“They said you rarely go outdoors, but we have a beautiful garden,” La Croix continued. He looked away from me toward the windows. “Visit it,” he said.
I couldn’t say no. He held his lean body so still and contained as if he expected me to balk. Suddenly, I wanted to eat and walk in the garden to prove to him that I could. I had amnesia, but other than that and my compulsion to paint, I was perfectly fine. So fine that I knew this was like saying a skydiver without a parachute could make it to the ground.
As if of its own volition, my paint-smeared hand reached up to touch his face. He started and turned back to me, his arms falling to his sides, and even the embarrassing realization that I’d gotten paint on his smooth skin didn’t make me regret that my fingers had a will of their own.
“Walks in the garden won’t fix me,” I confessed. I’m not sure why, but I needed him to understand that deeper things in me than met the eye were broken.
His midnight-kissed gaze dropped to my lips when I spoke. It was so full of dark mysteries I couldn’t imagine I’d ever been accustomed to it. He ignored the paint. He didn’t pull away from my hand. I continued to lightly cup the side of his jaw measuring the way it fit into the palm of my hand. Even now, seeing the shifting shades of blue in his eyes so close to the tubes of paint nearby, I knew I would never get him right.
***
Once La Croix left me, I sat in the room and painted until my neck grew stiff and my back grew tight. I tried to reclaim the feeling of urgency that had always gripped me at St. Mary’s, but Belle Aimée was different. I couldn’t focus. At the clinic, there had been a friendly detachment that allowed me to stay separate and apart in my own paint-filled world. I couldn’t shake the feeling that, here, the house had swallowed me whole and it watched me closely as I began to digest. I looked behind my back many times, but there was never anyone there. La Croix hadn’t closed the door. The dark hallway sat silent and empty. But my neck prickled and I kept expecting to see someone watching me from the shadows. Now and then there came a creaking as if the floor was lightly traversed by someone I could never see.
***
He was back for me at midnight and I didn’t protest. By the time the chimes in the hall declared the hour, the entire white canvas had been coated with a textural layer of swirling violets from lavender to purple. I was ready to stop. Unlike the paintings of La Croix, which had driven me from start to finish, I didn’t know what came next.
He walked into the room and I stood to meet him. I hadn’t taken the time to put on a smock. There was as much purple paint on me as there was on the canvas. He glanced over me, but it seemed to be my face that held his attention. I know he saw a too pale waif of a woman with hollowed cheeks and plain blond hair pulled back in a sloppy, paint-speckled tail. I’d seen myself this way many times before.
La Croix came closer and even though I now knew what my face looked like I was certain I wouldn’t recognize the look in my eyes. It felt new. I’d always been desperate to see him. Now I was afraid there might be hunger mixed in my desperation. The desire to look my fill even if it took a lifetime of looking.
“I came to show you your room,” he said. It was a low Louisiana murmur. I didn’t trust myself to do more than nod as I stepped forward. He had washed his face. There was no trace of my fingerprints on his cheek.
Suddenly, his hand came up and I flinched. I may be drawn to him, but he’d existed for me only in nightmares for too long. I stilled and swallowed, finding a bit of internal steel to prop my spine as he lightly traced the butterfly scar above my eyebrow with a warm finger. The tickle on my skin caused an answering flutter in my stomach as if there was a butterfly there too.
“You were hurt,” he said and I thought I felt a current of response in the air around us that echoed the anger in his eyes. I’d painted that intense burn. Many times. But I’d never gotten it dark enough.
“I don’t remember,” I said. It was a lie. I remembered the pain. I’d woken up with it scorching my skull, incinerating everyone and everything I’d known before.
“I do,” La Croix replied. “I remember for both of us.”
And then he turned away.
***
Screams woke me.
They were mine.
Someone had killed, here, in this house. I had seen a woman on the floor bleeding her life away in a purple room. Someone had pushed me. I had fallen. Then it was my own blood I’d seen running into my eyes.
La Croix had been there too. That’s why I had woken in a lather of terror and remembered pain.
La Croix had been there too with a horrible look of the blackest fury in his eyes.
Chapter Three
When I woke up the next morning, the lingering scent of night blooming jasmine haunted my room. I found the tiny flowers and sprig of vine in a glass of water near my bedroom door. I didn’t remember seeing it when I went to bed the night before. In the morning light, the tiny white flowers were closed tight and exuded no scent. Already the fragrance was fading from the air. Who had brought me the broken little piece of greenery while I slept? It hardly seemed the kind of thing La Croix would have done. The idea of him in my room while I dreamt of him was more embarrassing than I could face.
There were clothes in the drawers and the closet of the room. I didn’t allow myself to agonize over why they were so familiar. I took gray leggings from the bureau and a loose, raw silk shirt of the palest pink from a hanger. The fabric held the beguiling scent of lavender sachet, at once comforting and mysterious. These were my clothes, but they seemed like archeological finds. I was digging up my past a thread at a time.
I had more to paint now. Gruesome details in red and scarlet. But I made my way down to breakfast instead. I didn’t want to see La Croix again, but the magnet that had lodged itself beneath my breastbone called that a lie. I wanted more than to see him. I wanted to touch him. To memorize his face and form so that I’d never risk forgetting him again.
But I was also afraid.
A woman had died in this house and in my nightmares he had been a magnetic pull even in the midst of terror. Had he killed her? Had he pushed me? Did I have him to blame for my memory loss and the butterfly wings on my brow?
“You cried out last night. I wanted to come to you, but…” La Croix said. He held out a steaming cup of Café au lait and I took it with trembling hands. The bitter scent of roasted chicory rose up causing an answering pang in my chest.
“I often…dream,” I said. I didn’t mention the jasmine.
“They warned it might be worse here, but several of the doctors had urged my aunt to bring you ho…here. That it was time,” La Croix said.
“She paid for my care,” I said.
“It wasn’t until she died that I discovered you hadn’t disappeared on purpose. That you were still in New Orleans,” La Croix said. He watched me sip the rich coffee and nibble the edge of a beignet covered in a thick layer of powdered sugar. I tried to absorb the meaning behind the words “still” and “discovered”. He’d been looking for me, but why?
“I’m sorry I don’t remember her,” I said. I had remembered him, but I didn’t want him to know. I was vulnerable enough with him without adding that revelation.
Jonathan.
I’d almost called him by name and it felt like the syllables would roll easily off my lips as if I’d said them a thousand times before. But I should guard against that ease. I couldn’t assume he’d been looking for me for benevolent reasons. I had only my instincts to guide me and they were unsteady at best. Urging me to step into his arms one second and then causing me to fear shadows the next. He kept his impatience and frustration held in check, but I could sense it in the tension of his broad shoulders and the set of his angular jaw.
Upstairs my paint waited for a dark truth I was afraid to reveal.
***
After breakfast, I didn’t go to the garden.
La Croix had explained he had business to attend to and he had disappeared.
I sat with the sweet memory of powdered sugar on my lips for longer than I should have. Though my heart sped, a rabbit searching for the fox that would devour it, I needed to find the purple room. Before my gathered courage could fail me, I rose up and left the breakfast room.
The house was dark. It was summertime in Louisiana and these old houses had been designed for pre-air-conditioned times. There were windows aplenty, but they faced north to south away from the midmorning sun. They were also shaded by multi-level porches and darkened further by cool colors awash in rich earth tones and brights muted by a judicious blending of deep bruised blues.
There were many locked rooms, but the skeleton key I’d taken from my studio door fit them all. It was heavy and powerful in my fingers filled with the potential for revelation.
In the chill depths of a music room with a silent, draped piano and a dusty harp, I found a small lace-covered table that held a single daguerreotype in a gilded frame.
I drew closer, guiltily fingering the skeleton key. This seemed a shrine erected to a deity I hadn’t been invited to worship.
I reached forward and picked up the old sepia-toned photograph. It was faded and crackled with age, but I could see how beautiful the woman had been. Her black hair had been piled high in a Gibson Girl pouf. The uni-bosom of the time was held high by a corset, which caused impressive décolletage, but the look was made respectable by pearls and age. She’d been a mature woman when the likeness was taken. The blush on her cheeks artificial and soft wrinkles around her eyes.
The slight smile on her lips bothered me. As I stood looking into her pale eyes, I would have called it enigmatic or maybe a little sly. It was a Mona Lisa smile, hiding whatever she’d been thinking on this day so many decades ago.
The air in the room was decidedly cool. Thick tapestry drapes covered the windows. I sat the frame back in its place and backed away. The woman’s long dead gaze seemed to follow my movements.
I chided myself for the fancy, but I still felt better when the key turned in the lock and the rusty tumbler fell into place with a solid, metallic clunk.
I thought about abandoning my search for the purple room and going out to the garden instead. The house was heavy and hushed around me. Expectant. Every step I took on the polished floor seemed too loud and bound to betray my nightmare-fueled curiosity to La Croix.
Had the woman in the photograph been the mistress I’d read about on the plaque on the gate? The left-hand wife of a prominent Beauregard given this house as a token of affection and esteem? La Croix’s great grandmother had been the Belle Aimée. It seemed natural that her photograph would have a place of honor in the house and yet it still made me uncomfortable. The memory of her sly smile followed me even after the door was closed.
At the thought, I heard a muffled thump from deeper into the recesses of the downstairs hall. I probably should have taken it as a hint to flee. What would La Croix think if he found me snooping around so deeply that I was willing to unlock rooms that had obviously been sealed?
But just as paint and canvas drew me, and La Croix himself, the noise beckoned me closer instead of driving me away. There was so much I didn’t know.
I passed several doors without trying my key because the thump came again and again. It was rhythmic and paired with a sighing creak time and time again. My ears strained to ascertain its location but somehow without aural perception I would have known.
A mahogany door slowly, slowly opened inward as I approached and I knew before I reached it that the purple room was about to be revealed to me.
There was no one inside.
The door came to a stop after a few inches. No breeze stirred, but I told myself it had been a draft and nothing more.
I stepped forward, drawing the scent of dust and aged carpeting into my lungs.
Dark shades of violet damask on the walls exactly matched the shades I had placed on canvas the night before.
I was in the nightmare room.
Its shadowed interior enveloped me in a musty embrace. Why hadn’t it been locked too? Death seemed to linger in this place, waiting to be recalled. I saw where the body had fallen. I imagined the rug’s elaborate design darker in places than it should have been. I wished the room had been locked or destroyed or forever hidden from my memories.
But still I stepped farther and farther into the setting of my worst nightmares. I found myself reaching to test the beveled edge of a heavy cherry rocking chair. One trembling set of fingers traced the indentions, carefully gauging the mark it would make if a vulnerable forehead smashed against it. The butterfly wings above my left eyebrow throbbed.
I had found their creator. The harsh wooden cocoon from which they’d sprung in a bloody instant.
When I pulled my hand away, the rocker swayed back to thump the wall. I recognized the sighing creak of its movement on the rug.
It had been moving before I stepped foot in the room.
I backed away.
My gaze quickly tried to see into all the dark shadows. The room was a playroom. Besides the rocker, there was a toy giraffe hobbyhorse with a shabby moth-eaten hide and a porcelain doll near it on a straight-backed chair. The doll had very familiar lavender ribbons plaited into its long dark curls. One like them lay near a silver-handled brush in my room.
I took another step back and then another. I suddenly feared that the door behind me would slowly close, inexorably, inch by inch, cutting me off from the outside world. Once again I felt threatened by the house’s acidic digestion. Who would care if I were locked up in this purple room as if it was my tomb?
As I glanced behind me to gauge the distance I needed to travel to escape, a sudden biting click came from the other direction. I slowly turned around to face the direction the noise had come from. I scanned the rocker. I looked at the giraffe. And, then, I forced my reluctant gaze to the doll.
The doll’s eyes were open.
Its blue glass orbs stared and stared.
“No,” I said.
I no longer wanted to remember anything at all.
The carpet had been smooth moments before when I’d noted where the body had lain. It tripped me now, when I tried to whirl and leave, impossibly rolled into wrinkles under my feet. I fell away from the edge of the rocker, thank God, but directly onto the suspiciously dark patterns where the dead woman had been.
I gasped.
My cheek pressed against musty wool threads and there rose from its threadbare depths a metallic hint that made me cough and gag and struggle to rise.
On my knees, I saw the rocker continue its motion much longer than my touch would have inspired—thump, thump, thump.
And then Jonathan called my name.
Chapter Four
He came to me, filling the doorway with a solid presence my panic soaked up with sudden relief. I gathered myself and made to stand, but he came to my side and offered a strong arm to help me to my feet before I could complete the move on my own.
I didn’t pull away.
He was warm and steady and oh so real in that moment. I should have distanced myself right away from his tall, lean form. I should have been as afraid of him as I was this purple room from my nightmares with its squeaky rocking chair and its wakening doll.
I wasn’t.
The magnet he had woken in me was in full effect. From our thighs to our chest, we came together and the press completely replaced my fear with another form of adrenaline. At the edges of my perception, I noted that the chair had stilled and the porcelain doll slept once more. But, by far, the balance of my attention was on La Croix. His wide solid chest was against my breasts. His muscular arms held me close.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he said and it was a rumbling murmur that sent answering vibrations down my spine.
I didn’t know if he meant “here” in this room or “here” at Belle Aimée. I thought maybe both.
“There is nowhere else,” I replied.
I didn’t remember other places and I’d been told he was
legally my guardian until I could prove my competence. I couldn’t imagine doing that until my memory returned or I could distance myself from the painting that consumed my days. But the magnet that pulled me to him insisted that there was nowhere else but here, now, in the circle of his arms with our hearts beating fast and close together and his face tilting down close to mine, there was nowhere else to be. This past year—all my struggles, my painting, and the nightmares—had led me back to this room and his trembling touch.
Because he did shake.
I could feel contained emotion in his hands when he brought them up to touch my face. I resisted, afraid of what he might see in my eyes, but he was firm, tilting my chin with the press of his fingers against my jaw.
“I thought I’d lost you,” he said.
His words might have made sense to another me I no longer knew, a Chloe whose desire for the full sensual touch of the masculine lips so close to her own wasn’t tinged with fear and confusion. His warm breath teased across my mouth and his eyes searched mine as if he was still looking for the woman I searched for too.
“I am lost,” I said.
My voice matched his fingers, firm, but held there by force of will when tremulous tried to happen.
“No. I have you. I won’t let you go,” Jonathan murmured.
I lifted my hands and placed them over his on either side of my face. It should have been a defensive move. His intensity frightened me, but there was also a warmth rising up in me to meet his fingertips, telling me I was somehow fiercely glad that he wouldn’t let me go.
When he dipped his head to take the lips he held in place for his to meet, I tightened my grip on his hands, but not to push them away. I held on. I had him as much as he had me.
“Jonathan,” I breathed out on a sigh when the first press of his lips eased so he could draw back a millimeter to see… my reaction? My eyes?
Lost in Me Page 2