Page 8 of The Moonlight Healers

“You’re right,” she said at last. She opened her eyes, which shone under the kitchen lights. “It was real. And I believe you.”

Louise let her mother guide her to a seat at the kitchen table. Her anger was gone, and her entire body felt hollow, exhausted in a way she had never experienced.

“I think I brought him back. He was gone and I brought him back.”

“I know,” Bobbie said. “I know you did.”

Louise’s confusion deepened at her reaction. There was no shock, no surprise, only a sorrowful kind of understanding.

“I should have told you. Years ago.” Bobbie clasped her hands together on the table. “I didn’t know if you’d be like me, or her,” she said. “I tried to believe you wouldn’t be.”

“Bewhat?”

Bobbie took a deep breath, as though willing herself to say the words. “A healer.”

Before Louise could respond, she reached out and set a hand on Louise’s sore shoulder. At first it was just a small, hesitant gesture, uncertain. But then she increased the pressure, and warmthbegan to spread under Louise’s skin, a trickle, and then a wave, until the pain was gone.

She gazed up at her mother, her mind shifting and rearranging a hundred memories from when they’d lived in Crozet, the sting of scraped knees and burns that lost their edge with a kiss from her grandmother, sore throats and stomach aches and growing pains that receded like a tide when her great-grandmother held her.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“I know,” her mom said sadly, withdrawing her hand. “I don’t even really understand it myself, honey. I don’t know if I can explain it to you.” She steeled herself. “But I know who can.”

* * *

Louise woke to the sound of tapping on her bedroom window. For one blissful moment, she rolled over, relieved. It had all been a horrible dream, the accident, the hospital, her conversation with her mother. But as she sat up, she felt the sting in her eyes from where she hit the airbag.

The tapping grew louder and more insistent. Louise pulled herself to her feet and crossed the room, glancing at her phone. It was nearly four in the morning, and only one person could be here at that hour.

When she opened the window, her eyes went immediately to the hospital band around Peter’s wrist. She didn’t want to see his face, picture him the way he had been on the ground.

“Are you okay?” he asked her.

She tried to nod but she couldn’t look away from the band.

“Louise.”

There was a rawness in his voice, and finally she made herself look up. She didn’t know what she expected, but there was nothing out of the ordinary, no sign that they hadn’t just spent the afternoon at the pool as planned.

“Are you okay?” he repeated.

She leaned against the window frame. “I’m okay.”

A garbage truck rumbled by in the dark street behind them.

“You don’t look okay.”

Louise didn’t know what she could possibly say to him. It felt absurd to talk, to pretend she hadn’t felt the absence of his heartbeat only hours earlier, and the explosion of electricity as she pumped her hands into his chest.

“I’m tired—that’s all.” She stalled, feeling the weight of the next question. “I’m the one that should be asking howyouare.”

Outside the window, Peter slumped against the opposite side of the frame as her. “I’m fine. I don’t know how. No one does. The doctors were so insistent on finding something wrong with me I’m pretty sure I got every test there.” His eyes darted toward Louise. “They said it’s because of you. That you did CPR. That you saved my life.”

Louise pressed her forehead to the cool window frame. “I don’t know.”

“I’m here, aren’t I?”

For the first time since she came home, Louise felt an order to her thoughts, a sense that the world could right itself. He was there. He was alive, standing at her window, and they were acting the way they did as kids in the summer, sneaking out to play in his tree house with flashlights and scare each other with ghost stories. Did it really matter how he was alive? Or was it enough that he simply was?

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