Anxious Hearts

by Tucker Shaw

  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

  SWEAT FLEW FROM GABRIEL’S BROW AS HE BOLTED awake, gasping for air.

  The dream was the same dream he’d had every night for the last nineteen months, the short, awful dream in which he slips under the icy surface of Glosekap Bay, leaden, unable to move any of his limbs or even breathe. Paralyzed, he slips deeper into the night-black depths. He struggles to hold his breath, but eventually he loses the strength to resist and is compelled to inhale. Underwater, he opens his lungs to the cold, dark ocean and breathes in. The water flows into him, drowning him, chilling his body with frigid seawater, and he sinks faster, faster.

  Just as he succumbs to the darkness he wakes up, rigid, sweating, and gulping air.

  It was the same dream every night. Only this time, for the first time in nineteen months, Gabriel woke up not under the stars, but inside, under a roof.

  Where was he? Gabriel struggled to remember.

  His eyes scanned the room slowly. What little he could see in the near pitch-dark was bare, earthen walls and a dirt floor. He was the only thing in the room. He inspected every corner, first with his eyes, then with his hands, feeling for an exit. Faint, viscous light, dawnlike and sleepy, seeped in through a narrow, irregular slit carved out near the top of one of the mud walls. He found only one small entrance to his cave room, a planked wooden door about waist-high off the floor, set above a mud step. He pushed on it, leaning into the door with all his youthful strength, but it didn’t budge.

  Gabriel, who’d survived imprisonment in the Great House at Pré-du-sel, was captive once more.

  He put together the pieces of the previous night when he was captured.

  As the sun descended slowly into the gold-spun evening, Gabriel had come across a freshly killed rabbit in a game trap just up the bank from the river he’d been following the last few days. The Lesser River, he’d heard it called, far to the north and west of his Glosekap home.

  He’d entered the barren, boundless, tideless grasslands many weeks before, searching the skies for unfamiliar stars and following them, away from his Cadian homeland and toward, he hoped, his beloved Evangeline. With his birchbark and charcoal lashed to his forearms, he’d follow this rumor, or that one, listening to each hopeful story, each whisper, each assurance that the Cadians had survived, that they had settled together somewhere, just beyond here, or perhaps farther yet, across another horizon, ever closer.

  In retrospect, he knew he shouldn’t have taken the rabbit. The trap wasn’t his. Even in the wilderness, that was a universal rule. But he also didn’t think anyone would care about a rabbit. The trap was meant for beaver, he’d guessed. Or lynx. Not rabbit. Rabbits were plentiful, and valueless.

  So he had taken it out of the trap.

  He’d tried to reset the trap, that its owners might never know it had been tripped, but hunger clouded his brain and he couldn’t decipher the mechanism. So he left the trap sprung, hoping its owners would assume by the tufts of rabbit fur that the quarry had escaped. Besides, the rabbit was already dead. It would only rot. So he gutted and cleaned it with his pocketknife, tossing the head and entrails into the bushes. Then he walked, carrying the rabbit by its hind feet to bleed it as he went.

  Gabriel walked until the rabbit gave no more blood. There, in a small riverside hollow protected from the prairie wind, Gabriel built a campfire with driftwood and flint. He skewered the meager beast with a switch, and held it over the fire, watching the orange flames lick at the lean flesh, browning the meat and crisping the edges. After a few minutes of cooking, the sweet, gamey meat had a chewy, ropelike texture, tougher than fish or foul, the flesh legacy of a life spent running. Gabriel devoured it, scraping the bones clean with his teeth. Then Gabriel fell slowly, deeply asleep, curled beside the dying fire on the star-drenched bank of the Lesser River, fed full for the first time in days.

  It was still dark when the four men came upon the sleeping Gabriel. They tied him before he could awaken and resist, binding his feet and hands with horsehair ropes, and gagging him with a wedge-stick. The men, strong-limbed and carrying the stench of range work, were speaking a language Gabriel thought he recognized, but could not understand. They dragged Gabriel up the riverbank to their horses. There, they tossed him into a small carriage half filled with firewood, with just enough room for Gabriel and a small, beady-eyed dog with splotchy gray and black fur.

  The ride was long, and the potholes and ruts in the road tossed Gabriel like a dory caught in a stormy Glosekap tide, punishing and bruising his bound, weary body.

  Gabriel thought bitterly that if he were caught in the Glosekap tide, at least he would have known what to do. He could read the tide. He could trust it. It would come in, then go out, then return. But Gabriel was far from the Glosekap and its tides. Nothing kept time here in this prairie land. Nothing here could be trusted.

  The horsemen rode until the sun broke the morning horizon and raked across the midday sky. Without warning, one of the men shouted a command at the others, and the party came to an abrupt, jostling stop. Two of the men pulled Gabriel from
the cart and tossed him onto the scrubby grass. One held his shoulders to the ground while the other untied his feet. They led him to a rise in the endless flatland, where the lead horseman pushed aside a brush-bush to reveal a small door built into the side of the low hill. He swung open the door and pushed Gabriel inside. Gabriel dropped heavily onto the dirt floor, landing just as the door closed behind him with a thick, heavy thud. Whether he’d been knocked unconscious by the fall, or just fallen asleep from the exhaustion of the ride, he didn’t know.

  Gabriel peered through the slit-window, out into the wide-open landscape beyond. He could see the morning light casting ghost-shadows among the rocks and shrubs. The grassland, so featureless in the expansive view, appeared dotted from Gabriel’s confined vantage with orange and yellow flowers. Gabriel winced at the sight of them, so close were they in color to the wood lilies that grew in the gardens of Pré-du-sel and all around Glosekap Bay. They stabbed him with homesickness.

  But Pré-du-sel itself was a ghost now, the structures burned to cinders and the dikes broken and the land rinsed by the same unfeeling, trustworthy tide that had also saved Gabriel’s life.

  Gabriel curled onto the floor and once again searched his memory, remembering that day, that last day of Pré-du-sel, the last time he’d seen Evangeline.

  It was the coldest night he had ever known. Carried away into the sea after slipping off the dory in the harbor, Gabriel managed to shed his loose bindings and keep his head above water to breathe, just long enough to be washed ashore on the cove-side of Evangeline’s bluff, out of sight of the ships. Shivering and soggy and sick, he then climbed up the rocks and into the woods, taking shelter in a bed of leaves just above the high-water mark, where he slept, perhaps for a day, perhaps longer, bone-cold all the while. When he awoke, he traced a spring for water, then walked back to the village, taking the hidden wooden path should any New Colonists still be patrolling the coast. It was a half-day’s journey.

  But Gabriel did not find his village. He found only a charred meadow, inundated by saltwater from the bay. The dikes were purposefully breached. The soldiers were gone. His village was gone. The Great House was gone. The dock was gone. Everyone was gone.

  Evangeline was gone.

  Gabriel climbed Evangeline’s bluff to her house, expecting it to be burned as well. But, by miracle, design, or oversight, the Bellefontaine home was standing, humble and stalwart, and apparently unmolested.

  A familiar bark in the distance betrayed Poc, loyal Poc, Evangeline’s mutt. She would never have left him behind! “Evangeline!” he called, caught in a moment of youthful, doomed hopefulness. “Evangeline!”

  Gabriel sprinted for the door, eager to burst inside, blindly expecting to see Benedict in his chair and Evangeline at her spinning wheel, but halfway across the bec, clarity befell him, and his gait slowed to a hopeless stumble. Gabriel knew better. There was no one behind the door. Evangeline was gone from there. Only Poc, suspicious, protective Poc, remained. He stood in the doorway, growling at Gabriel.

  Gabriel stopped and looked a moment at Poc, until the growling subsided. He wondered how Poc came to be there alone, whether he evaded capture, whether the New Colonists refused him passage with his mistress.

  Unoccupied, the Bellefontaine cabin still eerily pulsed with life. Neat stacks of firewood stood behind it. Ripe, unpicked apples shone in the pruned orchard. Chickens clucked in the henhouse. An empty bucket swung over the well.

  Gabriel lowered the bucket into the well, filled it with sweet water, and placed the bucket on the ground beside the well. “Poc,” he said. “Drink.”

  Moments later, Gabriel was inside the house, where the furniture stood in place. Benedict’s and Evangeline’s cloaks still hung from the hooks. Wooden bowls and steel knives sat on the kitchen bench. The bed was still rumpled from its last sleeper.

  But the hearth was cold.

  Gabriel wasn’t sure if he’d decided to stay there, or if fate had decided for him. Winter was just a wind-whisper away, and there was no other shelter for some distance, many days’ walk at least, if he even knew of a destination, which he did not. Days were shorter, and nights colder. Winter was no time to wander, and even Gabriel, desolate, abandoned, countryless Gabriel, knew how valuable this shelter would be.

  He spent the next week gathering and stacking even more firewood under the lean-to behind the dwelling, enough for a winter. He scooped up the fallen apples from the orchard and pressed them for cider, setting it to ripen in the barrel by the hearth. He pulled up the onions and turnips from the garden and brought in the pumpkins, carefully storing them in the ground cellar. He insulated the chicken coop with dried grasses gathered from the bluff. And he faithfully fed and watered the ever-growling Poc.

  “You don’t have to like me, dog,” Gabriel said. “But I’m not leaving just yet. You’re stuck with me.”

  Gabriel fed Poc fish from the bay and crabs from the rocks and rabbits from the woods. One day, two weeks into the season of frost, he hit a deer with his bow and arrow. He cleaned it, butchered it, and froze the meat for him and Poc to gnaw on through the cold winter months. Together they slept in Evangeline’s bed, where Gabriel would spend his nights imagining her beside him, enveloping him with her softness and warmth. He would resolve to find her, then resolve to endure his solitude, then reverse again. He would try to sketch Evangeline from memory, then chastise himself for failing to succeed. He would will himself not to cry. He would pray.

  Gabriel remained in the cabin for five months. On the day the first crocus appeared, he gathered a satchel of belongings and walked down the bluff.

  Poc did not follow, loyal to the cabin. This saddened Gabriel, who’d grown fond of his four-legged adversary, but he understood Poc’s determination to protect the cabin, the only home he would ever know.

  Gabriel walked thirty-six days before reaching the northern border of the New Colonies, where he crossed over undetected. Once within, he began to roam, friendless, homeless, helpless, and never certain of his route. He walked thirty-six more days, and thirty-six more, from ramshackle town to polluted city to pastured landscape, looking for signs of Evangeline. He disguised himself as a mute in one city, as a monk in another, as a simpleton in another, never speaking, only listening, listening for the sorrowful sounds of his native tongue, for news of the Cadian diaspora, of his father, Basil, of his beloved Evangeline. He chased rumors and wagon trains, ghosts and hope. He never gave up.

  More than once, a campfire on a ridge in the distance spurred him to walk all night, arriving at the site just as the coals choked forward their final, dusty offering of smoke.

  Once, a rumor of a Cadian mission drew him south to the land of the crab diggers, where he found only the remains of a gale-tossed chapel, long abandoned by its shepherds. A glimpse of a colorful Cadian cloak, cornflower blue in a crowded city street, sent him racing through the throngs, only to find a Quaker maiden, not his beloved. A whisper of a Cadian huntress urged him into the deepest forest, but his quarry eluded him.

  And now, the whisper of a Cadian community here along the Lesser River. Here, where Gabriel was now captive to men whose language he did not understand and intentions he could not know.

  Gabriel sat back down on the floor of the dark, empty room and felt his pockets for a morsel. Perhaps from last night’s rabbit. There was none. He would have to wait.

  Wait and sleep. And dream.

  eva

  Ada, it’s me,” I say. “It’s Eva. I have your lunch.” Ada is sitting on the small purple loveseat next to her bed, her head leaning back on a pillow embroidered with a picture of a seal. A month-old issue of Yankee magazine lies on her lap, opened to an article on Mount Katahdin.

  “Eva, dear. Is it Sunday already?” Ada says.

  In the months after she moved here, Da’ and I used to visit on Sundays.

  “No, Ada,” I say. “It’s Tuesday. I’ve come with lunch. You remember.”

  It would probably be easier just to say, �
��Yes, it’s Sunday,” but my supervisor, Mr. Lench, told me that you shouldn’t do that. When the residents get confused or stop making sense, you’re supposed to correct them.

  “Lunch?” she says.

  “Yes, Ada. I have lunch for you, just like I did yesterday. You remember. I’ve been working here at Penobscot Pines for a month,” I say. “I’m living up at the Orrington Apartments across town. You remember. I was here this morning with your breakfast, and last night with supper, and yesterday at noontime with your lunch. You remember. You had chicken salad and cottage cheese and we watched General Hospital together.”

  “General Hospital?”

  “It’s on television, Ada. It’s one of your favorite stories.” I look at her yellowing hair. I decide to come back later and wash it with whitening shampoo after my shift. It turns her hair kind of blue, but that’s better than yellow. “You remember, Ada.”

  “Eva,” she says. “Beautiful Eva.”

  “Here,” I say. I feed Ada a few bites of spoon bread that I slipped some maple syrup onto even though she’s not supposed to have any extra sweets. She chews slowly, her lips curling around her teeth each time they come together. It’s remarkable that Ada still has all of her teeth, but she does. She brushed for her whole life with nothing but baking soda and water, and never even had a filling. If it weren’t for the arthritis in her jaw and her screwed-up digestive system, she’d eat steak. But as it is, she gets spoon bread. And if I’m serving it to her, she gets a little maple syrup on it.

  Sometimes Ada feeds herself, but not today. Today she just opens her mouth like a baby and waits. Each time Ada swallows, her eyes go blank for a second before focusing on the next bite.

  After about half the spoon bread, her eyes glaze over. I know the look; it usually means she’s going to check out for a while. That’s what the nurses call it here. Checking out. When a patient stops interacting and just sits and stares at nothing. They don’t seem to notice anything that goes on around them. They’re not awake, but not asleep, either. It can last for just a few seconds, or for a day, and no matter what Mr. Lench says, you can’t always get them to check back in. You can try all you want, but Ada comes back when she wants to come back, not before.