Page 56 of The Moonlight Healers

Helene knew if she didn’t finish, if she didn’t tell her mothereverything now, she never would. She would lose the courage. “He died. For no reason at all. And I couldn’t… I couldn’t do nothing. I couldn’t survive doing nothing.”

Agnes closed her eyes.

“I saved his life. I brought him back. I know you always said I shouldn’t, that it was wrong. And I couldn’t with Papa. But I had to try. And it was different this time. I healed him.”

“You didn’t heal him, Helene.” Agnes sighed.

“I did. You weren’t there. You didn’t see it. But I did.” Helene heard the note of impatience in her tone, but she couldn’t help it. She couldn’t stand the way her mother was looking at her. It was the same way Cecelia had looked at her, as if she had made some awful mistake when all she had done was save a life.

“No,” Agnes said. “You kept him here. For a little while. But, Helene.” She seemed to steel herself. “It won’t endure. He won’t live, not for more than a few days, maybe weeks.”

Helene was stunned into silence. It couldn’t be true.

“I told you. Time and again. We can’t stop death,” she said softly. “And we shouldn’t. The greatest healing we are capable of is in death, to let a person die with peace, with dignity.”

Helene blinked back tears and tried to compose herself. “So, Thomas will…”

Agnes’s eyes were full of compassion. “You gave him a little time. A few days, or maybe even weeks. It varies, but my mother always told me that it would endure for at least the length of a single moon phase, but never longer than a full lunar cycle. Any time you gave him is borrowed.”

Helene’s shoulders shook. A distant part of her admitted she barely knew Thomas, that even if he lived, she would probably never see him again. It shouldn’t hurt so deeply. But Thomas’s life, his continued existence, felt like the one bright point in a world that had been collapsing into darkness. It felt like her own future was woven into his, that his belief was enough to expand her own life.

“Isn’t there any way?” Helene asked when she found her voice again. “For him to stay.”

Agnes looked at Helene with a mixture of grief and apprehension. She reached out and rested her hand on her cheek. “We are speaking as adults now?”

Helene nodded, her heart racing at the change in her mother’s tone.

“My mother explained it to me this way. That there has to be balance. It’s why it won’t endure, why it can’t hold.” Agnes seemed to brace herself. “Unless we restore it.”

Helene searched her mother’s face. “Restore what?”

“L’équilibre.The only way to give your friend more time would be to take it from someone else.”

Helene searched her mother’s face. For a moment, she forgot about Thomas. All she could think of was her father, the emptiness of the house without him, the missing place in her life for all those years.

“But Papa…” she asked, terrified to even give the question a voice.

Agnes shook her head. “He was too sick, Helene. This boy you mentioned, he died suddenly. But your father.” She swallowed. “Your father’s life eroded over time. There wasn’t enough of him left. And even if I could have… I wouldn’t. Not this way.”

Helene wiped away her tears. “But there is a way then. If I can trade his life for someone else’s.” Her mind raced, a tiny spark of hope lighting its way through the darkness. She stood and started pacing. “One of your patients. Or…or at the hospital. There are wards full of people already half-dead. Sick and in pain.”

“That won’t work.” Agnes sighed. “A life in full bloom can’t be replaced by one that is already withered. That’s not balance. It would have to be someone with time, someone still whole. That’s why it can’t happen, Helene, why it doesn’t even matter. They would resist you. A life such as this cannot be so easily taken. It is entirely different from helping someone die who is already at the end of their life, someone who is suffering.”

But Helene’s mind was moving again, settling on the carnage in Dieppe, on Vogel’s cruel, ratlike face.

“I know where your thoughts are,” Agnes said. “The German soldiers at your hospital. The people who arrested your grandfather. Who imprisoned your uncles.”

Helene stood at the window overlooking the dark alley. She couldn’t face her mother, couldn’t bear the judgment in her eyes.

“There’s something I’ve never told you,” her mother said slowly. “Something you need to know. Your uncle Matthieu, my youngest brother, died of a fever, when he was little.”

Helene turned, confused. “Matthieu is alive, Maman. He’s in a prison in Germany.”

Agnes raised her hand. “I was ten. And he was three, with the most beautiful smile, and he loved animals, followed my father around for hours in the mud just so he could say hello to the goats and pigs.” Her eyes glistened. “He got sick and his heart stopped while he was in my mother’s arms. I was right there beside her. But she couldn’t let him go. How could she? So she brought him back. And because it was a sudden, quick death she was able to do so. There was enough of him still there.”

Helene sat back down at the table. She had never seen her mother so emotional. She was always the solid one, the rock of their family and town. Helene sometimes thought her mother didn’t experience emotions the same way as the rest of the world. Only now, she understood she had simply learned how to tuck it all away.

“There was a man, in our village, who lived alone, and was unkind to people. And he…he died, mysteriously, in his sleep, only a few days after my mother brought Matthieu back.”

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