Fragments of Light

by Michele Phoenix

  “Nice to meet you, Ceelie Donovan.”

  Twenty minutes later, the nurse who had performed my mammogram reentered the waiting room. “We just want to get a couple more shots from different angles,” she said in a friendly tone as she ushered me back into the hallway lined with exam rooms.

  I could hear sympathy under the practiced cheer of her voice.

  Just over two months later, Darlene sat next to me again and, by mere proximity, seeped comfort into my post-operative uncertainty.

  Her voice was softer than usual when she said, “The worst is over. All that waiting and imagining. Now you know what kind of pain you’re dealing with. And it’s not as bad as you thought, right?”

  I nodded and blinked back tears.

  “You’ve got this, sweetie. Every day is going to be different. There may even be one or two when it feels like you’re slipping back instead of making progress—I had a few of those. But you’re in good medical hands. The best. And you’re a fighter.”

  She must have seen something in my expression. Her smile faded and she sat back. Moments passed before she spoke again. “Tell me.”

  The tears that had been threatening since I’d woken began to fall. I hunched a shoulder and winced. I wasn’t distraught. I wasn’t terrified. I was . . . daunted. And so very disappointed. “Dr. Sigalove said I’ll probably need chemo.”

  Darlene’s pencil-fine eyebrows went up. “Didn’t she tell you going into this that the surgery would be enough—?”

  “They found another tumor,” I interrupted her, needing to get it out. “One that didn’t show up on the mammograms.” I took a breath and let it out slowly.

  Darlene sighed. “So . . . chemo.”

  “I might have gotten a pass with the small tumor they knew about, but this one . . . She said it could change things. A lot.”

  Darlene sat up straighter on the stool and projected such bold optimism that I felt it bridge the space between us. “So you don’t know for sure.”

  “No, but Dr. Sigalove—”

  “Lesson number one in being a survivor,” Darlene cut me off, “do not—I repeat, do not—borrow on tomorrow’s worries. Do today.” She put on her retired-high-school-teacher face. “Repeat that.”

  I’d grown accustomed to the exercise. “Do today,” I dutifully repeated.

  She gave me a hopeful look. “Dr. Sigalove didn’t tell you for sure about chemo because she doesn’t know for sure about chemo. They’ll figure it out when they get pathology back, but until then . . . Don’t borrow.” She squinted into my face and leaned in a little. “Repeat.”

  “Don’t borrow.” There was something spirit-lifting in the words. After a pause, I added, “You had chemo, right?” So much for not borrowing.

  I could tell she didn’t like the question, but she answered it anyway. “I did. And if the Chicago marathon I’m running next month is any indication, I’m fairly certain I lived through it.”

  Surprise took my mind off of myself for a moment. “You entered a marathon?”

  “October 13. Starts at Grant Park and goes all the way to the 31st Street Beach. But I plan on finishing my race at the Jackson Boulevard Starbucks.”

  I felt myself frown. “Isn’t that . . . like . . . two blocks from Grant Park?”

  Darlene winked at me. “Sure is. Now—tell me when that husband of yours is coming in to see you.”

  Nate. Encourager. Perspective-giver. In-demand contractor prepared to sacrifice a job or two—or three—to care for me.

  When I’d gotten back from my mammogram appointment that first day and told him about the repeat images followed by an ultrasound, he’d sat next to me on the couch and listened. Then he’d dragged me out to a nearby forest preserve for a walk in the sunshine.

  When I’d gone back to the hospital two days later for a biopsy, he’d sat next to me again and held my hand, talking to the doctor and nurses calmly—steadying my nerves with his attentiveness to me and kindness to others.

  When Dr. Sigalove’s office had phoned to tell me they had my results, I’d waited for Nate to come home before returning the call. He was sitting beside me—solid and still—when words like invasive, margins, and prognosis entered my vocabulary for the first time.

  In the weeks that followed, he lay next to me night after night as I grappled with an appalling new reality, consumed by impossible what-ifs and what-nows.

  In ways I couldn’t quite define, my diagnosis had altered our relationship. More than two decades of marriage had dulled our conversations and dampened our impulses. Our lives’ orbits had started off intertwined, but with time had imperceptibly drifted onto parallel paths. The shock of cancer—the waiting and absorbing and researching and decision making—had forced our trajectories back toward each other before we’d fully realized how far they’d strayed.

  Nate had gotten me a vintage Crosley record player for our anniversary, five weeks after the dreaded call from Dr. Sigalove’s office.

  “So . . . the traditional gift for twenty-four years is supposed to be musical instruments,” he’d explained as we sat on the floor in front of the fireplace washing pizza down with beer—a tradition that had begun at about two a.m. on our wedding night in a hotel off the Magnificent Mile.

  I stopped chewing and flashed him my attaboy smile. “You did some research, Nate.”

  “I did. But since neither of us is likely to pick up the saxophone at this point in our lives, I figured we could settle for playing classics on this old gem instead.”

  He smiled and handed me an LP.

  “Weezer?” I shouldn’t have been surprised. When we’d discussed what song we’d use for our first dance during the weeks leading up to our wedding, I’d brought “Endless Love” and “Now and Forever” to the table, and he’d tried to convince me that Weezer’s self-indulgent “The Sweater Song” was appropriate for that kind of occasion.

  On the night we celebrated twenty-four years of marriage, he said, “It took me a week of negotiating on eBay to get this vinyl.”

  I wanted to enter into the festive mood with him, but my upcoming surgery had been the deafening subtext of every conversation since my diagnosis, and I couldn’t quiet it now.

  As the album began to spin on the turntable, I said, “Nate, can we talk?”

  “We’ve done nothing but talk. Tonight, we dance.”

  “You didn’t marry me.”

  He looked at me as if he hadn’t heard me clearly. “Come again?”

  “You didn’t marry two-weeks-from-now me.”

  He dropped his head for a moment. I vaguely noticed that he was past due for a trim, his usual crew cut softening into graying brown curls. His shoulders were broader now than when we’d first met. His skin more lived-in and leathery from exposure to the elements on his construction sites. “Cee . . . come on.” I thought I heard a trace of exasperation in his voice, but his brown eyes were just as solidly calm as they’d been since the phone call that had upended our lives.

  I couldn’t blame him for feeling frustrated. We’d had this conversation a dozen times, but I needed to have it again—to be sure he understood how this surgery would change me. And probably us.

  I forged ahead. “You married someone—you chose someone—who was all woman. All her body parts accounted for and functional.”

  “Cee, I didn’t marry you for—”

  I put up a hand. “Let me finish. Please?” When he nodded, I went on. “I know we’ve already talked about this. But I just—” I took a deep breath and looked him in the eyes. “I need you to tell me again that you get how different I’ll be. How . . . rebuilt I’ll be.”

  He opened his mouth to say something, but I shook my head. I needed to say it all. “The reconstruction—it’s going to take months to finish it. And when it’s done . . . There will be scars. There will be nerve damage. There will be discomfort, and—I probably won’t look or feel like the Ceelie you married. I guess I need you to know that I’ll understand if . . .”

 
I couldn’t put into words the fears that had slithered their way into my courage as surgery day approached, eroding it so subtly that I was just beginning to identify the dread. Years ago I’d given up on becoming a mother—infertility forcing me to relinquish what I’d always considered a foundational piece of being a woman. We’d decided together to try treatments and, after multiple failures and devastating miscarriages, I was the one who’d finally decided I was done—with the treatments and all the alternatives we’d discussed for having children. I simply didn’t have it in me to take on the uncertainty and risk of adoption or surrogacy. And I told myself that it didn’t really matter—that my life was full with other things that were just as validating of my femininity.

  In the intervening years, I hadn’t allowed myself to question the decision. I’d focused on my career and told myself that it was fulfilling enough, that kids would only have hampered the aspirations that had brought me such professional joy. But I’d still felt a twinge of uncertainty every time I’d seen Nate playing with our friends’ children. I’d chalked it up to hormones and chosen to focus instead on the stability of the life we’d built together.

  With a double mastectomy just thirteen days away, the twinges I’d felt years ago were crawling back to the surface again—the sense that my womanhood, already diminished by my inability to have children, was facing an amputation that would erase it for good.

  Our intimacy had subtly changed since my diagnosis. What had become more perfunctory than passionate in the last decade or so had suddenly taken on a sad sort of intensity—the sense that every touch was the acknowledgment of inevitable change, the image-altering lessness that felt as threatening to me as it was life-preserving.

  The Weezer vinyl spun on the record player. “I just need to be sure you understand, Nate,” I said.

  I’d caught him looking at me a couple times over the past few weeks, as we got ready for bed, his eyes lingering on my breasts, as if he too was wondering who I would be without them. Something similar flickered in his eyes as he considered what I’d asked. It morphed into hesitation. Then resolve.

  He turned his attention back to the Crosley and gingerly lowered the needle onto the vinyl.

  I stifled sudden anger as the song began with its ridiculous banter. “I’m serious, Nate.”

  He held up a hand and watched the record turn, waiting for his cue. The lines around his eyes seemed deeper than they’d been a month ago as he looked up at me again, mouthing the words of Weezer’s song, coaxing me to join in and bopping a little to the rhythm. At any other time, I would have found his awkward moves endearing. “‘If you want to destroy my sweater,’” he crooned, his eyes and smile on me, “‘hold this thread and walk away.’”

  “Nate.”

  He winked and held a hand out to me. “‘Watch me unravel—’”

  “Nate!” My voice was sharp enough to cut through his best intentions.

  The needle squeaked as Nate lifted it off the LP. I saw his shoulders sag. His voice was rough with frustration when he said, “I understand, Ceelie.” He looked at the ceiling and let out a loud breath. “I’ve gone to your appointments with you, I’ve watched the videos, I’ve read the articles.” He looked at me, eyebrows drawn. “I know what’s coming. I know it’s going to be hard—really hard. I know it’s going to take a while. I know all that. But we have two weeks, Cee. Two weeks before everything we’ve been planning for happens. Can we not dwell on it every moment of every day until then?”

  I wanted to let it go. To drop the topic and find the box of old records I’d stored in the attic and sit on the floor while we played them all. “What if this changes everything?” I asked instead.

  A taut silence stretched between us. I stared at his face as if it could reveal our future. He looked down at the still-spinning record.

  “I told you it won’t.” There was something steely in the words.

  I felt myself frowning as trust wrestled with uncertainty. I wanted to believe that the same forces that had kept us together all these years—through miscarriages and IVF treatments and career upheavals and all the ebbs and flows of marriage between two very different and stubborn people—would serve us again as we faced what lay ahead. In that moment, despite the misgivings that had wreaked havoc on my sleep and sanity since my diagnosis, I chose to believe it. Because I needed to in ways that took my breath away.

  “I’m sorry, Nate.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “We’re going to get through this.” I nodded in affirmation of my own words. “We’re going to get through this,” I said again, just to be sure.

  Nate placed the needle back on the record and held out a hand. I stepped toward him and he brought my palm to his chest, anchoring it there with warmth and promise. I could feel his heartbeat—steady and slow. He cupped the side of my head with his other hand, and the roughness of his skin tugged on strands of my auburn hair as he caught the tears on my cheek with his thumb.

  “Nate . . .” There was so much more I still wanted to say. I just couldn’t seem to find the words for it.

  He wrapped his arms around my shoulders and drew me closer to the solidness and sureness of his frame. There was a faint smile in his voice when he said, “Hey, Cee—shut up and dance.”

  Just two weeks later, Darlene sat near my bed on the day after my surgery. “Nate took a couple days off work. I’m sure he’ll be here soon.”

  She nodded and hopped off her stool, moving to the window to lift the blinds. The sun was rising over Winfield. It tinged the treetops in the distance with hopeful hues.

  “Congratulations,” Darlene said. “It’s a new day and you’re breathing.” There was something bracing in the words.

  She stayed a few minutes longer, then sashayed out the door with a wiggle of her cubic zirconia–clad fingers and a pointed “Don’t borrow!” tossed in my direction.

  I sank lower on my bed, adjusting my position for the least amount of discomfort, and watched the sky lighten as I waited for Nate to arrive.

  Chapter 2

  The English Channel

  June 6, 1944

  Cal closed his eyes and tried to picture home, but the images felt out of reach. The roar of the plane, the lurching and banking, the boom of anti-aircraft fire—it all felt overwhelming. He patted his flight jacket, unable to feel the papers he’d tucked into an inside pocket, but somehow calmed knowing they were there.

  The jumpmaster, First Lieutenant Reid, a short, wiry man with a voice like a bullhorn, squinted into the chaotic night, then turned to take hold of the electronic communication receiver that hung on the fuselage wall next to the jump door. He yelled into it, addressing the flight crew in the cockpit, but Cal couldn’t hear him above the pummeling maelstrom of sound.

  Whatever the flight crew said back to Reid didn’t ease the hard-edged concern on his face. He turned toward the stick of seventeen paratroopers perched nervously on their metallic bench and motioned to them that they were getting close.

  Adrenaline and dread dueled in Cal’s mind. He had no idea what the hours ahead would hold, but he was certain they would change the world.

  In the days preceding Operation Overlord, Cal’s squadron had tried to pass the rare free time they were given by playing cards in a large hangar filled with hundreds of cots, or by predicting which of the squad would be the first to earn a battle scar. It was a morbid form of bravado that served the dual purpose of acknowledging the danger ahead and feigning nonchalance. A fearless private first class by the name of Buck Mancuso, they’d decided, would be the most likely to ignore common sense and beat his comrades to a visit with the combat medic.

  A preacher’s son from Mentor, Ohio, Buck had brought a reckless streak to the unit’s training and downtime, receiving more warnings and reprimands than anyone else in the platoon. He’d gotten his nickname from the pellets of buckshot lodged in his chest—one close to his heart—souvenirs from a childhood game of Cowboys and Indians that had nearly taken h
is life. He liked to point to his scars as proof that the “namby-pamby sissies” they’d be facing off with in France couldn’t possibly hurt him.

  When the GIs had made their dire predictions about his early injury on the evening preceding the launch of the Normandy invasion, Buck had yelled, “Not if I see the lousy Krauts first!” Something manic had flickered in his eyes as he’d pretended to mow down a row of Germans with a machine gun, yelling obscenities.

  He’d still been rattling off threats eight hours later, as the paratroopers made their way to the plane. Their briefing had been long and sobering, the meticulous outline of their mission riddled with the gaping holes of unpredictable factors—enemy preparedness, countermeasures, and unknown emplacements.

  By the time the men had suited up and strapped on well over a hundred pounds of ammo, guns, demolition packs, and rations, most of them had needed help getting up the ladder to the troop carrier.

  They took off from Upottery Airfield three planes at a time, then circled until all the C-47s in their series had assembled at five thousand feet into nine-ship formations. As they neared the coastline, they merged with planes flying in from other parts of southern England, then dropped to fifteen hundred feet to cross the Channel under cover of darkness—a wave of more than eight hundred thundering aircraft.

  Cal’s pilot turned off the navigation lights as they left the coast. They’d be flying without radio contact too, to avoid detection from the Germans far below. This was a stealth operation of massive proportions, and the fate of Europe—possibly the world—depended on its success.

  Cal breathed deeply and reviewed in his mind the dioramas of Normandy the paratroopers had memorized in the hours leading up to the invasion of France—the beaches along the northern edge of the Cotentin Peninsula, the landing zones they needed to reach, the Wehrmacht’s known anti-aircraft emplacements on the coast and inland, and the strategic supply routes they were tasked with clearing.

  When thick clouds obliterated the horizon, Cal knew that the planes in his group, crippled by radio silence, would drift out of formation, each cockpit crew now flying blind on instruments alone. And when flak and tracers lit the sky around them, he assumed that the wild, evasive action the pilots had to take to protect their human cargo would further dismantle the planes’ configuration.