He didn’t take me to a guest bedroom. While my blood still sang and the magnet pulled and I avoided the dark light in his blue eyes, he led me onward until we came to a corner of the house I knew to be a rounded turret I’d seen from the street.
When he turned the key and opened the door, I breathed out a rush of air I hadn’t realized I’d been holding tight in my lungs like a diver plunged deep into a cold, tumultuous sea.
I stepped forward onto paint-spattered tarps. Here they covered the Cyprus floors and led me in a wrinkled path straight to an easel and stool. Beside the easel, a long low bench held the paints I’d need. Only the deep, rich midnight colors I’d been working with for the past year and the necessary others for blending.
I dropped my bag and went for the paints and blank canvas.
But, unlike at St. Mary’s, the world didn’t narrow and fade around me. La Croix walked to a wall and placed the trunk against it and I watched him even as I began to mix and blend the deep purple I’d need for the background of the painting already taking amorphous shape in my mind.
This time I would paint something different.
“Chloe,” La Croix said and my fingers actually stilled. I didn’t make a move as he approached. I didn’t blink or breathe. There was still a hint of impatience in his voice or maybe it was frustration. He worked his hands open and closed as if he needed to do something with them now that the trunk had been placed on the floor. He didn’t stop until he stood directly beside my perch on the stool. The proximity of his warm body was more of a distraction to my senses than I’d ever allowed before when the paint called to me.
“Y…yes?” I replied.
I slowly rose to my feet because he was so tall and I didn’t want to feel small beside him. I immediately knew it for a mistake. He was still taller than me. I had to tilt my chin to meet his gaze and our bodies were also much closer than they had been before. I had met day after empty day for a year as if life was a vacuum threatening to leave me forever in limbo surrounded by nothingness. Surely I could look into this familiar stranger’s eyes.
I rubbed my fingers together.
The cool slide of bruised lavender reminded me I couldn’t reach up to trace the planes of his angular face no matter how they intrigued me.
He searched my direct gaze and I let him because paint was already on my fingers and I couldn’t run away from him without running away from the canvas I was compelled to fill.
“They told me that you sometimes forget to eat or sleep,” he began.
“No. I don’t forget. Not about those things,” I said. I never forgot my need for food and rest. I’d only learned exactly how little I needed to survive.
“Not here. You’ll have breakfast, lunch and dinner at Belle Aimée. Do you understand?” La Croix asked.
There was an intensity to his expression. This seemed…personal. He wasn’t a nurse hired to keep me well. The line they had drawn in the sand had shifted. I could almost imagine him kicking it out and redrawing it closer to normal. He had stilled his restless hands by placing them on his trim hips.
“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.