The Scent Keeper(31)

I didn’t know how to sit still for six hours. I didn’t understand eye shadow, or tampons, or the way the girls could giggle their way into a boy’s consciousness. I knew how to wash my hair with a single cup of water, and cook tiny crabs in hot oil—and now I felt like one, every day.

It’s your fault, Papa.

“I’m no good at this,” I told Fisher after the twentieth time I stupidly responded to a gesture of friendship, only to have it snatched away in a burst of laughter.

“Watch their faces,” he said. “Never trust a smile that doesn’t make it to their eyes.”

“How do you know all this?” I asked.

“How do you know how to smell?”

“I learned.”

He shrugged. “Me, too.”

The exchange was not uncommon—we talked about everything except where we came from. Every afternoon, Fisher left Colette and Henry’s home promptly at four thirty and headed up the path through the woods, but in all those months he never once invited me to his house and I never asked to go. Ours was a friendship built on instinct; we were young enough to think our pasts didn’t matter. Or maybe we just didn’t want them to.

I was wrong about a lot of things back then.



* * *



Bit by bit, the days grew longer. When we were done with homework, Fisher and I would play cards, or take Dodge exploring around the cove, Fisher in his brown cloth coat, me in my red rain jacket. The air would be filled with the scent of new leaves and the hope of more light. We’d wander down the boardwalk, Dodge checking out the waterlogged smells, while Fisher and I looked in the windows of every cottage, and I told him about the guests who stayed there.

Each time we went a little farther, until one day we passed the boardinghouse and arrived at the blue building where the big white bones hung from the ceiling. Since my conversation with Henry, I hadn’t gone inside the whale museum. I didn’t know what I thought about it. All I knew was that it never felt like answers.

I watched as Fisher peered in through a window, his hands cupped around his eyes so he could see better. His red hair was a burst of color against the white skin of his neck; he looked like a bird, all concentration and quick curiosity.

“Are those whale bones?” he asked, turning to me, his face alight.

Dodge nudged at my hand, and I opened the door to let us inside. The curved bones shifted in the breeze, ethereal, otherworldly. I waited to see Fisher’s reaction.

“It’s like a fairy tale in here,” he said, gazing up. “It’s amazing.”

I didn’t realize I’d been holding my breath until I let it out. The smell came in with my next inhalation, and it felt as close to home as I’d been in months.



* * *



When we weren’t exploring the boardwalk, we’d go along the tide line, or up into the woods. On one such day, Fisher led me off the trail, farther into the forest. He picked up a downed cedar bough and handed it to me. I could feel the caress of its fanlike foliage.

“Find as many of these as you can,” he said. “Branches, too.”

“Why?”

“You’ll see.”

The winter storms had left us plenty of material. We gathered a stack of boughs and another of branches. With practiced efficiency, Fisher took the branches and arranged them into something that looked like a little triangular house, lower in the back than the front. He took some of the boughs and layered them to make a deep carpet inside, then took the rest and laid them across the branches to form a roof.

“What do you think?” he asked, stepping back.

“It’s beautiful,” I said.

We crawled inside, the scent of sap and cedar all around us.

“It’s like a nest for people,” I said. “You could sleep in here.”

“Why did you say that?” he blurted out. He sounded angry.

“I’m sorry,” I said, confused. I waited for him to say something else, but his earlier excitement had gone quiet.

“Did you know that trees talk to each other through their roots?” I asked after a while. I held the words out like an offer, a door, but he didn’t say a word. We sat in silence, letting the green in the air heal what it could.



* * *



Later, Fisher set off up the trail into the woods, and I headed down to the cove. I was about halfway back when I heard heavy footsteps. We’d left Dodge behind that day because his hip had been bothering him, and the lack of his familiar, watchful presence hit me sharply. Maybe it was just Henry coming to find me, I told myself; I was getting home later than usual. Still, I stepped off the trail, behind a tree, and pulled my red rain jacket tighter around myself.

The footsteps drew nearer, then stopped.

“I know you’re there,” said a voice, deep and amused.

I emerged slowly and saw a man with a clean-cut beard and hair so dark it looked like the underside of the sea. He wore tall fisherman’s boots and a thick rain slicker. A lingering odor of gasoline surrounded him, sharp and yellow.

There’s only one fisherman who uses gas instead of diesel, I thought, wishing again for Dodge.

“You’re Henry’s girl?” the man asked.

I nodded, inhaling, searching for clues, but the smell of gasoline was blocking everything else.