems to love me again, and black squares when he doesn't. The past year was all black squares, pretty much.

But now? Nine days of hearts. In a row. Maybe all he needed to know was how much I loved him and how unhappy I'd become. Maybe he had a change of heart. I've never loved a phrase more.

Quiz: After over a year of coldness, your husband suddenly seems to love you again. You:

a) Go on and on about how much he's hurt you so he can apologize some more.

b) Give him the cold shoulder for a while longer  -  so he learns his lesson!

c) Don't press him about his new attitude  -  know that he will confide in you when the time comes, and in the meantime, shower him with affection so he feels secure and loved, because that's how this marriage thing works.

d) Demand to know what went wrong; make him talk and talk about it in order to calm your own neuroses.

Answer: C

It's August, so sumptuous that I couldn't bear any more black squares, but no, it's been nothing but hearts, Nick acting like my husband, sweet and loving and goofy. He orders me chocolates from my favorite shop in New York for a treat, and he writes me a silly poem to go with them. A limerick, actually:

There once was a girl from Manhattan

Who slept only on sheets made of satin

Her husband slipped and he slided

And their bodies collided

So they did something dirty in Latin.

It would be funnier if our sex life were as carefree as the rhyme would suggest. But last week we did ... f*ck? Do it? Something more romantic that have sex but less cheesy than make love. He came home from work and kissed me full on the lips, and he touched me as if I were really there. I almost cried, I'd been so lonely. To be kissed on the lips by your husband is the most decadent thing.

What else? He takes me swimming in the same pond he's gone to since he was a child. I can picture little Nick flapping around manically, face and shoulders sunburned red because (just like now) he refuses to wear sunscreen, forcing Mama Mo to chase after him with lotion that she swipes on whenever she can reach him.

He's been taking me on a full tour of his boyhood haunts, like I asked him to for ages. He walks me to the edge of the river, and he kisses me as the wind whips my hair ('My two favorite things to look at in the world,' he whispers in my ear). He kisses me in a funny little playground fort that he once considered his own clubhouse ('I always wanted to bring a girl here, a perfect girl, and look at me now,' he whispers in my ear). Two days before the mall closes for good, we ride carousel bunnies side by side, our laughter echoing through the empty miles.

He takes me for a sundae at his favorite ice cream parlor, and we have the place to ourselves in the morning, the air all sticky with sweets. He kisses me and says this place is where he stuttered and suffered through so many dates, and he wishes he could have told his high school self that he would be back here with the girl of his dreams someday. We eat ice cream until we have to roll home and get under the covers. His hand on my belly, an accidental nap.

The neurotic in me, of course, is asking: Where's the catch? Nick's turnaround is so sudden and so grandiose, it feels like ... it feels like he must want something. Or he's already done something and he is being preemptively sweet for when I find out. I worry. I caught him last week shuffling through my thick file box marked THE DUNNES! (written in my best cursive in happier days), a box filled with all the strange paperwork that makes up a marriage, a combined life. I worry that he is going to ask me for a second mortgage on The Bar, or to borrow against our life insurance, or to sell off some not-to-be-touched-for-thirty-years stock. He said he just wanted to make sure everything was in order, but he said it in a fluster. My heart would break, it really would, if, midbite of bubblegum ice cream, he turned to me and said: You know, the interesting thing about a second mortgage is ...

I had to write that, I had to let that out. And just seeing it, I know it sounds crazy. Neurotic and insecure and suspicious.

I will not let my worst self ruin my marriage. My husband loves me. He loves me and he has come back to me and that is why the only reason.

Just like that: Here is my life. It's finally returned.