Page 7 of The Moonlight Healers

“Why would you say that?” she asked. Her mom loved NYU, butLouisehad chosen to apply.Shehad chosen to enroll. And yet Peter was acting like she was some kind of puppet? “Of course it’s not for my mom.”

“She’ll be okay, Louise,” Peter said lightly. “She’s been okay now for a long time. You don’t have to base every decision off of what you think will make her happy.”

Louise’s stomach twisted. Peter knew, more than anyone, how that worry had shaped her life, how her mother’s unyielding sadness, her bouts of depression in the years after they moved from her family’s orchard to Richmond, had carved its way through her childhood like a river, creating vast gorges and valleys. Now he was acting as though she could simply pretend it never existed, as though that experience didn’t still live in every cell in her body.

“So be like you then? Tell everyone I’m taking a year off because I didn’t get into college? Still get celebrated with my parents buying me a car? It doesn’t work that way for me, Peter. No one pats me on the head for being a screwup—”

Louise stopped, immediately flooded with regret. “I didn’tmean that,” she said quickly, but Peter didn’t look at her, his jaw clenched.

Louise went on, rambling. “I think it’s great you’re going to take some time off. You get to travel. And go anywhere. And…and do anything.” She watched him anxiously, waiting for a sign he heard her.

“I’m not a screwup,” Peter said quietly.

And then in a flash of brightness, a screech of tires, the memory ended, replaced by another image: Peter, sprawled on the ground.

Every time she closed her eyes now, she saw him on the ground, broken and vacant, and then in the course of both milliseconds and an entire lifetime, alive, wide-eyed and awake and talking to the paramedics.

Her mother parked the car in front of their house, and for a few seconds neither spoke. She had been quiet since the hospital, tense in a way Louise didn’t understand, even as test after test came back normal, even after they spoke to Peter’s mom, Marion, and found out his tests were also normal, that they couldn’t find anything broken or damaged other than a handful of minor scrapes and bruises.

Louise looked back at Peter’s dark, white Cape Cod–style house across the street and touched her bruised shoulder.

“Let’s get you inside,” her mother said. “You must be starving. I can make you something if you’d like.”

“Mom,” Louise said, her voice cracking. She felt the words rise inside of her, the words she had wanted to scream all day, at everyone she saw in the hospital, at all the doctors and nurses who shook their heads and said they were both so lucky, to have survived, to come away without any real injuries. She had wanted to scream at Peter when she finally saw him, on her way out of the emergency room. He was being kept longer, for observation, and he had been asleep when her mother steered her into his room, and even then, Louise wanted to yell the words,wake Peter up and tell him what she knew beyond any doubt, what she saw on the street.

“Mom, Peter was dead,” Louise said.

There was a silence so deep that Louise wasn’t sure Bobbie had heard her.

“You just went through something very traumatic,” she finally said. “It’s normal to be…to be confused. You need to sleep. It will all feel better in the morning.”

With a wince, Louise unbuckled her seat belt and followed her mother up the brick walkway toward the house. “You’re not listening. He was dead. He went through the windshield and his neck was broken. I know it was. I saw it.”

Bobbie stopped and turned toward her. Even in the dark, Louise could make out the paleness of her skin, the way her hands trembled slightly.

“All that matters is he’s alive. You did CPR. You saved his life, and he’s going to be just fine.”

“I told you his neck was broken. It was bent. It was all wrong.”

Her mother shook her head, as though trying to force away the truth of Louise’s words. “You were in shock. Your eyes played tricks on you. You didn’t see what you thought you saw.”

Louise felt a surge of anger. “I wasn’t in shock. It was real. I saw him. He flew out the windshield, Mom. It wasn’t just his heart. It was…it was…everything. CPR shouldn’t have saved him.”

Her mother rubbed her face, smudging what was left of her makeup. She had turned forty earlier that year, and despite a few new wrinkles, was much younger than most of the parents of Louise’s classmates. “Louise, please, it’s late. And you’re exhausted. Maybe you hit your head harder than you remember. And you were…hallucinating, or things were jumbled, or you were dazed. Let’s just go inside.”

Bobbie strode quickly toward the house without looking back.

By the time Louise made it inside, her mother was already inthe kitchen, pulling bread from the pantry. She was usually too busy with evening showings or listing appointments to cook, and over the years she had perfected the art of a sandwich dinner. She called it her one true domestic skill.

“I’m not hungry,” Louise said from the doorway.

Her mother picked up a knife to cut the loaf of bread, but she froze, holding it in midair.

“Mom.”

She shook her head again. “Not yet,” she said, the words so slight Louise wasn’t sure if she meant to say them out loud.

She put the knife down, closed her eyes, and gripped the counter. The only sound in the house was the hum of the refrigerator and the distant night noises from the yard, chirps of cicadas and crickets, the occasional rumble of a car.

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