Who is Maud Dixon? Page 14

  “Two hundred dirhams,” the man behind the table said. “Twenty dollars.”

  Florence rotated the bag in her hands. She turned to Helen to ask her opinion, but Helen was a few paces away, watching a man pull feathers from a chicken carcass.

  “Okay,” Florence said to the man. “I’ll take it.” She fished the money out of her wallet.

  She transferred the contents of her purse into her new bag and put it over her shoulder. She was happy she’d have a souvenir from the trip. She imagined getting compliments on it, and telling people where she’d found it. She walked over to Helen, who had moved on to inspecting the tagines, and showed it to her.

  “You like?”

  “How much?”

  “Twenty dollars.”

  “Down from what?”

  “Down from nothing. Twenty dollars seemed like a bargain.”

  “You didn’t haggle?”

  Florence shrugged. “He probably needs it more than I do.”

  “That’s not the point. They respect people who know how to negotiate. Now he has one more reason to think all Americans are spineless, coddled buffoons.”

  Florence was briefly exasperated by Helen’s determination to always cast her as a fool. “Exactly,” she insisted, “wouldn’t it be wrong to mislead him?”

  Helen laughed, a begrudging snort.

  They left the souk and passed through Place Hassan II again, toward the harbor. Vendors were grilling fresh fish at stalls up and down the street. Smoke billowed up into the air before being tugged away by the wind. There were dozens, maybe hundreds, of boats bobbing in the water, mostly beat-up rowboats painted a brilliant blue and single-man fishing operations, though there were a few tall wooden ships and a handful of small, ugly yachts. In a way, it reminded Florence of home. When she was in high school, she and her friend Whitney used to sneak onto empty boats at the harbor. You couldn’t actually get inside, but you could lie on the deck and pretend it was yours.

  They came across a man slapping an octopus on the ground over and over. They stopped to watch.

  “What is he doing?” asked Florence.

  “Tenderizing it,” said Helen. “It’s too tough to eat if you don’t slap it around a little first.”

  They ate lunch outside at one of the seafood places on the harbor rather than walk back up into town. The breeze coming off the water seemed to blow in more of the same hot, heavy air. They each ordered octopus fresh from the ocean, or advertised that way, with a variety of grilled vegetables and bottles of the local beer, Casablanca. As the sun climbed toward its apex, the shade of their umbrella shifted and exposed Helen’s bare legs. She asked Florence to switch seats with her.

  “Your young skin can handle the sun,” she said.

  Florence frowned at this justification; she was only six years younger. But then she reminded herself that she wouldn’t even be here if not for Helen and quickly stood up.

  Under the sun’s glare, Florence felt herself wilt. She held the bottle of beer to her forehead and neck. She could barely look at the octopus. She thought of it being pounded to death on the ground. She pushed the plate away.

  “You’re not eating?” Helen asked.

  Florence shook her head.

  Helen pulled the plate toward her. “I’m starving.”

  When Helen finished her meal, she lit a cigarette and tapped the ash onto the uneaten tentacles on her plate. Florence looked away in disgust.

  The walk back up to the square under the scorching sun was steeper than Florence remembered. She recalled that she had wanted to buy a hat. “It’s hot as blue blazes,” she said under her breath.

  “What was that?” Helen asked.

  “Nothing.”

  Florence hadn’t thought to park in the shade, and they had to bunch up their dresses in their hands to grasp the door handles. The air-conditioning was still broken.

  * * *

  That afternoon they both retreated to their rooms. Florence tried to nap but she slept fitfully and woke up feeling less rested than she had before she lay down. It was past eight by the time they left for dinner. Florence was wearing a white cotton dress and a pair of leather sandals she’d splurged for in Hudson along with her new bag. Her face was pink from the sun.

  She knocked on Helen’s door. “Ready?”

  “One minute,” Helen called from inside. “Just finishing up some work.”

  Florence heard a drawer slam roughly then Helen swung open the door. She was wearing a navy dress that buttoned up the front, with a blue-and-white-striped scarf over her shoulders. “Let’s hit it,” she said, with the short stub of a cigarette sticking out of the corner of her mouth. Her whole room reeked of tobacco. So much for the no-smoking clause in their rental agreement, Florence thought.

  In the hallway, Helen flicked her cigarette butt over the side of the railing with ink-stained fingers. It floated down fifteen feet or so to the hard tiled floor below. Florence grimaced at the thought of Amina stooping to pick it up later. At the door, Helen handed her belongings to Florence once again.

  The night was nearly as warm as the day, the air scented with jasmine. They drove with the windows open and the sea air whipping their faces. They were going to a restaurant up in the hills, just north of Semat, which a friend of Helen’s had recommended to her.

  “What friend?” Florence had wanted to ask, but didn’t.

  “So you haven’t really explained what type of research you want to do for the book,” she said instead.

  “Hm?” Helen asked, looking out her window.

  “I mean, is there anything you want me to do while we’re here? Talk to anyone? Visit anyplace? I’m still not exactly sure what I’m supposed to be doing.”

  “Oh, nothing so regimented. I just want to get a feel for the place, that’s all.”

  The car’s engine hummed as the road climbed upward. Both the town and Villa des Grenades receded in the rearview mirror. The road clung to the coastline even as it rose ten, then twenty, then thirty feet above the churning Atlantic below. Florence gripped the steering wheel tightly. It was a windy night, and sudden gusts kept buffeting the car. She inched it closer to the right side of the road, as far from the drop as she could.

  “This is rather treacherous, isn’t it?” Helen said.

  Florence just nodded without taking her eyes off the road in front of her. She hadn’t wanted to betray her nervousness; she’d assumed Helen would mock her for it.

  They arrived at the restaurant without incident fifteen minutes later. Florence rubbed a tight knot in her shoulder as Helen pulled open the door, fighting against the wind.

  The restaurant was empty except for two other patrons, a British couple in their sixties who were already on dessert.

  The host greeted them warmly. “Bienvenue, welcome,” he said.

  “Two whiskeys,” said Helen in response, holding up two fingers.

  Florence had discovered only after they’d booked their trip that they were missing Ramadan by just a few days. It would have been nothing short of a disaster if Helen hadn’t been able to drink.

  They were led to their table by a waiter who looked like he was pushing ninety. A few moments later, the whiskey arrived in glasses smudged with greasy fingerprints.

  “When in Rome…” Florence said with a shrug, reaching for her drink.

  “…get salmonella,” Helen finished.

  They tapped their glasses together. “To new beginnings,” Helen pronounced. They both took a long swallow.

  * * *

  Helen had ordered them both the house specialty, camel, but when their food arrived, Florence was put off by the pile of meat in front of her. She was feeling the effects of the sun and the heat, and she suspected she had drunk too much on an empty stomach. Tinny Arabic music played from a speaker mounted above their table, and it seemed to be getting louder, strobing in conspiracy with the lights.

  Helen was talking but she seemed very far away. Everything felt very far away. Florence felt
as if her whole self, her whole consciousness, had shrunk down to the size of a pebble and was knocking around inside her skull. Her insides felt dark and vast, the outer world too distant to matter, like a movie projected on a remote screen. The meat on her plate seemed to be sweating. Do you keep sweating after you die? No, no, that was toenails and hair that kept going. Growing.

  The music quieted down then. Everything got quieter. As if underwater. Sounds were swallowed up by the water. She felt lulled by a swift current, swept away by the waves, pulled back by strong hands, then swept away again, and all the while Helen’s voice was deep and pulsating, like a whale’s song, like an echo, like a shadow in sound, like it had all been said before and would be said again but deeper and richer until it faded away entirely and all that was left were the waves. Lapping softly, softly, softly—

  PART IV

  26.

  Madame Weel-cock?”

  The next time Florence woke, she was more lucid. She’d been in a car accident, she remembered the doctor had said. And she remembered, too, that he had called her Madame Wilcox. What did that mean? Where was Helen? Perhaps in another bed, in another room, being called Madame Darrow?

  When the nurse returned, Florence asked, “The woman who was with me in the car, is she here?”

  The nurse looked at her blankly.

  “Is there another American at the hospital? A woman?” She struggled to find some basic French vocabulary in the foggy recesses of her brain. “Autres américaines? Ici? A l’hôpital?”

  The nurse shook her head. “Il n’y a que vous.” Just her.

  “There was a woman in the car with me. Do you know what happened to her? L’autre femme?”

  The nurse smiled helplessly and shrugged.

  “Have I had any visitors? Quelqu’un visite, um, moi?”

  The nurse shook her head. “Personne,” she said before leaving.

  Florence contemplated the ceiling. No one. No one had been to visit her.

  She turned her head toward the window and noticed for the first time a wrinkled plastic bag on the table next to her bed. She reached for it and a jolt of pain shot through her ribs. Grimacing, she pulled it onto her lap.

  Inside were the clothes she’d been wearing the night before: the white dress, her underwear, and the purse she’d bought earlier in the day. It was all soaking wet. Zippered into the side pocket of the purse were Helen’s passport, wallet, phone, and a sodden pack of cigarettes. Well, that explained why everyone was calling her Madame Wilcox. There was nothing else in the purse. Her own wallet and phone and passport were gone.

  She pressed the power button on Helen’s phone. Nothing happened.

  27.

  Florence woke with a start. She was out of breath and her heart was beating too fast. As she rubbed her eyes, she realized that there was someone else in the room with her. It was the man in the uniform she’d seen the first time she woke up in the hospital. The one the nurse had shooed away. Why did he only appear when she was asleep? He was like a figure conjured by her dreams.

  “Madame Weel-cock,” he said. “Do you remember me? I am Hamid Idrissi of the Gendarmerie Royale. It is important that I now ask you questions about the accident.” His English was slightly off, but better than she would have expected from a small-town policeman in Morocco.

  Florence looked around, hoping the nurse might appear to provide another reprieve, but no one came. She nodded at the policeman.

  The man patted his pockets until he found a small beige notebook, which he pulled out along with a chewed-up pen. All his movements had a jerky abruptness to them, as though his joints were brand-new and he was still getting used to them.

  “The first. Do you remember the events of last night?”

  Florence shook her head.

  Idrissi flipped back a few pages in the notebook and said, “Your car went off Rue Badr into the ocean at around twenty-two and a half hours. Luckily, there was a fisherman out late who saw this happen. He pulled you from the car and brought you to safety. You arrived at the hospital at twenty-three hours. Unconscious.”

  An inappropriate smile came out of nowhere and spread across Florence’s face. She felt like the butt of a joke.

  “My car went into the ocean?” she asked skeptically. “And someone pulled me out of it while it was sinking?”

  “That is what happened, yes.”

  Florence kept looking at him, waiting for the punch line. He stared back at her. He had a wary, tired look in his eyes. Her smile faded. She struggled to process this new information. It seemed absurd that something like that could have happened without her having any memory of it. The single most dramatic moment of her life, and she’d missed it. Typical.

  That road, Rue Badr, was the one they’d taken to get to the restaurant. She remembered the way the shoulder of the road had simply dropped off the face of the earth. It seemed incredible that just a few hours later, their jaunty Ford Fiesta had hurled itself into the night sky and crashed into the blue-black water.

  She tried to imagine herself and Helen suspended in midair, between land and sea. Had they known what was happening?

  And more importantly: Where was Helen now?

  She started to ask, but the policeman spoke at the same time: “Madame, what is your last memory of the night?”

  Florence tried to think back. The camel meat. The tinny music. “Dinner,” she said. “The restaurant.”

  “What restaurant?”

  “It was up in the hills. Dar Amal? Something like that?”

  He wrote this down in his notebook.

  “And were you drinking alcohol?”

  Florence willed herself to stay very still. “Pardon?”

  “Did you drink alcohol at dinner?”

  Florence said nothing. Was he suggesting that the accident was her fault? His expression gave away nothing.

  “Madame Weel-cock?”

  “I don’t remember,” she finally said. “I can’t remember, I’m sorry.” She shook her head.

  “Are you aware that it is illegal in Morocco to drive after drinking alcohol? Even just one alcohol?”

  She remembered the two greasy glasses of whiskey. How good that first sip had felt going down after the nerve-wracking drive. And then what? What had happened after that first glass? She couldn’t remember. There was just darkness.

  Her unanswered question returned: Where was Helen?

  And others: Why hadn’t Helen been to visit her? Why did she still have Helen’s passport and wallet? How could Helen not have been in the car? Of course they would have driven back from the restaurant together.

  So, where was Helen?

  She circled around this question slowly. Even after an answer had arrived, she continued to seek alternatives, as if a few more moments of uncertainty could change the outcome.

  The policeman continued to look at her significantly.

  Was it possible? Had Helen been killed in the accident?

  “Madame Weel-cock, I’ll ask again: Are you aware that it is illegal to drive after drinking alcohol?”

  Florence forced herself to answer. “I am aware of that. I wouldn’t have had anything to drink if I knew I was driving home.”

  He nodded slowly, watching her.

  “So—.” She wanted to ask this man something, but she didn’t know what. Why hadn’t he mentioned the other person in the car?

  “Wait, but who? Who rescued me?”

  “Fisherman.”

  “But who?”

  “You want his name?”

  “His name? I guess I do. I should thank him, right?”

  The policeman rubbed his temples. He copied a name and phone number from his notebook onto a clean page, ripped it out, and handed the paper to Florence. “I doubt he speaks English,” he warned.

  She placed it on the bed without looking at it and shut her eyes tightly. When she did, she saw, as if projected on her eyelids, an image of Helen banging furiously on the car window, watching helplessly as Florence was
spirited to safety. Is that what happened? Did the fisherman leave Helen there? Did he just not see her? Or did he only have enough strength or time to save one of them, and he’d chosen her? My god, what a fool. He’d picked the wrong one.

  She shook her head to dislodge the image of Helen drowning. Certainly, she would know if she’d killed Helen.

  Wouldn’t she?

  She felt her conviction wobbling. She remembered that she hadn’t eaten lunch or dinner the day before. Maybe she really had gotten drunk and driven the car off the road. It was the only explanation that made sense. Helen would be here with her if anything else had happened, either as a patient herself or as a visitor who’d somehow emerged from the accident unscathed.

  Florence felt tears stinging her eyes and blinked them back.

  The policeman uncrossed and recrossed his legs and asked her where she was from.

  “What?” she asked, surprised to suddenly get such an easy question.

  “Where are you from?”

  “The US.”

  The policeman continued with a series of benign questions. How long had she been in Morocco? Where was she staying? What was the purpose of her visit?

  “Research,” she said.

  He glanced up severely at that. “You’re a journalist?”

  “No,” she said quickly, startled at his tone. “No. For a book. Fiction.”

  He seemed appeased. “You’re a novelist?”

  Florence looked down at her hands. She nodded, once.

  He stayed for close to half an hour but never mentioned Helen. Finally, he stood up to leave, and said, “You are very lucky” in a way that made it sound like an accusation. As he turned and grasped the curtain, Florence said, “Wait.”

  He looked back.

  “What about the car?” she asked. “Was it dredged?”

  “What is ‘dredged?’”

  “Pulled out of the water?”

  “Yes, of course. But it is finished.” He spoke as if she were a child. “The engine is all wet. There is no windshield.”