driver opened the gate and it swung wide on well-oiled hinges. I could see pineapples worked into the design of the ironwork, but the welcome of the traditional symbolism made me uneasy instead of soothed. I wasn’t a visitor come to enjoy the fruits of a successful trade voyage. I was marooned. Lost in a world that might never be grounded in the memories of my previous life again.
But, for some reason, it was the fleur-de-lis rising out of the scrolled hearts along the top of the gate that caused me to dread putting one foot in front of the other to carry me through. I did it anyway, of course. I’d been hiding away at St. Mary’s for too long.
The walkway beneath my feet was made of interlacing bricks that fit together in rows of jagged teeth. I recognized the rough edges and slightly imperfect surfaces of handmade stone and found it cruel that I would remember such unimportant details about the world when I’d forgotten everything and everyone that mattered.
The driver carried my trunk and I followed him up to the imposing entrance of Belle Aimée. There had been a sign on the gate I’d read by the light of the street lamps. The house had been built one hundred and fifty years ago for the mistress of a wealthy New Orleans judge just before the Civil War. He’d been a Beauregard and she’d been a La Croix.
La Croix.
The name caused my heartbeat to skip erratically in my chest.
Two great palazzos stretched across the front and around the sides of the house. Artistically turned, white Corinthian columns held up these double porches. In the glow of the porch lights, I could barely make out the evidence of aged paint gone from white to ivory through a hundred years of thick reapplication. The weighty evidence of so much history was oppressive to someone who had no history at all. I was nothing and no one approaching a place that had obviously meant a great deal to many people through the years.
As he walked, the columns shadowed the driver’s face and the shifting darkness on his cheeks disturbed me. I almost imagined the house was reaching out to touch us. I could feel the cool slide of shadows on my own face though I knew that should be impossible. I could almost imagine a dark assessment taking place.
We came closer to the house and climbed the broad front steps to the door. My throat threatened to close and my respiration grew shallow and quick. Had I been here before? If so, my body was telling me I didn’t want to be here again.
Ever again.
Even the heavy sweet scent of night blooming jasmine carried on a faint breeze across my cheeks failed to soothe me. The touch of air was spidery. I wanted to brush it away. The scent caused goose bumps to rise on my skin as if, deep down, I was instinctively afraid. It was incredibly difficult to trust instincts that rose out of nowhere with no memory to ground them in reality.
The driver rang the bell and I jerked because its dulcet, ringing tones caused something inside of me to go aching and raw. But I knew nothing of ache. Not in those moments while we waited. Not until the heavy oaken door swung open to reveal the perfect shade of blue.
“Chloe,” he said. And I knew my name, as I hadn’t for twelve long months. They’d told me, of course. They’d used it to address me. But it hadn’t been me until he uttered it in the long, low accent of Louisiana French Creole.
My artist’s eye catalogued the black waves of his hair, the high prominent cheekbones and the Gallic nose, but some hidden part of me that had been suddenly magnetized noticed other things—the swell of his lips in an otherwise lean face, the thick sooty lashes so dark against the blue of his irises. Though I didn’t lack skill, the chance that I would ever have achieved his exact likeness on canvas was revealed to me as never.
“Are you Jonathan La Croix?” The driver asked the man from my nightmares.
“Yes. I’m La Croix,” he replied and even though I didn’t know my own last name or where I’d gone to school or how I’d gotten the scar over my left eyebrow that looked like tiny butterfly wings, I knew he was Old Louisiana. It was in the slightly arrogant tilt to his chin and the cultured tones of his southern drawl. It was in the cut of his jaw and the gleam of his light eyes against his skin. He had received all that was beautiful from his multicultural background—the Native American, French and Spanish—but he had the carriage of a man who could trace his roots all the way back to the original settlement and even if the unions that had gotten him to this point had been left-handed he was surely an aristocrat through and through.
La Croix drew me forward, but it was the kind of pull that brought out the large Luna moths flapping dangerously close to the hanging lights of Belle Aimée’s porches. When he’d said my name, it had sounded too intimate as if the utterance held all my secrets in its simple syllables. He corrected himself now, coolly, until I thought I must have imagined his ability to peer into a past I couldn’t see no matter how I strained and strived.
“Welcome to Belle Aimée,” he said.
I couldn’t tell him I was welcome nowhere, that I was too lost, wandering a world I couldn’t recognize, surrounded by strangers and constant confusion. I couldn’t tell him that I regained my equilibrium only when I painted because I recognized and understood the laws of paint on canvas when all else seemed to have deserted me.
Moisture welled in my eyes from frustration, loss and exhaustion brought on by the overwhelming changes I’d faced that day. It had taken all the courage I could muster to step out into a strange world with no memories to anchor me in it. I mustered more courage to hold back the tears, but if he saw my emotion, he didn’t acknowledge it. He simply took my trunk from the driver and directed me inside.
***
Walking into Belle Aimée was difficult. The air seemed thick and stubborn almost as if it would hold me back and press me out. Though it must have been nearly two hundred years old, the Cyprus floors gleamed and the vintage silk wallpaper glowed, barely faded for all its years. And, yet, I felt those years, every one of them, around me. The air was heavy, filled as it was with bygone whispers.
“We’ve prepared a room for you upstairs,” La Croix said, motioning to the curving staircase that branched like a wishbone at the top where landings led into two wings of the house. I barely noted the “we”. I was too overwhelmed by the house itself.
“I will never understand how they could have considered this a ‘cottage’,” I said.
He blinked as if surprised that I would know history. Had he been told that I barely recognized my own face in the mirror when I first went to St. Mary’s? Once he came to know me better, he would realize that the mundane hadn’t left me. Only the vital. Only my heart.
“Yes. Apparently this house was considered discrete when my great grandfather built it for my great grand-mère. Not hidden, you understand. Their relationship was formally acknowledged by society at the time. Her children had an inheritance from their father and fine social standing…just not his name. Her mother was a French opera singer. Her father was a trapper more Natchez than French.”
“La Croix,” I said, softly. The name was both strange and beguiling with vague familiarity on my tongue.
“Yes,” he replied. “She took her mother’s name.” He looked at me with that expectant pause I’d learned to dread. The one that seemed to wait for me to suddenly blink and remember everything. The one that said he knew more than I knew about my past, but it was too heavy with shadows to share. The weight of all I didn’t know behind his hooded eyes was almost more than I could bear.
“Will I have a place to paint?” I asked, desperate to regain my equilibrium.
“Always,” La Croix said. Now there was impatience in his clipped tones and maybe disappointment. It didn’t seem leveled at me, but rather the world around us as if he’d like to grab it and shake it into place with his bare fisted hands. The uncomfortable moment passed, but another followed it. My “always” consists of the three hundred and sixty five days I can remember. All else is as if it never was. I had to have known Jonathan La Croix. He held the evidence of that hidden in tight rolls of canvas in the trunk in his hands. What had he been to me and why was his