The Scent Keeper(32)

Do what Fisher told you. Watch his face.

“Funny we haven’t met,” the man said. He held out his hand. “I’m Martin.”

“Fisher’s father?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. I saw a smile travel slowly up his cheeks, almost to his eyes. Almost.

Never trust a smile that doesn’t make it to their eyes, Fisher always said.

Martin stood there, waiting, his hand outstretched. I shook it, stiffly, then stepped back so he could pass me on the trail. When he moved on through the woods, I turned and bolted back to the cove.





THE RESORT


Though I never spoke to Fisher about my encounter with his father, I found myself noticing things I hadn’t before. The way he checked the clock as we sat at the table doing homework. The way he hurried out the door and up the hill as soon as we heard the sound of the returning fishing boats.

I knew what it was like to be constantly aware of your father, but there was a difference between me and Fisher. I’d been scared for my father, for what might happen to us, but I had never been scared of him.

“What would you think about working here this summer?” Colette asked Fisher one afternoon. “We’ve got more guests coming this year, and we’re going to need some extra hands.”

For a moment I saw excitement in his eyes, but then he looked out the window at the harbor. “I don’t know,” he said.

“We’d pay you, of course,” Colette said.

“I’ll ask,” he said, but he didn’t sound hopeful.



* * *



His father came to the front door the next afternoon. Fisher had already left for home.

I smelled the gasoline odor even before Martin arrived and sprinted to my bedroom, where I stood in my doorway, listening. Dodge pushed himself to his feet and went to stand next to Colette as she opened the door. I pulled my head back out of sight.

Their voices were low, too low for me to make out the words, but I could feel them. Colette’s, soft as flour. Martin’s, like the sounds of footsteps bent on a destination. Back and forth they went, two, three, five times, until finally I heard the smile that wasn’t a smile in Martin’s voice and the front door closed.

I came out of hiding. Colette turned and saw me; her eyes were fierce, but pleased.

“Great news,” she said. “Looks like Fisher will be joining us this summer.”



* * *



School finally ended, and the relief I felt could have filled a whole sky. I had three full months of freedom, and I didn’t even care if they were filled with resort guests. I was away from the rumors, the tests, the small brown bags left on my desk, always with a note in different handwriting: smell this. I had learned not to open them.

By the end of the first week of summer, Fisher and I were a brilliantly efficient cottage-cleaning team. I mopped floors while he cleaned bathrooms; we changed the sheets together. We could be in and out of a cottage in half an hour. We worked so harmoniously that we barely needed words. Most of the guests assumed we were brother and sister, although we didn’t look at all alike.

With two pairs of hands doing the work, we had time to help Colette in other ways. She’d decided to start selling coffee and baked goods, and so our mornings started early, with yeast and cinnamon and cardamom. The guests would come and knock on the kitchen window with a mug from their cottage, and we’d fill it with steaming coffee, handing over warm rolls wrapped in paper napkins. I loved watching their faces relax as the aromas reached them.

In the afternoons, when our cleaning rounds were done, Fisher and I worked on Colette’s vegetable garden. We would dig and weed, and I would smell life growing again.

“We are mighty growers of food, Emmeline!” Fisher would say, holding up vegetables like trophies. “We will eat like kings.”

It was the happiest I had been since the time I believed in fairy tales and my father was my hero. I did my best not to remember that I would have to go back to school. But as with all things I tried to ignore, fall came too soon. I stepped out of Colette’s truck that first day of classes, and it was as if a tide receded around me, leaving me exposed once again.

I had hoped that the summer might temper the kids’ desire to torment me, but when that didn’t happen I tried to make myself small, unremarkable. I learned to keep my curls short, my eyes down. I never went in the cafeteria, and I avoided the bathroom at all costs.

I crossed off each school day on my calendar, and threw it away in June.



* * *



Summer. School. Summer. School. Time and tide moving in and out with the years. I was fifteen, then sixteen. The bullying never changed, although the methods did. The ubiquity of technology had found its way even to our little edge of the world. Some of the kids had gotten cell phones, and rumors and teasing, once the domain of notes and whispers, could now travel at lightning speed. I would sit at my desk and watch their fingers, tapping underneath their desks. Feel the insults flickering through the air.

Dylan had managed to keep his seat assignment, just in front of mine, and as his body grew, he expanded farther and farther into the space around him. His legs stretched across the aisle, blocking my access, while his eyes took their time with my body. Assessing. Approving of one part, not of another. His jokes thickened, took on the stench of hormones and hair gel. He would whisper them to me when Fisher wasn’t around. When it came to those taunts, it was as if we had a pact, Dylan and I. Neither of us wanted Fisher to hear them.