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.”
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?”