The Scent Keeper(16)

I waited anyway.



* * *



The sky darkened until all that was left was smells, and as I sat there breathing in the scents of salt water and damp sand, smells I had known all my life, I realized with a flash of panic that my nose was already overwriting those olfactory memories with new ones. Ones that didn’t contain my father.

When you change a scent, you change the memory, he’d always said. I hadn’t truly understood until now.

With every inhalation, my father was disappearing.

No, I thought. I stood up, gave one last frantic look across the lagoon toward the channel, then turned and ran up the trail.



* * *



I threw open the cabin door and shut it tight behind me, trying to seal the precious smells inside. His scent was still there—in the air, in the fabric of his shirts, even in the pages of our books. I shoved my nose into each and every object I could find, knowing as I did so that his scent was already slipping from them like water through a sieve.

I thought of all the scent-papers I had created of myself. All those white squares, dropping into my hand. I had never made a single one of my father—there had never been a reason to. He was my father; he would always be there.

“Selfish,” I whispered into the silence of the cabin. “Selfish. Selfish.”

I looked around. The upper drawers of the walls were all open, right down to the one where the blue-wax bottle had hid. The machine was unwrapped and on the table.

He knew, I thought.

The horror of it was more than I could stand. I picked up the machine, that sleek and beautiful thing. It had started all of this.

“I hate you,” I screamed. I threw it on the floor, again and again, until all that was left were tiny pieces of metal. Trash, not magic.

I picked up the fabric that had always protected it and tossed it into the fire without thinking. A fragrance, indolent and spicy, unfurled into the room, mingling with its smells, changing what was left of my father. I slammed the door of the woodstove shut, but it was too late.



* * *



I spent the next two days curled in our big chair, the book of fairy tales clutched tight against my chest. A part of me thought if I didn’t change anything, then maybe everything would go back to how it was. My father would walk through the door, shaking the water from his hair and laughing about an off-season swim. He would be the man of my childhood, the one who would stop our foraging to show me the shining path of a snail. Not the man he’d been these past months. Not the man flying into the water.

I tried to ignore the bottles still left in the lower drawers. If it weren’t for them, I would still have my father, I thought.

And yet, I knew what was inside those green-wax bottles. Our life, waiting for me.

After three days, the missing of him became so loud in my head that I couldn’t stand it anymore. I started opening the drawers. I just held the bottles at first—wondered which day each scent-paper had captured. What we had been doing. The last of the food disappeared, but I no longer cared. I sat, wrapped in the blankets from my father’s bed, holding one of the bottles against my chest until the heat of my body warmed its cool surface. Then I would swap it out for another.

On the morning of the fifth day, I woke up in the chair, the world cold and tilting around me. The smell of my father was almost completely gone from the room. I managed to get the fire going again, then went to the drawers. As I took out a bottle, the paper inside shifted, and I could hear my father’s voice. I am here. I am here.

I got a knife and broke the seal. The scent was still there, but barely, like trees through fog. A faint glimpse, nothing you could navigate by—and I needed navigation. I walked across the room, opened the door of the woodstove, and tossed the paper in.

It took a moment. I almost thought it wouldn’t happen and that this would be the punishment for all I had done—but then it was there. I was in the middle of a warm and sunny afternoon, the fragrance of late summer draped around me. I could smell a basket of ripe apples on the table. I remembered the knife, the smooth spiral of the peel as my father separated it from the fruit.

Here, little lark. He let the peel fall into my tiny hands. A toy you can eat. He was smiling.

I dropped to my knees. I could feel his arms, smell his animal warmth, the salt water and pine pitch in his beard.

I was already reaching for the next bottle before the fragrance was gone.



* * *



After that initial splurge, I tried to ration myself. But as my muscles weakened, my resistance went with them. One bottle a day turned into two, then three, then five. I was never going to leave. Even if I could figure out how to get help, or how to overcome that horrible channel, it was too late. I just wanted to be with my father again.

So I opened the bottles and lit the papers, one after another. I even found Cleo in one of them, and strangely, it was that one that made me sob.

Days passed. I could feel myself turning into air. The fragrances of the scent-papers became my lungs, the blood in my veins. I found it easier and easier to lose myself in them. My father had taught me to track a scent, but now I went inside the smells, wandering among them like trees in an unfamiliar forest.

Once upon a time, Emmeline, they whispered.

I wanted to live in the stories those fragrances told. When I realized that it would be too much effort to keep standing up to get them, I took down all the bottles. I needed to save what energy I had to keep the fire going.