Page 75 of The Moonlight Healers

“You didn’t take care of me,” he said, and this time his voicewas soft. “But I saw you. I… I always planned to come back. My name is John. John Winston.”

His eyes were kind, and his tone was gentle, but she had known enough men like him, the ones who could take their humanity off like a winter coat, slip in and out of it whenever it suited.

“I’m sorry. I’m scaring you, aren’t I?” He moved back toward the door. “I can leave. I shouldn’t have come.”

Some of the fear inside of Helene released at his acknowledgment. It was unusual for a man to be willing to make himself small, to take up less space so that she could have more of it. “No, it’s okay,” she said. She kept her tone professional. If he needed her help, it was her duty to provide it. “Please, what do you need?”

He let one hand rest on the doorknob, and he glanced back toward the parking lot, as though he were imagining a future where he simply left, where the possibility of what could be died on the vine. Helene saw it too, for an instant, a window closing. She had accepted, years earlier, that her life would be quiet, full of purpose. She didn’t deserve joy, or love, or beauty. She had survived. Her family had not. Neither had Thomas nor so many boys like him. Or Irene’s mother, who had been murdered in the same camp as her father, along with millions of Jewish people. It didn’t matter that Irene had forgiven her failure, that they’d found a way to build a new friendship in the last dark, catastrophic months of occupation, when countless bombs fell on Rouen and set the world on fire, the hospital now filled with injured civilians.

It felt selfish to want more than to merely live. But in that moment, as this man looked at her, Helene remembered what it felt like to believe in more. “Can I help you?” she asked again.

She stood and smoothed her gray, starched uniform, tucked a piece of brown hair behind her ear. She was aware of how plain she must look. She followed the sisters’ leads, never botheredwith makeup or the little jewelry of her mother’s she had taken from home. In the two years she had been in Virginia, she hadn’t felt the need to try to make herself pretty. Everything here was so rough, so hard, and it was a relief, to be somewhere there was no sea, no soaring cathedrals, only fading mountains and squat houses and red clay earth. She could be how she felt here.

He removed his hat, and when he looked at her, his eyes were filled with hope, hope that was scarred and weathered, blunted by war, but persistent.

“It’s taken me a while, miss. But when I saw you, I knew I’d like to come back here and ask you this. But I… My family has an orchard near here. It’s beautiful this time of year when the peach blossoms are just starting to bloom.” When he smiled, he appeared ten years younger. “The whole horizon is pink.”

He took a step toward the desk. She felt a sun slowly rising in her body, a gentle thaw of what she’d assumed would always be frozen.

“Would you like to take a walk with me?”

Helene felt the corners of her mouth twitch, the muscles out of practice. She knew what her mother would say if she were there, that even in a life of duty there was space for love, or her father, who’d prized books and music and found beauty everywhere, her grandfather who’d been a romantic at heart, or Thomas especially, who believed so much in the future. She knew they would tell her to say yes, to run recklessly toward a life of joy and love, to give everything she had for even one minute of hope in a world where it was never a sure thing. She felt a small stirring inside of her, like a tulip fighting its way out of the earth, drawn toward the promise of spring.

“I’d like that,” she told him. “I’d like that very much.”

CROZET, VIRGINIA

2019

21

LOUISE

Louise would always remember the sky on her grandmother’s last day, pale blue and strewed with clouds and a gentle sun. She would remember Jim’s face, etched with grief, when he brought her grandmother back to the house. They had met at dawn, and Louise knew that her grandmother had used a few of her last, precious hours to say goodbye.

She would remember the smell of coffee in the kitchen, her grandmother’s slippers shuffling on the floor as she made them eggs and toast, the sunlight as it gleamed through the window above the sink.

When Bobbie sat down at the breakfast table, she looked up at Louise with panic in her eyes. “You’re leaving tomorrow,” she said. She was pale and her eyes were bloodshot. Louise wondered if she had slept at all. “We’re supposed to catch a train to New York at seven in the morning.” She reached for her phone. “I’m going to have to reschedule, something next week maybe. And email the program director.”

Louise reached across the table and placed her hand on top ofher mother’s. She felt oddly at peace, relieved that for the first time in her life she had made a decision completely for herself. “I’m not going to New York, Mom.”

Bobbie was momentarily taken aback, but then she nodded. “Of course, there’s so much going on right now. And your grandmother… Of course you don’t want to leave home right now… I’m sure they’ll understand. I’ll call them, and then you can have the summer to get ready.”

Louise took a deep breath. She heard Peter’s voice in her ear.Tell her.

“I’m not going to NYU in the fall either.”

At that, Bobbie fell silent. Louise could hear Camille’s footsteps come to a stop behind them.

Louise felt a small trace of the old fear: that the world might stop entirely if she didn’t do everything possible to make her mom happy. But she wasn’t a little girl. And she couldn’t waste another day of her one brief, fragile life. She thought she could be safe, smart enough to never experience pain, but all she had really done was hide from life, too afraid of the hurt to open herself up to joy.

“I’m so sorry, Mom. I know how much you wanted this for me. But it’s not what I want.”

Bobbie gripped Louise’s hand. “You were going to go to NYU for me, because I wanted it?”

“I thought I wanted it too.”

Guilt washed over Bobbie’s features. “I’m so sorry, for making you feel that way, Louise.”

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