The Scent Keeper(20)

It was the dog, Dodge, who brought me back. At first, I was too frightened to be near his coarse fur and sharp teeth—too much like a bear, even if Dodge’s fur was golden, his muzzle white, and his eyes a calm, melting brown. I would stand in the doorway of the kitchen or living room, unable to enter until Colette rousted him and put him out on the front porch.

Then one day, when I neared the kitchen, he simply rose to his feet and went to the front door, waiting to be let out. As if he understood. Colette opened the door and I heard his body thud down on the painted boards of the porch.

I went to the window and watched him. He fell asleep again, his breathing becoming smooth and even. Then, suddenly, his head lifted, his nose on full alert. Standing on the other side of the glass, it took me a moment before I, too, smelled the odor of a motor and saw Henry’s boat turning into the harbor. While I stiffened at the smell, Dodge got up, ambled down to the dock, and waited as Henry tied up the boat. I watched as Henry bent and ran his hands over Dodge’s back.

They walked back up to the house together. When they got there, Henry opened the door but Dodge didn’t come in. Henry looked back, head cocked.

“Staying outside, old guy?” he asked. Dodge looked up and saw me in the window, then lay down in front of the door. Protecting me, I realized.



* * *



After that, I started watching Dodge all the time. I saw the way he knew by scent alone when Colette’s bread was done cooking, or a squirrel was a hundred feet away, or the wind had changed direction. Before he even saw them, he recognized each of the five fishermen who kept their boats in the cove. Most he would go greet, tail wagging, but one he stayed away from.

Over the following days, Dodge became my translator of the world outside the house. Through his nose it became safer, and soon I found myself wanting to inhale the air around me as he did, as something pure and alive and full of messages.

One afternoon, I looked out and saw Dodge on his feet, staring out across the water, every muscle in his body taut. Even though I was inside, I could smell the shift. A bit of metal, a heaviness to the air. I remembered the feel of it, the way the trees seemed to pull into themselves, the scent of quick sap.

Storm, I thought.

“You should let Dodge in,” I told Colette. She looked at me, surprised.

“There’s big weather coming,” I said.

“Really?” The sky outside was clear.

“He knows it. Look at him.”

Colette glanced at Dodge and checked the barometer.

“Well, aren’t you two something,” she said. She opened the door, and this time when Dodge entered, I didn’t leave.



* * *



That evening, the rain lashed at the windows. Henry and Colette talked softly in the kitchen, their words an indistinguishable murmur, while I sat in the living room with Dodge beside the fire. Colette had given me a big book she called an atlas. She said it would show me the whole world. What I saw was flat pages, shapes divided into colors.

“This is where we are,” she’d said, pointing to the edge of a mass of green, right up against a vast expanse of blue. “I was born here.” She tapped on a name, Montreal, far on the other side. “I met Henry here.” Her finger slipped down, through a thicket of tiny shapes, to the words New York. “I was walking in a big park, and there he was.”

She smiled, falling into memory. “He said he wanted to get away from everything. There was a caretaker job at the end of the world. He asked me to come with him. I was ready for a new adventure, and I wanted to be with him, so I said yes, for the summer.”

She laughed. “I guess I stayed, eh?”

I’d listened to the affection in her voice, wanting to fall asleep inside it and never wake up. A love like that seemed so simple, so real. But it wasn’t mine. I knew that. My father’s love had been tangled and full of secrets, locked away on an island.

“Where did I live?” I’d asked, and she turned the pages until she found one that looked like the others, but with everything bigger, more detailed. A puzzle of blue and green—inlets and islands, she explained, pointing to a speck in the middle of the page, lost amidst the others as soon as she removed her finger.

I could never find my way home, I thought. Even if I did, there was nothing there for me.

Now I sat in front of the fire, the atlas open in my lap, staring at where my island might be. At my feet, Dodge snored in his sleep. He smelled of the outdoors, of wet wool and trees and rain. I got down on the floor and carefully put my hand on his back. His eyes opened and he lifted his chin, resting it on my foot. We stayed there in a circle of our own for a long time, while the wind played in the downspouts and the logs crackled in the fireplace.

During a lull in the storm, I could hear voices, drifting in from the kitchen.

“What should we do?” Henry’s voice.

“We keep her.”

“But what if someone is looking for her?”

“How would we find them, Henry? We don’t even know her last name—they were Emmeline and John. He paid you in cash. She says her birthday is the first day of spring.”

“We could advertise.”

“And bring every crazy person and pedophile in the country to our door? Thank you, no.”

“A private detective, then.”

“We don’t have that kind of money, Henry.”