The Scent Keeper(45)

“You going to help or just watch?” He grinned, holding out the ax. I took it, got in position, and swung it high, bringing it down on the log, feeling the force of the blow travel up my arms. I had split wood as a child, but this was different. I was taller now, my body stronger. I sank the ax head into the cleft I had formed and the log broke in two.

That evening we lit a fire, the warmth and light of it filling the room. We made a stew of mussels and clams, flavored with wild onions and sea asparagus, and ate it from wooden bowls that fit in our hands like promises. I steeped spruce tea and watched Fisher as the steam reached his nose.

“Maybe we can do this,” he said, smiling.

“Maybe we can,” I said.

I kept busy; we had to work to survive, I told myself. I let my muscles rule the days, but in the evenings the thoughts came in. Each night after that first one in the woods, we slept in the cabin, me in the loft, Fisher in my father’s bed. I lay there, listening to breathing that was not my father’s, waiting for the familiar whispers of scent-papers that were no longer there. What would they have told me back then, if I’d known what to listen for? Who was the man inside them? Had any of them held the scent of my mother?

In my mind, I placed the stories of my father next to each other, pages in a book that made no sense. My father was my hero. He was a liar. He loved me. He’d kidnapped me. I had killed him. That last one was the only one I knew for sure.

I didn’t understand how it was possible to feel so right and so wrong in a place at the same time. The island itself was unchanged—its rules and beauties the same as they’d always been and always would be. It was me that was different, who couldn’t decide how or where I fit. I yearned to be the child who’d lived here, but I wanted to understand my father, and that would mean leaving childhood behind. I wanted to tell Fisher what I had done, but I didn’t know how to start. Perhaps, in the end, I didn’t want to.

And so, each night as Fisher and I buttoned up the woodstove and headed toward bed, I walked past the question in his eyes and went up to my loft alone.



* * *



We’d been on the island almost two weeks when I felt the first of the fall gales coming, an early one. The air grew heavy, then loud, the wind smashing like fists at the cedar shakes of the roof. The downspouts moaned. Fisher started pacing, his feet loud against the floor.

“It’s just a storm,” I said. He didn’t answer. A branch sheered off a nearby tree and landed with a crash on the porch. Fisher jumped, instinctively putting up an arm to block his face.

“Shit,” he said.

He paced for hours, leaping at each sudden noise, fists tensed at his sides. When the storm finally passed, he dropped down in the big chair and closed his eyes, as exhausted as the wind-smashed trees outside. I sat on the floor, put my head against his knee.

“Tell me,” I said. “Please.” I held out the words like open hands.

It took a while, the story finding its way up from some strange and subterranean place, slipping through the cracks of his fatigue. “He didn’t hit either of us at first,” he said finally. “But you could feel it coming. Even when I was little, I knew.”

I thought of my father, his arms around me as we read. Even later, when everything fell apart, I never once believed he would hurt me.

Fisher shifted in the chair. “My mom had a vegetable garden, and she taught me how to work it. At first it was just a place to keep me with her, but by the time I was five, I really was helping. I loved being there with her. She made me feel like I could grow things.”

He stopped. I caught a scent gathering, a darkening like the dirt that lives underneath mushrooms.

“I remember my first tomatoes,” Fisher said. “I’d gathered them all by myself. There were so many I had to hold up the edge of my shirt to make a bowl. I was so proud of them.” I heard the shake of his head. “My father was standing on the porch steps, and he asked me what I had. For one second, I actually thought he wanted to see. So I held out my shirt, and there were all those gorgeous tomatoes, and I said, ‘Look what Mom and I made.’

“And then he just hit me. Right in the face.”

It was quiet in the cabin. I waited.

“She’ll never leave,” he said. “I’ve asked her over and over.”

I thought of my father, refusing to leave the island, even after the bear had eaten everything we had.

“Why wouldn’t she come with me?” Fisher asked.

I climbed into the chair and put my arms around him. I didn’t know the answer. I didn’t think I ever would.



* * *



It was as if a door had opened after that. Not wide, but enough to catch a glimpse. Things we’d never told each other started slipping out as we made dinner, or cleared a trail, or walked along the sand at the lagoon.

“My father used to tell me stories about Jack the Scent Hunter…”

“Sometimes I slept in the garage…”

“I had a goat…”

“He won’t let my mother drive…”

“There are no mermaids…”

“I want to kill my father.”

I stopped; I couldn’t force the words out. I did. I didn’t know how to tell him what it felt like, to do what he was imagining. The way that you never took only one life; you always took two—the person you killed and the person you thought you were.