Gone Girl: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

doesn’t have anyone else
.
    I’d hoped when we all wound up back in Missouri, the two would let it drop—agree to disagree, free to be you and me. Neither did. Go was funnier than Amy, though, so it was a mismatched battle. Amy was clever, withering, sarcastic. Amy could get me riled up, could make an excellent, barbed point, but Go always made me laugh. It is dangerous to laugh at your spouse.
    “Go, I thought we agreed you’d never mention my genitalia again,” I said. “That within the bounds of our sibling relationship, I have no genitalia.”
    The phone rang. Go took one more sip of her beer and answered, gave an eyeroll and a smile. “He sure
is
here, one moment, please!” To me, she mouthed: “Carl.”
    Carl Pelley lived across the street from me and Amy. Retired three years. Divorced two years. Moved into our development right after. He’d been a traveling salesman—children’s party supplies—and I sensed that after four decades of motel living, he wasn’t quite at home being home. He showed up at the bar nearly every day with a pungent Hardee’s bag, complaining about his budget until he was offered a first drink on the house. (This was another thing I learned about Carl from his days in The Bar—that he was a functioning but serious alcoholic.) He had the good grace to accept whatever we were “trying to get rid of,” and he meant it: For one full month Carl drank nothing but dusty Zimas, circa 1992, that we’d discovered in the basement. When a hangover kept Carl home, he’d find a reason to call:
Yourmailbox looks awfully full today, Nicky, maybe a package came
. Or:
It’s supposed to rain, you might want to close your windows
. The reasons were bogus. Carl just needed to hear the clink of glasses, the glug of a drink being poured.
    I picked up the phone, shaking a tumbler of ice near the receiver so Carl could imagine his gin.
    “Hey, Nicky,” Carl’s watery voice came over. “Sorry to bother you. I just thought you should know … your door is wide open, and that cat of yours is outside. It isn’t supposed to be, right?”
    I gave a noncommittal grunt.
    “I’d go over and check, but I’m a little under the weather,” Carl said heavily.
    “Don’t worry,” I said. “It’s time for me to go home anyway.”
    It was a fifteen-minute drive, straight north along River Road. Driving into our development occasionally makes me shiver, the sheer number of gaping dark houses—homes that have never known inhabitants, or homes that have known owners and seen them ejected, the house standing triumphantly voided, humanless.
    When Amy and I moved in, our only neighbors descended on us: one middle-aged single mom of three, bearing a casserole; a young father of triplets with a six-pack of beer (his wife left at home with the triplets); an older Christian couple who lived a few houses down; and of course, Carl from across the street. We sat out on our back deck and watched the river, and they all talked ruefully about ARMs, and zero percent interest, and zero money down, and then they all remarked how Amy and I were the only ones with river access, the only ones without children. “Just the two of you? In this whole big house?” the single mom asked, doling out a scrambled-egg something.
    “Just the two of us,” I confirmed with a smile, and nodded in appreciation as I took a mouthful of wobbly egg.
    “Seems lonely.”
    On that she was right.
    Four months later, the
whole big house
lady lost her mortgage battle and disappeared in the night with her three kids. Her house has remained empty. The living-room window still has a child’s picture of a butterfly taped to it, the bright Magic Marker sun-faded to brown. One evening not long ago, I drove past and saw a man, bearded,bedraggled, staring out from behind the picture, floating in the dark like some sad aquarium fish. He saw me see him and flickered back into the depths of the house. The next day I left a brown paper bag full of