Nothing Else Smells Like You

I squirmed under Jamie’s bed, slapping at his hands, screaming as I went. Jamie woke up, jumped out of bed, and flipped on the light. Seconds later, his mom entered, followed closely by Heather.

“What the hell is going on in here?” Jamie’s mom glared at her drunken husband sprawled on the floor shirtless, his pants undone.

“Nothing! I just must’ve passed out in here. I don’t remember! Jesus, calm the fuck down!” He struggled to his feet, fastening his jeans. Jamie glared at his father, beet-red. His mom grabbed her husband’s arm and pulled him toward the door. He shook her off violently and turned, fixing his eyes on me, struggling to focus.

“I don’t know what you’re screamin’ for, girl,” he slurred.

“Everyone get back to bed,” the mom said. Heather ran back to her room and Jamie closed the door behind them.

“Are you OK, Jane?” he asked.

“I’m fine. Just turn out the light and go back to bed.” He kept looking at me, sad. I turned over and pulled the cover up over my face. He shut the light off. I never spent the night at Jamie’s house again, not in Lodi or in Chicago. He came to my house and never asked any questions.


The first day after returning home to Chicago, I walked to Mrs. Dalby’s house to return her Emily Dickinson book and borrow another. I was surprised by the amount of anxiety I had just going to her house. I walked across the front lawn and knocked on her door. There was no answer so I pushed the button for the doorbell. Still no answer. I was disappointed; the anticipation of seeing her again had been fueling me for days. I sat down on the front stoop and opened the book on my lap. I tried to read but kept thinking of Mrs. Dalby, wondering where she was, when she would be back, what she would think finding me here waiting. I scanned the page, then read and re-read the same three lines:
What Inn is this
Where for the night
Peculiar Traveller comes?

I read and read without comprehension. Only fantasies of spending the night at her house, the two of us on the fold-out sofa in our pajamas with mugs of tea and blankets draping our shoulders. I would watch her dark, beautiful face while she read to me poetry that she had written, words she had never shared with anyone. I heard the garage door lift and I looked up from the book to see her car approaching. We connected eyes and she smiled. I blushed, closed the book and stood up.

“Jane, it’s great to see you. I love your haircut.” She opened the back car-door and unbuckled Sarah from her car seat. She approached me with the child on her hip and gave me a one-armed hug. Her casual attitude clashed against the serious intimacy I had been imagining; her vanilla scent closed my eyes and demanded to be breathed in.

“I brought your book,” I said, my cheek pressed against her shoulder. I must have stayed too long in the embrace because Sarah began to squirm although Mrs. Dalby didn’t release until I did.

“Great! You ready for a new one?”

“Yeah.” I looked at the ground, the cement floor of her garage. I looked around and saw boxes of WWF action figures stacked in front of life-sized cardboard cutouts of muscle-bound men and women with furious expressions.

“What’s all this?” I pointed at the collection.

“That’s Josh’s, my ex-husband.” She slammed the car door. I imagined Josh as a 300 pound bulging, angry wrestler.

“Come on in; help me change Sarah and put her down.” She walked through the garage door into a small basement area, then up a few stairs to the front room with all the books, where I had been before. The baby’s room smelled like citrus. I stood beside her as she unpinned Sarah’s diaper.

“Where’s her dad?” Anxiety filled my gut waiting for the answer.

“He lives in California. We’re divorced.”

Relief. I knew that what I felt was relief, I knew I did not want him around, but I didn’t understand why. I wanted her all to myself.

“What happened?” I asked. She threw the diaper into a container beside her and reached across me to pluck a new diaper from the package. I leaned closer to her before I moved out of the way. She glanced at me, smiling. Sarah kicked her pudgy pink legs.

“He met someone new. Left even before I knew I was pregnant.”

“Did you tell him about her?”

“Oh, of course. He knows she’s here. He’s not really interested. We were only married nine months. It was a mistake. How are you? How’s Sophie?”

“We’re fine. We just got home from the summer in Wisconsin.”

“Nice.” She finished changing Sarah and put her in her crib. She covered her up and switched on the monitor.
“Let’s go sit and talk.” She held the door for me to pass. We sat on the couch in the front room. I noticed a woman with her in many of the pictures that I hadn’t noticed before. Short dark hair, dimples, a giddy smile squishing her eyes closed.

“How are your mom and dad?”

“Fine, I guess. I haven’t seen them. We stayed with my Gram in her cabin in Lodi all summer with our dog, Missy,” I answered, still staring at the picture.

“So you got some reading done there?” She followed my gaze, looked a few moments at the woman in the picture, smiled.

“Yes, I read the whole book.” That was a lie. I had actually only read about a quarter of the book.

“What’d you think?”

“It’s nice. I like her poems.”

“Good. I made a reading list for you but I don’t know what I did with it. I know the first book I have for you is Black Beauty.” She walked over to one of the bookshelves and plucked out the book.

“What’s it about?”

“It’s the autobiography of a horse. He tells the story of all his adventures. It’s really exciting; I know you’ll enjoy it.” She handed the book to me. I flipped through the pages.

“Thanks. Who’s that woman in the picture?”

She sat down next to me and crossed her legs.

“Her name is Anne. She was someone very special to me.”

My question hung in silence between us.

“What do you want to do when you grow up, Jane?”

“I don’t know—” I considered all the possible answers, all the answers I had heard other kids my age give to that question: doctor, fireman, astronaut. They all seemed so unimportant and uninteresting to me.

“Save the world, I guess.” She laughed a little too loud.

“Bold aspiration for a fifth grader,” she smiled. My face grew hot and I hugged the book to my chest.

“What makes you think the world needs saving?” She tapped my knee. I looked up at her.

“Have you seen it lately?”

“Maybe the world is a matter of perception. Maybe it’s you that needs saving.”

“I don’t need anybody to save me. I’m just fine.”

“Of course you are,” she smiled again, perfecting her face. I was squeezing the book so hard that my arms tingled and my hands felt numb. I walked toward the door.

“I better go home. Sophie’ll wonder where I am.”

She stood up, stretching. I walked close to the picture with the dimpled woman in it and leaned toward it. Mrs. Dalby’s hand was on the side of her neck almost cupping her face, tilting it toward her. Both of them looked so happy.

“Anne and I were in love.”

Her voice startled me. I didn’t believe she said what I heard.

“What, who?” I straightened and stumbled back a step, nearly knocking the picture over. My stomach grew tight and tense.

“She passed away.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. Do you miss her?”

“Like crazy.”

Suddenly sad, she was looking at the image of her and Anne happy together. I couldn’t understand why I asked that question.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean…”

“It’s fine, Jane, really.”

She put her arm around my shoulders and guided me toward the door.

“There’s something special about you, Jane.”

A stir rose and whirled in my chest, my stomach, like aching hunger.

“I’m not a kid.”

She laughed, pulled her hair back and twisted it. It was hard to tell through her darker complexion, but I thought I saw her cheeks blush.

“OK, Jane. I hope you’ll visit us again soon.” She walked toward the door, placing a hand on my shoulder, gently squeezing as she passed. The spot where her hand had been burned through my shirt and skin and ached in my bones for her touch again. A woody, musky scent filled the room like freshly cut oak and a lemon tree together with a hint of the light, sweet smell of vanilla. Walking home, that smell, it was in the pages of her book. It lingered on my clothes.

Dirt in My Organs

I went back to the playground every day after that to look for the girl. When I got back to Gram’s cabin that night, I was soaked and my knee was still bleeding. Gram cleaned me up and put a big band aid on my scrape. She washed and patched my jeans, too, only the patch she used was pink and flowery. Nobody would take me for a boy now. They were my only pair of jeans left that fit. I grew out of the others and gave them to Sophie. Gram said she would take me shopping in Chicago but that I would just have to deal with what I had for that summer. When I went to the park, I tied a black bandanna around my leg to cover the pink patch. Sophie looked at me funny but seemed to understand when I told her I hated the patch. The girl never came back. A couple of other kids that came every day took over my attention.

Jamie lived three blocks from our cabin in Lodi. I noticed first his black, lumpish hair and brown skin. There weren’t any other brown kids in Lodi. I was playing catch with Sophie when he asked where I was from. When he said his family was moving to the very same neighborhood in Chicago in the coming autumn, we decided we were meant to be friends. His sister, Heather was Sophie’s age. She was on the playground too, swinging alone. Jamie called to her and she came over to say hi. Her mouth pulled far to the left when she spoke and rested in a softly curved slash when she was silent. One of the two of them must have been adopted because Heather was white.

“Which one of you was adopted?” I asked. Looking from one face to the next, I saw a resemblance and it occurred to me they simply had two different dads. Jamie smiled.

“I was,” he said. I felt the confusion on my face.

“But now that I’m looking, I see that you do look alike so how’s that possible?” Jamie laughed and looked at Heather who laughed in response. Her face pulled out of shape when she laughed too. The smallness of her face and the lack of symmetry contrasted with her big eyes to make them stunning.

“I was left in a basket on the front porch when I was a baby,” he said. Now Sophie and I laughed. I appreciated a good sense of humor. Only neither of them were laughing. In fact, he looked serious, hurt even.

“It’s true, actually. My parents took me in and kept me as their own. They had Heather when I was three,” he said. His parents took him in and cared for him. I shook my head a little because he was telling the truth. When the truth sounds more like a lie than a lie does, it’s usually the truth. I looked at Heather. Without her facial deformity, she really did look like him.

My friendship with Jamie softened the rougher spots of being. Every morning that summer in Lodi, I rode my bike over to Jamie’s house. We pretended our bikes were motorcycles, climbed trees, and built forts in branches.

Almost every night I slept on the wide, wooden slats of his bedroom floor. Most of our tree-forts, built with plywood and brush, seemed to architecturally surpass Jamie’s own home, if not in structural soundness then at least in quality and age. His house was older than the eldest members of the thick-trunked trees in the woods surrounding it, shrouding and secluding it. There was a slight slant to every room and a dissymmetry to the house overall. One half looked barely attached to the other, like the two halves were built separately then placed together. When I asked Jamie about it, he said the east half of the house was newer than the west half. There had once been a fire that required a rebuild but the previous occupants wanted to save money, so they tore down just half the house to rebuild. Water at Jamie’s house smelled like dirt. It came from the poorly maintained well in the side yard. Every time his mom gave me a glass, I looked at the sediment in the bottom when I took a drink and tried not to think about it. The smell in the house was always that well water dirt mixed with the aroma of recently cooked game, usually squirrel, and sometimes, at its most pleasant, the scent of freshly brewed coffee.

Jamie and I rode up to his house on our bikes one day to the sight of his father and another man aiming shotguns at the tree tops around the yard. I skidded to a stop. Jamie rode ahead as if he didn’t notice then stopped and turned back.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“They have guns!”

“They’re hunting,” he laughed.

“Hunting what?”

“Squirrels and rabbits.”

“Why?”

“To eat, why else?”

“You kill squirrels and rabbits and then eat them?”

“Dad does. He goes up north to hunt deer, too. That’s my favorite. Especially the jerky he makes from the leftover meat.”

I just nodded, amazed.

The next day I woke up at Jamie’s early, shivering and sore from the hard floor and the cold draft. I waited for him to wake up, counting the spider-web cracks in the ceiling, starting over every time I blinked and lost my place. I heard his dad coming in from the night before. I actually smelled him coming before I heard anything, his one-hundred-proof sweat preceding him. He came through the door of Jamie’s room and peered at me with watery eyes. I feigned sleep with held breath and eyes too tightly shut, trying too hard not to open them. I felt him staring. I felt examined and disgraced. His stare left dirt under my clothes, under my skin, inside my organs. The grit made my bones ache. I heard him walk away and let go of my breath. It wasn’t until a few days later that I decided never to come back to his house again.

I was on the floor sleeping next to Jamie’s bed when I heard a loud whisper.

“Jane, are you awake?” I smelled whiskey and stale sweat. The room was oil-dark and I was lying on my side, my face half-buried in my pillow. I felt him close behind me, his breath hot against the back of my neck, then something wet. I jumped and turned over.

“Shhh, it’s OK.” He reached for my stomach.