The Scent Keeper

by Erica Bauermeister

“Tell me its story,” I asked him. “Please.” “All right, little lark,” he said.

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

When you change a scent, you change the memory, he’d always said.

“Martin used to tell me how salmon always return to the same river to spawn. He said it’s the smell that draws them upstream. Maybe we’re more like fish than we think. All I know is that when I met Martin, he felt like home to me.”

“Put each scent in a category. Fresh, floral, woody, spicy, animal, marine, fruity. You need to recognize them instantly, without thinking.”

By the end of the day, I’d reached the point where I could sense the category of a scent almost before the bottle was open. Fresh was quick and cool, never warm. Floral was soft and seductive, the kind that kept its clothes on, showing only an ankle or a shoulder. Spicy bit your nose, woke you up. Woody sent me to the island so fast I couldn’t stop the tears from filling my eyes. I couldn’t wait to start combining them, creating something new.

“A signature scent is a brand,” she said. “It works fabulously for helping people make emotional connections with places, but if a person wears the same perfume all the time, you risk muddying the memories.” She leaned back in her chair, contemplative. “I remember when I was younger, I learned about this artist named Andy Warhol—he would wear a fragrance for a while, and then put it in his museum, as he called it. Whenever he wanted to go back to a particular time, he’d just open that bottle.”

“Do you ever think of scents as colors?” I asked impulsively. It was the kind of question that would have had the girls in school rolling their eyes. Victoria nodded, however. “Absolutely. And sounds. Some of them even seem like people.”

The thought of Fisher picked the lock of my memories and sauntered out.

“Every perfume is made of top, middle, and base notes. Top notes are light, middle notes last longer, base notes last longest. A good perfume has all three, but they have to be in the proper proportions.”

“It’s simple, Emmeline. Nobody respects you if all you care about is what they think. I learned that lesson early on.”