Firefly

The summer of 1982 I was walking home from school along the little creek that followed the road home. It was a rural area so the fact the there was a creek between home and school was not anything special. Honestly, the town itself was relatively insignificant and you would probably never pay it any attention on a map. Along the small creek was a narrow dirt road next to a slightly wider asphalt road for cars. The leaf of the late summer trees bounced in the wind as I walked past them. In the corner of my eye, outside of my field of vision I thought I saw something in the creek sparkle. Something small and bright blue. I stopped to bend down and lean in towards the creek and didn't hear someone coming up behind me.

“Rina!” The sound of my name snapped me back.

“Oh,” I huffed, almost falling into the water. As I turned my head over my left shoulder I saw a familiar figure standing behind me. “Grandmother.” I said.

“Honey, your book is falling out of your bag. You can’t be in another world all the time.” She grabbed the back of my backpack to make sure I didn’t lose balance and zipped up the part that had been open.

“I saw something in the water. It reminded me of when Maya dropped her hair pin here.”

“School just started again, I’m sure she will be back soon.” she said reassuringly.
My closest friend, Maya, hadn’t come back from summer vacation and the semester was by then already a week in. Me and Maya had become friends when she saw me by the single track intersection that split her path home from mine. I was drinking peach tea looking into the creek with my black notebook in my other hand. She had followed me further up to my favorite pine tree as I sat down under it to scribble in my notebook, we couldn't have been more than six or seven years old back then. We used to play games like tic tac toe on the pages, and when we got older write down secrets that we were too embarrassed to say out loud. Like one time when I had an exceptionally embarrassing dream about kissing the boy that sat next to me in homeroom class.

The little black notebook I always carry with me is essentially my diary. My mother had been buying me one every year since she left to work in another city, that way I wouldn’t forget things to tell her about my life when she managed to call once a month. There is not much work to be found here and my father left, so she went to work in a factory in a city about a days travel from here to support us. She left me with my grandparents who I love, but still, back then I wanted nothing more than for her to come back. I stay up at night coming up with plans to make money as soon as I turned 13 and could get a job. The notebook looked the same every year. A simple small black one. I truly am my mother’s child in that sense, neither of us had ever appreciated overly ornate things. The first couple of years I had it, it had been nothing more than a few scribbles. Trying to get the curves and lines of the alphabet right and eventually evolving into a few simple words. My name, my mom’s and Maya’s.

Maya didn’t come to school the following week either and I hadn’t seen her since the beginning of summer vacation. I remember it because the night she left it was still early enough in the season, you could see fireflies around our creek at dusk. The two of us had sat there in the near dark listening to the sounds around us. Maya was never the most chatty person but she had seemed unusually tense. All she had told me was that her and her mother were going to meet up with her father somewhere and sounded like she hadn’t known where exactly or how long they would be gone.

Maya came from a affluent family although her home-life seemed strained. I was fairly sure the money came from her mother’s side of the family and they had opposed her marrying Maya’s father. Maya usually came to my house after school. Some days we would buy my favorite peach ice tea at the convenience store in town and sit down under the same strange-looking pine tree by the creek.

As time went on I grew tired of asking the teachers everyday if they had heard anything and going over things in my head so I decided to turn up her road at the intersection. I stopped at the start of it and looked ahead of me. The forest grew thicker up there and it was something ominous about the way the trees hung down over the small road. The thought of walking it alone made me shiver. However, my frustration with not knowing where Maya was was stronger than my fear so I walked. There were barely any other houses here in the forest.

After about 30 minutes or so of walking I saw Maya’s large house appear amongst all that green. The windows looked long empty and I realized her mother hadn’t come back either since the beginning of summer. I went around the house to a window I knew didn’t close. The humidity of summer had probably made the wood expand but after jiggling it back and forth it came open this time too. I paused before climbing through it, I had never been here by myself and my hands felt shaky as if there was something in the unyielding forest was watching me. I managed to climb through the window anyway and dropped right to an area of the house that had a telephone in it. The answering machine was blinking and I quickly listened to the messages that had clogged the tape over the summer. From it I concluded that no one knew where they had taken off to. This disturbed me. No one knew where Maya was. Even her mother was missing. Who could I even call? Someone must be missing them. At least her grandparents had alerted the local policeman. With nothing but a blur in my head I walked through the house to the front door and just as was about to unlock it and exit it hit me that the house did not look like it had been closed up. It looked like it had been left haphazardly for a short vacation.

By the week after there was a reward out for whoever could provide the right leads to Maya and her mother being found. I saw the poster in the modest town center, close to the convince store everyone got drinks and flipped through magazines after school. An early autumn breeze swept against my bare legs and I felt a slight cold spread to the core of me, settling like a puddle in the base of my stomach.

“Well…at least someone else is looking for them.” I mumbled quietly to myself.

“I guess no one has heard anything either.” Julie had snuck up next to me as I was searching the poster intently for new clues. Julie was in the same class as us but a year younger. They grouped different years together because the town didn't have enough kids to fill a whole class per year.

“The fact that her grandparents are so worried that they would put out a $20,000 reward must mean they are getting desperate.” she continued.

“I can’t believe she didn’t tell me anything.” I answered not knowing what I meant by that.

“Her grandparents are rich enough though, that kind of money is probably nothing significant to them.” I couldn't tell if she was trying to make me feel better or hoping that I would divulge some extra information she could use to one-up the others at school tomorrow. I just looked at her and shrugged before walking home.

Mother called later that night. I ran from my room to the receiver and grabbed it from my grandmother’s soft hand.

“Mom!” I yelled, a little to loud.

“Rina, you don’t have to yell I can hear you loud and clear.”

“Sorry, I missed you.” I chuckled at her clear annoyance with me. “I have my notes right here.” Readying myself to bring out my notebook and tell her about the last couple of weeks when a thought forced its way into my head. What if there was a way to find Maya through my diary? All those years of little notes and secrets we put down there. Thoughts and stories that was for no ones eyes but ours, now sitting there, black ink on white paper waiting.

I skipped school the next day, filled my backpack with notebooks from over the years and went to my usual spot under the strange pine I always sit under. My grandmother said its latin name is Pinus Densiflora but that means nothing to me, anyway it doesn't look like any of the other trees along the water. I sat for hours with the notebooks. It was painful reading diary entries from years ago. But at least I was on to something because under a particularly awkward drawing of that same boy from my dream was a passage about something strange Maya’s father had blurted out drunk one night. Maybe it was something.

I left all my notebooks with the one policeman in the town and as I scrambled to convey the importance, he acted as he didn't know anything about what was going on. I had expected I was going to get a call any moment saying they found Maya but the days dragged on and even as I called the station the policeman seemed uninterested in talking to me. I even pestered my grandmother until she tracked down Maya’s grandparents to talk about the notebooks but still nothing.

It wasn’t until mid-December when the snow was laying thick along the roads and the little creek was frozen that an envelope with $20,000 cash turned up with a messenger on my porch.

My mother moved back shortly after we received the money. With the extra funding she decided to open a small cafe she had long dreamt of in town, hoping it would be enough to support us while we continued to live with grandmother. Everyday I would help out there after school and on the weekends. Time went on and I found myself thinking about Maya less and less. I never heard from again and even though her grandparents must have found her whereabouts for me to receive such a large sum of money no one ever uttered a word of what had happened or where they had gone. Even the policeman was as useless as ever.

Lately I have been thinking about moving to the closest city from here for college. I’ve been studying and writing a lot in my little black notebook so hopefully I’ll can in. Maybe one day when I turn around on the street thinking that person looks Maya it will actually be her. I had always imagined love to be very exhausting, all consuming, self-sacrificing but lately working late nights with my mother at the cafe I see it in other places. It is an easy feeling, while cleaning up with my mother, watching my classmates sip coffee in the window, or even hearing the sounds of the cafe door chime.

Suddenly one night I look up after hearing that exact door chime and there she stands there in the flesh. Looking back at me, Maya.