Song of the Fireflies

Chapter Nine

Elias

When I made my way back to the top, I found Bray wasn’t sitting near the edge of the ridge where I had left her I moved farther out into the clearing with our blankets draped over one shoulder.

“Bray?” I said, looking around.

I brushed it off for a second, thinking she was probably just taking a piss behind a tree somewhere, and I set our blankets on the ground.

But then I got a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.

I walked quickly toward the edge and looked over. My heart started to bang against my rib cage. I peered down as far as my sight could penetrate the darkness, but took a step back upon realizing that if she had fallen there was no way I’d be able to see from way up here.

She had to be somewhere around close by. She had to be.

“Bray?” I called out again. “Where the hell did you go?”

Still no answer.

Panic set in quickly. I stood there as still and as quiet as I could for several long seconds in case she was coming through the woods, but I heard nothing. I arranged both hands around my mouth and shouted, “BRAY!” and my voice echoed through the wide-open space. But still nothing. I felt sick to my stomach. She wouldn’t have left like that way out here. And if she did, I would’ve seen her on the path coming down as I was making my way back up.

I ran toward the tree line, searching for any sign of her, for another path she might have taken. I refused to believe that she had fallen off the edge.

Just as I noticed another path through the woods that seemed to head south and I started to go toward it, I heard footfalls in the leaves. I didn’t wait to see if it was her, I ran blindly straight into the woods. A skinny branch slapped me across the forehead on my way, but I didn’t stop.

Bray and I nearly crashed into each other.

“Shit, baby! Where the hell did you go? Scared the hell out of me!” I started to pull her into a hug, but something about her was off and I stopped. She didn’t respond or even raise her head to look at me.

“Are you all right?”

I took her hands into mine. Hers were shaking. Her whole body was shaking.

I cupped her face in my palms and raised her head so that she’d look at me. She was crying, and something in her eyes… I couldn’t place it, but it haunted me. I wondered if she even knew I was standing right in front of her. Her hair was messy, with pieces of leaves stuck within a mass of strands. Dirt was smeared across her left cheek. She looked like she’d been in a fight.

I touched her split lip, where a thin line of blood glistened near the corner. “Bray, you’re scaring me. What happened to you?” I shook her gently and then more aggressively when she still didn’t respond. “What happened? Talk to me!”

Her lips trembled and more tears seeped from the corners of her eyes. And then as if a floodgate had been opened, she started screaming through her tears, “It was my fault! Elias! Oh my God!”

“What happened?” I roared, scared for her and for myself, my heart about to burst through my chest.

“Jana!” her voice trembled and she began to stutter. “Sh-she fell. Jana f-fell. Right off the cliff!”

“What?” I said, suddenly almost completely calm. I don’t think what she had just said registered in my mind yet.

Then suddenly, it did register and my heart stopped.

I crouched down in front of her, squeezed her trembling hands within mine, and I looked up into her reddened, tear-soaked eyes as she stood before me.

“Bray, look at me. Look at me.” She did. “Are you sure?”

She nodded in an unsteady, jerking motion. The tears never stopped flowing. Her pretty face distorted with every kind of pain and anguish and guilt that a person could possibly feel at once.

“Show me,” I said with intent, trying to contain the dread and panic. “Take me to where it happened.”

She shook her head at first but then nodded. “OK.”

I followed close beside her as she led me through the woods toward the edge of a ravine not even two minutes from the clearing. I held her hand tight as I stepped to the edge and looked over. The drop was no more than fifty or sixty feet, where I could clearly see Jana’s body splayed out on the rocks.

“Holy shit….”

Bray ruptured into heartrending sobs, and she buried her face in her hands. I seized her and pulled her harshly against my chest, squeezing my arms tight around her shaking body, my hands holding fast to her head.

“Shhh, baby please, stop crying. Listen to me. We have to go down there. We have make sure. Can you do that? Bray, can you help me?” I tried my best to calm her down. I held her gaze until she seemed fully coherent and cooperative. I wiped the tears from her cheeks.

She nodded slowly.

“We’ll figure this out, OK? Now let’s go.”

It took us what felt like a very long time, thirty minutes at least, to find the easiest way partway down the ravine and to Jana’s body. And once we got there, I knew before we even got close enough to see if she was breathing, that she dead.

Jana was dead. Jana was dead.

The words kept running through my mind, over and over again like a broken record. I think for two minutes straight I had an out-of-body experience, because nothing around me felt real. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the body. The rock beneath her head was painted with glistening red that appeared black in the darkness. Jana’s eyes were open, staring up at the sky, lifeless and empty, though still full of something… they were full of the truth of what happened. I finally looked at Bray standing next to me, on the verge of full-blown traumatization. At any moment she was going to crack. She was going to slip into oblivion, and I didn’t know if I’d be able to pull her out of it.

I pulled her against me again, even tighter this time, and felt her ribs moving against mine. “Stay with me,” I said. “We’re going to figure this out. Do you understand?”

And I held her there. We stood together next to the body.

I thought of my mother and the things she always said to me when I was growing up: Always do what you know in your heart is right. No matter what, Elias.

And I wept going over those words in my mind. I cried and shook and lost myself as much as Bray had done for a moment, crushing her against me, never wanting to let her go. But finally, I pulled Bray away from my chest and clasped my hands around her upper arms. “Baby, look at me and tell me… swear to me… that this was an accident.”

She fell to her knees on the cool rock and I went down with her.

“Please, Bray, tell me the truth.”

“It was an accident! I swear! I pushed her off of me, but she stumbled back too far and tripped and went over the edge! I didn’t think I’d pushed her hard enough! I didn’t want to push her off!” She screamed every word at me but it felt more like she was trying to convince herself, to make herself understand what just happened. Her face was stricken by pain. So much pain. Her fists were clenched against her thighs.

I tried to grab her head, but she jostled herself to the side and started puking on the damp bank next to the rock we stood on. I pulled her hair back and away from her shoulders and held her loosely around the waist while she threw up. She cried so much that her voice was strained when she tried to speak between vomiting intervals. “I didn’t mean—” and she’d vomit before she could get the rest of the words out. “I wasn’t try—”

Finally, she fell against my body when she couldn’t puke anymore, and I enveloped her in my arms and rocked her gently, brushing her hair away from her forehead.

“I-I don’t want to go to prison,” she said. “They’ll send me to prison, Elias. I can’t prove it was an accident. Elias, they’ll charge me with murder.” Her voice started to rise again and her body became stiff in my arms. “Please don’t let them take me to prison!”

She was crying heavily again.

“Shhh… that’s not going to happen. You can tell them the truth. Just tell the truth and this will work out. I have to believe that.”

I didn’t believe that…

“No, Elias,” she cried. “They won’t believe me. People know you slept with her. Mitchell knows. I’m the new girlfriend. People will assume. And…” She stopped cold.

“And what?”

Her hands were trembling harder.

“Bray, what is it?”

“She… she told me she thought she might’ve been pregnant.” She hesitated again. She didn’t want to finish. “With your baby.”

I froze.

“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “I-I mean, it’s not impossible, but I used protection. It wasn’t even that long ago.” My head was spinning now with the possibilities, my heart a heavy, uneven series of beats. I was almost as traumatized as Bray was at this point. “How would she even know something like that so early? I used a condom. It didn’t break. If she was pregnant, I doubt it was mine. Possible, but unlikely.” I was rambling now. Nervous as hell that something like that could’ve been true.

“She was just fucking with you,” I added, completely believing that, because it was the only thing that made sense.

“It doesn’t matter, Elias. She’s dead and I was the last one to be seen with her! There was a girl here with her just before it happened! And I, more than anyone out here, had motive. They won’t believe it was an accident! They’ll crucify me!” She buried her face in my chest, her fingers digging into the back of my neck.

I decided to do the right thing, just like my mother always said. In that moment, it was the right thing to do…

“Let’s go,” I said, pulling her to her feet. “We have to get out of here.”

Bray looked at me with confusion in her eyes, but it took all of two seconds for her to understand and follow me. We found our way back to the ridge in the clearing. We didn’t speak, overwhelmed by what had happened and exhausted by the uphill climb. I held her hand tight the whole way, afraid to let her go for even a second.

I was afraid to let her go…

I grabbed our blankets from the ground and tossed them over my shoulder.

Finally, I spoke. “Now listen to me, OK?”

She nodded.

“When we go back to the main camp we have to act normal. Hopefully no one will notice us, but if they do we have to act normal.”

“Are we leaving… now?” she asked nervously.

“Yes,” I said. “If they find her while we’re still here…” I stopped. I sighed. But I had to be truthful with her. “Bray, I’m not confident enough to believe that you won’t break down in front of everyone. We can’t stay here for that. Do you understand?”

She nodded again. “But it won’t be normal for us to leave in the middle of the night,” she pointed out.

I hadn’t thought of that. A heavy breath rattled through my chest. I looked out toward the ridge for a moment.

In the end, I could think of nothing. Nothing was going to make this better. I knew deep in my gut that unless she turned herself in, that if I didn’t talk her into doing the right thing, that from this point on everything would just get worse.

I pushed myself away from her and threw the blankets on the ground in a rage. “AHHH!” I shouted, balling my fists beside me, my arms bent upward. I went to the edge of the ridge. “God damn it!” My hands gripped the back of my head and I just stood there like that, staring into the dark sky.

Bray came up behind me. I felt her hands slip around my waist from behind, the softness of her cheek pressed against my bare back.

“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.”