Song of the Fireflies (23 page)

Her lips quiver uncontrollably. She stares deeply into my eyes for what feels like forever. And then she shakes her head no, the barrel of the gun moving with the movement of her head.

“
Don’t say that!
” she roars.

“I
will
!” I scream, and then I try to calm myself enough to make her understand. I inch closer. “Brayelle, this, this moment right here is the ‘anything’ I vowed to you last night. You didn’t ask me to prove it, but I’m going to prove it anyway—don’t look away from my eyes,” I say, and she looks back up. “Stay with me. Right here.” I point at my eyes with my index and middle finger. “If this is what you really want, then I go down with you. I don’t want to live without you, either. We’re in this together. We always have been. I won’t abandon you now. I’ll die with you if you think death is the only way.”

She shakes her head, over and over, and tries fruitlessly to produce words.

“I don’t want you to die because of me,” she finally says, her voice raspy from crying so much and so hard.

“I want to live, Bray,” I say breathily, and with desperation. “I want to live a life with
you
. I want to marry
you
. I want to grow old and have babies with
you
. I want to
live
. But I’m prepared to die. Do you understand?”

“Why are you
doing
this?!” Her features are tortured, her body trembling.

“Because we belong together! In life and in death! Because without you I’m dead anyway!”

She throws her head back against the bread shelf and screams, dropping the gun on the floor. I grab her and scoop her up in my arms and crush her so hard against me that it takes the breath out of my lungs. We cry into each other, her fingers grasping my shirt, mine digging into her back.

“Baby, I fucking love you so much. I’ll never let you go,” I murmur into her neck.

The police burst through the door, but I can only faintly hear them. They’re ghosts, like Bray had always been to her parents. I only see and hear and feel Bray when they’re pulling us apart. I only hear her yelling out my name as everything else around us is mute. My heart breaks as she is reaching out for me and I know I can’t reach back. Everything seems to happen in slow motion.

“I won’t abandon you,” I say almost in a whisper, as she’s being dragged away with her hands behind her back. “I won’t abandon you.”

And then she’s gone.

One year and two weeks later…

I have written her every day. I’ve visited her every week during visiting hours. I’ve spent every waking moment not only proving to Bray that I would never abandon her, but fulfilling my own need to be with her.

Bray was sentenced to three years for involuntary manslaughter and for leaving the scene of a crime, but her attorney expected her to actually serve less than half of her sentence. Having no prior criminal record except a harmless stint in juvenile and offering to take a polygraph test really helped her case. Bray passed the polygraph, but it almost wasn’t admissible in court because Jana McIntyre’s family initially didn’t agree. But in the end, they relented.

Turned out that Jana McIntyre had more of a record than Bray had. Jana spent most of her teenage life in and out of juvenile detention and juvenile court for behavioral crimes, most of them related to violence. But the one key thing that Bray’s attorney made sure to bring to light in court was Jana’s three-month stay in juvenile for attacking a girl in the school gym and beating her unconscious. This helped back Bray’s story about Jana attacking her on the ridge and Bray shoving Jana only to get her off. Bray might’ve been given a lesser sentence if she hadn’t admitted to pushing her out of anger rather than self-defense. But at least she told the truth. It
was
self-defense, and the judge believed this, given the details of the situation, but it wasn’t life or death for Bray, and she had acted more out of anger than fear.

Also, since Jana’s death was considered suspicious, an autopsy had been ordered. Along with enough alcohol to put her three times over the legal limit, a host of drugs were also found in her system.

And there was nothing noted about Jana being pregnant at the time of her death.

As for me, I got off much easier than Bray.

Two years of probation was all I got for my involvement. I didn’t have to spend any time in prison. But being without Bray and knowing that she was locked up and lonely all that time was my own personal version of prison.

And she made me swear that I wouldn’t try to be her witness. I was going to do it. I had planned everything out in my head, even though we never really got the chance to plan the story together, but she told me if I did it she’d never speak to me again. She told me that she would only tell them the truth: that I wasn’t there when it happened, and that I was only trying to help her by claiming that I was.

I knew then that if I tried to go through with it, I would only make a bad situation worse.

Bray hasn’t been doing well. Every time I see her I notice that she has slipped deeper into the darkness that lives inside of her. I haven’t slept much since she’s been away, worried that every time my phone rings it will be Rian, Bray’s sister, telling me that Bray attempted suicide. Or achieved it. I like to think that she’ll never try because she’s strong and refuses to let the darkness consume her again, but a part of me believes deep down that it’s only because nothing is available to her. Because of Bray’s previous suicide attempt in South Carolina and her bipolar II disorder diagnosis, Bray was put under suicide watch. It’s hard visiting her. As I sit with her across the tiny white plastic table every week I feel like she is slipping completely away from me.

“What’s on your mind?” I asked on my last visit. I reached across the table and held her hands. I smiled, trying to comfort her.

She smiled back, but I could sense that it was forced. “Just getting out of here,” she said. Her gaze drifted.

“Did you get my letter?” I had asked.

She nodded and raised her eyes to me again. The faint smile I saw resting at the corners of them wasn’t forced this time. “Every day but Sunday.”

I often wondered how much those letters helped keep her afloat. Well, I call them letters, but technically not all of them were. I wrote notes to her on everything. Anything that happened to be available wherever I was when I thought of something I needed to say.

On the back of a takeout menu from a nearby diner:

On the back of a grocery store receipt:

On a napkin at a Denny’s restaurant:

On one of those blank pages they always add to printed books—ripped it out of an old book at the dentist’s office:

I’d tuck each one in an envelope, slap a stamp on it, and mail it the same day. I wanted to make sure she got something every single day she was there, at least on days that the mail ran.

She writes to me, too, though not every day, and while I’m OK with that, it has started to worry me. Her letters often feel distant, emotionless. Sometimes I’ll get a letter out of the blue riddled with the Bray I fell in love with, cracking jokes and being a pervert. She’ll talk about the things she wants to do with me when she gets out, the life she wants us to have. I’ll smile as I read it, feeling like she’s starting to come around and that things are looking up for her. But as I read on, the pessimist eventually comes out of her before I get to the end of each letter. I keep telling myself,
The next one won’t be like this, Elias. It won’t end like this.
But so far, every one of them has.

I know she’s getting help where she is, but that hasn’t stopped me from looking for the right psychiatrist for when she gets out. I’ve scoured the Internet and the phone book searching for the one. I want Bray to have the best, and I’ll do everything in my power to make sure that she does.

Three hundred and seventy-nine days Bray has spent behind bars, and in two weeks she will be released. I’m going to visit her today, and while this is supposed to be something for both of us to look forward to, I’m nervous. I’m nervous because of the last letter I got from her just five days ago. It wasn’t anything that she said in the letter, it was what she didn’t say.

I get out of my car and go through the front doors of the building and check in with the officer at the counter. Like I do every week, I count the lockers in the small room adjacent to the check-in area just after I secure my wallet, cell phone, and keys inside one. I don’t know why I count them. I just do. Maybe it’s out of nervousness, like how as I’m allowed past the heavy security door I always read the signs posted on the walls about firearms and visiting hours, and reminders about how it’s against the law to bring contraband in to the prisoners. I always read the signs. Sometimes more than once. And I always stop at that word
prisoners
and it hurts me, like someone is reaching inside my chest and folding a fist around my heart.

The long hallway is stark white, the tile floors and the white walls blending in with one another to appear seamless in my peripheral vision. The fluorescent lights shine overhead so brightly that I can almost see my reflection in the floor. I take my time, passing a few doors that lead to other strange rooms, and I have no interest in knowing what’s behind them. A fatherless family walks by: a woman with two small children, their hands clutched in hers. I wonder if they were here visiting their father. Bray doesn’t belong here. She’s no criminal. She didn’t murder anyone in cold blood or kill someone because she was under the influence of anything that impaired her judgment. She’s not a drug dealer or a thief or an abusive spouse. She doesn’t fucking belong here. I guess prison really doesn’t discriminate.

I turn the corner at the end of the long hall and enter a room. A guard points me to a table where I sit. And wait. There’s a clock high on the wall and to my left. Plain. Black and white and boring. There are several round, plastic, white tables positioned about the room. Eight families are already inside waiting at other tables. I realize as I glance around that I’m the only one here alone. I look down at the bright white table and trace my finger along an indentation that looks like it had been carved with something sharp, maybe a paperclip. It smells like bleach and Pine-Sol in here. The back of my nostrils begin to itch, and I take a deep breath, hoping to force back the brewing sneeze.

I look up at the clock. She should be coming in here any second now. I place my hand against my chest to feel my heart beating, because it’s beating too fast. Why was it so important that I make this visit? What is she going to tell me?

Just as I feel like my mind is going to come undone with the possibilities, bright orange moves against the stark white walls, and I look up to see Bray coming toward me wearing her usual orange jumpsuit, white socks, and thick plastic sandals that squeak against the floor.

I stand up. I smile at her as she approaches and she smiles back, but I don’t feel like it’s real, and my heart twists in knots.

“Hi baby,” I say and hug her gently. Physical contact is limited here.

Her hug is tight and doesn’t at all reflect the smile she gave me, but that only makes me feel a fraction better. Her hair is pulled into a tight ponytail at the back of her head. She’s wearing no makeup, of course, and although she looks tired, physically and mentally, she’s still the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

We sit down.

“Two weeks,” I say, smiling even brighter, trying to lighten the mood. “You’ll be back with me in no time.”

“Elias?” she says and my heart stops. I don’t know why, but I have a bad feeling. I swallow a knot in my throat, but another emerges behind it.

“What’s wrong?” I ask.

She inhales a deep breath into her lungs and then reaches up and wipes underneath her left eye with the edge of her finger.

Then suddenly, she smiles. I feel the corners of my eyes hardening in confusion and I cock my head to one side curiously. A smile of my own teases the corners of my lips.

“What is it?” I ask, suddenly beaming.

Bray shakes her head. “It’s nothing,” she says and reaches her hands across the table, enclosing them over mine. Her fingers are cold and frail. She leans over and kisses the tops of my warm, calloused ones. And while I’m worried the guard might say something to her about that, I don’t care much, either.

“Then what was with your letter?” I ask.

She slides her hands away. “I just wanted to see you,” she says.

“But you knew I’d come,” I say. “I-It just… sounded urgent. Baby, is there something you’re not telling me?”

She sighs. “Yeah, but it’s not really that big of a deal.”

“Well, what is it?”

She hesitates and says, “My release date has been moved to the ninth.”

“But why?” I ask. “I mean it’s only four days more, but—”

“It’s just some kind of technicality,” she answers.

Wanting her to stay positive, I make sure to do the same. I let my smile reappear and I say, “Well, that’s fine. I mean, sure, four days sucks, but it’s just four days. You’ll be OK, right?”

She nods. “Yes.”

Something doesn’t feel right. I feel like she’s lying to me. But why would she do that? Why would she lie about something like that?

I’m just being paranoid. That’s ridiculous. No way I’m going to accuse her of not being truthful. Not now. She doesn’t need that from me.

“Good,” I say and reach out to hold her hands like she did mine.

“So, tell me about Mitchell,” Bray says.

“Well… he’s not on meth anymore,” I say. “And he’s working at that tire and lube place over by our old school. He really does feel like shit for what he did. To both of us. Not just me.”

Bray’s smile is soft and forgiving. “Well, you tell Mitchell that it’s OK,” she says. “I’m not mad at him. He couldn’t help what he did. How’s your mom doing? And your dad?”

“They’re great,” I say, nodding. “Mom got engaged to James. I just found out last Thursday. They’re getting married in March. My dad is the same as he was before. A hardworking loner. He wanted me to tell you he wants us to visit him in Savannah when you come home. He really likes you. Always has.”

Bray’s eyes light up with her smile and then she looks down at the table.

My smile fades and I’m reluctant to ask, but I have to. “Are… your parents, or Rian, still contacting you much?”