45 pages • 1 hour read
The Scent Keeper
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Pages 127-194Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Pages 127-194 Summary
Using the computer in the school library, Emmeline decides to do a Google search for “Nightingale.” Several dead-ends lead her to a business story dated 10 years earlier about an inventor named John Hartfell who created a machine he dubbed Nightingale; the newspaper photo showed the machine, and Emmeline remembers it as her father’s machine from the cabin. The article reveals how the machine, which promised to preserve scents, turned into a debacle when the scents began to fade, leading to a firestorm of lawsuits. The article identifies John’s wife and business partner, Victoria Wingate. Facing catastrophic lawsuits, John disappeared along with his daughter. Emmeline prints out the article, but she is confronted by one of the meaner kids as she tries to exit the library. Desperate to keep the print-out, she kicks him in the groin and heads out of the school, hiking the entire eight miles back to the resort.
The news article shakes Emmeline. Her entire life appears to be a lie. Her father, believed to be a hero, was a liar, a failure, a crank, and worst of all a kidnapper. She ends up at Fisher’s house where his mother, a gentle and pale woman, invites Emmeline to stay for dinner if she calls Colette and Henry first. Over dinner, Fisher’s father reveals how his life turned into one disappointment after another: Among these disappointments are a wife who gets sea sick and a son who has no interest in fishing. The dinner grows increasingly tense.
After dinner, Emmeline and Fisher talk. They know what they need to do: run away to Emmeline’s island and back to the cabin to sort things out. Emmeline knows it is time to separate fantasy from reality: “Now that I had found the article, I think a part of me knew I’d have to go back…to see if the man in the story bore any relation to the father of my memories” (143).
That night the two steal one of Fisher’s father’s boats and make the perilous night crossing to the island. Initially, Emmeline is overwhelmed by the familiar scents on the island. She breathes in all the aromas of the place she knows as home. She has brought in her pocket her father’s last bottle. As the aromas of the island entice her, she feels memories “shifting, returning, moving” (155). The two teenagers arrive at the cabin, and over the next two weeks they set up a home. In time, Fisher reveals the full extent of his father’s abuse, a secret he has never told anyone. The night he shares that, the two make love for the first time: “I was seventeen years old, alone on an island with a boy I had loved since the first time he sat down at the desk next to mine. I closed my eyes and kissed him back, and then we both went up to the loft” (159).
Exploring the island the next day, the two wander up to the bluff, but Emmeline resists sharing her secret about her complicity in her father’s death. Fisher senses she is keeping a secret from him. Then, they spot a small boat approaching the lagoon carrying Henry and Fisher’s father. The reunion is understandably fraught; Fisher’s father, with little warning, punches Fisher for disobeying him. The four return to the town. In their hurried exodus, however, Emmeline forgets her father’s bottle. The reunion with Colette is emotional, and Fisher returns to his home.
That night, Colette and Henry get a phone call from the hospital: Fisher has been admitted. Emmeline can barely stomach looking at Fisher in the hospital bed. He has been beaten, his eyes blackened and his face “every color but his own” (168). The doctor tells them no charges will be filed; without the mother’s testimony, the evidence only suggests the father and son had been in a bad fight. Emmeline goes home and finds out the following morning that Fisher left the hospital on his own, leaving her a note that reads, “Take care of yourself.” (170).
A week or two passes before Emmeline receives a letter from Fisher. He is in Vancouver working at a plant nursery. Emmeline knows she needs to go to the city. A Google search of her mother’s name, Victoria Wingate, reveals that more than 10 years after her husband fled in disgrace she emerged as the principal architect of a global perfumery called Inspire, headquartered in Vancouver. The premise of the revolutionary business was to promote how scents can encourage people to spend money: “Flood a bakery with the scent of fresh-baked cookies, and sales spike by more than 25%” (180). Aromas, the company has found, create memories that can in turn be used to market products. Provocative subliminal marketing using aromas enhances the consumer experience. Victoria is recognized as a powerful force in the scent industry.
Emmeline cannot forget Fisher. She clings to one of the t-shirts he wore when he worked at the resort, but even its scent—part sweat, part fir trees, and part paint—is fading. When Henry, after one of his delivery runs to the islands, surprises her and brings back her father’s last bottle, Emmeline knows it is time to act. Packing her few possessions and leaving a note for Henry and Colette, Emmeline departs in the night, determined now to “find the truth” (192).
Pages 127-194 Analysis
These chapters, which mark the end of Emmeline’s time in Secret Cove, fittingly introduce the toxic impact of secrets. Even as Emmeline uses the reach of the Internet to piece together some sense of who she is, the more she finds out, the more she sees how much has been kept from her. The pivotal emotional moment in these chapters centers on the difficult, painful imperative to share secrets. Fisher shares with Emmeline the secret he has kept from her: the physical abuse he and his mother have endured at the hands of a father who takes his disappointments out violently on his family. And it is Emmeline’s decision not to share with Fisher her darkest secret—her guilt over the role she played in the death of her father—that marks the sudden end to what had been a fairy tale romance. The secret is not a lie; rather it reflects the choice Emmeline makes not to trust Fisher. It is a page out of her own father’s life: His retreat to the island solitude reflected his decision to seek refuge from others, and to maintain a moat around the most vulnerable elements of experience.
Because the novel is a coming-of-age narrative, when Emmeline learns about the deceptions of her father, his failures as a scientist, and his criminal activity in kidnapping her, her reaction is predictably imperfect. She is still learning. “It was the mermaids all over again,” she declaims as she prints out the article about her father. “Nothing I had known was true. Nothing was real” (131). Devastated by the unexpected revelations, she conspires with Fisher to do what her father did best: run. When Fisher’s father, over what becomes an increasingly uncomfortable dinner, reveals the depth of his self-loathing and his dark anger, Fisher’s strategy is similar to Emmeline’s: run.
The interlude on the island is as magical as it is desperate, at once restorative and toxic: “I needed to go back to the island” (143). Emmeline the adult narrator understands what Emmeline, the teenager in love, does not: You cannot go home again, particularly when home is an artificially controlled environment designed to protect a person from the real world. Nothing seems particularly off when the two runaways arrive at the island.
Emmeline is emotionally reanimated by all the familiar aromas of the island. She shares her enthusiasm with a reluctant Fisher. Together they forage for food in the familiar paths of the woods. Emmeline is certain they can sustain their life here, an echo of her own father’s failed strategy. “Maybe we can do this,” Fisher says. “Maybe we can,” Emmeline responds (156). That fragile separate peace sustains the two sufficiently that they cross the boundary into a sexual relationship, a movement so subtle, gentle, and quiet that when the two head up to the cabin’s loft the movement seems inevitable.
Unsurprisingly, an adult Emmeline shatters this reboot of a fairy tale: “In many ways, it was the fairy tale I’d always wanted” (160). Reality, however, intrudes again. First, Fisher’s candid confession of the humiliation he feels as the victim of his father’s abuse does not entirely surprise Emmeline. Her uncanny sense of smell detected long ago something unsettling about Fisher’s father. She smelled fear, anger, and disappointment in his combination of stale smoke, beer, sweat, gasoline, and fish. But the moment of Fisher’s confession shatters the illusion that they were refugees from reality and had found the perfect place to live apart from violence, meanness, and brutality. In short order, Fisher and Emmeline watch as the boat carrying Henry and Fisher’s father appears in the lagoon.
The fairy tale is also shattered by Emmeline’s decision not to share with Fisher her darkest secret about the role she believes she played in her father’s death. By taking his bottles up to the bluff and over several weeks throwing them into the sea, Emmeline believes she drove her father to the desperate attempt to retrieve the bottles as they washed out to sea: “That one memory, the face in the water looking up at me, belonged only to my father and me… It was all I had left” (162). That decision ends the fairy tale of Fisher and Emmeline. With his intuitive sense of honesty, Fisher knows she is keeping secrets, and “the hurt slapped across his face” (162).
With shattering speed, the novel’s fairy tale ambience ends once and forever with the phone call Emmeline gets the night the two are returned to Secret Cove. Fisher’s condition in the hospital testifies to the reality of a world they cannot run from. His desperate decision to head to the security and anonymity of the city is no fairy tale escapade. He is a runaway, heading to a city that does not promise a magic woods and a fantasy cabin hideaway.
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