She furrows her brow.
“Come here.”
“You want me to help paddle now?”
“Yeah.”
“I thought I would just slow you down.”
“Now I want you to help.”
She accepts my hand and sits next to me, takes up the paddle. We paddle side by side. The breeze shakes the treetops. A loon’s cry pierces the quiet.
“A little faster,” I say.
She puts her muscle into it. We get up speed; not the kind of speed I had alone, but it gets her out of her thoughts.
“You can smell the leaves? The moss?”
“Yup.”
“Both of them? Right now? All the different notes?” she asks. “Like a wine connoisseur or something?”
“I don’t know about a wine connoisseur, but…it’s right there in the air for anybody to smell.”
She smiles. She’s happy to be with me, I suppose. For the moment, anyway.
“The institute smell must have driven you crazy.”
“More than you can imagine.”
“The antiseptic. Oh my God. You know, that cleaner they used?”
“Right,” I say. “The floor smell was the worst. But really every person and surface had their sharp smells.”
“You have such a sense of smell. It must have been hell.”
“Not when I caught your scent.”
Her face goes red.
“I mean your everyday scent. Clean and spicy. I could be in a place with dozens of people and hundreds of smells and pick it out. I could tell when you would enter the building.”
“Wow.” She paddles on, swishing the water.
“It’s nothing special. Just a skill I developed.”
She perks up. “For hunting?”
My heart sinks. That’s the sort of stuff the professor wanted to know. Would I practice smelling? Did hunger make my smell better? Would I scent and track my prey? Kill it with my bare hands? Feel the life go out of it? Even one of her beautiful deer? Yes. Absolutely.
Her boss Murray called me a caveman during one of their conversations. My face glows hot to think of it. They had a caveman cartoon on the TV at the institute. A figure of ridicule. Dragging women by their hair.
“A skill for hunting?” she asks again.
“Smell is a good skill for hunting,” I bite out.
She purses her lips.