“Yeah, she was,” Jeremy said.

She grabbed him by the face. “Don’t you ever stay away so long again, so help me God.” She kissed his forehead like she was blessing him. Then she pointed at Rafe. “You neither, Junior.”

Emilie covered her mouth to hide a laugh. But his mother still heard it.

“Now, who’s this pretty girl?” she said.

“Emilie.” Emilie raised her hand in a nervous wave. “Hi. I’m with Jeremy. Not with him with him.”

“Jeremy’s helping Emilie find her sister,” Rafe said. “They need a place to crash tonight.”

“You poor thing,” his mother said to Emilie. “I’m Bobbi. You all come in and we’ll get dinner on.”

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 CornerMoms

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.

Chapter Ten

Rafe stood in the kitchen doorway, watching the chaos, three people at one kitchen counter. His mother bustled around happily, giving orders. Emilie was making the salad dressing. Jeremy chopped onions while wearing Rafe’s mother’s old apron that read, Kiss the Cook! with big red lips on the front.

Turn back the clock fifteen years, put Rafe in Emilie’s place, and it could have been any Friday night when Jeremy slept over their freshman year in high school. 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.

He should’ve been helping, but Emilie had taken over his job, and there was nothing for him to do. It felt good to stand back and watch his mom having fun. She loved guests, loved meeting new people, and loved cooking for anyone who was hungry. She loved Rafe’s friends, always had, and she loved Jeremy most of all.

While the three of them threw dinner together, Rafe had the chance to slip away and find the maps. He was ninety percent sure everything had been stored in his old basement bedroom, another time capsule. He’d moved into this bedroom at eight years old, and when he left at eighteen, the tractor wallpaper was still on the walls. An old desk bought at a garage sale was still in the corner. The same twin bed he’d slept in his entire childhood still sat under the window.

The box of maps was either under the bed or in the closet. He got on his knees on the rug but found only a few boxes of old Christmas decorations under the bed. Closet then. He went to the closet and opened the door. On the shelf above all the winter coats, he found several plastic storage bins.

He took them out and piled them up by the bed. He sat down on the edge and pulled off the first lid.

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…

He heard footsteps and looked up. Jeremy stood in the bedroom doorway. Rafe immediately shut the book.

“Dinner ready?” he asked.

Jeremy said, “Not yet. But I want to give Emilie an archery lesson after dinner. Any chance there’s a kids’ bow in the house? She can’t use mine. It’ll kill her.”

“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.”

“I’ll talk to Mom after dinner,” he promised. “I think her bow’s in the shed. It’s only twenty-five pounds.”

Jeremy nodded but didn’t leave. After an awkward silence, Rafe said, “I haven’t found the maps yet.”

“They’ll turn up.” Jeremy peeled himself off the doorway and came inside, sat down on the floor among the boxes.

“What’s all this?”

“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.