Page 74 of The Moonlight Healers

“Follow me.”

She led him toward one of the magnolia tree’s lowest branches, a long, knotted limb that ran parallel to the ground. It was massive, sturdy enough to hold both their weight. As a little girl she used to balance on it, pretend she was a gymnast while her grandmother and great-grandmother played the part of judges from their lawn chairs.

The flowers spread among the huge, glossy green leaves were faded at that part of the tree, their white petals wrinkled and drooping toward the ground.

Louise traced the tree limb, her fingers shaking as she reached the first flower.

She rested her palm on a delicate blossom, inhaled the scent, notes of lemon and vanilla and earth. The warmth in her skin surged as the petals curled up, forming a perfect ivory saucer that stood out against the verdant leaves.

Cautiously, she raised her gaze to Peter’s face, but his eyes showed only trust, belief in what he was seeing.

“Wow,” he said softly.

Louise felt her cheeks relax into a small smile. The pit inside of her stomach, the dread of the next few days, loosened ever so slightly.

With Peter watching on, she moved on to the branches that surrounded them, until all around their heads, the sky was full of bright, white blooms.

CROZET, VIRGINIA

1950

20

HELENE

Helene didn’t bother to look up from her desk as the door flew open, carrying with it a gust of warm spring air, even as all around the Virginia mountains remained in their brown winter dormancy.

“We’re closed,” she said in her halting English, not waiting to see who was at the door. The women’s center in downtown Crozet was a tiny building, with only two rooms and a rudimentary kitchen. But it worked well enough as a clinic for the Augustinian sisters when they trekked over from their convent in the valley. “Hours are nine to two.”

Helene felt a flicker of annoyance at the interruption, especially when the hours were clearly posted on the door. The sisters had already left for home, waving goodbye as they walked out in their white habits to their van. Helene would take the truck back over the mountain when she was finished. But first, she had to finish the paperwork, carefully fill out and file each patient chart.

Since she was the sole lay member of the convent, she felt asense of obligation to help with the more menial tasks, though she was by far the most skilled and experienced nurse there, particularly since she was able to supplement her scientific knowledge with her inherited abilities. Cecelia had given Helene her reluctant blessing, shortly after their trip to the cave, to use her gift as long as she didn’t try to halt the natural progression of life or death.

“I think God has greater battles right now,” she told Helene, as she explained her change of heart. “I had forgotten what healing could look like, the beauty of it. I think we all have to adapt, do what we can to take care of each other.”

And so Helene had spent the last years of the war learning how to be both a nurse and a healer at the same time, finding little moments of mercy and grace even as the world around her rocked and shattered.

When the order sent a mission to Virginia a few years later, Helene begged Cecelia to go. There was nothing left for her in Honfleur, only her uncles, who were so lost and adrift in their own pain that they could scarcely take on the burden of Helene’s. Irene had moved to Canada, to live with her mother’s cousin. And so, Helene had jumped on the opportunity to leave Europe, to put an ocean between her and the ruin of her home.

In Virginia, Helene found satisfaction in the minutiae. It was a distraction, a way to keep her mind busy, to avoid thinking of her family or Thomas, everything she had seen over the past decade.

“I apologize, ma’am,” came a soft, lilting voice from the door. Helene recognized the accent. All the people in the mountains spoke like him, halting and quiet, barely moving their lips. Helene had been in Virginia for nearly two years, and she was only now starting to fully understand their dialect.

The man was younger than she expected. She was twenty-five and he couldn’t have been much older, thirty at most. He was clean-shaven, which was unusual for these parts, with neatlytrimmed hair and pressed clothes, as though he had dressed for church instead of a trip to the clinic. She hadn’t seen him here before. He wasn’t one of their regulars, most of whom were either elderly people with heart and lung problems, or GIs with chronic injuries.

He was tall, and broad shouldered, and his cheeks weren’t ruddy from alcohol like those of so many of the young men back from the war. But he leaned on a cane for support.

“Did you need to be seen for something?” she asked him.

He hovered in the doorway, half inside and half outside. “I…” He took a step and the door closed behind him, shutting out the breeze. “I actually came here to see you.”

Helene tensed. When men learned she wasn’t a nun, they either pursued her relentlessly, inappropriate and flirtatious, or worse, they grew angry when they discovered she was French, muttered about collaboration. She never bothered to defend herself, explain to them that she’d spent the last years of the war risking her life aiding the resistance in whatever small ways she could, delivering medical supplies to underground hospitals, helping wounded soldiers trapped behind enemy lines. She didn’t tell them that her mother and grandfather had sacrificed their lives to share the fight against evil, that her uncles came home broken men from their time as prisoners in German camps.

She didn’t owe them an explanation for who they thought she was.

“I was here,” the man continued, “a while back. For bronchitis.”

Helene watched him closely, her body alert, every nerve ending awake. Years could go by, years of peace, years of not living as a captive in her own home, of waiting every day for them to find her out, line her up in the courtyard and execute her like all the rest, and yet the fear remained as a muscle memory, embedded in every fiber of her being.

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