Under the Cajun Moon (39 page)

Jacques found what looked like the main building among a cluster of other buildings and knocked on the door. The woman who answered wore the dark garb of the sect and a simple silver cross hanging from a chain around her neck. Jacques explained to her that a package had come from Paris today and had been delivered here. She asked him to wait a moment while she tried to get more information. She left him standing outside the closed door, but after a few minutes she returned, and this time when she greeted him she was smiling warmly.

“Yes, indeed, this special package arrived just today. I must say, it’s quite beautiful.”

With that, she pulled open the door, revealing the masterpiece inside. There in the center of the room was not a communion plate or goblet or tankard or anything else constructed out of gold.

It was Angelique herself, who was more valuable by far.

”Would you please tell Minette and Ophé to meet me out back?”

Travis said to his uncle as soon as we heard the noisy group entering the house. Then, turning to me before he headed out the door, he added that I should wait there, that this shouldn’t take long and then we would be on our way.

Soon, the cluster of visitors made their way through the house and into the screened room. Minette and a younger man were ushered straight out the back door to talk to Travis. That left three children, who rushed over to embrace their young cousins and immediately engage in a discussion about a board game. Behind them came a woman carrying a baby. She looked around the room and suddenly thrust the baby into the arms of the teen, saying that she would be right back. Giving me a polite smile, she made a mad dash up the hallway, obviously to the restroom.

I was impressed with the teenager and how naturally she handled the baby that had been forced upon her. Propping the child on her hip with one arm, she teased it with a pointed, wiggling finger, cooing as she brought it in close and pulled it away, again and again.

I could hear voices from out back, and though I wanted to know what Travis was saying to his grandmother and cousin, it was clearly between them. Feeling suddenly out of place, I forced myself to go over to the couch
and sit among the kids and engage myself in the conversations they were having. From what I could tell, it sounded as though they were debating whether to play Risk or Monopoly. I didn’t know many children, and I was always uncomfortable around them, so it felt especially odd when one of them suddenly turned to me and asked my opinion.

“Oh, we’re not staying, so what I think doesn’t matter. You guys play whatever you want.”

“But which one would you choose if you were us?” asked one of the little boys who had just arrived. He was a cute one, about seven or eight, with curly brown hair and long, dark eyelashes.

Suddenly, all of the children were looking at me, waiting for my opinion. Squirming under their attention, I decided that since I didn’t know how to talk to children, I would simply treat them as short adults.

“You have to be careful with Risk,” I said. “Claiming territories and challenging others can lead to a lot of arguments. When I was in boarding school, so many of the kids fought over that game that it was banned. In larger groups, it just doesn’t work.”

“You’re right,” the boy said, clearly surprised and pleased by my insight. “Last time I was here and we played it, everybody got all mad over a bunch of nothin’.”

“There’s other games to choose from,” the teenager said, suddenly rising and thrusting the baby into my arms. Once she had passed it off to me, she went over to a cabinet and began going through it, calling out the names of the various games inside.

I was mortified. Never having held a baby in my life, I had no idea what to do. At least it wasn’t crying, but it just lay there, looking at me with wide eyes, as I tried to remember where all the danger zones were. I knew it had soft spots and a very fragile neck, and I was so afraid I might snap or break something that the best I could do was emulate the position the teenager had been holding it in before. Unfortunately, the baby didn’t seem to like me very much and soon it was wiggling and swarming to get free.

“He doesn’t like to lay back that far,” the little boy said to me, reaching out to guide my hands into a more suitable position. Even at his young age, he obviously knew more about childcare than I did.

As the rest of the children clustered around the cabinet and debated the merits of the various games, the boy stayed there next to me on the couch, obviously sensing that I was too uncomfortable to be left alone. Grateful for his presence and the way he interacted with the baby, playing peekaboo and opening and closing his hands over his face, I attempted some more polite chatter.

“Is this your baby brother? He sure likes the way you play with him.”

“Nope, he’s my cousin. But we’re together so much it’s kind of like we’re brothers.”

And with that, this kid had expressed one of the deepest, saddest regrets of my life, that I had never had any extended family at all, that I had never met a single cousin on either side of my family tree. In my mind, I had always wondered if people actually had gatherings like this and relationships like this with people who shared their same bloodline. Given what I had learned about my mother, now I wondered if maybe that was why there was no extended family in our lives, because they had disowned her when she became an exotic dancer.

“What’s your name?” I asked the boy.

“Everybody calls me TJ.”

“TJ? What does that stand for?”

The boy once again guided my arm to raise up the squirming baby to the correct position.

“Travis Junior,” he said.

Before I could react, the back door opened and in stepped Minette, Ophé, and Travis.

“Daddy!” the boy cried gleefully, jumping up and running across the room into Travis’ arms.

Lucky for the child I was holding, its mother showed up at that moment and scooped him out of my lap—just in time to keep me from dropping him right on his soft-spotted little head. Stunned, I looked from her to the baby in her arms to the boy named TJ to Travis, who had picked up his son and was holding him tightly in a hug.

“How are you related to Travis?” was all I could manage to say to the woman who was now standing nearby and patting her baby’s back.

“He’s my brother,
cher
. Don’t I know you? Haven’t we met somewhere before?”

I couldn’t even reply. All I could do was look across the room at the man I thought I had been falling in love with. He set his son down on the floor, and keeping a hand on the top of the boy’s head, finally met my eyes with his own. Maybe his sister and I had met before, all those years ago at Paradise. As for Travis, I realized I didn’t know him.

I didn’t know him at all.

Had I not been deep in the swamps and in very real danger, at that moment I would simply have stood and walked out. I would have left this absurdly jovial family reunion behind and take taken care of my problems on my own. As it was, however, I could not make that choice. Even if I hadn’t been in danger, I still couldn’t have left, for there was no way I would have been able to find my way back to civilization from where we were by myself.

Travis obviously knew I was upset, and to his credit he didn’t do anything stupid or placating. For a while, he didn’t even look my way. Instead, he seemed to be waiting as everyone else in the room settled into their various activities. The kids finally chose a game and gathered around the coffee table to set it up. Travis’ sister parked herself in an easy chair in the corner and began feeding her baby a bottle. The older folks, with Minette among them, went to the table and sat as the uncle went out the back door, ostensibly to make more pigs’ ears. Cajun etiquette being what it was, I had been greeted in turn by both Travis’ cousin and grandmother before they sat, but Minette didn’t seem to recognize me. Fortunately, Travis’ sister had also become distracted without my ever having to answer her question.

Everywhere there was chatter, some of it in French, some of it in English, all far outside the realm of what I felt like listening to at that moment. All I could do, in fact, was sit there on the couch among the children and their game as I wondered how many more times this week I would have to be shocked before I realized that no one, absolutely no one, was who they said they were or who they pretended to be. For all I knew, Travis Naquin was married. For all I knew, there were a couple of more kids back at home with their mother.

Travis seemed equally uncomfortable, and for a long moment he stood in the middle of the room, obviously unsure as to whether he should join me and the children at the game table or his grandmother and the other adults at the dinner table. Finally, he asked me if we could speak out front. Without a word, I rose and walked out of the room, retracing the steps that had led us through the house in the first place. Soon, we were outside on the lawn, and truly a big part of me didn’t even care if we were putting ourselves in danger by being out in the open like that, by standing in the glow of the little white lights where we would be easy targets. Travis seemed to have other things on his mind as well. He looked as upset as I felt, his easy-going stance all but swallowed up by this new and very different, far more duplicitous and dishonest version of the same man.

At first, he didn’t say a word, and though good manners made me inclined to break the heavy silence between us, I refused to give him the satisfaction. This was a mess he had created with his own omissions. It was up to him to initiate his explanation.

“I know you’re mad,” he said at last. “Trust me, Chloe, I almost told you about TJ a dozen times. But you have to understand how things are. On the rare occasion that I might interact with a young lady, I do not involve my son. He’s been hurt enough, and I see no point in bringing women in and out of his life just because they are in and out of mine. What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him. I always figured that when the right one finally came along, that’s when I would make him a part of my relationship.”

“Well, aren’t you just the noble hero, protecting this precious son? That all sounds well and good, Travis, except for one thing: I’m not angry that you didn’t want TJ to know about me or to meet me. I get that. I’m angry that you didn’t want me to know about TJ.”

“I know, Chloe, I—”

“At what point, exactly, was it going to come up? When you were kissing me? How about this? Maybe you just should’ve waited until I was in love with you. You should’ve waited until I had imagined a whole world for us, one where we were starting fresh together, just you and me, and then that might have been the perfect moment to let me know that you were married, with children!”

Pacing there on the lawn, I had to remind myself that Travis and I had only been together for twenty-four hours. It seemed like so much more than that. It seemed, in fact, like a lifetime. I realized that I was more angry at myself than I was at him. How had I let myself fall so far, so fast? Was I that lonely? Or was it just that I was an easy mark, naive and optimistic and desperate to belong to something, anything, bigger than myself?

I wanted Travis to tell me that TJ’s mother was completely out of the picture, that she had disappeared from their lives years ago. I wanted him to tell me there had never been anyone else, that he had never even considered the possibility of love or romance again until I had come back into his life, and that he had known from the moment he saw me outside the courthouse yesterday that both love and romance were inevitable. Here I was, so desperate to belong to his world. What I wanted him to tell me was there was room in that world, that there was no other woman who might rise up from the shadows and endanger the very thing I wanted so desperately for us to build together.

Before I could put any of that into words, in the distance a woman screamed. Shocked, I turned to look, though Travis didn’t even flinch.

“Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“That scream. A woman screamed!” We both stood frozen for a moment and then it happened again. “That! I know you heard it this time.”