The scent keeper, p.13
The Scent Keeper, page 13
“Here you are.”
Fisher’s voice cut through my thoughts. I looked up to see him gazing down at the cove. All the lights were on in Henry and Colette’s house. The clouds had disappeared while we were in the woods, and the moon lit the ripples of the water. A full moon, I realized suddenly. I could almost feel the pull of the tide.
Come find me.
Fisher turned to go up the hill. I couldn’t let him go back to that house. I knew now what waited for him.
My fault.
“Don’t go back,” I said.
“Where else can I go?” His voice was cold, ironic. Grown-up.
And then suddenly I knew.
“The island,” I said. The words came out fast, unthinking, as if speed could carry them past logic or consequences.
“What?”
“We can go together,” I said. “We can take care of ourselves. I know how.”
He paused. I could see him thinking, saw the yearning start in him. He looked at the moon, and his eyes widened.
“The channel…” he said.
The hope in his words pushed me forward. “We could do it, Fisher.”
“But what about a boat?”
That stopped me. I hadn’t thought that far. But I couldn’t turn back now. I took a deep breath.
“We’ll take Henry’s,” I said. “He only uses it for deliveries, and we just did them.”
Had it only been two days ago? The world had changed so utterly since then. For a moment I thought of that other life, out on the boat with Henry. The way he’d shown me my island, given it back to me.
“You’d do that?” Fisher asked. He looked me straight in the eyes. “Take the boat?”
He wasn’t asking me to choose, but it was a choice all the same. No, I thought. I can’t do that to Henry. But I nodded.
“Okay,” Fisher said. His feet were set, solid. “I have to go back first, though. I have to tell my mother.”
“No,” I said. “We don’t have time.” I needed to keep moving forward or I knew I’d back out.
“I’ll hurry,” he said, and set off running up the hill.
RUNAWAY
I watched until Fisher disappeared into the woods, and then turned back to the lights of the house, my heart sinking. What was I doing? For almost five years now, Colette and Henry had taken care of me. They’d sheltered me when I was terrified, cared for me without words when affection was all I could hear.
I thought of Colette, picking me up every day after school. Henry, teaching me about the world through paintbrushes and hammers. I was about to betray them, and I’d seen the consequences of that before. I’d sworn I’d never do it again—but I had to protect Fisher.
My brain went into rationalization mode. My father had had only me, I told myself; my betrayal had left him alone. Henry and Colette had each other. They would be okay. They might even understand—once upon a time, Colette had been a traveler, and Henry had run away once, too, searching for peace and safety. They would be okay. I said it like a mantra.
Sure, said a voice in my head. And Martin’s probably not beating his wife right now, either.
The only thing I knew for certain was that Fisher would be next, and I was to blame. It was worth all the costs if I could save him.
* * *
“Oh my darling child,” Colette said as I walked in the door. The love in her voice almost broke me. Maybe, I thought for one beautiful moment, if I told them everything, they could help. Do something.
But as I was opening my mouth, Henry came down the hall, truck keys in hand. His eyes did a quick scan over me, checking my face, hands. “You okay?” he asked.
I understood then—they’d known about Martin. Of course they had. And they’d done nothing. I didn’t know which made me angrier, their knowledge or my lack of it. I grabbed the wave of that fury, let it wash away the words I was going to say and sweep me away from them.
“I just want to go to sleep,” I said, heading for my bedroom.
“Emmeline, we need to—”
I closed my door and leaned against it, my heart hammering. After a while, Colette went back to the kitchen, taking the scents of cardamom and bread dough with her. Dodge made his slow way down the hall and scratched at my door. I couldn’t let him in. I was afraid I’d cry.
* * *
Henry and Colette stayed in the kitchen for a long time, their voices murmuring. I lay down on my bed, waiting for them to go to their room, to sleep.
As I lay there, my restless mind spinning, my body feeling the pull of the tide, I gradually came to understand that I wasn’t doing this just for Fisher. I needed to go to the island for myself. In reality, the idea had been simmering in my head ever since I’d started doing deliveries to the islands with Henry. It had been a fantasy then, but now that I’d found that article, I think a part of me knew I’d have to go back—to the lagoon, our cabin—to see if the man in the story bore any relation to the father of my memories. I needed to set the versions one on top of another and see where the edges matched.
But that would never happen if I couldn’t get out of the house.
To distract myself, I set my mind to details, plans. It was only September—when we got to the island there would be plenty of food to gather. Henry had said no one else was there, and with any luck the cabin would be in good shape.
I let myself relax into the memory of my own childhood competence, into the prospect of those tall, forgiving trees. I refused to think about what it would be like for Henry and Colette to find my empty bedroom. I refused to think about what it would be like to forage on the beach without the sound of my father’s laughter.
After what felt like forever, Colette and Henry went to bed. I listened as the night settled into silence. When I finally heard Henry’s deep, rhythmic snoring, I loaded some clothes in my backpack, then added the article and the green-wax bottle, shoving them deep inside. Carefully, I opened my door. Dodge was asleep in the hallway outside, but he was so old now that his sleep was more like a fall into a deep well. I looked at him for a moment, then stepped gingerly around him and made my way to the kitchen.
We needed basics—flour and rice and salt—and I packed a couple grocery bags, then slipped the boat key from its hook by the door. Glancing out the window, I saw Fisher’s silhouette crouching at the base of the porch steps. I put on the backpack, grabbed the food, and went to the front door.
Just go forward, Emmeline, I told myself as I heard it click shut behind me.
* * *
Fisher’s face looked like I felt. “You okay?” I asked.
“She wouldn’t come,” he said. He swallowed, a liquid sound. We hugged each other.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.”
The journey out of the harbor was agonizing. We couldn’t risk turning on the motor; we had to paddle, and the boat wasn’t designed for that. We moved forward ponderously, no matter how much Fisher and I leaned into our strokes. We’d positioned ourselves on either side of the boat, but if we didn’t paddle at exactly the same moment, we wandered sideways, and the tide we would need later when we tried to run the channel was no friend now. I could hear the front edge of it running through the rocks on the shore. I had always loved the music it made, the conversation between stone and water, but not now. We were in a race with that tide, and those rocks told us we were losing.
I felt the sharp, squishy pain of blisters forming in the curve between my thumb and index finger. The muscles in my neck screamed from the constant craning. I looked over my shoulder, searching Henry and Colette’s windows for a light.
“Should we…”
Give up. Go back.
“No.”
I shut my eyes then and listened for Fisher’s strokes, staying with them, putting every ounce of my energy into my back, my arms, my hands. As we slowly moved forward, I could begin to feel the boat rocking slightly with the current of the bigger water beyond. The scent of trees started giving way to water, to salt.
Then, with one thrust of our paddles, we were out. I opened my eyes and could just barely see the islands in the distance, a slim black line between the glittering water and the dark sky. It surprised me, how much you could see at night when there was nothing—no trees, no hills—between you and the moon.
The tide grabbed the prow of the boat and started pulling it south, along the coastline. Fisher turned the key and the engine roared to life. He cranked the wheel hard, steering us out across the current and toward the islands. As we shot eastward, I kept my face to the wind, pressing it into the blast of clean air and moisture.
Don’t look back, I told myself.
* * *
The moon lit the water as we raced across the strait. The world was a palette of silver and black, all contrast and mystery. If we hadn’t been watching the surface so closely for errant logs, we might not have seen how the slowly brightening sky was turning the tips of the waves from silver to white.
It wasn’t until I could see the trees of the first row of islands that I looked back. Just once, I promised myself. I scanned the rippling waves for boats, then paused. The horizon itself was moving, the edge of the water lifting up and down in bursts.
“Fisher,” I said, pointing behind us. “Look.”
He glanced over his shoulder. “What do you see?”
“Slow down.”
“Really?” Fisher asked. We’d been racing for over an hour.
“Yes. Look back.”
Fisher ramped back the engine while I waited, watching as the line of the horizon turned into dots and dashes—and then something slim and black and white lifted out of the water in a soaring arc that looked like nothing but celebration.
“Dolphins,” I said, laughing. “It’s dolphins.”
Hundreds of them, streaking toward us, faster than our boat could ever go. They overtook us, wave after wave of flashing tails and gleaming backs. For what must have been ten minutes we stood, stunned, as the dolphins flowed around our boat. Finally, the last wave passed and we watched as they traveled on, leaving a foaming white trail for us behind them.
“I think we can call that a welcome,” Fisher said.
* * *
We got to my island just before high tide. Even within the dark maze of the archipelago, there was enough light to see the rocks along the sides of the channel, the water pushing over them in angry bursts. There were more underneath the surface, I knew. On the day my father drowned, I’d spent hours staring at them, trying to learn every detail of the water as it rushed over the barely hidden rocks.
“What do you think?” Fisher asked. I looked at the surface of the water; there was still a strong current.
“Not yet,” I said.
We waited. The sky lightened, bit by bit. We could see the froth of the waves diminishing with each minute. And then, as easy as a last breath, the water in the channel slowed, then stilled. The drawbridge lowered. The island invited us in.
“Now,” I said, and Fisher started the motor. The walls were steep and dripping, the trees turning from black to green with the approaching sunrise. The water foamed in haphazard circles, as if confused by the sudden lack of movement. Bull kelp floated around us like strange sea creatures, long and languorous tails obscuring our vision.
We kept going, trying to stick to whatever the middle of the channel was when everything was a curve or the jag of a rock. We heard a long, rough scrape on the bottom of the boat, then one on the side. Fisher’s hands were tight on the wheel; my eyes strained as I looked for movement on the surface. We inched around another curve, then another and another. A moment later we passed rocks I recognized, and then there it was.
Home.
THE RETURN
Fisher whooped as we left the channel behind, the sound reverberating across the hushed lagoon, sending birds flying. I stood next to him at the wheel, my heart pounding as I stared at the beach.
It hadn’t changed, the oval of water still the welcome it had always been. The last of the high tide almost covered the beach, leaving seaweed draped along the upper edge like forgotten scarves.
Mermaid party, I thought, and memories collided inside me. I breathed in the fragrance of seaweed and cedar and mussels and salt that was my island, smelled the diesel exhaust mixing in, and suddenly I was twelve years old again, hiding in the woods, watching a white boat come into the lagoon and break my childhood in two.
But I was the one in the boat now. A stolen boat. Shaking off the thoughts, I jumped to the sand and tied the rope around a boulder. Fisher leaped down beside me.
“We made it,” he said, pulling me into a hug. He held me close and his warm scent was comforting, home. I could feel it starting to filter into the smells of the beach around me.
Once you change the scent, you change the memory, my father’s voice whispered.
I pulled away, and Fisher looked at me, confused. I didn’t know how to explain what I was feeling. For almost thirteen years, I’d lived on this island alone with my father. Now here I was again, without him, my mind full of the story in the article, my arms around a boy whose smells had never been here before. Each thing I did was changing everything I’d had.
I gazed past Fisher at the bushes that lined the beach, heavy with berries. The memory of my father hung in the air. A breeze brushed the needles up in the trees until they sounded like footsteps on the trail.
“Foragers feast,” I said, grasping the first idea that came into my head. I needed to move.
“What?”
“Let’s find some food.”
* * *
We gathered for an hour, and I watched Fisher the whole time. Just having the channel between him and his father seemed to calm him. His long fingers moved neatly among the berries and the roots of the sea plantains. He never crushed what he took, and he left plenty for later. He was comfortable, assured, like he’d always been when we harvested in Colette’s garden.
As he worked, the smells of the island gradually began to reach out to him, the dark night of salal berries lingering on his fingertips, the spiciness of the sea asparagus mingling with his breath. When the tide receded and the clams started their waterworks, one burst of liquid caught him full in the face. He stood up, laughing, wiping the water away, but the smell of salt and sea stayed in his hair like a mark of approval. One scent at a time, the island was taking him in.
Whether I still belonged here, too, I couldn’t tell. Because of me, my father was dead. Now I had returned, carrying stories that could kill the memories that remained.
“Should we make sure the cabin is okay?” Fisher asked after a while.
“Sure,” I said. But my feet were slow on the trail, which seemed to have little interest in aiding my passage. The salal bushes had grown over the past five years, their coverage so dense that I had to rely more on instinct and memory than sight. It was as if they knew what I brought with me.
The closer Fisher and I got to the cabin, the more my mind was filled with images of what we might find—the roof caved in, squirrels making homes in the beds, the drawers, the pantry, the stuffing of the big chair. Maybe someone else had gotten a boat through the channel, found the cabin, and burned it down; I’d heard of vandalism like that.
Or, perhaps worst of all, everything would be just as I’d left it the afternoon that Henry came and took me away. I didn’t remember much of my final days on the island, but I could still see my father’s machine, smashed to pieces, the empty bottles scattered like straw.
I didn’t deserve to be here, for so many reasons. I scanned the woods for a welcome. The trees were silent. I couldn’t even hear the birds. The only thing I could smell was the scent of my own nervousness, sharp and acrid.
“Let me go first,” I said to Fisher as we got close, and he nodded and stayed back.
I pushed through the last of the bushes, leaving the gloaming of the trees, and stood at the edge of the clearing. The vegetable garden in front of me was rampant with weeds, the once-careful stack of wood fallen into chaos, a sapling growing up through its midst. The woods were claiming back the land, bit by bit, but on the far side of the clearing I saw the cabin standing straight and true, its roof solid—so much the way it had always looked that for a moment I had the crazy hope that somehow my father was still inside. My father, not the one in the newspaper article, not the one from those awful last months on the island.
I could feel Fisher waiting behind me. I shook my head, then walked across the clearing, the long, damp grass whispering as I moved through it. I went up the stairs and stood, my hand on the doorknob. I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to see.
Breathe in, Emmeline. My father, standing by the chicken coop.
Who were you, Papa? The thought interrupted the memory, but my father’s voice stayed the same. I could feel myself yearning toward it, even with the article in my backpack, a sharp, folded reminder.
Let the smell introduce itself, he said.
I opened the door. The cool, dusty scent of time and absence met me there.
Now, open the back of your mind. Listen to the story.
The smells came to find me. I caught a hint of wood smoke and tobacco, dried apples and something else. Something out of place.
I opened my eyes.
I saw the wall of drawers, each one closed and orderly. The loft with my bed neatly made, the woodstove ready to be lit. Everything clean and loved and in its place, just as it had always been. I breathed in again and recognized the faintest slip of a fragrance—sawdust and paint and cinnamon rolls.
Henry, I realized. He had done this, for me, without knowing when or if I would ever return. Or maybe he had known, better even than I did.
And I had stolen his boat.
