The Collector of Dying Breaths Page 2

  Had he fallen asleep again? Jac L’Etoile didn’t know, so she did what she had been doing for days: she watched and waited. After almost ten minutes, just as she was about to go get the nurse they’d hired, Robbie reopened his eyes and resumed the conversation as if no time had passed at all. Perhaps for him it hadn’t. For her it had been interminable. Every moment of his illness had been.

  How was it possible that her baby brother, who weeks ago had celebrated his thirtieth birthday in perfect health, could suddenly be so sick?

  Robbie ran the family perfume business on his own, practiced meditation daily with Zen masters, hosted fetes that were the talk of Paris, and was on the board of one of the foremost fragrance museums in the world.

  The man in the bed could barely string more than two or three sentences together.

  “You need to finish my work with her . . .” he said haltingly, then stopped.

  What work was Robbie doing in Barbizon? And with whom? He seemed to think he’d explained it to her, but he hadn’t. And she didn’t want to press him.

  “You have the talent to . . . You doubt yourself, Jac. Don’t.” Every word came out on the edge of a ragged and labored breath. He closed his eyes once more.

  Although he was two years her junior, Robbie had always been there to help her. Was the wiser of them, who, since childhood, had calmed her and showed her the way. The Zen sage who reminded her that the path would reveal itself if she was only patient. Now, at his most vulnerable, even if nothing he was saying made sense, he was still trying to teach her.

  This time he was quiet for so long, Jac was certain he had fallen asleep. She fingered the thin scarlet cord tied around her left wrist. There were things Jac should do, calls to make, family to inform, papers to take care of, but she didn’t get up. Couldn’t leave Robbie’s sickbed. There was nowhere she wanted to be but with him. To be with her brother while he fought this disease that the doctors didn’t understand and couldn’t control.

  “Why are the drapes pulled?” Robbie asked ten minutes later, suddenly awake and smiling, more energetic than he had been all day. “People always pull the drapes and keep the lights dim when someone is dying. Open the window . . . I want to smell . . . the garden.”

  “You aren’t—” She couldn’t even say the word.

  “I am.” The burst of energy was spent. His voice was fainter already. “It will get easier to accept, Jac.” He fastened his eyes on her. “I promise it will.”

  As Jac unbolted the mullioned windows and looked out at the damp March day, she wished that there were more flowers blooming for him. And then felt the sting of tears. She took a deep breath. No. She would not cry, not yet. There would be all the time in the world to miss him later, if the worst happened.

  But it wouldn’t. They would figure out what was wrong with him. The doctors would find a drug to administer in time. They had to.

  Turning back, she forced a smile to match Robbie’s.

  Her brother, who was so fit and handsome, was drastically withering and aging while everything around him had stayed the same. The bedroom, which he’d always called his “cabinet of curiosities,” still seemed a magical Ali Baba’s cave of delights, full of collected treasures from his extensive travels. On the bed stand was a miniature jade laughing Buddha, an amethyst geode, Tibetan prayer beads and three antique perfume bottles—two glass with silver overlay, one gold with porcelain inlays. Books were stacked in piles on the floor. African sculptures, snow globes, vintage telescopes and kaleidoscopes, Victorian flower arrangements under glass domes and framed butterflies filled shelves. Prints and photographs covered the walls. Robbie was a dreamer and a scientist. An artist and an explorer. And all those aspects of his life were on display here.

  “Every L’Etoile perfumer since the mid-1700s has died in this house,” he said with great effort. “I like keeping tradition.”

  “Robbie, the doctors are going to figure out what’s wrong and cure it.”

  “Hope so . . . but it doesn’t seem likely . . .” The effort to communicate was draining him, and he paused. “Need to prepare you.”

  She shook her head, all ability to speak suddenly deserting her.

  “Listen.” He reached for her and took her hand. But the effort exhausted him, and for the next few moments they sat in silence. His fingers resting on hers. Hers on his. How cold his skin was!

  Finally he spoke: “You have to go to Melinoe Cypros . . . in Barbizon.”

  Did he know he was repeating himself ?

  “She’s extravagant . . . sad and extreme.” Pause. “All she has, Jac, are her collections. Rooms and rooms of antiques and artifacts she’s spent a lifetime amassing.”

  He stopped again. Took several more of those arduous breaths. Robbie’s heart was so weak that he couldn’t walk across the room anymore. Most of the time he even needed help to sit up. He slept twenty hours a day. Ate nothing. His liver had stopped functioning. His skin was a pale yellow. Once the doctors at the hospital had told him they had run every test there was and still didn’t know what was causing his illness or what to do for him anymore, he’d asked if he could go home. Nurses were hired, and he’d returned to Rue des Saints-Pères.

  Only then had he called Jac. She was on location, filming an episode of her cable TV show, Mythfinders, in Greece. He’d been in the hospital, he said, and missed her. She was instantly on alert and worried, but he lied, assuring her that he was all right. Just wanted to know when she’d be coming. Jac had a little less than three days of shooting left, but she offered to shut down production. No, he’d insisted, she should finish up.

  He sounded tired, but otherwise she had no reason to suspect it was any more serious than he’d explained. It made sense that he’d be anxious for her to come back. They were both unmarried and both currently unattached. Their mother had died years before. Their father had Alzheimer’s and was lost to them. Of course if Robbie was ill, he’d want her there while he recuperated. They were each other’s closest family, each other’s best friend.

  Even with her overactive imagination and tendency to worry, Jac hadn’t guessed that at thirty years of age, her brother, Robbie, had returned home to die.

  “Do you want some ice chips?” she asked. It was what he was living on now—ice and the IV drip that forced nutrients and glucose into his frail body.

  “I need to tell you about Melinoe and the job I started . . .” Robbie began to cough again. It was a long and ruthless bout. When he put a tissue to his mouth, Jac saw a red stain blossom on it like a rose.

  She stood up. “I’m going to get the nurse.”

  He shook his head. Fought the cough to try and speak, but lost.

  Jac stepped next door. Once a guest room in the family mansion, it was now the nurses’ station.

  “He can’t stop coughing,” Jac said in an alarmed voice.

  The nurse went to attend to Robbie.

  Jac didn’t follow. Not yet. She leaned against the wall in the hallway of the second story of the house where she had grown up. Where her grandparents had lived. And her great-grandparents. And all the generations before them. There were windows here that faced the landscaped courtyard and offered a view of the darkened workshop. So many L’Etoiles had lived and worked here. And now it was just her and Robbie. Only the two of them.

  When they were young, their father had built them a miniature perfumer’s organ, just like the grand one where generations of L’Etoiles had sat and created the house’s great creations. Shaped very much like the full-size organ, it had three shelves filled with amber bottles of essences, absolutes and scented oils. Everything a perfumer needed. For hours, she and Robbie played a game of their own invention, trying to capture concepts in fragrance. They made the Scent of Loyalty, the Scent of Lies, the Scent of Us Forever, the Scent of Rain and the Scent of Loneliness.

  Robbie had claimed the Scent of Us Forever—wit
h its combination of cinnamon, carnation, jasmine, patchouli and a little pepper—as his signature and always wore the spicy perfume. He said he’d been inspired by the tricks they played on each other and their parents and grandparents. The mysterious fragrance suggested getting in trouble. Going where they weren’t supposed to. Doing dangerous things in the name of adventure. It was an homage to the two of them against the world. Against their mother, whose manic-depressive moods were a constant source of anxiety for each of them. Against their father, who never seemed to be able to make a success of anything and had put the House of L’Etoile into debt.

  Robbie’s awful coughing had finally stopped. The nurse came out and told Jac that her brother was sleeping, and she should get something to eat, then try to nap and get some rest.

  Jac had another idea. She might not be able to mix any magic in, but a fresh version of the Scent of Us Forever might cheer Robbie up. She walked to the end of the hall, down the steps, through the French doors in the living room and outside into the courtyard. Here she and Robbie had built forts and played elaborate games of hide-and-seek. It was chilly and damp today, but in the spring the garden would be scented by roses, lilacs and hyacinths—jacinthe, the flower she was named after. Now there were only green aromas mixed in with the smell of wet tree bark.

  She’d meant to go directly across to the workshop, but instead she walked between the two boxwood pyramids and into the labyrinth.

  Here two-hundred-year-old cypresses were pruned into impenetrable walls. So tall a man couldn’t see over them. The puzzle of warrens and dead ends was so complicated anyone without prior knowledge of how to navigate the maze was lost. But Jac and Robbie knew the route by heart.

  At the maze’s center, two stone sphinxes waited for her. Once in a fit of laughter, she and Robbie had named them Pain and Chocolat—after their favorite breakfast croissant.

  Centered between the sphinxes was a stone bench. Jac sat. This had been her sanctuary as a girl. Where she fled to escape an angry parent or nanny, this green room was her hiding place. Here she was safe from everyone but Robbie. And she never minded when he came to keep her company.

  Jac felt tears threatening again. Knew they wouldn’t help. Forced herself to hold them back. She inhaled the sharp, clean smell, braced herself and stood.

  The ambient light from the courtyard illuminated the workshop. Robbie had taken sick more than two weeks ago, so it had been at least that long since the room had been ventilated. The air was heavy with a particular mélange of aromas that she knew so well. Each perfume studio had its own signature combination of smells created by the predominant notes that house or that nose gravitated to.

  These smells, here in the workshop, signified home to Jac in a way nothing else did—for both good and bad.

  This was where she’d sat at her grandfather’s feet and learned the art of mixing perfumes. Where he’d read to her, teaching her about mythology and history and magic. Where her father had spun his tales about the imaginary future he wanted them all to have. Where she and Robbie had played with their own fragrances. And where she’d spent much of the last ten months working with Robbie on a series of scents based on nineteenth-century formulas created by Fantine L’Etoile, the first and only other female perfumer in the family’s history.

  After their mother’s suicide when Jac was fourteen, she’d been sent to a Jungian clinic in Switzerland for a year. Afterward, seemingly cured of the hallucinations that had plagued her, she’d gone to live with her aunt and uncle in New York City. Robbie had remained here in Paris with their father. Through the years, brother and sister had remained close no matter how far apart they were. Remained each other’s constants. This last year, working side by side, they’d become even closer.

  Jac sat down at the organ. Closed her eyes. Conjured the Scent of Us Forever. Then she began to gather the ingredients. Cinnamon, jasmine, patchouli . . . all the individual notes that Robbie had combined to suggest the mischievousness of their childhood with the mystery of their future.

  As Jac mixed, the relief of doing something other than watching Robbie suffer soothed her. With each new essence she dripped into the bottle, the perfume grew, assuming greater complexity. She was lost in it. Floated on it. Disappeared into it.

  Often a perfume smells slightly different on whoever is wearing it, but the Scent of Us Together reacted drastically differently on Jac’s skin than on Robbie’s. If you smelled them each wearing it, you’d never think it was the same. Related—but unique to each of them.

  “Like us,” Robbie had said when they’d first noticed it.

  Returning to her brother’s sickroom, bottle in hand, Jac found him still sleeping. She put the mixture on the dresser and turned to go.

  “Jac?” Robbie’s voice, once deep and musical, was thin and frayed now.

  She went to his side.

  “What you do . . . the past-life memories you have . . . you know they are real,” he said. “Don’t you?”

  She shrugged, refusing to commit.

  “With everything that’s happened to you, are you still a skeptic?”

  Suddenly Robbie reminded her of their father. The dreamer.

  Jac sighed. The last thing she wanted to do was fight with him now, and she told him so. But he didn’t back down. Despite how ill he was, he raised himself up on his elbow and looked into her eyes.

  “You won’t ever find any peace until you accept . . . there’s more than just . . . just the here and now. Souls live on. As long as we need them. As long as we love them.”

  A new fit of coughing silenced him. Jac got a glass of water and held it while he took tiny sips. Then, instead of lying back and resting, he started again. “You can access deeper memories than the rest of us. You’ve proved it . . . You need to use it to . . .” He stopped to catch his breath and then drank more of the water.

  “Robbie, you need to rest and—”

  He interrupted. “So many things still to tell you. There is magic—it’s what we call something we don’t understand. Don’t dismiss it, Jac . . . please. Accept it, all right?”

  Even with interruptions, the speech had exhausted him. He fell back against the pillows.

  “All right. I can tap into past-life memories.”

  “But you don’t believe it. You still think you might be crazy. I can hear it in your voice. Why, Jac?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, and it was the truth.

  Jac hated herself for not being able to convince him that she believed him and give him some peace. Why was it still so damn hard for her to accept she had access to past-life memories? She’d found proof her brain wasn’t manufacturing hallucinations. Why still doubt what she had lived?

  Over the last couple of years, Jac, Robbie and her mentor, the reincarnationist Dr. Malachai Samuels, had amassed evidence of her ability. She’d made discoveries she couldn’t have guessed at. And not just memories that came from what appeared to be her own past. Sometimes she’d be able to remember other people’s memories too. A rare and unusual talent, Malachai had told her.

  Robbie’s question was the right one. Why couldn’t she believe it? Didn’t karma teach us that we repeat the past over and over until we get it right? If her memories of her own previous incarnations were accurate, then time after time her lives had been heartbreaking and ended tragically. She’d never moved on. Each repeated the same horror. She was stuck in a karmic nightmare. If she could accept that, then maybe she could move on and—

  “What we don’t know is so much greater than what we do know.” Robbie was looking at her. “Isn’t it exciting?” For a moment her brother’s ravaged face lit up with a glimmer of curiosity. Then the cough returned. His beautiful eyes filled with tears. His emaciated chest heaved.

  Jac waited. Robbie’s hacking subsided. He took a shallow breath. And then another. Finally he pleaded: “I need you to understand.”


  “I do.” She was determined to give him what he asked for.

  “There’s no end. No beginning. Only the infinite passion of life. The past . . . present . . . the future coexist. My body—this envelope—will die, but not the essence of me—not my soul.” He smiled. “You won’t have to miss me. I’ll be all around you.” He paused. “This is so much harder for me because you are in pain. Don’t you see? You don’t need to be.”

  She nodded, not trusting herself to speak.

  He coughed again and again. Drained of all energy, he closed his eyes. After a moment, one tear escaped and slid down his cheek.

  Jac dug her knuckles into her mouth to stop her sobs from erupting.

  Robbie fell asleep again, this time deeply. For the next few hours Jac came and went, checking on him. At five in the afternoon, she found him awake again and gave him the new bottle of scent she’d mixed.

  “Thank you.” He smiled. “Will you put some on me? And then I have to finish telling you what I was doing. What I want you to finish for me.”

  She opened the small vial, wet her fingers and touched her brother’s neck on the right side and then the left and ran her fingers through his thick auburn hair that was the same color as hers. He had always been so lovely. With finer features and heart-shaped lips, Robbie had always been the more beautiful of the two of them. She was handsome, resembling the women in Pre-Raphaelite paintings with strong bones and wide shoulders.

  Robbie breathed in the scent so deeply she thought he was going to set off a fresh coughing fit. But he didn’t. He just smiled at her and said: “Us forever, right, Jac?”

  And as it turned out, that was the last thing her brother ever said to her.

  Chapter 4

  Jac was in her brother’s bedroom when their cousin arrived on Sunday morning. Luc L’Etoile had driven up from Grasse on Friday night when Robbie had slipped into a coma.