Page 10 of Memories of the Lost

“You don’t know which one?”

Answering that honestly would mean getting into things about her mother that she wasn’t interested in expressing to a stranger. To deflect, she tugged the streak of white in the hair over her temple. “That’s when I got this.”

“Head injury?”

She nodded. “I was out for several days, they say. I had to learn to speak all over again.”

His attention sharpened, a contrast to his mild comment. “Interesting.” He bent his head. “And this”—he slid his finger from the pad beneath her middle finger to the heart of her palm—“might be the breakup with the man who misses you.”

The man who misses you.The words gave her a strange ache. “He does.”

“Do you miss him, too?”

She raised her eyes. Shook her head.

Liam bent in and kissed her. He held her hand, and his other arm moved behind her shoulders, giving her a sense of protection. The touch of their mouths created a sense of light, and a fragrance of forest enveloped them. Tillie leaned in as if enchanted, pulled by something she couldn’t name—

A bird cawed in her head. The porch from the painting emerged clearly on the screen of her imagination. Trees stood sentry around it, and the bird hopped down to the railing. A giant cat raced up the steps, and the bird flew away—

The lurking headache abruptly bloomed, throbbed across the bridge of her nose, and she felt suddenly sick to her stomach. Pulling away, she breathed in, then out. “Sorry,” she whispered, trying to calm the nausea. “It’s just—”

His hand fell between her shoulder blades.

Embarrassment mingled with the sudden, hard arrival of a full-blown migraine. She was trying not to barf in the cab when they pulled up in front of her building. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t think I can—”

“Let me help you inside. That’s all.”

They ran toward the foyer in the deluge. Her feet and shins were splashed with water, her hair soaked before they reached the stoop. She paused for a moment in the foyer, thinking wildly that she should check the mail, but the blindness had spread over one eye, and she didn’t even know if she could climb the four flights to her apartment. Sinking down on the stairs, she rested her head on her forearms.

“Do you have some medication to take?” he asked. “Can I get you something?”

She raised her head. His crown was surrounded with shimmering lights, like a halo. “It’s four flights.”

“C’mon. Lean on me.”

Honestly, she was so grateful for his presence, she didn’t think about anything else. Taking it slow, she held on to the railing. A whisper of regret moved through her—she wouldn’t see him again after all this.

In a way, that made it easier. She didn’t ordinarily take men to her apartment. It was too personal, too revealing, but without his help, she’d be sitting at the bottom of the stairs with her head on her knees.

Her loft, which sounded fancy but wasn’t in the slightest, occupied most of the top floor. It was barely finished and cold as the tundra. The only reason she’d landed there was because she’d inherited it from a friend who had moved to Los Angeles. It was two thousand square feet of open space and windows. To counter the cold, she’d scattered space heaters around and grouped the living areas together. The rest was open for easels and supplies and stacks of canvases. Organized chaos. Liam looked at the painting closest to them, a nude female nursing a baby wolf, her hair wild and full of vines. He said nothing, but it made Tillie feel vulnerable. Too much of her was visible in this room. Far too much for a stranger to see.

When he said gently, “Let’s get you settled,” she nodded and took a step toward her bedroom—

And fainted dead away, like some Victorian heroine.

CHAPTER FOUR

When he was nineteen, Liam fell in love. The girl was called Opal, and she was as beautiful as her name, with iridescent eyes and silvery hair. He had read all of Tolkien as a young teen, and she made him think of Galadriel, the queen of elves. They met in a bar one July night during his winter break from uni, where he was dutifully and without excitement studying architecture. She was a restless backpacker from some suburb of Paris and had been on the road for nearly a year. She’d just landed in Auckland, and Liam was more than willing to play guide to her New Zealand travels. For a month, they wandered north and south, Liam leaning on a small stipend he’d inherited from his grandmother in Brisbane, Opal working in cafés and bars.

He was drunk on her. Her small, tanned breasts and musky scent, the lyrical song of her accent. She was aloof, ungiving, and it only made him work that much harder. They had a lot of sex, urgently and often in places where they risked discovery—bathroom stalls and gardens and once in a darkened doorway along a street in Wellington.

They smoked a ton of weed and drank way too much. It began to make him feel lost, unsure where he began and she ended. She absorbed him, and he was willingly sucked in, happy to become the sweat of her pores, the curve of her waist.

His best friend Krish grew increasingly freaked out. He showed up in Queenstown to try to talk sense into Liam, but he was too far gone. Krish stormed away, vowing he’d never speak to his friend again.

A year later, Opal abandoned Liam in Rishikesh for a deer-eyed Indian who swept her off to Delhi.

He was on the floor. Lost from the long sojourn into drugs and booze and love addiction, he wandered for another year, bouncing through one thing after another—a guru, a game, a lover, a promise.