25. Louise
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.
Camille shook her head. “No, honey.”
Louise looked over at Bobbie. She nodded, her eyes full of tears.
“Go on, Louise,” Camille said. “Waiting will only make it harder.”
Louise felt the night sky expand around her, the million immeasurable pieces of the world dwarfing her existence. She felt inadequate, too small and insignificant for the weight of what was asked of her, to hold something as precious as a life in her hands.
“I don’t want to say goodbye to you,” Louise said, desperation in her voice.
“I know,” Camille said softly. “I don’t either.” She took a deep breath, a tremor of grief cracking her calm exterior. “So, we’ll say good night then. And trust that there will be a dawn.”
Louise closed her eyes. For a while, they simply sat together, their limbs entangled, their heads bowed.
Finally, Camille gently opened Louise’s hand and placed it over her heart. Louise kept her eyes on the sky, where the stars glowed impossibly bright. She felt her grandmother’s heart beneath her touch, each beat an echo of the one before it.
Louise rested her head on her grandmother’s shoulder as heat blossomed like one of her moonflowers.
Camille released a quiet breath through her nose, and Louise’s hand was pulled deeper into her grandmother’s chest. She felt no pain there, only a tender, spreading release.
Camille’s heart slowed, and the entirety of her grandmother’s life exploded inside of her, like a new universe being born.
Each exquisite image soared into her consciousness, until she was surrounded by a constellation of not only Camille’s memories, but also Helene’s, and Agnes’s, each holding the lives and recollections of the women before them inside their own souls.
She saw Agnes, on her bicycle in a town by the sea. The sky above her thundered with distant bombs. But there were still births, and deaths, people who needed her. As the world around her ripped in half, the last image that crossed Agnes’s mind had been her daughter, the feel of her head on her chest while she slept, and she knew only peace.
Louise saw Helene, not as she had known her, white haired and delicate, but young and strong, serious and capable in a gray uniform as she moved up and down the aisles of a hospital ward. She saw her at the end of the war, framed in a window overlooking a courtyard as Allied soldiers streamed through the gates. She was searching each face for the one she knew would never come back.
Louise saw the orchard, all its beautiful variations. She saw it in April when the hills were covered with peach blossoms, and the ground was soft and newly green. When John took Helene’s hand, and she felt the first tiny shift, a new life beginning. And in winter, when the land was cold and gray and streaked with freezing rain, when Helene squeezed her eyes shut in labor until a new world revealed itself.
Louise saw a striking, dark-haired woman named Irene, visiting Helene from her home in Canada with her daughter, named for her own mother, Esther. The way the two women laughed and wept as they clung to each other, as their two little girls waved shyly between their legs, the living, breathing proof that despite all they had witnessed and endured, the ruined world had found a way to move forward.
And there was Helene again, older this time, in her midseventies. She lay at night in the bed with her husband as Camille slept in the recliner next to them. John’s breathing was labored, his mouth open. Helene stood and walked to the window. There was snow on the ground, a white stillness that covered the orchard, but still, she opened the window, letting in a blast of icy air. It was an old habit, learned from her time with the sisters. She had kept it, through all her years working as a hospice nurse, a healer, every time a soul was ready.
She walked back to the bed and climbed in beside John. His body was warm, but his hands were cold as she took them in her own. For a long moment, she stared at his wrinkled face, blessed with the lines of old age. Another face rose in her vision, another goodbye, a lifetime ago, a boy she barely knew, and yet who she had carried, through all those long years, as she built a new life in a new world, with a man who had strong arms and a gentle heart, who loved her the way the boy might have loved her if given the chance.
She squeezed John’s hand as his breathing slowed, as she felt him drift away from her, as she let him go.
Time rushed by in a cascade of images and Louise saw Camille now, in nursing school, where she was always the smartest and most dedicated student in clinicals. And in countless homes during her years as a hospice nurse, where her hands were a steady presence at the end of life, a guidepost for the families who relied on her to help their loved ones depart.
In a simple cotton wedding dress, walking down the aisle underneath a canopy of pink blossoms. A few years later, pregnant with Bobbie, her belly enormous, straining the seams of her scrubs. Then she was under the magnolia tree, sitting in a rocking chair, an infant sleeping on her chest, her face tired but radiating joy.
A soft wind rustled across the hills of the orchard. The porch steps creaked, and Louise opened her eyes.
She saw her grandmother not as she was now, but who she had been then, the memory Camille returned to most often, where she had been most at home. A little girl in a cotton nightgown and mud-caked rain boots. Freckles on her nose and long hair that ran in tangles down her back. Camille searched until she found her, a tall woman down in the orchard, her hands trailing over withered leaves until they were green again. And then Camille was gone, down the porch stairs and among the fireflies that danced in the moonlight, following her mother toward the gentle hillside.
* * * * *