Anxious Hearts (20 page)

Gabriel walked for hours, covering a muddy block or a muddy mile, he knew not which. Thoughts came stubbornly, words not at all, only his beloved. Only Evangeline.

“Evangeline,” he muttered through the slowing raindrops. “Evangeline.” But the streets were silent.

After a time, a long time, Gabriel crossed paths with a pair of journeymen, weighed down with rusted scythes and darkened visages. They did not greet him. Later, an old woman, with holes in her skirt and dirt on her cheeks, pulled at his jacket and hissed, “Pestilence. All will die!” Gabriel heard but did not comprehend the woman.

Gabriel had the harbor of Vieux Manan in his sights when from behind him came the rumble of horse hooves,
approaching rapidly. “Attend!” exclaimed the driver with a booming voice as Gabriel jumped aside. He turned to see a young man driving a pair of horses, black hair flying behind him in wet tendrils, straining to hold the reins of the galloping steeds. “Attend!”

The horses, nearing a gallop, pulled a rickety wooden hay cart with two men, a woman, and a child, all wrapped together in a ragged blanket of broadcloth. The child stared at Gabriel with coal-ash eyes and coughed, his body convulsing with the effort. Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth as his tiny body bounced violently along the muddy street, but his face was expressionless.

Gabriel walked for another eternity, and another, through the deserted streets of Vieux Manan, winding past bolted houses and shuttered windows in a pattern known only to a fevered lover on the verge of madness, or perhaps even already crossed over into madness. Each step drained another measure of energy from Gabriel’s life-weary gait, each empty street corner stealing from his soul.

The wanderer’s pace slowed, step by excruciating step, until outside a row of closely built town houses across from the harbor, rickety and weathered from this storm and years of others, the weary Gabriel finally exhaled the last of his energy and crumpled onto the soft ground, his knees buckling over
his ankles and his body fluttering slowly downward, gently to the ground, like a page torn and tossed into the wind from atop a seaside bec.

He settled silently into the mud.

Alone.

eva

I close Gabe’s notebook and look around. I am still on the floor of the emergency room, alone except for a nurse at the intake desk.

I get up and, brushing off my jeans, walk over to the counter. “That boy who just came in,” I say to the woman behind the desk. “He was bleeding. Where did they take him?”

“I’m sorry,” says the nurse. She’s wearing wide, green-rimmed glasses with stems that start at the bottom of the frame and snake upward over her ear. “What boy?”

“They just took him in there.” I point at the swinging doors.

“I’ve been at the desk for two hours. I haven’t seen any
boy come through here. I haven’t seen anyone at all, except for you sitting there on the floor.”

“He was bleeding,” I say again, my voice tinny and shallow.

She pushes back from the low desk, the wheels on the bottom of her chair squeaking as she foot-powers herself across the small office space to a file caddy, where she sifts through a short stack of files. “What did you say the name was?”

“Gabriel.”

“That’s his last name?” she says.

“It’s Lejeune. Gabe Lejeune,” I say.

“Lejeune. Lejeune. Here he is. Let’s see. Emergency splenectomy.” She lowers her glasses and scans the file, her polished fingernail sweeping along the bottom of the chart. “He should be in post-op,” she says, glancing at her wristwatch. She slaps the file closed. “Only family can see him now.” She closes the file. “Is he your boyfriend, sweetie?”

“I—” I mumble. He is not my boyfriend. He is so much more. “Is he going to be OK?” I ask.

“They will give us a prognosis after he wakes up. But in the meantime only family can see him.” She readjusts her glasses over her eyes.

“What’s a splenectomy?” I say.

“It’s when they take your spleen out.”

“Why would they do that?” I say.

“Oh, there could be a million reasons. One guy came in last week after a rough hockey game and had to have his removed. It could be drugs. There was a woman last year who had some kind of cancer. Leukemia, I think. It could be anything. It’s pretty common.”

I hear what she’s saying, but none of the words really explain anything at all. All I know is that Gabe is in trouble and in pain, and I want to help him but I’m not family, so I’m not allowed to see him even though I know him better than anyone in his so-called family does. I doubt his father even knows that Gabe is in Maine, let alone in the hospital.

I’m not crying, but I sniffle like I’m about to.

“Is he going to be OK?” I say.

The nurse looks at me over her glasses and smiles softly. “Don’t worry, sweetie,” she says. “Everything will be all right. He’ll probably live forever.”

Gabriel

“O
VER HERE!” THE GIRL’S SHOUTS TORE INTO
Gabriel’s ears and brain. He could see nothing. “Over here!” she shouted again.

Gabriel found the will to pry his eyes open, and the sunlight, though low and muted in the steady, slowly falling rain, poured in as if for the first time. He blinked and squinted into the sky, straining to accept the muted light into his dilated eyes. He was on his back, staring upward, brown boarded buildings of Vieux Manan framing a sky of indefinite, infinite gray, cloud over cloud, circling lazily in the salty sky.

Into his sight came, suddenly and without presage, Evangeline, his life’s desire, pale and thin and anguished, but
alive. And here. Evangeline! Cloaked in a Cadian cape of cornflower blue, the hood drenched and dripping around her frantic, freckled skin, midnight eyes darting from point to point on his face. The stiff, white collar around her neck stood out against the gray sky, reflecting light onto her skin, the light of a sister of mercy, a wandering caregiver, his once and future beloved.

Was it a dream?

“Help us!” she shouted, to whom he could not discern. He felt himself slipping, straining to stay awake. His body, so cold in the mud a minute ago, was now numb, and he felt no discomfort.

“Gabriel,” Evangeline said over her crumpled lover, tears welling heavily in her eyes. “At last.” She bent to kiss him with colorless lips.

And as her lips met his, the young lovers, though the months and journeys had stolen from their beauty, were again, for a moment, enrobed in the golden light of Pré-du-sel, and for a moment he was grateful, alive again.

Gabriel closed his eyes, and for a moment recalled the first time Evangeline stood over him, with her hoe at his neck and Poc growling nearby. He remembered the liquid sunlight that crawled over that sylvan-bordered bec, illuminating the rolling tides of Glosekap Bay. He imagined Evangeline
tending to her garden and orchards, visiting the woods to collect honey for breakfast and wildflowers for the table, her flowing black hair and ocean-blue kirtle catching the gusts, soft and aromatic with sea and meadow and peacefulness. He revisited his hiding place just beyond the wall, that concealed corner of the birch grove where he spent so much of his camouflaged youth, watching, waiting, hoping for a glimpse of her, not with malice or any intent other than love, true love, and his compulsion to sketch her, to capture her beauty that he might carry it with him. Gabriel, behind closed eyelids, saw his birchbark and charcoal sketches of Evangeline, each revealing itself in succession, here as a child among the clam beds, here as a young woman attending her chores, here as a beauty, a radiant, heavenly beauty awaiting her love, Gabriel.

“Help!” cried Evangeline. “Help us!” A window opened above them, then slammed shut.

“My beloved,” he strained to say, but he was unsure if the words ever took the form of sound, or if only his lips, or his mind, expressed them. “My beloved.” He opened his shivering eyes.

She was there. This was not a dream. In this moment, she was crouched against him, sheltering him from the rain, a nurse holding his troubled head in her generous hands,
feeding him life. “Worry not, Gabriel. I am here now. We are together again. I will take you home.”

Home, Gabriel thought to himself.

“I have waited,” Evangeline whispered, leaning over Gabriel’s head to brush the sodden hair from his muddy, hail-battered face. She rubbed the water from her own eyes, leaving streaks across her cheeks, breathing and rocking back and forth slowly, rhythmically. She looked down into him with fearful eyes, swallowing a sob with a weak smile, the kind of smile a mother gives to a dying child to strengthen his spirit, at the expense of her own. “I have waited for you, Gabriel.”

Through the quieting rain, Gabriel could just hear the sound, so familiar to him, of the ocean tide as it turned away from the seawall across the street. He knew the speech of the tides. He understood them. He listened to the waves, less insistent by the moment, as the water retreated out to the sea, slowly, slowly drawing the strength of the storm with it.

Soon the skies would clear.

Gabriel strained to look up at his beloved, so long-sought was she, but his eyelids fluttered closed again and he went back to the bec above the village of Pré-du-sel, back to watching, sketching, and loving Evangeline, reveling in
her every breath and movement, back to the house he’d so carefully and exactingly built for her, back to her table, bountiful with pumpkin and salt cod and porridge, back to her orchard, collecting apples by day and lying under the stars by night, wrapped together in the same cloak she now wore, as the constant, trustworthy tide of Glosekap Bay marked the impatient days of their magical, golden world.

eva

I sit hopelessly in the emergency room for another forty-five minutes, waiting for I don’t know what, before I remember that I work here.

I have a hospital badge.

I may not officially be assigned to the ER or the OR, but if anyone asks why I’m there, I can just play lost. After all, I’m just the lowly work-study assistant to the assistant. How could I possibly know my way around this huge hospital?

All I have to do is get past the nurse at the desk. I don’t have a plan, so I wait.

I don’t have to wait long. Outside the sliding glass doors, a police car screeches to a halt, lights flashing. Seconds later, an ambulance arrives. The driver and passenger jump out of
the cab and race around to the back doors, which they open to reveal what appears to be an extremely old man lying on a gurney, an oxygen mask attached to his face. The cop helps the ambulance drivers unload the gurney and wheel it into the emergency room. “Cardiac arrest!” one of them shouts to the nurse before they race through the swinging doors and disappear into the same cave where Gabe is.

I look back at the ambulance, and see inside it a very old woman sitting on the bench next to where the gurney was. She’s surrounded by a wall full of medical equipment—a blood-pressure monitor, an oxygen tank, a pair of defibrillator paddles. She is strapped in with seat belts over both shoulders, but she’s making no attempt to unbuckle herself or get up.

I approach the ambulance. “Ma’am?” I say.