The Scent Keeper(53)

I waited for the perfect moment, and for another letter from Fisher, neither of which came. It had been more than two weeks since the last one.

Where are you, Fisher? I wondered. Do you still love me? Did you ever?

I thought of all the reasons he could want to forget me. Or maybe he was hurt, in pain, somewhere I’d never find him. I didn’t know whether to be angry or sad or lost. The world was filled with things I didn’t know.



* * *



The next Saturday, Colette said she wanted me and Maridel to scrub the red cottage—a toothbrush-in-the-crevices, make-the-inside-of-the-oven-shine kind of cleaning.

“It feels so good to get this done,” Colette said as she sent us off.

“Easy for her to say,” Maridel commented as we started down the boardwalk. I saw a smile flicker on her lips. Her first.

It was time.



* * *



I still had the T-shirt I’d been wearing the last day on the island with Fisher, the one that held his scent. Back then, I hadn’t known how that day would end, but after we’d returned to the cove, I’d hidden the shirt deep in the back of my dresser. Every once in a while I’d take it out and hold it up to my nose, be with Fisher for just a moment before I put it back.

Where are you, Fisher? I would ask his smell. Write me. Please.

On Sunday morning, I took out the T-shirt and put it on. The smell launched me back to the island, but I pulled a clean sweatshirt over it, masking the scent.

Time to help me, Fisher.



* * *



Maridel and I were working in the kitchen of the red cottage. I kept myself quiet, trying to match my movements to hers, the way Fisher would have. After an hour or so, my skin started heating up and the scent on the T-shirt began to warm, expand. Without looking at Fisher’s mother, I pulled the sweatshirt off and let the smell of him slip out into the room.

I knew from personal experience how scents could come at you sideways, sneaking in, setting your mind and heart wandering. It could take a while. As I watched, Maridel’s face changed, opened. Her hand slowed in its circular cleaning motion. She looked up, out the window, toward the water. When she spoke, it was not to me, really—as if directing these words to the world outside somehow meant they were still a secret. Or as if, perhaps, she was trying to send them all the way to Fisher.

“My dad was a baseball player,” she began, her sponge finding one spot, rubbing there. “He liked to hit things. We never had much, and if you asked for anything more, he’d kick you out of the house. He traveled with the team, so he wasn’t always there, but it felt like every time he came home, my mom got pregnant. And if my mom wasn’t available…” She did look at me then, a quick glance. “Well, he’d just choose somebody else.”

I stood next to her, unmoving. A quiet well of water, waiting for the stones of her words.

“It was always my older sister,” she said after a while, “until one night it wasn’t. I’d just turned sixteen. I left before anybody got up the next morning. Hitchhiked out of the city. Martin was the one who picked me up—he’d come in to buy fishing gear. He was so kind. It just felt like fate. He asked me where I was going and I said, ‘Somewhere nobody can find me,’ and he told me he knew just the place.” She laughed, more of a shrug than a sound. “You have to give it to Martin, he doesn’t lie.”

“But he…” I looked without meaning to at her arms. The bruises still showed up there sometimes.

“I know. He wasn’t always like that, though.”

“Why didn’t you leave?”

“Where would I have gone?” She shook her head.

“You know,” she said after a while, “Martin was the only person who ever told me I was beautiful. When we first met, he would just hold my face in his hands and look at me. I was the one who lied. I told him I could go out on his boat with him. Said we could be happy.”

I wanted to argue with her, tell her that her only lies were to herself, but I couldn’t speak. She glanced over at me. “Martin used to tell me how salmon always return to the same river to spawn. He said it’s the smell that draws them upstream. Maybe we’re more like fish than we think. All I know is that when I met Martin, he felt like home to me.”

Again she laughed that strange laugh. “I guess that should’ve warned me, huh?”

I felt like I was drowning. I concentrated on Fisher’s scent, though I could already feel it fading from the shirt.

“Why didn’t you tell Fisher any of this?” I asked.

“To protect him.” Her answer was quick, the words polished by years of thought.

“From what?” I thought of Fisher lying in that hospital bed, that boot print on his chest, the look in his eyes. She hadn’t protected him from anything, as far as I could see.

“From me,” she said.

I could only stare at her, dumbfounded. She struggled for words, as if logic shouldn’t have to be articulated.

“When Fisher was born,” she said at last, “and they wrapped him up and gave him to me, he was so perfect. So clean, you know? And I thought, if he didn’t know where I came from, it couldn’t touch him. Maybe I couldn’t stop Martin, but I could keep that away from him.”

“But he wanted to know. He asked you.”