The Scent Keeper(89)

People lie, Emmeline, my father had said. But smells never do. I walked across the room and faced the wall of squares.

“Tell me a story,” I said. “Please.”





THE WALL


Stories always begin at the top of the page.

I dragged over a wing-backed chair and scrambled onto it, reaching up to the top left square and pulling down a clear glass bottle, nearly full of a dark golden liquid. Its lines were simple but elegant, the stopper heavy, rectangular. On the side that had been facing the wall, I saw a label, yellowed and curling at the edges. The words were spare; straight black lines on white, no frills or flips.

No. 5. Chanel.

I returned to the floor and removed the stopper, inhaling top notes of bergamot, with a sultry middle of jasmine and orris root sliding into base notes of amber and vanilla. It was gorgeous, generous, set off by a series of synthetic, surreal scents, bright as searchlights, precise as expertly manicured fingernails tapping against a table.

Who are you? I asked it, but it said nothing. It wanted to mingle with skin, but not mine.

I set the bottle on the dresser and turned back to the wall, scanning for more hidden labels, but there were none. There had to be another way to crack this code.

My father’s wall of drawers had been a timeline, divided into red-wax bottles at the top and green ones below, a clinical partitioning of the outside and inside world. Before and after the island. His travels, our life. On that wall, the green-wax bottles had started roughly halfway down.

Maybe the same logic would apply here. I went to the center of my mother’s collection and chose a bottle of pale pink liquid. The perfume inside was lush, brilliant in its complexity, but again, it told me nothing. I unstoppered four or five nearby bottles, looking for a hint, a clue. A trace of myself, in any form, in my mother’s memories.

I was close to giving up when I opened a small vial of sepia-colored liquid and felt a memory lurch up from my mind to meet it. I was in the cabin, my father’s machine in pieces on the floor, the long gray scarf burning in the woodstove. I could see it curl, twisting in the flames, its treacherous scent infiltrating the fading remains of my father’s smell.

Here it was again. Indolent and spicy, full of longing. I pushed the stopper back in, but the scent had already slipped out, wandering around the room, lazily circling the ordinary bottles on the dresser, exploring the bed. That feels good—its voice was low and scratchy as the swish of branches across a roof, round as resin spilling from trees.

I want more, it said.

Focus, I told myself. Your father must have taken that scarf when he left Victoria. You have a time marker now. Use it.

Trembling, I opened the bottle that preceded it in the row, then the one before that. I found four scents based on the same essential fragrance, each with a subtle difference—a series of threads in an exquisite, invisible net, I realized. I lined them up and started with the oldest one, smelling them in order, noting the variations. The first contained a hint of musk, that basic, animal fire to stoke the passions. The next held the cool drift of water lilies, tangling around me, whispering promises.

I love you.

In the third one, so subtle I almost missed it, I detected that crisp note from the scent in the lobby of Inspire, Inc. Money. It vanished in the fragrance after that, replaced by the animal scents again, but stronger, more insistent this time. An olfactory urge to procreate.

It was my parents’ history, told through scents—orchestrated, controlled, one perfume after another. She’d done this.

Once upon a time, Emmeline, there was a beautiful sorceress who lived in a mansion made of scents …

Truth hidden in fairy tales. He’d told me that story, too.

I reached for the next bottle. I expected a variation, another piece of the narrative, but what came out was completely different. The fragrance was soft, floral—sweet orange and sunshine, with just a touch of violet leaf—and it hit me in a wash of pain. I felt fear spiking up through me, a desperate need to survive. Then comfort. I gasped, shoving the scent away. It was horrible. It was wonderful. More than any of the others, it was familiar.

It was me.

I pulled the bottle closer, sniffing, and then I could see it—the cool, sterile room. The white walls. A doctor, and there, in the corner, my father. I searched the memory, trying to locate a warm, animal smell, my mother’s skin, but there was nothing. Even for my birth, that most intimate mother-child experience, Victoria had put a fragrance between us. Held herself apart, pulling strings. Crafted the moment.

My whole body was shaking. I set the bottle in its square, and checked the remaining ones with renewed vigor. I found the lobby fragrance for Inspire, Inc. The citrus and pine of the elevator, the soft pink sunrise—and then, sure as rain, I found the one I had composed for that same store, held in a gracefully curved blue-glass vial. After that came a series of plain mixing bottles, like the ones we used in the lab.

They were small things, those last ones, each about half-full of liquid. I think I knew, even before smelling them, what they would be.

I opened the first, and my past smoked up to me—applewood. I kept going. Spruce. Cedar. Cinnamon. Sea salt. A single note in each bottle. All the smells of my childhood that I had told Victoria about, scents that somehow, inexplicably, had found their way here, into this clean, white space, hidden in a blanket, the food, my clothes. They’d made me feel safe. Each time I’d smelled them, I’d allowed myself to believe in a rational explanation for their presence. Now I sat there on the floor, surrounded by lies.