The Moonlight Healers

16. Helene

16

HELENE

Helene walked with purpose down the dormitory hallway of the H?tel-Dieu. None of the fresh-faced guards stationed at the gates outside had questioned her explanation for her return from Honfleur. To them, she was simply another indistinguishable French girl, and so with a perfunctory glance at her identification papers they had waved her inside.

It was mercifully empty at midafternoon, with the sisters and nurses either off on the wards or sleeping, and yet Helene couldn’t help but peer over her shoulder as she strode the dimly lit space. She couldn’t afford any delays. She didn’t have much time.

She tried to focus only on what was directly in front of her. She couldn’t dwell on the look on her mother’s face as the train pulled away, the way she held her with a tightness that felt so much like a permanent goodbye. She pushed away the forged identity cards hidden beneath her pillow, waiting like an unexploded bomb at the center of her life, and the question of what would be left if it ever detonated.

She crept inside her dormitory. The room was quiet, most of the cots vacant except the dozen or so belonging to the probates and nursing students assigned to night duty. Helene slipped off her shoes until she was only in stockings, her skin sticky from the day’s heat. Her bed was already bare, stripped of its linens, the trunk with her uniform open beside it, the contents removed.

Helene carefully set down her suitcase and padded over to Elisabeth’s bed, where her friend slept curled in a ball. She knelt beside her trunk. Elisabeth was taller, but Helene could still easily wear her friend’s uniform. She undid the clasps, pausing at the click, but Elisabeth didn’t stir.

Helene held her breath as the trunk creaked open, and felt for one of the neatly starched and folded squares of gray fabric.

“What are you doing?”

Helene dropped the uniform at the sound of Elisabeth’s voice, thick with sleep. She was sitting up in bed, her mouth creased into a frown as her eyes traveled from Helene to the open trunk.

“What are you doing back here?” Elisabeth asked in a hushed voice as she glanced around at the other sleeping girls. There were indentations on her face from where her skin had pressed into the pillow.

Helene looked over at the windows, where the afternoon sun was sinking lower over the city. Every second of passing time represented one less second at her disposal. “I need to borrow one of your uniforms. I’ll explain everything later, I promise.”

“Thomas’s body went missing,” Elisabeth said, dropping her voice even lower. “Right before you left. Vanished from the morgue with no explanation. They came and searched the entire hospital for him.” Elisabeth watched Helene closely. “But you know that already, don’t you?”

Helene tried to keep her composure. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

There was an edge of hurt in Elisabeth’s expression. “Why are you lying to me?”

Excuses formed in Helene’s mind. But she didn’t want to hide her true self from the first real friend she’d ever had. Maybe her mother was wrong, that not every part of the world was dangerous to healers, that there were places and people who were safe harbors.

“What if I told you he was dead? Thomas. And that I brought him back.” She waited for a reaction from Elisabeth, but her friend’s features remained neutral. “You wouldn’t believe me, would you?”

The heavy breathing of the girls sleeping was the only sound in the room.

“Is that why Cecelia took you to Dieppe?” Elisabeth asked. There was uncertainty, but not the total disbelief Helene had expected. “I wondered why she’d choose you of all people.”

Helene nodded. “Because she’s my cousin. This ability is in her blood too. It was different, in Dieppe. I didn’t save their lives. I only… I helped them die, with some peace. But I brought Thomas back. And that’s why Cecelia sent me away. She thinks it’s wrong, evil.”

Elisabeth stared at her pensively, then broke into a wry smile. “That’s the least of the evil in this world. Cecelia of all people should know that. But I still don’t understand why you came back. Why not just stay home? That’s what you’ve always wanted, to go back, isn’t it?”

“Because it’s not… He won’t keep living, Thomas. I gave him time, but it’s borrowed. He’ll still die. Unless…”

The hinges of the cot creaked as Elisabeth leaned forward. “Unless what?”

“Unless I take that time from someone else.” Helene couldn’t bring herself to look at Elisabeth, to see the horror or revulsion.

Elisabeth slid off the bed and onto the floor beside her. “You mean you have to kill someone? For him to live.”

Helene flinched at the casual way Elisabeth had said it. She seemed calm, curious.

“I know it’s awful. I know what you must think of me.”

Elisabeth didn’t speak for a long time. Finally, she faced Helene.

“My name isn’t Elisabeth,” she said softly. “My name is Irene. Your cousin knows that. And Mother Elise. A few of the other sisters. They’re why I’m here. Why I’m Elisabeth Laurent from Calais. And not Irene Berkowicz from Caen.” She clenched her hands together.

Helene remembered the yellow stars worn by some of the families in Honfleur, Jewish families, the shops with signs in their windows, the foreign neighbors who had vanished over the last year, their French families left with nothing but vague explanations about deportations.

“Last summer my father got a letter in the mail, a green ticket, for a…” Irene’s lip curled. “They called it a status review. He wasn’t a citizen, but my mother is. She was born here. So even though we had heard stories, he thought—we thought it was just a formality. We thought he would come home. He died from the flu, a few months later, or that’s what they told us.” Her eyes glazed over. “In June, my mother was the one to get the letter.”

Horror washed over her. As awful as the occupation had been for her family, she couldn’t fathom the experience of Irene’s family. Helene’s mother and grandfather chose to put themselves at risk, but Irene was at risk simply for being herself.

“She knew she didn’t have much time. There was a priest in our town who knew about the sisters, who knew they had been able to help people like me… I couldn’t tell you. I’m sorry.”

Helene’s chest ached for her friend, and she pulled her into her arms. “You have no reason to be sorry, Irene ,” she whispered into her ear.

“I only told you that so that you would know it’s okay,” Irene said as they drew apart.

“What is?”

“What you have to do. My father was a watchmaker. He was kind. He followed every rule, because he thought people were better than they are. Even when they wanted him to turn himself in to the police station, he went believing the best. He kissed me, and my mother, when he left the house that morning, and he told us he’d be back soon.”

The more Irene spoke, the more Helene’s purpose for being there took hold.

“They don’t think we’re real people,” Irene said, loud enough that Helene had to check around to make sure no one awoke. “They’ve taken everything. And they won’t stop. They’ll keep taking until there’s nothing left of any of us. Vogel is in the medical ward. Pneumonia. He was admitted last night with a fever.”

Helene’s pulse quickened. She hadn’t fully formulated her plan when she left Honfleur. She had to get to the German ward, find Cecelia after, convince her to disclose where Thomas had been taken, but she hadn’t thought of exactly how to go unnoticed.

“The guards will stop me. I’m not assigned.”

“Then be someone else.” Irene extended her uniform to Helene. “Anne is assigned to that ward. Since the landing, no one pays much attention to shift times, so you can go now.” Helene followed Irene’s gaze to where Anne slept soundly. “She’ll be asleep for at least a few more hours. She won’t even know.”

“What about the other sisters? The other nurses? They’ll know Cecelia sent me home.”

“Tell them she asked you back. They won’t question it until it’s too late.”

* * *

After supper, as the shadows lengthened on the walls of the convent and the chimes of église Sainte-Madeleine rang out to signal nine o’clock, Helene left the refuge of the lavatory. As Elisabeth instructed, she emerged as someone else entirely, no longer Helene Paré but Anne Corbin.

When she entered the medical ward, Marie, the ward sister, approached her immediately, arms laden with a tray of pill cups.

“What are you doing here?” she asked. She was one of the older sisters there, white haired and wrinkled, but she was soft-spoken, often singing as she worked the gardens on her days off. “Where is Anne?”

Helene lifted her chin and tried to maintain her composure. “Anne is sick. Sister Cecelia told me to cover her assignment.”

Marie pursed her lips. “Sister Cecelia said nothing to me about this.”

“It only just happened.” Her heart raced as the eyes of the men and the other nurses on the ward seemed to turn their way. “Anne came down with a fever this morning.”

Marie shifted the tray as a female voice called out. “Sister, I need your help.”

Another cry for help rang out, a doctor this time. “We’re full tonight. There’s a fever going around. Help where you can. I’ll speak with Sister Cecelia in the morning.”

Moments later, Aimee, a middle-aged lay nurse, thrusted a tray of thermometers at Helene. “Are you here to help or not? Start at the back. Work your way forward. Record each one on their chart.”

Helene nodded absently and reached for the metal tray.

Take something from them.

Helene clung to Irene’s words like a guidepost as she moved among the rows, stopping to examine the patient in each bed, a blur of strange, unfamiliar faces, men brought in from other parts of France to fight during the failed landing. Many of them were asleep, their skin flushed with fevers.

She found Vogel at the back of the ward, in a quiet corner with no other patients immediately nearby. He sat partially upright, his eyes trained on the ceiling, a book propped open against his chest. With a small movement of his head, he caught her eyes.

He seemed unsurprised to see her, as if he had been waiting for her, as if he knew all along that their paths would cross again. And she felt it too, that it had always been inevitable, that whatever had started between them on the rocky beach of Dieppe, as Helene pleaded for Thomas’s life, was unfinished. There always had to be a conclusion. But as Helene stood there, she understood that, for the first time in weeks, for the first time in years, her fate was not in the hands of a man in a uniform.

This time, she was in control.

Vogel covered his mouth as he let out several deep, barking coughs. When it stopped, he leaned back against the pillow, his eyes glassy.

“You went home,” he said in a congested voice as she approached his bed. “I watched you go, yesterday, from my post.”

Helene tried to steady herself as she set the tray of thermometers on a small table by Vogel’s bed. “I came back.”

Vogel cocked his head, his small eyes watchful, the muscles in his jaw taut. But he only nodded. His features were as sharp and unpleasant as ever, but he looked different out of uniform, as though it had never really fit him.

“I heard the boy died,” he said. “The one from the beach.”

Helene balled her hands into fists but released them before Vogel could notice. She picked up one of the thermometers. “He did,” she said carefully, shaking the thermometer back and forth to distribute the mercury.

“I also heard his body went missing,” he said quietly, emphasizing each word.

Helene placed the thermometer under Vogel’s tongue. His eyes probed hers, but she refused to look away.

“How strange.” She let the image of Thomas’s survival, the hope for his future life, glow inside of her like a flame.

“Yes, a strange accident, I suppose,” Vogel said once Helene had removed the thermometer. “Unfortunate for his family, who may never get his body. Maybe it would have been for the best then, if you hadn’t stopped me on the beach.”

“Yes, sir,” Helene said, a calm washing over her. She didn’t have to be afraid of him, and that knowledge expanded inside of her, until she could feel her power over him in every cell. “Maybe it would have been.”

Vogel opened his mouth to speak again but coughed instead, grimacing with the movement. “You don’t have to be polite to me, you know. You can say how you really feel.”

Helene set the thermometer back down and picked up the chart attached to the end of his bed. “We both know that’s not true,” she said as she recorded the numbers into a little black box.

When she glanced back up at Vogel, he was smiling. “See, that wasn’t so hard, was it? I think that’s the first honest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

His face contorted again, his body wracked with another coughing fit. In one swift motion, before she could change her mind, she knelt by his bed and put her hands on his chest. She closed her eyes so that she didn’t have to look at him, so that she could focus only on what Agnes had taught her, a tide receding, a pull instead of a push. She felt his heart beneath her hands, heard his breaths change instantly, from rough and labored to smooth and peaceful.

In that fraction of time, Helene could see the future unfold exactly as it should, Vogel cold and lifeless as he always should have been, Thomas alive, his gray eyes holding hers. There would be an after for both of them, and nothing in the before would matter, not the guns or the soldiers or the bodies on the beach. All that was taken would be restored. Irene’s mother and her grandfather and uncles, a million souls returned intact. All that was broken could be healed. And Helene knew it, for one gorgeous moment, she knew a world that was better.

Her arms began to shake uncontrollably, great currents of electricity running through them. She opened her eyes as Vo gel’s mouth widened, hungrily searching for oxygen. She could feel the shape of his life, the basic elements of his existence, the weight of his soul. His memories, one after the other, raced through her consciousness. For one endless, shuddering breath, Helene held that extraordinary force, and the power to erase it.

Helene saw a fear in his eyes that felt like victory, like she was taking back all that was theirs, but suddenly, she could sense an opposing tide fight against her. He wasn’t like the boys on the beach, who weren’t going to make it and surrendered to the peace she gave them. He was sick with pneumonia, but he was otherwise healthy, and he began to fight. She knew this act was necessary, but the pain in her own body was becoming nearly unbearable. She had to bite her lip to keep herself from crying out, and she pleaded with herself to not let go, to not fail.

“Helene!”

At first she was sure the voice was in her head. It sounded like her mother.

But then she felt a hand on her shoulder.

“Helene!” The voice was in her ear now, a harsh whisper.

“No,” Helene managed to say. “Please.”

But even as she heard herself beg, the tide in her hands rushed back out to an invisible sea. She felt Vogel’s heart accelerate, the rhythm frantic and urgent.

Thomas’s face flashed in her mind. Irene’s voice when she talked about her family. She shook the hand off her shoulder. She had to try again.

“Come with me now, Helene,” Cecelia said firmly. “It’s over.”

“What did you do?” Vogel asked, his chest heaving as he looked up at Cecelia. “What did she do?”

Helene reached her hands back toward his chest, but when Cecelia pulled her back again, she had no energy left to resist.

“She’s not well. I’ll take her off the wards now.”

“Tell me, what you were doing…what that…that was?”

“You’re feverish, sir,” Cecelia said to Vogel. “I’ll make sure to send a nurse over.”

Vogel pushed himself up in bed. “Send her away from here. She’s not to set foot in this hospital again. Or I’ll have her arrested. That’s an order, Sister.”

Cecelia narrowed her eyes, then leaned over Vogel’s bed until her mouth was only inches from his ear. “You are only alive right now by God’s will and my grace. And if you try to tell your superiors, no one will believe you. They will see you as weak, and poisoned in the mind. So, you will say nothing of this.”

Vogel’s jaw twitched at this challenge to his authority.

“And you will not harm her,” Cecelia continued, any trace of subservience gone. “Or you will wonder, every time you go to sleep, for as long as you’re inside these walls, if you will see the morning.”

Cecelia straightened as Vogel’s face became pale.

“Good night.”

Cecelia guided Helene out of the ward. “Don’t say a word.”

Helene let her cousin lead her down the long hospital hallways until they reached the empty chapel. “I have to go back there,” she said immediately. If Cecelia hadn’t stopped her, it would have worked.

Cecelia placed her body directly in front of the chapel door. “No,” she said. She held her head high, in a way that echoed her posture in Dieppe, when she had stood in front of Vogel’s gun to save Thomas.

Helene had to make her understand. “Thomas will die. If I don’t…if I can’t finish what I started back there, what you stopped.”

Cecelia didn’t move. “I know.”

“You have to let me go back there, Cecelia.”

“I can’t do that.”

Helene tried to push past her cousin but she grasped her by the shoulders, towering over her. “It’s over.”

Panic clawed inside her. She couldn’t let Thomas die. Not when she had been so close. “But I can save him.”

Helene struggled against Cecelia’s grasp, but she was surprisingly strong.

“You’d let a man like that live, instead of someone who is good and kind? You’d choose a Nazi over Thomas? Are you that much of a coward?”

Helene struggled harder. She wanted to scream until her throat was raw. She was furious at Cecelia for stopping her, but even more furious at herself for her failure.

Cecelia released Helene’s shoulders and caught her wrists. She placed Helene’s hands on her own chest. “If you have to take a life, take mine. I won’t fight you, Helene. My soul won’t resist. It will be easy.”

Despite her calm demeanor, Cecelia’s heart fluttered like a hummingbird.

“Go on,” Cecelia said, pressing Helene’s hands tighter to her chest. “Save him. Take my life. I’m giving it to you.”

Helene felt horror rise in her throat. “You would really give your life for Vogel’s?”

“Not for his life. No. For yours.”

Helene’s arms shook as Cecelia released her hands. She moved them quickly away from Cecelia’s chest, from her rapidly beating heart.

“I can’t do that.”

“But you could take his life so easily?”

“I wanted to. I tried.”

Cecelia’s eyes shone with a compassion Helene knew she didn’t deserve. She felt the fight leave her body and collapsed into the nearest pew.

“I know what you’re feeling,” Cecelia said as she sat across the narrow aisle.

“How could you?” Helene asked, her voice hollow as Cecelia folded her arms on the bench in front of her.

“I did what you did. Once. I brought someone back. I brought so many of them back.” She fingered the rosary around her neck. “When I was your age, even a little younger. Working as a nurse in a field hospital in Belgium. I was sixteen. They sent me to étaples, a field hospital called St. John’s. I had been there only a few weeks when the battle of the Somme began.”

Cecelia stopped for so long Helene wasn’t sure if she would continue.

“There were so many of them,” she said with a deep breath. “Thousands of them. They never stopped arriving. And so many of them were… There was nothing we could do for them. I couldn’t even… I couldn’t even help them, because there were so many other men who needed us, the ones who might actually survive it, and so they were alone, usually, when they died, calling out for us, or for their mothers, or home.

“I helped who I could. I prayed for it to end. I believed it would end. But they kept coming. Boys, most of them. Not much older than me. By winter everyone was sick, even the other nurses. I would go days without sleeping, or eating, because there weren’t enough of us, and there wasn’t enough time.”

Cecelia cleared her throat. “And then, one morning, when there was snow on the ground, we received a transport of men from the front. I just couldn’t watch any more of them die. And so, I brought them back. One after the next. I didn’t care if it wasn’t permanent. I mended tissue and bone, repaired organs and arteries. I felt such a fire inside of me, all those months of fear and grief the fuel.” She paused. “I always wondered. Where they were. When they did die. Sent back to the front most likely. Cold and muddy and afraid, bombs exploding over their heads, alone. You see, I didn’t do what I did to help those men, Helene. I didn’t even know them. I did it because I was afraid to watch more people die. I did it for myself.”

Helene didn’t want to absorb the truth of Cecelia’s words, but she couldn’t help think of Thomas, of how much she had done for him had been selfish. What if he had been at peace, and she’d wrenched him back to a world set afire?

“Is that why you think this is wrong? Because of what you did in the last war?”

Cecelia exhaled deeply. “I was so lost in shock after that war. I didn’t know who I was, or what to believe. But I knew my mother was waiting for me, that she would find a way to help me understand, as she always had.” She hesitated. “I had written to her, about what happened. My…my father found the letters.” Her features hardened.

“He claimed to be a religious man,” Cecelia said in a low voice, her eyes distant, as though remembering what had happened all those years ago. “He was also a controlling one. My mother was terrified he would find out about the healing. She would never speak of it unless he was out of the house. He wouldn’t let her work, help people in town. After they married, he forbade her from even using herbs at home. I suppose he had loved her once. But all I ever saw was his cruelty toward her. And he was furious, and horrified, when he found out what I had done.”

Louise thought of her own father, his kindness. He had never known about healing, but he was such a gentle soul, always ready to dance with Louise balancing on his toes, or twirl her in the air. She knew he would have accepted her.

“He disowned me. Told me I wasn’t welcome in his house. Told my mother he would kill her if she tried to help me. And I was completely alone.”

“Why didn’t you come back to Cordon?”

Cecelia fingered her rosary again. “I was penniless. And even if I could have found a way back there, I also… My father was right. That there was something evil in me. I wanted to be forgiven, because I couldn’t forgive myself, for bringing all those boys back from the comfort of eternity only to die again in the mud. I needed… I needed absolution. And this place—” she motioned around the chapel “—offered that to me. They took me in, gave me shelter, and a purpose.”

“They know about healing?”

Cecelia shook her head. “Only the mother superior who was here at the time. I confessed to her, and was ready to confess to the priests, seek absolution for my sins. But she told me not to.” She smiled weakly. “She was so full of grace, and compassion. She told me I was a child of God, and that I could live a righteous life. But she also wanted to keep me safe, and she knew enough of the world, and the men in it, to know that a confession could be dangerous. She told me God knew my confession. And that was enough.”

Helene felt like she was seeing her cousin for the first time, not the strict, unyielding force, but the terrified girl, cast out of her family, desperate to find a new home.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry that happened to you. But your father was wrong. You have to know that now.”

“Perhaps,” Cecelia said into the quiet. “After Dieppe. After I helped so many boys die with peace, it’s harder to accept that it’s not of His making. Honestly, Helene, I’m certain of so little these days. But I am certain that life is sacred. But so is death. As nurses, we protect both, hold both within us. To betray one is to betray the other. We help a soul live, if it’s their time to live, and we help a soul die, if it’s their time to die.”

Her cousin’s words echoed her mother’s, but Helene had never seen death as sacred. She had only ever seen it as an enemy. She was still the same scared little girl she was all those years ago. Resistant to her mother’s teachings that there could be beauty at the end of a life. It was why Agnes brought Helene with her to all of those quiet houses, showed her how to bathe a body, place flowers on their chest, close their eyes so it would appear like they were simply sleeping. “It’s not the end you think it is,” she always told Helene. “There’s peace here. They’re safe. Their pain is gone. And the living are the ones who carry it now. As healers, we must carry it, Helene. Always.”

She had been so sure, after Dieppe, that she was now the healer her mother was. But when it came time for her to face the death of someone she cared for, once again she hadn’t been able to accept it.

Helene looked up at Cecelia. “Do you know where he is?”

Outside the chapel, the hospital was still caught in the swirl of activity from the aftermath of battle, footsteps and voices sounding deep in the night.

“Yes,” Cecelia said as she turned to face Helene head on.

“You helped get him out.” Agnes’s face flashed in her mind, all that she had risked, so much danger that was yet to come. “It’s not the first time you’ve done something like that.”

Cecelia didn’t answer, but Helene saw the confirmation in her eyes.

“Can I…would I be able to see him?”

Cecelia pursed her lips. “Would it change anything?”

Helene shook her head. She knew that she couldn’t save Thomas’s life, and in so many ways, it would be simpler to never see him again, not to have to say goodbye.

“Then why? If I take you to him, you will be putting yourself at enormous risk.”

Helene held Cecelia’s stare as resolve settled into her chest. She thought of her mother and grandfather, who’d chosen resistance, Cecelia and the nuns who risked their lives to hide Irene. And Thomas, who fought for the world even when it would have been so easy to stay safe an ocean away. So much of her own life had been about hiding behind her mother. But it had always been an illusion that she could hide. Even Thomas’s dream for her had never been a real choice. For Helene, for the women like her, she would always carry the weight of duty, the infinite, fragile beauty of humanity. All she could do now was move forward, the way she had on the beach in Dieppe, find ways to be useful, even in the darkest night, and trust that the sun would rise again.

“I’d like to help,” she said, careful to keep her voice steady. “I want to fight back in whatever way I can, like you.”

“What would your mother say, if she knew you were risking your life?”

Helene followed Cecelia’s gaze to the stained glass above, the beatific smile on the face of the Virgin Mary, and felt an unexpected swell of grief. The time in her life where her mother could keep her safe, act as a bulwark between Helene and the true horrors of the world, was over. She would never be that girl again.

“I think she’d say she was proud of me.”

Cecelia studied Helene’s face and nodded slightly. “Tonight,” she said. “Once a week the sisters provide alms to the sick and elderly, the homebound people in the countryside. Or at least that’s what the German guards think. You’ll come with me, to assist.” Cecelia stood. “There will be more like him, Helene, more people you will want to save. More monsters inside these walls. And far more outside. I can’t lock you away. Or be your warden. So I need to know. Is it over? Will you respect the rules as long as you are under our care? Because if you can’t, I won’t allow you to stay.”

Helene knew that to follow Cecelia’s request, she would have to live with the hatred she felt toward Vogel, and the other men like him. She knew how hard it would continue to be, for however long the war lasted, to live and work alongside them.

“I can’t respect someone like Vogel.”

“Of course not. You think I have respect for these men? When I know the evil in their souls, the destruction they have caused?”

“Then why…?”

“I respect life, Helene. All life. I don’t treat human souls like numbers to be added and subtracted. Violence does not solve violence. Vengeance is not justice.”

Helene thought of Irene, about all she had endured, the fact that she was only alive because she was pretending to be someone else. Cecelia made it sound so simple. But it wasn’t.

“I can’t respect all life, not theirs.”

Cecelia clasped her hands. “Because you’re human. As am I. Which is why I put my faith in God. I follow God’s will, and mercy, even if I find it near impossible at times to understand. Can you trust in God, Helene?”

Helene hadn’t believed in God since she was a little girl, when her mother used to take her to church on Sundays, before her father died, before the war and occupation, before the world revealed itself, again and again, to be a ruthless place. God felt like a fairy tale, a tattered, lost remnant of childhood. Helene shook her head.

Cecelia stepped across the aisle. “Then trust in me. The sisters who would risk their lives to keep you safe. The nurses you work beside. These are just walls. Stone and brick and mortar. None of that is God. God is these women. So if you can’t believe in God, believe in them. Stay here, for them. And for the people who need you.”