by Odette Beane
Emma woke that first morning and briefly wondered what the hell she was doing in this damned town.
But she knew. She knew why she was here.
She was in the bathroom when she heard a knock on the door. When she opened it, she was surprised to find Regina Mills smiling at her.
“Ah, good morning!” Regina said. “I thought I’d stop by and offer you a gift.” She held up the apples and walked into the small room, not waiting to be invited. Emma watched her warily. “I’m sure you’ll enjoy them on your drive home,” she added. “It’s too bad you didn’t make it out of town last night, after all.” Looking around the room with mild disdain, Regina set the apples down on the countertop.
“I’ve decided to stay,” said Emma, looking at the apples. “But thank you.”
“Are you sure that’s such a good idea?” Regina asked brightly, apparently not surprised. “Henry has been dealing with a number of emotional problems. I think this will just confuse him more, don’t you?”
“The fact that you’ve now threatened me two times in the last twelve hours,” Emma said finally, “makes me want to stay more.”
“What?” Regina said. “You take apples as a threat? I wouldn’t—”
“I can read between the lines,” Emma said. “I think I’ll stay until I get a sense for Henry’s situation here. I want to make sure he’s okay.”
“I see,” said Regina. “You’re worried that I am in fact evil, are you? You’ve been reading his book as well. I can promise you that he’s just fine. And that his problems are being taken care of. He doesn’t need you.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means he’s in therapy,” Regina said. “It means that he will soon learn that reality makes more sense than fantasy. As I keep telling him. It means that only one of us knows what’s best for Henry.”
“I’m starting to think you’re right about that.”
The audacity of this woman was unbelievable—Emma could not imagine making the choice to enter so boldly into a stranger’s private space and speak so disdainfully, especially to someone who might be around for some time. Regina smiled a crisp smile and took a step toward Emma.
“This has been nice,” Regina said. “But it’s time for you to leave this town.”
“Or what?” Emma said, arms still crossed.
Regina took another step toward her. Their faces a mere foot apart, Regina said coolly, “Do not underestimate me, Ms. Swan. You have no idea what I’m capable of.”
Emma paused and considered that.
“Well, then,” she said finally. “You’re just gonna have to show me, aren’t you?”
Regina’s eyes closed to the thinnest of slits. “So be it.”
Ten minutes later, in great need of coffee, Emma made her way to the diner. She also needed to think; she needed to figure out why Regina was so bent on getting her out of town. This place—there was something just off about this whole place. What was it?
She felt the strangeness all the more when she saw her own face staring back at her on the cover of the town daily, the Storybrooke Daily Mirror.
It was an old mug shot. She picked up a copy of the paper and sat down in a booth.
Seriously? she thought. One day to put this together?
Whoever had written the article—Sidney Glass was his name—had managed to dig up a lot about her life in a very short period of time. He knew that Henry had been born in Phoenix; he knew where she’d lived since then. He knew about her trouble with the law. Not quite everything, but plenty. Emma shuddered. This was exactly why she didn’t like small towns.
“Here you go.”
Emma looked up. The same girl from the inn, the one who’d been arguing with her grandmother, stood beside her table, smiling. She had a cup of hot cocoa and set it on the table.
Emma looked at her name tag: Ruby.
“Thanks, Ruby, but I didn’t order this,” Emma said.
“I know,” said Ruby. She smiled, cocked her head. Emma was impressed by the brightness of her lipstick’s red; it was almost incandescent. “You have an admirer.”
Emma turned to look across the room and saw Sheriff Graham seated at a booth. He was sipping coffee and reading the paper as well.
She got up and stormed over to him, carrying the cocoa.
“Ah. You decided to stay, did you?” he said pleasantly.
Emma just stared.
“Would you like to join me?” Graham said. He motioned for her to sit.
“Look, dude. The cocoa is a nice gesture. And it’s impressive that you were able to guess that I like cinnamon on my chocolate—not many people do—but I’m not here to flirt. So thanks but no thanks, Sheriff.” She slammed the cocoa down on his table.
“I didn’t send that,” he said. He shrugged, looking at her innocently.
“I did,” came a voice.
It was Henry. He was in the next booth, down so low that she hadn’t been able to see him. “I like cinnamon, too,” he added. “Hi. I’m glad you stayed.”
“Henry, what are you doing here?” Emma asked. “Don’t you have school?”
“Yeah, I’m going right now,” Henry said. “Will you walk me there?”
Emma sighed and gave an apologetic look to Graham. He smiled kindly in return and went back to the paper. There was something about the sheriff that she liked. Sure, he was under Regina’s thumb, but he seemed to be his own person. He was also somewhat handsome. Somewhat.
She nodded her good-bye.
Henry led Emma out of the diner.
“I seriously can’t believe you stayed!” Henry said, once they were outside. “This is gonna work.” He was excited. Emma smiled.
“Your mom would have preferred it if I’d left, I think,” she said. “It’s very unlike me to have stayed.”
“That’s because she’s the Evil Queen.”
Emma frowned. He did seem to have a rich inner life, but she couldn’t help but think of what Regina had said back in her room. He was seeing a shrink, for God’s sake. What if there was something really wrong with him? Was it the right thing to just go along with it? She didn’t know. She would have to talk to Archie.
“Explain it to me,” Emma said, deciding that she would rather talk to him about something he was enthusiastic about than scold him for making things up.
“What? The curse?”
“Yeah,” she said. “What’s it all about?”
“Okay, yeah,” Henry said, getting excited as he talked more about it. “So you and me have to break it. That’s our job. And step one of the operation is ‘identification.’ ” He looked up at her knowingly. “The whole operation is called Operation Cobra.”
Emma listened dutifully as Henry explained the curse. All the people of Storybrooke—“Everyone!”—came from another land. Fairy Tale Land. They had been happy there, and they lived with different identities. And then, in order to punish Snow White and Prince Charming for wronging her, the Evil Queen decided to put a curse on the whole land. A curse that meant nobody could be happy. This curse transported everyone who lived in Fairy Tale Land to this place, their world, on Earth, which was a land without magic. No one could leave, time did not move, and no one was aware of what had happened. They all had amnesia, and they’d all been stuck here for twenty-eight years, living the same days over and over again. Except for Henry, who got it, and that was only because of the book, and because he hadn’t been born in Fairy Tale Land.
“The Evil Queen had to get the curse from her old frenemy, Maleficent,” Henry explained. “She went to her castle and they had this huge magic battle, and the Queen stole the curse from Maleficent’s scepter. It was a crazy battle!” Emma nodded. “But to make the curse work right,” Henry said, “the Queen had to use the heart of whoever she held most dear in the world.”
“Whoa,” Emma said. “Intense.”
“I know!” said Henry. “And guess whose heart she ended up taking to make the whole spell work? You’re never gonna guess.”
“I can’t imagine who an Evil Queen would hold dear.”
“Her father’s heart. She killed her father to make the curse!”
“Now that,” Emma said, “is some serious Oedipal anger.”
“The best part,” Henry said, “is who you are.”
“I’m from Fairy Tale Land?” Emma said. “Who knew?”
Henry ignored this and explained to her that she was the daughter of Snow White and Prince Charming.
Emma found this to be hilarious.
Not only that, Henry said, but she was the only person who could break the curse. It was all in the stories. She was the little baby born right before the curse came down.
He spun his backpack around and removed a set of pages—Emma saw that he must have ripped them out of his book. He showed her an illustration of the baby wrapped in a blanket, with the word “Emma” embroidered on the front.
“That’s your smoking gun?” Emma said, looking at the illustration. “There are other Emmas in the world, you know.” Emma took the pages from him and looked through them, searching for an author name or a copyright date. But there was nothing—no date, no author. Maybe in the book itself. It was anyone’s guess where the thing came from. Either way, though, quite a coincidence that the baby had that blanket. It reminded her of the one she had had with her when she was found, the one she carried through all the foster homes. She still had it somewhere, packed away in a box back in Boston. It wasn’t the type of memento she liked to pull out, though. Most of the memories that came along with it were painful.
“I think you should read all of the pages,” Henry said. “This part is your story. I know you’re not going to believe me until you do.” He nodded to himself, then said, “You can’t let her see these pages, though. You can’t. That’s why I ripped them out. It would be… very bad.”
Emma looked at the book.
“Really?” she said, looking at a picture of the Queen. It did look a little like Regina; she could see how Henry could have convinced himself of all this.
Sort of.
“Really bad,” he said. “Really really really bad.”
Emma and Henry soon reached the school. Before he left, he looked up and smiled and said, “Thanks for believing me about the curse. I knew that you would.” It almost killed her, he was so much in earnest. No problem kid, I didn’t believe you at all!
“I didn’t say that I did, kid,” she said, thinking that it would probably be best to be honest, but a tempered honest. “I just listened.” That was totally true.
Still, Henry continued to smile, then turned and ran off toward class. Emma watched him go, still unsure how to handle his “interesting” relationship to reality. This “Operation Cobra” game seemed to give him endless joy, and some instinct told her it was never a bad thing for your child to feel joy. That was a mother’s job, wasn’t it? But a part of her thought that she was behaving recklessly, like the grandmother who steps in and gives the grandkid sweets until he’s sick. An outsider who is playing the game for short-term gains, not long-term goals.
“It’s good to see him smiling.”
Emma, startled, saw that Mary Margaret had approached.
“Oh. I guess it is,” she said. “I didn’t do that, though. Magic did.”
“Does Regina know that you’re still here?”
“Yes. She charmed me this morning with an angry speech. Really, really pleasant. How did that woman ever get elected to public office? She has no social skills.”
“It seems like she’s always been mayor,” said Mary Margaret.
Emma looked at her and cocked an eyebrow.
“What do you mean?”
“I think everyone is too scared of her to run against her,” continued Mary Margaret. “And I’m afraid I only made things worse for Henry by giving him that book.”
“Where did you get that book?” Emma asked.
“Hm,” said Mary Margaret. “I’m not totally sure. Here at the school, I think?”
“And who does he think you are, by the way?” Emma asked.
“Me? It’s silly.” She smiled and looked down. “He actually thinks I’m—that I’m Snow White.”
“Wow, Snow White,” Emma said and nodded, impressed. “Not bad.”
“And who are you?”
Emma looked at her, and didn’t want to say it once she realized what it implied about their relationship. Emma was surprised at how eagerly some part of her imagination entertained the idea, tried to dock with it, albeit for just a few seconds. It was just the kind of thing she used to do when she was a kid, a game she played by herself. Making Up Mom was what she called it, even though she never told anybody what it was she was doing for all those hours, hiding in closets or tucked in a ball beneath a tree. She spent that time envisioning what her mother was like—who she was, where she was, why she’d been forced to give Emma up for adoption. The fantasizing had eventually cohered, over a couple of years, into one blurry image in her mind that was almost a memory. The woman was smiling and coming toward her with her arms out, saying, “Emma, Emma,” in a sweet, tender voice. It was silly. Made up. It was all stupid. She’d realized that when she was eleven or twelve, and had quit playing the game then. Forever.
“Me? Oh, I’m not in the book.”
“That’s right,” said Mary Margaret. “You’re from someplace else.”
Emma smiled. “But I do have to go see Jiminy Cricket.”
Mary Margaret frowned.
“His doctor. Archie,” explained Emma. “Know where I can find him?”
She did, and Emma walked through town to Archie’s offices, wondering if it was wise for her to get involved in Henry’s therapy, but unable to stop herself either way. Most likely he wouldn’t be able to tell her anything. But then again, she was Henry’s mother….
Strange how easily she’d settled into thinking of herself as Henry’s mother, and she thought again of the moment with Mary Margaret, the leap of believing. In Henry’s case, it was true, she was his mother, but still, the concept was the same, wasn’t it? You don’t know something, then you find it out, and blam! You start to rethink everything. She had to be careful. There were soft spots in her psyche, ways in which she was vulnerable in this place. For so many years she’d developed armor, and now, in just a couple of days, the chinks were showing up. If enough of them did, eventually someone would exploit them.
At the door, Archie smiled and said hello, invited her into his small office. As she strolled in, Emma told him that she needed to talk about Henry.
“Oh, no, no, ethically I really can’t—”
“I know, I know. I get it. Doctor-patient privilege. I just want to know one thing. Maybe you can bend the rules.”
Archie relaxed, crossed his arms. “What is it?”
“What causes it?” Emma asked.
That simple question had been on her mind all morning. “Why is he confused about what’s real? Is he… crazy? Or is it just his imagination? I guess I need to know if he’s sick, or diseased, or just… I don’t know. What is the actual diagnosis?”
Archie looked pained by the question, especially by her use of the word “crazy.” He adjusted his glasses nervously, shook his head some more, and walked her over to his desk. “Please don’t talk like that to him—please don’t tell him you think he’s crazy, that would be terrible.” He motioned for her to sit down; he sat as well. “These stories are his language. Think of it that way. This is how he communicates with the world right now. He’s been through so much. This is him communicating, Ms. Swan. That’s a good thing.”
“He’s dealing with his problems.”
“That’s right.”
“What are his problems, then?” The logical follow-up.
Archie seemed to realize where she was going. He pursed his lips, tilted his head.
“It’s Regina, isn’t it? She’s making him unhappy?”
“No, no, that’s an overstatement, far too reductive,” said Archie. “Of cou
rse not. She’s a complicated woman and a stern mother, but she’s a good mother, too.” He nodded as he said this, Emma noted. He appeared to believe it. “What is your relationship like with your mother? Do you see my point?”
Another arrow to the heart.
“You obviously haven’t read the morning’s newspaper,” Emma said.
“What do you mean?”
“I’m adopted, too,” she said. “I don’t know my mother.”
“Oh,” Archie said quietly, as though this made sense to him. He nodded to himself, touched his chin. “I see. Well. You understand the point. Relationships with mothers are always complicated.” He smiled. “Fathers, too.”
“Something tells me things are even more complicated when it comes to Regina.”
“She tries, but she pushes too hard,” Archie continued. Apparently struggling with something else now, he sighed, then opened a file cabinet. “You should take his file, go over it. You’ll see.”
Emma frowned, skeptical. The doctor was acting strange; something was off. “Why would you do that?”
“Because he cares about you,” Archie said, handing her the file. “And I care about him.”
Emma considered that. Something felt wrong about it, sure, but she wanted the file. Whatever Archie was up to, she was sure she’d be able to handle it. She reached out and took the file.
“Simple math, right, Doc?”
“Exactly,” he said, adjusting his glasses again. She got up, and he stood to see her out.
• • •
It did not take long for her to realize that her instincts were right about the good doctor. It was only a few hours later that the sheriff was “mysteriously” at her door, looking at her grimly. “I’m sorry, Ms. Swan,” Graham said, showing her his cuffs. “But you’re under arrest.”
Emma couldn’t believe what she was hearing. She was at the door of her room, having just showered and changed. The sheriff looked at her with sympathy in his eyes. She had opened the door expecting Granny carrying a load of fresh linens. Instead, Graham had informed her that she’d been accused of arguing with Archie and stealing Henry’s file from his office.
“He gave it to me,” she told the sheriff, handing over the documents. “This is ridiculous. You realize Regina set this up, don’t you? She’s somehow forcing him to say that.”
