The Scent Keeper(13)

“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.

My hands shook. I’d figured out what this machine did, but I still had no better explanation for it than magic. And magic, I knew, came at a price. I wondered if the machine could take as well as give. When I considered my father’s relationship with the scent-papers, it seemed entirely possible.

I listened for the sound of footsteps on the path and heard only the quick chirping of the birds. I inhaled once, taking the smells around me into my lungs, my mind, then I lifted the machine with both hands, aimed it at my face, and pushed the button. The machine breathed in, clicked, whirred. I felt air slipping through my curls, toward the holes. I didn’t move until the paper had almost completely scrolled out, then I lowered one of my hands and let it fall, like a leaf, onto my palm.

I looked at that paper for a long time. Then I gently took one of its edges and waved it in front of me. I could smell an ever-so-slightly younger version of myself in the air, and for a moment I sensed why my father might want to protect his creations.