Page 72 of Memories of the Lost

“Almost exactly the sequence of events that triggered your problems in college.”

She frowned. “No. That was just finals stress.”

“Was it?” Winnie flipped back through a file on her desk. “I don’t think so. The first episode, which was extreme depression and migraines, was triggered by a concert you attended, and you had several short memory losses.”

“Wait. I did?” Tillie frowned, trying to remember. “I completely blocked that out, that I had amnesiac episodes that time, too.” A clammy sweat broke out on her body. “Am I losing my mind?”

“I don’t think so.” Her tone was so matter-of-fact that it was reassuring. It was one of the things Tillie liked most about Winnie. No drama. Straightforward clarity. “But I think you are going to have to delve into those repressed memories, or these episodes will just keep getting worse.”

She heard the ring of truth, and dropped her face in her hands. “Yeah. But how?”

“There are a number of therapies we can try. Are you familiar with EMDR?”

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. It was a mental health treatment for dealing with trauma, Tillie had read. Her throat closed. “Yes. But what if ...”

“What if?”

“What if something terrible happened, and I don’t remember for good reason?”

“I suspect something terribledidhappen, Tillie,” Winnie said. “One part of your mind is protecting you from something it didn’t think you could manage, and it has done its job. But you were a child then, and now you’re an adult. If we go easy, I think we might be able to peel the onion without creating a crisis.”

She was silent, thinking about the repercussions of opening a box she’d kept tightly closed her entire life.

“If you don’t start trying to untangle this, Tillie, I’m afraid it will keep getting worse.”

“Yeah.” She took a breath. “Okay. I’m officially scared, and I need answers. How do we start?”

“Let’s go back to the college episode, when we first talked. Do you remember what set that off?”

“I thought I did,” Tillie said. “It was a rough semester. I was failing a class, and I couldn’t get it together.”

“According to my notes, you went to a folk concert. Do you remember that?”

“Not really. I mean, I went to a lot of concerts in those days. And smoked a lot of weed at them.” She smiled. “Which probably accounts for some of the forgetting.”

“Do you still indulge?”

She shook her head. “Makes me paranoid.”

“That’s probably better. You should avoid anything that alters your mental state for a while.”

“Painting is mind-altering, but I have to keep working.”

Winnie was silent for a moment, looking back at the notes in her file. “Hmm. You had a memory loss while painting then, too.”

“What? Why don’t I remember any of these details?”

“Protection, most likely.”

“Do you have notes on what I painted then that caused a lapse?”

Winnie ran a finger down the page. “It looks like it was a cat.”

Something plunked hard in her gut. “A cat. I don’t remember working on cats then, like, ever. I was in a semiabstract stage.” She could place herself in time according to the professors she’d been working with, and she’d been deeply enamored of a colorist who used abstracts to create mood. Jon had been in the same class, and it proved to be a keystone for him. “I was using big color,” she said, reaching back. “Fuchsia and lime and—” A flash of the painting at Jon’s gallery rose. “The painting that started all this is in those colors.” She shook her head, feeling a headache starting to knock at her temples.

“That’s interesting.”

“And I’ve been painting this cat, like, over and over. I keep dreaming about him.”