Page 3 of Memories of the Lost

“I’ve got some water here, mate,” the man said, handing her a metal bottle.A good voice,Tillie thought, smooth and rich, doubly excellent with that accent.

“Thanks,” Jon said, standing. He, too, appreciated the long limbs, the Renaissance mouth. He reached out a hand. “And you are ...?”

“Liam.” Tanned wrist with scatters of bleached hair, four bracelets of natural stone and crystal around it.Definitely surfer/hippie/New Agey something or another,Tillie thought. No ring. Not her kind of man, buthe would be worth a night or two of play. Those shoulders, his amiable expression.

“Liam. That’s a name you don’t hear too often,” Jon said, giving his trademark grin, bright as a full moon.

“Not here, but pretty common where I come from.”

Jon dipped his chin. “I stand corrected.”

Liam shifted his focus—and Tillie thought it was as if he steered a spotlight, wide and deep, and shined it on her. It was hard to look away. “You all right?”

“I’m fine,” Tillie said. “Thanks.”

He raised a hand. “Take care, then.”

Jon and Tillie watched him go, an athletic spring in his fit body. “Runner, you think?” Jon said.

“Mm. I’m going to guess surfer.”

“Maybe.” He touched his artfully thin goatee with one long finger. “Don’t make ’em like that on the East Coast too often.”

Tillie laughed, and slapped his arm. “Come on, let’s see the show.”

She carefully avoided the wall with the strange painting, keeping her eyes averted as Jon led her toward his abstracts, all modest in size with a spirit of melancholy or joy, phrased in unusual palettes. Two already showed the red dots that marked them as sold. “Well done,” she said.

He wrapped his fingers in hers. “Thank you. That one reminds me of your eyes.”

It was done in sea hues, with splashes of murky gray. “Really?”

“Yes.” He stopped. “It took a month to get it right. All that light and all those shadows.” He pursed his lips, considering. “I think I got it.”

A ghostly shape lurked through the blues and greens, and something about it caused a return of the earlier disturbance. Tillie touched her belly. “Is there food here? I think I might be a little hungry.”

“Jon!” a deep hearty voice said, the gallery owner. “I want you to meet—”

Tillie gave him a tiny push and slipped away, looking for the snacks that had to be here somewhere. Nothing too messy or hard to manage, somewhere near the back. A faint sense of dizziness followed her, muting the sounds of voices and music.

A gazelle of a girl with a long neck and yellow hair watched over the makeshift bar. Tillie pulled out her phone and snapped a photo, imagining the gazelle girl on an open plain, pursued by burly alpha lions.

She lowered the phone, narrowed her eyes, seeing possibilities in colors, in movement. The girl’s long nose, long neck.

A flicker zapped the edge of her vision, the broken mylar that warned of an impending migraine.

Of course.

A migraine. That was what this weirdness was. She’d suffered from them for years, off and on, the remnants of a head injury when she was a small child. It was annoying that they could still surprise her.

“Do you have water?” she asked the gazelle.

Without a word, she produced a metal bottle, ice-cold. Working quickly to beat the growing size of the shimmering aura that would soon cover the vision of her right eye, Tillie filled an environmentally friendly plate with crackers and cheese and some wildly appealing raspberries. Water, food, rest. The magic cure. Sometimes. She couldn’t lie down and have a nap, but she could address the other two.

A trio of chairs rested against the wall near the restrooms, and she gratefully sat down. The aura spread to the middle of her vision now, bringing a distant sound, a faint buzz. She opened the bottle and guzzled half the water. Maybe it would be only the aura. Sometimes, that was all it was. She closed her eyes and took long, slow breaths, pressed the cold bottle to her forehead.

“Try this,” said the New Zealander, and pressed a cool compress into her hands. “Over your eyes.”

She didn’t question how or what he knew—the aura was spreading quickly, and she could feel the headache itself starting to build beneathher scalp. She lifted the wet, cold rectangle and pressed it over her eyes. “Thank you.”