Page 33 of The Moonlight Healers

The boy was beyond saving. Helene had seen death enough to know what it looked like, the rattling sound lungs made as they gasped for air, the waxy sheen of skin. She thought of her father, how at the end there was so little left of him, to the point where he felt like a stranger, nothing like the man whose arms were so strong, who sang to her at bedtime and brought her home chocolate at the end of the day. She felt the tug in her chest to run. She couldn’t do what Cecelia had asked. She would fail again. But then the cadence of the waves filled her ears until it was all she heard, the crash of the water against the smooth stones, a sound she had known before she could even comprehend what it meant.

And suddenly she was six years old again, petulant in the kitchen as Agnes held out a tiny robin wrapped in a towel. Helene had found it on the street, lying listlessly near a shop window, and she had brought it home, breathless, so excited to give it to her mother to fix.

“We can help it,” Agnes had said gently, its red chest visible beneath the white fabric. “Just not the way you want.”

Helene’s shoulders shook as she looked down at the kitchenfloor. She hadn’t understood why her mother wouldn’t simply make the bird better, touch it and heal it and let it fly away.

“You’re old enough now.” Agnes had shifted the bird into the crook of her arm and took Helene’s hand. “It’s not just a scratch or broken wing. She’s very hurt, Helene. But you, you are special, my love, because you can make the pain go away, help her go peacefully.”

She guided Helene’s hand down to the bird, until her fingers brushed its delicate feathers. Helene had felt it then, little sparks in her fingertips, like touching candle wax. After a few seconds, the robin stopped its fruitless attempts to free itself from her grip. Its body softened, then went rigid.

“It may not seem like it now,” Agnes said. “But that was kindness. That was healing. It’s a tremendous blessing, to be able to help a creature die with dignity.”

Back on the beach, Helene tried to hold on to Agnes’s face, her voice, her composure. Without another thought she reached out her hands. The warmth spread through her before she even touched him, and she was overcome with an almost unbearable sense of relief, finally, as though after years of gray silence, her world had once again exploded with sound and color.

“Breathe,” she said kindly as she pressed into his bloodstained shirt, as the heat grew, until she could feel it leave her and pour into him. With a gasp, the boy’s body relaxed and his face went slack. He tilted his head up toward the sun that shone above them.

Helene kept her hands on the soldier’s stomach as his breathing slowed.

“I don’t want to die here.” His eyes were filled with understanding as the desperation drained out of him with the pain. “Will I go home? Will they send me back home?”

“Where is home?” she asked. The blaze in her hands intensified. She willed it to go deeper, to seek out every last devastated nerve cell, every shattered bone, the arteries and organs still atwar inside of him, to flood every part of him with peace. She tried to hold on to the image of the bird, the way her mother had stopped its suffering.

“Canada. Elora,” he said, his voice nearly lost in the noise around them. “Do you know it?”

Helene shook her head, trying to remember the English words. “I never leave France.”

He nodded slightly. “I had never left, before this.”

Helene pulled a piece of gauze from her medical kit and wiped his bloody lip. “You have family? Brothers, sisters?” she asked as she adjusted her hands back on the wound.

“Two sisters,” he said, the words now slurred. “My parents own a seafood restaurant. Right on the water.” He looked at her, but his eyes were becoming unfocused again, heavy. “It’s nice. You should come. After all of this.”

The blood flow from the wound beneath her hands slowed. “Tell me,” she said. “About home. Your papa. And mama.”

The force began to reverse, out of his body, into her hands. She knew what she was doing. She had seen her mother help people die, elderly men and women whose bodies clung to life even as they begged for it to be over. It was what Agnes had encouraged Helene to do with the little bird, not simply take away its pain, but help it to die because its death was inevitable.

Helene had always been terrified of this kind of healing, of what it must feel like to end a life. But as the warmth from his body flooded her own, as images of the boy’s life flashed across her mind, a mother’s face, a sister’s laugh as they played as children, she understood that it had nothing to do with her. She wasn’t taking his life from him. She was helping him find peace.

“I want you to think of them,” she said in French, fervent, the closest to a prayer she had spoken in years. “Your sisters. And parents. Think of them all, waiting for you together at the table, so happy to see you again. Because it’s over now. It’s all over. You can return to them.”

Her hands were cold as his chest stopped moving. She knelt there on the rocks, the bottom of her dress wet with sand and mud and blood, his vacant body beside her.

After seconds or minutes or maybe even hours, she felt a firm hand on her shoulder.

“There are more of them,” Cecelia said, the words a plea.

Cecelia took her place beside the soldier, her eyes closed and lips reciting as she made the sign of the cross on the boy’s forehead.

“You think that matters?” Helene asked, unable to stop herself. They were surrounded by countless dying men. If there was any proof God didn’t exist, they were living inside of it. “Here?”

Cecelia made another sign of the cross on the soldier’s forehead and gently shut his eyes. “I think it matters here more than anywhere,” she said.

Repeatedly that afternoon, as the sun crested above them, Helene followed the screams. She lost track of how many she tended, their faces indistinguishable, soldier after soldier, boy after boy. She was vaguely aware of the other sisters and nurses working near her, the living carried off on stretchers to medical tents, the walking wounded hustled up the beach at gunpoint.

With each soldier, she found it quicker, the source, the pulsing fatal wound. She worked without conscious thought, the heat palpable as it transferred from her skin to their cooling bodies, until the screams eased, and their bodies stopped trembling, until they were able to speak again, for a few moments, look up at the sky, feel the sun on their skin.

Eventually, Helene took a break. Beneath her dress her knees were raw from kneeling on the hard rocks. Her back ached and her head pounded from the sun. She hadn’t had any water or food in hours.

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