Florence had been blown away by the confidence and vitality of the writing. She had tried typing out a few of its sentences because she’d read that Didion had done that with Hemingway. She’d felt transfigured, like she’d been writing her own work with arthritic fingers and had suddenly found the cure.
But when she typed out Helen’s handwritten draft of her second novel, she felt none of that. In fact, she thought—with a different type of exhilaration—I could write this.
That was how it started.
When she couldn’t decipher a word that Helen had written, she made decisions more swiftly and surely. At first, it was just to avoid another terrifying encounter like the one in Helen’s study on her first day. But soon it became her favorite part of her job. Every time she chose a word to type into the manuscript, she got a small rush. She felt like Helen’s collaborator rather than just her assistant.
From there, she grew bolder. She started adding words that she knew were not what Helen had written. But they made the book better, they just did. Surely if Helen noticed, she would agree. Maybe she would even thank Florence.
But Helen did not notice. Every time she finished typing up more of Helen’s draft, Florence saved a new version of the manuscript on the laptop and emailed Helen the file. She assumed Helen was reading over it and making edits, but she never gave her back anything to retype, and she had yet to comment on any of Florence’s additions. Florence began to suspect that her own words might actually end up in the novel.
One morning, she had just typed a word—catastrophic—that bore only a loose resemblance to the scrawl on the page when she heard tires crunching on the gravel. She sat up. They’d never had a visitor before.
She stood and peered out the dining room window. A police car was in the driveway. She felt a brief and irrational suspicion that they’d found out what she was doing to Helen’s manuscript. She whipped around guiltily when she heard footsteps creaking down the staircase.
“The police are here,” Florence told Helen.
“What’d you do now?” Helen asked. “Rob a liquor store?”
Helen walked calmly to the front door and slipped outside just as the car door slammed shut.
Florence craned her neck to get a better view out the window. An overweight cop with gray skin and thinning hair hitched up his pants before waddling as authoritatively as one could waddle toward Helen’s erect figure at the foot of the steps. She was shielding her face from the sun, just as she’d done the first time Florence met her.
Florence couldn’t hear what they were saying. The man gestured toward the house. Helen raised her eyebrows and laughed lightly. She turned then and gestured at the house too. As she did, she caught sight of Florence’s face in the window and rested her gaze on it for a brief moment. Florence stepped back. She sat down at the table again and tried to look absorbed in her work.
Helen reentered the house a few minutes later.
“Everything okay?” Florence asked.
“Good god, if that is what I’m spending my taxes on, maybe I should be hiding my money in the Cayman Islands.”
“What did he say?”
“Oh, some foolishness about speeding tickets.”
“He came to your house for speeding tickets?”
“Well, I do have a lot of them.”
Florence remembered the drive from the train station. She could believe it.
“Do you want me to deal with them?”
“Hm? No, that’s okay. I can handle it. I think they’re stuffed in my desk drawer somewhere.”
Florence, feeling unusually chagrined, erased the word catastrophic letter by letter.
19.
The night after the policeman’s visit, Helen looked up from her dinner and put down her fork and knife. “Florence,” she said, “I’ve been meaning to ask you something.”
Florence froze. She’d been caught; she knew it.
What on earth had compelled her to tamper with Helen’s manuscript? It was beyond stupid.
She was so hemmed in all the time by timidity and insecurity that every once in a while some self-destructive impulse in her demanded brash action. It was the same impulse that had made her send those photos to Simon. She had no control over it.
There was a flavorless, over-chewed piece of lamb in her mouth that she couldn’t swallow. She’d braised the meat herself under Helen’s direction that afternoon. She lifted her napkin to her mouth and quietly spit it out.
“Do you have a passport?” Helen asked.
Florence was taken off guard. She shook her head.
“Can you get one?”
“Yes. Why?”
Helen composed a perfectly proportioned bite of lamb, rice, and tomato confit with her knife and fork. She chewed it slowly and thoughtfully. It was a performance, Florence knew, designed to keep her waiting.
“I thought you might like to join me on a research trip to Morocco. Would that interest you?”
It took Florence a moment to regain her bearings. “Yes, absolutely.” She was flooded with relief.
“Great. Why don’t you go to the passport office Monday and see if you can get it expedited. I’ll pay any fees, obviously.”
“Why, when do you want to go?”
“As soon as possible. I feel stuck on the novel, and I think being there will help. Besides, I’m getting a little sick of sitting around in cow country, aren’t you?”
Florence didn’t answer. She had, in fact, never been happier. Every morning she woke up awash in pink sunlight filtering through the cherry blossom tree and thought that she had finally landed where she was meant to be. “Should I look into flights?”
“Yes, do. Today is—what?—Saturday? Let’s go at the end of next week, maybe Wednesday or Thursday, if we can find seats.”
“Wait, four days from now?”
“Why not? What’s the point of waiting? We can fly into Marrakesh then drive out to Semat the next day.” Semat was the small town on the coast where Helen’s novel took place.
“Should I book hotels too?”
“Book any place that looks good to you in Marrakesh, but the hotels in Semat are a bit dicey. See if there are any villas available to rent. Something nice.”
“For how long?”
“Let’s say…two weeks?”
Florence nodded.
Just then her phone buzzed on the table next to her. She looked at the screen. It was another message from her mother: “CALL ME!!!!!” Ever since moving in with Helen, Florence had gotten into the habit of waiting two or three days before returning her mother’s calls. She’d started to find her mother’s flaws even more glaring now that she’d gotten to know women like Helen Wilcox and Greta Frost.
“Sorry,” Florence said as she turned the phone over.
“Feel free to take it.”
“I’d rather not. It’s just my mother.”
“Everything alright? You can talk to me, you know. I’m no stranger to family drama.”
“I mean, nothing happened. I just—。 Well, at first I was avoiding her calls because I didn’t want to tell her that I’d left Forrester. And then I started realizing how much happier I was not talking to her.” Florence let out a soft, uncomfortable laugh.