Anxious Hearts (8 page)

“Make certain that you see things, Eva,” Da’ says from the easy chair we moved into the kitchen last year so he can read the newspaper while I make supper. “The world, I mean. I’ve never been to New York City. I’ve never been to California. I’ve never been to Africa or China or London or Rome. I think that’s where I’d want to go most, if I could go anywhere. Rome. Do you know why, Eva?”

I don’t answer.

“Because it’s old,” he says. “Even older than I am.”

“You’re not that old, Da’,” I remind him.

“Well, not as old as Rome anyway,” he says, and the way he says it makes me wonder when he will die. The thought startles me.

I think about calling Louise, but I don’t. I know she’d take pity on me and listen to me whine about Gabe all night if I needed to, but I also know that if Gabe called I’d ditch her in a second. So I decide that it’s better not to get into a possible ditching-your-best-friend situation in the first place, and I don’t call Louise.

Later I have a really hard time falling asleep. I try to figure out why Gabe hasn’t called me yet. I start by listing all of the things I probably did wrong to make him not like me anymore. What really disturbs me is how many I am able to think of. Like, maybe he stopped liking me way back on the dock when he asked “down or up?” and I said up. Or maybe he thought he told me too much that day. Or maybe he didn’t like the way I kissed.

Or maybe he never liked me in the first place.

I’m not sure when I fall asleep, or whether I really ever do, but I’m pretty sure I hear the first stone that hits my bedroom window early the next morning. Outside, the black sky is
easing into grayish blue. Only the strongest morning stars are still visible; the big, lazy stars take their time fading in and out. Another stone grazes the window pane.

I shuffle over to the window. Another stone.

Gabe
. I push up the six-paned window and stick my head out into the icy dawn. The dew is still airborne, wetter and colder than fog but easier to see through. I see a tiny glow from the sun, pink and speckled beyond the road to the east. A figure stands at the edge of the driveway. “Gabe?” I say.

“I need to see you,” he says.

I can’t see his face, but he is standing directly below my window in a black sweatshirt with the hood pulled up, not looking up at me, but looking down at the ground instead. His square, aluminum-framed backpack sits high on his shoulders. He swings his tent, bagged in nylon, in his right hand. His notebook hangs from the fingers on his other hand.

I need to see you
.

“Are you all right?” I whisper, or shout, I’m not sure which. “Gabe?”

“I am going.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Away, Evangeline,” Gabe says. “I am going. Away.”

“What?” I say. “Where? Away? Why?” Gabe doesn’t respond, so I look for the answer myself. “Is this about Paul? Gabe?”

Nothing.

“Do you want to come inside?” I say. Da’ sleeps heavily in the morning hours, and I know I can easily sneak Gabe in without Da’ knowing.

Gabe doesn’t respond. He just stands there, staring at the ground, his tent swinging back and forth. I expect him to turn around and leave, and the thought makes me panic, but he doesn’t turn around. He just stands there, silently, shadowy, alone, as if he could vanish before my eyes.

We stay, deadlocked, me in the window and he below, for several minutes. How many minutes I don’t know, but I do know I would stay just like that forever if it would keep him from walking away.

When the first direct ray of sun pierces the misty horizon at the end of the road, I gamble. “Wait there,” I say. “I will come with you.” I quickly pull on a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt and tiptoe downstairs, hoping to make it outside before he disappears into the mist.

Gabriel

“G
OOD NIGHT
, M
ONSIEUR
,” B
ENEDICT SAID TO
the notary from his chair. “Good night, Jean-Baptiste. Gabriel, my son, will you bring the horses around?”

Gabriel glanced at Evangeline, who nodded and winked. “Just one of the family now,” she whispered.

After Notary Leblanc and his son Jean-Baptiste rode off, Gabriel was able to breathe again. Evangeline pulled her cornflower cloak off the peg behind the door and locked her hand around Gabriel’s wrist. She led him out the front door and into the small garden in front of the house.

“Evangeline,” Gabriel said, falling into step behind her. “Where are we going? Our fathers …”

“Hush, Gabriel,” Evangeline said. “Come.” She wrapped
her voluminous cloak around her shoulders, hoisting its hood up over her head.

Evangeline led Gabriel to the gate, and around along the wall to the orchard. The fog had lifted and the air was now clear. A low, golden harvest moon poured muted light over the meadow, giving the landscape a magical, restless glow. The earth was warm underfoot.

Fourteen apple trees stood in three neat rows that each should have held five trees. As in most Cadian orchards, the ground beneath the trees was groomed and well kept, a close cropping of soft grass and moss inside a protective barrier of scarlet blueberry bushes. Evangeline stepped confidently in the dark—her feet knew where the ground was soft—and Gabriel followed her.

Poc appeared before them, leaping up to lick Evangeline’s hand. Gabriel held out his own hand to Poc, but Poc met it with a growl. “Poc!” Evangeline said. “Quiet.”

At the head of the orchard was a stone bench, a flat-topped boulder rising out of the ground, its surface polished smooth. Evangeline often sat there, to brush Poc, or to read to Benedict, or simply to sun herself. Gabriel knew, because he’d seen her do all of those things. He’d even spent the night on that bench, keeping silent watch over his beloved, knowing that she’d napped there earlier in the day.

Tomorrow, this rock would be transformed into an altar where they would kneel together before the priest and all the gathered citizens of Pré-du-sel and be married, their adoration for each other finally consecrated.

Tomorrow.

Evangeline leaped up onto the bench and held out her hand for Gabriel. A gust caught her cloak, sending it skyward like a sail. She lost her balance and stumbled a step, nearly falling off the rock. Gabriel scrambled onto the bench behind her, catching her shoulders. He steadied her from the back.

“My beloved.” He encircled her with his arms, drew her head back into the cove of his shoulder, and locked his brown hands together across her chest. The wind was persistent and chilly, but they were warm together, and Gabriel was glad that, from this vantage, they could not see the ships that he knew were in the harbor. They stood in silence for several minutes, hearts beating apace.

“Gabriel,” Evangeline said, her voice breaking in the wind. “Oh, Gabriel. What about the ships?” Evangeline spun around, her braid blowing wistfully in the evening breeze. “What will we do? Where will we go?”

“I do not know, Evangeline. I do not know.” He grasped her more tightly, pulling her into his chest. “But we are stronger together. Do not be afraid.”

But Gabriel was himself afraid.

Together they stood on the bench, solid and steady, facing the seaborne wind. Their hearts were uncertain together, impatient together, afraid and aware together, together, as they watched infinity over the edge of the bec, the boundless comingling of black sky and black sea and never-ending time, so unforgivably short.

eva

Why are you limping?” I ask Gabe. I wince every time he comes down on his left foot, watching his shoulders tense with every labored, uneven step. “Are you in pain?”

Gabe, who hasn’t said a word since this morning, since “I’m going away,” doesn’t answer. He just keeps walking. Limping.

Where we are, exactly, I’m not sure, because there were a few turns I lost track of. But we walk all day. For the first part of the journey we stick to the shoulder of the road, but after a couple hours, Gabe turns abruptly into the forest, disappearing behind a No Trespassing sign.

Da’ has always told me that trespassing on someone else’s land is one of the worst things you can do. “Land is as
close to sacred as I know,” he says. I remember him telling me that if you trespass onto private property, the owners could kill you and pay no price for it. You don’t even have to be doing anything wrong. He says that one landowner in Aroostook County even tied up a trespasser and left him for the bears just for taking a pee on the side of the road near a No Trespassing sign.

But today, for the first time in my life, I ignore a No Trespassing sign. I disobey. I duck into the woods behind Gabe.

I will follow him anywhere.

We walk for several more hours, him limping ahead of me and me trying not to think about it, following a succession of trails through a dense forest of maple and tamarack, its soft floor padded with unknowable years of fallen needles and leaves. I know we are near the ocean because I can hear the surf off to the left, sometimes close, sometimes farther away. Through the shadows of the forest, I glimpse the ocean once or twice, brilliant blue and choppy white under the sun.

Twice we stop to rest. Gabe cuts chunks of salami with his pocketknife and hands them to me. He gives me his canteen and I drink.

Twilight falls earlier than I expect, but maybe I’ve lost track of time. It’s kind of been like twilight all day, ever since
Gabe appeared outside my window—not really daytime, not really nighttime. The light transformed with the hours, from golden to red to gray.

When Gabe stops, I’m not exactly sure why. Maybe he is just tired.

This spot looks like any other in this seaside forest. There are a few rocks and boulders tumbled around a tiny clearing in the pines. The trees are tall, some standing upright and some growing at an angle over the seabed, rooted in the outcrop that falls away just below the clearing. Looking at the watermarks, I guess that at high tide the water licks the rocks surrounding this clearing, but the tide is so far out right now that all I can see beyond the trees is mud and seaweed. A gull pecks at a crab in the muck. A few hundred feet across this shallow bay, I see more forest, perhaps an island or another peninsula, it’s impossible to tell. Da’ says there are thousands of miles of coastline around here, thousands of islands, thousands of ways to get lost. He says you could explore them forever and never really know your way around them.

Gabe drops his tent and pack and looks around the site. I watch him concentrate, and see the soft pulse of blood against his temples. He finds a patch of moss twenty feet in from the watermark. He touches it, wipes his finger against his jeans,
and nods to himself. I follow his eyes, which follow a faint stripe of moss and sticks that winds up a steep embankment. Gabe follows the moss-trail up the hill, maybe twenty feet, then stops. “Here,” he says out loud. I am surprised and relieved to hear his voice after his daylong silence. “A spring.”

I climb up to him. Gabe fills his cupped hands with the bubbling springwater. I sip from them, holding his wrists to steady them. I sit, melting into the moss, and Gabe trots back down the hill.

In fifteen minutes, Gabe has transformed the clearing—pitching a tent, building a fire pit, starting a woodpile. He makes it look like someone lives here.

“There’s a radio in my backpack,” he says. “I wonder if we get reception.”

I fish around in Gabe’s backpack, feeling with my fingers for the radio. I feel his notebook in there. My hand closes around it. I wish I could read with my fingers.

I find the radio and hand it to Gabe.

“No, you try,” he says.

I fiddle with the dials, but the only station I can get is a French-language pop music station from New Brunswick, Canada.

“Sorry,” I say.

“Why?” he says. “This is perfect.” He turns it up and we
listen to staticky songs we can’t understand. I wonder what the staticky singers are singing about. I wonder if they’re singing about love.

Gabe is quiet. Silent, actually, but I don’t doubt he wants me here. He lights a fire with dried driftwood, and we sit by it, near each other but not touching, and we eat more salami, and an apple, which Gabe cuts up with his pocketknife and hands to me in pieces. When there’s only one piece left, Gabe gives it to me. And then he moves next to me, brushes his bangs out of his face, reaches out and puts one hand around the base of my skull, my hair combed between his fingers. He pulls my face up and over to his and kisses me, solidly, insistently, unambiguously, completely—on the first try. I disappear into his kiss, close my eyes, and relax, letting him pull me in.