The Smell

What I remember from the rest of that night is the experience itself. I don't remember it ending. I don't remember the call ending, the phone leaving my ear, falling asleep, or the hours passing. I can't tell you where one part stopped and another began because there are no ordinary memories after the floor. There's only what happened in that room, what I've called the smell, the safety, and the certainty that I wasn't alone.

I've tried to explain it all away. I've sat with therapists and gone over what I remember. I've written about it over and over, trying to find the right words, and I've walked through it in my head for years. Nothing new has come back. I don't remember falling asleep, and what I woke from didn't feel ordinary. I can't say with certainty what happened during those hours. I only know what was still with me when morning came.

* * *

The light through the window is gray when I become aware of the room again. Feeling comes back before thought. My neck hurts from being bent at the wrong angle, my mouth is dry, and there's an ache behind my eyes. I hear birds at the feeder, a car on the road, and the house making its usual morning noises as the sun reaches the east wall. It takes me a while to understand what those sounds mean. I'm still on the bathroom floor. The house has moved into another day without me, and I'm alive.

I don't wake the way I recognize waking. There's no moment when I understand that I'd been asleep, no dream fading while the room comes back into focus. I become aware of the bathroom while the experience is still with me. The safety is still there. The recognition of Nonie's perfume, or what my mind understood as her perfume, is still there. I'd woken up, but I still can't explain what I'd woken up from. Even now, sleep doesn't feel like the right word for it.

I stay on the floor for a while before trying to move. My left hand is still closed, and I open it slowly, one stiff finger at a time. I expect to find what I remember holding, but my palm is empty. I turn my hand over and look at it again, as if a second look might change what's there. It doesn't. Then I look at the bottle on the counter. My memory says one thing, and the morning is showing me another. That should answer something, but it doesn't.

The empty hand doesn't prove that nothing had been there, and the bottle doesn't tell me what happened after my ordinary memory disappeared. I could choose an explanation, but choosing one wouldn't make it true. It would only give the missing hours a cleaner ending than they actually have. I put the bottle in the trash under the sink without counting anything or comparing it with the label. I've kept those details private for seven years, and they're staying that way.

I use the sink to pull myself up. The face in the mirror is swollen and blotched, but it's still my face. My eyes are different. The desperation I saw in them the night before is gone, and in its place is something I still have trouble naming. Happiness is the closest word, but it isn't ordinary happiness. I'm not glad about what happened, and there's nothing to celebrate. I’m standing in the same bathroom where, only hours earlier, I believed my life was going to end. Nothing about that should make a person happy.

What I feel isn't joy, relief, or the kind of happiness that comes from hearing good news. It's deeper and stranger than that. It’s a powerful sense that I’m safe and not alone, so strong that at times it overwhelms me and makes me cry. I don't understand where it came from or why it's still there in the morning. I only know the certainty that carried me into the bathroom is gone. In its place is this unfamiliar feeling that I'm supposed to remain here.

I run the cold water and drink from my hands. The recognition is still with me: the same rose and talcum. I don't know whether anything is actually in the air. Smell is the closest word I have for it, just as happiness is the closest word I have for the feeling. Both are real to me, even though I can't explain either one. When I open the bathroom door, neither of them stays behind.

* * *

For about three days, I keep catching brief traces of the smell. It's not constant, and neither is the happiness, but they return together without warning. One moment I'm exhausted and trying to understand the bathroom floor, and the next I feel that same powerful safety and catch the faint recognition of rose and talcum. I never see anyone, and I never decide that Nonie was there. I only know that my mind keeps going to her and that the experience doesn't feel finished.

Sunday, I decided to go take some photos from the Wooden Shoe Tulip Festival in Woodburn. I'm working on a design and thought some stock images of tulips would be a nice touch. That also gives me a reason to leave the house that I understand. A camera, a project, and something useful to bring home make more sense to me than sitting alone trying to solve the bathroom. Normally, I wouldn't have gone to something like that by myself, especially in the condition I was in. That Sunday, I get my camera and go anyway.

I walk around the tulip festival taking photos. I'm able to do the work. I know why I'm there, what I need for the design, and whether an image might be useful later. At the same time, the whole day feels almost surreal, as if I'm moving through it inside a cloud. Everything's visible and understandable, but it doesn't feel completely connected to me. I'm not sad. That's what makes the day so difficult to explain. I'm drained, confused, and still carrying a happiness that doesn't make sense.

The camera gives me something specific to do. I can look through it, choose what belongs in the frame, take the photo, and move on to the next one. Those decisions are simple. The rest of me is still trying to understand how I went from Cassie's voice in my ear to waking on a bathroom floor. I keep working because the work is familiar, and for a while I can let the questions remain unanswered without pretending they’re gone.

A tulip festival is probably the worst possible place to make a claim about smelling something. I understand that. I'm surrounded by flowers, and any reasonable person could tell me the scent came from the field. But what I keep recognizing isn't simply flowers. It's the same old perfume my mind connected to Nonie, rose and talcum with that third part I still can't name. Each time I catch it, the strange happiness comes with it. I can't prove that anything followed me to Woodburn, and I don't try. I only know what the day felt like from inside it.

I stay long enough to get the photos I came for. The files are real. I can open them, sort them, and use them in the design. That should make the day feel ordinary, but it doesn't. I'd gone somewhere alone that I normally wouldn't have done, moved through it in a daze, and returned with usable work while still feeling almost overwhelmingly safe. I don't know how those things belonged to the same person on the same Sunday.

Sometime Sunday evening, Cassie calls. When I answer, there's a slight change in her voice that sounds like surprise. I can't know what she expected to hear or whether she expected me to answer at all. She talks about when they'll leave and says they'll be home Wednesday so she can return to work. She'd been on the telephone with me when my ordinary memory disappeared. She knows how the call ended from her side, but she never asks what happened on mine. She doesn't mention the hotel, the bathroom, the bottle, or anything she said to me. The conversation stays with the drive home and her work schedule.

I keep waiting for the questions that never come: Is everything okay? What happened after the call? She asks neither one. I don't tell her about the experience because I still can't explain it. But she'd been there through the telephone when my ordinary memory stopped. Whatever she heard on her side of the night, she never tells me what it was.

The smell and the strange happiness keep returning until sometime around the third day, and then I stop noticing them. They're not ripped away from me. They're simply no longer there. What remains is exhaustion, the missing part of the night, the photos from Woodburn, and the knowledge that the certainty I carried into that bathroom had been interrupted by something I still can't explain. The experience leaves me with no answer, but it also leaves me alive long enough to keep trying to understand it.

Cassie and the kids come home Wednesday. The kids return to their rooms and routines with no idea what happened while they were gone. To them, the trip had been a trip. I had lived through something none of them should ever have to understand, and I was glad they didn't know. No child should have to carry what happened between their parents that weekend. Cassie still doesn't ask what happened on my side of the telephone call.

Within a day or so, I tell Cassie we need to talk about what happened. She avoids it at first. When we finally talk, she tells me the man is someone she knew when she was much younger, that he's been married for years, and that she still wants to work things out with me. At one point, I'm crying in the den when Cassie comes in and tells me she's sorry, that none of this is my fault, and that she loves me. I want to believe her because I still love her. For a couple of weeks, we try to patch the marriage back together.

Looking back, I see that apology differently. Only days earlier, she had told me everything was my fault. Now she was telling me none of it was. I can't know whether she meant it in that moment or whether she needed time to decide what came next. I only know what the apology did. It gave me hope and kept me trying while she continued talking to him, sometimes from one of the girls' rooms when they weren't home. I heard her tell him she loved him. We were still under the same roof trying to act like a family while she was promising me she wanted to save the marriage and telling him she loved him.

I'm not fixed, and the strange happiness doesn't solve any of this. I still don't know what stopped me in the bathroom, what happened during the hours I can't remember, or why the smell and happiness followed me for the next few days. I know only that the certainty I carried into that room didn't survive the night, and I did.

At that point, I had no idea I’d spend much of my fifties awake at four in the morning, going over that bathroom floor and trying to put it into words. I kept thinking that if I wrote it the right way, I might understand it, and maybe someone else would too. I still don’t have an answer, but I know why my mind went to Nonie. She was the safest person I had ever known. To understand what she meant to me, you have to go back fifty years, to a man I never knew carving a pine airplane for a boy who hadn’t been born yet.