"That's because the women at the shelter convinced me he'd done that since I had scrapes and bruises on my face and I couldn't remember what happened."
"You never said the women at the shelter told you that. I just assumed it was something you remembered." Karen looked at Anne and waited for an explanation.
She shrugged. "I know, and I'm sorry, but the women convinced me if I went to the authorities to learn who I was, they could take the baby when he was born and put him in foster care until my memory returned. It sounded logical and I didn't want anyone, including you, putting pressure on me to go to the authorities."
"Well, Joe Broussard's story changes the picture."
Anne had to agree, but Joe Broussard was also a stranger, which was disconcerting and bewildering, not having any memory of the man who'd spent at least one night with her and fathered her child, the man who gave her the small gold ring on her finger, and told her she planned to marry him. Now, she wondered why, at five months pregnant, she had not rushed into marrying him before the baby would arrive. There had to be a reason.
Karen pulled the car into the garage, and after Anne removed the baby from his car seat, she said to Karen, "I'll put Tommy down for his nap and meet you in the living room in a few minutes, and thanks for stopping at the race track. I don't know why I keep wanting to go there. I just feel like there's something about it in my past and I guess there was because that's where the man found me."
"His name is Joe Broussard," Karen said, "so you might want to start thinking of him as Tommy's father instead of 'the man.' It could help restore your memory."
Anne said nothing, but she knew Karen was right. The whole episode just didn't seem real.
While she changed Tommy, she heard Joe Broussard asking questions. How did she get here? When did she get here? How did she come to live with Karen?
Karen's answers were brief and succinct. "Anne arrived in New Orleans around the time of the flood and ended up in a homeless shelter, and when she came to the mission for meals, where I was a volunteer, I noticed her because she was pregnant but didn't look like the others, many of whom were alcoholics or drug addicts. And she seemed confused and disoriented. When her due time came I was afraid she'd end up on the street, so I invited her to stay with me and do some light housework in exchange for room and board, and she's been here ever since. The only trace of memory she seems to have is a desire to go to the race track, but she has no idea why."
"Her family raises racing thoroughbreds," Joe said.
Which explained her perplexing desire to go to the race track, Anne realized on hearing Joe's words, yet she had no memory of a family, or of horses.
After closing the door to the bedroom she shared with Tommy, she went into the living room and sat across from the two men on the couch. She was immediately aware of Joe's eyes on her, which was unsettling, a stranger staring at her. Yet, if what he claimed was true, and she had no reason to doubt it at this point, she'd shared the most intimate moments with him and she'd know his body like her own. But she had no awareness of what might have been, other than the reality that he was Tommy's father.
Catching her eye as she came out of that thought, Joe said, "What names are on our son's birth certificate?"
His words, our son, caught her up short, but only for a moment because she didn't doubt the man was the father. Looking at him now, she could see even more closely the resemblance, definitely something about their nostrils as well as the clefs in their chins. And unlike her honey-blond hair and blue eyes, Tommy's eyes and hair were dark, like Joe's. "They listed the father as unknown," she said, to answer his question, "and his last name is Hanks because I checked into the hospital as Julia Hanks, and I named him Thomas."
"After someone you know?" Joe asked.
Anne shook her head. "It was just a name I picked. I'd seen a poster for a movie with Julia Roberts and Tom Hanks, so I pieced together the name Julia Hanks, and Tom was the first name that came to mind when the nurse at the delivery asked for a name for my son."
Joe looked at her in puzzlement. "Then our son's named after a movie actor?"
Anne shrugged. "I don't think of it that way, but yes, I guess he is. I suppose his name could be changed though. He should have your name if you're truly his father."
"I am, and it'll be cleared up when you're declared alive and your memory comes back. As for our son, does the name, Joseph Beausoleil Broussard, sound familiar?"
Anne stared at the man. The name did strike a familiar chord, like it meant something, but it was only an instant before the feeling slipped away. "I don't know. Why that name?"
"That's what we were going to name him," Joe said. "Joseph Beausoleil Broussard was one of my ancestral grandfathers. He's become a Cajun folk hero and it was your idea to give our son his name. You planned to call him Beau."
Anne felt a memory start to surface, but then it receded when she found herself studying Joe's features, his broad forehead and strong nose, his squared jaw and well-defined male lips. Tanned and muscular, someone who did heavy work outside, he was unusually handsome, and she could understand having been attracted to him, but he was a stranger now. Nothing about him was familiar… except maybe his hands, though she had no idea why, other than his large square hands with their roped veins and muscular fingers seemed somehow familiar. She looked at his face again, wanting to find something memorable.
"Are you recalling somethin'?" he asked, when he caught her looking at him for an extended period.
Relaxing her frown, Anne said, "I'm sorry to stare but I'm trying to find something familiar about you but nothing comes, and I don't know how I could have been engaged to you and had a son by you and not feel something, or even know you."
"You're wearin' the ring I gave you and you were four months from giving birth to our son when you disappeared. And you were ready to marry me as soon as you returned." Joe's face looked troubled, and very sad.
"I'm not doubting what you're saying, only that I should feel something for you."
"You did once," Joe said, in a doleful voice.
The crestfallen look on his face touched Anne deeply because she realized this man, who was a stranger to her, truly loved her, loved her enough to want to marry her, and she felt guilty for not loving him back. But unless a person experienced what she was going through, it was impossible for them to understand what it was like to look for information in your head and find a blank slate, or to explain to a person whose memory was intact that memory wasn't just about where you left your keys. Memory was the essence of who you were.
"Then you know my parents," she said, another blank slate, but as she said the words she was swept with an uncomfortable awareness, like something wasn't right.
Joe's eyes sharpened, but not in a friendly way. Then his expression changed, eased some, and he said, "Your parents, grandmother, brother and two sisters live on a large spread next to our ranch. Your father grows sugarcane and raises racing thoroughbreds."
Anne tried to pull up images of a home, and racehorses, and the family Joe described, but nothing came. "And your family?" she asked.
"I'm from Cajun stock. We raise cattle and quarter horses." Joe gave her a kind of oblique look, and added, "Sundays, my grandfather holds races where Cajuns come in droves to race their quarter horses. When they run out of matches, the band fires up and they spend the rest of the afternoon eating, havin' a few beers, and dancin' till the band goes home. You sometimes watched from your parents' property."
An image came, people, music, a feeling of frustration like wanting to join in and not being able to. Then the image was gone, the slate blank again.
"We need to check this out," Karen said to Anne. "While I'm at work tomorrow, get your things and Tommy's together, and as soon as I'm off I'll drive you there. We'll stay in a motel overnight while you get oriented, and if you're okay, I'll return here and I'll be as close as a phone call away. If it doesn't work out there I'll come for you."
Joe said to K
aren, "I'll put y'all up in a bed and breakfast down the road from our place. I'd put you in my house, which I bought for Anne and had moved to my family's ranch a couple months before Anne went missin', but the spare bedroom's filled with Anne's furniture and stuff from her apartment, but I'll have that room ready for Anne and the baby by the time you get there."
"What about Anne's family?" Karen asked. "You said they lived next door to you?"
After a few moments of silence, Joe said, "They do, but Anne moved away because of certain circumstances, but when we get back it'll be up to her to decide where she wants to live."
Anne eyed again the man claiming to be the father of her child. She didn't doubt he was exactly who he claimed to be. She also got negative vibes when he brought up staying with her family. Still, moving in with him would be like moving in with a stranger.
When she remained staring at him with uncertainty, Joe said, "Sugah, I'm the father of your son and you were about to marry me, and now I want to take you home and help you get well."
His endearment and the way he said the words had Anne trusting him, trusting a stranger she'd met at the race track. "I suppose you're right," she said. "I do need my past back."
CHAPTER 3
While waiting for Anne and Karen to arrive at the ranch from the bed and breakfast where they'd spent the night, Joe tried to get a handle on what was happening. Anne had some kind of amnesia that blocked all her personal information from her memory, including him and her family. How long it would last, there didn't seem to be an answer. She did want her past back though, so regaining her memory was important, but placing him in her life didn't seem to factor in. He was a stranger, someone to help fill in her lost memory, nothing more.
From his perspective she was no longer dead, yet she was in a sense because he'd lost her in a different way. How long could a relationship survive where the woman he loved didn't know him well enough to love him in return? But now that she was back, even if she opened her mind and heart to him he'd be facing the biggest obstacle yet to having her as his wife. Her family.
Using Anne's blank memory, the Harrisons would poison her mind, filling it with their own kind of details. The established, like the Harrisons, considered Acadians a marginal group, their Cajun French a low-class ignorant mode of speech that kept them out of the English-speaking mainstream. Acadian solidarity and kinship patterns of living in close communities and marrying within those communities was another bone of contention as well as an explanation why there were so few surnames among Cajuns, which he couldn't deny. He and his brothers and cousins had a standing joke. Travel through Cajun country and you'll find a Broussard behind every bush. Anne resented her parents for their narrow view and their resolve to hold her to their centuries-long standards of British protocol.
On one occasion, during a fundraiser tea at her parent's house, she slipped away to find him at the bayou pulling a crawfish trap out of the water. Taking the trap and setting it aside, she put her arms around his neck and kissed him, not caring that she was getting swamp water on her dress, claiming she'd rather kiss him than drink tea. She wouldn't remember being with him like that, and the Harrisons would jump at the chance to fill her head with a glut of anti-Cajun propaganda to make sure she'd forget why she once loved him.
He hadn't yet gone to the authorities to report she'd been found so they could remove her from the missing and presumed dead list, and he would, but first he wanted her to spend time with him in the house she'd picked out. She'd found the house jacked up for sale with several other houses, all ready to be moved to new locations to make way for a highway interchange, and he'd bought the one she wanted.
The house, which was moved to the ranch in two sections, had just been positioned and reconnected on its new raised foundation when Anne went missing, and at the time she'd been enthusiastic about fixing it up. Now, he hoped her presence in the house with him would trigger memories of why she'd wanted to marry him, before the Harrisons would whisk her away to the house where she'd been raised in luxury, with servants and all the comforts she'd never have with him, and remind her of that fact.
Earlier that morning he prepared her room, placing in it her bed and other pieces of furniture he'd cleared from her apartment when her lease ran out, along with some clothes and personal belongings her family wouldn't miss. They hadn't objected to his clearing out her apartment because the furnishings were items she'd picked up in resale shops when she left her family's home to set up housekeeping on her own. But during her disappearance, when she was presumed drowned, he couldn't face the reality that she wasn't coming back, so her things remained in boxes stored in the bedroom.
As he unpacked and set up a room for her, separate from his own, he faced a different reality—having her in the house that was to be their home, and not being able to hold her, or kiss her, or even touch her. He hadn't yet held his son. The whole unreal scenario was almost too much to grasp. He did, however, place on the bedstand beside her bed the journal she'd kept about a hawk she'd befriended down at the bayou. The giant cypress tree where the hawk frequently perched was across the bayou from where he and Anne used to meet, and from the time the hawk started coming to Anne for meat scraps, she kept the journal of her interaction with him. If anything could trigger memories, the hawk she'd named Tannerin would.
Hearing the car drive up out front, he stepped onto the porch, sprinted down the stairs, and opened Anne's door. On leaving the car, instead of looking at his house, Anne stared across the cane field at the place where she was raised, a large, southern plantation style home that would've been hidden from view the month before by sugarcane standing well over ten feet tall. As she looked intently at the place, he offered no information about the people who lived there because he wasn't ready for her to be drawn into the Harrison's world.
Her attention was diverted to a wide expanse of prairie grassland where Ace, Pike, and several of their dogs were moving a small herd of red Brangus from the field where they'd been grazing to an adjoining fenced pasture. "Are those all your cattle?" she asked.
Joe nodded. "Mine, my father's, and my brothers'. We separate them by brands."
Anne's eyes scanning her surroundings, she said in a brooding voice, "I don't know... Nothing seems familiar."
She again looked toward the Harrison's house in the distance and stared at it for an inordinate amount of time, so long, he said to draw her attention from any memories that might surface at this time, "Come on in the house. It's the one you wanted. You found it jacked up on a lot scheduled for sale and relocation so I bought it, but it took longer than expected to get it moved, set on the new foundation and reconnected, and then the flood came and you disappeared, so it still needs work."
Anne looked toward the house, which sat on a raised concrete foundation to protect it from future floods, with a bank of steps leading to a wide covered porch, supported below by a row of short brick columns. Across the front of the house were several long narrow windows with equally long shutters, and the steep roof covering an unfinished attic also swept down to cover the porch, with the roof overhang supported by narrow square columns connected by sections of railing, broken only by the porch steps in the center.
As Anne stared at the house, the frown of moments before vanished, replaced by a thoughtful look, and after a few moments she said, "It's really a nice house. I love the wide front porch. It looks like a real southern Louisiana home."
"It's actually a typical old-style Acadian house, which is what you liked about it when you found it on the lot," Joe said. "It needs to be painted inside and out, and the floors need refinishing, but I'll get on it now. I packed some of your clothes and cleared out the furniture from your apartment in Lafayette when the lease ran out, and it's all inside. We can buy baby furniture later this week."
Anne eyed him curiously, as if she hadn't expected him to suggest buying baby furniture, then she gave a little shrug, and said, "I have a traveling infant bed. It'll do for now." She opened the b
ack door of the car and removed the baby from his car seat and lifted him into her arms.
When she turned toward Joe, he said on impulse, "Can I hold him?"
Anne looked at him with a start, like he was asking her to turn her baby over to a stranger, then she gave him a kind of half-smile, and said, "I'm sorry, I haven't adjusted to you being his father. Be sure to support his head."
She passed the baby to Joe, who cupped his son's head, and as he looked at this little person who was half him, half Anne, he couldn't help smiling. To his surprise, the baby flashed a gummy grin… And Joe felt a swell of pride, and love, and other emotions he couldn’t begin to describe. When he looked at Anne, she too was smiling, the first smile he'd seen since he found her, and it was a tiny glimpse into the Anne she was before.
The special moment was broken when the baby started nuzzling Joe's chest. It took a moment before he realized what was happening. "Sorry, little buddy, but your momma will have to take over now." When he looked at Anne she smiled again, this time at him, and with that smile he came to the startling realization that whereas yesterday he had only painful memories, today he had a family, or at least the promise of one.
Taking the baby from him, Anne said, "If you get the diaper bag on the back seat and show me where my bedroom is, I'll go inside and nurse and change him."
Karen, who'd stepped out of the car and had been watching and listening, said to Joe, "I'll get the bag and meet the two of you inside."
Joe nodded then led Anne up the steps to the porch and into the house where he hurried her through a living room badly in need of painting, and across scuffed and worn floors, and down the hallway. On opening the door to the bedroom, he stepped aside for her to enter, and when she did, she stood for a moment, her eyes scanning the room with her belongings, coming to rest on the hawk journal on the bedstand below where she stood. After lowering herself to the bed and while still holding the baby, she ran her fingers over the journal and stared at it, intently.
Tall Dark Stranger (Cajun Cowboys Book 1) Page 3
