Who is Maud Dixon?(34)

Florence looked at her phone, glowing in the darkness of her room. She held it in her hands briefly like an amulet. Then she wrote a message to her mother: I’m going out of the country for a while for work. I won’t be in touch while I’m traveling. It was nothing final, she told herself. Just a trial separation.

Almost immediately after she sent it, her mother called.

She silenced the ring and turned off the phone.





20.



On Monday afternoon, Florence stood outside the Dunkin’ Donuts a block from the Forrester office, chewing on the straw of her iced coffee. She’d just taken the train into Manhattan from upstate. The closest place to expedite a passport was the US passport office on Hudson Street—which happened to sit directly across the street from Forrester’s building. According to Simon’s restraining order, she wasn’t allowed within five hundred feet of it, but this risk, she’d decided, was worth taking.

She studied the building and tried to find his window. Was it five hundred feet as the crow flies? Simon’s office was on the fourteenth floor, so the elevator ride would take up nearly a third of that distance.

“Florence?”

She turned. Amanda Lincoln was walking toward her, smiling in amazement.

“I thought that was you. What are you doing here? Are you back at Forrester?”

“No. I have a meeting nearby,” Florence said automatically. She gestured vaguely toward the west side. The only thing that lay west of Forrester was the UPS plant, she realized.

“Are you still living in the city then? You disappeared so completely we thought maybe you’d left.”

Amanda was clearly fishing for some piece of gossip she could relate breathlessly to her colleagues upstairs. (“You guys won’t believe who I just ran into.”) Florence couldn’t imagine what they’d said about her when she was fired. She knew the story about the photographs had gotten out because Lucy had made a vague reference to it in one of her voicemails.

“No. I’m up near Hudson now. I love it. It’s such a relief to be out of the city. To be honest, I always found New York slightly overrated.” And then, recklessly: “You should come up to visit.”

“I’d love that.” They maintained eye contact in silence, each aware that such an outcome was absurd. They had never been friends. They were playing a game of chicken.

Florence broke first. “I can’t put you up, unfortunately—I’m in a guesthouse that belongs to a sort of mentor of mine, but it’s really small.”

“That sounds amazing. I need to get a mentor with a guesthouse,” said Amanda with a laugh. “How do you know him?”

“Her.”

“Oh, sorry, I just assumed.”

Florence felt a familiar prickling in her fingers, the heat in her gut. She wanted desperately to humiliate Amanda. To make her feel ridiculous. Amanda had probably never felt ridiculous a day in her life. She dug the fingernails on her left hand into her palm. They weren’t sharp enough.

“I have to go,” Florence said. “I’m going to be late.”

“Oh no. Well it was so good to see you!”

Amanda leaned in to kiss her on the cheek as Florence awkwardly responded with a hug. She ended up with a mouthful of Amanda’s hair.

Later, in line at the passport office, she replayed the encounter in her mind. Amanda could report her to the police for violating the restraining order. Or to Simon. Yes, that’s what she would do. Florence supposed she could deny it. Anyway, she was leaving the country in a few days.

She had never traveled farther than LA, where she’d flown for an audition when she was nine. Her mother had been giddy with excitement on the way there, then grim with disappointment on the way home.

Florence had a sense that she, too, would return a different person, that travel would change her. Change is never a smooth curve; it comes in leaps and jolts, plateaus and remissions. And in the periods after an old identity fades away but before a new one is fully installed, there is a certain sense of impunity. As if nothing quite matters. You are not quite yourself. You’re not quite anyone.

She was running out the clock on Florence, on the person she currently was. It was a pleasant thought. She was sick to death of herself. That was one of the problems of always being stuck in your own head; the outside world isn’t loud enough to drown out the constant monologue on the inside. The same shit, day after day. Does she like me? Do I look okay? Will I ever be happy? Will I ever be successful? It was like listening to the same song over and over every day for years. Didn’t they torture people that way?

“Florence Darrow?”

It was the man who’d taken her form and photograph twenty minutes earlier. Florence heard nothing. She was perched on a hard wooden bench watching an old woman fill out a passport application with a slow, shaky hand. Florence had a sudden urge to snatch the pen from her arthritic fingers and hurl it across the room. Tired old crone, she thought. How was she going to navigate customs and security when she couldn’t even fill out a fucking form? Florence’s body was rigid with unexpected fury. She didn’t even know why she was so angry. Something about the woman’s fragility struck her as offensive.

She forced herself to look away and take several slow, deep breaths. She knew from experience that the rage would pass. She tried to put Simon and Amanda and this old woman she didn’t even know out of her mind.