You may call me Ozark Amy. I am ensconced in the Hide-A-Way Cabins (has ever there been a more apt name?), and I sit quietly, watching all the levers and latches I put in place do their work.
I have shed myself of Nick, and yet I think about him more than ever. Last night at 10:04 p.m. my disposable cell phone rang. (That’s right, Nick, you’re not the only one who knows the old ‘secret cell phone’ trick.) It was the alarm company. I didn’t answer, of course, but now I know Nick has made it as far as his dad’s house. Clue 3. I changed the code two weeks before I disappeared and listed my secret cell as the first number to call. I can picture Nick, my clue in hand, entering his dad’s dusty, stale house, fumbling with the alarm code … then the time runs out. Beep beep beeeep! His cell is listed as the backup if I can’t be reached (and I obviously can’t).
So he tripped the alarm, and he talked to someone at the alarm company, and so he’s on record as being in his dad’s house after my disappearance. Which is good for the plan. It’s not foolproof, but it doesn’t have to be foolproof. I’ve already left enough for the police to make a case against Nick: the staged scene, the mopped-up blood, the credit-card bills. All these will be found by even the most incompetent police departments. Noelle will spill my pregnancy news very soon (if she hasn’t already). It is enough, especially once the police discover Able Andie (able to suck cock on command). So all these extras, they’re just bonus fuck-yous. Amusing booby traps. I love that I am a woman with booby traps.
Ellen Abbott is part of my plan too. The biggest cable crime-news show in the country. I adore Ellen Abbott, I love how protective and maternal she gets about all the missing women on her show, and how rabid-dog vicious she is once she seizes on a suspect, usually the husband. She is America’s voice of female righteousness. Which is why I’d really like her to take on my story. The Public must turn against Nick. It’s as much a part of his punishment as prison, for darling Nicky – who spends so much time worrying about people liking him – to know he is universally hated. And I need Ellen to keep me apprised of the investigation. Have the police found my diary yet? Do they know about Andie? Have they discovered the bumped-up life insurance? This is the hardest part: waiting for stupid people to figure things out.
I flip on the TV in my little room once an hour, eager to see if Ellen has picked up my story. She has to, I can’t see how she could resist. I am pretty, Nick is pretty, and I have the Amazing Amy hook. Just before noon, she flares up, promising a special report. I stay tuned, glaring at the TV: Hurry up, Ellen. Or: Hurry up, Ellen. We have that in common: We are both people and entities. Amy and Amy, Ellen and Ellen.
Tampon commercial, detergent commercial, maxipad commercial, Windex commercial. You’d think all women do is clean and bleed.
And finally! There I am! My debut!
I know from the second Ellen shows up, glowering like Elvis, that this is going to be good. A few gorgeous photos of me, a still shot of Nick with his insane love me! grin from the first press conference. News: There has been a fruitless multi-site search for ‘the beautiful young woman with everything going for her.’ News: Nick fucked himself already. Taking candid photos with a townie during a search for me. This is clearly what hooked Ellen, because she is 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 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 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 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. I just want you to know I’m on your side, Nick. I’m here for you. Probably baked him cookies.
The Ellen Abbott cameras are now panning the Volunteer Center, which looks a little shabby. A correspondent is talking about how my disappearance has ‘rocked this tiny town,’ and behind her, I can see a table lined with homemade casseroles and cakes for poor Nicky. Even now the asshole has women taking care of him. Desperate women spotting an opening. A good-looking, vulnerable man – and fine, he may have killed his wife, but we don’t know that. Not for sure. For now it’s a relief just to have a man to cook for, the fortysomething equivalent of driving your bike past the cute boy’s house.
They are showing Nick’s grinning cell-phone photo again. I can picture the townie slut in her lonely, glistening kitchen – a trophy kitchen bought with alimony money – mixing and baking while having an imaginary conversation with Nick: No, I’m forty-three, actually. No, really, I am! No, I don’t have men swarming all over me, I really don’t, the men in town aren’t that interesting, most of them …
I get a burst of jealousy toward that woman with her cheek against my husband’s. She is prettier than me as I am now. I eat Hershey bars and float in the pool for hours under a hot sun, the chlorine turning my flesh rubbery as a seal’s. I’m tan, which I’ve never been before – at least not a dark, proud, deep tan. A tanned skin is a damaged skin, and no one likes a wrinkled girl; I spent my life slick with SPF. But I let myself darken a bit before I disappeared, and now, five days in, I’m on my way to brown. ‘Brown as a berry!’ old Dorothy, the manager says. ‘You are brown as a berry, girl!’ she says with delight when I come in to pay next week’s rent in cash.
I have dark skin, my mouse-colored helmet cut, the smart-girl glasses. I gained twelve pounds in the months before my disappearance – carefully hidden in roomy sundresses, not that my inattentive husband would notice – and already another two pounds since. I was careful to have no photos taken of me in the months before I disappeared, so the public will know only pale, thin Amy. I am definitely not that anymore. I can feel my bottom move sometimes, on its own, when I walk. A wiggle and a jiggle, wasn’t that some old saying? I never had either before. My body was a beautiful, perfect economy, every feature calibrated, everything in balance. I don’t miss it. I don’t miss men looking at me. It’s a relief to walk into a convenience store and walk right back out without some hangabout in sleeveless flannel leering as I leave, some muttered bit of misogyny slipping from him like a nacho-cheese burp. Now no one is rude to me, but no one is nice to me either. No one goes out of their way, not overly, not really, not the way they used to.
I am the opposite of Amy.