“All right, Aila,” Mrs. Cliffton says soothingly, but she grips the steering wheel, and when Miles looks back and forth between us, I regret being so impulsive. Maybe whatever she’s hiding is so terrible that Miles shouldn’t know of it. My panic rises a notch further.
“And tell us why your flowers don’t smell,” Miles chimes in, leaning forward.
Color is flooding into the skin peeking out at the nape of Mrs. Cliffton’s neck, matching the maroon of her hat. “I’m sorry. It was a mistake not to say anything yet,” she stammers. “I was planning to tell you today. I just wanted you to settle in, and we didn’t know if—?being Juliet’s children,” she hesitates. “If you would even be affected.” She glances back at us with a look of apology. “What happens here isn’t something we ever speak of to outsiders.”
“What?” Miles asks. “What happens here?”
“We call them the Disappearances.”
A car passes, and the woman driving it lifts her hand in a cheerful wave to Mrs. Cliffton. But the woman’s smile falters when she sees me, and her brow knits.
Mrs. Cliffton says, “Your mother truly never spoke of this?”
Miles and I stay silent.
Mrs. Cliffton sighs. “I don’t blame her, exactly. Just leave and forget the whole mess.” She bobs her head at the road, considering. “We never knew what life was like before them. They started in 1907, the year we were born.”
She isn’t gripping the steering wheel quite as tightly, as if she’s relieved that the secret is now out. “The first things we lost were the scents. I was there that day, at the Harvest Fair—?of course, nearly everyone was—?but I was just a baby at the time.”
The steering wheel rolls under her hands. “It started innocently enough. We’ve always held a friendly competition among the townspeople to see who can come up with the best recipe for Sterling apples each year—?tarts and pies, ciders, jellies. You get the idea. Everyone brings dishes to a gathering called the Harvest Fair. It’s silly, of course, but people by nature can become quite competitive, especially in a town as small as this one. Everyone was so focused on who would be declared the winner, that at first, no one noticed that things weren’t quite right. Not until the judge uncovered the dishes and leaned down to smell them.”
The edges of town are coming into view, starting with the Texaco station. “Initially, no one was overly alarmed,” she continues. “Of course, we didn’t realize what it meant at the time, when the judge announced that the scents of every entry seemed to have vanished. The award was forgotten as people came forward to see for themselves.”
Her voice takes on the slightest tremor. “Perhaps they thought it was only temporary. Certainly no one guessed that it would be so far-reaching, that scents had disappeared entirely from Sterling. The Disappearance affected everyone, young and old, and every thing: fruits and flowers, perfumes and shampoos—?even those things that make people sentimental, like the smell of a child’s hair, or scents linked to important memories.”
I think of the scents that made up my childhood: eggs frying, cookies puffed up with sugar crystals, Mother’s chicory coffee every morning, the painted bowl of lemons on the coffee table, Father’s fading after-shave when he leaned down to kiss me good night—?even the smells I hated. Like boiled spinach. The compost pile. The burnt whitefish that coated the Tilt’s walls for days until Mother swore she’d never cook it again.
“Anosmia experts came from around the country to investigate,” Mrs. Cliffton continues. “But even after Sterling began to understand the extent of what happened, no one knew what had caused it—?or how to go about its reversal. No one regained their sense of scent, even when they tried to leave town. From there on after, Sterling’s children were all born with it. And as the years went on, people became more resigned to the fact that this was something permanent.”
“Is this—” I ask, hesitating. I swallow. “Will it be permanent for me and Miles?”
“Not for you, dear,” Mrs. Cliffton says quickly. “You should step out of its hold as soon as you leave our borders.”
I exhale with a swell of relief so immense that it makes me feel both guilty and selfish. I peer out at the men and women of Sterling. They all look so normal and unconcerned, walking through the center of town with packages tucked under their arms, ducking into Fitzpatrick’s General Store. A woman in a large brimmed hat points out the curb to her pudgy-armed son.
“What happened next?” Miles asks.
“True panic didn’t set in until later,” Mrs. Cliffton says. She parks the car. “When, on the exact same date, seven years after the original Disappearance, it happened again.” She turns off the engine and faces us. “Your mother and I woke one morning to find we no longer had reflections. I was only a little girl, but it was the strangest thing—?to go looking for myself only to find that I had disappeared. And then, the year we turned fourteen, it was as though all the colors had been drained from our paints and pens. Anything new that we tried to paint or draw with them—?it all came out gray.”
I think of my mother as a girl, of the confusion and grief she must have felt when she woke up to find that something she loved was gone.
“Bit by bit, these pieces of our lives that we always took for granted have been slipping away,” Mrs. Cliffton says. “Every seven years, like clockwork, something else is lost. Scents, reflections, colors—”
Miles interrupts. “But why?”
“I wish I knew, dear. No one does.”
“But my mother could smell,” I protest, remembering her garden, the awful coating of the whitefish.
“Yes . . .” Mrs. Cliffton says, her voice tightening. “Which is a story for later.” She glances toward the town. “Not here.”
I can hardly believe anything she’s said, even though I’ve seen it with my own eyes. I’m lightheaded and sweating, trying to grasp at an unspooling thread. Trying to remember every last thing my mother ever said about growing up here, to do the math in my mind.
“If something disappears every seven years . . .” I say slowly, “how long has it been since the last one?”
Mrs. Cliffton waves at someone across the street, fixing a smile on her face. “Well, I’m afraid you’ve come just in time.” She adjusts her hat without the use of the mirror and pushes open the door with a spark of defiance. “There’s a month left before we find out what disappears next.”