Song of the Fireflies
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“I won’t turn myself in,” she said softly, as if she knew what I was thinking. “Elias, I know in my heart that this will be the end of us. I’m scared. I’m scared of losing you, of being taken away from you and put away. Haven’t we been apart long enough?”
Those last words wrenched my heart. My fingers dug in between hers against my stomach. I choked back the tears.
“If you don’t want to leave with me,” she continued, “I’ll understand. It’s probably better that you don’t. Because this wasn’t your fault. You don’t need to ruin your life because of me. But I want you to know—”
“I’m not going to leave you,” I stopped her, turning around to face her. “I’m not going to lose you. It’s you and me, it always has been. It always will be.”
I smashed my lips against her forehead.
We made it out of the camp that night without a scene. Only one person stopped us to ask why we were leaving, and Bray pretended to be sick. It wasn’t hard for her to pull off especially since she looked like she had been to hell and back. And she smelled faintly of vomit.
It was daylight when we arrived back at my apartment. Everything was different. The way the early morning sun hung over the trees and how it always made the wind chimes hanging outside my neighbor’s front door glisten and sparkle. The sunrise seemed darker; the reflected light on the shiny metal trinkets, lifeless. I didn’t hear any birds. I had always heard birds chirping in the early morning, but not this morning. Maybe they were there, carrying on like they always did, but I didn’t hear them. Even the paint on the apartment walls appeared dull and faded. The comfort I always felt when I’d walk through my front door after work was replaced with something ominous. Nothing was the same and it never would be again.
Bray and I knew that skipping town would would look suspicious, and put us on the police’s radar. But we also knew that it didn’t matter much at this point, because what we had already done was enough to make us the number one suspects. The motives that Bray pointed out. Mitchell having it in for me and knowing everything about those motives. Us leaving the camp before the first night was over. It didn’t matter what we did from that moment on. We just knew that we had to get away. We hoped that maybe Jana’s body wouldn’t be discovered. It was our only way out.
Of course, the bodies are almost always found, sooner or later. And since we didn’t try to hide it and left it out in the open, I knew too that “sooner” would trump “later.”
Chapter Ten
Elias
We drove southeast toward the ocean and wound up in Savannah. Things quieted down while we were on the road. We sat mostly in silence for the four-hour drive, but every now and then one of us would bring up the what-ifs and the maybes, which always rendered us silent again, left us to think heavily about this ever-expanding web of disorder we were creating for ourselves. One question would produce three more, but never any answers. By the time we found a small shithole of a motel to stay in, we had exhausted the topic. For a short while, anyway.
I chose this motel, likely the first choice of hookers and drug dealers, because it was one of the few that accepted cash and didn’t care if I’d “lost” my driver’s license.
The only thing that worried me as I stood at the front desk waiting to get my room key was that I was already in fugitive mode. It was like something was triggered in my brain that told me that we had to be careful in everything we did. Use fake names. Pay only with cash. Don’t call home. Don’t answer the phone when home calls us. And we hadn’t even officially been targeted as suspects yet. Hell, we didn’t know if Jana’s body had even been found.
“I’m starving,” Bray said, sitting down on the end of the bed.
“I’ll get us something,” I said. “There’s a few fast-food restaurants farther down the road.”
She reached out to me, and I took her hand and crouched on the floor in front of her. She brushed her fingers across my unshaven face. I kissed them.
“I love you,” she said with a weak smile. She was exhausted. Physically and mentally. We both were.
I raised up on my toes enough to reach her lips. “I love you, too,” I said after I pulled my lips away from hers. Then I stood up and grabbed my keys from the nightstand. “I’ll be back soon,” I said and left her in the room.
Instead of stopping at a restaurant I drove right past them all and went straight to my father’s house about ten minutes away.
He welcomed me at the door with open arms. “Elias! It’s good to see you, son. Come on in.”
If there was any person in the world whom I could trust and count on even more than Bray, it was my father. Unlike my mom, who was always the voice of reason, the do-gooder, my dad was the one who wasn’t beyond doing the wrong thing if, in his heart, it happened to be right. His was another kind of voice. Like father, like son. In more ways than one. I favored my father. I inherited his dark hair and blue eyes.
“You didn’t mention you were coming to Savannah las’ time we talked,” he said.
He brought two bottles of beer from the kitchen and handed me one as I sat on his old beige sofa.
“It was an unexpected trip,” I said.
“Well, I’m always glad to have ya here,” he said with a proud smile. He pushed his glasses up to the top of his nose.
We took a sip of beer at the same time and silence ensued.
“Dad, I’m in trouble.” I got right to the point. Not only was I not afraid to tell him, but I didn’t want to leave Bray alone in the motel for longer than I had to.
My dad cocked an eyebrow and his beer hung inches from his lips in pause. Slowly he lowered it. “What kind of trouble?”
“The worst trouble I’ve ever been in.”
He set the beer on the coffee table. All traces of him being happy to see me dimmed on his face. He looked intent and worried and, as I had expected of him, very fatherly and ready to do whatever he had to in order to help me.
“Talk to me, son.”
“You remember Brayelle, don’t you?”
He nodded and smiled again briefly. “Of course I remember her. Cute little girl. Beautiful like your mother later on when she grew up. Had a mouth like a biker chick.” He laughed and then said, “She was the one your mom whipped you over because you snuck out that summer I went to Michigan. Brayelle always was the Bonnie to your Clyde.”
His words stunned me. He had no idea how relevant the seemingly innocent comparison was.
He smiled again and winked at me. “Yeah, I knew all about her.” He grinned.
“Then you knew how I felt about her,” I said.
“Umm-hmm.” He took another swallow. “You were in love with that girl from the moment you saw her. I may not’ve been around much, but some things are easy to figure out in just a few visits. You two were always together.” He rested his back against the chair. “I used to look at your mom like that.”
“Well, something happened last night,” I began. “I’m not going to tell you the details—don’t want to drag you into it any more than I am just by being here. But I want you to know that it was an accident.”
He narrowed his gaze on me subtly. “Was it her accident, or yours?”
“It was Bray’s.”
“And you’re sure it was an accident?” He looked at me in a short, sidelong manner.
“Yes, she said it was an accident, and I believe her.”
“Do you?” He raised his back from the recliner and slumped over forward, resting his arms across his pant legs. “Think about it, Elias. Think about it long and hard, because the answer really is the difference between you doing what the law says is right and you doing what your heart says is right. You have to be sure. One hundred percent, son.”
I thought about it, just like he said to do, but I didn’t have to think long. I already knew.
“I know it was an accident,” I said. “She wouldn’t lie to me. And I could tell she was telling the truth. Bray may be brazen and a little over the top sometimes, but she’d never intentionally do something like that.”
My dad nodded once, accepting my explanation, trusting in me and what I believed. “Y’know, Elias, as your father, first and foremost I have to tell you that I don’t want to see you ruin your life to protect someone else’s.” He set his beer down again and got up from the chair. His camouflaged T-shirt hung sloppily over the top of his jeans. “But I’d be a fool and a hypocrite to expect you not to follow your heart.” He turned and looked down at me. “What do you need?”
I stood up with him, leaving my beer on the coffee table, and I hugged him long and hard. I wondered if it would be the last time I ever saw him, at least without a thick wall of security glass separating us.
I left my father that day with some extra cash to get us by for a little while at least, but more important, with his advice, which I always took to heart. He told me that I should try everything in my power to talk Bray into turning herself in before it was too late.
“Are you sure that’s what’s stopping you?” he had said. “Because you think it’s too late?”
“Yes,” I had lied. “We’re already in this too deeply to turn back now.”
But my father was a smart man. He could see right through me and I knew that he could. Bray and I still could’ve turned back and done the “right” thing, but I couldn’t lose her again, and Bray didn’t want to lose me. We had already established that before we left the ridge that night. And that was the way it was going to stay.
I went back to our motel room with burgers and fries.
We ate in silence. Silence seemed to be the norm for a while. And we watched television, both afraid we’d turn the news on at ten o’clock and see our faces staring back at us from the screen next to a reporter. But for the first several days, from Savannah to Fernandina Beach to Daytona Beach, we were still in the clear. Bray’s cell phone hardly ever rang. Just once when her sister, Rian, called to see how she was doing. Bray let it go to voice mail.
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