The scent keeper, p.8
The Scent Keeper, page 8
“There it is!” Colette said suddenly, pointing to the screen. Our brightly colored cottages encircled the water like wildflowers. Henry looked gruff but lovable; welcome shone in Colette’s eyes.
“Down a long dirt road lies a little piece of magic.” Terry’s voice came from the box as the camera’s focus roamed over the curve of the cove, the boats in the harbor.
“It’s so beautiful,” Colette said, giving Henry a kiss on the cheek. He smiled and took her hand. I watched them as if they were a fairy tale I could read.
* * *
The calls started the next morning. By the end of the week, Colette was using a recorded message so she wouldn’t have to keep picking up the phone. It took me a while to get used to her disembodied voice floating through the house like a ghost: This is the Secret Cove Resort. We’re sorry to tell you we’re fully booked for the summer, but …
“What’s going to happen to our regulars?” Henry asked as we ate breakfast.
Colette was making notes in the reservation book, frowning. “I held their slots, but it’s going to be tricky.”
“Things are gonna change,” Henry said. He got up and went to the window. The cove was hushed and peaceful, the fog so thick that even the fishermen had stayed home. Thin white wisps wove through the branches of the trees, muffling everything.
Colette put down her pencil and looked at him. “I know, I know—but we could use the money.”
Henry stiffened, but after a moment he came back to the table and sat down next to her. “I’ve been thinking about redoing the boardinghouse,” he said. “I could take a look, see what I’d need to do.”
“That would be wonderful,” Colette said, relief washing through her words.
The kitchen grew quiet. After a while, Henry stood up and put his dishes in the sink.
“Guess I’d better get to work,” he said.
“Should we get the Internet?” Colette asked as he was leaving the kitchen. She saw him pause. “People keep asking, that’s all.”
“No,” Henry said firmly. He turned and looked at her. “You saw what happened to the Big Cove Lodge. George calls it Screenville now. I’ll do the rest, but not that.”
He left without another word. Colette washed the dishes as she watched him tromping down the boardwalk. I’d made this happen, I thought. My bottles had brought that woman to our cove, and now Henry was sad and Colette looked worried. My fault. Again.
* * *
After a while, Colette came over and sat down at the table across from me.
“We’re going to need your help, ma cherie.”
I stared at her, uncertain.
“There’s going to be a lot of people here this summer,” she said.
I shook my head no.
“I know,” Colette said, “but you can help me clean cottages and change sheets—and it’ll be good practice talking to people before you start school.”
“School?”
“Yes. You’ll like it. There’ll be kids your own age, books.”
I shook my head. The thought of a group of kids made me freeze. I was barely used to Henry and Colette. And what would I do without Dodge to tell me whom to trust? Something told me dogs didn’t go to school.
Colette smiled, but there was sympathy in her eyes. “We don’t really have a choice, I’m afraid. I talked to the folks at the school district. We can keep you out for this spring, but come fall you’ll have to go.”
I tried to keep the panic from my face.
“Don’t worry,” she said, “you’ll be fine.”
The phone rang again.
* * *
Even though there was too much to do before the summer guests arrived, Colette set aside a couple hours every morning for lessons with me. I didn’t tell her that this was exactly how my father had started each day, and that every time she and I sat down at the kitchen table and opened a book, it broke my heart.
“You know a lot,” she said encouragingly. “Especially about science. Your father did a good job.”
Except he never told me what really mattered, I thought.
* * *
In the afternoons, I worked with Henry in the boardinghouse while Dodge kept us company. It was cold in there, but I liked the steady rhythm of the labor. I learned how to hold a paintbrush. How to clean eighty years of grime off windows. How to drive a straight line of nails. It was a relief to feel the solidity of a hammer or a brush, to know that this thing in my hand existed and would be there tomorrow. That it was what it was and nothing more.
Mostly, we were quiet, but sometimes I could get Henry to tell me stories about the cove.
“Are those your whale bones?” I asked one day, pointing with my paintbrush toward the blue building next door. A couple drops of creamy white paint fell to the floor. I grabbed a rag to wipe them before they dried.
“Ah,” Henry said. “The whale museum. Those are the professor’s. People used to bring him skeletons they found. He’d clean them up and donate them to museums.”
The wizard. “Where is he?” The words came fast. Maybe the professor could answer my questions.
“I don’t know.” Henry looked over at me, curious. “He used to come every summer, but not for years now. He was an old guy—I keep the bones, just in case, but…”
I could almost feel the door of opportunity shut. Another clue lost, I thought. It felt like every time I got a chance at a real story, it disappeared. In the end, truth seemed no easier to catch than the scent of violets. My father used to show me how their smell could be there, so clear and beautiful, and then vanish, only to return a few minutes later, as strong as it had ever been. You couldn’t control it. You couldn’t hold on to it. I’d thought that was a wonderful thing, back then.
Henry dipped his brush in a can of bright white paint, and started on the window trim. I listened to the quiet swish of the bristles against the wood.
“Why did you come here?” I asked after a while.
He angled his brush around a tricky edge. “I was tired of people,” he said, his eyes focused on his work. “There was a war. I’d had to do some things I wasn’t proud of, and didn’t want to ever do again.” He looked over at me. “This place can heal you, if you let it.”
I ignored this comment; I wanted the kind of healing that came from information. “Who else lives out on the islands?” I asked.
“I thought we were done with the interviews.” But he smiled as he said it. He took the paintbrush from my hand and gave me a hammer. “There are some loose floorboards,” he said. “Check the nails, okay?”
“Please,” I said.
He sighed, picked up his brush again, and talked while he painted. “Well, there’s Old Man Jenkins. Back when he was twenty, he built a canoe and went exploring. Bought an old floating shack from a fisherman for forty bucks. Still lives there, ’cept he’s too old to paddle into town anymore. I take him supplies every once in a while.”
“Did we live close to him?” I asked. My hands roamed over the floorboards, feeling for the sharp edge of a raised nail. Found one. Waited for the answer.
“No,” Henry said, and I could almost hear him calculating distances in his head. “Your nearest neighbor would’ve been Mary. She lived a couple islands over from you. Her husband died in a logging accident, but she stayed on her island. She’s got three kids, too.” He shook his head in admiration.
There were other kids. I could’ve had friends. I wouldn’t be so scared now.
And then—we might have survived.
I hit the raised nail with the hammer, hard.
THE SHEETS
As summer approached, the talk of preparing for the new guests grew more heated.
“That chair in number two is so ratty,” Colette said.
“It’s Jerry’s favorite,” Henry countered. “He always says that’s his place to sit after a day of fishing.”
“It smells like it, too,” Colette noted.
She planned a trip to the big city to pick up supplies. It was a long drive, and she would have to spend the night.
“Want to come along?” Colette asked me.
I looked up at her, horrified.
She laughed. “I’m going to stay in a hotel. Go to a restaurant.” She said these things as if they could be enticing.
“No thank you.”
“You know, Emmeline, you can’t hide forever.”
Apparently, she’d forgotten whose daughter I was.
Early the next morning, Colette got in the big, clanking truck and set off down the dirt road. She returned two days later with bags of sheets, bottles of cleaning supplies, and a chair that held the smell of plastic in the weave of its cloth. Henry helped her move it into number two the next morning, but he went straight out to his boat afterward.
“He’ll be okay,” Colette told me. “He just has to get his head around things. He’s not one for change, but we need this and he knows it.”
Out on the water, I heard the puttering engine cut off. I could barely see Henry sitting there, just beyond the cove, his head tilted toward the sky, his hand dipped toward the water. I knew just how he felt.
* * *
When the guests finally arrived, they brought chaos with them. The children ran and screamed; the grown-ups lounged and laughed. Henry got a young man from town to take over his deliveries, and now his boat was always full of people who wanted to go on bottle-hunting excursions, or do something they called sightseeing. Each time the boat returned, I would run to a spot where I could see the people disembarking, check their hands for red-wax bottles, but it appeared there were no more to be found.
Maybe the wax seals had cracked, the water slipped in. Maybe they’d made it down, down to the bottom. Maybe the one in my drawer was truly all that was left. Some days the thought brought me relief, other days panic. I kept it all inside. It was safer there.
* * *
Henry tried to be excited about all the activity at the resort, but I could see it wearing on him. Behind the scenes, Colette was a blur of action. At the end of each day, she and Henry would sit in their chairs in the living room, eyes dozing shut, until somebody banged on the front door and asked for soap or ice or complained about something called cell reception. Colette was right—the two of them couldn’t do all this alone.
So I cleaned.
In spite of my apprehension, it wasn’t a bad job. When guests checked out, I would go into their cottage, shut the door, and tidy up for the next group. Dodge would come with me and watch as I mopped the floors and changed the sheets. I didn’t like the stuff I had to use for the floors, which smelled nothing like the pine tree on the bottle, but I enjoyed making the beds—it turned into a guessing game of sorts. As I took off the rumpled sheets, the smell of the people who had slept in them would lift up into the air. There was the round, almost sweet sweat smell of a child who had spent a day happily exploring, or the sharper-edged odor of one who’d gone to bed unhappy. With the bigger beds, I came to understand the way the scents of two people could mingle as effortlessly as rainwater, and to recognize the times they stayed apart, the smells resolutely separate. Sometimes there were those unreal perfumes, jumbling and talking too loudly—but underneath them I could always find the person. Sadness, like the dark purple juice of a blackberry. Fear, like the metallic taste of an oncoming storm. Love, which smelled like nothing so much as fresh bread. In an odd way, the game wasn’t that different from reading the smells of our island. Scents were always about what was growing and what was dying. What would last through the next season. This was just with people instead of trees or flowers or dirt. Maybe I could read them after all. The thought gave me hope.
* * *
For the longer-term guests, I would go in once a week and change the sheets and towels while the occupants were out and about. Those cabins felt different, filled with belongings. A small red shoe under a bed, a bright blue hat with Just Do It written across its brim. Bottles and tubes sprawled across the bathroom counter. I read their labels—sunscreen, pain reliever, anti-aging serum—apparently my father wasn’t the only one who kept magic in bottles.
There was something unsettling about being among other people’s possessions. The lives in those rooms felt exposed. I thought again of our cabin as I had left it, the book of fairy tales dropped next to the chair, the pieces of my father’s machine scattered across the floor, the empty scent-paper bottles. What story would they tell a stranger?
One morning late in the summer, I was in the yellow cottage, lifting up a pillow to take off its case, when underneath it I saw something pink, carefully folded. I picked it up to get it out of the way, and it loosened in my hands, draping down long and silky, releasing a scent of vanilla and cinnamon. Lingerie. I’d seen a beautiful woman on TV wearing something like it.
As I was standing there, trying to refold the slippery thing, the door opened. A woman stepped inside, freezing in place as she saw me.
“What are you doing with that?” she asked.
I dropped the nightgown and it floated to the floor like seaweed moving in the ocean.
“I was just changing the bed,” I stammered. My skin was on fire.
“Give me that,” she said, her face every bit as red as mine. As she came closer, I smelled the buttery-white scent of coconut, a hint of sweat. I picked up the silky thing and handed it to her, shaking. Even as I did so, my nose automatically inhaled again and I noticed something. There was no human scent on the fabric, no fragrance of dreams and warmth. They’d been here a week. It didn’t make sense.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “I’m sure it’s still clean. I just swept the floor.”
She looked at me. “I’m going to wear it, you know,” she said. “It just hasn’t been the right…” She stopped. “Oh, for God’s sake, I’m not discussing this with you.”
She went into the bathroom, locked the door. Turned on the water in the sink and let it run. I stood there for a moment, unsure of what to do. I didn’t know what had happened, really, but the one thing I did understand was the scent of loneliness that waited beneath the coconut and sweat on her skin.
I finished making the bed, as neatly as I could. Later, when I knew she had gone, I slipped back into the cottage and left a wild rose on her pillow, pink against the white fabric.
* * *
The next morning I saw the woman and her husband, strolling along the boardwalk. Her hand was tucked in his arm, his head bent down toward hers. The rose was tucked in the brim of her straw hat.
A stupid smile overtook my face. Perhaps I could understand people after all. Perhaps school wouldn’t be so bad.
I was wrong.
SCHOOL
The old truck clattered up the dirt road, and I watched as everything I knew slipped away with alarming rapidity. My fingers gripped the door handle and I could feel every jolt in my feet, my spine, my brain. The trees, tightly packed on both sides of the road, surged around us like breaking waves. We rounded a curve, and I gasped as I felt my body press against the door.
Colette glanced over at me. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I was going to take you into town—get you used to everything before school started. But then the guests came, and…”
“It’s so fast,” I said, unsure whether I meant the truck or everything else.
Colette tapped at a circle on the panel in front of her. “Look,” she said. “Not too bad.”
The circle had a single pointer, hovering at fifteen. Fifteen was how many minutes there were in a quarter hour. More hours than half a day. Older than I was. What it had to do with a truck, I had no idea.
“It’ll be smoother once we hit the main road,” Colette added as the truck dipped into a rut with a gut-wrenching lurch.
When we finally reached the top of the hill, the woods disappeared. I looked down on an open bowl of land covered with stacks of what looked like sticks. When we got closer, I realized they were trees. Hundreds upon hundreds of them, stripped of their branches, piled up. I could smell the scent of sap and sawdust filling the air where once there had been branches, trunks, bark, green.
“What is that?” I asked Colette.
“The mill,” she said. “It used to be a lot bigger.”
I couldn’t imagine bigger. My father and I had cut wood, certainly, but a tree at a time, and only when there were none that had not already fallen. This place looked like our lives after the bear was done with them.
Colette and I descended into the bowl, skirting its edge to the far side, where the dirt gave way to something smooth and black, and the wheels sighed in relief. Just like that, the sides of the road were lined in trees again, as if what we had just passed had never existed.
“Not too long now,” Colette said.
* * *
We reached another break in the trees and there was the town of Port Hubbard, a set of dirty white buildings crowded together like barnacles on a rock. Colette ticked off names as we passed—grocery store, coffee shop, hardware store—as if they meant something to me. I let my eyes unfocus and everything became a blur. I wondered how long it would take to break off each barnacle of a store, let the trees come back.
“Here we are,” Colette said a few moments later, forcing me back to the real world. I saw a patch of grass and a rectangular building with evenly spaced square windows. It was the most boring thing I had ever seen.
“All right,” Colette said, and I could hear the extra brightness in her voice. “We’ve got an early appointment so we can get you settled in before the other students arrive. Shall we go meet the principal?”
No, I thought—but even I knew when a question wasn’t a question.
“Okay,” I said.
* * *
The principal’s office was in the center of the building, its door almost hidden behind a tall counter, as if it didn’t really want to be found.
