"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'd 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 front 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 fucking 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'd 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 random.
Rand 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. Nick wants her back." He put a hand on my shoulder, wiped his
eyes, and I involuntarily turned steel. My father again: Men don'd cry.
Rand 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 Nick 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'd a dick, I was a
nice guy despite the affectless stare, the haughty, douchebag face.
So there it came, out of nowhere, as Rand begged for his daughter's return: a killer smile.
