The Moonlight Healers

1. Louise

1

LOUISE

Louise stood in the quiet of the orchard where she’d been born. Around her, the mountains rose against the pink skies. The tree branches were ripe with fruit, the light of a thousand fireflies glowing beyond them. She knew there was someone up ahead, out of sight, just on the other side of the tree line. She had caught a glimpse of a woman in a long, white nightgown, her hands trailing the branches.

She tried to follow but her body wouldn’t obey. She was stuck, anchored in place, her legs heavy. From somewhere behind, she heard the distant sound of sirens, muffled, as though she were under water. She squeezed her eyes shut as the noise grew louder, clearer.

When she opened them again, the orchard was gone. She was alone, in the passenger seat of Peter’s car, blinking into the bright June sun that streamed through the windshield. Only it wasn’t a windshield anymore. The center was gone. All that was left were shards of glass along the edges.

Her head throbbed, her thoughts jumbled. She tried to sort through the confusion and find something real. Peter had been in the car. He was driving. She knew that. She clung to the solidity of that fact like a lifeboat.

But he hadn’t been wearing a seat belt, despite her chiding. She remembered the van swerving into their lane, Peter’s voice shouting her name, a white flash as the airbag exploded, and then only silence.

Louise continued to search her memory, moving up from the depths that surrounded her toward the light of the surface, and her stomach twisted as the previous night crashed back on her. The reason she hadn’t wanted to open the door for Peter this morning. A bright, moon-drenched sky, the blue-green glow of the pool lights in the backyard of Kyle Tan’s house, hundreds of voices, laughter, lukewarm beer in sweaty cans.

And Peter.

Peter at the end of the night, standing in front of her, saying the three words she used to want to hear more than anything, but years too late for her to be able to believe him.

Louise didn’t want to open her eyes again. She didn’t want to see the empty driver’s seat, or the broken windshield.

She pushed her mind back to the night before.

She had been awkward at first at the party, unsure of which circles to join. But then she and Peter took a shot of coconut rum, followed by another. Louise recalled the blooming affection, the rush of nostalgia for people she had barely spoken to over the years propelling her into conversations and games of flip cup, into one more beer, then another, her desire to leave early receding as the night went on.

They had been there for hours when Peter asked her to take a walk, pulling her to the edge of Kyle’s backyard, his hand firm around hers. She wasn’t sure if he had ever held her hand. If he had, it had been years, since the days of pretend play and tree houses.

They were both drunk by then, and they laughed as they stumbled over enormous old magnolia roots that raced across the ground like primordial snakes. The branches were dotted with soft, white flowers, their sweet scent hanging in the air as Peter stopped abruptly and gazed down at her.

A preemptive sadness cut through the haze of alcohol. She knew what he was doing. She was leaving in five days for New York to attend Summer Start, a six-week program for incoming freshmen at NYU. This would be their first summer apart, the first summer in years they wouldn’t be counselors together at Camp Staunton Meadows, where they had cemented their friendship as kids, sitting on warm grass under a glittering sky, drinking flat Cokes from the camp store.

Louise knew he was going to tell her goodbye, or good luck, or some other horribly meaningless phrase that would signify the end of the world they had shared since childhood.

But when he looked at her, there was no sadness, only a question. “I think, maybe… I love you,” Peter said.

Louise’s mouth curved up into a smile even as it hit her that he wasn’t joking. After all these years she knew what his voice sounded like when he was being real.

The pause lasted for hours. Music from the party shook the ground beneath them. There were loud splashes from the pool, the distant sounds of glass breaking inside. She wanted to turn away, but he held her eyes in a way that made it impossible.

“Oh right,” she finally said, widening her smile. She felt frozen, trapped between two worlds. One was the safe, dependable life she knew, where Peter was her best friend. And the other was a future she had long convinced herself she didn’t need, where Peter loved her the way she loved him, an unbearably wonderful but fragile idea.

She grasped for words that could defuse the tension, though she knew how false they would sound. “Isn’t that how it always goes in the movies? Graduation-party declaration of love.”

Peter watched her, his expression still hopeful. But then his entire body seemed to fold inward. He looked down at the ground and cleared his throat. “Right.”

When he looked back up at her, he was smiling, but even in the dark she could tell it wasn’t genuine. “You’re too smart to fall for it, though.” He glanced back toward the house, the boisterous noise of their classmates. “I need another drink. You want one?”

She nodded blankly, and he turned and walked back to the party.

* * *

In the car, Louise opened her eyes. With a shaking hand, she groped for her seat belt. It was her fault. All of it. But she could fix it. If she could only find him, she could put everything back together, make it whole again.

Louise leaned against the dented car door, but it wouldn’t shove open. The guardrail was in front of them. They must have hit it. She slammed into the door harder a second time, with all her weight, and this time it gave. She pulled herself out with a wince at a soreness in her shoulder.

There was a person lying on the road, a few yards away. She felt herself sway and grabbed for the car frame, her whole body trembling as comprehension roared toward her like a freight train.

She took a few careening steps, her legs numb, until she reached him.

“Peter,” she said hoarsely.

His eyes were open, and for a second, she wanted to laugh. Of course, he was okay. He was right there, awake.

But then she noticed the trickle of red from his bottom lip, the way his mouth hung, the horrible angle of his neck. His eyes weren’t bright anymore, just dull, empty spheres.

Louise crouched beside him, recalling her CPR training from her babysitting certification course two years earlier.

She pressed hard into Peter’s chest. “One…two…three…four…five…”

She took a ragged breath as her vision swam.

“Six…seven…eight…”

His skin was still warm. It couldn’t be too late. She had read stories of trauma victims brought to the hospital in full cardiac arrest, kids who had drowned, or heart attack victims. Sometimes they were down for nearly an hour. But they came back.

“Come back.”

She wasn’t sure if she had said the words out loud or in her head. She continued to press into Peter’s chest. There was something about the depth of compression, the degree and number of inches. She had known that in the class, gotten a hundred percent on the quiz. But it was so much harder on a real person. She couldn’t even tell if Peter’s chest was moving.

She reached “thirty” and started the cycle again. With the blood coming from his mouth, she couldn’t bring herself to do rescue breaths.

She heard voices behind her, people approaching, but Louise ignored them. She could do this. She felt the wetness on her cheeks, the scream inside her lungs, but she didn’t stop.

“Please come back,” she said, her words choked. She didn’t care who heard it. She didn’t care about the people on the road watching her with pity. She didn’t care that she looked ridiculous. She only knew that he had to come back.

“Twenty-two…twenty-three…twenty-four…”

This time she pushed down onto Peter’s body so hard she thought she might break his ribs, but instead a jolt of heat shot out from her own chest, sparking down her arms and into her hands.

She jerked away as though she had been electrocuted. She didn’t know what she expected, burns maybe, a wound, some sign of the current that had just exploded at every nerve ending. But she was uninjured, the skin of her arms intact.

From the sirens she could tell the ambulance was right beside her now. Several car doors slammed behind her, followed by loud footsteps.

Two people in navy blue uniforms set down a stretcher and equipment and knelt next to her. There was a C-collar and oxygen tanks, medical kits. It all fell to the ground around her.

The paramedic across from her pumped up and down into Peter’s chest, and the other jammed a needle into the crook of his arm.

There was a hand on Louise’s shoulder. “Let’s get you taken care of. They’ve got him now.”

Louise looked up to find a very tall firefighter in full gear above her. He was wrinkled around the eyes, gray at the temples. She gazed past him farther up the street. The entire road was lit up with flashing lights, blue-and-red pulses all wrong against the pale sky. She felt the strange desire to laugh. It was absurd. A few minutes ago, a blink of an eye ago, Peter was beside her in the car, on the way to the pool.

“Let’s get you checked out,” the firefighter repeated, his voice kind but firm, his hand tighter on her shoulder.

Louise let herself be pulled to her feet. But she couldn’t move away. If she left, they would stop. If she was still there, if they worked to save him, he wasn’t fully gone.

“Come on now.” The firefighter tried to steer her, but Louise continued to watch the paramedics.

“Switch,” the male paramedic said, and seamlessly, as though they had done it a thousand times, they switched roles.

“Rhythm check,” the female paramedic said as she took her place beside the monitor. They both checked the little screen.

Louise’s knees buckled, her legs no longer willing to hold her up. Without a word, the firefighter slipped his arms under her shoulders and half carried her toward another ambulance. Already the crowd was dissipating, bystanders back in their cars. No one wanted to be there for the end.

“Mike?” The female paramedic’s surprised voice lifted over the group of emergency workers, loud and clear.

Louise stopped.

“Holding compressions,” Mike said.

Louise ignored the firefighter’s murmur of protest. She felt her legs steady beneath her as she pushed away from him and walked back toward the emergency workers. No one spoke. The only noise was the distant street traffic, the rustle of the tree branches along the road.

Louise brushed past police officers, her body propelled forward by that new urgency in their voices. She could feel the plea form inside of her. She would do anything to hear his voice again, give up every carefully plotted plan, trade New York and college and her perfect future for one continued second of his existence.

“Showing sinus rhythm,” the female paramedic said, her focus on the monitor. The male paramedic put his fingers on Peter’s neck.

Louise was right beside them now, Peter’s face barely visible over the oxygen mask. Her breath caught in her throat at the look in the male paramedic’s eyes as they found hers.

For a long second, the longest of her life, the entire world balanced between the two of them. The streets were empty. The cars and flashing lights gone. There was nothing but the words that would follow, that she heard before they even reached her, before they formed on his lips, finally, out loud, the most beautiful and impossible words she had ever known.

“He has a pulse.”