Song of the Fireflies(74)
Author: J.A. Redmerski

We head out around nine to a fall party going on at a local nightclub. With Halloween just a couple weeks away, the town is gearing up for the many Halloween parties that will go on. Even the streetlights are decorated in orange and black.

Life is good, and every day it proves to be more so.

Tate and Jen went back to Miami the day after they visited, but we keep in touch and will be making a trip down to Florida next summer to spend a week with them. Grace and Bray talk all the time. On the phone. E-mail. Text messages. By the time spring rolled around, they had been back and forth to Norfolk and Savannah to visit each other three times. And I’ve even heard them discussing something about Grace and Knox moving to Savannah. I couldn’t be happier about news like that, especially since Grace is such a great friend to Bray. She knows all about the things that Bray has gone through, and while at first it made me nervous that Bray would open up to her so fast about such personal things, it didn’t take me long to fully accept it. She needed a best friend like Grace.

Aside from having me and Grace in Bray’s life, and even Mitchell and Bray making up and getting back to normal, Rian and Bray spend a lot of time together. Rian’s all right in my book. Sometimes she’ll try to be the big sister and piss Bray off, but it’s all perfectly harmless, your average sisterly squabbles that I think are pretty healthy to have.

And Bray has a better relationship with her mom now, too. Her dad is still a stubborn hard-ass, but I think even he is coming around.

But Bray and her illness has been the biggest turnaround of all.

Before we left the hospital that day back in July when I pulled her from Mr. Parson’s pond, I vowed to do everything in my power to help make her better. I set her up with a good psychiatrist—after I did a bit of research on the woman—whom Bray seems to love. She sees her once a week, and since I make good money at my roofing job, I pay for Bray’s health insurance. She argued about it in the beginning, but I won that argument. Dr. Ashley worked with Bray to help find her a medication to manage her bipolar disorder and that doesn’t make her feel catatonic or, worse, like killing herself. Bray has done really well, and I can feel it, that she’s a happier person.

Come to find out—and this is hard for me to think about—but before we left the convenience store that day in Baton Rouge, Bray had it set in her mind that she was going to commit suicide eventually. For a month after she got out of the hospital, I told myself that they must’ve put her on some kind of medication while she was locked up, which ultimately caused the suicide attempt. Just like back in South Carolina. It tore my heart out when she finally admitted to me one day that the only reason she didn’t pull that trigger was because I was sitting there. She couldn’t die knowing that she would put me through something like that. And she had contemplated ending it while she was locked away. But with limited means of pulling something like that off—though she claims she still could’ve done it—it helped to keep her alive.

Alive long enough until she could get out and die in the one place she had always found peace in her life. Mr. Parson’s land. Where we met. Where we spent our childhood.

But with my help, the love and support of her sister, and the right counseling and medication, Bray is a changed person. I see it in her every day. She’s happy. When I watch her smile or hear her laugh, I know that the darkness that lives inside of her—and it will always be there—is so small, so weak now, that it can’t hurt her anymore. I worried for a while if she was only better because I was with her. I couldn’t stand feeling that if we were to break up someday—not that I’d ever see that happening—that she might commit suicide. As much as I wanted to be her crutch, her rock, I didn’t want to be the only thread holding her life together.

Thankfully, I found out that I’m not.

We still fight but we always make up, and she’s never reverted back to that darkness. Not that far, anyway. She still has her moments, but she loves life and every day she shows me that. But yeah, life is good. And I know it’s only going to get better.

It has been a long road for Bray, but I’m helping her travel it every step of the way. And even though sometimes she still feels like she doesn’t deserve someone like me, she’s learning that she does.

Everyone deserves someone who loves and cares for them enough to see them through life’s obstacles. Especially people like Bray.

Chapter Thirty-Three

Bray

Three years later…

Today, I’m a very different person than I once was. It’s so strange looking back on my life, wondering how I managed to get through any of it in one piece. I truly am one of the luckiest people in the world. Not only because I have Elias in my life, but because I survived two and a half suicide attempts. Not many people can say that. I’m not sure what made me so special, what gave me the right to live when so many others who deserved a shot at life more than I ever did, lost their battle on the first try. But whatever it was, I’ll always be grateful.

I know that I never would’ve made it through anything if it weren’t for Elias and his unconditional and unwavering love for me. He, in every sense of the word, was everything to me. He was my parents, my sister, my friends, and the love of my life. He was my conscience, my will, and my direction.

Today, Elias is still all of those things. Even though I have a great relationship with my sister now and my father has finally started acting like one. I have the best friend in the world, Grace, who lives less than ten minutes from Elias and me. My mother calls me twice a week and we actually spend time together, doing things that mothers and daughters do. It took most of my life to feel like I had a family other than Elias, but now that I do, I couldn’t be happier.

But like I said, I really am a different person.

I wake up every morning next to Elias, thankful that the person I used to be, as damaged as she was, was never strong enough to chase him away. And when I crawl out of the bed in the mornings and stand in front of the bathroom mirror, I look at that girl staring back at me, and for the first time in my life, I like her. I understand her. I’m not ashamed of her.

I smile as I look at myself, then grab my toothbrush and get ready for the day. Elias has been marking the calendar for three weeks, counting down the days to something he refuses to tell me. I waltz into our tiny kitchen and spin around dramatically, modeling my new summer dress, white with little straps over my light sun-kissed shoulders.

“Overdressed? Underdressed? What do you think?” I ask, grinning at Elias, who is sitting at our small, round two-person kitchen table.