The Scent Keeper(42)

Don’t look back, I told myself.



* * *



The moon lit the water as we raced across the strait. The world was a palette of silver and black, all contrast and mystery. If we hadn’t been watching the surface so closely for errant logs, we might not have seen how the slowly brightening sky was turning the tips of the waves from silver to white.

It wasn’t until I could see the trees of the first row of islands that I looked back. Just once, I promised myself. I scanned the rippling waves for boats, then paused. The horizon itself was moving, the edge of the water lifting up and down in bursts.

“Fisher,” I said, pointing behind us. “Look.”

He glanced over his shoulder. “What do you see?”

“Slow down.”

“Really?” Fisher asked. We’d been racing for over an hour.

“Yes. Look back.”

Fisher ramped back the engine while I waited, watching as the line of the horizon turned into dots and dashes—and then something slim and black and white lifted out of the water in a soaring arc that looked like nothing but celebration.

“Dolphins,” I said, laughing. “It’s dolphins.”

Hundreds of them, streaking toward us, faster than our boat could ever go. They overtook us, wave after wave of flashing tails and gleaming backs. For what must have been ten minutes we stood, stunned, as the dolphins flowed around our boat. Finally, the last wave passed and we watched as they traveled on, leaving a foaming white trail for us behind them.

“I think we can call that a welcome,” Fisher said.



* * *



We got to my island just before high tide. Even within the dark maze of the archipelago, there was enough light to see the rocks along the sides of the channel, the water pushing over them in angry bursts. There were more underneath the surface, I knew. On the day my father drowned, I’d spent hours staring at them, trying to learn every detail of the water as it rushed over the barely hidden rocks.

“What do you think?” Fisher asked. I looked at the surface of the water; there was still a strong current.

“Not yet,” I said.

We waited. The sky lightened, bit by bit. We could see the froth of the waves diminishing with each minute. And then, as easy as a last breath, the water in the channel slowed, then stilled. The drawbridge lowered. The island invited us in.

“Now,” I said, and Fisher started the motor. The walls were steep and dripping, the trees turning from black to green with the approaching sunrise. The water foamed in haphazard circles, as if confused by the sudden lack of movement. Bull kelp floated around us like strange sea creatures, long and languorous tails obscuring our vision.

We kept going, trying to stick to whatever the middle of the channel was when everything was a curve or the jag of a rock. We heard a long, rough scrape on the bottom of the boat, then one on the side. Fisher’s hands were tight on the wheel; my eyes strained as I looked for movement on the surface. We inched around another curve, then another and another. A moment later we passed rocks I recognized, and then there it was.

Home.





THE RETURN


Fisher whooped as we left the channel behind, the sound reverberating across the hushed lagoon, sending birds flying. I stood next to him at the wheel, my heart pounding as I stared at the beach.

It hadn’t changed, the oval of water still the welcome it had always been. The last of the high tide almost covered the beach, leaving seaweed draped along the upper edge like forgotten scarves.

Mermaid party, I thought, and memories collided inside me. I breathed in the fragrance of seaweed and cedar and mussels and salt that was my island, smelled the diesel exhaust mixing in, and suddenly I was twelve years old again, hiding in the woods, watching a white boat come into the lagoon and break my childhood in two.

But I was the one in the boat now. A stolen boat. Shaking off the thoughts, I jumped to the sand and tied the rope around a boulder. Fisher leaped down beside me.

“We made it,” he said, pulling me into a hug. He held me close and his warm scent was comforting, home. I could feel it starting to filter into the smells of the beach around me.

Once you change the scent, you change the memory, my father’s voice whispered.

I pulled away, and Fisher looked at me, confused. I didn’t know how to explain what I was feeling. For almost thirteen years, I’d lived on this island alone with my father. Now here I was again, without him, my mind full of the story in the article, my arms around a boy whose smells had never been here before. Each thing I did was changing everything I’d had.

I gazed past Fisher at the bushes that lined the beach, heavy with berries. The memory of my father hung in the air. A breeze brushed the needles up in the trees until they sounded like footsteps on the trail.

“Foragers feast,” I said, grasping the first idea that came into my head. I needed to move.

“What?”

“Let’s find some food.”



* * *



We gathered for an hour, and I watched Fisher the whole time. Just having the channel between him and his father seemed to calm him. His long fingers moved neatly among the berries and the roots of the sea plantains. He never crushed what he took, and he left plenty for later. He was comfortable, assured, like he’d always been when we harvested in Colette’s garden.