Who is Maud Dixon?(49)

She tried over and over again to remember the night of the accident. She shut her eyes and saw the drive to the restaurant, the whiskeys, the camel meat.

And then what?

She couldn’t keep the narrative going. She tried to gain enough momentum from the beginning of the story to sail through the point at which her memories stopped. Drive. Whiskey. Camel. Drive. Whiskey. Camel. Then what? Then…nothing.

There was nothing there.

Had she really drunk that much? She’d blacked out from drinking before, but not for years. Not since college. Of course, she had been drinking on an empty stomach. Stupid.

She shut her eyes tightly again. Drive. Whiskey. Camel.

And all of a sudden she remembered a rush of water. Was she just imagining it? No. There it was again—cold water, rising quickly.

And there was more: A hand gripping her arm tightly. Whose hand? The fisherman’s?

She opened her eyes and pushed up her sleeve to inspect her upper arm. Much of the skin on her upper body was discolored, but she thought she could discern four small bruises—each the size of a fingerprint—that were distinct from the rest.

Just then Amina knocked on the door.

“Come in,” Florence called out hoarsely.

The older woman entered with a tray of toast and eggs. She returned a minute later with a large brass teapot and poured Florence a steaming cup of mint tea. It would have been easier for her to pour it in the kitchen, but Florence appreciated the ceremony of it. Her mother had rarely been able to take off a day from work when she’d been sick as a child, and she was enjoying Amina’s ministrations.

Amina watched with satisfaction as Florence sipped the sweet tea. “Your friend is gone?” she asked.

Florence hadn’t said anything about why she’d swapped rooms or what had happened to Helen. She hadn’t even explained where her bruises had come from. She could have blamed the lapse on confusion from the pain medication, but the truth was that she couldn’t stand the thought of Amina looking at her in the same way that policeman had. She nodded.

“She will return?”

“I don’t think so. She went back to Marrakesh.”

“Without…” Amina gestured around the room that was strewn with Helen’s belongings.

“She brought a few things in a small bag. I’ll bring the rest when I go.”

Amina nodded.

Florence spent much of the day dozing. She kept waking up in a confused panic. Maybe she’d gotten food poisoning, she thought at one point, eager for an explanation that would shift the burden of responsibility. Maybe Helen had somehow forced her to drink too much. She’d certainly been liberal with the wine back in the States.

Finally, as dusk was falling, Florence reached over and took a double dose of her pain medication. The next time she woke, it was morning.

*



The heat had thickened overnight, and Florence could feel it lying heavily on her like another blanket. It might already have been ninety degrees. She kicked off the covers, pushed two pillows against the headboard, and shimmied herself up as gently as she could to a sitting position. She was sore, but the pain had lost its sharp edges. She reached for her phone before remembering that she didn’t have one anymore. She looked at the hydrocodones on the bedside table but decided not to take one. Yesterday had been a swirl of confusion and frustration and paranoia, fueled in part, she felt sure, by the pain medication. She couldn’t do that again.

Sitting there in the hot, bright room, she could smell the sourness rising from her body. She hadn’t showered in more than two days. She smelled deeply, grotesquely of herself—flesh marinated in its own excretions. How much effort we have to put into concealing our own scent, she thought.

She walked into Helen’s large tiled bathroom on shaky legs and took a long shower, holding the wrist with the cast on it outside the stream of water as best she could. Her scrapes stung, but it felt pleasantly bracing. The pain reinforced her physicality. She didn’t want to be in her head right now.

Afterward, still wrapped in a towel, she patted on some thick moisturizer from a glass jar on the counter. She combed her hair back and looked at herself in the mirror.

She understood how she could have been mistaken for Helen at the hospital, at least in comparison to the photograph in Helen’s sodden passport. The major points matched—slender build, blond hair, dark eyes. And her face was swollen and bruised, which obscured most of its individuality. She was reminded of a piece of writing advice Helen had once given her: You only need to give one or two details about a character’s physical appearance. It’s all the reader needs to build an image in her mind. Anything more is a distraction.

Florence put on a pair of Helen’s underwear—gray silk. She opened the door to Helen’s closet and pulled out a beige linen dress with horn buttons running down the center. She slipped on a few of Helen’s bracelets.

She remembered suddenly that Helen had been wearing chunky bangles on the night of the accident. Had she tried to swim out of the car? Could they have weighed her down?

She patted her cheeks lightly. It doesn’t matter, she told herself. It doesn’t matter. Don’t get sucked into an endless stream of questions again.

Downstairs on the terrace she ate heartily. She slathered brioches with butter and jam and asked Amina to make her fried eggs. She drank three cups of coffee with cream. Afterward, she flopped down in one of the lounge chairs. Amina brought her some cold water with mint and lemon in it. The glass had already started sweating before she set it down. Florence closed her eyes and felt the heat press on her.