The Scent Keeper(69)

As I stepped into the elevator of Inspire, Inc., at the end of the day, I was thinking about the store: its snowy white couches that had never known dog hair; its tall vases waiting to be filled with flowers by husbands who would never actually remember an anniversary, a birthday.

“Dammit.” A woman in a suit pumped the lobby button with a well-manicured finger, checking the time on her watch.

“Day care?” said the woman next to her.

“Yeah. If I’m late one more time, they’re going to kick us out.”

The two women exchanged glances.

“I had a talk with Tim,” the second woman said as the elevator started its ponderous way toward the ground floor. “Told him he needed to help more at home.”

“How did that go?”

“He said he’d just washed his car.”

“Christ.”

“I just want…”

“I know.”

The elevator opened and the two women quickly exited. I followed them onto the sidewalk, hearing a different conversation in my head.

Home isn’t perfect.

Oh, but it can be.

I’d known perfect. Against my will, my mind went back to my time on the island with Fisher. Lying in bed, our smells blending in the sheets. His hand on the small of my back as I cooked.

A man bumped into me, jostling my thoughts to pieces. I blinked, looking around at the people thronging the sidewalk. The suits and strollers, the frustrations and exhaustion of day’s end. In the middle of it all, half a block ahead, a couple waited for the light. There was nothing exceptional about them. He wore jeans and an old sweatshirt. Her hair was an uncombed cloud around her head. But they were looking into each other’s eyes as if nothing around them existed, or needed to. I felt something go through me, sharp as a spike.

And just like that, I knew the base note I needed to leave out.



* * *



I turned around, and flew back up in the elevator to the third floor. Even before I entered my classroom, I could hear the scents whispering, moving in their glass containers. I went through the boxes, pulling out bottles almost without seeing them. I placed them in the beautiful leather messenger bag Victoria had bought me. I could hear them clinking softly as I walked down the hall and I tried not to remember the last time I’d heard that sound, or what had happened.

This is different, I told myself.



* * *



I got the bottles back to Victoria’s apartment, sequestering myself in the bathroom and closing the door behind me. I laid out my supplies on the white tile floor, took a breath, and began mixing. The scents were talking now, full of ideas. They leapt from the bottles, eager to blend.

Come play, they said, and I did.

At one point, Victoria came and knocked on the door.

“What are you doing in there? I can smell it all the way out in the living room.”

I straightened up, feeling a sudden ache in my shoulders. How long had I been working?

“It’s a surprise,” I said.

“Smells like a good one.”

I pushed the hair back from my face, breathed in the developing fragrance on my fingertips. I was so close.

“Can we go to that store tomorrow?” I said. “The first one you and I went to?”

“Why?”

“I want to show you something.”

In the mixing bottle, the scents swirled.



* * *



Inspire, Inc., used a machine that dispersed fragrances in a mist so fine it was effectively invisible. The smells spilled into the imaginations of customers, hitched rides on their clothes and the products nestled in their shopping bags. A perfect branding delivery service.

I breathed in the store’s scent, that pale pink sunrise of a thing. Just you wait, I thought.

“Ready?” I asked Victoria, the mixing bottle raised in my hand above the machine.

She hesitated, looking out toward the sales room.

“I know what I’m doing,” I said. “I’m your daughter.”

Victoria smiled then, and stepped back. “It’s all yours.”

I tipped the liquid into the container.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s go see what happens.”



* * *



The fragrance started off bright and happy, fresh-cut grass and sunshine, iced hibiscus tea, the best of a Sunday afternoon. Lavender and rose released their sweetness into the air so serenely you knew there was not a weed within ten yards of them. The scents filtered out through the store, and as Victoria and I watched, the customers began putting down their phones, looking about with greater interest, smiling at one another.

“Well, you’ve certainly made them friendly,” Victoria said.

I just smiled.

The fragrance began to deepen. Vanilla, the clarion call of mothers in aprons and after-school cookies warm from the oven. The women’s expressions softened.

Your life can be like this, the fragrance said. Your children will love you.

Then, slowly, lazily, in came the scent of jasmine.

Victoria tilted her head. “Hello, troublemaker,” she said.

It floated out across the room, heavy and sensual, the essence of beautiful, younger women. Women who birthed children and wore bikinis within a month, or worse yet, never had children at all, their stomachs taut, their breasts ripe. Women who drew the wandering eyes of husbands.