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

night
mare,’ she
said. ‘How are you, Nick?’
When Marybeth asked 
How are you
, it wasn’t a
courtesy, it was an existential question. She studied my
face, and I was sure she was studying me, and would
continue to note my every thought and action. The Elliotts
believed that every trait should be considered, judged,
categorized. It all means something, it can all be used.
Mom, Dad, Baby, they were three advanced people with
three advanced degrees in psychology – they thought more
before nine a.m. than most people thought all month. I
remember once declining cherry pie at dinner, and Rand
cocked his head and said, ‘Ahh! Iconoclast. Disdains the
easy, symbolic patriotism.’ And when I tried to laugh it off
and said, well, I didn’t like cherry cobbler either, Marybeth
touched Rand’s arm: ‘Because of the divorce. All those
comfort foods, the desserts a family eats together, those
are just bad memories for Nick.’
It was silly but incredibly sweet, these people spending
so much energy trying to figure me out. The answer: I don’t
like cherries.
By eleven-thirty, the station was a rolling boil of noise.
Phones were ringing, people were yelling across the room.
A woman whose name I never caught, whom I registered
only as a chattering bobblehead of hair, suddenly made her

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presence known at my side. I had no idea how long she’d
been there: ‘… and the main point of this, Nick, is just to get
people looking for Amy and knowing she has a family who
loves her and wants her back. This will be very controlled.
Nick, you will need to – Nick?’
‘Yep.’
‘People will want to hear a quick statement from her
husband.’
From across the room, Go was darting toward me.
She’d dropped me at the station, then run by The Bar to
take care of bar things for thirty minutes, and now she was
back, acting like she’d abandoned me for a week,
zigzagging between desks, ignoring the young officer
who’d clearly been assigned to usher her in, neatly, in a
hushed, dignified manner.
‘Okay so far?’ Go said, squeezing me with one arm,
the dude hug. The Dunne kids don’t perform hugs well.
Go’s thumb landed on my right nipple. ‘I wish Mom was
here,’ she whispered, which was what I’d been thinking. ‘No
news?’ she asked when she pulled away.
‘Nothing, fucking nothing—’
‘You look like you feel awful.’
‘I feel like fucking shit.’ I was about to say what an idiot
I was, not listening to her about the booze.
‘I would have finished the bottle, too.’ She patted my
back.
‘It’s almost time,’ the PR woman said, again appearing
magically.
‘It’s not a bad turnout for a July fourth weekend.’ She
started herding us all toward a dismal conference room –
aluminum blinds and folding chairs and a clutch of bored

---

reporters – and up onto the platform. I felt like a third-tier
speaker at a mediocre convention, me in my business-
casual blues, addressing a captive audience of jet-lagged
people daydreaming about what they’d eat for lunch. But I
could see the journalists perk up when they caught sight of
me – let’s say it: a young, decent-looking guy – and then the
PR woman placed a cardboard poster on a nearby easel,
and it was a blown-up photo of Amy at her most stunning,
that face that made you keep double-checking: 
She can’t
be that good-looking, can she?
She could, she was, and I
stared at the photo of my wife as the cameras snapped
photos of me staring at the photo. I thought of that day in
New York when I found her again: the blond hair, the back
of her head, was all I could see, but I knew it was her, and I
saw it as a sign. How many millions of heads had I seen in
my life, but I knew this was Amy’s pretty skull floating down
Seventh Avenue in front of me. I knew it was her, and that
we would be together.
Cameras flashed. I turned away and saw spots. It was
surreal. That’s what people always say to describe
moments that are merely unusual. I thought: 
You have no
fucking idea what surreal is
. My hangover was really
warming up now, my left eye throbbing like a heart.
The cameras were clicking, and the two families stood
together, all of us with mouths in thin slits, Go the only one
looking even close to a real person. The rest of us looked
like placeholder humans, bodies that had been dollied in
and propped up. Amy, over on her easel, looked more
present. We’d all seen these news conferences before –
when other women went missing. We were being forced to
perform the scene that TV viewers expected: the worried

---

but hopeful family. Caffeine-dazed eyes and ragdoll arms.
My name was being said; the room gave a collective
gulp of expectation. 
Showtime
.
When I saw the broadcast later, I didn’t recognise my
voice. I barely recognised my face. The booze floating,
sludgelike, just beneath the surface of my skin made me
look like a fleshy wastrel, just sensuous enough to be
disreputable. I had worried about my voice wavering, so I
overcorrected and the words came out clipped, like I was
reading a stock report. ‘We just want Amy to get home safe
…’ Utterly unconvincing, disconnected. I might as well have
been reading numbers at random.
Rand Elliott stepped up and tried to save me: ‘Our
daughter, Amy, is a sweetheart of a girl, full of life. She’s
our only child, and she’s smart and beautiful and kind. She
really is Amazing Amy. And we want her back. Nick wants
her back.’ He put a hand on my shoulder, wiped his eyes,
and I involuntarily turned steel. My father again: 
Men
don’t
cry.
Rand kept talking: ‘We all want her back where she
belongs, with her family. We’ve set up a command center
over at the Days Inn …’
The news reports would show Nick Dunne, husband of
the missing woman, standing metallically next to his father-
in-law, arms crossed, eyes glazed, looking almost bored as
Amy’s parents wept. And then worse. My longtime
response, the need to remind people I wasn’t a dick, I was
a nice guy despite the affectless stare, the haughty,
douchebag face.
So there it came, out of nowhere, as Rand begged for
his daughter’s return: a killer smile.

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