Page 80 of The Moonlight Healers

2019

25

LOUISE

After hours of talking and walking and crying together, Louise sat with her mother and grandmother on the front porch, the sky fiery shades of red and orange. They sat in silence, Louise in the middle, until the moon rose over the mountains.

Louise couldn’t speak. It didn’t matter how many times her grandmother assured her that it was her decision, that she wanted to die on her own terms; losing her was shattering. And it was made all the more painful because Louise would have to be the one to end her life if they wanted to save Peter’s.

As if reading her mind, Camille looked over. “You don’t get to torment yourself over this. That is my one request. And if you do, I will come back to haunt you.”

Louise tried to smile but couldn’t.

“I mean it, kid,” Camille said, her expression now solemn. “I would have made this choice, with or without you. And soon. But doing it this way, doing it now, means I get to save his life. I told you before. I don’t want time. It doesn’t mean anything to me unless I’m still fully myself.”

Louise leaned back on the porch swing and for a while they were quiet again. She was wracked with grief, but she also knew that as a hospice nurse, her grandmother had likely formed her beliefs about the way she wanted to die a long time ago.

“One thing I forgot to ask,” Camille said finally. “I was going to put it up for sale, you know? The orchard.”

Louise wasn’t surprised Jim had known before she and her mother did. He was Camille’s best friend.

“We don’t need to pretend there’s another way. My brother certainly doesn’t want it. Even Jim, because of course I asked. But he’s too old to take on something like this himself. And that’s fine. I’m at peace with it. But will you make sure whoever buys it promises to keep it as an orchard? I can’t bear the thought of it being torn down and turned into a neighborhood of identical modern farmhouses.” She gazed out at the hills, deep green in the twilight, the trees lush and heavy with fruit. “It’s silly. Mama should have probably sold it after Daddy died. She was never really meant to be a farmer. Or me. But it was his home. And so it was hers too. And then mine, of course.”

“I’m not selling it,” Bobbie said quietly.

Louise turned to her mom in surprise. She had never expressed any interest in the orchard.

“It’s where I brought Louise home from the hospital, where I became a mother. It’s my home too.”

“Still?” Camille asked.

The moon gleamed above the mountains, and a whip-poor-will cried in the distance.

“Always.”

Camille reached across Louise and took Bobbie’s hand. “Thank you.”

“Besides,” Bobbie said, her voice thick. “If Louise goes to nursing school at UVA, it would be nice to have a place to stay. And someone needs to take care of Jim, right? He’s going to be lost without you, Mama.”

Camille sighed. “He’ll be okay.”

“He will be,” Bobbie said firmly. “I’ll make sure of it.”

* * *

“It’s getting late,” Camille said, her chest rising and falling in slow, even breaths.

Louise’s own breaths grew shallow, more rapid with each moment that passed. She wanted to run, to fly down the porch steps on bare feet and race down the hill to the creek like she had as a little girl, to look for tadpoles and minnows, to dig in the dirt for worms. She wanted to be four years old again, when time was gorgeously infinite, when everything and everyone in her life was fixed.

Camille put an arm around Louise’s shoulder. “You don’t need to be scared,” she said.

Louise had never felt more scared in her life. She didn’t know if she could ever do what her grandmother was doing, trade her own life to save someone else’s. She knew, even if her grandmother said it was what she wanted, had planned for, that it was also, unmistakably, a gift that went beyond any love Louise had ever known.

“Aren’t you?”

Camille squeezed gently. “I’m scared of missing you two. But not of death.”

“Will it hurt you?” she asked when she found her voice again.

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