Shivering Mind

Chapter 47

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 presence known at my side. I had no idea how long she’d been there: ‘… and the main point of this, Matilda, 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. Matilda, you will need to – Matilda?’

‘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 n****e. ‘I wish Mom was here,’ she whispered, which was what I’d been thinking. ‘No news?’ she asked when she pulled away.

‘Nothing, f*****g nothing—’

‘You look like you feel awful.’

‘I feel like f*****g shit.’ I was about to say what an i***t 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 f

ront 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 f*****g 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 Maxom.

Max 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. Matilda 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.

Max 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 Matilda 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 d**k, I was a nice guy despite the affectless stare, the haughty, douchebag face.

So there it came, out of nowhere, as Max begged for his daughter’s return: a killer smile.

AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE

JULY 5, 2010

– Diary entry –

I won’t blame Matilda. I don’t blame Matilda. I refuse – refuse! – to turn into some pert-mouthed, strident angry-girl. I made two promises to myself when I married Matilda. One: no dancing-monkey demands. Two: I would never, ever say, Sure, that’s fine by me (if you want to stay out later, if you want to do a boys’ weekend, if you want to do something you want to do) and then punish him for doing what I said was fine by me. I worry I am coming perilously close to violating both of those promises.

But still. It is our third wedding anniversary and I am alone in our apartment, my face all mask-tight from tears because, well, because: Just this afternoon, I get a voice mail from Matilda, and I already know it’s going to be bad, I know the second the voice mail begins because I can tell he’s calling from his cell and I can hear men’s voices in the background and a big, roomy gap, like he’s trying to decide what to say, and then I hear his taxi-blurred voice, a voice that is already wet and lazy with booze, and I know I am going to be angry – that quick inhale, the lips going tight, the shoulders up, the I so don’t want to be mad but I’m going to be feeling. Do men not know that feeling? You don’t want to be mad, but you’re obligated to be, almost. Because a rule, a good rule, a nice rule is being broken. Or maybe rule is the wrong word. Protocol? Nicety? But the rule/protocol/nicety – our anniversary – is being broken for a good reason, I understand, I do. The rumors were true: Sixteen writers have been laid off at Matilda’s magazine. A third of the staff. Matilda has been spared, for now, but of course he feels obliged to take the others out to get drunk. They are men, piled in a cab, heading down Second Avenue, pretending to be brave. A few have gone home to their wives, but a surprising number have stayed out. Matilda will spend the night of our anniversary buying these men drinks, going to strip clubs and cheesy bars, flirting with twenty-two-year-olds (My friend here just got laid off, he could use a hug). These jobless men will proclaim Matilda a great guy as he buys their drinks on a credit card linked to my bank account. Matilda will have a gMax old time on our anniversary, which he didn’t even mention in the message. Instead, he said, I know we had plans but …

I am being a girl. I just thought it’d be a tradition: All across town, I have strewn little love messages, reminders of our past year together, my treasure hunt. I can picture the third clue, fluttering from a piece of scotch tape in the crook of the V of the Robert Indiana love sculpture up near Central Park. Tomorrow, some bored twelve-year-old tourist stumbling along behind his parents is going to pick it off, read it, shrug, and let it float away like a gum wrapper.

My treasure-hunt finale was perfect, but isn’t now. It’s an absolutely gorgeous vintage briefcase. Leather. Third anniversary is leather. A work-related gift may be a bad idea, given that work isn’t exactly happy right now. In our kitchen, I have two live lobsters, like always. Or like what was supposed to be like always. I need to phone my mom and see if they can keep for a day, scrambling dazedly around their crate, or if I need to stumble in, and with my wine-lame eyes, battle them and boil them in my pot for no good reason. I’m killing two lobsters I won’t even eat.

Dad phoned to wish us happy anniversary, and I picked up the phone and I was going to play it cool, but then I started crying when I started talking – I was doing the awful chick talk-cry: mwaha-waah-gwwahh-and-waaa-wa – so I had to tell him what happened, and he told me I should open a bottle of wine and wallow in it for a bit. Dad is always a proponent of a good indulgent sulk. Still, Matilda will be angry that I told Max, and of course Max will do his fatherly thing, pat Matilda on the shoulder and say, ‘Heard you had some emergency drinking to do on your anniversary, Matilday.’ And chuckle. So Matilda will know, and he will be angry with me because he wants my parents to believe he’s perfect – he beams when I tell them stories about what a flawless son-in-law he is.

Except for tonight. I know, I know, I’m being a girl.

It’s five a.m. The sun is coming up, almost as bright as the streetlights outside that have just blinked off. I always like that switch, when I’m awake for it. Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I’ll pull myself out of bed and walk through the streets at dawn, and when the lights click off, all together, I always feel like I’ve seen something special. Oh, there go the streetlights! I want to announce. In New York it’s not three or four a.m. that’s the quiet time – there are too many bar stragglers, calling out to each other as they collapse into taxis, yelping into their cell phones as they frantically smoke that one last cigarette before bed. Five a.m., that’s the best time, when the clicking of your heels on the sidewalk sounds illicit. All the people have been put away in their boxes, and you have the whole place to yourself.

Here’s what happened: Matilda got home just after four, a bulb of beer and cigarettes and fried-egg odor attached to him, a placenta of stink. I was still awake, waiting for him, my brain ca-thunking after a marathon of Law and Order. He sat down on our ottoman and glanced at the present on the table and said nothing. I stared at him back. He clearly wasn’t going to even graze against an apology – hey, sorry things got screwy today. That’s all I wanted, just a quick acknowledgment.

‘Happy day after anniversary,’ I start.

He sighs, a deep aggrieved moan. ‘Amy, I’ve had the crappiest day ever. Please don’t lay a guilt trip on me on top of it.’

Matilda grew up with a father who never, ever apologised, so when Matilda feels he has screwed up, he goes on offense. I know this, and I can usually wait it out, usually.