Fragments of Light

by Michele Phoenix

  It felt like a lot. On the heels of the surgeries, the chemo, Nate’s departure, and the move out of our house. I wondered when—if ever—life would feel predictable again.

  But this was Darlene. This was my friend and champion, the only person with whom I didn’t have to muzzle the memories, disappointments, or grief because she wanted to hear it all. Ugly and sad and angry and raw.

  And she was dying.

  There was so little I could do for her, so little that might ease the pain that lay ahead. I owed it to Darlene to at least try.

  “Okay,” I said.

  My seventy-six-year-old, terminally ill friend squealed. Then she giggled and punched the air like a high school football player. “I knew you’d come through for me!”

  We smiled at each other for a long moment.

  “You sure you’re up for this?” she finally asked, her smile slipping a bit. “His trail will be cold as Finnegan’s feet.”

  “I’ll do what I can. How’s that? I’ll dust off that journalism degree, think like a detective, and hunt down whatever information is still out there about the man in that picture.” I tried to sound confident, though I knew the odds were against me. “And when my post-op drains come out in a couple weeks, I think I might take a quick trip to Kinley, Missouri,” I said. Then a thought so irrational that I didn’t dare question it popped into my mind. “But I have one condition.”

  “Name it.”

  “You’re coming with me.”

  Chapter 10

  The tension in the castle was palpable. Few spoke above a whisper. Fewer yet dozed. The distant bursts of gunfire and the concussion of mortar shells exploding kept Aubry-en-Douve’s refugees on high alert.

  Those who had been most hostile at the time of Cal’s arrival seemed to have lost some interest in him in the handful of hours since he’d been carried inside. Their eyes and ears, their very spirits, it seemed, were fully trained on the world outside the castle. They exchanged glances as planes flew over, with less frequency now than they had in the early hours of Operation Overlord. They listened for the wail of falling bombs or other ominous sounds outside the thick, stone walls. They took turns at the windows, peering around blackout curtains and through holes in the tar paper.

  The more time he spent under the same roof as the terrified people of Aubry-en-Douve, the more protective Cal felt of a population that had endured so much for so long at the hands of the Nazis.

  Sabine had applied some kind of poultice to the base of Cal’s skull, and he was able to sit up again, though the edges of his vision still felt a bit soft. He’d gotten Albert’s attention, communicating as best he could through sign language, and the old man had left his position by the living room window to join him. Now he sat hunched over the low table between them, drawing a rudimentary map with charcoal on the back of one of the warning leaflets that had been dropped by the Allies over Normandy before the invasion.

  Cal peered intently at Albert’s sketch, determined not to let lingering pain and dizziness prevent him from planning his next move. Based on the drawing, Cal estimated that he was about ten kilometers west of Sainte-Mère-Église, a town he clearly remembered from the map he’d memorized before departing England. More importantly, the castle stood some twenty kilometers from Carentan, whose access roads were essential to securing the area and routing Nazi forces. He’d head that direction as soon as he could and had to assume he’d intersect at some point with other soldiers who had, like him, dropped far from their landing zones.

  “Les Allemands,” Albert said, his voice gruff and barely above a whisper. He made a Heil Hitler salute, followed by a shooting motion.

  “Yes,” Cal said. “The Germans will be everywhere.” He waved his hands over the map to show that he knew they’d cover the whole territory.

  Albert mimicked getting low and scanning his surroundings.

  “Yes, I’ll be careful. I’ll watch for them.”

  “Careful,” Albert repeated in an accent that would have been comical under other circumstances.

  “Can I keep this?” Cal asked, folding the hand-drawn map.

  Albert nodded, pushing his chair back and reaching for the hunting rifle that was never far from his side. Sabine took Albert’s vacated chair as he left the room and handed Cal a cup of steaming tea.

  “Drink,” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am.” Cal pointed his chin toward the door, immediately regretting the motion as it made nausea stir again. “I’m surprised the Germans let Albert keep his rifle.”

  “They didn’t,” Sabine said. “It has been wrapped in old sheets and buried in a corner of the barn since the Nazis arrived. They will kill him if he is found with it.”

  “Brave man,” Cal mused.

  Something that looked like pride crossed Sabine’s face. “He has been waiting for years to fight back. Living occupied is . . .” She searched for the right word. “It has been an insulte suprême to men like Albert, men who oppose Hitler’s regime but could do nothing more than bow down to the Germans if they wanted to keep their families safe.”

  Cal took a sip of the tea she’d offered him and couldn’t mask his disgust. For the first time since he’d arrived, he heard Sabine’s laugh. It was rich and honest. “Fenouil,” she said. “Fennel, I think, in English. For your dizziness.”

  “It tastes like licorice and hay,” Cal mumbled, sniffing the steam coming off the liquid.

  Sabine reached into the pocket of her skirt and handed him a hunk of dark bread. “You need to drink and eat. If you are going to go out and fight . . .” After some hesitation, she continued. “But you know you do not need to fight. You are just one man—one injured man—and there are thousands of boches. In homes. In churches. In the fields and the forests. They are everywhere and you are just one man with an injured leg and head.”

  “I’ll be more than one man when I find my guys out there.”

  “The Germans know this land. They have been here for many years. They know where to hide and where you and your people will hide too.”

  Cal sipped the tea again and took a moment to consider the odds against him. Before they could discourage him, he said, “I have to try. I have to do something.”

  He wasn’t sure whether it was approval or misgiving that flashed across Sabine’s face. Probably a combination of both. “First, you must feel better.”

  Lise entered the living room and came to lean against her sister.

  “Tu vas tirer sur les Allemands?” she asked Cal.

  Cal looked to Sabine for a translation. “Will you shoot the Germans?” she said.

  Looking into the little girl’s wide, brown eyes, he answered, “I will.” Something almost imperceptible in him flinched at the admission. Killing another human being had until then been a theoretical thing. He knew it would become reality in the hours that followed and understood on a visceral level that the first kill would take something from him. But he wouldn’t question it, just as he hadn’t questioned the operation that had left him stranded near Aubry-en-Douve. He would kill without hesitation to stop Hitler in his tracks.

  “If you see Otto, do not shoot,” Lise said in halting English, her brown eyes wide with pleading. “He is nice. He is scared of you.”

  Cal looked at Sabine. “Otto?”

  “He is one of the Germans who has been living here. The youngest of them, I think.”

  “Wehrmacht?”

  Sabine nodded. “Lise is still able to see the humanity in people who do not show it well.”

  Cal looked at the younger sister and hesitated before answering. “I can’t promise—”

  Lise interrupted him. “Please.”

  “Lise. We cannot ask Cal to . . .” She paused, deep in thought, before looking at Cal again. “He was not cruel to us. Not like the others, but he was—how do you say it? In French, it is rigide. Very rigide. Wanting to impress his superiors, perhaps. We could tell he did not want to be here, but when the Kommandant gave orders, he was the first one t
o obey.” She looked at Lise and smoothed her hair with a gentle hand. “Lise told me there were times when she saw him being sad, but I did not see that in him. I saw only an enemy soldier.”

  “He was nice sometimes,” Lise insisted to Cal. “But he does not climb trees,” she said. Her disapproval was clear on her face.

  Sabine drew her sister closer and swept her bangs out of her eyes. “Lise sees a friend in everyone.”

  “I’m guessing you can’t, given what you’ve been through,” Cal said.

  “I am not seven, like Lise. The way I see the world is not so innocent.” She looked around the room at the exiled population of Aubry-en-Douve and shook her head. “They have starved us. They have stolen everything from us. They have lined up villagers and shot them in the square in front of their children because they thought they were working against them. Without any proof. They just . . . shot.” She looked directly at Cal as something soft came over her face. “They took our father to a work camp in Germany because they thought he was in the résistance. There was nothing we could do.”

  “So that’s why it’s just the three of you.”

  Sabine nodded and glanced at her little sister. Lise was looking down, but Cal could see tears suddenly filling her eyes. Sabine wrapped an arm around her shoulders and drew her in to kiss her cheek, but Lise pulled free and hurried out of the room, head low. Sabine watched her go. “They came for Papa more than a year ago. And then they came back months later and told us they would live here with us. They took it all when they moved in—our house, our food, our horses. Everything.”

  “Did they harm you?” Cal could feel something protective stirring.

  Sabine shook her head. “They weren’t really cruel—not the ones who lived here. Just preoccupied and unhappy. They rarely spoke to us, except for Otto. He speaks English like we do, so when we didn’t understand what the Kommandant wanted, he translated for us.”

  “How long have they been here?”

  “More than one year. We had no choice. They would have shot us if we refused to house them. To serve them. So we did. We cooked and cleaned and sewed for them. We ate black bread and soup because they took all the better food. We tried not to make them angry and we waited for the Allies, the Américains, to come.”

  A gunshot rang out instantly panicking the castle’s occupants, just as Cal was about to ask another question. Women screamed and men barked orders. Cal bolted upright and squinted hard against renewed dizziness, realizing in a flash that the sound hadn’t been the crisp clap of a military-grade weapon, but the more sloppy concussion of a hunting rifle.

  Sabine’s face blanched as she looked toward the windows facing the courtyard. Cal leapt to his feet, urgency overriding caution, and heard as much as he felt a crack in his injured ankle. Pain shot up his leg, but he ignored it, a surge of adrenaline coursing through his bloodstream. He took two steps toward the entryway as the distinctive burst of a semiautomatic split the air, but his exit was blocked by the crush of townspeople rushing into the living room.

  Sabine grabbed a hold of the back of Cal’s shirt and pulled him up hard, stepping in front of him with eyes wide and jaw set. The girl pointed with a shaking hand at the people now cowering in the far corner of the room, a handful of the men in front of the women and children, eyes fixed on the door. “You go stand with them!” she said fiercely. “Remember, you are not American! You are not American!”

  She snatched the envelopes extending from his shirt pocket and looked around for a place to hide them. Then she froze and looked toward the door. Her face turning impossibly whiter, she whispered, “Lisou” so softly that Cal barely heard her.

  There was screaming outside now. The raised voice of a man shrieking orders penetrated through the windows. Then another round of gunfire.

  An elderly woman stepped forward to take the letters from Sabine’s shaking hand and returned to the alcove, bending low to stuff them into the crack between two warped floorboards, but Cal’s mind wasn’t on his precious possessions anymore. It was on the voice, distorted by hysteria, hurling expletives with orders to “Drop it now, you—”

  Cal recognized it instantly. “It’s okay,” he barked at the villagers, holding his hand out, palm down. “It’s okay!” he said again, more urgently. But at the sound of the front door bursting open, the men still raised their pitchforks, as if they’d do any good against a military rifle. Cal stepped in front of them, waving his arms this time, “No—it’s okay! It’s okay!”

  The living room door crashed back on its hinges and Albert stumbled in, followed by a paratrooper whose face was partially obscured by dried blood. Before Cal could get a word out, the GI caught sight of the combat-ready villagers. He shoved the old man out of the way and raised his Garand, crouching in anticipation of the salvo that would eliminate the threat.

  “No!” Cal yelled.

  The other American froze.

  “Holy mother of—” He lowered his rifle and cocked his head to the side, as if he wasn’t sure of what he was seeing. Then his bloodied face split into a gap-toothed smile. He let out a wild howl and yelled, “Cal McElway! What are you doing in this Kraut-infested hellhole?”

  Chapter 11

  I didn’t bother to knock on Joe’s office door. I walked right in and struck a confident pose. Ten days had passed since I’d told Darlene that I’d search for her father, and I was a woman on a mission. “I need time off,” I declared, hitching my chin up a notch.

  Joe leaned back in his faux-leather chair, making springs creak. He contemplated me with eyes that held both frustration and kindness. “Ceelie . . .”

  I’d grown accustomed to Impatient Joe, Dictatorial Joe, and Borderline-Friendly Joe in our years of collaboration, but Sensitive Joe still made me—and him—uncomfortable. “It’s not so much time off as the chance to go on an assignment.”

  “An assignment?”

  “Yes. Or I can resign and pursue this on my own time.”

  He raised a bushy, salt-and-pepper eyebrow. “So this is blackmail?”

  I pasted on my best employee-of-the-month smile. “I’d prefer to keep my job, but . . .”

  “We need you here.”

  “And I’ve been here for going on twenty years. A few days, Joe. A week, tops. That’s all I’m asking for.”

  He leaned forward again and propped his elbows on the desk, pointing with his chin for me to sit in the chair across from him. Joe wasn’t a nice man, not in the traditional sense of the word. He was driven—driven enough to keep a regional paper circulating where other publications had failed. He was old-school in his approach to business and relationships: work hard, say little, and prove your mettle.

  Given the limited curb appeal of those traits, it was no surprise that he’d seen in my more gregarious personality a useful addition to his small but sturdy paper. My greatest contribution to the company had been pulling it kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century, adding a digital element to our reach, and hiring a millennial or two to man our social media accounts. The mere mention of Twitter still made Joe cringe, but now that we were the fourth largest paper in the state, I knew he saw the benefits of “selling out,” as he put it.

  Though most of our content was regional, we didn’t shy away from the global, but covered it from a perspective that made it feel local. We reported on political, social, and economic events, but with a painstaking devotion to cutting out the superfluous and pointing out—per Joe’s oft-repeated question—why it should matter to our readers. His motto, since starting the paper in his parents’ basement nearly forty years ago, had been “Entertain, Educate, and Elevate.” To the extent that our readership covered more than two hundred thousand households, the approach had been effective.

  “Is this about Nate?” Joe didn’t understand or employ subtlety. Before I could answer, he put up a hand. “What with your . . . challenges . . . and Nate’s decision. Is that what this is about?” He held my gaze for a second or two, and when I didn’t immedi
ately respond, took off his glasses and made a production of wiping the lenses with the tip of his tie. Joe had never been good with loaded silences.

  I opted for truth. “It’s about Darlene. Remember her?”

  “I remember her,” he said, shifting in his seat. Of course he did. My mind flashed back to an awkward encounter in the days following my surgery. “Breast cancer,” Darlene had said, a bit too loudly, after Joe had tried to find a euphemism for the disease during the three and a half minutes he’d spent in my home. “Repeat after me. Breast. Cancer,” she’d said again, leaning toward his flushing face.

  “She needs me to track down her father, a World War II veteran by the name of Cal McElway,” I now told Joe. “He left when she was young and she needs to know what happened to him.” I shrugged, hoping it looked nonchalant. “So you can fire me or you can give me some time off. Either way, I’m taking my high heels and chutzpah and hitting the road.”

  “High heels and chutzpah, huh?” It was a phrase I hadn’t used in years, not since my early days at the Sentinel when everything I said was a plea for recognition. I sat up straighter and looked him in the eye. “I told Darlene I’d try.”

  “So you make a few calls.”

  “We did. We called every McElway within a hundred-mile radius of his hometown. All dead ends. Turns out his branch of the family was pretty small and insular, and after they scattered . . . radio silence,” I said.

  I could tell he was running numbers in his mind. “Your guy would be well into his nineties by now.”

  “There’s no obit on record—I checked. And if we could at least find a neighbor or someone back home who knew him . . .”

  “So you’re going to drive around until you stumble across a WWII veteran’s trail?”

  “I have a couple leads. And I’m a reporter. I investigate for a living. So, yes. But without the ‘stumbling’ part.”