The Scent Keeper(34)

“No,” he said. He tossed a clean pillowcase toward me.

“He won’t take me unless you go, too.” I didn’t say, I don’t know what I’m doing. I didn’t say, I’m scared to go without you.

“It’s not…” he started.

“Please,” I said.

I didn’t know what I was asking for, but he gave it anyway.





THE END OF SUMMER


A few days later, we set off in Henry’s boat, a small vessel, maybe fifteen feet long and open to the sky. The weather was calm and clear, the islands tiny in the distance. Henry stood at the front, his hands on the wheel, glowing with the joy of being out on the water. Fisher stood next to him, and I watched his body relax, lighten with each mile away from the cove.

I sat on the bench seat, feeling panic lapping at my feet, getting ready to rise up and roll over me. I’d told myself I was ready to go back to the islands. I had thought I’d forgotten the day Henry brought me to Secret Cove. My body remembered, though, and as we entered the strait and the boat began to buck its way through the currents, I felt my breathing turn shallow. I smelled the diesel, the cold water, the biting scent of fast air, and suddenly I was twelve again, curled tight in the bottom of the boat as we flew across the waves, away from everything I knew.

You’ll be okay, little one. Henry’s voice, calling out to me over the roar of the motor. Hang in there.

Little lark, I’d wanted to tell him, but I hadn’t, and nobody had ever called me that again.



* * *



I faced away from the exhaust, opening my lungs, forcing in clean, salty air. This is what now smells like, I told myself. I let Henry and Fisher’s conversation fade while I watched the islands in the distance. Slowly but surely they grew closer, rising out of the water, veiled in evergreens. I could feel the pull of them deep in my muscles. I wanted this place with every fiber of my being, and I was scared of it in equal measure.

After more than an hour, we left the chop of the strait and the rocking of the boat calmed. We slipped into an intricate maze of gray and green islands, their sides steep around us. White birds flew over our heads, then wheeled about and disappeared. The only sound was our engine.

After a while, Henry took a right turn down a slim passage and throttled back on the motor until we were barely coasting. The surface of the water quieted into a mirror; it looked as if we were moving through two worlds, with trees living equally above and below the surface. A seal head emerged, and its liquid brown eyes watched us pass. I could smell magic in the air again, and I wanted to sob with the relief and pain of it.

This is who you are, the trees said.

“Oh,” I said, so low I didn’t think it was even a sound.



* * *



After that, we went out every couple weeks or so to do the deliveries, and every time I looked for my island, desperate to see it, not wanting to see it at the same time. I noticed that Henry seemed to take us close to every rocky outcropping but mine, as if my island was a heat source you had to approach slowly, getting used to the temperature before you touched it. Sometimes that made me frustrated, but mostly I was relieved. I needed the time.

Something was happening to me on those trips. At school, even at the cove, my senses were always sharp, spiky, alert to every buzz of a machine, every nuance of conversation. I could feel the grate and shred of them. But when Henry aimed the prow of his boat toward the islands and the sky opened up in front of us, all of that changed. I could feel my mind lighten. With miles of nothing but water in front of me, my thoughts expanded, slowed, gaining altitude without speed. I could track a whale by a far-off disturbance on the surface; I could feel the day move across my skin. And I could smell. Oh, I could smell.

“Look!” I’d say to Fisher, pointing out an eagle’s nest high in a tree, or a group of sea stars clinging to an underwater rock. But then in the next instant my nose would pick up the scent of cedar wood smoke in the distance, or I would see a steep gray cliff that looked like my bluff, and I would fall into memories. My father—working at our table, watching the bear from the window, swimming away from me. I’d step out of my body, and the world would disappear.

Fisher and Henry let me work through it on my own. Henry focused on teaching Fisher how to navigate tides, how to hear when the boat was low on fuel or the motor was skipping. The sight of them standing next to one another at the wheel was my lodestar.

“You doing okay, Em?” Fisher asked one day as we were tying up the boat.

For something was happening between us, too. When we were out on the water, we spoke in gestures more than words, his hand on my arm, his breath on my cheek. Out there, in the midst of all that air, our scents wove together and had their own conversations. It was as if the more space we had, the less we needed it between each other. I remembered the way Colette’s voice had sounded when she’d talked about meeting Henry—the love so simple and easy. I thought I’d never know anything like that. But here it was.



* * *



It wasn’t until the second to last day of summer vacation that Henry took us past the entrance to a narrow, steep-sided channel that curved quickly out of sight.

“That’s it,” Henry said, watching me closely. “That’s your island.”

“How do you get in?” Fisher asked, looking at the frothing water.