The Scent Keeper

by Erica Bauermeister

We are the unwitting carriers of our parents’ secrets, the ripples made by stones we never saw thrown.

We humans are almost entirely made of water, except for the stones of our secrets.

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.

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.

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.

Smells don’t care what the mind or heart wants, however. Scents will find their way around the darkness of closed eyes, slipping past barricades of thought. The body is their accomplice. We can live without food for weeks, and water for days, but try not to breathe and the lungs mutiny.

People are like that—given a chance, we come back, whether we want to or not.

I hated my father for what he’d made me. A freak. The girl who lived through her nose. I’d loved our island, believed in the wonder of its smells and bottles. But I had come to understand that my father had created that world—and now I fit nowhere else.

Ours was a friendship built on instinct; we were young enough to think our pasts didn’t matter. Or maybe we just didn’t want them to. I was wrong about a lot of things back then.

It wasn’t just her skin or hair or eyes, because I had all of those, too. It was how she inhabited them. If I were a scent-paper, she was what it was like when it burned.

“We’re just doing what nature already does, honestly. A flower has a scent for one reason—to attract whatever will pollinate it. Animals use odors to communicate all the time. The difference is, they pay attention to those messages. People don’t.”

Top notes were the ones that caught your attention, the glittering invitations that led you deeper into a fragrance.

It couldn’t be a middle note, either—those warm, round things, full and loving. Taking them out would induce the soft purple of wanting, but that was still too passive.

Need lived in base notes. It was the difference between appetite and craving, a bruised heart and a broken one. Base notes were just that, base—subterranean and simmerin...

“Coco Chanel used to say, ‘Dress shabbily and they remember the dress. Dress impeccably and they remember the woman.’” We

Nobody respects you if all you care about is what they think. I learned that lesson early on.”

The susurration of saffron. The sweet reassurance of benzoin. The way sandalwood always seemed to be asking a question, and vetiver always seemed to have an answer.

“Petrichor,” Rene said. “The word comes from petra, which means stones, and ichor, the ethereal blood of the Greek gods. Plants release an oil that stops their seeds from germinating when it would be too difficult to survive. The oil soaks into the pores of the stones, and is set free with water. They say it’s the smell of waiting, paid off.”

What was I doing in this city? I’d been leaping from one thing to the next, chasing Fisher, following my mother, filling my loneliness with her assurances that I was special. And I had been; I’d made masterpieces—but they’d been crafted for her approval, and they’d manipulated other people in the process. In the end, I’d been no more faithful to the scents I’d loved than I’d been to my dog, and now I’d lost them all.

Maybe that’s how it always is, I thought—we all just go along, catching glimpses of one another, thinking we know everything.

In the end, it wasn’t the flavors or the alcohol that made people relax—it was the experience of being seen and understood.

Perhaps, my little fish, you will create great fragrances one day, just like your mother, and your grandmother. You will play among the sparkling top notes, the hints of citrus and the salt mist of waves. You will sink into the flowers and spices of the middle notes. But never forget the base notes, for no fragrance is ever balanced without a touch of musk, or smoke, or sadness. Base notes can come from dark places, but they can create beauty all the same. They are reminders of what we will do to live, and what we can give each other. My parents taught me that.