Page 20 of The Moonlight Healers

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 a sense 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 neatly trimmed 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.

“You didn’t take care of me,” he said, and this time his voice was 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 bothered with 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.”