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

pissed
. There he is, Nick in his sweetie-pie mode,
the 
I am the beloved of all women
mode, his face pressed
against the strange woman’s, as if they’re happy-hour
buddies.
What an idiot. I love it.
Ellen Abbott is making much of the fact that our
backyard leads right to the Mississippi River. I wonder then
if it has been leaked – the search history on Nick’s
computer, which I made sure includes a study on the locks
and dams of the Mississippi, as well as a Google search of
the words 
body float Mississippi River
. Not to put too fine a
point on it. It could happen – possibly, unlikely, but there is
precedent – that the river might sweep my body all the way
to the ocean. I’ve actually felt sad for myself, picturing my
slim, naked, pale body, floating just beneath the current, a
colony of snails attached to one bare leg, my hair trailing
like seaweed until I reach the ocean and drift down down
down to the bottom, my waterlogged flesh peeling off in soft
streaks, me slowly disappearing into the current like a
watercolor until just the bones are left.
But I’m a romantic. In real life, if Nick had killed me, I

---

think he would have just rolled my body into a trash bag and
driven me to one of the landfills in the sixty-mile radius. Just
dispose of me. He’d have even taken a few items with him
– the broken toaster that’s not worth fixing, a pile of old
VHS tapes he’s been meaning to toss – to make the trip
efficient.
I’m learning to live fairly efficiently myself. A girl has to
budget when she’s dead. I had time to plan, to stockpile
some cash: I gave myself a good twelve months between
deciding to disappear and disappearing. That’s why most
people get caught in murders: They don’t have the
discipline to wait. I have $10,200 in cash. If I’d cleared out
$10,200 in a month, that would have been noticed. But I
collected cash forwards from credit cards I took out in
Nick’s name – the cards that would make him look like a
greedy little cheat – and I siphoned off another $4,400 from
our bank accounts over the months: withdrawals of $200 or
$300, nothing to attract attention. I stole from Nick, from his
pockets, a $20 here, a $10 there, a slow deliberate
stockpile – it’s like that budgeting plan where you put the
money you’d spend on your morning Starbucks into a jar,
and at the end of the year you have $1,500. And I’d always
steal from the tip jar when I went to The Bar. I’m sure Nick
blamed Go, and Go blamed Nick, and neither of them said
anything because they felt too sorry for the other.
But I am careful with money, my point. I have enough to
live on until I kill myself. I’m going to hide out long enough to
watch Lance Nicholas Dunne become a worldwide pariah,
to watch Nick be arrested, tried, marched off to prison,
bewildered in an orange jumpsuit and handcuffs. To watch
Nick squirm and sweat and swear he is innocent and still

---

be stuck. Then I will travel south along the river, where I will
meet up with my body, my pretend floating Other Amy body
in the Gulf of Mexico. I will sign up for a booze cruise –
something to get me out into the deep end but nothing
requiring identification. I will drink a giant ice-wet shaker of
gin, and I will swallow sleeping pills, and when no one is
looking, I’ll drop silently over the side, my pockets full of
Virginia Woolf rocks. It requires discipline, to drown
oneself, but I have discipline in spades. My body may never
be discovered, or it may resurface weeks, months, later –
eroded to the point that my death can’t be time-stamped –
and I will provide a last bit of evidence to make sure Nick is
marched to the padded cross, the prison table where he’ll
be pumped with poison and die.
I’d like to wait around and see him dead, but given the
state of our justice system, that may take years, and I have
neither the money nor the stamina. I’m ready to join the
Hopes.
I did veer from my budget a bit already. I spent about
$500 on items to nice-up my cabin – good sheets, a decent
lamp, towels that don’t stand up by themselves from years
of bleaching. But I try to accept what I’m offered. There’s a
man a few cabins away, a taciturn fellow, a hippie dropout
of the Grizzly Adams, homemade-granola variety – full
beard and turquoise rings and a guitar he plays on his back
deck some nights. His name, he says, is Jeff, just like my
name, I say, is Lydia. We smile only in passing, but he
brings me fish. A couple of times now, he brings a fish by,
freshly stinking but scaled and headless, and presents it to
me in a giant icy freezer bag. ‘Fresh fish!’ he says,
knocking, and if I don’t open the door immediately, he

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disappears, leaving the bag on my front doorstep. I cook
the fish in a decent skillet I bought at yet another Wal-Mart,
and it’s not bad, and it’s free.
‘Where do you get all the fish?’ I ask him.
‘At the getting place,’ he says.
Dorothy, who works the front desk and has already
taken a liking to me, brings tomatoes from her garden. I eat
the tomatoes that smell like the earth and the fish that
smells like the lake. I think that by next year, Nick will be
locked away in a place that smells only of the inside.
Fabricated odors: deodorant and old shoes and starchy
foods, stale mattresses. His worst fear, his own personal
panic dream: He finds himself in jail, realizing he did
nothing wrong but unable to prove it. Nick’s nightmares
have always been about being wronged, about being
trapped, a victim of forces beyond his control.
He always gets up after these dreams, paces around
the house, then puts on clothes and goes outside, wanders
along the roads near our house, into a park – a Missouri
park, a New York park – going wherever he wants. He is a
man of the outdoors, if he is not exactly outdoorsy. He’s not
a hiker, a camper, he doesn’t know how to make fires. He
wouldn’t know how to catch fish and present them to me.
But he likes the option, he likes the choice. He wants to
know he can go outside, even if he chooses instead to sit
on the couch and watch cage fighting for three hours.
I do wonder about the little slut. Andie. I thought she’d
last exactly three days. Then she wouldn’t be able to resist
sharing
. I know she likes to share because I’m one of her
friends on Facebook – my profile name is invented
(Madeleine Elster, ha!), my photo is stolen from a popup ad

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for mortgages (blond, smiling, benefiting from historically
low interest rates). Four months ago, Madeleine randomly
asked to be Andie’s friend, and Andie, like a hapless
puppy, accepted, so I know the little girl fairly well, along
with all her minutiae-enthralled friends, who take many naps
and love Greek yogurt and pinot grigio and enjoy sharing
that with each other. Andie is a good girl, meaning she
doesn’t post photos of herself ‘partying,’ and she never
posts lascivious messages. Which is unfortunate. When
she’s exposed as Nick’s girlfriend, I’d prefer the media find
photos of her doing shots or kissing girls or flashing her
thong; this would more easily cement her as the
homewrecker she is.
Homewrecker. My home was disheveled but not yet
wrecked when she first started kissing my husband,
reaching inside his trousers, slipping into bed with him.
Taking his cock in her mouth, all the way to the root so he
feels extra big as she gags. Taking it in her ass, deep.
Taking cum shots to the face and tits, then licking it off,
yum
. Taking, definitely taking. Her type would. They’ve
been together for over a year. Every holiday. I went through
his credit-card statements (the real ones) to see what he
got her for Christmas, but he’s been shockingly careful. I
wonder what it feels like to be a woman whose Christmas
present must be bought in cash. Liberating. Being an
undocumented girl means being the girl who doesn’t have
to call the plumber or listen to gripes about work or remind
and remind him to pick up some goddamn cat food.
I need her to break. I need 1) Noelle to tell someone
about my pregnancy; 2) the police to find the diary; 3) Andie
to tell someone about the affair. I suppose I had her

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stereotyped – that a girl who posts updates on her life five
times a day for anyone to see would have no real
understanding of what a secret is. She’s made occasional
grazing mentions of my husband online:
Saw Mr Hunky today.
(Oh, do tell!)
(When do we get to meet this stud?)
(Bridget likes this!)
A kiss from a dreamy guy makes everything better.
(Too true!)
(When do we get to meet Dreamy?!)
(Bridget likes this!)
But she’s been surprisingly discreet for a girl of her
generation. She’s a good girl (for a cunt). I can picture her,
that heart-shaped face tilted to one side, the gently
furrowed brow.