Anxious Hearts (16 page)

“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.

This time she’s only gone for a minute or so, and when she checks back in, she checks in hard.

“Where has he gone?” she says, suddenly full of energy, her blazing blue eyes drilling into mine urgently. “Where is he?”

“Who?”

“Gabriel!” She’s almost shouting, scolding me. “Where has he gone?”

I wonder if I could get away with pretending that I don’t know what she’s talking about. I’m trying to forget Gabe. But I answer her.

“I don’t know, Ada. He is gone. He left a year and a half ago. You remember. I haven’t seen him since. No one has. You know that.”

Ada leans back in her chair. “Water,” she says, and I bring it to her. I lie down on her bed.

Ada begins to tell me the story of her husband, her own Gabriel, her Lawrence, who served in World War II and Korea and returned home with honors, only to disappear in a nor’easter during a fishing voyage off the coast. They never found his body. Ada tells me about his funeral, and about how she never believed him to be dead, and how she never went a day without hoping he would come home and they would be together again. “Believing he’d come back is what has made my life worth living,” she says. “He has not been here for over thirty years. But he’s been here.” She puts her hand on her chest and inhales slowly before whispering, “Forever.”

When she finishes, I am not sure if I am asleep or awake for several minutes. I just lie on the bed and breathe.

“You must find him,” Ada finally says.

“How?”

“I don’t know, my dear. But where your heart has gone, so must your hand. It is the only way.” She closes her eyes.

After a minute or so, I sit up at the edge of the bed. I say, “I tried, Ada. But he’s gone.”

Ada’s chin falls to her chest with a sigh, and her breathing slows. It must be naptime.

“And I have a life to lead,” I mumble to myself, propping up Ada’s head with a pillow.

Gabriel

O
NCE MORE
, G
ABRIEL AWOKE WITH A START JUST
before drowning in his dream.

But this time, all wasn’t silent when he awoke.

An argument was in the air outside his prison. Gabriel could hear it through the window slit in the earthen wall. Three voices, maybe four, were talking over one another in a swell of heated speech, each voice louder and more urgent in succession. They spoke and shouted, one after the other and one over the other, in the language of his captors, familiar in cadence but unintelligible.

As the bickering continued, a new voice soared over the others, silencing all the rest. Gabriel sprung to his feet. It had
been nineteen months, and he didn’t recognize the words, but Gabriel knew the booming voice.

Basil.

Gabriel jumped up and looked through the window slit but couldn’t see anyone, only prairie grass and clouds. The voices had been coming from around the corner. “Father!” he yelled.

The voices outside fell silent.

Gabriel pressed his face into the opening. “Father!”

“Gabriel!” shouted Basil. The voices rose again, all of them more frenzied now, but Basil bellowed louder than the others, interspersing his own language with theirs, layering word over word in ways that defied precision but, as Basil delivered them, were unmistakable and clear:
Open the door and release my son.

“Gabriel! Attend, my son!” he roared. “Are you injured?”

“I am safe, Father,” Gabriel yelled back. “I am unharmed.”

Gabriel could picture Basil’s veins popping on his neck, his eyes wide and tense, the corners of his mouth lathered. He spoke low now, careful and direct, with exceptional force. Gabriel understood none of the words, but they were powerful enough, and Basil’s tone was powerful enough, to silence the others.

Soon, the door to Gabriel’s earthen cell began to rattle, and then it swung open violently. Light poured in, and just
as on the last day of Pré-du-sel, Gabriel was blinded for a moment. He shrunk away from the door and crumpled against the wall, shielding his eyes from the onslaught of light.

“My son!” Basil said. “You are alive.” He stepped down into the dark, earthen room. “Come. Where have you been? What took you so long to get here?”

“Father,” Gabriel said. “I cannot see. The light.”

Basil grasped Gabriel under his arms, drawing him up to his feet. “Come, Gabriel.”

Gabriel rubbed his eyes as his vision crept back. He stepped through the doorway and out onto the grass, which stretched to every horizon. Blinking, squinting, he looked around for the other men, but there was no one else there. Only Basil.

He turned back to his father. “Where have they gone?”

Basil, whose hair had gone from black to gray but whose arms were perhaps even more powerful than before, stood before his son in dusty gaiters and a worn doublet of deerskin, and regarded him head to heel. “My son,” he said, shaking his head at Gabriel’s tattered breeches and road-worn shoes. He stepped forward and embraced Gabriel with a powerful, breath-stealing grip. “They have gone.”

“Who are they?” said Gabriel.

“It doesn’t matter. They have gone. We are alone now. They will require a fee, of course.”

“A fee?”

“A fine, I should say.”

“A fine? For the rabbit?”

“Nay. Not for the rabbit. For trespassing,” he said. “They’ve requested four pelts and a barrel of cider. But I’ll wait them out and barter them down to just a barrel of cider. They’ll accept. They need me. I’m the only one in these provinces who knows how to shoe a horse.” Basil tossed back his hair and laughed heartily. “You do remember how to press cider, yes?”

“Who are they?” Gabriel asked again, and more forcefully. “Tell me, Father. I have a right to know. Tell me now! Who are my captors?”

Basil regarded Gabriel sternly, then spoke slowly to his now-grown son, nineteen months and a lifetime wiser than before. “Only trappers,” he said, “from the north. Their villages, too, were burned by the New Colonists. They have hardly any land, and you were on it.”

“How do you know their language?”

“I don’t,” Basil said, dismissing the thought with a lordly shrug.

“But,” Gabriel said, “they listened to you.”

“They think I’m important, Gabriel, because I act important.” Basil smiled. He boosted Gabriel onto his horse and, taking the reins, walked triumphantly upstream toward the river, leading the horse and quarry behind him. “Come. I will lead you home. It’s just a short distance,” Basil said. “Along the riverbank.”

The white-blue sky was everywhere, unbroken by tree or hillside. Gabriel sat rigid in Basil’s saddle and watched it through jostled eyes as the towering clouds glided silently by.

“Evangeline,” Gabriel said.

“What?”

“She is there, too?”

Basil did not answer right away, but Gabriel also did not repeat himself. He knew that Basil had heard the question.

“You must forget her, Gabriel. Your future is here, with us. We are building anew. We will build, and we will multiply. Our defiance will be our language, our ways. They can move us, but we will persevere. We must. It is our only path. We must stay together.”

“Evangeline.” Gabriel’s voice caught in his throat.

“My son,” Basil said.

“I must find her.”

“Gabriel. This land seems foreign to you, remote. But we are not so far away. Only five days from here, at the mouth of this river, the Lesser River, lies the port of Vieux Manan, where the New Colonists have assembled to fortify their garrisons. Once again, they seek to destroy us, to disperse us. We must prepare to defend ourselves against them, to protect our adopted land. We cannot allow ourselves to be evicted again. We have formed an alliance with the northern territories. Gabriel. We will fight.”

Gabriel shook his head. “I must find her, Father.”

Basil drew in a sharp breath as if to bellow, but he was silent. For several minutes, neither man said a word—not father, not son.

Finally, Basil broke the silence. “Evangeline is not important, Gabriel. Your place is here,” Basil said. “You cannot go to find her. It is a reckless errand, dangerous and costly. And you are needed by your people. Honor is a higher calling than love, my Cadian son.”

“She is my wife.”

“No, Gabriel. She is not. You have been counted among the dead, along with Benedict Bellefontaine. You have been but a ghost to the Cadian people, a memory, a lost soul. And to Evangeline.” Basil’s tone was grave. “She has
chosen another, and her wedding day is nigh, if not already passed.”

“Impossible,” Gabriel protested. “You lie.”

“I do not lie, Gabriel. Evangeline is to marry Jean-Baptiste Leblanc in the city of Vieux Manan. Michael the fiddler brought the news when he arrived a fortnight ago.”

Silence. Gabriel ground his teeth. Jean-Baptiste Leblanc. It could not be.

Gabriel closed his eyes. For a moment, he was back in his never-ending nightmare-dream, swirling into the cold black waters, drowning again in icy Glosekap Bay. Then, in a gasp, his breath returned and his eyes opened.

“I do not believe you, sir,” Gabriel said. He reached around and took the reins from Basil and cantered ahead. “I cannot. I must go to her.”

“But you don’t know where you’re going!” Basil shouted after him.

Gabriel only sped up. He had heard enough. Gabriel would follow the river to this city called Vieux Manan, and there he would reclaim his beloved. No one would stop him. Not even his father. He sped to a gallop.

“Gabriel!” Basil roared after him. “Attend! I will not lose you again! I will not lose you to this foolhardy quest!”

But Gabriel, itinerant, lovelorn Gabriel, did not stop for his father’s call. He was closer now, closer to Evangeline than perhaps he’d ever been. He would not stop now, or ever, until she was again in his arms.

He sped along the path, the only path, toward a thicket of low trees in the distance.

eva