Anxious Hearts (14 page)

“Gabe,” I say, I whisper, hoping my voice will soothe him.

He stops for a moment and stares at me, body and voice shaking, and for a moment he is not an angry young man, just a child frightened by the storm. “It’s not my fault,” he says, voice shivering.

“Please,” I say, holding out my hands, my hair plastered wet against my face. “Please.” I want to shout but, like in a dream where your legs won’t move just as you need to run, my voice fails me, and all I can do is whisper. “Please. Gabe.”

“Do you hear me?” he shouts at me violently. “No one is to see this! No one is to know!” He suddenly turns and starts running, racing toward the edge of the cliff. He tears the pages from the notebook and tosses them into the air. They catch the violent wind, sweeping and spinning upward into the stormy night sky, shrinking as they’re sucked, one after another, into the tempest.

“Gabe!” I whisper. “Gabe!” I race after him, not sure what he’s going to do, only knowing that the cliff is there, just steps away, massive and unforgiving and slick, and after that there is nothing, only driving rain, black with rage.

“It’s not my fault!” he yells.

I race, but I trip, and I crumple to the ground just as Gabe reaches the edge. “Gabe,” I say. I get back up and stumble forward. “I love you.”

Gabriel Lejeune doesn’t answer me, and I catch a rock with my toe, and fall again into the wet, cold grass, slowly, and before my head hits another rock and the blood starts to seep into my eyes, I see him disappear over the side of the cliff.

My last thought is to wonder if they will ever find us.

PART TWO

eva

I have accepted that Gabriel is gone. It’s been a year and a half. I’m graduating today. Growing up. I’d better be used to it by now.

I know he’s not dead. I would have heard about it if he’d washed up on a beach somewhere like the Felician girl. It would have been a big deal, like on the news and everything. “Local Boy Drowns in Tide, Residents Reminded to Wear Life Jackets.” That kind of thing.

But I have no idea where he actually is. I spent months in those woods, looking for him, I guess. I knew how stupid it was, but I tried. I never found him, of course, and eventually I had to try to stop wondering where he was, to stop looking for clues, to quit listening to rumors. There’s always another
story: He’s moved to Los Angeles, he’s a drug addict in New York City, his father sent him to military school in South Carolina, he moved to Paris with a girl.

Wherever he is, he’s not here.

When I do let myself picture him, or when I dream about him, which is harder to stop, he’s always alone. He’s never in the sun, always in the shadows, in the fog, in the forest. I can barely see him. But he’s always carrying that notebook.

Gabe’s father, Mr. Lejeune, is gone, too. Shortly after Paul died and Gabe disappeared, he moved to Boston. But then I heard he moved again, to Washington, D.C. Or somewhere. Who knows. Da’ says that happens to families. Tragedy either brings them closer together or rips them apart. The Lejeunes were ripped apart. After Paul’s funeral, they were like ghosts here. People spoke of Gabe and Mr. Lejeune, but no one ever saw them in Franktown again.

At the beginning of this school year, I even got rid of the quarter Gabe gave me, that day under the docks. His life’s savings. Tossed it right off the edge of that same stupid cliff he disappeared over.

I can’t believe we’re graduating today. Louise has been all over me to wear striped tights and Converse sneakers under our graduation robes, which I protested against but finally gave in to because it was easier than explaining to Louise
how refusing to wear stupid tights doesn’t make me a party pooper. To be honest, I wanted to skip the whole graduation altogether, just blow it off, but when there are only thirty-three in your graduating class, people notice if you don’t show up. I tried to use the excuse that Da’ wasn’t feeling well enough to come, which he wasn’t, but Louise didn’t let me get away with it. So here I am, walking across the stage to accept a rolled-up diploma from Principal Hawthorne, in a canary-yellow graduation robe over striped tights and Converse sneakers. Louise chose the tights—light blue and dark blue—I guess because we are both going to the University of Southern Maine down in Portland and those are their school colors.

I’m looking forward to college. I’m going to study premed. I don’t know if I want to be a doctor or a researcher or what. I can’t explain it, but I just want to learn how to fix things. Things like old age. Leukemia. Pain.

I wish Ada were here today. She’d be proud. But she hasn’t been home since the New Year’s Day blizzard, when she was picked up by the cops walking down Route 18A in a nightgown, bare feet frozen blue in the driving snow and ice. She was a month in the hospital in Bangor, where they removed all except one of her frostbitten toes, and now she’s living at Penobscot Pines in Brewster, where I guess she’s going
to die. I mean, it’s not like you leave places like Penobscot Pines when you get better. People there don’t get better. Ada knows it, and Da’ and I know it, too. But we never talk about it, and everyone tries to pretend that it’s no big deal. All Ada ever said about anything was once when I was telling her about how the crocuses were starting to come up back in Franktown, and she said, “I never got to say good-bye to my home.” And then she smiled and shook her head, as casually as if she’d just missed a ringtoss at the Franktown Fair.

We go up to see her every two weeks or so. Sometimes she’s embroidering or looking at
Yankee
magazine. Sometimes she’s asleep. Sometimes she just sits there in bed, staring at the wall, with no expression at all. I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t creepy when she’s like that.

I think it made Da’ pretty happy that I applied to do my pre-pre-med summer work-study at Penobscot Pines. I’ll be answering phones, filling out forms, distributing activity schedules. Boring. But I’ll get paid minimum wage, plus I’ll get credits at USM. And I’ll get to hang out with Ada, which I feel is something I’m supposed to do. I mean, we’re practically related, and in a weird way she’s one of my best friends. I haven’t told her about my job yet. I want it to be a surprise. Da’ said I can take his car for the summer, since he hates driving it anyway.

It’s going to be weird to be around all those old people all summer. Odds are someone will die while I’m there, which will freak me out. But I better get used to people dying if I want to study medicine. It’s part of the deal. And I guess it’s easier to be around old people who are dying than to be around kids who are dying. Like Paul.

Paul. He’s the real reason Gabe left. If Paul had lived, if the transplant had worked, Gabriel would have gotten better. His father would have called him a hero. It would have been the best thing that could have happened to him. And to me, because he would still be here.

But that’s not what happened. Paul died, because his body rejected Gabriel’s gift. “Close but no cigar,” as Da’ would say.

Principal Hawthorne hands me my diploma and I shake his hand, then take my seat on the side of the stage. My canary-yellow polyester graduation gown catches a nail and tugs me backward. I tear at it, ripping the bottom seam of the gown. Principal Hawthorne glares at me.
You’ll be charged for that
, he seems to say.

“Louise Letiche,” Principal Hawthorne announces. “Valedictorian.” Louise walks across the stage, shakes Principal Hawthorne’s hand, accepts her roll, and smiles broadly. She yanks up her gown to reveal her tights, and the small audience applauds—except for Robert Manning, who
barks “Go Wildcats!” which I guess means he’s going to the University of New Hampshire.

It’s no surprise that Louise is valedictorian. She is definitely the smartest girl in Franktown. Straight A’s every semester. And I don’t think she even studies that hard. She’s just one of those people who knows the right answers all the time.

Ha. All the answers. I should have listened to her a long time ago. If I’d listened to Louise and not gone down to the docks that day with Gabe, if I’d never cried into his shoulder, if we’d never watched the stars come up over Passamaquoddy, if we’d never kissed, if we’d never spent the night together in that sleeping bag in the woods, maybe I wouldn’t have ended up with a broken heart and twenty-six stitches in my head from tripping on a rock on top of that stupid bluff. I wouldn’t have spent all those months after he left wandering the woods, even when the snow was past my ankles, looking for signs of him. I wouldn’t have spent afternoons sitting up on the bluff, waiting for him to come back. I wouldn’t have finally gathered up my courage and made the harrowing hike down the face of the cliff where Gabe had disappeared. I wouldn’t have fallen the last twenty feet and broken my collarbone, and I wouldn’t have had to wear a sling for the entire second half of my junior year.

I wouldn’t have wasted so much time trying to find him.

Or trying to forget him.

As I sit there, pretending to listen to Louise’s speech, I’m surprised at the words that come to my head.
“Evangeline,” he sighed through the slats as he drew. “Evangeline.” He was not calling that she may hear, he was calling that somehow her soul might know that he longed for her.
They are words from Gabe’s notebook. I never memorized them. But they spring so easily to my mind. I wonder if Gabe ever finished the story.

Louise, whose summer plan is to wait tables in Bar Harbor (boyfriend shopping, she calls it), is up there talking about preserving the fond memories of high school and sticking together as we face the challenges of an uncertain future and having faith in our abilities and a whole bunch of other crap that I should probably be paying attention to, but then again I’ve already heard her practice the speech about forty-four times, and I personally don’t really have that many fond memories of high school, and really I just want to get out of here. I’m glad high school is over. I’ll be sad leaving Da’, but really I just want to get going.

I look over to my right and see John Baptiste flashing a victory sign at me. He mouths some words, but I can’t see them. Probably something dumb like “Come to my keg party later.”

Later, Louise and I do end up at John Baptiste’s party, mostly because there’s nothing else going on and Louise is determined to go out. Everyone’s drinking some kind of punch, so I do, too. It tastes like Kool-Aid, sort of, only worse. I have a few cups and end up dancing to “Mony Mony” with John Baptiste. He grabs me around the waist and kisses me. “You don’t even know how hot you are, do you?” he says. I kiss him back, but only a little peck, and only because I know Louise is watching, and only because I’m packing up Da’s Dodge and leaving for Penobscot Pines tomorrow. I kiss him again.

I’m not proud of it, but I do it. Louise squeals and high-fives me.
“Très bien!”
she says.

I can’t wait to get out of here.

Gabriel