The Lost Story

by Meg Shaffer

“Don’t tell my mom about Red Crow. Let me tell her.” “What if she asks?” Emilie said. “Lie,” Rafe said. “I’m not lying to your mother,” Jeremy said. “You lied to your mother all the time,” Rafe countered. “Yes, but that’s my mother. Very different.” “She’ll know anyway,” Emilie said. “Moms always do.” “Now I know why my parents stopped after one,” Rafe said. Emilie’s mouth fell open. “Hurtful,” she said. “It’ll be all right,” Jeremy said. “Bobbi will be too happy to see me to even care why we’re here.” “She doesn’t like you that much,” Rafe said but had a feeling he might be right. “Just let me handle it.” “Fine.” Emilie flung open the car door. “But I’m telling you, she’ll know.”

“You hush,” his mother said. “This is my redheaded stepchild, and I’m going to hug him tight if I want to.” She patted Jeremy on the back and said softly, “I’m so sorry about your sweet mama. Mary Cox was a great lady.”

Just that easy, Rafe thought as they filed into the house. But as they went inside, Emilie turned around and mouthed to him, “She knows.”

STORYTELLER CORNER Moms When you read fairy tales, you’ll learn fast there are only two types of mothers you’ll meet in those stories. One—good and dead. Two—bad and alive. Fathers usually fare better. They live longer. However, without their wives around, they tend to make very poor decisions. Snow White had a good and dead mother. Then her father remarried her wicked stepmother. Cinderella’s father also exercised very poor taste when looking for wife number two. The father in “Rumpelstiltskin” took parental bragging to a whole new level when he swore to all who would listen that his daughter could spin straw into gold. One imagines if his wife had been alive, she would have quickly shut those rumors down by explaining to all and sundry that she’d married a narcissist. There is a third type of mother in fairy tales, neither good and dead nor bad and alive, and though a rare figure, she does have a part to play in some stories, including this one. That would be the fairy godmother, of course. Sometimes she doesn’t even have to do magic to bestow a gift upon a worthy young prince or princess. Sometimes the godmother is just a good mother. And Emilie was right. Bobbi knew.

The kitchen even looked the same as it had since it was built in the aesthetically challenged seventies. Yellow counters and yellow table. Brown checkered wallpaper. An oval rag rug lay atop the brown linoleum, which his mother mopped daily.

Sketchbooks. All his old sketchbooks. He knew he needed to be looking for the maps, but he couldn’t help himself. He took the books out and checked the inside covers for the dates penciled there. In his sloppy teenage penmanship, he found October 7, 2006, scrawled inside the cover of one book. That was the month he and Jeremy had started spending all their free time together. He rarely looked through his old sketches. He didn’t mind the art, but he avoided the history. Especially from that year with Jeremy before they were lost. He opened the sketchbook to the middle and found a sketch of Martha, Jeremy’s poodle. Another one of Jeremy’s old house decorated for Christmas. A sketch of a breakfast Jeremy had dubbed Still Life with a Tudor’s Egg & Cheese Biscuit. After that, several pages of nothing but sketches of Jeremy sitting at the piano. So many good memories from that year they’d been inseparable. If only it could be this easy to get his missing memories back. Open a book, turn the pages, and there they are…

“You still hunt?” Rafe asked. True, that year they’d been friends Jeremy had gotten pretty good with a bow. His father, for all his faults, had been a great teacher. But he never expected Jeremy to keep it up. “You don’t want to know the answer to that.” “I asked.” “No, I don’t hunt anymore, but if I’m looking for a body, I’ll take my bow with me in case coyotes or vultures are—” Rafe didn’t need to hear another word. “Yeah, I get it. Shit. How are you sane after all that?” “Who said I was?” “True.” Rafe caught himself staring at Jeremy. “I guess you can’t tell me how you do it, right?” “Right. Wish I could. Come with us tomorrow, and I will.”

“My entire childhood in pencil sketches.” Jeremy dug out a sketchbook that looked different from the others—thicker, beat-up pages sticking out from the binding at odd angles. “This is the one your dad ripped apart,” Jeremy said. He opened the book to a sketch of himself, aged fourteen, sitting on the front porch of his mother’s old house on Park. “Yeah,” Rafe said. Jeremy flipped through the pages. “Who taped it back up? You?” “Had to have been, but I don’t remember doing it.” “What’s the last thing you do remember?” Jeremy asked. “I don’t remember the day we got lost,” Rafe said. “I remember most of the day before, but…not all of it. I remember asking to stay the night at your house. Then all hell breaking loose.” Asking to stay the night at Jeremy’s had been a mistake. His parents had a strict no-school-nights rule, but Rafe had argued the next day wasn’t real school, just an end-of-year field trip to Red Crow State Forest. His mom had said yes. His father had said no. When Dad said no, it was no. So, Rafe had been sullen and silent during dinner, picking at his mother’s meatloaf. His dad returned this silence with surliness. “What do you do at his house that’s so much better than what you can do at ours?” Rafe knew better than to answer that. When he’d eaten as much as he could stomach, he’d taken his sketchbook out of his backpack to work on a drawing he’d started that weekend. “Son, stop doodling and help your mother with dishes.” Doodling? Rafe did not doodle. He dr...

Katniss Everdeen had made it look so easy, but shooting arrows was not fun. “All right,” Jeremy said, “this time, slacken your fingers and release the arrow. Let the string and the arrow do the work.”

You release arrows, you don’t fire them, Jeremy had told her sternly. They are not guns. The only firepower in archery is the fire inside the archer.

“I suck at this,” she said, nodding. “You do,” Jeremy replied. “Is that your pep talk?” “I also sucked at this once. I no longer suck at it. You, too, could be just like me. With practice.”

“Defend myself? Against what?” “The unknown. Now try again. Pull back. Anchor. Don’t release. Just let the string slip through—”

“I hit it! Horribly, but still!” She lifted her hand for a high five. “No high-fiving,” Jeremy said. “When you make a good shot, you say, ‘West-by God!-Virginia!’ ” “West, by God, Virginia?” “No, it’s West! By Gawd! Virginia!” He put ludicrous emphasis on the God in a mock West Virginian accent that was not flattering to West Virginians or any other people on planet Earth. She tried it again. “West—by God!—Virginia! Better?” “Much. Now shoot the target again and try to make it stick this time.” She released her arrow two feet to the left of the target. “I quit.” “Don’t quit,” he chided. “You want to boop death, remember?” “Gotta be an easier way to boop death than this. Jeremy?” He seemed to be elsewhere. He was looking up at the sky. Here in the country, miles from any town, the stars were out in full force. The stars and the old beat-up moon. The air was crisp and smelled lightly of distant smoke from a fireplace. He breathed in and smiled. “On cold nights like this, we’d sit by the fire and read to each other until it was time for bed. Just the three of us. We were halfway through The Wonderful Wizard of Oz when we left. Your sister’s probably still waiting for us to come back and finish reading the story.”

“How’d you and Rafe meet? I asked Rafe, and he just said”—and here she lowered her voice an octave and made herself sound a little surly—“ ‘School.’ ” “Was that your Rafe impression?” He yanked an arrow out of the ground. “School,” she said again, trying to sound even more like Rafe. “I almost had it there. School.” “Uncanny.” “So?” “First day of high school. We sat next to each other in World Civ.” “Best friends immediately?” “Stuck together like glue,” he said as they walked back to the shooting line. “Everyone thought we were the odd couple. Everyone but us.” “Why odd?” “Let’s put it this way,” Jeremy said. “I have a great-uncle who’s an earl. Rafe has an uncle in prison named Earl.” She laughed. “We didn’t care about any of it, though. Mum was a music professor at WVU, concert pianist. Bill was an electrician, very blue-collar and proud of it. He didn’t even want Rafe to go to college, much less art school. When Mum started encouraging his talent, telling him she could help him if he wanted, his dad wasn’t happy. Thought we were putting ideas in his head.” “Some ideas are good to have in your head, aren’t they?” “It was more than that. He liked it better at our house. Never wanted to be home.” He smiled, and Emilie could tell he was replaying a treasured memory. “I remember the first time Mum made me practice piano when he was over…Humiliating. I told him he could go upstairs and play Xbox or whatever until I was done. He didn’t want to. He sat on the sofa in the music...

“Hmm,” she said again. He turned and glared at her. “Now what’s hmm?” “Can I ask a question?” He eyed her sternly, and she knew he was onto her. “Only if it’s archery related.” “Um, it is,” she said. “It is archery related in every respect.” “Go ahead.” “So…when did Cupid’s arrow first hit you? The day you met Rafe, or was it later?” He froze momentarily, then pulled back at the string and released the arrow. Gold. She waited. And waited. He looked at her. “Day we met. The second we met. For me anyway.” “Gay? Bi? Pan? Fun at parties?” “That is not even remotely archery related. And I prefer the term unisex.” “Unisex?” “Like a T-shirt. Fits both men and women. Plus, T-shirts are tops.” Emilie groaned and punched him in the upper arm. “That was inappropriate. So so so inappropriate.” “You asked,” he said. He didn’t even have the decency to rub his arm and pretend her punch had hurt. “What about Rafe?” “Why don’t you go ask him yourself if he’s gay, bi, or fun at parties?” “I will not be doing that.” “Smart. But yes, to answer your question, he likes girls. And me, for some reason.” Emilie muttered, “I can think of a few reasons.” “Thank you,” he said. “So what gave me away? The Subaru?” “Exhibit A—you did not appreciate it when I made a joke about Rafe impressing girls with his big sexy bed. Exhibit B—when he showed his face after shaving, you looked like…you know, in the movies when the vampire finally sees the sun after centuries of darkness? Like that. No, even better.” S...

“When he was twenty-two, Rafe got in a car accident. He was driving to the Crow in his sleep and ended up in a ditch. He’d had a few incidents before, but this time, they decided to commit him to a place called Brook Haven.” “Mental hospital?” “Yeah. I took the first flight I could find and drove to Brook Haven straight from the airport. He could only have one visitor at a time, and Bobbi was back with him. Bill was in the waiting room. He wasn’t happy to see me. Called security and had me kicked out. He blamed me for us getting lost. Easier than blaming himself.” “You should tell Rafe you tried to see him. He should know.” Jeremy shook his head as he nocked his arrow. “Rafe took his dad’s death hard. It’s harder when there’s unfinished business. I shouldn’t have gone anyway. Tempting fate.”

“No, you won’t. And that’s more than enough about me. What about you? Boyfriend? Girlfriend? Anyone you’re leaving behind in Ohio?” “Oh, me? Nobody. Ever.” “Ever?” “I just want a family again,” she said, “not boobs and boners in my face. Priorities, man.” Jeremy looked at her, then said, “Agree to disagree.” He pulled back the string again— “Oh no.” She gasped as a realization hit her quick as an arrow in the guts. “He doesn’t remember it. If Rafe doesn’t remember anything from when you two were lost, and that was when you two were together, then he doesn’t remember…” Jeremy drew back the string. “I don’t know what’s worse, that he doesn’t remember I’m in love with him or that he doesn’t remember he was in love with me.” Jeremy smiled, but it was so fleeting she wasn’t sure if she’d seen it or not. “At least I can still play ‘Primavera.’ I can play it from memory. If I had to, I could play it blindfolded.” He sent his last arrow flying. Gold.