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.
Helen was dead.
She rotated the thought around, like she was holding it up to the light, inspecting it on all sides. Helen was dead.
She waited, again, to feel something: grief, maybe guilt. But neither came.
Death is the most transformative event in anyone’s existence, she thought, yet once it has happened, it doesn’t matter to that person anymore. There’s no person left. At that point, any significance it has fragments and scatters. Its impact is diffused among the survivors.
And who were they, for Helen? Her mother was dead, and she was estranged from the rest of her family. Who else was there? Her editor? By Helen’s account, they were not close. Greta? She might feel the sting of losing a client, but everyone has their share of professional disappointments.
Really, the only person to feel sorry for was herself. She was the one who’d been injured, left alone in a foreign country, shorn of a job, a home, and a mentor in one fell swoop.
Yet she didn’t feel anything. No pity, no regret, nothing.
And in the lack of this emotion, of any emotion really, Florence was able to view the facts in a clearheaded way. And what she found so interesting about the facts, so very interesting, was that no one knew what had happened. She was the only person on earth who knew that Helen Wilcox was dead.
30.
It’s possible that some part of Florence knew what she was going to do the moment she heard Officer Idrissi whisper that name in her ear: Madame Weel-cock. Or maybe it was earlier—maybe it was the first time she walked into Helen’s cold, whitewashed house five weeks before and saw the ranunculus in the window, the glowing fireplace. Certainly by the time she found herself lying under Semat’s glaring sun on that unseasonably hot morning there was little doubt in her mind.
She was going to become Helen Wilcox.
And why not? Helen’s identity was just waiting there, unused, like a big, empty house. Meanwhile, she was living in a small, ugly, Florence-size hovel. Why shouldn’t she move into the abandoned mansion? Why should she let it fall into disrepair instead? She could go in and do some upkeep. Clean the gutters, wash the floors, make sure it stayed in good shape.
She already had the keys; that was the amazing part. She knew how to be Helen. She was more experienced in the minor bureaucracy of Helen’s life than Helen was herself—she lived in her house and paid her bills and wrote her emails. She certainly thought she could pass, physically, for Helen; she already had. Helen’s passport and driver’s license photos were small and outdated anyway, obscured by both holograms and, now, water damage. Helen’s most prominent feature was the sharp bump on her nose, but it wasn’t really visible in a photograph taken straight-on. Besides, who really looked all that closely at these photos anyway?
She remembered then that she didn’t even have her own passport; it had, like Helen, been swept away in the current. In the normal course of events, she would go to the embassy and get a new one, but the normal course of events had done nothing but disappoint her for her entire life. Besides, what did she need Florence Darrow’s passport for anymore?
Florence couldn’t help letting out a quiet laugh: a small, whispery exhale. This situation was so bizarre, so unlikely, that it seemed to her that it must be a gift from some higher power, maybe even the one her mother had promised her for all those years. This was her chance at greatness. She could simply step into the void Helen had left behind. It all just hinged on not telling anyone that Helen had died.
Florence flung an arm across her eyes. She lay very still for several minutes.
She felt light, light in her bones, light in her soul. All those old doubts and insecurities and anxieties, her constant companions—those belonged to Florence Darrow, and she could finally let them go. She didn’t have to try so hard to change anymore. Change? What a hoax! Nobody changes. They spend years tweaking their habits, taking small incremental steps in the hopes of altering the course of their lives, and it never works. No. You just have to know when to cut your losses. And Florence Darrow was, without a doubt, a write-off. She had no one. She’d published nothing. What would even be worth saving? She would purge it all. She would shrug off Florence Darrow in one swift motion and clothe herself in Helen Wilcox. An extraordinary life. The life of an artist; a writer.
And Maud! She hadn’t even considered Maud Dixon yet! She was getting two identities for the price of one. Helen Wilcox and Maud Dixon.
She could be Maud Dixon.
Could she?
She could never come out publicly as Maud Dixon aka Helen Wilcox—that would invite too much scrutiny—but she could certainly publish her own work under Maud Dixon’s name. The next book was already under contract; all she had to do was finish it. In fact, Greta hadn’t even seen the beginning yet; she could write the whole thing herself. Then she’d finally see her work in print. And it wouldn’t just be a handful of words here and there, like she’d been toying with in Cairo; it would be the whole thing. Hers. She didn’t even care that it wouldn’t be under her real name. “Florence Darrow” already felt like a relic from the past. She had no attachment to it. And she was sure that under Maud Dixon’s name, people would finally see her talent. It’s all about packaging—how often had Agatha told her that?