The scent keeper, p.4
The Scent Keeper, page 4
“Cleo,” I called. “Come back!”
But Cleo didn’t listen, caught up in the joy of sand and water and space to run. The beach was her favorite place on the island and she was never there as much as she wanted to be. She danced about, her small feet leaving tiny cloven marks on the wet sand, her back legs kicking high in the air. Beyond her, the water danced in the sunlight, a mirror of her happiness. The channel was full and frothing; the drawbridge was up.
Nothing to be afraid of, I thought. My father worried too much. I stepped out onto the sand, let it slip between my toes. We’d had a week of hazy cloud cover, and that endless blue above me turned hesitation into euphoria. I broke off a knobby bit of sea asparagus, and crunched it between my teeth. My favorite boulder had been warmed by the sun, and I lay down on top of it, feeling its friendly solidity against my back. I closed my eyes and let the sunshine play across my lids. There was plenty of seaweed on the beach, I told myself; I could gather food in a little while.
I don’t know how much later it was when the sound woke me, deep and growling. I jolted up and looked around. Everything was the same except the channel, which was flat and calm. I had never seen it like that before. All I could do was stare. The sound grew closer, rumbling up the channel.
“Cleo!” I called, and this time she came. We scrambled up into the woods just as a boat entered the lagoon.
I had seen boats from my perch on the bluff. From a distance, they had looked like birds skimming over the water, friendly even, but the noise of this thing up close was huge. The smell of it filled the air, thick and slick, wiping out the scents of salt and sand. From my hiding place, I could see a man at the front of the boat.
A pirate, I thought, and my skin went cold.
The boat roared across the lagoon, the noise stopping as it reached the shallows. The trees around me shivered in the sudden silence. The man stood straight, seeming to listen, too. I watched him from behind my tree, even as I willed myself to be invisible. He was wiry and small, with tanned skin and white hair that stuck out from under a bright red cap. When I concentrated, I could smell his sweat, different from my father’s, and the scent of something like bread dough.
The man jumped over the side of the boat into the water, grabbed a rope off the front, and slogged over to one of the larger rocks. He tied the boat up with easy efficiency, and then patted the top of the rock’s craggy surface. He didn’t seem like a pirate, at least not the ones I’d read about.
Beside me, Cleo trembled with excitement. I kept my hand firmly on the back of her neck, trying to calm both of us, but with a quick shake of her head she broke away and capered down the beach toward the man.
“Daisy!” he said, and opened his arms. Cleo ran to him, and my eyes widened as the man knelt down, rubbing the top of her head.
“Look at you,” he said to Cleo. “Such a big girl now. They must be feeding you well.”
Cleo bleated happily and the man rubbed the top of her head a little harder. “Hush now,” he said. “There’s a bear swimming out in the big water. We don’t want to let it know you’re here.”
The man’s eyes scanned the perimeter of the beach, searching for something. Me, I thought. He’s looking for me. I froze in place, becoming part of the trees. Then the man seemed to hear something from behind him; he glanced back at the channel. It was starting to move again, the first ripples showing on its surface. He stood.
“I gotta get going,” he said to Cleo. “Tide’s changing.” He went to the boat and pulled something out. His back was to me so I couldn’t see what it was, but I could tell by the slope of his shoulders that it wasn’t light.
I watched as he carried his load up to just above the high-tide mark, where the seaweed lay in crazy strands. He straightened and gave one more scan of the beach. With a sigh, he turned and gave Cleo a pat on the rump.
“Head on home now,” he said. He untied and started his boat, then headed into the just-frothing water of the channel.
I waited until I couldn’t hear the motor anymore before coming out of the trees. Cleo ran up and nuzzled my hand, but I didn’t pet her. I just stood, staring at the high-tide mark. At the black plastic box, nestled amidst the seaweed.
It made no sense. The man was no mermaid. There had been no party. I didn’t understand.
But then suddenly I did—and just like that, everything was different.
THE LIE
I wonder sometimes how I could have ever believed in mermaids. I never would have accepted something like the Easter bunny—I knew too much about chickens and who they let take their eggs away. But I had seen flowers bloom into fruit, like straw turned into gold. I’d seen the way sea anemones seemed to die and be born again with every shift of the tide. I’d found seashells that spiraled into themselves, and my father had told me that those elegant shapes once housed animals. In such a world, mermaids did not seem impossible.
There was another thing, too. For good or ill, my father and I lived close to the earth. My childhood was suffused with wonder—along with the stone-hard knowledge that our lives depended upon what we could make or find or grow. For me, those mermaid boxes were about more than just food. They gave me the feeling that someone magical knew we were there and was taking care of us. Someone beyond my father, bigger than the island. I very much needed to believe in that. I think we all do.
But all I knew that day on the beach was that my father had told me a lie. I didn’t stop to ask whether that lie was for me or him or both of us. Whether his stories were to make reality go away or bring it closer. All I knew was that if mermaids didn’t exist, then everything else must be up for grabs, too. I turned and headed for the cabin, my feet slamming against the dirt.
* * *
“You lied, Papa.”
My father had been facing the stove. He whipped around at the sound of my voice, his eyes red.
“Where were you?” he asked. “I looked everywhere. I thought I’d lost you.”
I was shaking with outrage. “There are no mermaids,” I said.
He looked at me, the shock on his face pure and clean.
“You went to the beach.” His words fell onto the floor and cracked open. Even with everything that was happening, everything else that had changed, his trust in me had been so complete he hadn’t even thought of it.
The realization knocked me sideways. I stood, stunned at the pain on his face. I had been heading in a single, retaliatory direction, but now everything inside me was a jumble. It was like being caught in the channel midtide. I was furious at my father’s deception, but I burned with shame at the depth of my own betrayal, too.
He had done a terrible thing. I had done a terrible thing.
It was impossible to hold both those thoughts inside me. I was too grown-up in some ways, but still a child in too many others. I didn’t want to think about what I had done. I just wanted the purity of my anger, the way it had felt when I came stamping up the trail to the cabin, a flaming torch of righteousness.
“Is that why you didn’t want me to go?” I snapped. “Because I might see the truth?”
“No,” my father said quietly. I waited for more, but there was nothing. Just the soft and broken smell of sadness, coming off him in waves from an ocean deeper than I had thought possible.
I needed to get away. I needed room for my thoughts to settle. I started to go outside to put Cleo in her shed for the night.
“No,” my father said, putting a hand on my arm. “Stay inside.”
I didn’t want to, but the shame held me tight as lies. My father went out the door. I could hear him murmuring softly to Cleo, and then the click of the shed latch. When he came back in, I was up in my loft.
“Dinner?” he asked, but I didn’t answer. I didn’t know who to be mad at anymore. I listened as he rustled about the kitchen, but in the end I never smelled any food, just the flame of a candle when it got dark, and then nothing.
I lay in bed. Outside, I heard Cleo bleating. I wanted to go to the shed and be with her, but I knew I couldn’t. I couldn’t add one more bucket of pain to my father’s ocean, no matter what else had happened. So I lay awake, listening as Cleo’s cries turned from frustrated to heartbroken. Eventually she quieted and I was left alone with my own thoughts, which tangled and spun until exhaustion pulled me into sleep.
* * *
I woke to a scream, shooting its way into my dreams. I sat upright, my brain spinning. The sound was too high-pitched for my father, too loud for an owl. It came again, an icy wail of fear.
Cleo.
“Papa!” I yelled, tossing aside my covers. The screams continued, interspersed with deep-pitched blasts of noise, hoarse and rough, unlike anything I had ever heard.
My father caught me as I reached the bottom of the ladder.
“What’s happening?” I asked.
We ran to the window. The moon was full, lighting up the clearing. Something shaggy and huge was circling the perimeter, as if the darkness between the trees had turned solid and begun to move. Every once in a while the thing would shake, and water droplets would fly. I could hear Cleo in the shed, her hooves scrambling against its sides. In their cage, the chickens were a blur of feathers and shrieks.
“What is that?” I asked.
“A bear.” My father’s face was white.
The creature came into the clearing, and I could see muscles moving under its thick fur. It passed by the chicken coop and gave it a casual glance, as if appraising it for later. Then it went to the shed and circled it once, twice, Cleo growing more frantic with each revolution, her hooves pummeling the walls. The bear stood on its hind legs. I heard wood splinter, heard Cleo’s scream reach new heights as she leapt from the enclosure.
“Papa!” I cried out.
Cleo was running, darting right and left, trying to get to the cabin or the woods or just away, but the bear was unrelenting, cutting off her exit each time, moving in closer and closer. Cleo was terrified, her eyes huge, looking for safety. She had almost reached the cabin, but the bear made a quick move to the right, blocking her. She reared up, her hooves raking the air. The bear stood, too, and pulled back one paw. The first swipe cut her scream into silence. And then there was just the bear, and the moist, soft sound of eating.
I stood by the window, stunned.
“Papa,” I said, “why didn’t you do anything?”
Outside, the bear growled in satisfaction.
“How did it find us?” My father was asking the air, not me.
But I knew then. It was my fault. I had taken Cleo to the beach. We had called the bear. And there was no place inside me big enough to hold that knowledge.
THE INTRUDER
The bear didn’t leave immediately—our island was a fully stocked smorgasbord with nobody else in line. It spent the next day cleaning Cleo’s bones, then made its way through the chickens and the eggs, one by one, until all that was left was the rank odor of bear. The smell came in under the door, around the sides of every window, through every crack in the walls. I stopped eating.
My father stayed by the window, hands clenched. I’m not sure if he moved for days. We had no weapons; we’d never needed any. I had seen pictures of guns in books, but they’d seemed as fantastical as witches, or trolls under a bridge. In our cabin we had an ax for cutting wood, but the one time my father looked in its direction, I ran and stood in front of the door.
“No,” I said, terrified.
He relented, and went back to watching the bear. After a while he spoke again, his voice dull and factual.
“It’s a female. If we’re lucky, she’ll have a den somewhere else; she’ll go back to hibernate. If she has babies, she’ll stay with them and she won’t come back here for years.”
Then there was nothing left but waiting.
* * *
Cleo was gone. I didn’t know what to do with the suddenness of it. Mice were killed that way, gripped in the talons of owls at night, sailing off screaming into the dark—but not things I loved. The world had been one way and then, with a swift slap across my face, it was another.
I had fallen out of a tree once, when I was first learning to climb. It hadn’t been far, but I’d landed on my back and the ground smacked the breath from my lungs, leaving me suspended, neither here nor there, for one long, crystalline moment. Cleo had raced up, licking my face until I’d finally inhaled and life had swooped back into me with a rush. But now there was no Cleo.
I wanted to scream. I wanted to cry. I wanted to hit my father, the walls, myself. I wanted to do something, anything that would let the pain out, but there was nothing.
* * *
Once the chickens were finished, the bear turned to the apple trees. Then it shoved over the fence to the vegetable garden with a desultory slap of its paw and rooted through the potatoes and the carrots. We watched as our provisions for winter disappeared, sucked down into the seemingly endless appetite of the bear.
When the clearing was truly cleared, she lumbered up onto our porch. From up in my loft, I could hear her sniffing at the crack in the door, and I froze. She soon grew disinterested, however. There was no need for the effort it would take to get inside; our woods and beach were full of food. She disappeared into the trees. We couldn’t see her anymore, but I could smell her anytime I opened the door.
“She’ll leave when there’s nothing left to eat,” my father said. “It could take a while.”
We waited, day after day, my father and I circling each other in the confined space, our need pulling us together while everything else pushed us apart.
Every morning, I awoke determined to tell my father that I was the reason the bear had come. To tell him I was sorry. But every time I climbed down the ladder and saw him staring out the window or looking up at the bottles, there was a part of me that still wanted to blame him. His secrets. His lie that had ruined everything.
My fault. His fault. My fault.
My father paced the cabin, his eyes moving back and forth in quick darting motions. The clothes began to hang loose on his body.
I wish I could say that I knew what my father was feeling, or that I tried to guess. Grief makes a tunnel of our lives, and it is all too easy to lose sight of the other people in the darkness with us—to wish they weren’t there, so their loss would stop rubbing up against ours. My father and I desperately needed open space, clean air for our pain to move into. But all we could do was wait.
“Do you want to burn a scent-paper?” I asked my father. Anything to bring a different smell into the space.
“No,” he said, moving to stand in front of the drawers. “I need to protect them.”
From me? I wondered, but I didn’t say anything.
* * *
We had always been careful with our food stores, but normally we had fall to prepare us for winter, and we’d already been behind on foraging that day I had gone to the beach. The thought of eating still made me retch, but I knew that eventually my body would demand its due, and we did not have enough—even if the bear left us with anything. I spent days staring at the pantry, dividing food into days. Not enough.
Then, one morning, something was different. I could smell it in the air when I opened the front door—an absence as welcome as all the rest of the absences were awful.
“She’s gone,” I told my father. He came and stood beside me, then nodded.
The temperature was cool, veering toward cold. We had lost most of autumn to the bear. My father got the ax, just in case, and we walked the trail, past where the salal bushes had been stripped of almost all their berries, past trees with their mushrooms scuffed into dirt. We walked to the beach and saw the bear’s footprints, heading to the water. Disappearing.
We were free.
Except, of course, we weren’t. The bear had taken more than Cleo, more than our ability to make it through the winter. It had ripped the fabric of what made us two and now we were not even one plus one.
THE MESSAGE
The island as I had known it—my place of wonder and delight and safety—was gone. Cleo was dead. For weeks, the grief had crammed itself into my thoughts and muscles. Now that it had been given space it turned huge and reckless. It didn’t want to be quiet anymore.
It was a terrifying thing, far bigger than me. Bigger, I knew, than anything my father could handle. So I went deep into the woods and set the howls free. I sucked in air and slammed it out again, and yet for all my caution, my sobs held the same refrain every time—hear me, hear me, hear me. I wanted my father to take this pain and put it in one of his precious bottles, make it go away. I wanted him to love me, even though it was my fault that Cleo was dead and our island was ruined.
But my father was so closed off that speaking to him felt like throwing pebbles against the window of an empty house. More and more, he went off by himself to search for things that no longer existed.
“Do you want company?” I asked.
He shook his head. Looked up at the drawers.
“All I wanted was to keep you safe,” he said, but whether he was referring to me or the bottles I didn’t know.
“Papa,” I said.
But he just grabbed his foraging basket and headed out the door.
I stood in the cabin, sensing everything that was no longer in it. As I often did to settle myself, I went to the pantry to check how much, or rather how little, was left. It was then that I caught sight of my father’s machine on the top shelf.
* * *
The machine was lighter than I’d expected, the cloth wrapping soft and gray, so faded that the white swirls woven into the fabric seemed more like smoke than thread. I set the fabric aside and lifted the lid, half expecting it to crack off as punishment for my transgression, but it just slid up soundlessly to expose the hundreds of tiny holes.
