The Scent Keeper(9)

“What are you doing?” I asked.

He shut the stove door and sat down heavily on the bench at the table.

“They’re going,” he said.

“What?”

“The scents. They’re disappearing.”

“Let me smell.” I thought perhaps it was his nose.

But it wasn’t. When my father raised the scent-paper to my face, there was nothing there.

“How long has it been out of the bottle?” I asked, trying to apply the scientific principles he had taught me.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It won’t change. I’ve been checking them for weeks. The top row is almost gone.”

My first reaction was a feeling of betrayal: he’d been opening the bottles without me. Then his words sunk in—the scents were leaving us.

I thought of the bottles in the upper drawers, the worlds they contained. The way some had felt like flying and others like swimming and one like being held in the gentlest arms I could imagine. I’d always thought I could hear them whispering amongst themselves as I fell asleep. When was the last time I had listened? I spent almost every night out in Cleo’s shed now. Perhaps the scent-papers had been quiet for a long time. Perhaps they’d wondered where I was. Maybe that was why they’d left.

“What were you going to do?” I asked my father, pointing toward the woodstove.

“Burn it,” he said, the scent-paper still in his hand.

The violence of the idea shocked me. “Why?”

“Some of the first fragrances men ever created were made to burn,” he said. “Per fumare—through the smoke. It was a way to talk to the gods. I wanted to send the scent home.”

“But what if we find a way to get it back? Wouldn’t Jack want us to try?”

He shook his head. “It’s impossible.”

I saw the resignation in his face. He had given something up, although I had no idea of its shape or origin. All I knew was that my father was in pain.

“Let’s burn it, then,” I said.

We walked over to the woodstove, opened its door, and stood, looking at the fire. My father paused and seemed to go inside himself for a moment. Then he dropped the paper in. We watched as the flames caught its edges and curled them into light, then blackness. The smoke that emerged was a blue so clear it surpassed the sky, the water, my father’s eyes. And then, the fragrance.

It was big and full, shimmering with a strength its scent-paper had never had. This was no brief window into a world. This was the thing itself. I closed my eyes and the cabin walls vanished. I could smell the sweet spice of just-cut grass, and a sparkling conversation of flowers—lush and creamy, sharp and quick, dusty and soft as memory itself. They came together like bird songs overlapping. There was sunshine, pulling out the fragrances with its warmth. I could feel it on my skin, surrounding me in a way the heat of our woodstove never could. I stood in the middle of it all, inhaling. I had never felt so full of anything before.

I don’t know how long it lasted, only that it left a bit at a time until there was just the rain outside and the faint smell of tobacco again.

“Oh,” my father said, and his eyes were filled with tears. He reached toward the fire as if to pull the paper out, but it was well and truly gone.



* * *



My father changed after that. He’d always been fascinated by the bottles, but the loss of that scent-paper shifted something in him. The pressure in the cabin grew until I could smell it, heavy and hot. I watched his eyes, flicking to the upper drawers no matter what we were doing. When we went out collecting food, he would return to the cabin earlier and earlier, leaving half our potential harvest on the beach. One afternoon, something finally seemed to break, and he took down another red-wax bottle, unsealed it.

“Okay,” he said, and opened the door of the woodstove.



* * *



The act of burning a scent relaxed him for a few days, but then the whole process started again. Each time it speeded up, the lull afterward disappearing more quickly, the tension rising faster. Before I knew it, the top row was gone. I was worried about what would happen when he got through those upper, transcendent bottles and found himself left with only old versions of our life.

“Why don’t we make new scent-papers?” I asked him. “We could take the machine outside. Cleo and I have found things. We could show you.”

I was willing to give him all my secrets, even the bluff overlooking the world. But my father shook his head.

“What if we made a new scent-paper of one of them?” I said, pointing to the third row from the top. “Start over?”

He looked at me, hope springing into his eyes, and for that moment I was Jack the Scent Hunter, brave and smart and full of ideas. I was Emmeline, the daughter he loved more than anything else.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s try.”

He took down one of the bottles and held it for a moment. Then he snapped open its red-wax seal with the practiced motion I knew so well, and pulled out the paper inside. The scent was undetectable, as we knew it would be, but we had a plan now. Together we walked over to the stove.

“You hold it,” my father said, handing me the paper. It lay in the palm of my hand, light and full of silent mystery. It had one chance left to express itself, unless we could catch it again.