The Scent Keeper by Erica Bauermeister
For the islands
PROLOGUE
We are the unwitting carriers of our parents’ secrets, the ripples made by stones we never saw thrown. If I close my eyes and breathe, I can still smell the sparkling, brittle moment my father broke my trust, and with it his heart. I can smell the honey of my mother’s promises.
Maybe you will smell them, too, and more as well. The simmering heat of a boy too scared to let go of anger. The bright numbness of a girl who lost everything in an instant of heroism. The scents of rain, and salt, and just a hint of pipe smoke. Things that happened before you found your way to me.
I can feel you, my little fish, swimming in the tidal motion of my blood, my breath. We humans are almost entirely made of water, except for the stones of our secrets. May mine become solid places to land your feet as you cross the wide river of your life. May they be stones to build a home, not take you under. This is my gift to you.
Let me tell you a story.
Let me tell you everything.
PART ONE
The Island
THE BEGINNING
Back before there was time, I lived with my father on an island, tucked away in an endless archipelago that reached up out of the cold salt water, hungry for air. Growing up in the midst of the rain and moss and ancient thick-barked trees, it was easy to forget that the vast majority of our island was underwater—descending down two, three, five hundred bone-chilling feet. Forever really, for you could never hold your breath long enough to get to the bottom.
Those islands were a place to run away, although I didn’t understand that at the time. I had nothing to run from and every reason to stay. My father was everything. I’ve heard people say that someone is their “whole world,” their eyes filled with stars. But my father was my world, in a way so literal it can still grab my thoughts, pick them up, and toss them around like driftwood in a storm.
Our cabin was set in a clearing at the center of the island. We were not the first to live there—those islands have a long history of runaways. Almost a century ago there were French fur trappers, with accents that lilted and danced. Loggers with mountainous shoulders, and fishermen who chased silver-backed salmon. Later came the draft dodgers, hiding from war. Hippies, dodging rules. The islands took them all in—the storms and the long, dark winters spat most out again. The beauty there was raw; it could kill as easily as it could astonish.
Our cabin had been built by the truest of runaways. He set up in a place where no one could find him and built his home from trees he felled himself. He spent forty years on the island, clearing space for a garden and planting an orchard. One autumn, however, he simply disappeared. Drowned, it was said. After that the cabin was empty for years until we arrived and found the apple trees, opened the door. Raised the population of the island to two.
I don’t remember arriving on the island myself; I was too young. I only remember living there. I remember the paths that wandered through those watchful trees, the odor of the dirt beneath our feet, as dark and complicated as fairy tales. I remember our one-room cabin, the big chair by the woodstove, and our collection of stories and science books. I remember the smell of wood smoke and pine pitch in my father’s beard as he read to me at night, and the ghostly aroma of the runaway’s pipe tobacco, an olfactory reminder that had sunk into the walls and never quite disappeared. I remember the way the rain seemed to talk to the roof as I fell asleep, and how the fire would snap and tell it to be quiet.
Most of all, I remember the drawers.
My father had begun building them when we moved into the cabin, and when he was done they lined our walls from floor to ceiling. The drawers were small things, their polished wooden fronts no bigger than my child-sized hands. They surrounded us like the forest and islands outside our door.
Each drawer contained a single small bottle, and inside each bottle was a piece of paper, rolled around itself like a secret. The glass stoppers of the bottles were sealed with different colored waxes—red in the top rows, green for those below. My father almost never opened the bottles.
“We need to keep them safe,” he said.
But I could hear the papers whispering inside the drawers.
Come find me.
“Please?” I’d ask, again and again.
Finally, he agreed. He took out a leather book filled with numbers and carefully added one to the list. Then he turned to the wall of drawers, pondering his choice.
“Up there,” I said, pointing up high to where the red-wax bottles lived. Stories always begin at the top of a page.
My father had built a ladder that slid along the wall, and I watched him climb it almost to the ceiling, reaching into a drawer and drawing out its bottle. When he was back on the ground, he carefully broke the seal. I could hear glass scritching against glass as he pulled out the stopper, then the rustle of the paper as he unrolled it into a plain, white square. He leaned in close, inhaling, then wrote another number in the book.
I meant to stay still, but I leaned forward, too. My father looked up and smiled, holding out the paper.
“Here,” he said. “Breathe in, but not too much. Let the smell introduce itself.”
I did as he said. I kept my chest tight and my breath shallow. I could feel the tendrils of a fragrance tickling the inside of my nose, slipping into the curls of my black hair. I could smell campfires made from a wood I didn’t recognize; dirt more parched than any I had ever known; moisture, ready to burst from clouds in a sky I’d never seen. It smelled like waiting.