The Scent Keeper(18)

* * *



I looked around after she left. The walls of the room were smooth and blue. No drawers. No bottles. No glowing wood. The window across from the bed looked out to water, and the light coming in held the silver of late winter, bright as it had ever been on the bluff. I felt exposed, away from the protection of the woods. I pulled my knees to my chest, ignoring the room, staring at the door.

The smell of cardamom preceded the woman into the room, soft and comforting. A memory opened—one of the scent-papers from a red-wax bottle, with the fragrance of a sultry place that had wound itself around me, kissed my skin. Cardamom, my father had said. They hide like treasure. He’d shown me pictures of pods shaped like tiny boats, spilling out black seeds.

“Here,” the woman said, holding out a plate in one hand and a glass of something white in the other. “No one has ever turned down one of my rolls.”

The smell from the plate made me dizzy. We’d made bread on the island, but this scent was rounder, more delicate, with something heavy yet silky woven into it. I pulled one of the rolls off the plate. It was brown and sticky, and when I took a bite it filled my mouth with sweetness. I had tried sugar before, but only as a rare treat from the mermaid boxes. This was as much sugar as I’d ever had in a whole season all at once. My teeth buzzed; saliva rushed across my tongue.

I looked up at the woman, my eyes wide, and she smiled.

“I’m glad you like them,” she said. “And now that we’re looking at each other, let me introduce myself. I’m Colette. My husband’s Henry—he’s the one who found you. This is our home.”

She handed me the glass. I put it to my mouth and sipped, then gagged. I was accustomed to water and the bright clear green of spruce tea. This was thick and cold, soft as the scum that would collect at the edge of the lagoon.

“It’s milk,” the woman said.

So that’s what it tastes like. It had been a recurring image in one of my storybooks—the glass of milk given to a child at bedtime. It had seemed like such a treat.

“I’m sorry,” I said. My stomach roiled, and I worried I might be sick.

Colette left and brought me a glass of water. It tasted of metal, not at all like the cool stones that had lined our well, but it was better than the milk. She sat on the edge of the bed while I drank, staying long after I was done. I looked around the room, trying to avoid the message lingering in the taste of the water and the sight of that open sky outside the window.

You are not home.

I turned my head away. To my left was a dresser with a small lamp on it. Next to the lamp, I saw a bottle with a green-wax seal. I started at the sight.

“You wouldn’t let go of it,” the woman said. “Henry says it was the last one in the cabin.” She watched me closely. “People have been finding these all over the beaches. Everyone’s been wondering where they came from. There was even an article in the Daily Sun. But most of them have red seals.”

I remembered standing on the bluff, throwing my father’s bottles into the water. My father’s face, looking up at me from the waves.

“Don’t tell,” I said to Colette. “Please.”

She looked down. My fingers were tight on her wrist, but if it hurt she said nothing.

“Okay,” she said.

I let go. She picked up the bottle and handed it to me.

“Here you go,” she said.

She left the room—to work on Henry’s lunch, she said—and I lay there with the bottle in my hands. The desire to open it, to burn the paper and smell my father, was almost overwhelming, but that scent-paper was all I had left. It was proof of everything we had been—and of everything I had done to us. It was the best and the worst of me.





DODGE


It must have been close to a week before I left that room. Colette put a bucket next to the bed so I could relieve myself, and I was stunned at the energy it took to move even that far. Mostly I slept, but whether that was for my body or my mind, I couldn’t say. All I remember is that slowly the room seemed to get brighter, and my arms and legs remembered they were made of bone and muscle. People are like that—given a chance, we come back, whether we want to or not.

This new world was a strange place, however. On the island, I had read fairy tales about houses made of candy, and animals that could talk. Our walls had been filled with bottles that held time. My father had told me how the roots of trees spoke to one another, deep beneath the soil.

All that was more believable than what I now encountered.

“Would you like to take a bath?” Colette asked one afternoon.

For me, a bath was a cold, wet cloth. A bar of soap and a scratchy towel to dry off with. Hair washing was rare and involved a jug of water and a bowl—one to wet my hair, the other to catch the runoff. As for the water itself—well, that came from a well or off the roof.

Instead, Colette led me to a bright white room with shining walls. She pushed back a curtain to reveal a tub, slick and white. I looked around for a bucket, but Colette turned a handle, and an endless torrent of cool, then hot, water poured out of the wall. I watched, fascinated and terrified, as it filled the tub. I couldn’t imagine how all that water stayed inside the walls, or what might happen if you made a hole in them by accident.

“Want to get in?” Colette asked, smiling. “You don’t want it to cool off.”