The Scent Keeper(19)

I looked at her.

“I’ll wait outside,” she said. “Tell me if you need anything.”

The door closed behind her and I stood staring at the water. I’d been in water that deep before, but it had always been cold and full of salt. This had a different smell—steam, and the same sharp, white scent I’d smelled on Colette’s hands. Something else, too. I followed my nose to a bar of soap on the lip of the tub and picked it up. Its fragrance was sweet, and a little sad. It reminded me of something I’d smelled in one of the red-wax scent-papers, but this time it felt wrong—thin, not even alive.

I didn’t want these unknown smells, but I knew what soap and water were for. I took my clothes off, my body still shaky from weeks of starvation followed by a week in bed. I sat on the side of the tub and put in a foot. The heat welcomed my toes, then my leg. I slid down until only my nose was above the water. The warmth surrounded me; I couldn’t believe how good it felt. I looked at my body, pale skin in a white tub, almost invisible. I wanted to stay there forever.

The water had turned cold when Colette came and knocked at the door.

“Are you all right in there?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

I toweled off, dressed, and went to the kitchen, where Colette sat me in a rocking chair. I looked around at the pots hanging on hooks, the plates and bowls on shelves, the apples in a wire basket. I knew what all those things were.

“How about some tea?” Colette asked.

I nodded. You can do this, I told myself. It’s not so very strange.

Colette turned her wrist and flames flared out of the top of a big white box. I screamed and ran for my bed. I lay there for hours, clutching my father’s green-wax bottle. I pretended he and I were in the cabin again, but it was a comfort enclosed in glass. It would never be the same, and I could never go back.



* * *



Over the days that followed, I learned many things. In this place, stoves did not require wood, and heat did not require fire. Clocks cut the day into equal parts, and barometers turned weather into numbers. Colette and Henry flipped switches and night went away; they held small boxes to their heads and talked to people who weren’t there.

The smells of these new things were different, too—spiky and agitated, as if they moved too quickly to let life accumulate. By the end of each day, I was desperate for the scent of island dirt beneath my feet, the smell of applewood smoke and oatmeal and the runaway’s tobacco.

I fit nowhere. There was no call here for foraging or bow drills. Colette made her tea with a bag, not spruce tips. All the skills that I had been so proud of mattered not at all here, and the ones I needed, it seemed, were indecipherable. At night I would go to sleep and retreat to the island in my dreams, hoping to find home, only to wake up screaming.



* * *



Henry, the mermaid man, had white hair, but he moved with the lithe energy of someone much younger. He spent his time working nearby, the sound of his hammer providing a steady rhythm to the day. When he was inside the house, he was a quiet presence. I’d seen him watching me, waiting for my questions. My father used to do that with the chickens when they were agitated, standing in their coop until they settled. The memory stung, sharp and fizzing; would I ever get used to that absence?

“How did you find me?” I asked Henry finally. I had put it off, suspecting the answer.

He looked at me, as if deciding something. Then he said, “Old Man Jenkins lives out on the islands, too. He found your father’s…”

Colette had come out of the kitchen, and shook her head at him slightly. He coughed, looking abashed.

“I’m sorry, Emmeline,” he said.

My fault. My fault. My fault.

“I had to wait for the right tide to get through your channel,” Henry said. “It was hard waiting, thinking of you out there all by yourself.”

I focused on my hands in my lap. I didn’t want to think about those days. I felt Colette’s hand on my shoulder.

“I remember when your father brought you here,” she said.

Her words made me look up. “What?”

She nodded. “You were a little thing, barely walking. Your father was wrestling with something—we could see that. But a lot of people who come out here are, you know?

“What was clear,” she added more forcefully, “was that he loved you. He knew how to take care of you, too. I never would have let him take you to that island if he hadn’t.”

Henry nodded. “We don’t mind a hankering for solitude out here, but we don’t hold with cruelty,” he said. “And once you two were on the island, we could tell you were doing okay by what he asked for.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’d leave me notes in the empty boxes. Tell me when you wanted something special.”

The blue rain slicker. The books and the chocolate. Cleo, I thought, and looked outside, so they couldn’t see my eyes.

“I think maybe that’s enough for today,” Colette said.



* * *



There had been a time in my life when I had felt grown-up, capable. Now I was too scared of the world outside to leave the house. I stayed in my room mostly, telling myself the stories from my father’s book of fairy tales. The girl in the red cloak, running through the trees. The genie waiting in the bottle, growing more powerful with time. The children, lost in the woods with only breadcrumbs to help them. I spoke the words in my mind, as if they could tell me how to navigate this place I’d found myself in, but the best they could do was help me forget. Still, I returned to the stories, wishing for something that would never come. An ending that had already happened.