The Scent Keeper(62)

She reminded me of Fisher, the way she was able to read a person, a situation.

Don’t think about him.

So I told her about the resort, about the guests and the scents they left behind. I told her about making cinnamon and cardamom rolls in the mornings, and helping Henry fix the boardinghouse. I didn’t say anything about the whale building, or school, or Fisher.

“How long were you with them?” she asked.

I counted in my head. “Five years.” Almost exactly, I realized.

“So much time,” she said softly. She was looking out the window, and I couldn’t see her face. “How did John…?”

“Drowned.” It was all I could say.

“Oh.” She paused. Her index finger found its way through a curl, winding it tighter. “Did he ever tell you about me?”

“No,” I said. He never told me about anything.

“How did you find me, then?” she asked, turning to me now.

“The machine—Nightingale. I looked up the name online, and it linked to you.”

“Well,” she said. “There’s irony for you.”

Cars buzzed by outside, making the windows hum. I could hear the occasional distant rebuke of a horn, the cry of a seagull. All I could smell, however, was her.

“He made it for me, you know.” Her voice held a dreamy tone I remembered.

Once upon a time, Emmeline.

“He insisted we call it Nightingale,” she continued, “although I told him it made no sense for a scent machine. Still, it sounded so romantic, like something out of Romeo and Juliet, so I said okay. The investors hated it, but we didn’t care.”

I remembered the story my father had torn from the book of fairy tales. I opened my mouth to tell her, but Victoria was still speaking, gazing past me now.

“It just about killed him when it turned out the machine didn’t work,” she said. “The backlash was horrible, and he was so sensitive to things like that, you know? He couldn’t take it. He just … left.” She rubbed her eyes, once, quickly. “All this time, I thought he was alive.”

She shook her head and glanced at the clock. “We should get you settled in—let you take a nap. You’ve had a long day.”



* * *



The wide bed in Victoria’s extra room was covered with a comforter as soft and white as fog, and looked as if it had never been slept in. The carpet was beige, and thick beneath my feet. It reminded me of a fancy hotel, like the ones I’d seen in magazines guests left behind at the cove.

“Your bathroom is in there if you want to take a shower,” Victoria said, motioning to a door on the far side of the room.

All I wanted to do was lie down. I was exhausted, mind and body, but I looked at the pure white sheets and decided it might be better for all of us if I did as she suggested. Besides, a shower that wasn’t operated by coins, that wasn’t a mere curtain away from strangers, felt like a luxury beyond belief.

I stood under the water for twenty minutes, letting it wash away the hostel, the nurseries, the past two weeks. I tried not to think about Fisher, or where I was. It was all too much, too new. Instead, I opened the bottles on the shower shelf, smelling rosemary and lemon, and then a flower so delicate it became the steam around me.

At last I dried off and lay down on the bed, my body falling deep into the mattress. Still, I couldn’t sleep, no matter how tired I was. The texture of the sheets was so smooth, the fragrance too perfect, too clean. My thoughts skittered across them, unable to settle. Finally, I went over to my backpack and pulled out Fisher’s T-shirt. The smell was almost gone, more peanut butter than Fisher by this point, but even if it was almost nothing, even if he was no longer mine, I wanted to feel his scent around me. I took the shirt back to bed with me. I wouldn’t think about him, I promised myself. I would just breathe.

It wasn’t until I was almost asleep that the back of my mind found Victoria’s words again.

All this time, I thought he was alive.

Just for a moment, I wondered what she’d thought about me.



* * *



The aroma of coffee woke me. Throughout my years with Colette and Henry, that scent had been my alarm clock, pulling me out of bed. Even when I was too young to drink it, it was the way the day started.

When I entered Victoria’s kitchen, she was standing at the counter, working an espresso machine. I’d only seen them in pictures, and the fragrance was astonishing, as deep and rich and complicated as the dirt on the island. Victoria put a pitcher under a thin metal pipe and turned a knob. There was a hissing sound, and I could smell milk heating, expanding.

“Hello, sleepyhead,” she called over the noise. “Ever had a latte?”

I shook my head.

“Here,” she said, holding out the cup.

It was as luxurious as the bed I’d slept in, silky and warm. I thought of Colette’s coffee—the let’s-get-going feel of it. The way Henry would carry his thermos all day, drinking it even after it got cold. I took another sip and breathed in the smells of freshly ground beans and hot milk and just a touch of cinnamon. Beyond them, hovering in the air around me, was another scent. Spruce, I thought. I must have still had some on the sweatshirt I’d pulled from my pack that morning. I relaxed into the familiarity of it.