Anxious Hearts (19 page)

I fall asleep at the nurse’s station, textbook cradling my head like a pillow. I dream about the night on the bluff when Gabe went over the edge. Only, in my dream, I don’t lose consciousness after I hit my head. In my dream, I float away from the bluff, and watch Gabe climb down the cliff in the rain, clinging to the narrow trail that exists there only for thrill-seekers and death-wishers, and I watch him climb into a dory and push out into the head-high, cone-shaped waves, chopping black and green and blue through the bay, tossing the dory from crest to crest. In my dream, there is no tide sweeping in and out through the harbor, only violent clockwise swirls in the storm-churned water, leaving paisley patterns of foam across the surface of the bay. Gabe rows
between the waves, away from the cliff, away from the dock, as pages from his notebook flutter around him and into the sea, where they sink and disappear.

When I awaken, at first I’m not sure why. There isn’t a voice coming over the loudspeaker or anything. The phone isn’t ringing. I look around, but there’s no one here. Only fluorescent lights and a bunch of files. I take a deep breath and look back at my textbook and struggle to remember what I was reading before I passed out on top of it.

“Are you OK?” It’s Cammie, one of the night nurses on duty, walking by.

“Can you watch my station for a minute?” I say. “I have to go to the ladies’ room.” Which I don’t, really. I just want to get up for a few minutes and take a walk.

Cammie takes my seat and I walk down the hall toward the bathrooms. I push my way through a pair of swinging hospital doors, finding myself at the head of a long hallway, nearly empty except for an IV tower and vacant wheelchair about thirty feet ahead. Patients’ rooms line both sides of the hallway, plastic file-holders mounted just outside each door, a clipboard swinging from each one.

I carry on down the hallway. I’ve never been in this part of the hospital before. It’s surprising to see all the patients’ doors closed, rather than open. I peek into one. It’s empty. I peek
into another, and another. Empty. All the rooms in this hall are empty. This is strange, I think, because the other nurses have been complaining about the shortage of beds, about how the administration has been talking about doubling up and tripling up patients, even those who’ve requested and paid for single rooms.

But all of these rooms here are empty. It’s eerie.

The hallway ends at another set of swinging doors. I push through them.

I find myself in the emergency waiting room. It’s quiet here; the only sound comes from the television flickering above clusters of chairs spread across the tiled floors. There is a candy machine on the left wall, next to a hot chocolate machine and a table stacked with tattered magazines. Wide, sliding glass doors, activated by an electric welcome mat, open into the parking lot beyond. During the day, the doors whisk open and close rhythmically, as patients and others enter and exit, but tonight they stand silent, reflecting the fluorescent room back into itself. To my left, a pass-through window opens into the intake desk, where I see two attendings playing cards. They don’t look up. I scan the walls for signs to a restroom, which I didn’t really need in the first place, but now that I’ve come all this way, I figure I might as well pee.

Suddenly, sliding doors sweep open. A figure in a hooded
black sweatshirt comes busting into the room, arms wrapped tightly around himself, face obscured by his hood. He lunges toward the intake counter, moaning, but his sneakers trip up underneath him and he collapses to the floor with a thud.

“Help!” I yell.

The two attendings jump up from their cards. “Are you all right?” one yells as he leaps through the pass-through. I point at the man, now lying facedown on the floor, deadly still. “Call security!”

I race to the hooded man, reaching him before the doctors. His body is tense, rigid. I crouch down and strain to turn him over.

He is bleeding from the mouth. His eyes are wide, dilated, glazed. His arms are wrapped around his own torso with a desperate grip.

And against his chest is a notebook.

It is Gabe. His eyes begin to roll, and the world beyond me, beyond us, disappears.

Gabriel

G
ABRIEL COUGHED HIMSELF AWAKE AND OUT OF
the drowning dream, the incessant dream that had plagued him since the destruction of Pré-du-sel.

It took a moment of squinting through the sunlit mist to remind himself where he was. And why.

Evangeline.

Gabriel was hot, as if with fever. And he was also cold, exposed here, in this foreign mist. Shivering and sweating together. But the rain and wind had ceased.

He coughed. His skin felt cold and clammy against his wet, tattered clothes. Gabriel looked around for his waistcoat, then remembered that he’d lost it in the river.

“Evangeline,” he said to the mist. His voice wavered and cracked with fatigue and thirst. “Evangeline.” He couldn’t be certain if he said it aloud, or merely thought it.

The last thing he expected to hear was an answer, but an answer came. It was a voice, a girl’s voice, humming or singing, he could not discern, so muffled by the mist.

“Evangeline,” he called again, weakly. “Evangeline!” Heat raged through his temples and his head drooped from his limp neck. Gabriel wiped the cold accumulation of sweat from his forehead.

“Evangeline?”

The lilting, ethereal voice, beautiful and melodic, came from the brush just below his rock.

Gabriel, soggy and dirty from the splattering storm, sat up and, hitting his head on the overhang, looked dizzily down into the brush. There, surrounded by mist, was a girl, a tall girl he saw only from the back, with dark, wavy hair and powerful shoulders. Deerskin leggings covered her legs, and there were leather moccasins on her feet. Her body was turned away from him.

“Evangeline!” he said again. He leaped off the rock and landed heavily at her feet. He stood up and, wobbling, threw out his dirty, arms to embrace her.

Only, when he closed his arms around her, she wasn’t there. He was hugging only himself. And the music of her voice became the disconsolate silence of misery.

“Evangeline,” he whispered as he collapsed into the brush, arms wrapped around himself, shivering with fever. He did not see the rainbow above him, half formed but vibrant with colors of violent yellow and red, for as soon as he rose up from the brush, the rain began again.

eva

Evangeline.”

Gabe chokes up a column of blood with my name.

Then, with a shudder, Gabe’s body goes limp. His eyes roll violently, blue turning to gray turning to black. His lips quiver. I take in a sharp breath, and hold it.

Activity swirls around me. One of the emergency room guys pushes me aside. I lose my balance and tumble backward, sitting down on the hard tile floor. “Backup! We need transport!” the other one yells toward the swinging doors. They crouch over Gabe, one pulling apart his eyelids and shining a flashlight into his eyes, the other bowing his head to lay his ear on Gabe’s chest. “Stat!”

A gurney comes crashing through the door, pushed by
a middle-aged nurse with an intense, breathless stare. The three hoist the shivering Gabe onto the gurney. His notebook falls to the floor, unnoticed, as they race toward the swinging doors. And Gabe is gone again.

“Gabriel,” I say, sitting alone on the silent tiled floor.

I pick up the notebook and, in the lonely flicker of the fluorescent lights of the waiting room, I begin to read.

Gabriel

T
HE GRAY AND GUSTY STREETS OF VIEUX MANAN
were rich with the scent of ocean and wood fires and fish, aromas that Gabriel, even in the opacity of his fever and desperation, had detected well before he arrived.

It had been three days since the stormy night on the river, three days since he’d lost his boat, three days of dizzy, dirty trudging, following the bramble-filled banks of the Lesser River, gathering scant fistfuls of wineberries and leaves of wood herbs for sustenance and thirstily sipping the churned-up water from the river, a source that in long-ago days of lucidity and wisdom he would have dismissed in favor of an easily found spring, but that thirst and carelessness had driven
him to. Three days of walking, of losing, then regaining his footing, of feverish faith and obstinate determination, of visions of a reunion with Evangeline, had brought him to this place, this muddy collection of docks and storage garrets laid on a cockeyed grid by the sea. Vieux Manan.

Gabriel wandered with uneven steps and uneven thoughts through the deserted lanes at the outskirts of the compact town, where weathered row houses leaned awkwardly against each other in crooked repetition. Tiny plots wedged between blocks held shelters for goats and horses and small vegetable gardens. But there were no goats. The plots were fallow.

Not a single person crossed his path as he entered Vieux Manan. The city felt empty, but Gabriel knew that it was anything but: Behind the shuttered windows and bolted doors were certainly warm, dry citizens, driven to their hearths by a week of lingering rain.

He was desperately hopeful that behind one of those doors was his beloved, his Evangeline, but his heart beat with trepidation that even if he found her, she would be wrapped in the arms of another, of Jean-Baptiste Leblanc. He spit at the ground in disgust.

It mattered not, he told himself. When he found her, after these months of wandering, of searching, of yearning, then
Jean-Baptiste Leblanc would simply disappear. Everyone would disappear. Only Evangeline and Gabriel would remain. It was this vision of a happiness, a complete, eternal, soul-encompassing happiness, contained between the two, that gave him energy even as his fever drained him. It was this vision that renewed his desire to breathe, to move, to search, to find.

Evangeline.

Gabriel, waterlogged and weary, his shoulders hunched in the storm, was grateful the wind had begun to abate. He guessed haphazardly at the direction to the sea, to the harbor, to the docks near which the center of the city would likely be. From there he would canvas the streets of this unfamiliar city, spiraling his way outward to its perimeter, and back in again, until he found Evangeline. He would search in the streets, peek in the windows, speak and shout her name with whatever strength he might find. He was nearer than ever now.

He would find her.

And they would, again, be together. And his wandering, their journey, would finally end. He would be home.

Gabriel walked through the city, drunk with his mission, exhausted and blistered but unwilling to stop. Unable to stop. He held himself up on the brick and wooden walls of
the structures for balance, stopping every few steps to look behind and ahead of his position. He squinted into every uncovered window, but saw only gray, cold interiors bereft of people. The warmed hearths or busy drawing rooms or families gathered for song or mealtime or prayer lived only in his imagination.

If the city wasn’t deserted, it was asleep.

Unsure of his feet, half clad in torn moccasins, Gabriel slipped frequently into one or another of the carriage ruts that dug through the saturated city streets, staining his already soiled garments with cold, wet dirt.