What Ozium Does When You're Not Looking

The Ozium can had been under the driver's seat for three weeks before I found it. Not lost, exactly. Just there. Doing its job. Existing in the dark the way things do when you forget they exist.

I bought it because the car smells like the child. Not bad. Just her. Fruit snacks and whatever she stepped in at the park. Organic, mostly. But still. A man reaches a point where he thinks: there is chemistry for this.

Ozium promised to sanitize. To neutralize. The can showed a clean white room. A happy room. A room where nothing had ever happened, least of all a spill of apple juice that I'm still not sure came completely out of the back seat.

I sprayed it once. The car smelled like industrial flowers for six hours. BW got in and said, "Did you fumigate something?" I said no. She knew I was lying. She always knows. (This is why she runs the house.)

The second can I bought lasted longer because I forgot about it. Three weeks under there, slowly working. Slowly sanitizing the air that the child breathes every day on the way to school. Slowly turning the smell of her into the smell of nothing. Which is what I wanted, I think. Until I realized what that meant.

Then the child found it.

She asked what it was. I told her it was for making the car smell better. She nodded like this made sense. Like a seven-year-old has opinions about air quality. She took it to school for show-and-tell because of course she did. Came home and reported that Mrs. Patterson said it was "very useful for grown-ups."

Now there are three cans. One under the driver's seat. One in the garage. One in the back because the child spilled milk last Thursday and I panicked.

I sprayed the garage one yesterday while BW was out. The whole place smelled like a hospital lobby for an afternoon. When she got home she just looked at me. Didn't say anything. Didn't have to. I knew what she was thinking: You bought another one.

The thing about Ozium is that it works. The car smells neutral now. The garage smells neutral. Even the back seat where the child sits, where she eats, where she exists—that smells neutral too.

I found the empty can this morning. She'd taken it outside and hidden it in the sandbox, like she was burying evidence. Maybe she was. Maybe she knew what I was doing. Erasing her slowly. One spray at a time.

I haven't bought a fourth can yet.

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