Sam must look so different to his brothers. I’m sure he’s changed a lot since they last saw him. My mother bought the clothes he’s wearing at Sears Roebuck two weeks ago, when we first arrived in Fairbanks, because all he had were Uncle Gorky’s old ones. I’m still getting used to seeing him in them myself.
Even when we first got here for the audition—was that just a few hours ago?—he seemed so out of place. Stiff, and more seasick than he ever looked on the boat. He gestured at my pointe shoes. “They look so weird on your feet.”
I thought so, too. “They’d look weird anywhere but hanging over the bunk during fishing season.”
Maybe he thought I still felt guilty, because he said, “Your dad doesn’t want you to live your life trying to please him. He really wants you to be happy.”
And then he leaned back in case that made me mad like it did the last time he’d said that.
But I get it now. I’d thought I was protecting my dad all this time, but I’m pretty sure he’s always just wanted me to be me.
For the first time, I danced like someone who knew what she wanted. It felt fearless, like I was letting nobody down, especially myself.
But even that doesn’t seem quite as important now, watching Hank and Sam. He was wrong about Hank being mad at him, or not worried. I add up every minute, hour, and day I spent with Sam, and it’s obvious that every one of them Hank spent thinking Sam was dead. I feel selfish, watching Hank try to come back from such a dark, dark place. I’m not sure I would ever stop crying if I were him.
“I had a feeling,” Jack says suddenly, watching me closely, “that there was someone like you out there with him.”
He hugs me.
“You were right,” I tell him. “Will Hank be okay?”
“Hank’s fine,” Jack says. “Or he will be.”
Jack has Sam’s eyes.
I’m so busy noticing Jack that I don’t realize Hank and Sam are no longer sitting on the floor until I feel a hand on my shoulder.
“Alyce, this is Hank,” Sam says. It seems impolite to stare at Hank’s tear-stained face and red, puffy cheeks. But he steps forward and hugs me, squishing the roses between us. He smells like miles and miles of mud-soaked road, mingled with sweat and a hint of lavender; beneath it all is the familiar musty smell of a boat. He gives me a squeeze, then steps back and says, “You’re a beautiful dancer. It almost killed me watching you.”
Even though I’m not sure I understand exactly what he means, I know it’s one of the nicest things anyone has ever said to me.
Even after your heart breaks into a million pieces and your baby is gone, I am here to tell you—all around you the world will still go on spinning. People might even say kind words to you and think you are listening, but mostly you won’t hear anything because you’re too busy collecting each of those tiny pieces of your heart—wrapping them up into a safe corner of yourself, so you can find them again later.
You might only be able to nod at first, at the smiling faces that look familiar, and the mouths with the silent words trying to tell you something. It could be a while before you realize what they’re saying.
And then, on a morning like any other morning, you’ll start to wiggle your toes. Or feel the blood returning to the tips of your fingers. Slowly, like warmth after frost nip. All that new blood will seep back into those frozen spots until it reaches the secret place where you’ve hidden all the broken pieces—shards, really—and you start to move them around, maybe fit them back into place. Although you probably won’t get them exactly the way they were before, so it will feel funny at first and you might have to do it a few times.
Slowly, slowly, you’ll start to do normal things, like drink a cup of tea that will taste like tea again, instead of just brown water that someone has thrust into your hands for no reason. Things like taste and smell and touch—they’ll all come back, but slowly.
“It just takes time,” you’ll hear over and over again, once you can hear again.
When you do decide to speak, you limit yourself to asking only one question a day, at least in the beginning.
—
Day One:
“Was it a boy or a girl?”
“It was a beautiful, healthy little girl.” (Sister Bernadette)
—
Day Two:
“What did they name her?”
“You don’t remember? You asked that they name her after your gran. Marguerite.” (Sister Josephine)
—
Day Three:
“Why did I name her after my gran?” I really can’t remember.
“I think you were trying to wipe the slate clean—a new beginning.” (the abbess)
—
After two or three weeks, people will expect you to think about getting on with your life, especially Sister Agnes. Eventually you will say good-bye and push out through the abbey gates, trying not to hear the sniffling nuns behind you. You won’t be the same girl who walked up the steps of that exact same bus all those months ago even though you are wearing the same ratty red coat and carrying the same brown satchel. You’ll watch the world go quickly by, as if it’s a movie being played in reverse. The hours and then the days come and go before you barely even blink. You think maybe it’s been five days because Sister Agnes gave you enough sandwiches and scones for at least a week, and the last few have begun to taste old and dry, like sawdust. The only thing anchoring you to your seat is the embroidered pillow you found stuffed into your satchel, a gift from Sister Josephine and Sister Bernadette. You clutch it with both hands and bury your face in the stitches, breathing in the smell of the nuns, trying not to float away completely. Until you recognize the truck stop where you bought an apple pie for your seventeenth birthday, but you were not alone then and you are now.
—
Except for the stranger who leans over and says, “Can I ask you something?”
“Me?”
He looks around. “We’re the only two people on this bus,” he says.
The spell is broken. I am a person, back in my old body.
I look into his eyes, which are a funny shade of green, like beach glass washed up on the shore. His face is weathered, so it’s impossible to tell his age.
“So, I was wondering,” he says, “I’m going to meet someone for the first time and she’s about your age. I’m nervous about the gift I got her.”
I wonder how old he thinks I am. I could be seventeen or seventy; I don’t know how much my outside matches my insides anymore.
But he’s busy riffling through his backpack and pulls out two bars of homemade soap. “Soap?” I say, and I can tell he was hoping for more enthusiasm. “I mean, wow, soap,” I say again. He laughs a deep, barrel-chested laugh that warms up the empty bus.
“A friend of mine made it,” he says. “I thought teenage girls liked things like baths and…stuff.”
“No, really, she’ll love the soap,” I tell him, and he hands me a bar. It smells like lemons. “I lived with some…uh, women…who made soap,” I say, the longest sentence I’ve uttered in weeks.
He doesn’t press me to say more. I hand him back the soap and then curl up on the seat pretending to read.
Outside the bus windows, the sky is turning pink; the sun is already setting even though it’s only two in the afternoon. There is nothing but miles and miles of mountainous terrain reminding me that I am just a tiny speck in the universe.
The next time I wake, there are a few more people on board. Mostly men, and I wonder what I must look like, a young girl traveling alone at Christmas. Soap guy is talking about fishing and boats with a man who must have got on near the border. The new guy has a dry bag sitting on the seat next to him that smells like diesel, mildew, and fish.
Selma’s most recent letter falls out of my book. I forgot that I stashed it there, a few weeks ago when the words failed to make any sense to me.
Selma says she finally learned the truth about where she came from, but she can only do the story ju
stice in person—she can’t wait to tell me. Her cousin, Alyce, has been accepted to a college dance program; there’s a bunch of new boys in town attracting all sorts of attention; and, most perplexing, Dora and Dumpling (who has recovered slowly from her accident) spend a lot of time at my house, with Lily and Bunny.
I want to hear Selma’s story and I want to see Lily and Dumpling, but beyond that I haven’t let myself think much about going back.
The abbess did say Gran would meet me at the bus station. I wonder if she’ll pretend nothing’s happened and act like she did before—because I’m not the same person I was before. And I doubt I can see her the same way, either, after everything Sister Josephine’s told me.
It makes me so tired just thinking about Gran that I fall back to sleep, Selma’s letter fresh on my mind, the smell of that man’s dry bag filling my nose.
I dream I am sitting on the edge of the ocean. The moon is shining, and I can see huge rocks bobbing into view as the tide goes out, and the beach is suddenly full of starfish and small crabs scurrying away under the moonlight. Something is sitting on the rock and I see it is a woman; she has dropped her clothes into a pile. She leaves them on the rock and comes to the beach, stepping gingerly over broken shells and seaweed. She walks right past me but doesn’t see me; she’s heading to the harbor where the boats are tied up, lights shining inside their wheelhouses. My curiosity draws me to the rock. What I thought were clothes is a wet, shiny sealskin, reeking of rancid fish. The skin is oily and slips from my grasp into the ocean. I watch in horror as it starts to float away and I can’t grab on to it—I’m swimming and swimming, and if I don’t save it that woman will never be able to go back to the sea, but I can’t reach it.
Crash!
I wake up on the floor of the bus.
“Sorry, everybody—moose in the road,” says the driver, who slammed on the brakes. “We’ll be in Fairbanks in about fifteen minutes.”
“Are you okay?” asks stinky dry-bag guy as I pull myself up off the floor.
I nod, but my coat is wet and splotched with mud and dirty snow melted from people’s boots. He turns back to talk to soap guy.
“I have to buy some roses,” he says. “I’ve been warned by my ex-wife that if I show up at The Nutcracker without roses, I may as well not show up at all.”
Soap guy laughs and says, “I hear that’s where I’m headed, too.”
It’s the last thing I’d expect from either one of them.
The bus pulls into the station garage, where the lights are blinding and it’s hard to make out the faces of the people waiting on the curb. Everyone looks a tiny bit different. There is Alyce in full stage makeup, looking shockingly out of place. She’s wearing a sparkling tiara and a puffy down coat over her Nutcracker costume.
From inside the bus, I watch her throw her arms around the dry-bag guy as he steps onto the curb. Alyce pulls on the arm of a boy—a handsome boy—who comes forward and shakes hands with the guy. I’ve never seen him before, and I’ve never seen Alyce’s eyes shine like that, either.
My feet have stopped working. The universe is moving at a much faster pace than I’m used to. It’s loud and colorful, after months of living in a black-and-white world with whispering nuns, so I take my time getting off the bus. It’s easier, watching from this side of the window anyway, until I get my bearings.
Selma’s face pops up in the crowd. Not the boisterous Selma I remember—the one who lines up first to get a shot in the arm, or throws back her head and laughs like a hyena—but a hesitant Selma, who is walking shyly toward the soap guy. He’s just stepped off the bus with his bag full of lemony soaps slung jauntily over his shoulder.
He holds out a wide hand for her to shake, but she surprises him (and me) by launching herself straight at him. I’ve never seen so much hugging in all my life. So I’m not the reason Selma’s here, I realize as she pulls out another lumpy orange hat and presents it to him as if it’s the goose that laid the golden egg. Poor Selma—the biggest heart in the world doesn’t make a whit of difference for her knitting. And suddenly I’m laughing—still on the bus, all by myself, laughing. It feels so good.
Until I see Gran—way off on the side of the crowd. She looks older, her hair thinner. In her threadbare overcoat and nylon stockings, she must be freezing. She does not look angry or scary, just nervous and cold. Selma is walking over to her, proudly dragging the soap guy by the arm. Gran shakes his huge hand in her frail little one. It makes her look even smaller—she is shrinking with every minute I don’t get off this bus.
It’s time I rejoin the world.
I finally stand to leave, when I see him.
Hank.
He is watching someone with that same expression he had the day I saw him watch his brother Jack eat a pink Sno Ball. I follow his gaze, and of course, there’s Jack. He’s smiling at Selma and the soap guy as if he created them out of thin air. The handsome boy with Alyce is there, too; now he’s shaking soap guy’s hand and it all looks so cozy—but also impossible for me to reach.
As I think this, Hank glances up and sees me through the window.
He walks slowly toward the bus. Slow enough that I have time to replay our entire last meeting in my mind. By the time he stands at the door of the bus, I have once again seen him naked with a bouquet of bluebells, and draped in a white sheet sitting on a clump of cranberries, saying, “Maybe I can see you in Fairbanks someday?”
Now I am standing two steps above him, and apparently this is “someday.”
“It’s you,” he says.
“It’s me,” I say. For the second time in the span of a week, I have used the word me.
I still exist.
But then his brother Jack is beside him, staring at me.
“It’s you,” he says.
I decide not to say it again.
Then Selma appears and the spell is again broken, at least for now, because she is yelling, “Ruth! You’re back! You’re back!”
She is genuinely happy to see me, and I feel warmth seep all the way down to my toes as she hugs the air out of me. I hug her back.
She kisses my cheek and whispers, “I missed you.”
“I’ve missed you, too.”
At some point I know she’ll tell me everything—and it will be worth hearing. For now they will all have to wait—even Hank—until I get past this first reunion with Gran.
But before I can take another step, Hank grabs my wrist and ties the red ribbon onto it. For a split second everything goes quiet, and all I know is that wherever she is, my baby’s fat little wrist is wrapped in the other half of this ribbon.
I hear Dumpling’s voice saying, “It works, I promise.”
And I finally understand.
Hank is watching me closely. I point to Gran and say, “You might have to hold the space just a tiny bit longer.”
He squeezes my wrist and says, “I’m quite good at waiting.”
It feels as if Gran is miles and miles away, rather than just a few yards. She is even frailer up close. I’m not the only one who’s aged over the past few months.
“Hi,” I say.
She looks like she’s going to cry.
“Where’s Lily?” I ask, because she seems lost for words.
“She’s home baking you a cake.”
Then she adds, “Dora and Dumpling and Bunny are there, too. So I hope you’re in the mood for a party.”
“I named her after you,” I blurt out as fast as I can. If I don’t say it now, I might never say it.
“I don’t deserve that,” she says.
“I thought it might be like a do-over,” I say, and at first the old Gran looks back at me; her eyes narrow like I’ve insulted her. And then all of a sudden she laughs—not a deep, rolling laugh like Selma’s savior on the bus, but a dry, cobwebby one.
She hugs me tight, even tighter than Selma did, but the smell of her takes me by surprise.
They’re the same old smells: Lemon Pledge, Joy soap, and Hills Bros.
coffee all jumbled together. But there’s one that catches me totally off guard. It’s the face cream that Gran has used every morning for as long as I’ve known her.
“Sister Josephine’s milk-and-honey lotion,” I say.
It’s the smell of two worlds colliding.
She kisses me on the top of my head, like we share a secret.
“I’ve never been very good with words,” she says. “I’m so sorry, Ruth.”
Now she really is crying. But so am I.
We link arms and I steer her across the icy sidewalk toward home. It suddenly dawns on me that there is a big difference between feeling tired and being weak. I place my hand on my chest one last time before we reach Birch Park, just to check.
It’s still there—my own heart, cobbled together and a little worse for wear—but it’s definitely not all beat out.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book is a work of fiction, but it’s also only possible because four generations of one family have lived in one particular place for a very long time. I cannot thank the members of that family enough, every single one of them.
Mainly this started out as a free write in the home of my dear friend and talented writer, Lisa Jones. If Lisa Jones says “Let’s all write for twenty minutes about the smell of other people’s houses,” by all means, do it. Take a writing class from Lisa Jones if at all possible is probably the best advice I can ever give anyone.
I wrote a very different version of this book as my creative thesis while attending Hamline University’s MFAC program in Writing for Children and Young Adults. I want to thank all of the Hamline faculty, staff, and students, but especially the comma goddess, Marsha Wilson Chall, who was the first person to think this idea had any merit at all.
Claire Rudolph Murphy convinced me that it’s not cliché to write about the place you know best, even if it is Alaska (something she does so well herself).
And the incredible Kelly Easton worked so hard on this book that sometimes I still hear her voice in my head saying things like “This is very dark, even for you.” Thank you for everything, Kelly—especially for convincing me that the title should be The Smell of Other People’s Houses.
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