Anxious Hearts (18 page)

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

I
N THE MIDST OF A GREAT STORM, IT IS IMPOS
sible 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 chic”
), 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

U
NDER 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