Rating: ★★★★☆ Tags: Mystery Detective, General, Fiction

Of course she has to
stage-manage this. She wants the image of me and the
wild running river, my hair ruffling in the breeze as I look
out onto the horizon and ponder our life together. I can’t
just go to Dunkin’ Donuts
.
You need to decide what you want
. Unfortunately for
Amy, I had decided already.
Boney looked up brightly from her notes: ‘Can you tell
me what your wife’s blood type is?’ she asked.
‘Uh, no, I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know your wife’s blood type?’
‘Maybe O?’ I guessed.
Boney frowned, then made a drawn-out yoga-like
sound. ‘Okay, Nick, here are the things 
we
are doing to
help.’ She listed them: Amy’s cell was being monitored, her
photo circulated, her credit cards tracked. Known sex
offenders in the area were being interviewed. Our sparse
neighborhood was being canvassed. Our home phone was
tapped, in case any ransom calls came in.
I wasn’t sure what to say now. I raked my memory for
the lines: What does the husband say at this point in the
movie? Depends on whether he’s guilty or innocent.
‘I can’t say that reassures me. Are you – is this an
abduction, or a missing persons case, or what exactly is
going on?’ I knew the statistics, knew them from the same
TV show I was starring in: If the first forty-eight hours didn’t
turn up something in a case, it was likely to go unsolved.
The first forty-eight hours were crucial. ‘I mean, my wife is
gone. My wife: 
is gone
!’ I realized it was the first time I’d

---

said it the way it should have been said: panicked and
angry. My dad was a man of infinite varieties of bitterness,
rage, distaste. In my lifelong struggle to avoid becoming
him, I’d developed an inability to demonstrate much
negative emotion at all. It was another thing that made me
seem like a dick – my stomach could be all oiled eels, and
you would get nothing from my face and less from my
words. It was a constant problem: too much control or no
control at all.
‘Nick, we are taking this 
extremely
seriously,’ Boney
said. ‘The lab guys are over at your place as we speak, and
that will give us more information to go on. Right now, the
more you can tell us about your wife, the better. What is she
like?’
The usual husband phrases came into my mind: 
She’s
sweet, she’s great, she’s nice, she’s supportive
.
‘What is she like 
how
?’ I asked.
‘Give me an idea of her personality,’ Boney prompted.
‘Like, what did you get her for your anniversary? Jewelry?’
‘I hadn’t gotten anything quite yet,’ I said. ‘I was going
to do it this afternoon.’ I waited for her to laugh and say
‘baby of the family’ again, but she didn’t.
‘Okay. Well, then, tell me about her. Is she outgoing? Is
she – I don’t know how to say this – is she New Yorky? Like
what might come off to some as rude? Might rub people the
wrong way?’
‘I don’t know. She’s not a never-met-a-stranger kind of
person, but she’s not – not abrasive enough to make
someone … hurt her.’
This was my eleventh lie. The Amy of today was
abrasive enough to want to hurt, sometimes. I speak

---

specifically of the Amy of today, who was only remotely like
the woman I fell in love with. It had been an awful fairy-tale
reverse transformation. Over just a few years, the old Amy,
the girl of the big laugh and the easy ways, literally shed
herself, a pile of skin and soul on the floor, and out stepped
this new, brittle, bitter Amy. My wife was no longer my wife
but a razor-wire knot daring me to unloop her, and I was not
up to the job with my thick, numb, nervous fingers. Country
fingers. Flyover fingers untrained in the intricate, dangerous
work of