The Scent Keeper: A Novel

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.

Now, breathe in deeply, my father said.

I inhaled, and fell into the fragrance like Alice down the rabbit hole.

Later, after the bottle had been stoppered and sealed and put back in its drawer, I turned to my father. I could still smell the last of the fragrance lingering in the air.

Tell me its story, I asked him. Please.

All right, little lark, he said. He sat in the big chair and I nestled in next to him. The fire crackled in the woodstove; the world outside was still.

Once upon a time, Emmeline… he began, and his voice rolled around the rhyme of it as if the words were made of chocolate.

Once upon a time, Emmeline, there was a beautiful queen who was trapped in a great white castle. None of the big, bold knights could save her. Bring me a smell that will break the walls, she asked a brave young boy named Jack …

I listened, while the scents found their hiding places in the cracks in the floorboards, and the words of the story, and the rest of my life.

THE SCENT HUNTER

After that, I asked every day: Please can we open another one?

He’d relent eventually, but never as often as I wanted him to.

The bottles protect the papers, he said. If we open them too often, the scents will disappear.

It made no sense to me. Scents were like rain, or birds. They left and came back. They told you their own stories, letting you know when the tide was low or the oatmeal was done cooking or the apple trees were getting ready to bloom. But they never stayed.

Even as a young child, however, I understood that those scent-papers were different, magical somehow. They held entire worlds. I could recognize bits of them—the smell of a fruit, but one more full and sweet than anything I had ever tasted. Or an animal, lazier than any I had ever met. Many of the scents were utterly foreign, however—sharp and fast, smooth and unsettling.

I wanted to dive into those worlds; I wanted to understand what made their smells. Even more than that, I wanted to be Jack the Scent Hunter, the hero of my father’s stories, flying through the canopies of dripping jungles and climbing to the tops of mountains, all to catch the fragrance of one tiny flower.

How did he do it? I asked my father. How did Jack find the scents?

By following this, he said, tapping the bridge of my nose.

I paused. How? I asked.

My father smiled. You just get out of its way, I suppose.

I didn’t understand exactly what he meant, but from then on I tried my utmost to let my nose lead me. I lifted it to every change in the weather, and then checked the smell of the dirt to see how it responded. The salt from the sea was a constant twist in the air, but when I breathed in I noticed how it got stronger when the waves were crashing. I caught a bright green scent, falling through the Douglas firs like a waterfall, and tracked it back to the breeze, the way it moved through the tops of the trees, brushing the needles together.

Every day I was out of my loft at dawn, determined to find every smell I could.

You’re my wake-up call, my father said as I clattered down my ladder. My lark of the morning.

We spent much of our days outside. We raised chickens for eggs and tended the fruit trees and the vegetable garden. Even so, the majority of our food was gathered from the untamed portions of our island. I cannot remember a time when I was not a part of this process, and by the age of eight, I considered myself an essential, if not quite equal, partner in our survival.

Foragers feast, my father would say, and we’d set out into the woods, cedar bark baskets in our hands. In the summer, we harvested bright red huckleberries, and salal berries so dark blue they looked like night in your hand. In the fall, we found mushrooms hiding under the trees—I was captivated by the convoluted morels, each one a labyrinth of nooks and crannies.

Tell me its story? I asked my father one day. I pushed the curls back from my face and looked up at him. Please?

He looked down at me and thought for a moment, considering the morel in my hand.

Once upon a time, Emmeline, he began, Jack found himself in an enchanted forest where the trees were as tall as the sky. In the forest there was a beautiful sorceress who lived in a mansion made of scents, and when Jack saw her, he fell in love. The sorceress took him to her magnificent house, but once he was inside, he found he could not get out.

Oh no, I said, shivering into the danger of it.

Should I keep going? he asked.

Yes, please.

I won’t let you go, said the sorceress, and she led him into a room filled with a fragrance so mesmerizing he forgot the world outside. Whenever he started to remember, she showed him another room, each more enchanting than the last.

Jack wandered that mansion for years, until one day he discovered a room he’d never seen before. When he entered, he smelled a scent that took him back to all the things he wished he’d done, and all the things he had wished he could be. Then he saw a key, hanging by a blue ribbon on a hook next to a door.

I waited in anticipation. I loved magic keys.

And so, my father said, he took the key and opened the door and never went back again.

I waited, thinking there would be more, but my father just put the mushroom in my basket.

That’s not enough, Papa, I said. Even I knew endings were more complicated than that.

Oh but it is, little lark, he said, and kissed me on the head. Now, let’s get going. These baskets won’t fill themselves.

Perhaps the best place to forage was our lagoon, an oval of protected water, ringed by rocks and fed by a narrow channel that churned with the tide. You could spend your whole day harvesting there. Along the shore were wild onions and sea asparagus and the grassy stalks of sea plantains; under the beach rocks were tiny black crabs no bigger than my thumbnail. The boulders that lined the shores were packed with barnacles and mussels, and the seaweed came in infinite varieties. My favorite was bladderwrack, with its little balloons that popped in your mouth and left the smell of salt behind.

The best work, however, was hunting for clams.

There! my father said, pointing to a spout of water that fireworked up from the beach. I raced toward it, trying to get there quick enough to catch the spray and feel it run through my outstretched fingers. But even though I was small and fast, I arrived to find only the smell of salt and a slight indentation in the sand at my feet. I stuck a small stick next to the spot to mark it.

There’s another! I yelled, and ran down the beach in the other direction.

Good job, my father said, following the trail of my sticks with a small shovel in his hand. At the end of an hour of running and digging, our basket was full.

Usually, we’d have to save the clams, drying them for the winter, when the dark came and wrapped around us like a heavy blanket. I didn’t like winter; the rain turned into a mood of its own, and the food on our plates faded in color until all that was left were dry things—apples, clams, a crackle of seaweed. My father faded, too, and his stories disappeared almost completely.

Do we have to dry the clams? I asked, and that day my father smiled his summer smile and agreed to a picnic. We made a fire and cooked the clams, adding some wild onions and sea asparagus for flavor, and ate out of bowls made of abalone shells, with mussel shells for spoons and berries for dessert. Then we sat on the sand as the sky turned the palest of blues, and my father watched the water snarl its way through the narrow channel.

It always made me nervous, that channel. Four times a day the tide changed, and the water started its rush in or out of our lagoon through the winding, rock-filled passage. It was an angry, dangerous thing, eager to chew up anything that came near its mouth.

My father saw the way I was studiously avoiding looking in its direction and lifted his mussel shell spoon in a toast.

Here’s to the channel that keeps us safe, he said.

It did, that much was true. Except for the lagoon, our island was entirely steep sided, its edges a vertical plunge down to the water. Evergreen trees clung to its steep rock walls, their lowest branches sheared off in a perfect horizontal line denoting high tide. The only way to access the island was through the channel. I had seen pictures of castles, towering things, impervious to all below. Our island was a castle, its angry channel our drawbridge.

It’s scary, I said.

But it keeps out pirates and bears, my father noted.

I had seen pictures of both in my books. I had no desire to confront either.

Here’s to the channel, I said, and raised my spoon.

Every once in a while, we arrived at the lagoon to find the beach wildly scattered in seaweed, all the way to the high-tide mark.

Mermaid party, my father declared, and it made sense. The sand was decorated with such abandon that only the most fanciful of creatures could have done it.

Let’s see if they left us anything, he’d say. We’d check behind the rocks and search the huckleberry bushes that lined the beach. Sure enough, we’d find treasure. Black plastic boxes with heavy closures that snapped shut tighter than a scent bottle. Inside were the most marvelous presents—rice and flour, chocolate and coffee. Sometimes there were even books or shoes or clothes.

One day, when I was nine or so, we discovered a particularly wonderful treasure trove—two black boxes, one of them containing a new pair of boots and a blue rain slicker, just my size.

How do the mermaids know what we love? I asked my father.

They’re magic, he said, and it made sense, for only magic would be able to find a way through our channel.

We hoisted the boxes in our arms and carried them triumphantly back to the cabin. Jack might hunt little flowers, but we had scored big and heavy game. We feasted that night, but carefully, putting most of our plunder in the pantry. We knew the ocean was a fickle thing, its mysteries unpredictable. It could take as much as it gave. The lingering scent of the runaway’s pipe tobacco was a never-ending reminder of that.

After dinner, my father and I read books to each other, as we always did. My father loved the science books, and he would teach me about the weather or the stars or the names of the trees around us. We spent hours looking at drawings of peculiar sea creatures, and flowers and animals that seemed to come from another world.

What’s that? I asked, pointing to a picture of a brown animal with slender legs and a little beard on its long chin.

A goat, my father said.

Are goats real?

He nodded.

Would the mermaids bring me one? The goat looked quick and smart and maybe funny. A goat could be a friend, I thought.

My father paused for a moment. You never know what a mermaid will do, he said finally.

Can we ask them? We always took the empty boxes back to the beach. Be kind to the mermaids, my father always said, and we’d write a thank-you note and leave it inside the box.

Try it and see, he said with a shrug. You never know. The subject appeared to have reached an end. This was how it often was with my father. He could spend hours telling you all about the inner workings of a tree or the weather, but other times, he just stopped talking.

How about a story? I asked, taking advantage of his silence to swap the science book for the big, thick collection of fairy tales. Its cover had golden writing and a picture of a princess and a crumpled little man who fascinated me. The fables inside were fantastical, intricate things, filled with girls who slept forever and houses made of candy and lies.

My father had told me that many things in fairy tales weren’t real, but my problem was I didn’t always know which ones. I knew the woods were real, of course, but for me, living on an island with only my father, the image of two children holding hands was no less extraordinary than the idea of spinning straw into gold. I wondered what it would be like, to hold a hand the size of my own, to know someone else who had more questions than answers. I wondered about a lot of things back then.

Why don’t I have a mother? I asked my father, staring at the illustration of a woman with long blond hair, a child in her lap.

Because you have me, he said. He turned the page, and I saw the picture of the wicked lady with the pale skin and dark hair, staring into the mirror. My father hadn’t given me a real answer to my question, but he’d offered a reasonable trade-off, I figured—for in fairy tales, where there were mothers there were always witches.

I flipped through the stories, feeling the breeze of the pages, leaving the woman behind. About halfway through the book, there was a gap, strange as a missing tooth. I was drawn to it, every time. I loved to run my finger along the space, feeling the ragged edges tucked into the spine.

Was there a story here? I asked my father.

It wasn’t a good one, he said.

I looked up at him, a question in my eyes, but his only answer was a kiss on my forehead.

That’s enough for tonight, Emmeline. It’s time for larks to go to bed.

I climbed up into my loft and lay there among my blankets, thinking about mermaids and goats and mothers, missing pages and witches. About fathers who don’t tell you everything you want to know. But the day had been long, the boxes heavy, and my father’s love was a sure and steady thing in the room below, so I didn’t ask any more. Maybe everything would have been different if I had.

THE MACHINE

Even more mysterious than mermaids or goats was my father’s machine. Once a season, he would use it to make a new scent-paper. I would wait during the long stretches in between, feeling my excitement growing. At last, my father would open the pantry, take down the machine from the top shelf, and unwind the long length of soft gray fabric that protected it. Inside would be the sleek, silver box, about the size of a half loaf of bread, with a hinged lid that lifted to expose a panel with innumerable tiny holes.

My father would lift the machine up, aim it across the room at the woodstove, and push the black button on its side. I could hear a whisper of air through those holes, as if the machine itself were breathing, and then a series of clicks. Finally, with a whir and a whoosh, a square of paper came slowly rolling out of a slot at the base of the machine.

Let me smell, I’d say, darting in before the paper made its journey into the bottle. Every time, I hoped for magic—a new world, something I had never smelled before, like the scent-papers in the top rows. I breathed in, excited for the lush unveiling of an unknown flower, the puzzle of an unfamiliar spice. Perhaps it would be a scent so unexpected I could only take it in as a color or a feeling. Whispering blue. Dancing orange. Anger. Joy.

But every time I was disappointed. There was no fragrance on the new square of paper.

Why doesn’t it have a smell? I asked my father.

He looked puzzled. It does was all he said as he wrote a series of numbers on the back of the paper, then rolled it up and tucked it in a glass bottle. Sealing it tight with melted green wax, he put it in an empty drawer in one of the bottom rows.

It was not a satisfying answer, but I could not imagine my father would keep creating scent-papers that didn’t work. So how did this no-smell paper turn into one of those other, fantastical creations? I could feel the red-wax bottles waiting, high up, glittering and unattainable. Did they scatter magic down through the rows, change the others through proximity? That didn’t seem likely. Maybe the new ones were like caterpillars, who took their odd squishy selves and disappeared into their cocoons only to emerge as something else. Or maybe it was the simple process of sitting so long that made them grow, like some darkness-loving flower. Anything was possible.

I was ten the year I became determined to have a scent-paper of my own, one I could keep and observe. But my father was sparing and careful with the machine. One paper a season, he reminded me, and he stuck to the schedule, although many nights I would look down from my loft and see him bent over the table as he cleaned and tinkered with the machine’s small, shimmering parts. To someone else, his behavior might have seemed obsessive, but when you live on an island—when you gather or grow your food and fuel and water, when the weather can be your friend or enemy, changing by the day—being sparing and careful just seems like common sense.

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