The Book of Lost Fragrances: A Novel of Suspense (43 page)

She nodded.

“Even if it’s just to talk about what—”

“Thank you,” she interrupted. Jac didn’t want Malachai to bring up the hallucinations in front of Robbie. She wanted to forget about them. Wanted not to discuss them. With anyone. Not again.

Once they left, she found herself alone with Griffin in his hospital room for the first time. All the lights were off. Only electronics illuminated the cubicle.

The doctors had said it was important for Griffin to know someone was with him.

“I never asked you what your favorite myth was,” she said now. “Isn’t that strange? Mine is Daedalus and Icarus. Would you like to hear me tell it?”

Jac began the time-honored, age-old way. “Once upon a time . . .”

But she was tired, too tired. It would be all right if she rested for a few minutes, wouldn’t it?

She lay down her head on her crossed arms. Closed her eyes.

A nurse woke her at six in the morning when she came in to take Griffin’s vitals.

A half hour later, when his team of doctors arrived, Jac went downstairs. She bought a cup of coffee and took it outside. Leaning against the building, she sipped as slowly as she could, resisting rushing back to his room. She knew they wouldn’t let her in while they were examining him.

After what seemed like fifteen minutes, she checked her watch. Only five minutes had elapsed. Watching the people come and go, she was able to tell who worked at the hospital even if they weren’t dressed in nurses’ or doctors’ uniforms. The staff’s faces didn’t tell a story. There were no vestiges of fear etched on their foreheads. No grief in their eyes. Their lips were not pursed in anxiety.

When Jac went back upstairs, there was a new nurse on duty who stopped her from going in to see Griffin.

“Is he all right?” Jac asked, looking toward the door.

“He’s fine.” The nurse smiled. “I’m Helene by the way. I’ll be on duty until five. Are you Mr. North’s wife?”

“No, not his wife, no. His cousin. I’m his cousin.”

Robbie had been the one to lie to the hospital when he and Jac came in with the ambulance. If he hadn’t said they were relatives, they might not have been able to stay with Griffin. When she asked how he knew that, he smiled sadly and told her how many gay friends had been kept out of hospital rooms because blood trumped love.

“Why are the doctors taking so long, then?”

“Mr. North is out of the coma. They are doing some tests.”

“Is there any brain damage?”

“I’m not supposed to—”

Jac grabbed the nurse’s hand. “I know you aren’t. And I won’t ever tell you did, but I’m going crazy. Please tell me, is he all right?”

The nurse leaned in a little. Jac smelled lemon, verbena and something sweet mixed up with the medicinal smells. Helene’s heart-shaped lips slid into a smile. She wore bright-pink lipstick almost the color of bubblegum. That must have been what smelled so sweet.

“I was in there for a lot of the tests,” Helene said. “It looks like he’s going to make a complete recovery.”

Like a warm wind, relief wrapped around Jac. Cosseted her. She knew she was standing still, but she felt as if she were spinning. Before she realized it, she was sitting in a hard plastic chair, Helene beside her, holding out a paper cup.

“Take sips,” the nurse said.

“What happened?”

“You got a little light-headed, I think.”

Jac nodded. “Relieved. So relieved.”

“I know, dear. I know. Now just rest here until the doctors are done. One of them will want to talk with you.”

Helene started to walk away. Jac reached out and grabbed her hand. “You actually saw him awake?”

The nurse nodded. “I did.”

A half hour later, Griffin’s neurosurgeon reassured Jac that he was going to make a complete recovery and would probably be in the hospital for only another two days or so. “Mr. North is sleeping now,” he said. “He’ll probably sleep off and on most of the day. But you can go in.”

All of the tubes except for one intravenous line were gone. Griffin was lying on his back, his mouth open slightly. His color was almost back to normal. The bandages across his upper shoulder had been changed. There was no blood seeping through. Just hours ago, there had been blood all over.

Then she saw it was still in his hair. Dried dark brown coating the silver. It made her shiver.

Jac stood beside his bed and looked down at him. Looked down at Griffin, the man who had so long ago brought her to life. And now had saved her life. It seemed too great a thing to even contemplate. Too complicated to comprehend.

Leaning down, she kissed his forehead, hoping that her lips would wake him the way it happened in fairy tales. But he didn’t open his eyes. Didn’t shift in the bed. He didn’t react to her touch at all.

She didn’t know how long she stood there, but at some point, the nurse with the bubblegum-pink lipstick came into the room.

“You might want to go home for a while. He’s going to sleep now for most of the day. You can take a shower and get some rest.” Helene smiled. “Change your clothes. Come back later, perhaps at dinnertime? He might be more alert by then.”

Jac looked down. There were splashes of blood on her shirt. On the scarf. On the top of her right shoe. She was wearing the same clothes she’d left the house in yesterday morning.

Yes, she should go home. She started for the door. Reached it. Put her hand on the handle, but then couldn’t pull it. She listened for what he always said when they parted. All she heard was his steady breathing.

Could she really leave him now? Leave him again? They had too long a history of leaving. From the time she first met him till he’d finally walked away from her that day in the park, they’d said good-bye so many times she could hear him in her memory now.

Except Griffin never actually said good-bye. Instead he’d tilt his head to the right, a hint of a smile would lift the corners of his mouth, his voice would dip a little, slide into a lower register, and in a hoarse whisper he’d say, “Ciao.”

The first time she heard it, she wondered if he was a little affected.

“Ciao?”
she’d asked.

“In Italy, it’s what you say when someone arrives—not just when they leave. Isn’t that better? What could be good about us being separated? We can pretend that you just got here and we have the whole weekend ahead of us.”

Jac turned, walked back, sat beside the bed, leaned over, and laid as much of her upper body beside his as she could. She closed her eyes. Gave in to a thought that she hadn’t allowed herself for more than fifteen years. She wanted to be with him.

Jac could never get her mother back; she could smell her perfume and hear her voice. But that wasn’t real. It was a daughter’s desperation. But Griffin was real. How many people did she have to lose? How many times did she have to lose this one?

At first, the touch of his fingers on her cheek was so natural that she didn’t realize what it meant. He was wiping away her tears. “You know you can drown in that much sadness,” he whispered.

She opened her eyes and looked at him. No words came. There wasn’t anything to say. There was just this man whom she’d never stopped loving. And whom she couldn’t say good-bye to again. Ever.

Fifty-nine

9:30 A.M.

At home, Jac took a shower and then tried to take a nap. But it was only ten in the morning. And she couldn’t stop her mind from reliving the past few terrible days.

Barefoot, with her hair still wet, wearing the same terrycloth robe that she’d worn as a teenager, she left her bedroom. On her way to the kitchen, she stopped at her brother’s room. She wished he was awake, but his door was shut.

Downstairs Jac made herself a cup of Etoile de Paris tea. Her grandfather once told her Mariage Frères created the blend just for him. But she never knew if that was true. As she watched the dried leaves tint the water green, Jac breathed in the scent. Vanilla wrapped around mint. And a flowery thread. She sniffed. Familiar but elusive. Peppery and sweet at the same time. Very green.

Lotus.

In those few seconds in the Orangerie, after she’d taken the pouch from Robbie, as she hurried to Xie Ping, she’d smelled the scents impregnated in the ancient pottery with a clarity that had eluded her in the catacombs. Even in the midst of the commotion, for those few moments, she’d recognized all of the individual essences.

Frankincense and myrrh, blue lotus and almond oil, and—

There was another, but now she couldn’t remember what it was. How could that be? She’d known it in the museum.

What was it?

Not sure why it mattered so much but determined to remember, she left the house, crossed the courtyard, and entered the workshop.

The scent that Robbie called Fragrance of Comfort suffused the studio. No one had been in here for at least two days. Dark and provocative, the perfume of time long gone—of regret, of longing, maybe even of madness—had intensified.

Here in this room, generations of her ancestors had blended elusive essences and absolutes from flowers, spices, wood and minerals. They had mixed elixirs to tempt patrons. Constructed perfumes to delight emperors and empresses, kings and queens. Created magic potions that no one could resist.

Here she’d discovered she was different from everyone else. Here she had suffered the most. Here her mother had ultimately failed them all. And Robbie, in saving his own life, had ended someone else’s.

Here in this terrible and wonderful room, secrets had been lost. And found. And lost again.

Jac stared at the instrument she hated and feared. Maybe it was time to finally welcome the conscious nightmares instead of fighting them and accept that she had an illness she couldn’t always control.

Jac sat down at the organ. Inhaled the cacophony of smells. Hundreds of threads. A whiff of rose. Jasmine. Orange. Sandalwood. Of myrrh. Vanilla. Orchid. Gardenia. Musk. Could there be so many, many smells in one place anywhere else in the world? A richness of odor. A treasure of it. Each individual scent a story. A tale that went back in time. Instead of interpreting myths, she could spend the rest of her life tracing them.

The glass bottles were lenses. The liquid in them prisms. Her vision was wavering. In the gold and bronze and amber, pictures were coming to life. Jac could pick out the individual threads that made up her mother’s perfume. Her father’s cologne. She remembered, when she was little and things were still good, she’d sit on her father’s lap, here at the organ, and he’d tell her the story of the book of lost fragrances that their ancestor had found. She’d close her eyes and see the scenes play out. Her own private theater of the mind.

Sixty

PARIS, FRANCE, 1810

Marie-Genevieve had agreed to accompany her husband because she couldn’t think of any reason to say no. But she didn’t want to make the trip from Nantes to the place where she’d been young. Memories weren’t always her friends. Often they woke her at night and held her hostage. The brutal revolution that had begun in that city had robbed her of all her family. Her mother and father, two sisters. All imprisoned. Then killed.

In Paris, all the ghosts would be there to greet her. She’d have to walk down streets she’d traversed as a girl. She’d have to see the specter of her past. Of Giles.

But her husband wanted her to go. And she had no excuse to refuse him. He was a kind man. He’d saved her life when he found her—mostly dead, half drowned—on the shore of the Loire River. The priest she’d been bound to had used his last bit of strength to untie them and to give her a chance to survive.

Without his dead weight, Marie-Genevieve had risen to the surface. Sputtering, choking, she gulped in air. Took in water. If not for the current, she wouldn’t have lived. But the river had pushed her onto the shore.

The first two days in Paris were not as emotionally trying as she’d expected. There had been so many changes in the past fifteen years that Marie-Genevieve’s memories were mitigated by the shock of the new.

On the third morning, she was so relaxed that when their carriage crossed the Seine at the Pont du Carrousel, she was watching a young woman trying to control her three little children and didn’t focus on where they were. Or ask where they were headed.

Then the carriage turned onto Rue des Saints-Pères and pulled up in front of the building.

Marie-Genevieve turned to her husband. “Where are we?”

“A surprise.”

Except she’d never told him anything about L’Etoile.

“I don’t understand!”

Couldn’t he hear her panic? Why was he smiling?

“I’ve heard they make the finest fragrance in all of Paris here. I wanted to buy you something to remember the trip by.”

“It’s too dear. We’ve spent enough money.” She was looking at her husband. But over his shoulder, through the window, she could see the door to the perfume shop that she used to go in and out of a hundred times a week. The door opened. Someone was coming out. At first Marie-Genevieve thought it was Jean-Louis L’Etoile. Tall. Gray hair. Eyes so blue she could see them from here.

He noticed the carriage. Glanced in. Right at her.

There were ghosts here after all. Giles had died in Egypt when she was still a girl. He was long dead.

Except the man who was looking in at her, staring at her as if she were a ghost too, was very much alive.

Their gazes met. For a few seconds, Marie-Genevieve forgot she was married with two children and sitting in a rented carriage with her husband. The sound that escaped from her lips was a sob blended with a laugh.

“Are you all right,
ma chérie
?” her husband asked.

“I don’t feel well . . .”

That night, once her husband was asleep, Marie-Genevieve stole out of the hotel room. It was only ten blocks to Rue des Saints-Pères. The streets weren’t dark and dangerous. She wasn’t a forty-two-year-old woman with streaks of gray in her hair anymore but seventeen again. She didn’t lumber, she flew.

The door to the store was unlocked despite the hour. Even though they hadn’t made contact, hadn’t arranged for the rendezvous, he was there. Sitting in the darkened boutique. Waiting.