The Smell of Other People's Hou - Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock Page 0,58

but they, too, wipe their eyes with the corner of their wet habits. I stare at these women, who used to scare me in their long black robes, flitting around the abbey like bats.

There’s Sister Bernadette, who smells of pistachios and always leaves a cup of tea by my bed; Sister Josephine, with her lead foot and the way she’s helped me understand Gran; even Sister Agnes, off in the kitchen now, because she has to be gruff or she wouldn’t know what to do with herself. I remember the abbess saying “She’s a member of our own family,” and I remember Selma’s letter—how I rolled my eyes at her words even as she knew I would. But once again, Selma was right. We don’t have to be blood to be family.

Dumpling has been in a coma for weeks now, but she also has a punctured lung and a broken clavicle. Her father might have gotten to her sooner if I hadn’t said she was right behind us, but everyone tells me it’s not my fault. No, I think, it’s all Ruth’s fault. Ruth and her stupid blue note.

I thought it while I watched them load Dumpling into the plane to be medevaced to Fairbanks; I thought it as we packed up fish camp to return home early; and I’m thinking it now as I bake a blueberry pie because Dumpling’s mother asked me to, before she left to go sit beside Dumpling’s hospital bed again. She wants me to take it over to the Lawrences’, and I wonder if she knows I would rather throw it in their gran’s face than give her a pie while my best friend lies silent in a coma. “Damn you straight to hell, Ruth Lawrence,” I whisper as I roll out the crust.

It has ruined the smell of blueberries for me, probably forever. Because isn’t that how forever happens—instantly? One minute your best friend is right there, and then suddenly she’s not. I used to love the smell of sweet, hot blueberries signaling the end of summer. Just the right amount of Crisco flaking the crust, the bubbly berries seeping out onto the oven floor and smoking up the whole house. These berries are from last year’s haul on the top of Shotgun Ridge, from a sunny day after Dumpling and Bunny had come home from fish camp and we hiked up to the secret berry spot, up past the tree line where you could see to the end of everywhere. We were all sweating and covered in DEET, but it didn’t make any difference to the mosquitoes. We picked until our fingers were solid purple, and Bunny’s teeth and lips, too, because she always ate more than she put aside.

It was a bumper crop and a perfect fall day, when everything smells ripe, like it’s just about to turn and it’s rushing to do so before winter. It’s the cry of fall: Hurry up and fill the buckets; hurry up, the fireweed is about to top off. Once it does, the snow is right around the corner and that’s it for another year. Hurry, hurry, hurry.

If the seasons bleed into each other like a watercolor painting, it means not enough fish and berries to last the winter, not enough wood chopped for the stove, not enough meat in the freezer. One year winter came so fast and so hard, the leaves on the birch trees didn’t even have time to turn yellow and fall off; they froze solid green on the branches. They clung there for months on skinny skeleton arms, the color so blindingly wrong it was creepy. Every year it’s a race between the seasons, and that year fall lost.

And then it hits me—Dumpling lying in her hospital bed is just like fall. Wake up, Dumpling, wake up, wake up, it’s almost winter, hurry, hurry, hurry, I whisper to her in my head, praying that somehow she can hear me.

Dumpling’s father comes in looking even older than he did when he left this morning to go sit by Dumpling’s bed with her mother. I know her condition is still the same or he wouldn’t look like he does. I pour him a cup of the brothers and he smiles at me, as if it takes all his strength.

“Pie smells good,” he says. “Is that for Lily’s gran?”

“Why do I have to take a pie to their gran?” I try not to sound angry. He smiles again, as if my question