Page 22 of The Moonlight Healers

The ground was warm as Louise stepped out from the screen porch. She was barefoot, the way she’d always been as a child here, when the land and the mountains and orchard had been Louise’s home.

She followed her grandmother out into the wide, sprawling garden behind the house. At one point, the area had been nothing more than a blank slate, mostly grass, home to the chickens they used to keep. But Helene had started a garden in one corner and Camille eventually took over. Between the two women, nearly every inch of soil had been cultivated, with a small, winding walking path that ran through all the color and greenery. Each pocket of the garden was full to the point of bursting, with containers and raised beds exploding in color, a high wire fence tangled with vines and weeds.

“What are all these?” Louise asked as she approached the bed where Camille had stopped.

“Lavender, bergamot, pokeweed, peppermint.” Camille leaned in toward a large, sprawling plant that was nearly her height, with huge heart-shaped green leaves and prickly pink flowers the size of grapes. She plucked off one of the flowers, and turned it in a slow circle.

Louise tried to focus on her grandmother’s words and the flowers in front of her, but she didn’t want to talk about plants. She wanted to know about healing. She wanted to know everything.

“Are there still other people like us?” she asked as Camillestraightened up beside her on the garden path. “Have you ever met other healers?”

Camille nodded. “Yes, there are. And yes, I have. But there are fewer and fewer with every generation.”

“Why?”

Camille let the pink flower drop to the ground. “Smaller families. Not as many daughters to pass the genes on.”

Louise shivered. It was strange to hear something that seemed like a fantasy described in such practical terms, as though her grandmother was talking about eye color or any other hereditary trait.

“And some choose not to practice it,” Camille continued. “Pass it on. There’s less of a need for it now, of course. Communities have doctors and hospitals. It’s not like it used to be, when it was all midwives and healers, when these women were all that people had from birth to death.”

“But you chose to practice it?” Louise asked, turning to observe her grandmother.

“It never really felt like a choice for me. It was always who I was.” Her eyes were distant as she spoke, as though lost in the remembering.

Louise tried to make sense of it all, rearrange the parts of her past, all the way back to her earliest memories with her great-grandmother, Helene, who had been revered in Crozet. People would talk about her like she was a saint, the French nurse who used to run the old Winston orchard and spent her career seeing patients deep in the mountains and valley. She hadn’t simply been a nurse. She was also a healer.

Camille motioned for Louise to follow her toward the edge of the garden, where the land began to slope down to a creek at the base of the mountain.

“I haven’t gotten around to cleaning up over here yet,” Camille said as she took in the gray-and-brown plants that peeked out from the soil. She squatted and pointed to a shriveled, nearlyblack collection of stems. “This is a daylily. Has no medicinal use. I just think it’s pretty. It looks like this because of rust, a kind of fungus.”

Louise didn’t know why they were talking about plants again, but it did seem messier here than she remembered.

Camille’s eyes were intent. “I want you to try to heal this.”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“You heard me.” She gestured toward the garden bed. “Revive it. You asked me how it works. This is how you practice. It doesn’t work quite the same with a flower as a person. But it’s a good place to start. They’re living things too after all.”

Louise fought the instinct to argue that it was ridiculous. A small, stubborn part of her was still unwilling to submit to the new reality right in front of her. However, at her grandmother’s encouragement, she crouched beside her and reached out toward the daylily, let her hand brush its soft petals as a little bumblebee zoomed up from the ground.

Around them, the sounds of birds and insects deepened.

“I don’t feel anything,” she said.

“Close your eyes,” Camille requested, just as Louise started to draw her hand away. “Do it with intention. Picture it in your mind, not as it is now, but how it was, green and upright, the petals bright yellow.”

Louise did as her grandmother suggested. She knew, on a logical level, the ability was inside of her. She could still feel echoes of the electricity that surged through her body when she’d saved Peter’s life. She remembered how she had willed his heart to beat, begged him to come back to her.

A warm breeze tickled the back of her neck, and the noises of the garden came into focus again, the low vibration of hummingbirds at their feeders, the rustle of leaves as blue skink lizards darted out from rocks, the cries of birds as they swooped in and out of the rows of peach trees.

And then Louise felt it, a little heat inside of her skin, pulling her toward the lily as though a tide toward the moon. She opened her eyes as it spread into her hand and flowed into the plant, all the places inside of it that weren’t dead, but simply silent.

The lily curled further toward the ground, as though stooped by a heavy rain, and then in one swift motion righted itself, stretching toward the sun as its leaves turned green, as the flower fell to the earth, replaced instantly by a delicate, new yellow bud as soft as a marshmallow. Faint lines of red spread along the edges of the bud.

Louise let go of the flower and lowered herself the rest of the way to the ground. Even after what had happened with Peter, even after everything her grandmother had explained to her, a part of her had still not been able to truly believe it, to accept this new, wilder world.

“That’s healing?” she asked, overwhelmed.

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