The Scent Keeper(43)

As he worked, the smells of the island gradually began to reach out to him, the dark night of salal berries lingering on his fingertips, the spiciness of the sea asparagus mingling with his breath. When the tide receded and the clams started their waterworks, one burst of liquid caught him full in the face. He stood up, laughing, wiping the water away, but the smell of salt and sea stayed in his hair like a mark of approval. One scent at a time, the island was taking him in.

Whether I still belonged here, too, I couldn’t tell. Because of me, my father was dead. Now I had returned, carrying stories that could kill the memories that remained.

“Should we make sure the cabin is okay?” Fisher asked after a while.

“Sure,” I said. But my feet were slow on the trail, which seemed to have little interest in aiding my passage. The salal bushes had grown over the past five years, their coverage so dense that I had to rely more on instinct and memory than sight. It was as if they knew what I brought with me.

The closer Fisher and I got to the cabin, the more my mind was filled with images of what we might find—the roof caved in, squirrels making homes in the beds, the drawers, the pantry, the stuffing of the big chair. Maybe someone else had gotten a boat through the channel, found the cabin, and burned it down; I’d heard of vandalism like that.

Or, perhaps worst of all, everything would be just as I’d left it the afternoon that Henry came and took me away. I didn’t remember much of my final days on the island, but I could still see my father’s machine, smashed to pieces, the empty bottles scattered like straw.

I didn’t deserve to be here, for so many reasons. I scanned the woods for a welcome. The trees were silent. I couldn’t even hear the birds. The only thing I could smell was the scent of my own nervousness, sharp and acrid.

“Let me go first,” I said to Fisher as we got close, and he nodded and stayed back.

I pushed through the last of the bushes, leaving the gloaming of the trees, and stood at the edge of the clearing. The vegetable garden in front of me was rampant with weeds, the once-careful stack of wood fallen into chaos, a sapling growing up through its midst. The woods were claiming back the land, bit by bit, but on the far side of the clearing I saw the cabin standing straight and true, its roof solid—so much the way it had always looked that for a moment I had the crazy hope that somehow my father was still inside. My father, not the one in the newspaper article, not the one from those awful last months on the island.

I could feel Fisher waiting behind me. I shook my head, then walked across the clearing, the long, damp grass whispering as I moved through it. I went up the stairs and stood, my hand on the doorknob. I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to see.

Breathe in, Emmeline. My father, standing by the chicken coop.

Who were you, Papa? The thought interrupted the memory, but my father’s voice stayed the same. I could feel myself yearning toward it, even with the article in my backpack, a sharp, folded reminder.

Let the smell introduce itself, he said.

I opened the door. The cool, dusty scent of time and absence met me there.

Now, open the back of your mind. Listen to the story.

The smells came to find me. I caught a hint of wood smoke and tobacco, dried apples and something else. Something out of place.

I opened my eyes.

I saw the wall of drawers, each one closed and orderly. The loft with my bed neatly made, the woodstove ready to be lit. Everything clean and loved and in its place, just as it had always been. I breathed in again and recognized the faintest slip of a fragrance—sawdust and paint and cinnamon rolls.

Henry, I realized. He had done this, for me, without knowing when or if I would ever return. Or maybe he had known, better even than I did.

And I had stolen his boat.

“Henry,” I said into the room. “I’m so sorry.” And then, “Thank you.”

I took my father’s last bottle from my backpack and walked over to the wall, opening the drawer that had once held the bottle with the blue-wax seal. I put mine inside. I thought I heard a sigh from within, but I couldn’t be sure.



* * *



When Fisher finally poked his head in the door twenty minutes later, he found me sitting on the floor. I couldn’t bring myself to sit in the big chair yet. The width of its arms would tell me how different I was from the girl who had sat there with her father.

I watched as Fisher gazed around the cabin. I wondered how it looked through his eyes.

“How is it?” he asked.

“Okay,” I said. “Strange.”

“Do you want to go back?” he asked hesitantly.

“No.” We had come this far. I wanted to stay.

I didn’t say what we both knew. The afternoon was well under way; the next high tide was coming in a few hours. It would be the last chance to get through the channel for a month. Our last chance to leave, and anyone else’s last chance to come.

Fisher sat down on the floor next to me. “My mom said she’d tell my dad I went to school. That should slow him down.”

“Henry and Colette will know we took the boat,” I said. My throat clenched at the thought of them finding my room and the dock empty.

“They’ll have to find another boat small enough to make it through the channel,” Fisher said. “That’ll take a while.”

I thought about how the inside of the cabin felt when I first saw it. I remembered those trips in the boat with Henry, the way he had slowly brought me closer and closer to this island.