Healing Gabriel: Chapter Forty
※(*)※Gabriel's POV※(*)※
Everything passed me by in a haze for the rest of the night. There was not one clear figure, one simple color, that I could see that was neither morphed nor blurred in shape or hue. It was difficult to form sentences, difficult to enunciate the different syllables in words. Moving was nearly arduous; my body felt like it weighed two tons, my muscles were stiff, and my knees were locked. And to make matters worse, my hands were trembling again, something they hadn't done in a while.
And there was no Evan by my side to clasp his hands around my shaking ones and help still them.
I hadn't been allowed in the ambulance, hadn't been allowed near Evan while he laid passed out, his chest slowing its rises and falls by the minutes as he inched closer and closer to death. I had to stay here, at my house, and talk to the medics and police. Tell them what happened.
It'd all passed in a blur. A terrible, whizzing blur that was filled with flashing red and blue lights and loud sirens and doors opening and slamming closed and voices yelling out demands and other voices calling me to attention, to tell them what they needed to know.
So I'd told them, in the simplest, most monotone yet trembling and whispery tone. His name was Evander Ricci, he was seventeen, soon to be eighteen, years old. He had been complaining about his throat and breathing for several months. His mom had been trying to schedule an early doctor's appointment for him, but there was still a week until then. His mom began making him stay home sick last Tuesday. His parents went out, he snuck over, then lost his balance, fell down against my living room floor, and stopped breathing.
It had all been a befuddlement up until now. I barely even remembered the rush of emergency vehicles and people pouring out from their cars and homes. It had all left me where I was now, lying on my back, staring up at my ceiling in an emotionless daze. Waiting. For what? For Evan? He wouldn't be coming back for a long time--I had no idea if he would ever be coming back. So then what was I waiting for?
To feel something, the little voice in my head whispered. You're waiting to feel something other than numb.
It was a bit of an oxymoron, the phrase "to feel numb," because when you're numb, you don't feel anything. You never actually feel the numbness, you feel the withdrawl of the things the numbness takes from you. You feel the hollow thumps of your heart and wonder absentmindedly, how can it still possibly be beating? You feel the ghost of the tingling nerves in your fingertips, and you wonder, how can they still possibly be working? You feel the cold running through your veins, the chills sweeping across your skin, and all you can think is, could I get frostbite from this?
You do not feel numb. You felt the effects of numb.
But the numbness I was experiencing was different. This numbness, this hollow heartbeat, these tingling fingertips, this coldspell flooding through my body, was much different than any other type of numbness. I was actually feeling it, feeling the deprived sensations of life. I felt empty, I felt hollow, I felt nothing. But at the same time, I felt the hollow heartbeats, felt the empty tinglings in my fingers, felt the burning nothingness traveling through my veins. It all hurt so badly that I think I just got used to it and finally became numb.
I felt numb. And I don't think I'd felt this type of numbness since I was thirteen, alone in a hospital room, barely registering the difference between my heart's beats and the heart monitor's beeps.
The only thing I could feel was the headache pulsing throughout my skull, but it wasn't an actual headache. It was the one thought I kept thinking over and over and over again that was bouncing around my mind to the point where it actually, literally hurt. The thought was short, only six small words, a total of seven short syllables.
I am going to lose him.
I was going to lose Evan. This was the end. It had to be. He'd been sick for too long, and all of a sudden, out of nowhere, he'd crashed down to my living room floor and stopped breathing.
Right before the paramedics arrived, I'd felt him stop breathing.
When you stop breathing, you're practically dead. If your body is deprived of air for too long, it starts to believe you're dead, so it starts shutting down, and you do, eventually, die.
Evan had died with his head in my lap and my fingertips in his mangy, oily hair. He had died with my mouth on his lips as I'd tried to give him CPR. He had died with his eyes mirroring a faint, smoky reflection of my terrified expression before his eyelids had sealed his fate and his breathing had stopped.
The sudden sob that escaped my lips was so thick that I actually coughed and reached my fingers up to rub at my throat. I pushed myself up in my bed and curled into a ball, rocking back and forth the slightest bit as tears began to gloss over my eyes. I was so terrified of the thought of losing him that, for the first time in years, not a fragment of my brain held any thoughts about my past. Nothing was about me anymore, it was all about Evan.
But I would take fifty minds pulsing with memories of him over my one brain that kept forcing me to believe Evan was dead, gone, no longer a part of my life, no longer in existence in this world. Because, in a way, I already had those fifty pessimistic minds compressed into one big, bad burden, but I only had one Evan who was the only person that had the power to annihilate those bad minds and memories.
These thoughts are going to be the death of me, I thought hopelessly, tugging at strands of my hair. I was torturing myself, but I didn't know how not to.
Yes, you do, the little voice in my head encouraged.
No. No, I don't.
But you do, it insisted. I gritted my teeth.
No, I really, really don't know how to stop these thoughts.
I promise you do.
Tears began threatening to spill from their barrier behind my waterlines, but I refused to give that stupid little voice the satisfaction. "No I fucking don't, so stop saying that I do when I clearly don't how to stop being a fuck up by myself!" I screamed, my hands balled up into tight, trembling fists. I paused as soon as the last of the sentence died from my ears. My eyes widened as I realized what I'd said--the f-word. Twice. I quickly covered my mouth with both of my hands, as if it would make any difference. I was horrified at myself, at the rawness, at the impurity, of the cuss word, and yet at how good it felt to say it. It felt like that single word gathered all the frustration, fear, hopelessness, anxiety, paranoia--every wrong emotion I'd ever felt since the incident had poured itself inside that word and left my body in a whoosh and soared out all around me to go pester someone else for once.
"Gabriel? Gabriel, sweetheart, are you alright?" My mother's voice caught me off guard. I blinked my eyes to clear them from whatever leftover shock lurking inside me that my outburst had caused.
I scampered off my bed and unlocked the various bolts on my door before pulling it open to reveal my mother wrapped in a blue shawl and my dad holding a half-empty glass of water. "U-uh, y-yeah?" I whispered, my voice shaky, uncertain though there wasn't much to be uncertain of.
"We heard you talking, and we just got a little worried . . . " she trailed off, bright blue eyes pained. My dad shifted his stance besides her. "Nevermind. Are you okay, though?"
"I-I do-don't r-really kn-know," I admitted, scratching hard at my wrists from behind my back. Her gaze lowered to my arms before flickering back up to my face, and I saw that her eyes were getting bleaker and more and more worried by the seconds.
"I know that what you went through tonight must've shaken you up, but you were very brave for calling the police and, what, performing CPR on him--on Evan?"
I averted my gaze to the glass of water in my dad's hand. "I g-guess s-o," I murmured meekly.
"We talked to one of the paramedics, and they said that if you hadn't done what you did, if you were to perform the CPR after the ten seconds that you did do it, it could've been too late."
I looked up at my dad, the one who had spoken. "S-so h-he's alr-alright?"
He pursed his lips and furrowed his brows but didn't answer, just offered me the glass of water. I didn't know how thirsty I was until the privilege to drink was literally right in front of me. I took the glass, being careful for our hands not to touch, and took several gulps.
"We don't know," my mother said, speaking for my dad. "The paramedics weren't exactly certain, either." She must've seen the tiny glimmer of hope in my eyes disappear, as if that hope were the spark of a flame and her words were the harsh spray of water ordered to douse it. "But--sweetheart, listen, they said he wasn't as helpless as he could've turned out to be without that CPR. You helped give the doctors a chance, helped Evan get a chance, and you should feel proud about that, Gabriel."
Her words were supposed to help me feel better, were supposed to be the fan and gasoline to help rebuild the flames of hope in my eyes, but they only frightened me. If I hadn't put my lips to Evan's and blown into him and pressed my hands to his chest within those ten seconds that I had, he could've fallen into some sort of coma. Or, worse, he could've died right away in the back of that ambulance surrounded by strangers and loud noises, died by the metaphorical hands of the very things he never wanted to be confronted by.
"S-so h-he's n-not o-kay?" I asked.
"Nobody knows for sure," she whispered. "But I'll call his parents in a couple hours to see how everything's going."
I didn't think it was possible for me to fret over everything for a couple more hours. I had to know now--had to know whether or not Evan survived the ambulance ride, the hospital transition, whatever procedures that were being done to him. My dad seemed to sense the build up of anxiety starting to form in me, for the hand that had previously been holding the glass of water started forward, as if he were going to ruffle my hair, before he rethought it and put his arm back down. I saw my mother's eyes water from my peripheral vision as he said in a careful, even tone, "He's in the gray right now, sport."
The gray. What a dangerous area, that gray. It was the place between wrong or right, old or young, living or existing, breathing or dying. It gave no clear answer, no clear direction; it was just this fog that disoriented you enough so that when it finally came time for you to make your decision about white or black, the gray messed you up so bad you usually ended up picking the wrong shade anyway.
My life had never entered that gray stage until after I met Evan. I'd always been stuck in that dark area, that blackness, that emptiness, that basically convinced me to curl up and die. But then Evan sauntered along and (while literally opening the garbage can and tossing out those pop boxes for me so many months ago) metaphorically opened the Garbage Can for Bad Memories and helped me throw away the Pop Boxes of Emotional Trauma.
Alone in my bedroom, once again lying down on my back and staring emptily up at my ceiling, I almost laughed at the images in my head. Evan and I were tossing in blood, chains, Eightie, even him into this giant black hole that served as a trashcan. But then those images transformed into an actual scene, of me cowering from Evan as he offered his help. If only I could go back in time and tell Past Me that it was okay, that trusting Evan would bring the domino effect to everything happy in my life, maybe some things could've been avoided. Maybe Evan and I's relationship wouldn't've been so bumpy in the beginning.
I sobered up immediately, though, because thinking about Evan made me want to burst into tears and curl in on myself and die, but for totally different reasons than before. I was afraid to lose him, afraid to be alone with my thoughts of gore and hatred and fear, afraid of everything in my head that he used to chase away with one bright-eyed glance or challenging smirk.
I was afraid that my final memories of him would be him pale and cold and placed squarly in a box, coffin-bound six feet under my feet.
You're torturing yourself again, the voice chided from somewhere far away.
So? It's better to face the inevitable head-on rather than build up false hope.
Stop mentally messing with yourself like this. You have to have hope, no matter how fallacious you think it is. There's millions of people who believe in God, yet there's no actual proof that He exists. For all they know, their hope could be false, but their devotion and faith keeps them strong.
So you're telling me to think of Evan as my god or something? That's a little obsessive, even for me. I don't think I'm liking you that much anymore, Voice.
You know how to stop torturing yourself, it repeated, making my jaw clench at that stupid phrase, but you still refuse to stop anyways.
I realized, then, in the time it takes to bat an eyelash or for a camera to snap its flash, that the voice had been right. I knew all along how to stop torturing myself over Evan's "death," and that was to convince myself to build up hope and faith that he was still alive. That he was making his way out of the gray, away from the black that threatened to obliviate him, and into the white that was the forever he'd promised me.
*
*
I never fell asleep. So when my digital clock on my dresser read 4:05am in bright, neon orange numbers, I decided that I couldn't take staring at my ceiling any longer and went over to my fish tank instead. I'd fixed its lightbulbs awhile ago; apparently someone had knocked its cord out of place and the usual purple glow that belogned to the tank disappeared. Now, I could once again see the many fish swimming about or hiding in strands of seaweed.
My eyesight soon filled with something dark as my vison of the rest of the tank disappeared, blocked by a long, pin-pointed face with a wriggling, snakelike body that was painted with two thin horizontal yellow strips on each side of it.
"Hi, Jerry," I whispered feebly, my breath frosting over an area of the glass as I rested my forehead against the tank. The eel didn't respond, just continued to wave its body like ribbons outside on a windy day. "I know, you're probably mad at me for swearing earlier. Sorry. I'm disappointed in myself, too. I hadn't meant to. Do you forgive me?"
Jerry's head swerved a little to the left, indicating the aqaurium's food supply. I sighed and went over to that area, giving up on conversation. He never focused on me, anyways, unless his hunger was sated.
I grabbed a small, balled up grub and reached into the open slot at the top of the tank. I wasn't going to make Jerry swim up to the top, though, because he got nervous being near the filters, and I didn't want to force him into anything he didn't like doing. I rolled my sleeve up and dipped my hand, elbow and finally the top of my bicep into the water, my hand outstretched and holding the wriggling grub loosely between my fingertips for Jerry to munch on. Jerry squirmed his slippery body between my fingers as he angled himself to take little chomps at the food in my hand. Usually I'd be smiling by then, watching his pretty scales flash in the dim purple lighting of the tank, but I couldn't find it in myself to do so at that moment.
After two more repitions of the first feeding, I focused my attention on the other fish. They never paid much attention to the giant arm invading their home, just continued swimming about their merry ways, waiting for their breakfast to be served to them. Unlike Jerry, though, they didn't mind swimming up to the top of the tank to capture their fish flakes. I was never sure if it was because they weren't afraid of the bubbling filter, or if it was because they were just stupid and careless compared to him.
As the dozens of colorful fish shimmied their sleek bodies to the top of the tank, I squatted back down so I could be eye level with Jerry again. "I wish Evan liked you as much as I do," I murmured softly. Jerry just wriggled the tip of his tail. "But I don't think you like him very much anyways. He knocked out our nightlight and called you Berry. He's kind of an idiot, but he means well, he really does."
Jerry began moving tiny pebbles at the bottom of the tank around with his face.
"I don't know about this time, though. He was a much bigger idiot than usual. He kept trying to play the tough guy for so long, acting like whatever was going on with him wasn't that big of a deal because he had me to deal with. I've been thinking, you know, that maybe if I--if I was normal, per se, he wouldn't've forced himself to ignore his own problems for so long just so he could fuss over me and stuff. Like, if I'd never had to deal with him, Evan wouldn't've ever had to deal with me and my issues, and . . . and he'd've never ended up dea--almost dying on my livingroom floor."
Jerry didn't respond, just kept nuzzling the colorful rocks. I took it as my cue to keep rambling.
"It's my fault he's this sick, isn't it? Just like everything else. Just like it's my fault my mother and dad are so miserable around me and are constantly trying to get out of the house just to avoid me. Just like it's my fault I ended up in there--I mean, I'm not sure how that was my fault, I can't remember, but it must've been. It's not like he just broke into my house and stole me from my bed, right? So it's my fault I got molested, it's my fault Sixx is dead, it's my fault Eightie hung himself, it's all--it's all my fault," I gasped out the last word, unaware of the sudden sting of tears in my eyes until my vision blurred over and I could no longer make out Jerry burrowing into his rock pile.
I sniffled and blotted at my eyes with the neck of my t-shirt. My chest was rising and falling quickly, my body threatening to send me into a panic attack if I kept it up. I really didn't feel like dealing with another one, though, so I just tried to steady my breathing and watch Jerry's head sway back and forth against the water's currents. In a way, it almost looked like he was giving a negative shake of his head, trying to disprove my words . . .
"It's not my fault?" I whispered after clearing the cracks out of my throat. Jerry's head swaying stilled beneath the pebbles, answering my question. That was when a mixture of two voices sounded in my head, voices from the past together as one to confirm it.
It's not your fault. None of this is your fault, ghosted the voice inside my head, but this time I recognized it.
The voice had been Evan and Sixx all along.
The realiztion had hit me hard, and I needed to lie back down in my bed to sort everything out. It made sense, the voice in my head belonging to two of the people I cared for the most and helped me throughout my struggles as a victim. A majority of the voice's phrases had belonged to Sixx, but the voice had also harbored Evan's stubborness.
It was refreshing to finally discover that I wasn't going totally crazy, that it had simply been my subconsciousness trying to help me all along. I just hoped that like Sixx, I wouldn't be left to carry on through life with nothing but Evan's voice to keep me company inside my already cluttered head.
*
*
It was 8:16am when I heard several feverish raps against my bedroom door. I jerked up out of my daze with a start, nearly tumbling out of my bed and onto the hardwood floor. I regained my balance, though, and hurriedly unlocked the several bolts on my door to reveal my frantic looking mother dressed for work and staring at me with a scowl on her heart-shaped face.
"Gabriel Lane, you have school in fourteen minutes and you're still wearing the exact same outfit from yesterday! You're usually up bright and early, so why're you still in bed on a Monday morning?" she interrogated. I sighed. I'd been hoping she would just leave me alone about the whole 'school' thing, Monday morning or not. I didn't want to go to school today. I didn't think I could make it through first period without another anxiety attack creeping up on me. Plus, how could I focus on schoolwork when Evan, the closest thing I had to a lifeline, was in the hospital? I told her that, not stuttering as much as last night, and she let out a soft breath in response.
"Alright, sweetheart, I'll call you in as sick. But just for today. I know what you saw last night probably took a toll on you, and I don't want you to deal with anything you're not ready to. But you're definitely going back tomorrow, okay?"
I nearly hugged her. Nearly. My arms twitched outwards at my sides and my body took an involuntary step forward towards her. Her eyes widened and her mouth seemed to drop, but when she saw that I'd caught myself, her face fell hopeless again and she glanced down at her feet. I felt awful of course, and I had no reason why I could hug Jurnee and Alana but not my own mother, but I was suddenly far too tired to ponder more about it.
"Okay," I agreed, taking a step back inside my bedroom. She hesitated for several seconds, as if waiting for me to leap at her again with a bright smile and wide, eagle-spread arms, but when I didn't, she just nodded her head and turned to walk back downstairs. "Wait!" I called after her.
"Yes?" she asked, stopping right in her tracks and facing me agian.
"Last night you said you would call Evan's parents. Did you?"
She trained her bright blue eyes on me and nodded her head slowly, making the curls of her blond hair bob forward. "Yes. I talked to his mother. She said he almost . . . " she paused, scrunching up her nose like she was choosing another train of thought, "that they almost had a close call. The doctors discovered a build up of fluid in his lungs and had to drain it from him right away. He's doing much better now, she said, and will probably be up for visits by tomorrow afternoon."
My face had paled an incredible amount at the words "fluid in lungs," but when she said that he was doing much better and could have visits soon, a giant swell of relief whooshed itself throughout my body, like some giant eagle flapping its wings of freedom against the universe. It was a petty, childish thought, but so was forcing myself to believe Evan had died.
I fell asleep much more easily that morning than I'd expected, and it wasn't until I woke up later in the evening that I'd realized I'd left my bedroom door opened and unlocked.
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Note
First, please try to excuse any grammatical and/or spelling mistakes. It's 7pm and I haven't slept since 2am yesterday, so I'm a bit drowsy. I'll probably end up rewriting this chapter, but enjoy it as it is now, I guess.
Good news good news good news! For me, at least...not sure about Gabe and Evan. (Actually, yes I am sure about what's gonna happen to them, 'cause I'm the author and you guys will never know mwahahaha!) I'm finally on summer break! Woo! Time to freshen up in the world of free writing. Also, on the right is a piece of fanart drawn by the amazing Diddlebug! I absolutely adore the drawing; Gabriel's the cutest thing ever, and she captured him perfectly! ( Thank you again(:! )
Thanks for the surplus amounts of reads, votes and comments! Everything is always 110% appreciated! :) xx
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