The Scent Keeper(4)

“A goat,” my father said.

“Are goats real?”

He nodded.

“Would the mermaids bring me one?” The goat looked quick and smart and maybe funny. A goat could be a friend, I thought.

My father paused for a moment. “You never know what a mermaid will do,” he said finally.

“Can we ask them?” We always took the empty boxes back to the beach. Be kind to the mermaids, my father always said, and we’d write a thank-you note and leave it inside the box.

“Try it and see,” he said with a shrug. “You never know.” The subject appeared to have reached an end. This was how it often was with my father. He could spend hours telling you all about the inner workings of a tree or the weather, but other times, he just stopped talking.

“How about a story?” I asked, taking advantage of his silence to swap the science book for the big, thick collection of fairy tales. Its cover had golden writing and a picture of a princess and a crumpled little man who fascinated me. The fables inside were fantastical, intricate things, filled with girls who slept forever and houses made of candy and lies.

My father had told me that many things in fairy tales weren’t real, but my problem was I didn’t always know which ones. I knew the woods were real, of course, but for me, living on an island with only my father, the image of two children holding hands was no less extraordinary than the idea of spinning straw into gold. I wondered what it would be like, to hold a hand the size of my own, to know someone else who had more questions than answers. I wondered about a lot of things back then.

“Why don’t I have a mother?” I asked my father, staring at the illustration of a woman with long blond hair, a child in her lap.

“Because you have me,” he said. He turned the page, and I saw the picture of the wicked lady with the pale skin and dark hair, staring into the mirror. My father hadn’t given me a real answer to my question, but he’d offered a reasonable trade-off, I figured—for in fairy tales, where there were mothers there were always witches.

I flipped through the stories, feeling the breeze of the pages, leaving the woman behind. About halfway through the book, there was a gap, strange as a missing tooth. I was drawn to it, every time. I loved to run my finger along the space, feeling the ragged edges tucked into the spine.

“Was there a story here?” I asked my father.

“It wasn’t a good one,” he said.

I looked up at him, a question in my eyes, but his only answer was a kiss on my forehead.

“That’s enough for tonight, Emmeline. It’s time for larks to go to bed.”

I climbed up into my loft and lay there among my blankets, thinking about mermaids and goats and mothers, missing pages and witches. About fathers who don’t tell you everything you want to know. But the day had been long, the boxes heavy, and my father’s love was a sure and steady thing in the room below, so I didn’t ask any more. Maybe everything would have been different if I had.





THE MACHINE


Even more mysterious than mermaids or goats was my father’s machine. Once a season, he would use it to make a new scent-paper. I would wait during the long stretches in between, feeling my excitement growing. At last, my father would open the pantry, take down the machine from the top shelf, and unwind the long length of soft gray fabric that protected it. Inside would be the sleek, silver box, about the size of a half loaf of bread, with a hinged lid that lifted to expose a panel with innumerable tiny holes.

My father would lift the machine up, aim it across the room at the woodstove, and push the black button on its side. I could hear a whisper of air through those holes, as if the machine itself were breathing, and then a series of clicks. Finally, with a whir and a whoosh, a square of paper came slowly rolling out of a slot at the base of the machine.

“Let me smell,” I’d say, darting in before the paper made its journey into the bottle. Every time, I hoped for magic—a new world, something I had never smelled before, like the scent-papers in the top rows. I breathed in, excited for the lush unveiling of an unknown flower, the puzzle of an unfamiliar spice. Perhaps it would be a scent so unexpected I could only take it in as a color or a feeling. Whispering blue. Dancing orange. Anger. Joy.

But every time I was disappointed. There was no fragrance on the new square of paper.

“Why doesn’t it have a smell?” I asked my father.

He looked puzzled. “It does” was all he said as he wrote a series of numbers on the back of the paper, then rolled it up and tucked it in a glass bottle. Sealing it tight with melted green wax, he put it in an empty drawer in one of the bottom rows.

It was not a satisfying answer, but I could not imagine my father would keep creating scent-papers that didn’t work. So how did this no-smell paper turn into one of those other, fantastical creations? I could feel the red-wax bottles waiting, high up, glittering and unattainable. Did they scatter magic down through the rows, change the others through proximity? That didn’t seem likely. Maybe the new ones were like caterpillars, who took their odd squishy selves and disappeared into their cocoons only to emerge as something else. Or maybe it was the simple process of sitting so long that made them grow, like some darkness-loving flower. Anything was possible.



* * *



I was ten the year I became determined to have a scent-paper of my own, one I could keep and observe. But my father was sparing and careful with the machine. One paper a season, he reminded me, and he stuck to the schedule, although many nights I would look down from my loft and see him bent over the table as he cleaned and tinkered with the machine’s small, shimmering parts. To someone else, his behavior might have seemed obsessive, but when you live on an island—when you gather or grow your food and fuel and water, when the weather can be your friend or enemy, changing by the day—being sparing and careful just seems like common sense.