10: The Man I Could Smell But Not See

Layla's pov

"Breathe," someone said. "In, and out. Slowly."

I was sitting on a wooden stool I didn't remember reaching. Madame Fontaine stood in front of me with one hand on my shoulder, her cane hooked over the edge of the counter. A glass of water was in my fingers. I didn't remember taking that either.

The shop came back in pieces. The shelves. The little bottles. The strip of paper lying on the floor between my shoes, still giving off its heavy, sweet smell.

I kicked it away with my foot, hard, like it had bitten me.

"Drink," Madame Fontaine said.

I drank. The water was cold and tasted like metal. My hands were shaking so badly that it sloshed over the rim and ran down my wrist.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I haven't eaten much today. I think I just got dizzy."

"You are lying."

"I'm not..."

"Your hands are shaking, your lips are white, and you threw that paper like it was on fire." She said it without any heat, the way you'd read a weather report. "A person who is dizzy does not do that. A person who is afraid does."

I looked down at the floor.

"What did you see?" she asked.

"Nothing."

"Layla."

"It's stupid."

"I am seventy-one years old," Madame Fontaine said. "Almost nothing is stupid to me anymore."

The bell over the door was quiet. The street outside had gone dim and gray, and rain had started to tick against the window. I listened to it for a while, and I thought about how long it had been since anyone had asked me a question and actually waited for the answer.

"A room," I said finally. "A hotel room, I think. I don't remember being in it. But the second I smelled that, I was there."

"Tell me about the room."

"I can't. I don't remember it."

"Not what happened in it." She pulled out the other stool and sat down slowly, wincing when her knee bent. "I do not ask what happened. I ask what it smelled like. You have a nose. Use it."

It was such a strange thing to say that I almost laughed. But she was watching me with her pale, sharp eyes, and she didn't look like she was joking.

So I closed my eyes and went back, carefully, the way you walk into a cold lake.

"Jasmine," I said. "That was the strongest. It was almost too much. Like someone had crushed a whole bunch of flowers in a closed room."

"Good. What else?"

"Rain. Not the kind in the air. The kind on stone, right after it starts. Wet and dusty at the same time."

"Good."

"And..." I stopped.

"And?"

"A man's cologne."

Madame Fontaine didn't move.

"Describe it."

My throat felt tight. "It was dry. Dark. Like cedar, and some kind of pepper, the black kind, that catches in the back of your nose. And underneath, something smoky. Like the end of a fire, when the flames are gone but the wood is still hot."

The rain ticked on the glass.

"Cedar," Madame Fontaine said slowly. "Black pepper. Smoke."

"Yes."

"You smelled that in a memory you say you do not have."

"I know how it sounds."

"It does not sound like anything. It is just what happened." She was quiet for a moment. "Who was he?"

"I don't know."

The words came out smaller than I meant them to.

"One morning, almost a year ago, I woke up in a hotel room and I couldn't remember the night before," I said. "I couldn't remember anything. A few weeks later, I found out I was pregnant."

I waited for the look. I knew the look. I had seen it on the faces of everyone back home who had heard some version of the story. It was pity mixed with something quietly curious, like they were turning the facts over to see if I had it coming.

Madame Fontaine's face didn't change at all.

"And the child?"

"She died." It still felt strange to say it out loud, like a word in a language I had only half learned. "At the hospital. She was..." I pressed my lips together. "I don't want to talk about that."

"Then we will not."

That was all. No sympathy, no questions, no hand squeezing mine. I think that was what undid me. My eyes stung, and I stared hard at the wooden counter until the feeling passed.

Madame Fontaine got to her feet again and walked down the length of the shop, her cane tapping on the old floorboards. She stopped in front of a shelf, ran one finger over the bottles, and came back with a small ledger. She opened it on the counter and turned it so I could see.

I didn't understand much. There were columns of numbers in tiny handwriting, and half of them were in red.

"This shop is dying," she said, as calmly as she had said everything else. "Slowly. Like me. Nobody wants a perfume made by an old woman in Belleville. They want a name on a box and a model on a billboard."

"I'm sorry."

"Do not be sorry. Be useful." She closed the ledger. "I need someone to sweep and wash and carry. That is what the sign says, and that is what I will pay you for. Six days a week, nine o'clock to six."

"Okay. Yes. Thank you."

"But I also need someone with a nose." She tapped the side of her own. "I have watched many noses in sixty years, Layla Orion. I can count the real ones on one hand, and I do not need all the fingers. You had the orange, you had the vanilla, you had the jasmine. And then you gave me the cologne of a man you have never met, in the middle of a memory you cannot touch."

"I don't know what that means."

"It means I will teach you," she said. "If you want to learn."

I stared at her.

"Why?"

"Because I am old and I have nobody else." She shrugged, one thin shoulder lifting under her cardigan. "And because it would be a sin to waste it."

I almost said yes right there. But there was something I had to say first, and I hated how heavy it felt.

"Madame Fontaine, I need to be honest with you. My landlady wants five hundred and forty euros by Thursday. My money is stuck in a transfer from America, and I have sixty-three euros to my name. If I take this job, I can't..." I swallowed. "I can't promise I'll be able to stay."

She looked at me for a long time. Then she walked behind the counter, pulled open a drawer, and counted something out with her fingers.

She set a stack of bills on the wood.

"Four hundred and eighty."

"No. I can't take that."

"It is not a gift. It is an advance. You will pay me back fifty a week out of your wages." She pushed it toward me. "With what you have, it is enough for Thursday."

"You don't even know me."

"I know enough." Her eyes didn't leave mine. "You do not have the face of someone who runs away with my money. You have the face of someone who has already run, and is tired of it."

My mouth opened. Nothing came out.

I picked up the money. My hand wasn't steady. It was more cash than I'd held since I left home, and it felt heavier than it looked.

"Thank you," I managed.

"Come back tomorrow at nine. Wear shoes you do not mind ruining." She tapped her cane on the floor, once, like a gavel. "First lesson, you will sweep. Second lesson, you will smell."

I folded the bills into my pocket. I stood up, and my legs held, and I realized the shaking in my hands had almost stopped.

At the door, I turned around.

"Madame Fontaine? Can I ask you something?"

"You may ask."

"That cologne. The man's. It's been almost a year, and I can't remember his face or his voice or anything he said. But the smell is still so clear that I can feel it in my teeth. Why would that stay when everything else is gone?"

She was standing under the one yellow lamp in the shop, small and bent, with her glasses swinging on their chain. For a moment she looked like a very old bird.

"Because scent is the oldest memory we have," she said. "It goes straight to the part of the brain that does not use words."

"That's not what I meant."

"I know." She tilted her head, and something in her gaze made the hair rise on my arms. "A cologne that lingers in a memory that long was worn by someone who meant to be remembered."

The bell chimed as I stepped out into the rain, and I stood on the pavement with my heart pounding, because for the first time since that morning in the hotel, I understood something I had never thought about.

Whoever he was, he hadn't been a stranger by accident.