Prologue 

The jet fell carelessly as a pebble through the thick grey sky, through drifts of mist and furling fog. Little Tim Henkins, out jigging, illegally, for cod, happened to look up at the right time. His father, Big Tim, was bent over the outboard motor, removing rings of corrosion with the looped end of a bottle brush. At first Little Tim did not know what it was that he was watching. A black object falling straight and fast. No bigger than a dime. Tim searched for the word. Meteor. The jet was fist-sized, almost to the water when his eyes distinguished wing and viper nose. Dumbly, he felt for his father’s arm. Touched the brass bracelet, the narrow rib of wool and sealy rubber and the jet was gone. Swallowed, noiselessly, by the sea. Big Tim wouldn’t believe his son’s account until the following day, but he could tell by the ricocheting surf that something heavy had struck. Hastily, the men reeled in the trawler and made for land. 

A week later, Big Tim would slap The Telegram down on the docked boat’s hold. “Substantial reward for credible information,” he’d say, looking Little Tim hard in the eye. And Little Tim would chuckle, mime the zip of the lips, the toss of the key. Fishing out of season subject to ruinous fines and your name slapped across the hangasman’s paper. But truth be told, he longed to describe it. The unblinking beauty of free fall. 

 

Part 1: The Great Escapes

Rhode Island, 1980 – 1988

Chapter 1: First Flight

The roof had been Lena’s idea. Late afternoon in waning February; light like sawgrass, wind bearing traces of thawing soil, of greening crocus and loosening down. Lena wanted to capture that wind, in mason jars she’d packed loosely with cotton balls. Lynn’s roof was pitched and higher than Lena’s, and besides, she was the only one home. Even in her deepest hibernations, Lena’s mother had an uncanny sense of when her daughter was on the verge of having fun, as Lena thought of it, or getting into trouble, in Qamra’s words. 

All through school, the air had been flat and still, so still Lena had wondered if maybe a snowstorm was coming, but when the girls were walking home, the wind came in, gusting at Lena’s legs in their thin black tights and tugging at the braided top of Lynn’s ski hat. Despite herself, Lena had done a little jig. The wind didn’t lie: spring was coming. Soon enough, she’d be inundated with smells, so many she’d be forced to go around with a bandana pulled up over her nose so she could filter out enough of them to think straight. But this wind, this late February wind, had only a few notes, easily handled. Let’s go on your roof, she said to Lynn. Lynn looked at Lena, bemused. I was on the roof last night. In my dream, she said. And then I flew, she added. Behind them, Timmy Anderson sniggered. Lena told him to shut up, the tips of her ears burning. Lately, flying was all Lynn could talk about. 

They accessed the roof by clambering one by one through the dormered window in Lynn’s bedroom. Lynn went first, the knapsack of bell jars clinking rhythmically as she made swift work of the roof’s incline. Lena was slower, due not to caution but her own physical weakness; had she the aptitude to look up, she’d have seen the sudden life in Lynn’s face.

In retrospect, she shouldn’t have been surprised when, after she’d screwed the cap on the last jar and slid it back into the knapsack, her friend had balked at leaving.  

“We have what we came for.”

“No. You have what you came for.” 

Lynn was nearly two years older, but Lena was the bossy one; she looked surprised and then intrigued.

‘What did you come for?” she asked, though she had an idea. 

 Lynn scooched further from Lena, almost to the edge of the ridgeline. 

“I’m going to fly to that tree,” she said, pointing to the crab apple tree that formed a sort of natural fence between the two backyards.

 Lynn had very pale green eyes, the green of thick pond ice; as she spoke, the ice defrosted a little, and her voice, which had always been startlingly low, vibrated with excitement.

Lena was whimsical by nature — assigning personalities to the wildflowers that grew in abundance in the abandoned soccer field behind the old elementary school; pretending the bits of dusty gravel she stirred into her ashes-to-ashes potion were partially pulverized bone — but never had she engaged in quite so literal a flight of fancy. 

“It isn’t going to work,” she said, quite sorrowfully, when Lynn, who’d had one leg slung over each side of the ridgeline, as if the roof were a pony, began to scooch forward.

“It will.” She seemed to believe it. But Lynn knew humans couldn’t fly. Lynn wasn’t prone to speculation or whimsy; Lynn liked facts. Which made the whole thing even more confounding.  

Lynn shrugged. She had been flying in her dreams for almost a year. Always at night, amongst stars that were not much bigger than they seemed on land. In her cupped hands, they jittered and glowed like fireflies.

“But there aren’t any stars,” Lena pointed out. 

Lynn spidered to the roof’s edge, bracing against the wind. 

“It was warmer in my dream,” she remarked, not turning around. 

“You’re not going to hit my azaleas, are you?” Lena had grown the shrubs herself three summers earlier, from seeds. 

“I think I need to stand.” She got to her feet and turned them inwards for balance. The wind buffeted her back, causing her orange coat to billow like a cape. 

Lynn was bigger than Lena, but not so much bigger that Lena could not have tackled her, pinned her to the shingles, yelled for help. Mrs. Thornburton, Lynn’s neighbor to the right, was sure to hear; perhaps even Qamra could be roused. But competing with this instinct was its opposite, far more shameful: to let Lynn jump. Her friend’s actions would provide invaluable firsthand data; an opportunity to capture scents she had little chance of encountering otherwise. 

When Lynn bent her knees and prepared to jump, Lena’s arm shot out. 

“Hey –” she began. 

Lynn jerked her leg free and leapt. 

Lena waited, tensed, for the thump that was sure to follow, but heard only a faint snap, followed by a rustling. She lifted her head and stared for a full minute at the bright jacket that was now suspended like a giant orange in the crab apple tree. Then came to her senses, eased back through the open skylight that led to the lofted crawl space. Lynn was already out of the tree when Lena reached her; apart from a few scratches on her forehead and a small tear down the front of the jacket, she was unscathed. “Toldya,” she said, smiling. She didn’t seem the least bit shocked. 

Years later, when Lena began to work on the triad of perfumes she’d go on to call The Great Escapes, she would ask Lynn what she remembered of that fateful flight. And Lynn would set down the wrench she’d been using to tighten one of the ballbearings on her skateboard. All of it, she’d say. As if it were yesterday. 

As she flew, she had been perfectly sandwiched between the snow and sky, as if she hadn’t had a body at all. Georgia had appeared just before she reached the tree, wearing her favorite leopard dress, sitting as if on a stool, with her long legs in their slasher heels crossed twice, at the knee and ankle. She’d smiled at Lynn, and it wasn’t the smile she used on the phone, or with the customers at Reggie’s. A real smile, with all her teeth. She’d smiled and then Lynn had been pummeled by hundreds of tiny, icy branches. 

Lena lifted the headnotes of vol 1: Lynn, 1989 directly from that scene. 

 

Chapter 2: The Garden of Earthly Delights

Early one spring morning, a few months after the Abramahim family — Bibi, Qamra, and their daughter, named, erroneously, after the fabled swan — had moved from Providence to the little blue cape on Forsythia Street, Bibi rolled over to his wife’s side of the bed and woke with a start. The sheets were cool. Moonlight shone on the vacant crib. Bibi called out for Qamra, and listened as his voice echoed through the house. From outside the window, he thought he heard the clink of metal on stone. He peered into the shadows of the backyard, turned on the floodlights.

“La, la,” came Qamra’s voice, gently chiding. “She likes the dark.”

He spotted Qamra crouched like a thumb over the 6×6 plot of dirt he had just the day before overturned. Her braid was another shadow snaking into the grass. The spade in her hand bucked against the overwintered earth. A flimsy thing, silver paint on plastic, meant for a child. Lena was under the crab apple tree, a length of rope tethering her chubby ankle to its lowest branch. 

Bibi came out into the yard, untied Lena and picked her up. His daughter’s fist was closed around a sprig of the tiny apples; there were strands of russet around her nostrils where the apples’ thin skin had bled. She smiled at him and showed off her apples, howled when he pried them away. 

“Give her back the fruits,” Qamra said. She did not look up from her digging. She had never planted anything before; it seemed important that the holes be uniform, so that all the seeds, the carrot and celery; the dill and the marjoram, had equal chance.

Bibi protested. The apples might be poisonous.

“She wants only to smell them,” Qamra said, calmly. 

Reluctantly, Bibi rewrapped his daughter’s fingers around the sprig.   

Lena stopped crying. 

 

On its face, not much of a story, but eventually, all three Abramahims would vest it with prophecy. In Qamra’s version, it was fate that had put the “rediscovery” of gardening into her mind, fate that had led her to walk the nearly three miles in a fine mist or a light drizzle or sometimes a full-blown downpour to Key’s Nursery, Lena strapped to her back or else jostling in the little umbrella stroller. Lena did not disagree with this interpretation, though her version did not end, as Qamra’s did, with the mother and daughter in the nascent garden. In Lena’s version, Qamra soon faded away; it was Lena, not yet two (in reality, not yet three), who took over the plot, diligently watering and pruning, clipping and weeding, rearing each shoot and tendril with such solicitous care that they soon burst forth in glorious abundance. In Lena’s version, she would spend entire days in her garden, tending not for tending’s sake, nor for the pleasure of harvesting, but for the smells. “Bouquets,” she’d later learn to call them. There were good scents sprinkled about the house, but all of them, even her mother’s lamb pies and her baked fish, heavy with sumac – all diminished in comparison to what she could find in the garden. With her nose in a rose or a sprig of rosemary or the feathery stem of a carrot, she became nothing; she became only an orb encircling a scent.

For all that, several years would pass before the Abramahims grasped the unordinariness of Lena’s nose, let alone its potential implications. It was true that when Bibi brought Lena with him to the Chinese greenmarket in Pawtucket (the fruit and vegetables were not the same as what grew in his native Lebanon, but they were fresh; they privileged flavor over color),  he liked to ask her which dragonfruit and wintermelon had just peaked, and which were on the cusp. Also true that he’d come to rely on Lena’s predictions of when it would snow or sleet or thunder, and for how long, and with what intensity after she’d proven to be a more reliable forecaster than the weather station out of Providence. But such feats, in Bibi’s mind, were parlour tricks. If he’d had a parlour, and friends to fill it, he could have trotted Lena out, regaled them with her unthreatening and amusing talents. 

Qamra might have given the nose more attention – after all, it had been she who had realized, long before the crab apples, that certain scents were far and away the most effective means of soothing her often fractious daughter. But Qamra retreated to her bed not long after the garden had put forth its first harvest. Intermittently, at first, and then increasingly, until, by the first frost, the bed and adjoining bathroom had become her daylight world. At night, sleepless, she would make her way to the recliner in the den, where she’d watch reruns of The Days of Our Lives and ER until 3, when the channel went blue, or popcorn. Lena would often steal down and burrow into the wedge between the recliner’s arm and her mother’s hip and wait for her mother’s fingers to begin to braid Lena’s slippery-dark hair, french braids and reverse french braids and fishtails and maid marions; she would fashion dozens of reed-skinny braids and braid these into one or two rope-like plaits that seemed somehow much heavier than the unbraided hair, satisfyingly heavy, like a clock’s pendulum. Qamra smelled of turned milk and cider vinegar and worn-in cotton, and for the rest of her life, Lena would always hunt out the sour and tumid, the transference of body to inorganic material. People were wrong about taste; there was always an accounting for it. 

For her part, Lena thought all noses worked the way hers did, and some of their owners paid attention and some didn’t, the same way some people stopped to listen to the old man who played cello outside the library while others hurried by. It was because of Georgia Clougherie and her daughter Lynn that Lena came to learn she was different, though later she would assure herself that this discovery was a matter of when, not if. 

 

Chapter 3: Forsythia Street

The two families moved into the second and third floor apartments of 158 Bennet street within weeks of one another, late in the fall of 1981. The Abramahims came first, Bibi driving the moving van, needlessly large, his father Maier and his wife Qamra, recently, volubly pregnant, trailing in the new old Solaris Bibi had purchased in anticipation of this new life, with its presumable driveway. The Clougheries (though no one in Hamlet would ever call them by that – or any – collective; it was always Georgia and that sweet baby of hers, Georgia and her little girl, Georgia and Lynn) came a week later, in a white Buick that left immediately. The Abramahims moved in with a high-backed, red damask sofa, a circular walnut dining table and four matching chairs, a wicker moses basket, and a four-poster bed, everything purchased for a song from estate sales Bibi had diligently scouted for over a year, until the unassembled newel posts and legs and headboards piled in every corner of their small one bedroom drove Qamra out of her bed and into the bowels of the hotel laundry where Bibi still worked, rabid with desire to move. (Which had been Bibi’s hope all along). Georgia and that little girl of hers arrived with two suitcases and a carton of Spode china, light blue, and vanished into apartment 3 so quickly and thoroughly that weeks later, many in the neighorhood began to doubt themselves. Only Qamra, listening to this stunted new world from within the drawn folds of her bedroom, heard the occasional footfall overheard. 

At first, neither family had anything to do with the other. Bibi because he was too busy (and shy, besides); Qamra because she was too exhausted (and fearful, besides); Georgia because she was too sad (and disinterested in these solemn new neighbors, besides), Lynn because she was a baby; Lena because she hadn’t been born. In the first two years, not twenty exchanges, these mostly quick greetings on the shared interior stairwell, or the thanks, at first embarrassed, and then friendly, that Georgia, hearing the scrape of Bibi shoveling the driveway, or methodically chipping the ice from the back steps, would call out of her bathroom window. It was this quick, American friendliness, and the dazzling smile – part sheepish, part knowing – with which it was proffered that emboldened Bibi, one blustery January day, to offer Georgia and Lynn a jumpstart to the white Buick, which had reappeared in the driveway a few months earlier. Between the hours she kept (late and later), the clinging wrap dresses and needle-like stilettos she favored, Bibi had surmised, correctly, that Georgia worked at a restaurant, and that this position, like the car, was a recent one. 

The Buick, for all Bibi’s nimble application of cable to wire, only hacked and wretched oily black clouds. Hearing it, Georgia started to laugh, heartily and with malice. 

“Isn’t that just like Janice, to ‘give’ me a dead car,” she said, softly. “My mother,” she added, to Bibi’s questioning look. 

“I can fix it,” Bibi assured her. “I will drive you, and while you are at work, I will fix it. Okay?” Bibi was just as sure that he would fix it as Georgia was that the car was dead – but Georgia would already be late; the other girls would have to cover her share of napkins to be rolled, tables to be set; push it any further and Tony, the owner, might decide to switch zones on her, put Lydia on the lucrative two and four-tops and stick her with the booths, where the families sat and dropped all manner of even the clingiest dishes, spilled sodas and played with ice chips and were too harried and watchful to order more than one drink per adult and who apologized for the messes and small bills with words instead of tips. 

“Thank you,” she said, and lowered herself, cat-like, into the captain’s seat.

“Get in, darlin’,” she said to Lynn, still standing, quiet, outside the car. 

“We have a seat –” Bibi began, but Lynn was already climbing onto her mother’s lap. 

The restaurant where Georgia worked was only a ten minute’s drive from Bennett street. In Pawtucket, though the dividing lines between the city proper and its villages was evident only in the brick bones of the dead center. The six mill towns had been grafted onto the original city a half century earlier, the mills having failed (slowly, then – truly – all at once); their failure so absolute the city, no boomtown itself, was forced to subsume them all. 

The restaurant was called Reggiano’s; the name spelled out in swooping green cursive edged in gold. “Very nice,” Bibi said. Through the large plate glass window, he took note of the tablecloths – peach, nicely starched. There were small bud cases with yellow roses on the table closest to the window, and as he watched, a woman, much older than Georgia, wearing chef’s whites and big, plasticky blue glasses, came and lit the candles. “Very nice,” he said again, coming around to open the passenger door.

“Too nice by half,” Georgia said. “Just like you,” she added.

 

All afternoon, he worked on the Buick. His daughter, now fifteen months, watched him from her pack n play, which Bibi had carried outside. Though Qamra complained, frequently, of the baby’s fussiness, her refusal to eat or sleep, around her father, she was quiet and attentive; her big near-black eyes tracked his movements with interest; when he looked over at her, her face, serious otherwise, with none of the typical baby roundness, would split wide in smile. 

Lena, they’d named her. A surprise to Bibi, this name, but Qamra, sitting slanted in the hospital bed with a freshly washed and squalling baby in the well of her motionless legs, had been firm, and Bibi took this decisiveness as a good sign, a sign that the months of darkness, of increasing instability, had been temporary, merely a byproduct of pregnancy. 

Lena. It meant light, bright, shining. A name not wholly unheard of in Beirut, and of average popularity in Finland. The baby was bright; she seemed, to Bibi, to be perpetually and lightly buzzing, in the way of a lightbulb too powerful for its socket. Qamra had been right in naming her, and he had been wrong in thinking the act meant more than it had. For the first two weeks, his wife had bubbled over with energy and ideas. She wanted to fashion a nursery in the corner of the kitchen where the pots and boots and recycling lay in louche stacks. She wanted to start a supper club, a cook book, a food pantry. At the start of the third week, she embarked upon an epic poem about her mother Rasha’s journey on foot through the Turkish desert to the coastal town of Izmir, and then the perilous passage across the Agean to the little Greek island of Kos. The skiff began to sink two miles from the shore, and the panicked passengers fought desperately for the limited life jackets. Half of the passengers were dead by the time the HCG arrived. Rasha, who had insisted on life jackets for herself and her five year-old daughter before boarding, keeping them on throughout the six hour journey, even as they baked like shrimp in the pointed glare of the mediterranean sun, had grabbed Qamra and slipped into the water before the fighting began; she and Qamra watched it as deadly spectacle from a distance of one hundred yards. 

“Keep writing,” Bibi encouraged. What a tale! But Qamra could not leave the water. They had been dragged from the water like dead seals by a trio of angry guards, roughly plunked on the stubbled cement of the boat and left to drip dry beside the other beleaguered rescues. Then transferred to a dusty camp encircled with concertino, where they would wait for some beknighted northern nation to grant their amnesty. 

Bibi did not understand – what about the train through the Greek mainland, up through Bulgaria, Serbia, Hungary, Czechloslovakia, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, the final ferry through the stony gulf of Finland to Helskini? The freshly falling snow that had greeted little Qamra and her mother stepped off the boat ramp. The candles shining from every apartment window. Magic!

No, Qamra shouted. She ripped her epic, length-wise, crosswise. Rasha’s decision to leave the boat early had been the last significant choice that was hers to make. Did her not so new husband really not understand?

She retreated to her bedroom, leaving a suggestion of a nursery and a bookshelf turned towards the wall, so that the spines might cease to taunt her. Then followed weeks where Bibi could not rely on her to feed the baby, and so he took her with him to the dryclean. The customers who noticed a pack n play beyond the til also noticed the hollows under the young man’s eyes, the even, careful way he slipped their shirts off the rolling rack and conjoined the hangers. They looked the other way; at most, one might say “cute kid you got there,” even though Lena, with her jaundiced angles and great, sunken eyes, had all the cuteness of a capuchin. 

Bibi located, beneath an alarming nest of input wires, the engine’s loose, corroded spark plug. With his fingers, he carefully, slowly twisted and tugged until the piece came out, giving himself a light shock in the process. He jumped and Lena giggled.

“Next time you and Mrs. A come to Reggie’s, dinner’s on me.”

Reggiano’s was the new restaurant in town. Italian, with aspirations — expressed in burgundy faux-leather banquettes and a dedicated wine list and a menu whose baroque descriptions slipped fluidly between English and an inventive, italicized pidgin – of fine dining.  Georgia was prescient in calling the restaurant “Reggie’s.” Though still a newcomer in the eyes of most townspeople, she had a bead on what they liked. Within a year of its opening, the menu (now almost entirely in english) had been pared down to lasagna, spaghetti and meatballs, stuffed manicotti, the holy trinity of parms. Georgia was technically the hostess, but really, she was the maitre de, captain, server, and mayor of Hamlet rolled into one. When Bibi Abramahim, propelled by curiosity and okay, sure, maybe a slight fascination with this woman who was so very opposite from his wife (and yet, had not Qamara, when he first met her in the bowels of the Biltmore, where he was washing dishes and she retrieving a silver cloche for room service, exhibited a similar strain of magnetism?), did finally come in for lunch, holding tight to the hand of a now four year-old Lena, he was made to feel he was that most sought after of titles: a regular. Bibi was gratified — no, he was pleased beyond belief to receive Georgia’s quick wise cracks, the facial expressions that welcomed him to commiserate over the haplessness of their fellow mankind, the gentle steering away from the lasagne in favor of the manicotti. Lena, whose prior sightings of Georgia had been even scarcer than her father’s, was captivated. Her sharp black eyes followed Georgia around the peach-lit room; when Georgia came by their booth, she held herself very still and smiled widely at her hands. 

“But kiddo, you haven’t touched your spaghetti,” Georgia exclaimed, after Bibi had, with evident reluctance, asked for the bill (“and, please, a dog bag”). 

Lena’s eyes shone.

“I was smelling it,” she said, earnestly. If anyone else had laughed, she might have bristled, but for Georgia, she sat up even straighter, the better to hear the melodious waves. 

“This kid’s a keeper. Say,” she said, and crouched down at Lena’s level. “I’ve Sunday off and it’s supposed to snow. Why don’t you come over and help Lynn and me with our snowmen? Lynn wants to build hers like the Terminator; we could really use the help.”

Father and daughter, walking out of the restaurant with the heavy bag of spaghetti clutched jointly their clasped hands, each felt they had never been so happy, so excited for Sunday to come.