The Scent Keeper(25)
There were other kids. I could’ve had friends. I wouldn’t be so scared now.
And then—we might have survived.
I hit the raised nail with the hammer, hard.
THE SHEETS
As summer approached, the talk of preparing for the new guests grew more heated.
“That chair in number two is so ratty,” Colette said.
“It’s Jerry’s favorite,” Henry countered. “He always says that’s his place to sit after a day of fishing.”
“It smells like it, too,” Colette noted.
She planned a trip to the big city to pick up supplies. It was a long drive, and she would have to spend the night.
“Want to come along?” Colette asked me.
I looked up at her, horrified.
She laughed. “I’m going to stay in a hotel. Go to a restaurant.” She said these things as if they could be enticing.
“No thank you.”
“You know, Emmeline, you can’t hide forever.”
Apparently, she’d forgotten whose daughter I was.
Early the next morning, Colette got in the big, clanking truck and set off down the dirt road. She returned two days later with bags of sheets, bottles of cleaning supplies, and a chair that held the smell of plastic in the weave of its cloth. Henry helped her move it into number two the next morning, but he went straight out to his boat afterward.
“He’ll be okay,” Colette told me. “He just has to get his head around things. He’s not one for change, but we need this and he knows it.”
Out on the water, I heard the puttering engine cut off. I could barely see Henry sitting there, just beyond the cove, his head tilted toward the sky, his hand dipped toward the water. I knew just how he felt.
* * *
When the guests finally arrived, they brought chaos with them. The children ran and screamed; the grown-ups lounged and laughed. Henry got a young man from town to take over his deliveries, and now his boat was always full of people who wanted to go on bottle-hunting excursions, or do something they called sightseeing. Each time the boat returned, I would run to a spot where I could see the people disembarking, check their hands for red-wax bottles, but it appeared there were no more to be found.
Maybe the wax seals had cracked, the water slipped in. Maybe they’d made it down, down to the bottom. Maybe the one in my drawer was truly all that was left. Some days the thought brought me relief, other days panic. I kept it all inside. It was safer there.
* * *
Henry tried to be excited about all the activity at the resort, but I could see it wearing on him. Behind the scenes, Colette was a blur of action. At the end of each day, she and Henry would sit in their chairs in the living room, eyes dozing shut, until somebody banged on the front door and asked for soap or ice or complained about something called cell reception. Colette was right—the two of them couldn’t do all this alone.
So I cleaned.
In spite of my apprehension, it wasn’t a bad job. When guests checked out, I would go into their cottage, shut the door, and tidy up for the next group. Dodge would come with me and watch as I mopped the floors and changed the sheets. I didn’t like the stuff I had to use for the floors, which smelled nothing like the pine tree on the bottle, but I enjoyed making the beds—it turned into a guessing game of sorts. As I took off the rumpled sheets, the smell of the people who had slept in them would lift up into the air. There was the round, almost sweet sweat smell of a child who had spent a day happily exploring, or the sharper-edged odor of one who’d gone to bed unhappy. With the bigger beds, I came to understand the way the scents of two people could mingle as effortlessly as rainwater, and to recognize the times they stayed apart, the smells resolutely separate. Sometimes there were those unreal perfumes, jumbling and talking too loudly—but underneath them I could always find the person. Sadness, like the dark purple juice of a blackberry. Fear, like the metallic taste of an oncoming storm. Love, which smelled like nothing so much as fresh bread. In an odd way, the game wasn’t that different from reading the smells of our island. Scents were always about what was growing and what was dying. What would last through the next season. This was just with people instead of trees or flowers or dirt. Maybe I could read them after all. The thought gave me hope.
* * *
For the longer-term guests, I would go in once a week and change the sheets and towels while the occupants were out and about. Those cabins felt different, filled with belongings. A small red shoe under a bed, a bright blue hat with Just Do It written across its brim. Bottles and tubes sprawled across the bathroom counter. I read their labels—sunscreen, pain reliever, anti-aging serum—apparently my father wasn’t the only one who kept magic in bottles.
There was something unsettling about being among other people’s possessions. The lives in those rooms felt exposed. I thought again of our cabin as I had left it, the book of fairy tales dropped next to the chair, the pieces of my father’s machine scattered across the floor, the empty scent-paper bottles. What story would they tell a stranger?
One morning late in the summer, I was in the yellow cottage, lifting up a pillow to take off its case, when underneath it I saw something pink, carefully folded. I picked it up to get it out of the way, and it loosened in my hands, draping down long and silky, releasing a scent of vanilla and cinnamon. Lingerie. I’d seen a beautiful woman on TV wearing something like it.