The Scent Keeper

Emmeline heads to Vancouver on a bus. The city that unfolds around her is new and strange. With the help of a kind bus driver, Emmeline finds her way to a cheap boardinghouse where, if she watches her money carefully, she can stay in the city long enough to find Fisher. She lives on peanut butter sandwiches as she begins to check nurseries one by one in the city. It is a frustrating effort, and only occasional respites in a nearby park keep up her spirits. After 47 dead-ends, Emmeline finally finds the nursery where Fisher worked. He was fired three months earlier, Emmeline is told, over a problem with a girl who also worked there. Out of money and angry at how quickly Fisher moved on, Emmeline decides to make one last visit: to the corporate headquarters of Inspire, her mother’s perfume company: “After what I’d learned about Fisher, maybe my only real hope was that I’d have a chance to decide whether or not I wanted [my mother]” (205).

The high-rise building where Inspire is headquartered, with its lobby crowded with streams of business people, intimidates Emmeline. She waits for nearly three hours by the lobby elevator hoping to recognize a mother she only knows through grainy newspaper photographs.