I'm Not Insane (Heaven Help Me)

Back in the room Savanna was gasping for breath against those invisible fingers she knew so well. Her arms refused to help and her hands refused to grasp. Her bloodshot eyes were practically popping out of her head and her heart was beating so fast she thought it would burst. Sav’s brain should have been reeling with whys and ifs, hopes and dreams, regrets and losses. It wasn’t. As her eyes slipped shut and the room closed around her all she thought was. “Well fuck…” The last thing she heard was silence. The last thing she touched was the floor. The last thing she smelled and tasted was blood. The last thing she saw was the inside of her own eyelids. When the nurse came in to move her to a new room all she found was Sav’s body. The nurse called for help and felt what used to be Savanna’s neck and chest. No pulse, no heartbeat. No hope or glimmer of life in the pale body on the ground. It was no longer Savanna and Savanna was no longer the body. The limp memory of a girl was loaded onto a rolling hospital bed and rushed through the halls even though all the staff new Sav was dead. Gerard and Mikey walked out the door right as the bed rolled past the common room. Their eyes followed the bed with an unattached gaze that wouldn’t have been plastered there if they knew who lay beneath the sheet. The bed disappeared down the long white hallway that Sav had been forced to walk only a short while before as the brothers walked in the other direction towards Mikey’s room. Mikey was the first to notice the silence. He was the one who thought that something wasn’t quite right. Gerard picked up on it just before they turned the corner and found the door wide open and stains on the carpet just outside. Stains that looked like drops. Stains of red. The smell hit them a second after they saw the stains. Gerard recognized the smell right away. “Blood! Blood!” He choked out. They ran into the room to find it in total disarray and there was a pool of blood on the floor being fed by a trickle on the wall. The wall. Right where they had left her… right where she had sat so many times before… right where she told them to leave only minutes earlier. Their eyes were wide and no one spoke. Mikey bent down to pick up a … something. Gerard didn’t know what it was until Mikey’s normally impassive eyes started watering and tears spilt over the rims. The tears made their way down his long face into the hair that covered it. Then he knew. The bloodstained thing Mikes held in his hands was the notebook. The same notebook that had been lying next to the friend now gone when they last saw her. “Mikey… are you…okay…?” Of course Gee knew the answer before he even opened his mouth. Mikey only slumped over more as though he had been kicked in the stomach. Soft sobs escaped from his lips no matter how much he tried to hold them back. Gerard felt the way his brother did but he hadn’t let himself cry in years. He wasn’t about to cry now. He couldn’t. He simply turned Mikey around and sat down with him on the bed. He took the notebook from those long slender fingers and set it on the bed beside them. A voice suddenly broke the silence. It didn’t belong to either of the brothers who sat together on the bed. It was a soft female voice that spoke to them. In the grief and astonishment of losing a friend the boys hoped for a moment that it could be her. But it wasn’t. “Hey what are you doing in there? This is a crime scene! Come out now!” It was only a nurse. Gee helped his brother up and dragged him away but he did not forget to pick up the small bloody notebook and quickly shove it in his shirt before the nurse could see it. Mikey went to Gerard and Frankie’s room along with his brother, as he now had no room for himself. He curled up in Gee’s bed and fell asleep listening to his brother’s breath. As soon as Mikey was asleep Gerard walked over to the corner beside him and sat down. He slipped the notebook out from beneath his shirt and tried to part the bloodied pages without tearing them. The first page was of a girl that brought a sad smile to his hidden face. It was almost a perfect likeness of her except her lip ring was missing. The next page was of a mythical creature halfway between a woman and a wolf. And so Gerard continued flipping through the many pages looking at every drawing and writing until he was about halfway through. As he turned the page he recognized the first drawing of hers he had ever seen upon her arrival at this place. He stared at the page and Frankie stared back. Gerard inspected every extraordinary detail of the picture. The shadows looked almost alive and Frank looked like his feisty little self that Gee loved so well. The next page made him gasp and almost smile as his own eye once again, confronted him. He had forgotten this particular drawing. He didn’t know quite why. Even though the drawing was in black and white he could almost see the hazel swirling inside. “Gee?” The voice startled him out of his trance and he slammed the book shut. Mikey looked at him from the small bed. “You’re…crying…” Gerard lifted his hand to his face and felt the tears for the first time. He stared at his hand. “So…so I am.”