Page 2 of The Moonlight Healers

There was a person lying on the road, a few yards away. She felt herself sway and grabbed for the car frame, her whole body trembling as comprehension roared toward her like a freight train.

She took a few careening steps, her legs numb, until she reached him.

“Peter,” she said hoarsely.

His eyes were open, and for a second, she wanted to laugh. Of course, he was okay. He was right there, awake.

But then she noticed the trickle of red from his bottom lip, the way his mouth hung, the horrible angle of his neck. His eyes weren’t bright anymore, just dull, empty spheres.

Louise crouched beside him, recalling her CPR training from her babysitting certification course two years earlier.

She pressed hard into Peter’s chest. “One…two…three…four…five…”

She took a ragged breath as her vision swam.

“Six…seven…eight…”

His skin was still warm. It couldn’t be too late. She had read stories of trauma victims brought to the hospital in full cardiac arrest, kids who had drowned, or heart attack victims. Sometimes they were down for nearly an hour. But they came back.

“Come back.”

She wasn’t sure if she had said the words out loud or in her head. She continued to press into Peter’s chest. There was something about the depth of compression, the degree and number of inches. She had known that in the class, gotten a hundred percent on the quiz. But it was so much harder on a real person. She couldn’t even tell if Peter’s chest was moving.

She reached “thirty” and started the cycle again. With the blood coming from his mouth, she couldn’t bring herself to do rescue breaths.

She heard voices behind her, people approaching, but Louise ignored them. She could do this. She felt the wetness on her cheeks, the scream inside her lungs, but she didn’t stop.

“Please come back,” she said, her words choked. She didn’t care who heard it. She didn’t care about the people on the road watching her with pity. She didn’t care that she looked ridiculous. She only knew that he had to come back.

“Twenty-two…twenty-three…twenty-four…”

This time she pushed down onto Peter’s body so hard she thought she might break his ribs, but instead a jolt of heat shot out from her own chest, sparking down her arms and into her hands.

She jerked away as though she had been electrocuted. She didn’t know what she expected, burns maybe, a wound, some sign of the current that had just exploded at every nerve ending. But she was uninjured, the skin of her arms intact.

From the sirens she could tell the ambulance was right beside her now. Several car doors slammed behind her, followed by loud footsteps.

Two people in navy blue uniforms set down a stretcher and equipment and knelt next to her. There was a C-collar and oxygen tanks, medical kits. It all fell to the ground around her.

The paramedic across from her pumped up and down into Peter’s chest, and the other jammed a needle into the crook of his arm.

There was a hand on Louise’s shoulder. “Let’s get you taken care of. They’ve got him now.”

Louise looked up to find a very tall firefighter in full gear above her. He was wrinkled around the eyes, gray at the temples. She gazed past him farther up the street. The entire road was lit up with flashing lights, blue-and-red pulses all wrong against the pale sky. She felt the strange desire to laugh. It was absurd. A few minutes ago, a blink of an eye ago, Peter was beside her in the car, on the way to the pool.

“Let’s get you checked out,” the firefighter repeated, his voice kind but firm, his hand tighter on her shoulder.

Louise let herself be pulled to her feet. But she couldn’t move away. If she left, they would stop. If she was still there, if they worked to save him, he wasn’t fully gone.

“Come on now.” The firefighter tried to steer her, but Louise continued to watch the paramedics.

“Switch,” the male paramedic said, and seamlessly, as though they had done it a thousand times, they switched roles.

“Rhythm check,” the female paramedic said as she took her place beside the monitor. They both checked the little screen.

Louise’s knees buckled, her legs no longer willing to hold her up. Without a word, the firefighter slipped his arms under her shoulders and half carried her toward another ambulance. Already the crowd was dissipating, bystanders back in their cars. No one wanted to be there for the end.

“Mike?” The female paramedic’s surprised voice lifted over the group of emergency workers, loud and clear.

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