The Scent Keeper(87)

I put down the paper towel. “Will you tell me about my parents?” I said. “I’d like to know the truth.”

Rene gazed about as if trying to figure out what exactly to tell me. “You know,” he said after a while, “I think one of the most fascinating things about perfumes is how they change with each person’s skin chemistry. I’ve always thought of them as verbs, not nouns. Truth, I’ve found, is much the same.”

“I want to know,” I said stubbornly.

He nodded, picked up one of the bottles, and peered into it.

“I met your father fresh out of graduate school,” he said, almost as if talking to the scent inside. “He was a scientist—could talk to smells more easily than people. I think he liked smells better, too. We got along well.”

His smile was directed toward the past, but I understood what he was feeling.

“Your mother worked at the same company,” he continued, turning his gaze to me. “They had her making fragrances for dryer sheets and hand soap. A complete waste of her talent, if you ask me. She wanted to try something new, to prove herself, and I told her about a scent John had just discovered on one of his travels. I introduced the two of them, but I wasn’t matchmaking. They were not an obvious combination.”

I nodded in agreement.

“I should have seen it, though,” he added ruefully. “In the end, I don’t think I’ve ever met two people with more restless minds, or a stronger fear of being deserted. They made a powerful—if unstable—combination. I do think they loved each other, as much as they were able.”

“And Nightingale?” I asked.

“Your mother’s idea. She started talking about Polaroid cameras, asking why we couldn’t do the same with scents—capture and re-create them in one machine. That kind of challenge was perfect for John, simple and complicated at the same time. He worked at it for years. He could have played with it forever.”

I thought of my father sitting at the table in our cabin, taking the machine apart, night after night. I bit off the words before they left my mouth:

He did.

“But you see,” Rene said, “that’s where your parents were different. I remember your father warning Victoria, telling her about how when photos were first invented, they used to fade. He was worried the same thing might happen with his machine. He wanted more testing—but she couldn’t wait. She kept dropping hints into the right ears, and before long she had investors signed up. When John found out, he was devastated. It was like she’d sold him instead of the machine.”

I thought of the look on my father’s face when he found out I’d broken my promise and gone to the lagoon. His trust, cracked into pieces. The second time, I realized now. First his wife, then his daughter.

Rene continued. “Your father threatened to tell the investors the machine hadn’t been fully tested yet, but Victoria said it would ruin them both. So he took one of the prototypes and left—said he was going to do his own testing, as far from her as he could get. The price for his silence was that the machine would be called Nightingale.”

I thought of the fairy tale, with its broken machine. He’d known, I thought. And if Rene was right, then all those articles about my father—even the story Victoria had told me herself—were wrong. It wasn’t his ego that had brought them down. It was my mother’s.

“What about me?” I asked.

Rene shook his head. “Victoria found out she was pregnant after he left, but nobody knew where he was. I finally tracked him down in Sri Lanka, and he got back right before you were born. She almost didn’t let him see you. She said you were hers, not his.”

Then why didn’t she keep looking for me? I was so deep in my own thoughts that I almost didn’t catch his next words.

“The first time I saw him holding you, I could tell,” Rene said. “You were his missing note.”

“What?”

“The thing that made him whole. It wasn’t Victoria who did that—it was you.”

Victoria’s bitterness came back to me: Men will always betray you. Whatever Rene had seen in my father then, she’d seen it, too—felt the loss of being replaced. I knew what that was like. All the same, I could never have done to Fisher what she did to my father.

And I had been a child—a baby, blameless—but still I’d reaped what my parents had sown.

Rene and I were quiet. His hands went back to moving among the bottles, arranging and rearranging their order, formulating fragrances without ever opening a stopper.

“She’s not going to like that you’ve told me,” I said.

“Probably not,” he said, and gave me a crooked smile. “But I’m not so sure I belong here these days, anyway. A scientist friend got in touch recently—he’s researching the influence of scents on people with Alzheimer’s. Sounds far more interesting.”

I shook my head, trying to clear my thoughts. “If you knew all this,” I said, “why work for her?”

“I love scents,” Rene said with a shrug. “And your mother has one of the most brilliant minds for them I’ve ever met.”

“Is that enough?”

“If you want to work with genius, you usually aren’t signing up for easy.” Rene started putting away the bottles, tidying his notes into stacks.