Anxious Hearts (11 page)

It was two hours before the door of the Great House saw the arrival of Gabriel Lajeunesse and all the able men of Cadia.

eva

It takes me pretty much all day, but I finally find my way out of the woods, past the No Trespassing sign, up the road, and back to the house, where I find Da’ in a wicked bad state. He hasn’t slept in the two nights I’ve been gone. I feel even smaller than before.

“I am so sorry, Da’,” I say, bending over the back of his chair and cradling his head after I feed him a warmed-up can of noodle soup for supper. “I am so sorry.” He cries, just like he cried on my dead mother’s birthday, and he calls me Evangeline, all the syllables, but this time it doesn’t bother me as much as it did before, because I know how badly I screwed up, and I know I scared him, and if using that name
gets him through being scared, then it’s cool with me. I hold his head in my hands, watching the dusk fall outside the kitchen window.

Da’ eventually falls asleep in his chair, and I call Louise.

“Where have you been?” she says, practically yelling. “Where are you? Did you hear?”

“I’m at home. Did I hear what?”

“Where have you been?” Louise repeated. “Were you with Gabe?”

“Yes,” I say. “Did I hear what? What happened?”

“Where is he now?” Louise asks, urgency in her voice. “Eva?”

“I don’t know,” I say. I tell Louise about Gabe showing up at my house before dawn, about walking with him past the No Trespassing sign and into the woods, about the salami and the spring and the limp and the camp and the fire and the night in the sleeping bag and how he left this morning.

“So he didn’t tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“Eva.” Louise’s voice slows down. She says gravely, “It’s Paul.”

“What about Paul?” I say impatiently. “What now?”

“He’s dead, Eva.”

I freeze, the blood draining from my stomach to the floor below. My eyelids feel heavy. “He’s what?” Dead? How could that be? Surely they found a donor for Paul. They did those operations all the time. Paul couldn’t be dead. “How do you know?” I ask, and then I realize it’s a stupid question.

“Eva, it happened two days ago.”

I think back on the past two days, Gabe’s strange appearance at my house in the morning, his silent walk, our night together, his disappearance, and then his second disappearance.

“Mr. Lejeune has been calling everyone in town constantly for the last two days looking for Gabe. No one can find him. Pretty much everyone is freaked out. Do you know where he is?”

I say I don’t know, which is true.

Had Gabe known about Paul and not told me? Did he not know yet?

Or did he know everything? Is that why he left?

“Eva?” Louise is talking, but Gabe is all I can see, all I can hear. I know now why Gabe is gone, truly gone this time. I stare at my father, snoring in his chair, and feel the pain of this moment take over my body. It doesn’t wash over me, it doesn’t slice through me. It shreds me from the inside. This
is a pain I’ve never felt before, a desperate, jittery pain that I don’t recognize, that I can’t trust. And it won’t let me breathe.

But I don’t want the pain to subside. Suddenly I’m nauseous with fear that it will go away, just like Gabe went away. And then I will have nothing.

I turn to look out the kitchen window. The first evening stars are rising.

“Eva?” Louise says.

“What?”

“Did you go all the way?” she says. “With Gabe?”

“What do you mean?”

“Just answer me, Eva.”

I don’t answer. I breathe a few times, and once my voice cracks when I open my mouth, but I don’t form a word. Silence.

“I see,” says Louise.
“D’accord.”
And then she doesn’t say anything for a long time.

I don’t either. I hear a few drops of rain hit the window-pane, running lazily down the glass, distorting the early-evening view.

Louise talks first. “What kind of person disappears when his brother dies? Eva?”

“I can help him,” I say. “I can find him. I have to find him.”

“Eva, do you know where he is?”

“Oh, God.” The words rise involuntarily from my stomach.
Oh, God
.

“You can’t help him, Eva.” Louise’s voice is flat and serious. “You will only lose yourself trying, and no one will be able to find you.”

Gabriel

W
HEN ALL THE ABLE
C
ADIAN MEN HAD FILED
into the Great House and taken seats on the benches that lined the center of the common room, the front doors were bolted closed with a thud.

The commander stepped onto the small platform at the front of the room. Tall and slender and younger than half the soldiers in his employ, he had been protected from the rain by a canopy hoisted over his horse by six of his men on the trek down. Gabriel, bone-sodden, was insulted by the commander’s dry uniform and clenched his jaw in humiliation and rage.

Gabriel counted eighteen troops surrounding the commander. He knew there were a hundred more outside.
The commander opened his tablet, cleared his throat, and read in a nasal, patrician voice:

“His Excellency Lord Governor Lawrence has resolved that the governing of this country shall be assumed by the New Colonies and the lands cleared of their current inhabitants, who shall be relocated thusly: To be transported to the Capital District, three hundred persons. To the Central Valleys, two hundred persons. To the Western Prairies shall be transported three hundred persons. And to Vieux Manan for holding until a final destination is determined, two hundred persons. We are ordered to use all the means proper and necessary for collecting inhabitants together for relocation. If we find that fair means will not do, we shall proceed by more vigorous measures. We are ordered to deprive any who escape all means of shelter or support by burning the houses and destroying everything that may afford them the means of subsistence. We are directed not to delay, and to use all possible dispatch to save expense to the public.”

The commander rolled up the scroll. “Please remain here as we provision our ships and prepare for transport. You are now guests in this land.”

Gabriel bit down on his lip, releasing a stream of bitter blood.

eva

After I hang up with Louise, I cross the rain-slicked street to see Ada. She is sitting on her porch-rocker under the front-door light, straining to stretch her embroidery canvas over its hoop.

“Hello, Eva,” she says when I hit the first step.

“Hi,” I say.

“Aren’t you beautiful?” she says.

“Not really,” I say. “New project?” Not that I’m really that interested. Gabe is missing. Paul is dead. I don’t know what to think or where to turn. I guess this is why I came to see Ada. At least with her, I know what to do: turn up the television, fix a snack, help with the crossword, bring in the latest issue of
Yankee
magazine.

Ada ignores my question. “I never told your father where you were,” she says, dropping the hoop into her lap. “I knew you’d come back.”

“Thanks, Ada. But how could you have told him where I was? You don’t know where I was,” I say. I hold out my hand for the frame and the embroidery pattern. “I don’t even know where I was.” I stretch the pattern over the frame, smoothing and straightening it.

“Ah,” she says. “But I know where your heart was. I know where it still is. And so do you.”

“He’s gone,” I say. I lock the canvas into the hoop and hand it back to her. “Here.”

“Then you must find him,” she says. “You’ll never stop loving him, you know. He’ll never really be gone. My Gabriel is still here.”

“Your Gabriel?”

“Yes, my Gabriel. My husband.”

“You mean Lawrence,” I say. Lawrence, her husband who disappeared in a storm over thirty years ago.

“I mean my Gabriel. Everyone has one.” Ada takes my hand and puts it over her chest. “Eva, my heart is ancient. But it still beats for him. Only for him.”

I look into Ada’s glistening eyes. She is telling the truth.

“You must find him.”

I know that she is right.

Gabriel

“N
EVER!” SHOUTED
B
ASIL, STANDING UPON HIS
bench. He tossed off his embroidered jacket and tore open the neck of his white linen shirt, flexing his powerful arms. “We will never leave our land! You will kill us first!” Basil thrust his fist over his head. “Rise! Cadians!”

Around the Great House, a few men’s voices shouted in lackluster agreement. “No surrender!” But it was a meager battle cry. The able men of Cadia knew better. There were no arms there. There was no hope of resistance.

“Rise!” Basil bellowed again.

Three or four men stood up. Gabriel, crestfallen and hopeless and dizzy with panicked thoughts—of his village, of his future, of Evangeline—was not one of them. He did not rise. He simply sat and glared at the commander in the black suit.

“Rise, I say!” shouted Basil. “Death to these foreign soldiers, who seize our homes and our harvests! Gabriel!”

Gabriel moved to stand in obedience to his father, but before he could stand, the commander pointed at Basil. “Please escort the gentleman in the center to the isolation area.” Three soldiers moved toward Basil, one pointing his bayonet, two approaching from the side.

“Death, I say!” Basil growled. He did not see the fourth soldier, bearing down on him from behind.

“No, Father!” shouted Gabriel. Basil turned for a moment to see his son stand, and in that second, the soldiers descended on Basil, tackling him to the floor. One pointed his bayonet at Basil’s chest, the others held him. “Death to these foreign soldiers!” Basil cried, flailing against his captors, who pulled him to the front of the room, then through a doorway, which they closed behind them. “Never!” Basil’s muffled voice cried out. “Never!”

The remaining soldiers cocked their muskets and aimed into the crowd.

“Oh, Father, forgive them,” came a voice from behind Gabriel, pleading. “Forgive them.” It was Père Felician, on his knees. “What is it that ye do?”

Gabriel let out a single, desperate sob. Then he, too, fell to his knees.

eva