Page 21 of The Moonlight Healers

“Okay.”

* * *

After her mother left, Louise found her grandmother in the kitchen. She sat with a crossword at the kitchen table, her forearms already stained with paint, a pair of red-rimmed reading glasses balanced on her nose.

“Mom’s really busy,” Louise said, hovering near the table. “With work. I’m sure she would have liked to stay.”

Before Louise could come up with more lies to explain Bobbie’s absence, she noticed the smell of something burnt and slightly sweet. “What is—” There was a small plume of smoke rising from the range against the wall.

“Oh, damn it,” Camille said loudly as she got up to grab a towel and moved an old cast iron frying pan off the heat. She sighed as she waved away the smoke. “I wanted to make you French toast. Like I used to. Our little tradition.”

Whenever her mother worked a night shift at the hospital, Louise would stay up in the big house with Camille and her great-grandmother, Helene, and in the morning, her grandmother always made French toast, slathered in butter and oozing with syrup. “It’s no big deal,” Louise told her now. “I don’t even usually have time for breakfast before school.”

“You should always eat breakfast. Especially when you’re away this summer on your own. If that’s still the plan?” Camille turned from the stove. “I didn’t know, with the accident, with what happened…” Her eyes searched Louise.

“Of course it’s still the plan,” Louise said.

Camille waved away a wisp of smoke above her. “I’ve been meaning to ask you though, how is your friend?”

Louise pulled out a kitchen chair and sat down. Peter had called her several times the previous evening. Every time she answered, he asked her to go over the accident again, explain it in more detail. With each telling, she felt herself spinning morelies, glossing over a new detail, minimizing things to make it more logical for him.

“He’s fine,” Louise said. “Completely fine. That’s why I’m here, isn’t it? Because he’s alive. Because I brought him back.”

“Of course,” Camille said. She walked to the table and patted her arm. “I promised I’d explain it. Would you still like me to show you?”

A trickle of anticipation ran down Louise’s spine. She had been so caught up in the fear of all that she had almost lost, that she hadn’t let herself think much of what she hadgained. But at her grandmother’s words, she could feel an unspoken world blooming before her. All she had to do was enter it.

Camille went to the small bookshelf near the door to the back porch. The top was scattered with papers and sunglasses and cans of bug spray, and the shelves were full of books, mostly paperbacks.

Camille squatted and removed a thin leather journal from the bottom shelf. “I wanted to show you this first.” She carried it across the kitchen and sat down.

Louise examined the red leather cover. There was no inscription, but it looked decades old.

“This was my mother’s. Her mother, my grandmother, Agnes, started it in France. About halfway through, my mother added to it when she was working in Virginia as a home hospice nurse. And then I even have a few pages at the end, although nothing I wrote in here is as useful as what they wrote.” Camille’s expression softened. “I should keep it in a safe, or under glass. To protect it. But I also like it to be nearby.”

“What is it?” Louise asked, mesmerized by the tender way her grandmother traced the cover with her finger.

Carefully, Camille opened it. The yellowed paper inside held drawings mixed with words and phrases that appeared to be in French. She thumbed through a few pages, revealing additional illustrations, flowers and herbs and trees. There were even a fewdried flowers pressed between the pages, so fragile they would blow away in the wind.

“A guide, of sorts. My grandmother and mother wrote about herbal remedies and plant medicine, a heritage that was passed down in writing and word of mouth from generations before them.”

She touched the faded ink on the page with her fingers.

“But they also wrote about the magic in our blood, what you just experienced with your friend, the gift of our touch. Healing.”

“What does that mean exactly?” Louise asked as she craned to get a better view of the journal. She recalled the power she had felt when she brought Peter back, the raw intensity of it.

Camille was thoughtful for a moment. “What my mother always taught me is that the foundation of our healing, the very essence of it, is taking away someone’s pain.” She looked at Louise intently. “You can do that, my dear. Put your hands on someone who is suffering. And make it go away. It’s a tremendous gift.”

“But what about the rest of it?” Louise asked, thinking of the way her mother had erased the bruise from her seat belt. Her mother hadn’t only healed the pain, but the injury itself. “What else can we do?”

“There are limitations to our touch, Louise. It’s not a magic wand. There are little things we can ‘cure’ or ‘fix,’ yes, small cuts or scrapes or burns. But cancer, heart disease, diabetes, strokes, those are beyond our abilities.” She paused. “I didn’t really understand this myself, when I was your age, but healing and fixing are not necessarily the same thing, not always. And much of what we do, our touch, has nothing to do with curing.”

She looked down at the journal, then up at Louise, her eyes full of both grief and pride. “I’m a hospice nurse. I’ve spent my career caring for people who are dying, and there are times medicine isn’t enough. When no amount of opiates will grant someone peace. And I’ve been able to help people who are suffering, give them some small respite from the pain, some dignity in their final days. I know to you it could seem like it’s not enough. But…to them, it’s everything.”

Camille closed the journal. “Here I said I would show you, and all I’m doing is blathering on. Come with me out to the garden. That’s where we begin.”

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