He’ll go where your courage goes. That’s where you’ll always find him. What in the world does that even mean? Why does everyone want to talk so fuzzy around here and expect me to know what they’re talking about?

“Will you stop all that thinking?” Mikayla suddenly blurted out, jerking me out of my rant. “You got what you wanted.”

“I did?” I had to ask. “What did I get that I wanted?”

“Now, you know what we’re looking for,” she answered.

“You might be looking for a treasure,” I said. “But I think I’m here for something else.”

“Of course, you are,” she said without hesitation.

I stood there looking at her, dumbfounded. I couldn’t figure out what to say. She said it without thinking, as if it were something she already knew. “What?” I stuttered. “What do you mean?”

“All of us. Everyone,” she began. “We could all be together, going to the same place. But that doesn’t mean we’re going for the same reason.”

“What’s your reason?” I asked.

“Hello,” she said in that drawn-out way of saying something obvious. “There’s treasure.”

“Then, what’s my reason?” I asked, without fully thinking it through.

“That’s for you to figure out,” she answered.

“Fair enough,” I had no choice but to agree. “So, we’re just going to go off looking, not knowing where it is, and you expect to find it?”

She looked at me with certainty, “Pirates do it all the time.”

She was getting better at this. I had nothing to say to that either.

When I looked around, the woods all looked the same. Were we in the same woods we had been in before? Were we running circles around ourselves like busybodies without a chore? Like being in a maze that doesn’t believe in doors anymore?

“Where are we?” I finally asked.

She turned and looked at me as she rested her hand against a tree, “Has it been that long?”

“I guess it has,” I answered.

She reached down and picked up a stick, then pointed it one way, “The house is back there.” She pointed the stick the other way, “The river is that way.” Then, she pointed it up in the air above her, “And this is the tree where you and me made an elevator out of rope and creativity.”

I looked up at the branches high above us, and the memories came rushing back. Even though I was dazzled, I almost let it go. But I felt it my duty to say something, “Where you and I…”

“What about my eye?” she asked.

“No, it’s you and I,” I repeated.

“You and I, what?” she asked again as she looked at me sideways.

I looked at her for a moment and then began, “When you said where you and me made an elevator out of rope and creativity, you should have said you and I because we were the subject of the sentence.”

“Oh, you became one of those,” she grinned as she shook her head.

What she said stopped me in my tracks. Here we were playing, and I decided to correct her mistake. But I couldn’t just let it go. She had to know.

“There you go again,” Mikayla interrupted. Then, she looked up at the branches above her with a huge smile on her face, “Get back to remembering this.”

Her smile was infectious, and her wonder pulled me away from myself for a flash. But I didn’t get a chance to look up because a rope hit me on the head. It didn’t hurt. Maybe just a little. But there it was, the magic piece to the puzzle.

Without a blink, I wrapped the rope around my waist and tied it, making sure it was good and tight. Then, I looked around and found the other end of the rope dangling in front of me. When I yanked it, I could feel it pull. Then, I yanked it again and took out all the slack.

“Come on,” Mikayla cheered. “You remember how to do it.”

I looked up the tree and then put my effort into it. With each pull of the rope, I lifted a foot off the ground. As long as I kept pulling, my body kept lifting. It wasn’t long before I was up to the branch. Then, I wrapped my leg around and climbed up like I had been doing it all along.

“There you go,” she cheered again. “Feel good?”

I untied the rope from my waist and threw it down to her, “It does. It really does. Come on up.”

“Be right there,” she said.

Quicker than a hiccup, I saw her head rise above the branch. I grabbed her hand and helped her up. She wiped off her hands and looked around with a huge smile, even letting out a laugh. Then, she looked down.

We were up pretty high. It’s why we came up with the rope idea in the first place. I normally climbed trees where I could reach the first branch. But this tree was taller than most. Its first branch was above my head.

One day, I studied it. I walked around the tree and looked at it from all angles. Then, a thought occurred to me. I ran back to the barn and grabbed some rope Gilmer had thrown in a pile. I don’t think he ever missed it.

I knew how wells worked with a bucket at the end of a length of rope wrapped around a windlass. My mind flashed through other examples of this kind of mechanism, like a crane, a pulley system, a fishing reel, and an elevator. That’s when we knew we had come up with its name. It was our elevator.  

After that day, I must have climbed that tree a hundred times. Then, the thought occurred to me that brought on a strange feeling in my heart. I wasn’t sure when the last time was that I had climbed it. There was a day I walked away and didn’t know that it was for the last time.

“Come on,” Mikayla ordered.

Shaken from what I was thinking, “Where are we going?”

“We’re going to catch our ride,” she said as she flipped her leg around the branch and held on with both her hands. Then, dangled for a second until she let herself drop.

Getting up the tree took some engineering. Getting down was the easy part. I did it the same way she did it and joined her on the ground. After brushing my hands off on my jeans, I looked at her with a happy heart and eyes full of curiosity, “Our ride?”

“Yeah, it will be along soon,” she said as she started to run along the path.

I had no time to waste. I would have lost her if I hadn’t started running after her. She was fast, too. Keeping up with her had always been the hard part. But I followed with every breath I had.

Suddenly, there was a clearing. We had made it out of the woods, and there she was in front of me. We were standing on the bank of the Rappahannock, that beautiful river I’ve always called home.

“Our ride is coming, you said,” I repeated as if half asking, half making a statement.

“They’ll be here,” she said. “Be patient.”

“How do you know?” I asked. It was a good question. As far as questions go, it was up there in the top five at the moment.

“They always come,” she answered.

It might have only been a minute, but the clock felt like it was tick, tick, ticking. It was one of those waiting games that seemed to get longer the more you waited. Wasn’t waiting supposed to get shorter as time went by?

When Mikayla gave me a side eye look, I knew what she was thinking. She didn’t have to say anything. And just like that, the thinking trigger had been activated both ways.

Confirmed by the fact that I looked before she had a chance to say, “Here they come.”

In the distance, I saw a ship. As it got closer, the pirates on the ship looked somewhat familiar. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had met them some time before. But I couldn’t put the time or the place together.

Mikayla whispered, “It’s Captain Teye Ba, First Mate Johnson, and Bruce.”

“Bruce,” I whispered in return. “What an odd name for a pirate!”

That struck me too. It felt like déjà vu. It seemed to me that I had said those very words before.

The ship pulled right up to where we were standing. That’s when the captain in the big black hat said, “Ahoy, hearties! What can I do you for?”

“We need a ride,” Mikayla blurted out without a beat.

“Aye,” his shipmate said. “You looking for the treasure too, I see.”

“Well, that’s a maybe,” she replied. Then, she looked at my confusion and offered an explanation, “The one wearing the headband is First Mate Johnson, and Bruce is wearing the bandana.”

“Oh, she knows who we be,” Bruce laughed.

“It will come to her,” Johnson agreed.

Captain Teye Ba took his time. It felt like he was staring into my soul. Then, he announced, “We’ve got fresh wind and old friends! Come aboard, the tide waits for no one!”

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