The Scent Keeper(5)

So I never questioned my father’s care with the machine; I only waited with ever-increasing anticipation for the perfect opportunity to make my plea. Autumn started its slow slide toward winter. I could feel the cold coming in the air. I sensed my father drawing into himself, like a squirrel hunkering into its nest. And then one morning I looked outside to see a world articulated by frost.

“Today?” I asked my father, and he understood what I meant. It wouldn’t have been hard to figure out. My impatience had been compounded by five days of rain that washed the light from among the trees, holding us in. But that day the sky was clear, the frost writing its message across the veins of fallen leaves and the vertical outlines of grass: It’s time.

My father took the machine down from its place in the pantry.

“Please,” I said. “Will you make one for me this time?”

“This is not a toy, little lark,” he said.

“It can be my birthday present.”

“Your birthday isn’t for quite some time.” But I could hear the almost smile in his voice. I was close, I could tell.

“Half birthday, then. I’ll be careful with it, I promise.”

He looked over at his leather book, the one in which he took his notes. He picked up the machine and did what he always did—aimed it across the room and pushed the button. The paper came out and he put it in a bottle. I watched, my disappointment dark and hard. I had waited so long.

But then he picked up the machine again. I thought he was going to put it away, but instead he pushed the button one more time. The holes breathed in, and with the familiar whirr and whoosh the paper came out. He waved it softly in the air, then handed it to me.

I looked at him, amazed. He smiled all the way to his blue, blue eyes.

“What drawer would you like to put it in?” he said. “We can write your name on it.”

I lifted the paper to my nose and inhaled. All I could smell was the smoke of our familiar fire, the fading aroma of our oatmeal from that morning.

But I had my own scent-paper in my hand, and I was ready to be patient. The ones in the red-wax bottles told me what could happen, and my body thrummed with anticipation. This paper would not go in a bottle, nor hide in a wall. I would keep it in my jacket pocket, deep down where it was safe and dark. I would protect it, but I would also hold the process in my hand.

My thoughts flew in excited circles. What new world would I get? Was it random, which one came through the paper? Or did the paper choose with you in mind? Who would the paper think I was?

“Emmeline?” my father prompted.

“No drawer,” I said.

“Are you sure?” My father’s hands shifted nervously as he watched me put the paper away in my jacket pocket. “It’ll last longer in a bottle.”

“I want to smell it change,” I said—and now he seemed sad, but I didn’t know the why of that, either. Perhaps it was that you weren’t supposed to try to catch magic. The fairy tales were always saying that.

But this was different. This was science, I told myself. I would unravel the mystery, following the principles my father had taught me as we’d walked through the woods.

Assess the situation, Emmeline. Eliminate the variables. Determine the best course of action.

Even at the age of ten, however, I suspected that science wasn’t my only reason for keeping the paper.



* * *



It was cold that morning, but maybe the bite in the air would wake up the fragrance on my paper a little early. I didn’t have any idea how long it might take to make a new world. Did the scents have to travel here from far away? Were they already in the paper, waiting to be released by time?

The frost crackled under my feet as I set off. I told myself I just wanted to see the progress of the Sitka spruce that had fallen years before in a storm. Over time it had become a horizontal birthplace for dozens of slim new saplings, which rose up like exclamation marks along the decomposing trunk. I scrambled my way up onto it, although it was sodden from the day’s rain and soaked the knees of my pants. Perhaps, I thought, if I was a little higher, the paper would be able to catch the scents more easily as they traveled.

I stood on the top with my feet in the thick moss, careful to avoid the new saplings, and slipped my hand into my pocket. I could feel the sharp corners of the paper. I knew it might be risky to bring it out into the light, but I told myself that the trees were so dense in this part of the forest that there was barely any light anyway.

I exhaled, pushing out all the air that I had collected from the forest. I, too, would be a clean slate, ready for a new scent. I positioned my hand around the square, protecting it as best I could, and then I drew it out and brought it close to my nose. I breathed in.

Nothing. Only the fragrance of the cabin. I put the paper back in my pocket, disappointed.

And then I stopped. I wasn’t in the cabin. I was in the forest. I smelled my jacket collar, my hair, the skin of my hands and arms, to see if that was where the scent had come from. There was definitely a residual smell—wood smoke, coffee—but it was faint and so interconnected with me that it was merely notes added to myself. The fragrance on the paper had been different, separate. I pulled it out again. Breathed in deeply, eyes closed.

The forest seemed to disappear. I was in the cabin, every scent of it alive: the dried apples in the pantry, the basket of onions in the corner, the lingering whisper of pipe smoke.