Page 3 of The Moonlight Healers

Louise stopped.

“Holding compressions,” Mike said.

Louise ignored the firefighter’s murmur of protest. She felt her legs steady beneath her as she pushed away from him and walked back toward the emergency workers. No one spoke. The only noise was the distant street traffic, the rustle of the tree branches along the road.

Louise brushed past police officers, her body propelled forward by that new urgency in their voices. She could feel the plea form inside of her. She would do anything to hear his voice again, give up every carefully plotted plan, trade New York and college and her perfect future for one continued second of his existence.

“Showing sinus rhythm,” the female paramedic said, her focus on the monitor. The male paramedic put his fingers on Peter’s neck.

Louise was right beside them now, Peter’s face barely visible over the oxygen mask. Her breath caught in her throat at the look in the male paramedic’s eyes as they found hers.

For a long second, the longest of her life, the entire world balanced between the two of them. The streets were empty. The cars and flashing lights gone. There was nothing but the words that would follow, that she heard before they even reached her, before they formed on his lips, finally, out loud, the most beautiful and impossible words she had ever known.

“He has a pulse.”

HONFLEUR, FRANCE

July 1942

2

HELENE

Helene woke before dawn as she always did, when the narrow old house was quiet and deep with sleep. She lay very still on her small wooden bed, and stared out the dormer window, trying to suppress the panic that gripped her.

Normally, she would rush out of bed the moment her eyes opened, dress in clothes that had been patched or hemmed a dozen times, and tiptoe down the long staircase from her room in the attic in the dark of the blackout curtains. It was the only useful thing she could do, trudge out to the bakery or butcher or market each morning before the long line had formed, and so she did it with total devotion, made it a ritual, even throughout the long cold winter days, with snow on the ground and a white sheen of frost coating the handful of fishing ships left in the harbor.

But today, she sat upright in bed and hugged her knees to her chest. She still couldn’t fathom that in only a few short hours, she would leave her home and family to train as a nurse at the Hôtel-Dieu, a Catholic convent and hospital in Rouen.

“You will be safer there,” Agnes had explained to her weeks ago. It was midmorning, and her mother had just returned from spending the night at a delivery on the outskirts of town. The baby arrived past midnight, but because of the curfew her mother had to wait until daylight to make the trek home. She was pale and red-eyed as she stood at the sink. “A cousin of mine is there. I haven’t seen her since we were little girls, the handful of times she visited from the south with her mother. But I wrote to her, told her of your work with me, that you would be a valuable nurse at the hospital. And she agreed.”

Helene’s shock almost immediately gave way to fear. She didn’t want to leave her mother, her grandfather, be cast out alone in a strange city in the midst of a war.

“No,” Helene had said, startling herself. She never said no to her mother. Everything wasYes, Maman. Each time she woke Helene up in the middle of the night because a woman was in labor or someone was in the last hours of life. Every time she asked Helene to miss school to gather wild weeds in the countryside that had been overlooked by the farmers but treasured by Agnes for their medicinal properties. Helene always followed her mother, even when the boys at school called Agnes a witch, even when she sometimes longed to be like one of the other girls in town, whose lives were light and easy and unburdened by the intimate knowledge of life and death.

“It’s not a question,” Agnes said.

Helene looked down at her hands, blistered from the previous day of helping clean their family seafood shop downstairs. Once full of the rough voices of fishermen and the briny smell of ocean, the store now stood empty, but cleaning it had become an important part of their day, a tiny act that felt like resistance.

Without a word Agnes reached over and placed her hand on top of Helene’s. Familiar warmth spread over her skin. She knew the sensation well, from her earliest memories, scraped kneesor burns from the stove, the way the pain receded the moment her mother touched her.

Agnes removed her hand, and the blister was gone. If Helene weren’t her mother’s daughter, if that same ability didn’t live in her own body, she might have marveled at it. An outsider would be sure it was an illusion. Or witchcraft.

But to Helene it was simply her mother’s very being, a magic that was ingrained in their blood, as real and dependable as the tides.

Agnes took a step back from the table. “You can be useful there,” she said. “They need nurses.”

“But I’m not a nurse, Maman.” Helene studied the spot where the blister had been. “And if they knew about this, what we can do, they would hate me for it.”

She heard the smallness in her voice, the little girl’s plea. She didn’t understand how her cousin could function in a place that would condemn her if they knew the truth of her abilities. The church had persecuted their ancestors for centuries, accusing them of witchcraft and demonism. It was the entire reason they now practiced their gift in secret.

“They will not know,” she said. “I couldn’t ask Cecelia in the letter. It’s not safe these days with the mail searched. But she must have found a way to work as a nurse and a healer. To hide what she needs to hide. It’s not so different from how I work here, Helene. Why I prefer to see patients at night, when the world is asleep.”

“But I can’t even…” Helene’s voice faltered. She felt the familiar shame, that what came so easily to her mother was still such a struggle for her.

“Maybe you’ll find it there, Helene,” Agnes said gently. “What you’ve been missing. Cecelia might be able to help you, more than I can.”

“You’re my mother,” Helene replied. “What could she teach me that you cannot?”

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