Anxious Hearts

by Tucker Shaw

  “Help!” I yell.

  The two attendings jump up from their cards. “Are you all right?” one yells as he leaps through the pass-through. I point at the man, now lying facedown on the floor, deadly still. “Call security!”

  I race to the hooded man, reaching him before the doctors. His body is tense, rigid. I crouch down and strain to turn him over.

  He is bleeding from the mouth. His eyes are wide, dilated, glazed. His arms are wrapped around his own torso with a desperate grip.

  And against his chest is a notebook.

  It is Gabe. His eyes begin to roll, and the world beyond me, beyond us, disappears.

  Gabriel

  GABRIEL COUGHED HIMSELF AWAKE AND OUT OF the drowning dream, the incessant dream that had plagued him since the destruction of Pré-du-sel.

  It took a moment of squinting through the sunlit mist to remind himself where he was. And why.

  Evangeline.

  Gabriel was hot, as if with fever. And he was also cold, exposed here, in this foreign mist. Shivering and sweating together. But the rain and wind had ceased.

  He coughed. His skin felt cold and clammy against his wet, tattered clothes. Gabriel looked around for his waistcoat, then remembered that he’d lost it in the river.

  “Evangeline,” he said to the mist. His voice wavered and cracked with fatigue and thirst. “Evangeline.” He couldn’t be certain if he said it aloud, or merely thought it.

  The last thing he expected to hear was an answer, but an answer came. It was a voice, a girl’s voice, humming or singing, he could not discern, so muffled by the mist.

  “Evangeline,” he called again, weakly. “Evangeline!” Heat raged through his temples and his head drooped from his limp neck. Gabriel wiped the cold accumulation of sweat from his forehead.

  “Evangeline?”

  The lilting, ethereal voice, beautiful and melodic, came from the brush just below his rock.

  Gabriel, soggy and dirty from the splattering storm, sat up and, hitting his head on the overhang, looked dizzily down into the brush. There, surrounded by mist, was a girl, a tall girl he saw only from the back, with dark, wavy hair and powerful shoulders. Deerskin leggings covered her legs, and there were leather moccasins on her feet. Her body was turned away from him.

  “Evangeline!” he said again. He leaped off the rock and landed heavily at her feet. He stood up and, wobbling, threw out his dirty, arms to embrace her.

  Only, when he closed his arms around her, she wasn’t there. He was hugging only himself. And the music of her voice became the disconsolate silence of misery.

  “Evangeline,” he whispered as he collapsed into the brush, arms wrapped around himself, shivering with fever. He did not see the rainbow above him, half formed but vibrant with colors of violent yellow and red, for as soon as he rose up from the brush, the rain began again.

  eva

  Evangeline.”

  Gabe chokes up a column of blood with my name.

  Then, with a shudder, Gabe’s body goes limp. His eyes roll violently, blue turning to gray turning to black. His lips quiver. I take in a sharp breath, and hold it.

  Activity swirls around me. One of the emergency room guys pushes me aside. I lose my balance and tumble backward, sitting down on the hard tile floor. “Backup! We need transport!” the other one yells toward the swinging doors. They crouch over Gabe, one pulling apart his eyelids and shining a flashlight into his eyes, the other bowing his head to lay his ear on Gabe’s chest. “Stat!”

  A gurney comes crashing through the door, pushed by a middle-aged nurse with an intense, breathless stare. The three hoist the shivering Gabe onto the gurney. His notebook falls to the floor, unnoticed, as they race toward the swinging doors. And Gabe is gone again.

  “Gabriel,” I say, sitting alone on the silent tiled floor.

  I pick up the notebook and, in the lonely flicker of the fluorescent lights of the waiting room, I begin to read.

  Gabriel

  THE GRAY AND GUSTY STREETS OF VIEUX MANAN were rich with the scent of ocean and wood fires and fish, aromas that Gabriel, even in the opacity of his fever and desperation, had detected well before he arrived.

  It had been three days since the stormy night on the river, three days since he’d lost his boat, three days of dizzy, dirty trudging, following the bramble-filled banks of the Lesser River, gathering scant fistfuls of wineberries and leaves of wood herbs for sustenance and thirstily sipping the churned-up water from the river, a source that in long-ago days of lucidity and wisdom he would have dismissed in favor of an easily found spring, but that thirst and carelessness had driven him to. Three days of walking, of losing, then regaining his footing, of feverish faith and obstinate determination, of visions of a reunion with Evangeline, had brought him to this place, this muddy collection of docks and storage garrets laid on a cockeyed grid by the sea. Vieux Manan.

  Gabriel wandered with uneven steps and uneven thoughts through the deserted lanes at the outskirts of the compact town, where weathered row houses leaned awkwardly against each other in crooked repetition. Tiny plots wedged between blocks held shelters for goats and horses and small vegetable gardens. But there were no goats. The plots were fallow.

  Not a single person crossed his path as he entered Vieux Manan. The city felt empty, but Gabriel knew that it was anything but: Behind the shuttered windows and bolted doors were certainly warm, dry citizens, driven to their hearths by a week of lingering rain.

  He was desperately hopeful that behind one of those doors was his beloved, his Evangeline, but his heart beat with trepidation that even if he found her, she would be wrapped in the arms of another, of Jean-Baptiste Leblanc. He spit at the ground in disgust.

  It mattered not, he told himself. When he found her, after these months of wandering, of searching, of yearning, then Jean-Baptiste Leblanc would simply disappear. Everyone would disappear. Only Evangeline and Gabriel would remain. It was this vision of a happiness, a complete, eternal, soul-encompassing happiness, contained between the two, that gave him energy even as his fever drained him. It was this vision that renewed his desire to breathe, to move, to search, to find.

  Evangeline.

  Gabriel, waterlogged and weary, his shoulders hunched in the storm, was grateful the wind had begun to abate. He guessed haphazardly at the direction to the sea, to the harbor, to the docks near which the center of the city would likely be. From there he would canvas the streets of this unfamiliar city, spiraling his way outward to its perimeter, and back in again, until he found Evangeline. He would search in the streets, peek in the windows, speak and shout her name with whatever strength he might find. He was nearer than ever now.

  He would find her.

  And they would, again, be together. And his wandering, their journey, would finally end. He would be home.

  Gabriel walked through the city, drunk with his mission, exhausted and blistered but unwilling to stop. Unable to stop. He held himself up on the brick and wooden walls of the structures for balance, stopping every few steps to look behind and ahead of his position. He squinted into every uncovered window, but saw only gray, cold interiors bereft of people. The warmed hearths or busy drawing rooms or families gathered for song or mealtime or prayer lived only in his imagination.

  If the city wasn’t deserted, it was asleep.

  Unsure of his feet, half clad in torn moccasins, Gabriel slipped frequently into one or another of the carriage ruts that dug through the saturated city streets, staining his already soiled garments with cold, wet dirt.

  Gabriel walked for hours, covering a muddy block or a muddy mile, he knew not which. Thoughts came stubbornly, words not at all, only his beloved. Only Evangeline.

  “Evangeline,” he muttered through the slowing raindrops. “Evangeline.” But the streets were silent.

  After a time, a long time, Gabriel crossed paths with a pair of journeymen, weighed down with rusted scythes and darkened visages. They did not greet him. Later, an old woman, with hole
s in her skirt and dirt on her cheeks, pulled at his jacket and hissed, “Pestilence. All will die!” Gabriel heard but did not comprehend the woman.

  Gabriel had the harbor of Vieux Manan in his sights when from behind him came the rumble of horse hooves, approaching rapidly. “Attend!” exclaimed the driver with a booming voice as Gabriel jumped aside. He turned to see a young man driving a pair of horses, black hair flying behind him in wet tendrils, straining to hold the reins of the galloping steeds. “Attend!”

  The horses, nearing a gallop, pulled a rickety wooden hay cart with two men, a woman, and a child, all wrapped together in a ragged blanket of broadcloth. The child stared at Gabriel with coal-ash eyes and coughed, his body convulsing with the effort. Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth as his tiny body bounced violently along the muddy street, but his face was expressionless.

  Gabriel walked for another eternity, and another, through the deserted streets of Vieux Manan, winding past bolted houses and shuttered windows in a pattern known only to a fevered lover on the verge of madness, or perhaps even already crossed over into madness. Each step drained another measure of energy from Gabriel’s life-weary gait, each empty street corner stealing from his soul.

  The wanderer’s pace slowed, step by excruciating step, until outside a row of closely built town houses across from the harbor, rickety and weathered from this storm and years of others, the weary Gabriel finally exhaled the last of his energy and crumpled onto the soft ground, his knees buckling over his ankles and his body fluttering slowly downward, gently to the ground, like a page torn and tossed into the wind from atop a seaside bec.

  He settled silently into the mud.

  Alone.

  eva

  I close Gabe’s notebook and look around. I am still on the floor of the emergency room, alone except for a nurse at the intake desk.

  I get up and, brushing off my jeans, walk over to the counter. “That boy who just came in,” I say to the woman behind the desk. “He was bleeding. Where did they take him?”

  “I’m sorry,” says the nurse. She’s wearing wide, green-rimmed glasses with stems that start at the bottom of the frame and snake upward over her ear. “What boy?”

  “They just took him in there.” I point at the swinging doors.

  “I’ve been at the desk for two hours. I haven’t seen any boy come through here. I haven’t seen anyone at all, except for you sitting there on the floor.”

  “He was bleeding,” I say again, my voice tinny and shallow.

  She pushes back from the low desk, the wheels on the bottom of her chair squeaking as she foot-powers herself across the small office space to a file caddy, where she sifts through a short stack of files. “What did you say the name was?”

  “Gabriel.”

  “That’s his last name?” she says.

  “It’s Lejeune. Gabe Lejeune,” I say.

  “Lejeune. Lejeune. Here he is. Let’s see. Emergency splenectomy.” She lowers her glasses and scans the file, her polished fingernail sweeping along the bottom of the chart. “He should be in post-op,” she says, glancing at her wristwatch. She slaps the file closed. “Only family can see him now.” She closes the file. “Is he your boyfriend, sweetie?”

  “I—” I mumble. He is not my boyfriend. He is so much more. “Is he going to be OK?” I ask.

  “They will give us a prognosis after he wakes up. But in the meantime only family can see him.” She readjusts her glasses over her eyes.

  “What’s a splenectomy?” I say.

  “It’s when they take your spleen out.”

  “Why would they do that?” I say.

  “Oh, there could be a million reasons. One guy came in last week after a rough hockey game and had to have his removed. It could be drugs. There was a woman last year who had some kind of cancer. Leukemia, I think. It could be anything. It’s pretty common.”

  I hear what she’s saying, but none of the words really explain anything at all. All I know is that Gabe is in trouble and in pain, and I want to help him but I’m not family, so I’m not allowed to see him even though I know him better than anyone in his so-called family does. I doubt his father even knows that Gabe is in Maine, let alone in the hospital.

  I’m not crying, but I sniffle like I’m about to.

  “Is he going to be OK?” I say.

  The nurse looks at me over her glasses and smiles softly. “Don’t worry, sweetie,” she says. “Everything will be all right. He’ll probably live forever.”

  Gabriel

  “OVER HERE!” THE GIRL’S SHOUTS TORE INTO Gabriel’s ears and brain. He could see nothing. “Over here!” she shouted again.

  Gabriel found the will to pry his eyes open, and the sunlight, though low and muted in the steady, slowly falling rain, poured in as if for the first time. He blinked and squinted into the sky, straining to accept the muted light into his dilated eyes. He was on his back, staring upward, brown boarded buildings of Vieux Manan framing a sky of indefinite, infinite gray, cloud over cloud, circling lazily in the salty sky.

  Into his sight came, suddenly and without presage, Evangeline, his life’s desire, pale and thin and anguished, but alive. And here. Evangeline! Cloaked in a Cadian cape of cornflower blue, the hood drenched and dripping around her frantic, freckled skin, midnight eyes darting from point to point on his face. The stiff, white collar around her neck stood out against the gray sky, reflecting light onto her skin, the light of a sister of mercy, a wandering caregiver, his once and future beloved.

  Was it a dream?

  “Help us!” she shouted, to whom he could not discern. He felt himself slipping, straining to stay awake. His body, so cold in the mud a minute ago, was now numb, and he felt no discomfort.

  “Gabriel,” Evangeline said over her crumpled lover, tears welling heavily in her eyes. “At last.” She bent to kiss him with colorless lips.

  And as her lips met his, the young lovers, though the months and journeys had stolen from their beauty, were again, for a moment, enrobed in the golden light of Pré-du-sel, and for a moment he was grateful, alive again.

  Gabriel closed his eyes, and for a moment recalled the first time Evangeline stood over him, with her hoe at his neck and Poc growling nearby. He remembered the liquid sunlight that crawled over that sylvan-bordered bec, illuminating the rolling tides of Glosekap Bay. He imagined Evangeline tending to her garden and orchards, visiting the woods to collect honey for breakfast and wildflowers for the table, her flowing black hair and ocean-blue kirtle catching the gusts, soft and aromatic with sea and meadow and peacefulness. He revisited his hiding place just beyond the wall, that concealed corner of the birch grove where he spent so much of his camouflaged youth, watching, waiting, hoping for a glimpse of her, not with malice or any intent other than love, true love, and his compulsion to sketch her, to capture her beauty that he might carry it with him. Gabriel, behind closed eyelids, saw his birchbark and charcoal sketches of Evangeline, each revealing itself in succession, here as a child among the clam beds, here as a young woman attending her chores, here as a beauty, a radiant, heavenly beauty awaiting her love, Gabriel.

  “Help!” cried Evangeline. “Help us!” A window opened above them, then slammed shut.

  “My beloved,” he strained to say, but he was unsure if the words ever took the form of sound, or if only his lips, or his mind, expressed them. “My beloved.” He opened his shivering eyes.

  She was there. This was not a dream. In this moment, she was crouched against him, sheltering him from the rain, a nurse holding his troubled head in her generous hands, feeding him life. “Worry not, Gabriel. I am here now. We are together again. I will take you home.”

  Home, Gabriel thought to himself.

  “I have waited,” Evangeline whispered, leaning over Gabriel’s head to brush the sodden hair from his muddy, hail-battered face. She rubbed the water from her own eyes, leaving streaks across her cheeks, breathing and rocking back and forth slowly, rhythmically. She looked down into hi
m with fearful eyes, swallowing a sob with a weak smile, the kind of smile a mother gives to a dying child to strengthen his spirit, at the expense of her own. “I have waited for you, Gabriel.”

  Through the quieting rain, Gabriel could just hear the sound, so familiar to him, of the ocean tide as it turned away from the seawall across the street. He knew the speech of the tides. He understood them. He listened to the waves, less insistent by the moment, as the water retreated out to the sea, slowly, slowly drawing the strength of the storm with it.

  Soon the skies would clear.

  Gabriel strained to look up at his beloved, so long-sought was she, but his eyelids fluttered closed again and he went back to the bec above the village of Pré-du-sel, back to watching, sketching, and loving Evangeline, reveling in her every breath and movement, back to the house he’d so carefully and exactingly built for her, back to her table, bountiful with pumpkin and salt cod and porridge, back to her orchard, collecting apples by day and lying under the stars by night, wrapped together in the same cloak she now wore, as the constant, trustworthy tide of Glosekap Bay marked the impatient days of their magical, golden world.

  eva

  I sit hopelessly in the emergency room for another forty-five minutes, waiting for I don’t know what, before I remember that I work here.

  I have a hospital badge.

  I may not officially be assigned to the ER or the OR, but if anyone asks why I’m there, I can just play lost. After all, I’m just the lowly work-study assistant to the assistant. How could I possibly know my way around this huge hospital?

  All I have to do is get past the nurse at the desk. I don’t have a plan, so I wait.