She was on foot and hugged a dirty cloth bag to her chest that appeared to wrap itself around several books. She turned slowly as if needing to remember an important line from a distant conversation, or as if something or someone had spoken her name so far away and so subtly that she had felt it rather than heard it. She was looking through the locked iron gate of Old Saint Mary's Garden, a rare interruption of green earth between two walls, two walls in the midst of steadfast rows of three and four-story brick buildings lining both sides of Main Street like the drawn faces of old men at a long narrow table, shoulder to shoulder, waiting for the lights to change so they could be served. She closed her eyes. She opened her eyes. She realized she was breathing. It was lilac.

That was it. In the far corner of this locked city garden, huddled next to the stone wall were a few lilac bushes in bloom. It was early April and the weather had suddenly turned quite gray and cold. The handfuls of wafting lavendar seemed self-conscious in the dreary world, like the cheeks of young neighborhood girls who had done their make-up in front of the mirror together for only the third or fourth time, applying perfume to each other giggling, still unconvinced that a little goes a long way.

But yes. When she was in the fifth grade, the house her mother rented had a cluster of lilacs in the corner of the yard just before the grass sloped steeply down toward the sidewalk and the street. The bushes had been there when they moved in, untended but prolific all the same. And now she realized that this trace, this scent which had entered her was a thread, a trail of crumbs, a perfumed diary which perfectly and instantly spanned 25 years of her life, strangely able to stop her dead on her way. She stood still, her back to the city, to the world, to the universe and everyone in it. It occurred to her then quite suddenly that she was going to die.

. . .

In Scent
by Brenda Volk

. . .

Death. The thought came to her before she had a chance to think of what the word truly meant, the flicker of darkness, the coming to light. It was at this very moment, the pause, the smell of lilacs wafting past her and into the distance, that he came back to her. The details seeped out of the dingy corner where they had been contained for all these years, details that came to her sharp and slowly, as though secretions from holes pricked by the tiniest of needles. Its play began like a movie, where she was both actor and viewer, the observer and the observed.

She slipped into her fifth-grade self, her hair long, wet, and tangled--she had spent the afternoon swimming in the above-ground pool in his backyard. At the beginning of the summer the other kids in the neighborhood came to swim, but they soon disappeared from the pool, as did the inflatable toys, the rafts and kickboards that were stacked against the side of his house. What remained was the curvy slide, which they climbed together, her climbing the ladder in front of him, then sitting and waiting at the top as he situated himself behind, placing his legs on top of her own. "For safety," he explained. "Your mom would never let you come here again if something happened." He circled his arms around her stomach, holding her tightly as they slipped down the slide, whipped around the curves, and dropped into the pool. He still held her as they sunk to the pool's slimy floor, then he catapulted them out from the sting of chlorinated water, into the air, the sun, another walk to the top of the slide.

They drank root beer floats that day. He put so much ice cream in her glass the foam overflowed. She sat there watching its overflow, uncertain of what to do. "Well, don't just sit there," he said. "Lick it off." She slurped the foam off the top, and began to lick the sides of the glass. When she was finished she looked up at him, as if to say, "Is it ok now?" But he wasn't paying attention. His arm had half disappeared into the gallon pail of vanilla ice cream, and he drew out an enormous scoop which he dumped in her glass. The root beer overflowed again, sending her tongue to the glass' sides.

It came time for him to walk her home. It was always when the sun had lost its peak, when her skin became parched and wrinkled by too much time in the water, and her stomach ached from whatever he fed her. When she envisioned the walk, she thought of it as a father walking with his daughter. She had seen this on television, where fathers and daughters walked alone in the emptiness of land, where they held hands, and swung them softly. She never heard the words they said, but the father would point to a tree or something in the sky, and his lips would move, and the daughter would look into the distance where he pointed, and nod. But the father always wore polo shirts and chinos, and that day and every day before it, he wore ragged jeans slipped over his Speedos, and no shirt. During the walk his chest hair would lose the sleekness it had gained from the water, drying wildly, making him seem primitive, gorilla-like.

The walk was not far, and they walked in silence. The only sound in the dry open fields was the rhythm of his thongs as they slapped with each step, kicking dust, dirtying the tops of his feet. The uncomfortable wetness of her bathing suit had shadowed its outline on her shirt and shorts. She was terrified at the sudden sensation of her nipples tightening, and she crossed her arms over her chest. This feeling brought her back to the horror the morning when she first noticed her breasts poking out from her night shirt. They came up without warning, the way waves suddenly ripple a flat sea, suddenly they were perched upon her chest, and she knew there would be no crest to them, no fall back to flatness. Only her mother was excited. "You will soon know the power of breasts," she shrilled, pushing her own up and together so they rose like a tidal wave, a tsunami of flesh. But she felt too young to learn the offerings and rewards of that sort of power--whatever it was.

And she didn't know what to say to him during the walk, or how to respond to what he said. In the pool it was different, there was more physical activity, swimming and sliding and eating, so she was never thinking about words. The walk held a different sort of weight, it seemed to come with expectation, and she didn't quite know what this expectation was.

He stopped. He wiggled a can of Copenhagen from his back pocket, slid a wad beneath his lip, offered her some and chuckled as she shook her head.

"Thanks for letting me swim today," she said. She was afraid that soon she would be like the other children, told not to come back, and be left to spend the summer alone in her hot house, or running through dusty potato fields with the town's misfit children, carrying sticks and rocks, and wishing there was some place she could escape the heat, drop into water.

"Anytime you want to come over," he said. She watched his lips form the words he spoke, the tobacco specks wedged between his teeth, the bits of spittle flying forth like fireworks dribbling down on a crowd of spectators, only to spark out before the touch. Then he said, "Tomorrow?"

It was such a dry summer. They stopped at the lilac bush, its flowers brittle, the sole element keeping them attached to their stems was their strong scent. How the smell floated so freely in the early morning before the dust on the road was kicked up, before the fields were turned over by sunrise tractors, how it would waft into her window, into her dreams as she slept, and how when they moved away a month later, she thought that the scent of those lilacs was the only thing she missed. But she knew better now.

And, here. This is where she wanted to stop the memory, to alter the storyline, but it, in all its veracity was pouring forth on its own, leaving her unable to divert or pretty its flow. It began, as such things do, with a touch. He touched her elbow, not with just a finger, but with as much of his hand as he could possibly cup around her skin. The feel of his hand, she remembered, was raw and gummy from the pool, the day spent in the sun. It felt dead, rubberish, as though it was made up of layers of skin on skin, lacking bones, veins, and rushing blood. Her hands were folded over her chest, and he nudged her elbow out from its resting place, causing her arms to fall slack against her sides.

"Call me daddy," he said. "Say you won't tell anyone, daddy."

"I won't tell anyone what?"

"You won't tell anyone what?"

"I won't tell anyone, daddy."

"That's better."

"But what won't I tell anyone, daddy?"

She could hear her own voice, young and quiet, as if a thin slice had been taken from her own sound. The sun's set was just beginning, and she was relieved to think that soon she would hear her mother's car sputtering up the road, and at that moment he would turn her body away, and slap her on the bottom. As she ran to her house, the stinging sensation of his hand still lingering on her backside, she would wonder why he spanked her as she left. Was she bad for not leaving earlier, or was she bad for not staying longer?

But this night was different. The car's sound hadn't come yet. Her mother was late--in just an hour, they would be sitting in front of the television eating microwaved macaroni and cheese, her mother telling her about the tire, the nail, the slow release of air as she worked cleaning the rooms of Motel 6. She would telephone him over to help. He would come quickly, with a line of sweat running down one cheek, and he would nod to her and smile. As her mother ran in the kitchen to get him a glass of orangeade, he would take her head to his lips and whisper in her ear, "If you tell your mom--if you tell anyone . . ." Then he would pull back, hold his hands in front of her face, and say, "See how strong they are?"

But this was later, it was after. For now, he said, "I'll show you what not to tell."

The sun dropped deeper into sky, and she didn't think to look again before it sank luxurious and sad beneath the horizon. She felt a sinking in her stomach, like she ingested something that was heavily weighted, yet fell slowly so she could still feel the line of its courseway after it had settled deep within her body. She felt that this was the pathway of fear, that it fed itself into an opened mouth, and she had opened hers. She had taken the hairy knot in and had swallowed it whole, and it had untangled itself and dissipated throughout her body.

It was almost over, this beginning, this start of something that was coming back to her now, telling her it wanted to be known, that it wanted its end. He reached his arm above her head and plucked a strand from the lilac bush. On her face, she felt the exhales from each of his nostrils as he bent to position the brittle flower behind her ear. The stem poked at the side of her head, and the slight seeping from where he had ripped the flower from its grounding she felt as a tiny spit of wetness.

"I like how that looks," he said.

This was it. He touched her hair and cupped his hand softly over her cheek, then ran his fingers over the front of her shirt, going past her breasts and back up to them again. And then his fingers found their way beneath her shirt, onto her bathing suit. She stood in the light that came too late for sun and too early for moon, beneath the shelter and scent of the lilac bush that rustled slightly in the night breeze. As he rubbed his hands over her, she stood like a trembling patient in a doctor's office, letting the doctor measure her breathing by touching places on her back, letting the doctor check her pulse, her reflexes, letting him breathe into her ear and slip his tongue inside to see if everything was all right.

"Call me daddy," he whispered into her ear. "Pull on my chest hair."

And maybe she did this because she never had a father. Maybe she did it because she was getting older and growing breasts and because once while sitting in the stall in the girls' rest room at school, she heard the other girls talking about boys with hands that wandered up their shirts, down their pants, talking about the shot of electricity that coursed up their legs and throughout their bodies. She didn't know this then, but those bathroom girls had experienced the moment that would birth a spark into their bodies. And this spark that flickered in the lowest pit of their stomachs would never be dormant. It would always be present, yearning for fire, for flame, it would always take what would give it the brightest burn.

But she knows this now.

And she knows the rush of relief that came when the gravel sounded, when her mother's car with its flat tire came warbling up the road and he yanked his hand from beneath the tight nylon of her bathing suit, just as his fingers began to wander past her navel, just before they had the chance to make their spark.

It was over. She remembers running away before his hand had the chance to slap at her backside. As she ran, her tears rolling off and blowing behind her, she pulled at the straps of her bathing suit, snapping them over and over against her skin, making sure there was nothing in there that didn't belong--no hands, no fingers, just her own body--alone, deceived.

Back at the Garden, she rested in a patch of grass that trickled from the perimeters, her bag of folded laundry beneath her head. She watched the shadow of her breath blow into the cold sky, the sight of this comforting, showing her that she was alive. She sat up and stared at the fields in the distance and away from the town, the winter wheat having been stripped of their berries, the fields torched in preparation for the next season, the next cycle. She had always loved the absolute black of this land after it had been burned. It was one of the few things in her life she had to come to know as pure and true.

Her bag of laundry seemed to mock her, the ease of cleansing the clothes that she put on her skin, when she wanted to cleanse her skin itself, wash away the touch, his hands. And not just wash the visual memory of them, but take away her skin's memory of their heat and sweat, the sensation of their false landscape, the wandering movements of their touch. She felt weakened, sickened by the sight of her own body, and by her inability to separate herself from it. She stroked the back of her ear, and looked down at her breasts, then clutched the rope of her laundry bag and sighed.

It was her then and it is her now.

The sky was darkening, she looked toward the town, a few early lights on, shining steadily. There was nothing to do except walk, and keep walking into the distance, leave the scent of lilacs to the tree, and to her childhood, which had, after that day in the pool, disappeared. Her back to town she headed toward the fields, breathing in the newness of the dirt on the ground, still raw and fresh in its recovery from winter. The moon had come up thick and near full, and it pained her that its cycle was so beautiful and so predictable, that it was able to look over the gravities and trials of the Earth and at nighttime still shine glorious and complete.

She ducked beneath the barbed wire of a field, and stepped onto the expanse of burned land. This land was not flat, but rose in dull waves, a slack ocean that expanded black and oily ahead of her, its darkness taking away the distinction between land and sky. It surprised her that the blackened wheat stems only needed her slightest touch to fall. And how different the scent was here, the smokiness of destruction, of ash, fire, and spark. The scent was as it should be, she thought. With each step, she was making ash.

Each small hill led to another, and she seemed to be walking higher, closer and closer to the moon, where soon she would be able to trace her fingers over its pale surface, like she wished to reach out and comfort her face as that child. She saw her outline through the curtains of her bedroom window as he fixed her mother's tire, and his words to her mother floated up to her, "Ahh, here's the hole. I'll patch that right up, and everything will be just fine."

She knew that her mother leaned against the side of the garage, next to the pink bike with the banana seat and white streamers, watching his every move, analyzing every detail, not because she cared how a tire was patched or bolted on, but because she wanted to create the perception, the woman as heroine in distress, the man as hero coming to the rescue. She saw her in the tight tank top and jeans she had thrown on after she phoned him, she could smell the scent of White Shoulder's perfume blending with the scent of grease and garage oil. As she tried to sleep that night, she felt transformed and dizzy as the world spun the day's secret around her like a cocoon. She felt alone with her new definition of herself and her placement in the world, that now she needed to protect herself from her own body--not only in the sense that she had been, and could be touched, but that she could also touch. And now as she held her hand up and stroked the cheek of the moon, she told herself that it was okay, she told herself that if she kept breathing, if she kept making distance, she would be all right.

And she would be. She continued walking, transforming the wheat fields into ash. When her shoes and the legs of her jeans blackened, she turned toward the river that ran next to the paper mill at the end of town. There, she took her clothes off, let them lose themselves with the current and be bathed. Naked, she sat in the shallow of the river bed, sinking into the rocks and coarse sand, drawing comfort in the soft ripples that spun around her and were swept away. She let her body grow numb until she knew, and could only feel, the color blue.

As she sat in the river, she decided this. She would sit in the April waters until the sunrise swept the underbellies of the clouds to a soft pink. At that point she would rise from the water, her skin tingling and new. She would reach into her laundry bag and slip on clothes that still smelled like the antiseptics used by the laundromat, the comforting smell of fabric softener. She would follow the river into town, sit at the diner and sip coffee while she read the newspaper, other people's stories. Then she would walk home, place the clothes in her dresser. She would begin the day in her usual way, by sprinkling food for her chickens, swinging slowly on the porch swing. It would give her a new kind of pleasure to watch the chickens peck the seeds, to see how they ate every bit the scatterings. She would watch until all the seeds were gone and the chickens had stopped searching, content that they had left nothing except the beauty of bare and solid ground.