Anxious Hearts

by Tucker Shaw

  The house was his greatest expression of love for her. But it was now just a pile of ashes and cinders. Evangeline had never seen it.

  Softly the evening came. Gabriel drifted and wept alone in the twilight. His shoulders collapsed and sobs of exhaustion and desperation skimmed across the river. “Are you so near to me?” he cried to the riverbanks. “Have you dreamed of me?” His voice carried through the fireflies gleaming on the riverbank, and into the dark caverns of the night forest.

  “I will build another house for you, my beloved. I will build another life for you. This is my vow.” As he swore, he felt the first raindrop on his forearm.

  The storm came in slowly, with the markings of a shower, not a torrent. The heavy drops fell into the dark river around him, and Gabriel, though he knew he should find cover, swelled with determination, not prudence. He paddled more deeply in the rushing water, keeping a steady rhythm as he rowed: “Evangeline, Evangeline.”

  The storm grew only stronger, drenching the oarsman and conjuring up a formidable, swirling headwind, but Gabriel didn’t stop. His goal was forward, and though already drenched, he rowed on.

  Each stroke of the oar now brought him nearer, ever nearer, to her.

  eva

  It’s too late. It’s done.”

  Da’ is still stirring the coffee that I set down in front of him at least ten minutes ago, as if the half-and-half isn’t yet mixed in. I managed to convince him to get out of that easy chair and sit at the kitchen table while I fix us a couple of sardine sandwiches, open-faced with cheddar cheese melted over the top. I find some coleslaw in the refrigerator, too, which I sniff and set out. The pale green cabbage and faded orange carrots match the cracked floral vinyl tabletop. “I’ve already sold it,” he says.

  “But Da’,” I say.

  “Half of it is yours,” he says, still stirring his coffee.

  “Half of what?”

  “The house. The land. The money.”

  “Da’,” I say. “If you’ve sold the house, where are you going to go? Where are you going to live?”

  “That’s not all,” he says. “Ada’s property is ours now, too.”

  “What?”

  “Yes.”

  Ada has maybe a couple dozen acres. I never really thought about what would happen to her property if she died. I guess I figured she had some nephew or cousin somewhere who would show up, probably bummed out that they had to deal with trying to sell it off.

  “What do you mean, her property is ours?”

  “Ada’s lawyer called me after we took Ada to Penobscot Pines. He said she would be leaving pretty much everything to me, and you. He says that if we found the right buyer, the land could be worth a decent price.”

  “No kidding,” I say.

  “It will help pay for school,” he says. “You won’t have to borrow as much.”

  “But Da’. Where are you going to go?”

  “I can’t stay out here, Eva.” He sounds so old when he says it. “Come here. Look.” He points out the kitchen window to the lawn. The grass outside hasn’t been cut since I left a month ago. The rosebushes are disheveled and brown. The fields beyond are choked with weeds. Only two chickens are left after a fox attack last week.

  “It is too much,” he says. “Even the barn is falling apart. The roof needs replacing. The loft is full of mice.”

  I know that he is right. He can’t stay here. But I can’t imagine him living anywhere else. And I can’t imagine anyone else living here.

  “Are you sure, Da’?”

  He is silent for a minute or two, letting his watery eyes dart left and right before closing them behind heavy lids. “Our story here is nearly finished,” he says. “And you are grown. It is time.”

  He stops stirring his coffee.

  Later I call Louise and ask her if I can come to Bar Harbor for a couple of days before I go back to Penobscot Pines. She says yes, of course, and I drive down to meet her after her shift at Blueberry Fields Cantina. She steals a bottle of champagne from behind the bar and we drink it on the beach, where the midsummer moon is full and the sand glistens. Louise tells me about her latest beau, Gaston from Montreal. “He wears the tiniest bathing suit!” she says. “C’est tragique.” We laugh, and then I tell Louise about Ada dying, and how the last thing she told me to do was find Gabe.

  I laugh out loud, but maybe I laugh too hard, because Louise doesn’t laugh with me. She just shakes her head.

  On our tipsy bike ride home, I fall off my bike and skin my knee, and the raw pain of it makes me feel so small and motherless and lonely. I am glad I am with Louise, but I really wish Gabe were here with me instead, because he was once small and motherless and lonely and he would understand.

  But Gabe is gone. No matter what Ada says.

  When I wake up with a headache I tell Louise that I’ve decided to stay in Bar Harbor for the rest of the summer. I call Da’ to tell him I’m going to wait tables with Louise at Blueberry Fields until school starts. Even though it means sacrificing my credits from Penobscot Pines, I’ll make a lot more money.

  When I call Dr. Wadsworth to tell her my plans, I can tell she is annoyed. But then she says that if she were in my shoes she would probably do the same thing.

  Gabriel

  IN THE MIDST OF A GREAT STORM, IT IS IMPOSsible to quantify time or distance or damage. What occurs in the dark swirl of weather is unseeable, its effects unknowable. Decisions are made without forethought or pretext or wisdom. Actions and decisions are only justified later.

  And so it was that Gabriel, though equipped with the knowledge and experience and will to shelter himself from nearly any storm, indeed to thrive in it, ignored his better judgment, giving in to his obsessive quest and pressing on through the great storm now howling around him.

  He paddled, facing the driving rain and racing wind. Streams of water collected in his hair and flowed down his face, and his eyes squinted to slits, but he forced his small canoe through the oncoming wind and waves and darkness, digressing as much as progressing but undeterred and single-focused and determined to move ahead, whatever lay in his path. Obstacles did not matter. Nothing mattered, only rowing. For it was only rowing that would bring him to Vieux Manan. Only rowing would bring him to his reward, his beloved.

  Her image appeared before him, hanging in the air just above the bow of his canoe, beckoning him ever forward. “Come, my love. Come.” He saw her, curls cascading softly around her shoulders, midnight eyes shining with comfort and love. He imagined her alone, waiting for him, quiet and content, carefully tending to their house, to the goats and cider and garden, scanning the seascape of the bay for her beloved like a sea captain’s widow in the years after battle. He would not disappoint her.

  He imagined her with friends, among Cadians in a village as beautiful as Pré-du-sel, nay, in the very village of Pré-du-sel that belonged to them, that they belonged to. He imagined the stories she told of his devotion, his persistence, his never-ending quest to return, and to return to her the life he’d promised.

  He imagined her mourning his reported death, a demise the others, perhaps even Père Felician, wisely but wrongly told her was certain. He imagined her in an embrace, a passionate embrace with Jean-Baptiste Leblanc, resigning herself to the apparent truth of her new future. He imagined Jean-Baptiste’s hands on her. He imagined them lying together. He imagined them petitioning Père Felician to release her from her past entanglements and allow her to marry Jean-Baptiste.

  The storm, stronger now, spun his boat in directions unknown. But Gabriel, fighting current and gale, rowed even more furiously.

  eva

  USM is a big enough school that they don’t do dumb small-school things like not allow you to choose your own roommates, which meant all Louise and I had to do was ask the admissions office and they let us room together.

  We spend our first couple of days getting the dorm room organized: cheap carpet from the thrift store, posters of black-and-white photographs (“très c
hic”), a tiny refrigerator. We signed up for classes—two requireds (American Studies and English—ugh) and four electives (I choose Organic Chemistry, Biological Ethics, Basics of Anatomy, and French). I picked French because Da’ always wanted me to learn it since that’s what his parents spoke. I know I’m going to hate it.

  On the morning of our second breakfast, I see Gabe standing in front of us in the cafeteria line. His back is to us, but the rolled-up sleeves of his flannel shirt and his worn jeans are unmistakable. I stare for a minute, or maybe a hundred, until he turns around and I realize that it’s not Gabe. It’s hard to shake off, but Louise refills my coffee cup over and over until I do.

  Part of the pre-med requirement is an on-site work-study program at a hospital or hospice or other health-care provider. I get my first choice for assignment—assisting a group of nurses at the Cumberland Medical Center, which is one of the best hospitals around. I’ll be in the Palliative Care Unit.

  Palliative care is where they send you if they can’t cure you. Kind of like Penobscot Pines—you don’t really get better and go back to regular life. They just try to keep you quiet and comfortable. They don’t bother trying to fix you, because they can’t. By the time you get to palliative care, they’ve pretty much tried everything they know.

  My shift at the Cumby is twice a week, Thursdays and Fridays, from five P.M. to midnight. The job is mostly sitting at the nurse’s station, waiting for something to happen. I answer phones when they ring and file paperwork when they ask me to. After my first few shifts, they started having me deliver mail and things to the long-term patients. By last night I was answering patient calls to see whether they really needed a nurse or whether they were just having trouble with the television remote control or needed a refill of water or whatever. If it didn’t involve touching the patient or the medical equipment, I was allowed to take care of it.

  The nurse’s station where I sit is surrounded by a low wall, separating the “pit,” as they call it, from the rest of the hospital. It’s Friday, so the hospital is pretty active all afternoon, with visitors and patients and doctors and nurses and lab techs and fighting families crowding the hallway. Families fight a lot in hospitals.

  At 7:45 I take my thirty-minute lunch break. It’s really supper time, but they call it lunch here, so whatever. I go to the cafeteria in the basement. It’s wicked depressing down there. I stand around looking at all the options along the self-serve tray-slide line, the Salisbury steak and the chicken fricassee and the seafood chowder and the Jell-O, and I must have seemed really indecisive and pathetic, because finally the guy behind the counter, who’s wearing a name tag that says MAX, tells me to get the chili. I’m skeptical, but he says it’s the only thing there he’ll eat. I scoop myself a bowl, he hands me a chunk of corn bread, and I pay my $1.70 and sit in one of the industrial-orange booths to eat.

  Max is right. The chili—black beans and red beans and ground beef and tomato sauce—isn’t that bad. And the corn bread is fine, too, especially with an extra slather of margarine. I eat alone.

  Later, after my break, the hall lights go dim and the hospital slides into quieter hours. Visiting time ends at nine o’clock, and people start trickling out well before that, intent on keeping normal lives while their mothers, sisters, babies are waiting for their diseases to either fade or finish them off. I sit at my desk at the nurse’s station and watch them go, without looking up.

  By ten o’clock, there’s almost no one in the hospital. My shift doesn’t end for two hours, so I crack open my Organic Chemistry book. I’m already behind.

  Gabriel

  UNDER A STORM-FILLED SKY DARKER IN DAYTIME than he’d ever known it at midnight, Gabriel, disheveled of mind as well as body, drove his canoe forward into a furious downward stairway of storm-fed rapids.

  Rain turned to hail and drove down from the sky, swirling in deadly whirlpools, first this way, then that way, sideways and upward together through the air, slapping the surface of the river like buckshot, boring into Gabriel’s hardened flesh like stones. Blood flowed from his limbs and eyes, washed by the water as quickly as it was drawn to the surface.

  Gabriel shouted in defiance, still paddling forward as his canoe bounced and tumbled its way over the rapids and rocks, tossing him aft and fore and nearly capsizing his craft. His weary muscles were surging with determination and foolish faithfulness, and he struggled to stay on his knees, digging his oar deeper and more forcefully into the river with every stroke, until his boat drove hard against a boulder in the whirling stream, rupturing the shell and sending a thunderous crack through the whistling, groaning winds.

  Gabriel, drawing on strength that came not from his body but from a force greater than the one he commanded, did not waver as water seeped into the doomed hull, but he paddled on, determination giving way to madness, shouting her name, “Evangeline! Evangeline!” even as the river swamped the canoe and began to pull it apart and below the swirling surface.

  It wasn’t until the canoe broke cleanly in half that Gabriel stopped paddling and released the boat, and his own body, to the raging current, swept away into the depths of the swirling, blackened, hail-pocked water.

  Gabriel held fast to his oar to stay afloat. With a few frantic strokes he maneuvered through the wind-whipped rapids to a steep, slippery bank under a row of pines, bullets of hail pummeling his head. Tossing the oar aside, he pulled himself, slipping here, catching himself there, bloody-fingered and sweating in the rain, up the shining rocks and away from the river, climbing onto a ledge under a jagged overhang. In another instance he would have judged this ledge too precipitous, too dangerous to stop on, but Gabriel was saturated, with exhaustion and delirium and rain, and so there he stayed, wet and cold and shivering with fever. He would regain his strength and wait out the pounding deluge.

  The rain cascaded from the sky like a waterfall, spinning in the day-night above and around him, stifling everything else on earth to an unheard whisper. The storm lasted through the night and into the next day, a day unmarked by sunlight.

  Gabriel, sapped of strength but not of hope, laid his heavy, sodden head on a curled arm and slept deeply and still, as only the dead can do.

  eva

  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 ea
ch 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.