The Lost Story

by Meg Shaffer

Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. —C. S. Lewis

They were gone long enough that people had stopped referring to them as “missing,” which implied a temporary state of being, and now simply called them “lost.” You looked for missing children. You mourned lost ones. By that November, the boys’ missing posters on the signboard at Red Crow had faded and wrinkled behind the protective plexiglass. When Maggie and Tom noticed the posters while looking for the trail map, they remembered that they’d forgotten all about the lost boys. Because that’s how it worked. First you were missing. Then you were lost. Then you were forgotten.

“They never found those boys?” Tom asked. “Nope. Probably never will.” Maggie was a nurse, and because she’d seen the worst, she knew to assume the worst. If the boys went missing in the Crow, odds were they’d died the first or second night. If they weren’t missing but kidnapped as some had theorized…they probably wished they were dead. She didn’t say that part out loud to Tom. It was only their fourth date, and she didn’t want to spoil the mood.

Below and before them lay the still autumn-lovely woods. Trees upon trees upon trees rising and falling in endless waves, an ocean of forest, and two boys drowned in it.

Two hours and a bucket of sweat later, they reached the Goblin Falls, a small waterfall in a hidden ravine deep in the woods where the air always smelled like moss and cold rain, and the rock formations looked like little men with strangely twisted faces. Maggie squatted next to one of the goblins and made a face while Tom took her picture. “Nice.” He laughed. “Was I hideous enough?” she asked as she stood up. “Disgusting.”

Tom started forward, but Maggie grabbed his arm to stop him. Why? She didn’t know. Instinct. Fear. The uncanny feeling that they’d crossed the border into a story they didn’t belong in…

The one with the red hair met her eyes. Serious eyes. Older-than-his-years eyes.

When Tom opened his mouth, Maggie shook her head. The boy with red hair had an animal’s quiet readiness about him. One wrong word, and he might bolt like a deer, take flight like an eagle, vanish like a ghost.

He didn’t argue. He seemed relieved to get away from this moment that asked more of him than he had to give.

“Where did you go?” she asked Jeremy. He looked at the boy on the ground, then at her, and his one-word answer was frightening enough that she asked him nothing more. “Far.” Then Jeremy, who had been so eerily calm until that moment, wept. Relief? Happiness? No. He and Ralph had just been found. Why did he cry like something unbearably precious had been lost?

Maggie and Tom followed them, like the final members of a religious procession.

By the time they reached the parking lot, the cavalry had arrived. A dozen cop cars. A dozen fire trucks. Four ambulances for two boys. Everyone wanted to see this show.

Maggie sat and listened as Jeremy spoke under his breath to Ralph in a language she had never heard before and never would again. His words were like the sound of dry leaves rustling and skittering on the breeze through an autumn wood. And whatever he said, she knew that if she understood the words, she would understand one of the deep secrets of the world, a secret the world needed to keep.

When he stopped speaking, a red bird landed on a branch above their heads. Cardinal red but not a cardinal. A red crow, though there was no such thing as red crows, even in Red Crow. She looked at Jeremy. He raised his finger to his lips. Surely she’d imagined it. She’d been swept up in the moment, half-crazed with adrenaline. No red crows. No magic words. A good story, yes, but not a fairy tale. They didn’t have fairy tales in West Virginia. They were lucky to have a Target. Then again, why not here? Why did France and Germany and all those places get to have fairy tales but not West Virginia? Wild West Virginia. Wonderful West Virginia. Beautiful and dangerous and dark and strange West Virginia. Why didn’t they get to have magic here, where the hills rolled like ocean waves and the morning mist was as thick as the silence of a family keeping secrets? If fairies were in the world, they couldn’t find a better place than the Crow to tell their tales…

Maggie never saw the boys again after that day. It wasn’t her story, and neither is this one, but she never forgot the moment when the universe allowed her to brush her fingertips along the spider-lace edges of a true-blue fairy tale. Boys vanishing into the woods, then magically reappearing after everyone thought they were dead…if that’s not a fairy-tale...

STORYTELLER CORNER A Recipe for a Fairy Tale Hello. This is your Storyteller. You may already be wondering why I’m intruding onto the story like this, which is a fair question. But this is a fairy tale and fairy tales play by their own rules. I wanted you to be aware of these rules so we could all, pun intended, be on the same page. First, what is a fairy tale? A wise and kind teacher I once knew worked up her own recipe. It went something like this… Mrs. Adler’s Recipe for a Fairy Tale For any fairy tale worth its salt, you will need most, if not all, of the following ingredients… One princess in some sort of trouble and/or distress. One magician. If a magician is unavailable, you may substitute a wizard and/or wise woman. Basically, anyone with magic powers who knows more than they’re willing to tell. One hero, the more unlikely, the better. One to three villains worth fighting (and don’t skimp on the evil deeds). A member of a royal family disguised as a nobody. A pinch of unusual animals. Place all ingredients into a world that is not our own, mix well, and let it rise. You’ll know you’ve created a good fairy tale if your story ends happily ever after for the heroes and badly for the villains. You may have noticed “The Storyteller” isn’t listed in the recipe, but I am there, I promise you. We’ll play Rumpelstiltskin’s game, and I’ll let you guess my name. Oh, for this story, you should also know about the rule of three. In fairy tales, things are always coming in three...

Women get lost differently than men, who get lost differently than small children, who get lost differently than the elderly. A lot of psychology goes into it. It makes sense to specialize.

Even in countries he’d never stepped foot in before, in harsh climates, in unforgiving landscapes, Jeremy Cox had an uncanny knack for finding the lost, dead or alive.

Interviewer: Let’s say I’m lost in a wooded area like this. What should I do to aid in my own rescue? Jeremy: Even in thick forest terrain, someone lost can travel about two miles per hour. In two hours, that’s a four-mile radius, making for a possible search area of over fifty square miles. That’s why we tell people to stay put and let someone find them. Unfortunately, studies have shown about sixty-five percent of lost people in that situation don’t stay put. Interviewer: Why is that? Jeremy: Denial. Interviewer: Denial? As if sensing Emilie’s stare, Jeremy glanced at her. They were only twenty feet apart, close enough that she knew he was looking at her, searching her face. His brow furrowed as if he was trying to place her, but then he turned back to the woman interviewing him. Jeremy: Nobody wants to admit they’re lost. The interviewer laughed. She turned to the director. “That’s good,” she said, sounding like a completely different, almost normal person. “Good line to end on.” “Are we finished?” Jeremy asked. He had the slightest hint of an English accent. “One more,” she said, then turned her NPR voice back on. Interviewer: If Ralph Howell were lost out there again, would you make an exception to your “girls only” rule and try to find him? Emilie watched as Jeremy Cox’s jaw set and his eyes turned to granite. They would get an answer from the Forest Giants before getting one out of him. “You were right,” Jeremy said, glancing her way again. “That was a good line to ...

Nodding, she said, “Right, right. Stevie and Lindsey all over again.” He looked at her. “Who?” She’d jogged in front of him and then stopped, which forced him to stop. She unzipped her hoodie to reveal her T-shirt underneath—a vintage Fleetwood Mac concert shirt, the one with the penguins and the baseball sleeves. “Stevie Nicks. Lindsey Buckingham. Everybody wants to get the band back together.” “Nice shirt,” he said. He had hazel eyes, like a summer forest—evergreen trees, rich earth, golden sunlight—and they lit up when he smiled or even almost smiled. She had a feeling there was a very different Jeremy Cox underneath the stone-faced TV persona. “Thanks. Stevie Nicks is my lady and savior.” His eyebrows slightly lifted. “She’s a little before your time, isn’t she?” “Stevie Nicks transcends space and time,” she said. “Was that weird? I talk too much when I’m nervous. Or just in general. Can you say something weird so I’ll feel less awkward?” “I’ve had impure thoughts about Ann Wilson,” he offered. She snorted a laugh. She’d been right. The true Jeremy Cox had peeked out from behind the façade, and she already liked the guy. “Ann Wilson from Heart? No, that’s not weird. Awesome, but not weird.” “I tried,” he said, and though he sounded apologetic, she could tell he was trying not to laugh at her.

They decided to walk and talk along the trail that led to the other Forest Giants. It was an easy trail, and she was finally able to catch her breath. “You ever been here before?” she asked Jeremy. “Never,” he said. “Bit small for people to get lost in. You can hear the highway.” Had he been in search-and-rescue so long that he judged forests not by their beauty but by how easy or hard it was to get lost in them? “I almost came here this summer,” she said, pausing to study Little Elena, the daughter of the giant troll family. The figure sat on the ground, playing with a large stone like a toy race car. “Mom and I had this thing we did. Whenever someone died, we’d go into the woods. The first time, this sweet outdoor cat I’d been feeding got hit by a car. We buried him in the backyard, but I couldn’t stand to go back inside the house and act like everything was normal, you know? So Mom took me to a state park, and we walked. We walked until we were too tired to feel sad.” She started walking again, Jeremy right at her side. “Mom died in June. She’d wanted to see the giants, so I thought about coming here, but I couldn’t. Guess I’m doing it now.” “It’s called ‘searching behavior,’ ” he said. “People who lose someone will find themselves walking for miles or driving for hours…Lots of theories on why. I think it’s guilt. Misplaced usually. We think we should have been able to stop it, but we can’t. Even after they’re gone, your body keeps trying to do something to help even th...

“How is that gross?” “When they found his body, birds had pecked out his eyes.” “Gruesome,” Jeremy said, sounding almost impressed or maybe pleased.

It began with her mother dying of breast cancer in June. It had always been only the two of them, and they’d liked it like that. Emilie always knew she was adopted. That was never a secret, but her mother had asked her to stay away from DNA and ancestry websites, which Emilie never questioned, but maybe she should have. Emilie loved her mom, and her mom loved her. When her mother said, “Maybe don’t do that,” Emilie wouldn’t do it. So, no looking up relatives on Ancestry or 23andMe. Until her mother died, and she was so lonely she went fishing for family.

“Wow,” Jeremy said. She was perversely proud of herself for having a story that made the guy with an almost mystical ability to find missing people say Wow.

“My mom’s buried near my house. I walk there every single day. I want to bury Shannon there too. Have a real funeral or something? Even if no one shows up but me, she deserves that.” Emilie already had the tombstone engraving planned—Shannon Katherine Yates. She deserved a better world than this one. “Why is this so important to you? Because if the answer is that you think finding her body will help you deal with your mother’s death…I promise you, you’ll be wasting your time and money.” “I have plenty of money to waste,” she said. “Seriously, I don’t blame you for thinking that. Mom died, and within a week, I’m looking for relatives? And maybe that was true when I started, but…” She took a long breath. “But when that cop got me on the phone, the first thing he said was ‘I need to talk to you about your sister.’ It’s stupid, I know, but there was this split second when I was so happy. I had a sister? Nobody had ever used that word with me before. The first time I felt anything other than completely alone since Mom died. Well, except for Fritz.” “Fritz?” “My pet rat. Named after Stevie Nicks’s first band. You didn’t need to know that. Sorry.” “Look, Emilie—” “Please, please, please don’t say no. Mom left me a lot of money, so I can pay you a lot. And I can help. It’s not like I have a job.” “I wasn’t going to say no. But the forest can be a beautiful resting place,” he said. “And after twenty years, you need to understand there might not be much left of her body to find.” Sh...

She called out after him. “If that was Ralph Howell’s body in Red Crow, would you walk away?” He stopped, but only for a second before doing just that.

Music was magic for Emilie, especially the music of Stevie Nicks. For as long as she could remember, Stevie’s crushed-velvet voice could calm her racing mind even on the roughest days. And since her mother died, there had been a lot of those. But today, it wasn’t working. The music blasted through her earbuds, but her mind spun like a top that never slowed, never stopped.

With “Nightbird” playing in her ears, she walked the center’s labyrinth. Like a record skipping, a broken lyric echoed in her mind—walk away, walk away, walk away… The police had already tried to find her sister, failed, and given up. Jeremy was her only hope, her last hope, and he had said no and walked away. She reached the labyrinth’s center, then turned on her heel and started to walk it back to the beginning. The labyrinth wasn’t very big or fancy, only a painted stone circle. At first glance, it appeared as if there were a hundred lines, dozens of paths, twisting and turning and doubling back over and again. But no, there was only one line, one path. Order hidden inside the chaos. That’s why Emilie liked it. Usually. Because though it looked impossibly complex, she always found her way through it.

Why did she care so much? She’d never met her sister, who’d been dead for two decades. Why go to all the trouble? She knew why. Because the whole thing was like a fairy tale or something. Two sisters who never met raised by two different families, each not knowing the other exists. And one lives in luxury with a loving mother and everything she could ever want handed to her on a silver platter… And the other sister gets kidnapped by a known sex offender on the way home from school. Why was Emilie the lucky one? Why was she the princess, not the pauper?

“Jesus.” She popped out her earbuds and stared at him, wild-eyed. “Wrong guy,” he said. “But I think I saw him over there.” He pointed to a white marble statue of Jesus by the maintenance shed. “Not funny,” she said. “You said you had a flight.” “I lied.” “Oh great. Thought you were some big hero.” “I am, apparently. I’m also an asshole. They’re not mutually exclusive.” She stared at him, trying to decide if she was glad to see him, terrified, or both. “What are you doing here? You scared the shit out of me.” “If you hadn’t been blasting music directly into your ear canals, you might have heard me calling your name.” Yes, definitely could be a bit of an asshole. “My birth mother took drugs when she was pregnant with me. It made me very fussy as a baby, and only music calmed me down enough to sleep. Stevie Nicks—probably because she’s literally the fairy queen of rock—works better than any other music.” She paused for a breath. “Sorry, I didn’t need to tell you that, but the doctors said the drugs probably wired my brain a little differently. To quote my seventh-grade teacher verbatim—‘Emilie has trouble self-censoring.’ ” “I find that refreshing actually.” He glanced around at the center grounds. “Are you Catholic?” “I’m nothing. What are you?” “I’m everything,” he said.

“Why didn’t you want to be found?” he asked. “What?” “I know it sounds like an existential question, but I’m being literal. Were you scared of someone finding you?” Not often in her life, maybe twice, had Emilie been speechless. This made three. “How did you know?” “So I’m right. You didn’t want to be found?” “I’m adopted. And the adoption was legal, except nobody ever knew who my biological father was, so he never signed off on it. Mom was always a little worried he’d show up out of nowhere and try to contest the adoption. She never told me that, but when I was four or five I overheard her talking to a friend about it. I prayed a lot as a kid that nobody would ever find me.” “Then your mother died and you started feeling lost?” “Very lost. Yeah. Who wouldn’t?” She took a step toward him. He took a long breath, then looked up to the sky as if he’d finally understood some deep mystery the universe had been keeping from him.

He ignored the question and instead pointed at the stone platform, spinning his finger to indicate the painted twisting lines. “What is this?” “A labyrinth?” she said. “You’ve never seen one?” “Where’s David Bowie?” “Ha ha.” She was freaking out and he was making film references. “A labyrinth is a spiritual journey in miniature. They took the concept of a ‘pilgrimage to the Holy Land’ and shrunk it.” With both hands, she mimed shrinking the world down to a size walkable in ten minutes. “That’s a labyrinth.”

She stared at the house that had once been a haven. She’d never wanted to leave home. Her friends all wanted to go to California for college or Florida or Texas or England or anywhere but Ohio. If her mother had lived, Emilie could have stayed in this house forever without feeling like she was missing a thing. Now, it was only a fancy storage shed for her memories.

She opened the little door. Fritz, white with gray spots, ran out to her hand and scrambled up her sleeve to sit on her shoulder. “You aren’t afraid of rats, are you?” “Only the two-legged kind.” He held out his hand to pet Fritz, but her rat took it as an invitation and crawled into Jeremy’s palm. “Hello, Fritz,” he said, his tone dry as the Sahara Desert. She watched him intently, making sure he wouldn’t accidentally hurt Fritz, but Jeremy did a good job, holding him with one hand close to his chest and petting him with the other. She didn’t trust people who didn’t like her rat, and so far, Jeremy Cox was passing the Fritz test. “He likes you,” Emilie said. “How can you tell?” Half a hoodie string landed on the floor. She hoped it wasn’t an expensive hoodie. “He just chewed through your hoodie string instead of your finger. I go through two charger cords a week.”

“What’s all this?” He nodded toward the piles of books on the fireplace mantel. Do You Dare?—A Manual for Finding Your Courage. Braver Every Day. The Personal Power Handbook. How the Lamb Became a Lion… “Oh, um, I need to get some of that stuff back to the library. With Mom gone, I guess, you know, I’ve just been trying to find myself.” Holding Fritz nose-first like a pointer, he made a show of counting the books. Seven in total. “Find yourself? How many of you are there?” She glared at him. “I felt kind of bad about bringing up Ralph Howell yesterday after I swore I wouldn’t. I don’t feel bad anymore.” “You shouldn’t.”

They had an old upright piano, but Emilie rarely thought about it. Her mother had treated it like a second mantel, perfect for flower vases and picture frames. But Jeremy had opened the fallboard and was playing a few stray notes of some piece she didn’t recognize. It sounded like a spring storm to her—willows swaying in the wind, clouds racing across the sky, the waking earth eagerly drinking the dark gray rain…

The box contained all the stuff in it you’d expect from a dreamy thirteen-year-old girl. Fantasy novels—The Last Unicorn, The Hobbit, Dragonsbane, The Clockwork Raven. A plastic toy horse, black with gray and white painted spots, and a flowing mane. A single polished moonstone in a velvet bag, something she might have bought in a museum gift shop. Old VHS tapes with garage sale stickers on them—The Princess Bride. Matilda. Mulan. Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. The NeverEnding Story… Fritz crawled out of her hood, down her arm, and trotted over to the piles of books and things. He tried to climb onto the horse toy but only managed to knock it over. “Kind of breaks your heart a little,” Emilie said as she gently stroked Fritz. “Her sad little treasure chest. A rock. A toy. Some old fifty-cent VHS tapes from garage sales. Library discards falling apart.” She ran her fingers over the ratty spines of her sister’s Chronicles of Narnia books held together with old rubber bands. She knew it was a seven-book series, but Emilie counted only six. A notecard tucked inside one book read, Discard, missing book. Her sister had gotten the series for free because one book got lost. Meanwhile, Emilie had owned the entire series in beautiful hardcovers, and she never even read them. Her mother had eventually given them away to a neighbor’s son.

He opened a folded sheet of poster board covered with pictures Shannon had cut out of magazines. A page of fairies and elves. A page of tigers and wildcats. Doors without walls, freestanding in strange deserts. Giants. Goblins. Queens and princesses and knights and archers and girls with swords. Valkyries. Lost boys. Smoke-colored foxes. Dragon boats on rainbow rivers. On the top of the page, it read in a girl’s looping print, WHERE I WILL BE IN TEN YEARS. “Guidance counselor project, I think. He wrote on the back that she was supposed to do a collage of what she wanted to be doing for a job in ten years,” Emilie said. “Not make up a fairy world to live in. He gave her a B− for not understanding the assignment. Jerk.” It appeared she’d tried to do it the “right” way and had quickly given up on that. In the bottom corner of the page was a pencil drawing of a teeny tiny girl sitting at a desk. Wouldn’t anyone rather be a queen than have a desk job? “She understood the assignment,” Jeremy said, more to himself than her. He ran his fingers across the magazine pictures—the strange mossy forests, the fairy circles, the mythic animals—almost tenderly, like they were family photos and not some kid’s old homework.

The Nobody Queen By Shannon K. Yates Once upon a time, in a world unseen. A nobody girl became the queen Of a land of magic so wild and airy Full of giants and tigers, ghosts and fairies Wizards and wolves, battles and glories Told in unicorn songs and old crow stories. Fierce girls with swords and princes and knights Went on brave quests, turned wrongs into rights. They searched for a princess. At last, she was found. The loneliest princess, lost and then crowned. So that’s the whole truth and most of the lore Of the nobody queen, nobody no more.

“Straight As,” Emilie said. “Writing poetry. Won awards. Was in the school play. Who knows what she could’ve done with her life, what she could’ve been? Then one day a monster picks her at random, and the whole story of her life is just…lost. Forever.”

You okay?” He set the box down again. “Sorry. Having a mild mental breakdown. Ignore me.” Suddenly, Jeremy sat up straight and ran his hands through his hair, slicking it back. He breathed through his fingers, eyes red like he was trying not to cry. “Jeremy?” His head fell back and he laughed. He laughed like he’d won the lottery, or better, like he’d won the heart of his true love. Or even better than that, he laughed like the doctor had said they’d made a mistake, and he would live a good long life after all. She’d never heard a more beautiful laugh. In a flash, so fast she gasped, he grabbed her hand, looked up, and met her eyes. “Thank you,” he said. He wasn’t laughing anymore. “For what?” “For finding me,” he said. “Okay, you’re scaring me again.” “Good.” “Good. What does that even mean?” “I mean, there’s no bringing her here. We go to her.” “So she is alive? Can you tell me that much?” “Yes. I believe so. And I tend to be right about these things.” Emilie sat back in her chair. “She’s alive. She’s really alive.” He nodded. “In the woods? Is that where she is? Red Crow State Forest?” she asked. “That’s where we’ll find her.” “Okay…okay…” She stood up and paced around the dining room table. “I can, um…I can handle this. I think. Maybe…” “You can.” She needed to hear that. “What now?”

“Not that simple. I’m not his favorite person. Safe to say he hates me a little. Admittedly, I can’t fault his reasoning, though I do argue with the conclusion he’s drawn.” “I’ll talk to him then.” “No, absolutely not.” He shook his head no, no, no. “Rafe is not safe for human consumption.” “I want to meet him, not eat him. If he hates you, maybe I’d have better luck talking to him. Think about it.” He jabbed his thumb toward the stack of library books on the mantel. “Your courage books are working, Princess. You should renew them.” She narrowed her eyes at him. “Look, things are very complicated and delicate between Rafe and me. Let me handle him.” “I’m just trying to find my sister. I don’t need you to protect me—” “I’m not trying to protect you. I’m trying to protect him.” “Jeremy, she’s my sister.” Finally, that got through to him. “All right,” he said. “I’ll talk to him alone first. If I can’t get through to him, you can try.” She exhaled heavily. “Thank you.” “Fair warning. Things are about to get very weird.” Emilie scoffed. “About to?”

STORYTELLER CORNER The Holy Grail Time to meet our hero. Well, meet him again, I mean. The last time we saw Rafe, he was fifteen and mostly unconscious. He probably didn’t make much of an impression. But he is our hero and per the recipe, a bit of an unlikely one. Regarding heroes, a famous professor named Joseph Campbell, who studied the world’s fairy tales and folktales, once wrote, The journey of the hero is about the courage to seek the depths; the image of creative rebirth; the eternal cycle of change within us; the uncanny discovery that the seeker is the mystery which the seeker seeks to know. In other words, a hero on a quest for the Holy Grail isn’t looking for the Holy Grail. The hero is trying to find himself, and the only way he can find his true self is by going on a journey, being tried and tested until he knows if he is a hero in name only or a hero in truth. And that’s why the world has Holy Grails—not because the world needs Holy Grails but because the world needs heroes. Oh, and Jeremy was right. Things are about to get weird. Ready?

In a nearby rhododendron, a robin woke and started a song. Rafe spotted him on a low branch. He had a bright red breast and one oddball white feather in his wing. Rafe always paid attention to birds. It was the birds who’d warned him about the intruders. Rafe had gone on his usual hike yesterday, climbing to the Queen’s Tower Rock, where he could survey all of Starcross Hill. He made the trek daily, and the animals had long ago accepted him as part of the landscape. He could sit in the shade by the silver creek that wound down his hill. Deer would stand five feet away from him to drink, barely blinking at his presence. Coyotes jogged past him on the game trails. Birds kept singing when he passed under their branches. Except yesterday, the birds had been suspiciously silent. High on Queen’s Tower Rock, he’d peered through his binoculars and spotted tire tracks on the neighbor’s logging road. Poachers. And they were back again. When his breathing eased, he started off again. The robin’s song suddenly changed into a loud whinny. Rafe froze, then heard a soft rustle of leaves. His eyes, now accustomed to the low light, spotted a fat black rat snake, nearly six feet long, darting across the trail, disappearing under leaves. He’d almost stepped on it. He glanced at the robin and whispered, “Thanks, buddy.” Then he hiked on, telling himself “further up and further in,” which was something Jeremy used to say when they were hiking, though he didn’t remember what he’d gotten it from...

From out of nowhere, the mother black bear appeared. She rose on her back legs, raised her front legs, and roared. Instinct screamed at him to run, but something more ancient than instinct, a memory of a time before fear, held Rafe in place. He raised his arms over his head, made himself large, and roared even louder. A primal cry meant to save them both. A bear that mauled a human would be hunted down and killed, and her cubs would be left motherless before winter. She went quiet and dropped down onto four paws again. He waited for her to turn, to run away, but she remained. She stared at him with dark and shining eyes. Then she bowed her noble head to him, bowed like a commoner to a king. What could he do but nod at her, accepting the bow, though he didn’t know why, only that he knew he must. The bear turned and trotted away to join her cubs.

“Shit, shit, shit.” This was his fault for scaring off the hawk. He didn’t want to see the robin eaten, but he knew better than to take sides in the woods. He’d lost a red-tailed hawk her breakfast and maybe killed a robin for nothing.

Rafe whispered to himself, to the bird, “Don’t die, okay? You’ll fly again,” as he placed the lid on the box. The robin whistled one small, hopeful note.

Rafe looked at Jeremy. “Okay, so what the hell are you doing here?” “I need to talk to you.” “No.”

“Ale-8.” Rafe’s aunt lived with her husband and horses outside Lexington, Kentucky, and this was their local swill, as she called it. He’d spent every spring break with her as a kid, took Jeremy with him that one year they were best friends, and they’d drunk the stuff all week like water and wine. “Remember when we drank so much of it that spring break, your aunt made us start buying our own?” Jeremy asked. Not an offering then, but a bribe—the chance to taste being fourteen again.

“Rafe,” Jeremy said. Just that. Just his name. But it wasn’t his name. Nobody called him “Rafe” but Jeremy. Bank tellers, teachers, and dentists called him “Ralph.” His mother called him “baby” and always would. And his dad had called him “son” in the same way people said “Mr. President,” because the office mattered more than the person holding it. But he was Rafe, in his own mind anyway. When Jeremy called him that, it was like hearing his true name spoken for the first time in fifteen years.