The Lost Story: A Novel

The narrator says that there are usually only two types of moms in fairy tales: the good, dead mother and the evil, living stepmother. Fathers in fairy tales tend to make poor decisions, such as marry the vile stepmother or, as in the case of Rumpelstiltskin, brag unnecessarily about their children so as to attract unwanted attention. A few fairy tales, like this one, contain a third kind of mother: the fairy godmother. The godmother doesn’t have to be magical; she just has to bestow a gift upon a worthy character. The narrator adds the aside that Emilie is right—Bobbi does know why the three are at her house.

Rafe and Jeremy go to Rafe’s room to look for a box that contains Bill’s maps of Red Crow. In the process, they find Rafe’s old sketchbooks, filled with Rafe’s drawings of Jeremy. The sketchbooks bring back memories. The night before they got lost, Bill asked Rafe to help Bobbi clean up after dinner. Rafe shot back that Bill could help Bobbi for once. Enraged, Bill slapped him and tore up the sketchbook in which Rafe was “doodling” (143), Bill’s dismissive word for Rafe’s art. Bobbi sent Rafe to his room to protect him from Bill. 

The next morning, Rafe told Jeremy that he did not want to go home. The boys missed the bus and lost their way while walking to Jeremy’s place. Before they got lost in the forest, Rafe had given Jeremy a taped-up sketch from the torn notebooks. Jeremy calls himself and Rafe “partners in crime” since it was not just Rafe’s love for art that infuriated Bill. With this cryptic remark, Jeremy goes off to find a bow for Emilie to train with.

Emilie asks Jeremy why she needs to learn how to shoot arrows. He replies that archery is a necessary life-saving skill where they are going. He teaches her to celebrate a bull’s eye by exclaiming, “West—By God!—Virginia!” (149). During a break from practice, Jeremy tells Emilie that it is Bill who taught him how to shoot. Even though Jeremy is reasonably good with a bow and arrow, Rafe is the true prodigy. Rafe could outshoot Bill, himself an expert archer, by the time he was 14. 

Emilie disarms Jeremy by asking him when cupid’s arrow made him fall in love with Rafe. Momentarily nonplussed, Jeremy recovers and replies that he has loved Rafe since the day he met him. Rafe also loved Jeremy but could never admit to his sexuality because of Bill’s hardline views. While Rafe likes girls and Jeremy, Jeremy describes himself as unisex because he “fits both men and women” and is a top (153). Emilie groans at the bad joke.

Given Jeremy’s love for Rafe, Emilie thinks it’s odd that Jeremy never went back to meet him. Jeremy replies that he did go to the psychiatric ward where Rafe was admitted after he drove his car off the road in a sleepwalking incident. However, Bill did not let Jeremy see Rafe, blaming him for Rafe getting lost. It was easier for Bill to blame Jeremy than himself. 

Jeremy never told Rafe about his visit, as he knows how hard Rafe took his father’s death. According to Jeremy, it is always tough to deal with a loved one’s death when there is unfinished business.

While Emilie and Jeremy are out in the yard practicing shooting, Rafe tells Bobbi about going to Red Crow to find Emilie’s sister. Bobbi says that even though she wants Rafe to always be close to her, she will not stop him from looking for a missing girl. Bobbi then gives Rafe an early Christmas present: a custom-made bow. An ecstatic Rafe cannot wait to show the bow to Emilie and Jeremy.

Rafe joins Emilie and Jeremy in the yard. He dazzles them by moving 40 yards away from the target—the others have been practicing at 20—and shooting a bull’s eye. Jeremy asks Rafe to show Emilie how to shoot the spider, the cross in the middle of the gold bull’s eye. Rafe says that it is impossible at 40 yards, but Jeremy tells him that he has shot the spider twice, though he cannot remember one of the times. The other time was in Jeremy and Bill’s presence, and Bill told him that his shot was off-center because he was jealous of Rafe. However, Jeremy saw that Rafe had shot the arrow right in the middle of the spider. Rafe tries the shot and misses. Jeremy tells him that he will make the shot again when the time comes.

The next morning, Emilie wakes up from strange dreams to find Rafe studying Bill’s topographical maps of Red Crow. As Emilie stares at him and tells him that he is stunning, Rafe tells her that she does not have to tell people every single thought she has. Emilie grins and replies that she actually does, as she is wired that way. 

They study the maps together, where Bill had marked every area where the boys could have been. Rafe cannot understand Jeremy’s and Bobbi’s lingering anger toward Bill, who never stopped searching for him. Emilie gently tells Rafe that perhaps Bill was indulging in what Jeremy calls “searching behavior” (173), where grieving people look for someone they have lost, spurred by guilt. Rafe says that Bill does not have that much to be guilty about: He only hit Rafe once and never blew up at him after Rafe returned from the forest.

Bobbi sees the three off with hugs and kisses, giving Jeremy an old Nokia button phone and Emilie an antique pocketknife that belonged to Bill. Rafe drives Jeremy’s car deep into the woods toward Red Crow, feeling the forest tug at him. He parks at the forest’s edge. Jeremy asks them to leave their iPhones behind in the car, taking only the old Nokia. Jeremy also arms himself with a sword. Jeremy asks Rafe to lead the way, and Rafe inexplicably knows exactly where to go, pointing to a trail.

Rafe leads the others into the forest, finding paths as if by an old instinct. They pass Goblin Falls to get to a steep hill and begin to climb. At the top of the hill is a grove of enormous trees, with the largest emperor tree in the middle. The tree has a hollow in its trunk. 

Rafe looks up at a branch and sees a red crow there. The bird flies into the hollow, as if to lead the others inside. Jeremy says that they must all go in together, so the three hold hands and step inside the dark hollow.

Referring to a quote from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the storyteller tells the reader that it is time to start believing in impossible things.

Rafe wakes up in a world where the trees are thousands of feet tall, with trunks ranging in every color from blue to pink, as if in a child’s imagination. It is clear that he is in a new world, a theory that is confirmed when he sees Jeremy sitting on the ground with a sleeping unicorn resting its head on his lap. Emilie is still asleep. 

As Rafe takes in the landscape, he can see that this is what he has drawn and sculpted in his cabin. Realizing that what he has been recreating are his memories and not his dreams, he asks Jeremy why he didn’t tell him that they had been lost in an alternate world. Jeremy replies that magic plays by its own rules: The conditions of their return were such that Jeremy could not have told him about the magical forest until now.

When Emilie wakes up, Jeremy finally tells Rafe the story of their lost time. They had been lost in the forest for a day and a half when they climbed to the steep hill beyond Goblin Falls and entered the magical kingdom of Shanandoah, where they are now. They were immediately found by the Bright Boys, terrifying creatures with sharp teeth who are drawn to fear. The Bright Boys were about to kill Jeremy and Rafe when they were saved by a party of girls, the Valkyries, led by the ruler of the kingdom, Queen Skya. Queen Skya is none other than Shannon, Emilie’s missing sister. It is after her that Shanandoah is named.

Rafe assumes that the scars on his back were from wounds given by the Bright Boys. Queen Skya’s healers healed the wounds, and Jeremy and Rafe became Skya’s subjects, living happily in Shanandoah and going on adventures. However, Skya always pined for her baby sister, who had been put up for adoption. In the magical kingdom, Emilie is known as the “Lost Princess of Shanandoah.” When Jeremy and Rafe needed to return to the real world, Skya deemed it too dangerous for both to be out there with complete knowledge about the hidden kingdom. She sought a solution from the Witch of Black Wolf Cave.

The witch told Skya that the only way Jeremy and Rafe could return was if their memories were divided: Jeremy would remember everything about their time in Shanandoah but forget the way back; Rafe would know the way back and forget the rest. The spell had one unbreakable rule: Jeremy could not tell Rafe about Shanandoah until they were back in the kingdom. 

Skya asked Rafe to draw all his memories in a sketchbook and lock it with a combination. When Rafe returned to Shanandoah, he could open the sketchbook and recover his memories. Now that he knows the truth about Jeremy’s silence, Rafe feels his anger against Jeremy melting away.

To know about how Jeremy survived the last 15 years, the storyteller suggests that the reader go to Chapter 17; otherwise, they will resume the current timeline in Chapter 18. Also, the reader would be right in thinking that Emilie suddenly vanishes at the end of the last chapter.