Page 4 of The Moonlight Healers

Agnes smiled sadly. “Sometimes, I fear I make it all worse for you. Maybe being away from here, away from all these memories—” She glanced toward the parlor, and Helene knew immediately what she saw there. It was what Helene saw every time she was in that room, the bed her uncles had set up for her father in his last weeks, the curtains drawn, the air heavy with a sweet, sickly smell she could still conjure even four years later. “Maybe you just need a fresh start.”

There was a sorrow in Agnes’s pale green eyes Helene had never seen, but her mouth was set, her jawline firm. There would be no more argument.

And so, two weeks later in her attic bedroom, the rain now pounding the eaves above her, Helene had no choice but to wait for dawn.

When the edges of the blackout shade were framed in light, Helene got out of bed and put on the dress her mother had brought to her room the night before. It was a simple cotton, its blue color slightly faded, with one mismatched button on the back to replace a lost one. But the dress had been new once, a gift presented in tissue paper. Helene remembered her mother in it, leaving for the train station with her father, off to meet vendors in Paris for their family seafood company, her father skinny as he always was in her memory, but handsome in a suit and tie.

The dress was slightly short on Helene, who had several inches on her mother, but otherwise it fit, and as she tied it at the waist, she inhaled the fabric’s smell—cedar, mostly, from storage—but also the faintest, lingering notes of her mother’s old perfume.

Helene brushed her hair, clipped it back, and splashed cold water on her face from the washbasin. Then she opened the blackout shade and carefully made her bed as she did every morning, tucking the sheets into tidy, sharp corners.

When she finished, she let her fingers run along the blanket, frayed in places but warm enough on cold nights, then her lategrandmother’s quilt folded at the end of the bed, and when she couldn’t bear it anymore, she left the room.

One floor below, Helene stopped on the landing outside her grandfather’s bedroom and stared at his closed door. Today, for the first time since the rationing started, he would take her place in line instead.I’ll see him again soon, she told herself as she continued down the back stairs.

When she entered the kitchen, she found it was already bright, the shades lifted to allow the sun rising behind their house to fill the space with light. Her mother stood at the stove, boiling a pot of water, and at the table, to Helene’s surprise, sat her grandfather, already fully dressed in a gray wool suit, the day’s paper open in front of him.

“Ah, there she is. My little duck. Up so late this morning.” He took a sip from his mug and grimaced only a tiny bit at the bitter chicory mixture. Then he motioned to the chair beside him. “Sit, sit. Your mother is making us breakfast.”

Helene took a seat across from him at the table. “You’re up early, Grandpapa.”

He folded his newspaper. “I have been given my instructions, haven’t I? March to the store at sunrise. Any later and there will be only—” he smoothed his scruffy white beard “—I believe the phrase was ‘mealworms and moldy bread.’”

Helene knew what it cost him, to perform this role, wake up early and dress to stand in line for scraps. He was no stranger to the early-dawn hours. For nearly all of Helene’s life, except on Sundays, her grandfather left the house before anyone else was awake, off to the little boat docked in the harbor, where he would spend the morning dredging for scallops or oysters. Before the war he fished with his surviving sons, Helene’s two uncles, Marc and Jean Luc, who were now prisoners of war in Germany, captured during the brief, failed Battle of France. In Helene’s older memories, before he got sick, her father was there too, off at dawn, back for the midday meal, all of them crowdedaround the table in their work clothes that smelled of the ocean, briny and fishy and wonderful.

The Germans had taken her grandfather’s boat almost immediately after the occupation, “repurposed” it, they had told him. But even if they hadn’t, it would have been far too dangerous to continue. There were already stories of fishing boats from towns nearby that had run into underwater mines or submarine attacks in the channel.

“Grandpapa, I’m sorry.” Helene couldn’t look at her grandfather. “You shouldn’t have to…”

“Little duck,” he said gently.

Reluctantly, Helene met her grandfather’s eyes. Away from his boat, his rough, freckled skin was softer, the bright redness of his nose and forehead fading with each passing week. Every day there was less of the sea in his appearance, less of him entirely, his wide, round stomach dwindling, his once-full cheeks sunken beneath his beard.

“No apologies. We will get on,” he said as he laid his palm on hers. The skin was comfortingly the same as it always was, callused by decades of ropes and the work of hauling heavy pots of pink clams and gray oysters.

She nodded, even though there was so much she needed to hear him say. She needed to know he would stand in line every day, even in winter when the edges of the harbor froze and there was snow on the ground. She wanted him to promise that he would be deferential to the soldiers, answer their questions but avoid their eyes.

But mostly, she needed him to promise her there would be something left of him when she returned, that he wouldn’t fade away completely.

“Breakfast,” Agnes said as she set a plate down in front of Helene.

Helene swallowed, her mouth dry and her appetite gone. Her mother had spread a precious bit of butter on a small rectangle ofdense, stale bread, as well as all that remained of the apple preserves stored in the basement from last autumn. She also placed a boiled egg on the plate, along with tinned herring.

“Maman, this is too much.”

“You will eat your breakfast, Helene,” Agnes said, her back already turned.

“Be a good girl,” Helene’s grandfather said as he winced through another sip of chicory. “And do as your mother says.”

Agnes returned to the table with her own smaller plate and the three of them ate in silence. Every so often Helene stole a glance at her mother, who absently thumbed the pages of her journal, a now-worn book started by Helene’s grandmother, filled with remedies and notes from her work as a healer in Cordon, the mountain town where Agnes grew up. Helene’s grandmother died before she was born, but Helene sometimes felt like she knew her through the journal, by the small flourishes of her handwriting, the delicate drawings of native plants and wildflowers from her home in the Alps.

Agnes looked up from the journal. She hadn’t worked the night before, a brief respite from the births and illnesses that constantly demanded her presence, but she still appeared as though she hadn’t slept, the blue shadows under her eyes as deep as bruises. Agnes too was less substantial lately, her muscles carved away by the effects of rationing, her once-indomitable strength from growing up in the mountains receding little by little like the tide.

“If we wait any longer, we will miss your train,” she said, her voice light, as though she was simply hurrying Helene off to school. She addressed her father-in-law. “And for you, the lines will be down the block already.”

Her grandfather cleared his throat. “Of course,” he said. He patted Helene’s arm, and rose to his feet. “I must be off.” He tapped his coat pocket. “Just need…”

Helene got up and walked to the small chest by the door.From the top drawer she pulled out a blue piece of paper with the wordViandeprinted on top, half of its small squares for the month already stamped. “The butcher today,” she said as she handed it to her grandfather. “Ask for the ham hock. No one ever wants it, but there’s enough meat on it for a stock.”

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