Boney frowned, then made a drawn-out yoga-like sound. ‘Okay, Nick, here are the things we are doing to help.’ She listed them: Amy’s cell was being monitored, her photo circulated, her credit cards tracked. Known sex offenders in the area were being interviewed. Our sparse neighborhood was being canvassed. Our home phone was tapped, in case any ransom calls came in.
I wasn’t sure what to say now. I raked my memory for the lines: What does the husband say at this point in the movie? Depends on whether he’s guilty or innocent.
‘I can’t say that reassures me. Are you – is this an abduction, or a missing persons case, or what exactly is going on?’ I knew the statistics, knew them from the same TV show I was starring in: If the first forty-eight hours didn’t turn up something in a case, it was likely to go unsolved. The first forty-eight hours were crucial. ‘I mean, my wife is gone. My wife: is gone!’ I realized it was the first time I’d said it the way it should have been said: panicked and angry. My dad was a man of infinite varieties of bitterness, rage, distaste. In my lifelong struggle to avoid becoming him, I’d developed an inability to demonstrate much negative emotion at all. It was another thing that made me seem like a dick – my stomach could be all oiled eels, and you would get nothing from my face and less from my words. It was a constant problem: too much control or no control at all.
‘Nick, we are taking this extremely seriously,’ Boney said. ‘The lab guys are over at your place as we speak, and that will give us more information to go on. Right now, the more you can tell us about your wife, the better. What is she like?’
The usual husband phrases came into my mind: She’s sweet, she’s great, she’s nice, she’s supportive.
‘What is she like how?’ I asked.
‘Give me an idea of her personality,’ Boney prompted. ‘Like, what did you get her for your anniversary? Jewelry?’
‘I hadn’t gotten anything quite yet,’ I said. ‘I was going to do it this afternoon.’ I waited for her to laugh and say ‘baby of the family’ again, but she didn’t.
‘Okay. Well, then, tell me about her. Is she outgoing? Is she – I don’t know how to say this – is she New Yorky? Like what might come off to some as rude? Might rub people the wrong way?’
‘I don’t know. She’s not a never-met-a-stranger kind of person, but she’s not – not abrasive enough to make someone … hurt her.’
This was my eleventh lie. The Amy of today was abrasive enough to want to hurt, sometimes. I speak specifically of the Amy of today, who was only remotely like the woman I fell in love with. It had been an awful fairy-tale reverse transformation. Over just a few years, the old Amy, the girl of the big laugh and the easy ways, literally shed herself, a pile of skin and soul on the floor, and out stepped this new, brittle, bitter Amy. My wife was no longer my wife but a razor-wire knot daring me to unloop her, and I was not up to the job with my thick, numb, nervous fingers. Country fingers. Flyover fingers untrained in the intricate, dangerous work of solving Amy. When I’d hold up the bloody stumps, she’d sigh and turn to her secret mental notebook on which she tallied all my deficiencies, forever noting disappointments, frailties, shortcomings. My old Amy, damn, she was fun. She was funny. She made me laugh. I’d forgotten that. And she laughed. From the bottom of her throat, from right behind that small finger-shaped hollow, which is the best place to laugh from. She released her grievances like handfuls of birdseed: They are there, and they are gone.
She was not the thing she became, the thing I feared most: an angry woman. I was not good with angry women. They brought something out in me that was unsavory.
‘She bossy?’ Gilpin asked. ‘Take-charge?’
I thought of Amy’s calendar, the one that went three years into the future, and if you looked a year ahead, you would actually find appointments: dermatologist, dentist, vet. ‘She’s a planner – she doesn’t, you know, wing anything. She likes to make lists and check things off. Get things done. That’s why this doesn’t make sense—’
‘That can drive you crazy,’ Boney said sympathetically. ‘If you’re not that type. You seem very B-personality.’
‘I’m a little more laid-back, I guess,’ I said. Then I added the part I was supposed to add: ‘We round each other out.’
I looked at the clock on the wall, and Boney touched my hand.
‘Hey, why don’t you go ahead and give a call to Amy’s parents? I’m sure they’d appreciate it.’
It was past midnight. Amy’s parents went to sleep at nine p.m.; they were strangely boastful about this early bedtime. They’d be deep asleep by now, so this would be an urgent middle-of-the-night call. Cells went off at 8:45 always, so Rand Elliott would have to walk from his bed all the way to the end of the hall to pick up the old heavy phone; he’d be fumbling with his glasses, fussy with the table lamp. He’d be telling himself all the reasons not to worry about a late-night phone call, all the harmless reasons the phone might be ringing.
I dialed twice and hung up before I let the call ring through. When I did, it was Marybeth, not Rand, who answered, her deep voice buzzing my ears. I’d only gotten to ‘Marybeth, this is Nick’ when I lost it.
‘What is it, Nick?’
I took a breath.
‘Is it Amy? Tell me.’
‘I uh – I’m sorry I should have called—’
‘Tell me, goddamn it!’
‘We c-can’t find Amy,’ I stuttered.
‘You can’t find Amy?’
‘I don’t know—’
‘Amy is missing?’
‘We don’t know that for sure, we’re still—’
‘Since when?’
‘We’re not sure. I left this morning, a little after seven—’
‘And you waited till now to call us?’
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t want to—’
‘Jesus Christ. We played tennis tonight. Tennis, and we could have been … My God. Are the police involved? You’ve notified them?’
‘I’m at the station right now.’
‘Put on whoever’s in charge, Nick. Please.’
Like a kid, I went to fetch Gilpin. My mommy-in-law wants to talk to you.
Phoning the Elliotts made it official. The emergency – Amy is gone – was spreading to the outside.
I was heading back to the interview room when I heard my father’s voice. Sometimes, in particularly shameful moments, I heard his voice in my head. But this was my father’s voice, here. His words emerged in wet bubbles like something from a rancid bog. Bitch bitch bitch. My father, out of his mind, had taken to flinging the word at any woman who even vaguely annoyed him: bitch bitch bitch. I peered inside a conference room, and there he sat on a bench against the wall. He had been a handsome man once, intense and cleft-chinned. Jarringly dreamy was how my aunt had described him. Now he sat muttering at the floor, his blond hair matted, trousers muddy and arms scratched, as if he’d fought his way through a thornbush. A line of spittle glimmered down his chin like a snail’s trail, and he was flexing and unflexing arm muscles that had not yet gone to seed. A tense female officer sat next to him, her lips in an angry pucker, trying to ignore him: Bitch bitch bitch I told you bitch.
‘What’s going on?’ I asked her. ‘This is my father.’
‘You got our call?’
‘What call?’
‘To come get your father.’ She overenunciated, as if I were a dim ten-year-old.
‘I – My wife is missing. I’ve been here most of the night.’
She stared at me, not connecting in the least. I could see her debating whether to sacrifice her leverage and apologise, inquire. Then my father started up again, bitch bitch bitch, and she chose to keep the leverage.
‘Sir, Comfort Hill has been trying to contact you all day. Your father wandered out a fire exit early this morning. He’s got a few scratches and scrapes, as you can see, but no damage. We picked him up a few hours ago, walking down River Road, disoriented. We’ve been trying to reach you.’
‘I’ve been right here,’ I said. ‘Right goddamn next door, how did no one put this together?’
Bitch bitch bitch, said my dad.
‘Sir, please don’t take that tone with me.’
Bitch bitch bitch.
Boney ordered an officer – male – to drive my dad back to the home so I could finish up with them. We stood on the stairs outside the police station, watched him get settled into the car, still muttering. The entire time he never registered my presence. When they drove off, he didn’t even look back.
‘You guys not close?’ she asked.
‘We are the definition of not close.’
The police finished with their questions and hustled me into a squad car at about two a.m. with advice to get a good night’s sleep and return at eleven a.m. for a 12-noon press conference.
I didn’t ask if I could go home. I had them take me to Go’s, because I knew she’d stay up and have a drink with me, fix me a sandwich. It was, pathetically, all I wanted right then: a woman to fix me a sandwich and not ask me any questions.
‘You don’t want to go look for her?’ Go offered as I ate. ‘We can drive around.’
‘That seems pointless,’ I said dully. ‘Where do I look?’
‘Nick, this is really fucking serious.’
‘I know, Go.’
‘Act like it, okay, Lance? Don’t fucking myuhmyuhmyuh.’ It was a thick-tongued noise, the noise she always made to convey my indecisiveness, accompanied by a dazed rolling of the eyes and the dusting off of my legal first name. No one who has my face needs to be called Lance. She handed me a tumbler of Scotch. ‘And drink this, but only this. You don’t want to be hungover tomorrow. Where the fuck could she be? God, I feel sick to my stomach.’ She poured herself a glass, gulped, then tried to sip, pacing around the kitchen. ‘Aren’t you worried, Nick? That some guy, like, saw her on the street and just, just decided to take her? Hit her on the head and—’
I started. ‘Why did you say hit her on the head, what the fuck is that?’
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to paint a picture, I just … I don’t know, I just keep thinking. About some crazy person.’ She splashed some more Scotch into her tumbler.
‘Speaking of crazy people,’ I said, ‘Dad got out again today, they found him wandering down River Road. He’s back at Comfort now.’
She shrugged: okay. It was the third time in six months that our dad had slipped out. Go was lighting a cigarette, her thoughts still on Amy. ‘I mean, isn’t there someone we can go talk to?’ she asked. ‘Something we can do?’
‘Jesus, Go! You really need me to feel more fucking impotent than I do right now?’ I snapped. ‘I have no idea what I’m supposed to be doing. There’s no “When Your Wife Goes Missing 101.” The police told me I could leave. I left. I’m just doing what they tell me.’
‘Of course you are,’ murmured Go, who had a long-stymied mission to turn me into a rebel. It wouldn’t take. I was the kid in high school who made curfew; I was the writer who hit my deadlines, even the fake ones. I respect rules, because if you follow rules, things go smoothly, usually.
‘Fuck, Go, I’m back at the station in a few hours, okay? Can you please just be nice to me for a second? I’m scared shitless.’
We had a five-second staring contest, then Go filled up my glass one more time, an apology. She sat down next to me, put a hand on my shoulder.
‘Poor Amy,’ she said.