They drove another hour in silence. The landscape became drier and dustier the farther they went. Marrakesh, Florence had read, was actually an oasis in the desert. Here, on the highway, there was none of the city’s lushness or color. The heat and steady thump-thump of the wheels on the road lured them both into a trance. They started to awaken only after noticing that the air rushing into the car felt different. It had cooled off a few degrees, and it felt fresher and brighter. Florence thought she could smell the sea. The area around them was getting greener too. Florence glanced at the map on her phone. It looked like they were about ten or fifteen kilometers from Semat.
The road approached a steep drop and continued along the cliff’s edge. Below, the Atlantic foamed and churned. The sun glinted off its surface in the distance. It was hard to believe it was the same body of water Florence had grown up beside. How disappointing the ocean must have found the flat-topped warehouses of Florida, she thought, after the ramparts and minarets of Morocco.
The cliffside road was barely wide enough for two lanes and every once in a while, when a car or a motorcycle raced toward them from the opposite direction, Florence felt compelled to slow to a near halt. She kept wiping her palms on the upholstery to dry the sweat.
A truck with canvas flaps closed in on her back bumper and let out a keening moan. It finally swerved around her, barely making it back into the right lane before a car on the other side zipped around a curve. Their competing horns created a distracting din in Florence’s head.
Finally the road pulled away from the cliff’s edge and soon after that Florence took a left onto a small road whose name matched the one on their rental papers. She breathed deeply through her nostrils as they bounced up the quiet street. It smelled like wet soil.
The road pulled them upward at a sharp incline, and soon a white house with vivid blue trim—another riad, Florence knew—loomed before them. It was perched, alone, at the top of a steep hill. They drove past a large boulder that had been painted white with VILLA DES GRENADES spelled out in blue.
“Des Grenades?” Florence had wondered aloud when they’d booked it. “Like hand grenades?”
“Pomegranates,” Helen had corrected.
Florence drove through the gate and parked the car in the driveway. She leaned back in her seat. Her entire body was sticky.
A stout, gray-haired woman in her sixties emerged from the house. She walked down the path toward them with a hitch in her step. Helen and Florence climbed out of the car to greet her.
The woman stepped forward and shook Florence’s hand. “Bonjour, mesdames, bienvenue,” she said.
“Do you speak English?” Helen responded.
“Yes, little,” she said with a shy smile.
She introduced herself as Amina and explained that she had worked at Villa des Grenades for more than twenty years. She would do all the cooking, shopping, and cleaning. Anything they needed, just ask her. She lived right down the road, she said, gesturing somewhere down the hill. She tried to take their bags, but Florence insisted on carrying them herself.
Stepping inside the house, Florence felt a wave of panic. The floor was missing large chunks of tile, and mold had found refuge in every corner. Creepers stretched their long tendrils inside the windows, crawling up walls and across ceilings. There were brown stains where the weeds had made gains before being hacked away. They reminded Florence of the sticky wakes left by slugs back home.
Upstairs, the walls and floors were in similarly bad shape, but at least the sheets looked clean, and the water ran hot and cold. As in the hotel, the second floor was open in the center, dropping down to the sunny courtyard below.
Behind the house, a large slate-paved terrace stretched back toward a small pool shaded by palm trees whose shaggy trunks of loose, burlap-like bark made it look like they’d been caught in the act of undressing. The pool itself was only three-quarters filled, and a thick layer of green algae filmed the water. Bugs marched fearlessly across the surface. Three mangled lounge chairs were arranged around the edge, trailing broken vinyl straps on the ground below them. Amina pointed to a stack of clean towels folded neatly on a nearby table, which made Helen laugh.
“I’ll call the rental agency,” Florence said. “Let’s see if there’s anything else available. I promise the photos did not look like this on their website.” Helen had seen the photos too and had okayed Florence’s selection.
But Helen just said, “It’s fine. It’s absolutely fine.”
*
Helen wanted to get some writing done that afternoon, so they settled in the large, bright living room on the ground floor, which had doors leading both to the terrace out back and to the tiled courtyard in the center of the house. Helen wrote in quick, frantic bursts, the pen careening wildly across the paper and occasionally digging a divot in the page.
Florence watched from the couch across the room. She, too, had a notebook on her lap and a pen in her hand, but she had not written anything.
One sentence, she told herself. Just write one sentence.
She wrote: I am.
The second shortest sentence in the English language.
I am…what? I am what?
She put the cap back on the pen. She looked again at Helen, her brow furrowed in concentration.
Florence slapped the notebook on the table in front of her, eliciting an annoyed glance from Helen, then stood up and moved outside to the terrace. She lay down on one of the lounge chairs and closed her eyes. It was nearly 7 p.m., but the air was still warm. She listened to the rustling palm leaves and chattering birds.
She felt betrayed. She’d given up her mother, hadn’t she? Why was she still unable to write? Where was the great torrent she’d been promised? Or was that only Helen’s reward?
The shrillness of the bird calls started to annoy her. She went back inside and checked Helen’s email on the laptop, which she’d set up at a carved wooden desk in a corner of the living room.
There were a few emails from Lauren, Greta’s assistant, but nothing pressing. And one personal message in the Helen Wilcox account.
“You have an email from Sylvie Daloud,” she said.
Helen looked up and blinked a few times. “Sorry, what? I was miles away.”
“You have an email from Sylvie Daloud. She says she’s getting her Met subscription for the upcoming season and wants to know if you’re interested in coordinating your dates for some of the performances.”
Helen set her notepad and pen on the table next to her. “Okay, I’ll write back later.”
Florence nodded and shut the laptop. “Helen, I know this is a stupid question…but how do you know what to write about?”
Helen frowned. “How do I know what to write about? I think that’s getting it backward. When I wrote Mississippi Foxtrot, it wasn’t like I decided to become a writer and then sought out a plot. I had a story that I needed to tell, so I wrote it down.”
“Oh,” Florence said, deflated, though she wasn’t entirely sure what Helen meant: she’d had a story in mind, or one that had actually happened? Well, Florence didn’t have either, so what did it matter. “What about now?” she added. “Is it the same process with your second book?”
“Well, no. Not exactly.”