Page 15 of The Moonlight Healers

There was a long pause that seemed to hold the weight of years.

“Come, come,” Camille said. “It’s not even noon and it’s hot as hell out here.”

They followed Camille up the wooden stairs, careful to avoid the board on the second step that had been missing since Louise was in middle school, and the others that were loose or splintering.

The porch was crowded with an assortment of Camille’s shoes, mud-caked boots and flip-flops and garden clogs, as well as umbrellas and a stack of unopened packages.

“You want me to bring any of these in, Mom?” Bobbie asked with a nod to the packages. Her eyes narrowed as they traveled over the rest of the porch, the rocking chairs with peeling paint, the mugs of coffee and iced tea glasses left on tables.

“Oh, no, no, leave them,” Camille replied as she opened the screen door. “Most of them are for Jim anyway. They tend to get lost when he sends them to the business PO box.” She motioned for them to come inside. “Come on, I’ll get you something to drink.”

They trailed Camille through the living room, with its worn couches and chairs and window air conditioning unit blasting in the corner.

As they passed through the old dining room, which Camille had converted to an art studio that spring, Bobbie stopped. “What…?” she began to ask, looking around at the canvases stacked all over the room, the brushes and jars of paint scattered over a folding table, the paint-splattered drop cloth on the floor under a large easel. Her mother hadn’t seen the room sinceCamille moved the table and chairs out a few months earlier. Now, every time Louise visited there were a dozen new canvases lying out to dry.

“I told you about this,” Louise said beside her mother, whose eyes were trained on a large canvas propped against the fireplace. It was an abstract landscape of a mountain, a swirling world of color, blues and greens and pinks.

Camille followed Bobbie’s gaze. “Oh just thought it made sense, I have more time now with—” She stopped abruptly. “I don’t do as much gardening because of my back. And you know I’ve always liked painting. I just used to keep it all in the shed when you guys…”

For a moment, they were all quiet, transported back to a past where they had been together in that same room, gathered around the table for Louise’s early birthdays, the space filled with balloons and glitter and streamers, or for holiday meals, Christmases with carols blaring from the speakers, Thanksgivings where Jim always brought a massive turkey he deep-fried at his house, only to wave away all the fuss her great-grandmother tried to make about it.

“Anyway,” Camille said hoarsely, moving on. “Excuse the mess. It’s all very amateur.”

They reached the kitchen at the back of the house. “What would you girls like to drink? I have iced tea, coffee, water?”

“Iced tea would be great, Grandma.”

“I’ll take some coffee,” Bobbie said. She walked to the window and looked out toward the little two-bedroom guest cottage near the creek, where they had lived until they relocated to Richmond when Louise was six.

Camille handed a mug of coffee to Bobbie and a glass of iced tea to Louise. “How about we go sit on the back porch?”

The porch was cool and dark, shaded by the large magnolia tree in the center of the yard. Louise sank down onto the wicker couch, which shuddered slightly with the weight. Many of herrecollections of her early life at the orchard were faded, blurred at the edges, but she had vivid, Technicolor memories of sitting on that wicker couch after she got home from kindergarten, on the days her mother was at work. She would play with dolls or color as her great-grandmother, Helene, sat in the rocking chair across from her, listening to country music or thumbing through the pages of an old red journal, talking to herself in French, which always sounded to Louise like a song. It wasn’t until years later that Louise understood that her great-grandmother was already sick with dementia by that point, that this was the reason she never went out by herself, why Jim would sometimes appear in the house, musing about orchard business when in reality he was there as a favor to Camille, to sit with Helene when she and Bobbie were both gone.

“Thanks for the tea,” Louise said, her throat tight at the sight of the familiar stenciled brown leaves of her iced tea glass. All these years, and nothing here had changed, not a single detail. Camille had been living by herself in this crumbling old house for nearly twelve years. Her brother, Daniel, a dentist who lived in Pennsylvania, helped the orchard financially, but the day-to-day operations of the orchard, and care for Helene, had been left entirely to Camille. Louise felt a rush of gratitude for Jim, for the fact that he had at least been present, when her mother couldn’t be.

Her grandmother glanced between Louise and Bobbie, the expectation of what needed to be said so thick it felt like something solid between them. “Barbara,” she said at last, “why are you here?”

“The car accident,” Bobbie said. “Her friend Peter was in the car too.”

Camille stilled, her eyes almost vacant, but then she blinked and focused again. “He was hurt,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

“He was gone,” Louise said. “He was thrown from the car. He…he died.”

Camille’s face registered a thousand emotions before finally settling into understanding. “And then…”

“He came back,” Louise said, as the numbness again descended like a curtain, the knowledge of what she had done clouded by the certainty that it was impossible. “I brought him back.”

Camille rested back in her chair and folded her hands on her lap.

“I told her you could explain it,” Bobbie said. “Because it’s your truth after all, isn’t it?”

Louise watched her grandmother carefully.

“I wasn’t expecting this,” Camille said. “You could have warned me over the phone.”

Bobbie shook her head. “You don’t get to decide how this happens.”

Camille visibly blanched. “Barbara, I’m not… I’m simply trying to process all of this. You’ve sprung this on me, without any warning, without—” She stopped abruptly.

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