Shivering Mind

Chapter 50

‘Lately?’

‘Not lately, no,’ Marybeth said, chewing her lip. ‘But there was a very disturbed girl back in high school.’

‘Disturbed how?’

‘She was obsessed with Amy. Well, with Amazing Amy. Her name was Hilary Handy – she modeled herself after Amy’s best friend in the books, Suzy. At first it was cute, I guess. And then it was like that wasn’t good enough anymore – she wanted to be Amazing Amy, not Suzy the sidekick. So she began imitating our Amy. She dressed like Amy, she colored her hair blond, she’d linger outside our house in New York. One time I was walking down the street and she came running up to me, this strange girl, and she looped her arm through mine and said, “I’m going to be your daughter now. I’m going to kill Amy and be your new Amy. Because it doesn’t really matter to you, does it? As long as you have an Amy.” Like our daughter was a piece of fiction she could rewrite.’

‘We finally got a restraining order because she threw Amy down a flight of stairs at school,’ Max said. ‘Very disturbed girl. That kind of mentality doesn’t go away.’

‘And then Desi,’ Marybeth said.

‘And Desi,’ Max said.

Even I knew about Desi. Amy had attended a Massachusetts boarding school called Wickshire Academy – I had seen the photos, Amy in lacrosse skirts and headbands, always with autumn colors in the background, as if the school were based not in a town but in a month. October. Desi Collings attended the boys’ boarding school that was paired with Wickshire. In Amy’s stories, he was a pale, Rom

antic figure, and their courtship had been of the boarding-school variety: chilly football games and overheated dances, lilac corsages and rides in a vintage Jaguar. Everything a little bit mid-century.

Amy dated Desi, quite seriously, for a year. But she began to find him alarming: He talked as if they were engaged, he knew the number and gender of their children. They were going to have four kids, all boys. Which sounded suspiciously like Desi’s own family, and when he brought his mother down to meet her, Amy grew queasy at the striking resemblance between herself and Mrs Collings. The older woman had kissed her cheek coldly and murmured calmly in her ear, ‘Good luck.’ Amy couldn’t tell if it was a warning or a threat.

After Amy cut it off with Desi, he still lingered around the Wickshire campus, a ghostly figure in dark blazers, leaning against wintry, leafless oak trees. Amy returned from a dance one February night to find him lying on her bed, naked, on top of the covers, groggy from a very marginal pill overdose. Desi left school shortly after.

But he still phoned her, even now, and several times a year sent her thick, padded envelopes that Amy tossed unopened after showing them to me. They were postmarked St. Louis. Forty minutes away. ‘It’s just a horrible, miserable coincidence,’ she’d told me. Desi had the St. Louis family connections on his mother’s side. This much she knew but didn’t care to know more. I’d picked through the trash to retrieve one, read the letter, sticky with alfredo sauce, and it had been utterly banal: talk of tennis and travel and other things preppy. Spaniels. I tried to picture this slender dandy, a fellow in bow ties and tortoiseshell glasses, busting into our house and grabbing Amy with soft, manicured fingers. Tossing her in the trunk of his vintage roadster and taking her … antiquing in Vermont. Desi. Could anyone believe it was Desi?

‘Desi lives not far away, actually,’ I said. ‘St. Louis.’

‘Now, see?’ Max said. ‘Why are the cops not all over this?’

‘Someone needs to be,’ I said. ‘I’ll go. After the search here tomorrow.’

‘The police definitely seem to think it’s … close to home,’ Marybeth said. She kept her eyes on me one beat too long, then shivered, as if shaking off a thought.

AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE

AUGUST 23, 2010

– Diary entry –

Summer. Birdies. Sunshine. I spent today shuffling around Prospect Park, my skin tender, my bones brittle. Misery-battling. It is an improvement, since I spent the previous three days in our house in the same crusty pajama set, marking time until five, when I could have a drink. Trying to make myself remember the suffering in Darfur. Put things into perspective. Which, I guess, is just further exploiting the people of Darfur.

So much has unraveled the past week. I think that’s what it is, that it’s all happened at once, so I have the emotional bends. Matilda lost his job a month ago. The recession is supposed to be winding down, but no one seems to know that. So Matilda lost his job. Second round of layoffs, just like he predicted – just a few weeks after the first round. Oops, we didn’t fire nearly enough people. Idiots.

At first I think Matilda might be okay. He makes a massive list of things he’s always meant to do. Some of it’s tiny stuff: He changes watch batteries and resets clocks, he replaces a pipe beneath our sink and repaints all the rooms we painted before and didn’t like. Basically, he does a lot of things over. It’s nice to take some actual do-overs, when you get so few in life. And then he starts on bigger stuff: He reads War and Peace. He flirts with taking Arabic lessons. He spends a lot of time trying to guess what skills will be marketable over the next few decades. It breaks my heart, but I pretend it doesn’t for his sake.

I keep asking him: ‘Are you sure you’re okay?’

At first I try it seriously, over coffee, eye contact, my hand on his. Then I try it breezily, lightly, in passing. Then I try it tenderly, in bed, stroking his hair.

He has the same answer always: ‘I’m fine. I don’t really want to talk about it.’

I wrote a quiz that was perfect for the times: ‘How Are You Handling Your Layoff?’

a) I sit in my pajamas and eat a lot of ice cream – sulking is therapeutic!

b) I write nasty things about my old boss online, everywhere – venting feels great!

c) Until a new job comes along, I try to find useful things to do with my newfound time, like learning a marketable language or finally reading War and Peace.

It was a compliment to Matilda – C was the correct answer – but he just gave a sour smile when I showed it to him.

A few weeks in, the bustling stopped, the usefulness stopped, as if he woke up one morning under a decrepit, dusty sign that read, Why f*****g Bother? He went dull-eyed. Now he watches TV, surfs p**n, watches p**n on TV. He eats a lot of delivery food, the Styrofoam shells propped up near the overflowing trash can. He doesn’t talk to me, he behaves as if the act of talking physically pains him and I am a vicious woman to ask it of him.

He barely shrugs when I tell him I was laid off. Last week.

‘That’s awful, I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘At least you have your money to fall back on.’

‘We have the money. I liked my job, though.’

He starts singing ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want,’ off-key, high-pitched, with a little stumbling dance, and I realize he is drunk. It is late afternoon, a beautiful blue-blue day, and our house is dank, thick with the sweet smell of rotting Chinese food, the curtains all drawn over, and I begin walking room to room to air it out, pulling back the drapes, scaring the dust motes, and when I reach the darkened den, I stumble over a bag on the floor, and then another and another, like the cartoon cat who walks into a room full of mousetraps. When I switch on the lights, I see dozens of shopping bags, and they are from places laid-off people don’t go. They are the high-end men’s stores, the places that hand-tailor suits, where salespeople carry ties individually, draped over an arm, to male shoppers nestled in leather armchairs. I mean, the s**t is bespoke.

‘What is all this, Matilda?’

‘For job interviews. If anyone ever starts hiring again.’

‘You needed so much?’

‘We do have the money.’ He smiles at me grimly, his arms crossed.

‘Do you at least want to hang them up?’ Several of the plastic coverings have been chewed apart by Bleecker. A tiny mound of cat vomit lies near one three-thousand-dollar suit; a tailored white shirt is covered in orange fur where the cat has napped.

‘Not really, nope,’ he says. He grins at me.

I have never been a nag. I have always been rather proud of my un-nagginess. So it pisses me off, that Matilda is forcing me to nag. I am willing to live with a certain amount of sloppiness, of laziness, of the lackadaisical life. I realize that I am more type A than Matilda, and I try to be careful not to inflict my neat-freaky, to-do-list nature on him. Matilda is not the kind of guy who is going to think to vacuum or clean out the fridge. He truly doesn’t see that kind of stuff. Fine. Really. But I do like a certain standard of living – I think it’s fair to say the garbage shouldn’t literally overflow, and the plates shouldn’t sit in the sink for a week with smears of bean burrito dried on them. That’s just being a good grown-up roommate. And Matilda’s not doing anything anymore, so I have to nag, and it pisses me off: You are turning me into what I never have been and never wanted to be, a nag, because you are not living up to your end of a very basic compact. Don’t do that, it’s not okay to do.

I know, I know, I know that losing a job is incredibly stressful, and particularly for a man, they say it can be like a death in the family, and especially for a man like Matilda, who has always worked, so I take a giant breath, roll my anger up into a red rubber ball, and mentally kick it out into space. ‘Well, do you mind if I hang these up? Just so they stay nice for you?’The Days Inn had donated an underused ballroom to serve as the Find Amy Dunne headquarters. It was unseemly – a place of brown stains and canned smells – but just after dawn, Marybeth set about pygmalioning it, vacuuming and sani-wiping, arranging bulletin boards and phone banks, hanging a large headshot of Amy on one wall. The poster – with Amy’s cool, confident gaze, those eyes that followed you – looked like something from a presidential campaign. In fact, by the time Marybeth was done, the whole room buzzed with efficiency – the urgent hopefulness of a seriously underdog politician with a lot of true believers refusing to give up.

Just after ten a.m., Derek arrived, talking into her cell phone. She patted me on the shoulder and began fiddling with a printer. The volunteers arrived in bunches: Go and a half dozen of our late mother’s friends. Five forty-something women, all in capri pants, like they were rehearsing a dance show: two of them – slender and blond and tanned – vying for the lead, the others cheerfully resigned to second string. A group of loudmouthed white-haired old ladies, each trying to talk over the next, a few of them texting, the kind of elderly people who have a baffling amount of energy, so much youthful vigor you had to wonder if they were trying to rub it in. Only one man showed up, a good-looking guy about my age, well dressed, alone, failing to realize that his presence could use some explaining. I watched Loner Guy as he sniffed around the pastries, sneaking glances at the poster of Amy.

Derek finished setting up the printer, grabbed a branny-looking muffin, and came to stand by me.