Anxious Hearts (3 page)

It’s not my fault I’m in a bad mood today. My father called me by my full name this morning. Evangeline. Da’ is the only person in the world except Gabe who even knows my full name. Everyone else in Franktown calls me Eva. Everyone. Ada. Louise. Mr. Denis. Even Da’, most of the time. Eva.
That’s it. Eva Bell. Done. Da’ only calls me Evangeline one day a year, on my dead mother’s birthday.

It’s a whole routine. He wakes up early, puts a framed photograph of my mother on the kitchen table, and sits there and stares at it until I wake up and come downstairs. When I sit down at the table across from him, he says, still looking at the picture, “You are so beautiful, Evangeline.” I don’t know if he’s talking to me or to my mother, because her name was Evangeline, too. Then he cries for the rest of the day. It happens every year.

Ada, who lives across the street, says that once men lose their wives, they add twenty years to their ages. Which I guess would put Da’ north of seventy, in widower years. And Da’s not just old in his mind, either, or in the way he behaves. It’s his body, too. Da’s got arthritis way worse even than Ada, who’s over ninety and
should
have it. Some days he can barely make it out to his fields, or even just to the barn. “But we’ll manage, Eva,” he says. “We always do.” I guess you have to be optimistic to be a farmer.

No one’s ever really told me why my mother died the same day she gave birth to me. They just say vague things like “there were complications.” They don’t want me to think it was my fault that she died, that the complication was me. That my birth caused so much bleeding that she
never regained consciousness. That Da’ and my mother were definitely planning to name me Evangeline long before I was born, so that I don’t get the idea that he named me Evangeline after she died because he really wanted his wife back, not a new daughter. This is why I never bring up my dead mother in conversation, because that kind of conversation always ends in a lie.

Gabe, who still hasn’t looked up from his notebook, is the only other person I know whose mother is dead. I remember the first time he told me. I think we were seven, or maybe eight, and he was high up in a tree in the woods behind Ada’s house. I yelled at him to come down, and he shushed me. “You’re not my mother,” he said, then pointed to a gnarled branch far out beyond the limb he was on. “Beehive.”

“Be careful!” I yelled. “Come down!”

“Shh!” Gabe crawled across the branch like a panther, crouching low and moving slowly. A few bees buzzed around the branch, which was about as big around as Gabe was, which is to say not very big. Gabe kept moving, reaching out to grasp the branch with his hands, then pulling his body forward, each inch deliberate and intense. When he reached the hollowed-out knot that opened into the hive, he stopped. He flexed his fingers and took a deep breath. “Here goes.” Slowly, deliberately, he maneuvered his hand down
around the branch and reached into the hole. A few more bees buzzed around him, but Gabe’s hand moved steadily, disappearing deeper into the opening. “Got it,” he said.

Gabe pulled the honeycomb free from the hole and tossed it down to the mossy ground. He scooted back to the trunk of the tree and lowered himself down. “You’re crazy,” I said.

“It wouldn’t hurt anyway, even if I got stung,” he said, picking up the honeycomb and scooping honey onto his finger. “My mother is dead. Nothing hurts me anymore.” He licked his finger and held out the honeycomb to me. “Have some.”

Almost every day after that we went to the harbor at low tide. We left our shoes in the muck and climbed up under the dock. One day, Gabe found a quarter balanced on two of the beams, twenty feet above the seabed. He picked it up, breathed on it, shined it on his T-shirt, and handed it to me. “My life’s savings,” he said.

“Wow, a whole pack of gum,” I said, but when I put it in my pocket I knew I wouldn’t spend it.

We stayed there under the dock that day picking periwinkles off the posts and shivering in the midsummer chill and wondering if anyone noticed we were gone.

Gabe told me that he was probably going to run away one day. To disappear. I asked him why, but he just stared back at
me with clear, child eyes, blue and determined. I wanted to tell him that no matter where he wanted to run, ever, I would go with him, if he wanted me to. But I said nothing.

We stayed under the docks until the freezing tide licked at our backs and forced us out and up, choking water and gasping for air. Our shoes were gone. After I got home, and told Da’ what happened to my shoes, he yelled at me. Didn’t I know how dangerous the docks were? Didn’t I remember how the Felician girl was washed away last year and turned up down in Nova Scotia? He told me that Gabe’s father called to say he didn’t want me hanging around with Gabe anymore. I said that was stupid, but Da’ said it didn’t matter. He said that when a rich man like Mr. Lejeune says he doesn’t want his son hanging around with the daughter of a poor farmer like Da’, he means it. And the sooner I got used to it, the sooner I would get over it. He said it all really matter-of-fact, like I wouldn’t care, like Gabe wasn’t my best and only friend.

That’s pretty much the last time I talked to Gabe. He never really had any friends after that, just his notebook. He was always around, because everyone in Franktown goes to the same school, and I saw him every day, and I thought about him every night, but it was like part of him had disappeared and I didn’t know how to find him.

Sometimes, I still pretend to talk to him. I pretend to reach out and take his troubled head in my hands.

“Mr. Lejeune!” Gabe doesn’t look up from his writing. His pen speeds across the pages. “It is your turn to read, but it appears that you are otherwise occupied.” Mr. Denis raps his hand on Gabe’s desk. “Mr. Lejeune. May I inquire what it is that you are so feverishly documenting?” Mr. Denis daintily pulls Gabe’s pen from his hand.

Gabe doesn’t look up. He just puts his hand over his notebook, pressing it into the desk.

“Let us have a look!” In a tiny instant, Mr. Denis grabs the notebook from under Gabe’s hand and whisks it violently upward, pages flying like a flapping chicken. Gabe grabs at it, clawing at the spiral binding, sending torn paper floating into the air like feathers, but Mr. Denis holds the notebook up out of his reach and quickly steps away. “Please, share this masterpiece. Surely your words have more literary merit than this laborious Longfellow we are wasting our time on.”

Gabe’s lanky body freezes, stiff in his chair, eyes fixed on the floor, hair flopping back over his face. He is awkwardly good-looking, olive-skinned with clear, green-blue eyes, but you have to look pretty hard to see it. His clothes are always
rumpled, his sneakers worn, and he never has a coat warm enough for the weather.

John Baptiste, all blond and square-jawed and varsity-jacketed, snickers and winds his finger around his ear, making the crazy symbol, but I pretend not to see. Gabe is not crazy. He is strange, but he is not crazy. I know that much.

“Would you like to read aloud?” Mr. Denis says. “No? Then allow me to give voice to your words.” Mr. Denis walks to the front of the room and clears his throat. “Ladies and gentlemen, an original work by Gabe Lejeune, Esquire.”

I watch Gabe. He is staring at me. It’s the first time I’ve seen his eyes straight on since that day under the docks, and even though they seem darker now, they are still full of determination, and they pierce into mine and I know he remembers, too. I stare back.

I know him.

He knows me.

“Evangeline,” says Mr. Denis, reading from the notebook.

My stomach drops suddenly. What did he just say?

“Evangeline,” he repeats.

No. I bow my head. I get that strange kind of nausea that comes in a wave over your body and brain right after you cut yourself, that kind of sinking sickness that tells you the worst is yet to come. I pull the hood of my sweatshirt around and
across my mouth. My heartbeat gets deeper, stronger, and thumps in my ear.

“Evangeline,” says Mr. Denis again, his eyes scanning the page. “Evangeline, Evangeline, Evangeline, Evangeline.” Mr. Denis turns the page. “Evangeline. Evangeline.”

He flips a few more pages. “Evangeline.” He stops. “Well, Mr. Lejeune, it seems as if you are not as far off-topic as I feared. You’ve got the right poet, just the wrong poem. We are not reading ‘Evangeline,’ also by Longfellow, in this class. Instead, we are muddling through ‘The Courtship of Miles Standish,’ and it is your turn to contribute to the recitation. Please take it from ‘Over his countenance flitted a shadow …’” He drops the notebook back on Gabe’s desk. Gabe slams his hand over it.

I am frozen.

“Freak,” Louise whispers. John Baptiste snickers and shakes his head. I hide behind my hair, thanking God I have hair to hide behind. I peek out into the classroom and realize that not everyone is looking at me. Of course. No one knows that Evangeline is my full name. No one knows that Gabe is sitting over there writing
my
name over and over.

“‘The Courtship of Miles Standish,’ Mr. Lejeune,” Mr. Denis says. “Please begin.”

But Gabe does not begin. He slowly stands up, then stuffs
his notebook into his backpack, bunches his windbreaker in his fist, walks straight over to my desk, and says, “I’m sorry.”

Then Gabe turns toward the door and pushes his way into the hall and leaves.

“Good-bye, Mr. Lejeune,” Mr. Denis says.

I slip my hand into my jacket pocket and take Gabe’s quarter in my fingers.

Gabriel

G
ABRIEL STRUCK HIS HEELS AGAINST HIS MARE
, Eulalie, who responded with a brusque trot across the rippled, mucky flats of the darse. She moved with staccato steps between the groves of Irish moss and clusters of moules, between the tiny pools of abandoned seawater glistening golden with the reflected light of the falling sun. At high tide, this stretch would lie beneath thirty feet of water, but at low tide the exposed seabed stretched far out into Glosekap Bay, linking the mainland becs and marshes to the islands. Dories and whaleboats, temporarily landed until the water’s return, sat like stranded toys in the muck.

The Glosekap tides were ferocious, fast, more like an insistent, unstoppable wave than a slow rise, plunging some
thirty feet of water from Glosekap Bay into the darse, the narrow harbor where the Manan River emptied into the sea. Twice a day the wave rolled into the darse, sometimes angrily, sometimes merely resolute, speedily transforming the landscape into a seascape, before retreating with equal haste. Only the secrets passed through generations allowed the Cadian fishermen to navigate it, so complex were its currents. Many of the oldest stories told around Cadian fireplaces were of those unlucky enough to be carried off into the desolate heart of the ocean. Bodies were rarely found.

Twice in their history had an angry, storm-fed tide washed through their village, destroying it.

Now, some forty summers after the last flooding, an elaborate system of dikes protected the basin where Pré-du-sel was built. All Cadians, male and female, worked on the dikes as soon as they were big enough to move earth. The tide was unrelenting, and the erosion of the dikes was constant. Repairs were always needed.

Basil Lajeunesse, Gabriel’s father and the village blacksmith, often spoke of the three New Colony ships that once anchored in Glosekap Bay, back when Gabriel was a very small boy. They shone, he said, glinting like ice even in the summer.

As soon as the ships were spotted, the villagers extinguished their fires so that no telltale column of smoke would incite the ships to attack the town or the dikes. But the foreign ships never released a dory, no person ever landed, no contact was made, not a single shot was fired, and most important, not a dike was compromised.

The presence of the ships nonetheless took a great toll on the village. It was autumn when they came and the days were still temperate, but by the time they left some five weeks later, the first snows were falling. The harvest, already thin that year, went unharvested. With no fires burning and precious little food to eat, thirty-four villagers died.

Among the dead was Gabriel’s mother, who drew her last breath on the day the ships disappeared, as Basil cradled their stillborn son in his arms.

Basil never recovered.

Fifteen years later, men in the village still argued about the ships. Some believed the village was never in danger in the first place, never even spotted. Some said the ships simply sank. Some claimed there were never any ships at all. Basil the blacksmith, whose vocation ranked him as the most powerful man in Pré-du-sel, believed that the sailors were unable to decipher the tides well enough to land there and simply sailed away, taking word of the harbor’s inaccessibility
to the New Colonies. He predicted that the Glosekap tides would continue to protect this remote Cadian village, and that never again would the ships return.

But if they did, he said, all Cadians would be compelled to resist. In the name of the dead.

eva