Fragments of Light

by Michele Phoenix

  “You’re killing me, kid.”

  I could hear the hesitation in his voice. “It could make for a great human-interest story. You know our readers love that kind of thing.”

  Joe frowned and didn’t bother to address the fact that I hadn’t written an investigative piece in years. He tapped the rim of his glasses on the pages of the article he was editing longhand—always longhand—and didn’t look up for a while.

  “The seventy-sixth anniversary of D-Day is this June,” I added as the thought came to me. “It’s the perfect tie-in—we feature a long-form essay about a lost local veteran to mark the occasion. People love WWII fare.”

  “Except the veteran isn’t from here.”

  “Okay, but his daughter is.”

  Joe said nothing for a moment.

  “Come on, Joe,” I pleaded.

  He seemed to be contemplating the frustrations of running the company without me again. “What’s the hurry?” he finally asked.

  “Darlene is dying.”

  That got his attention.

  “Her cancer’s back. It’s in her bones and her lungs, maybe in her spine too. There’s no time to put this off until it’s convenient, Joe.”

  He let out a loud breath. “Three days,” Joe said.

  “One week if necessary?”

  He put his glasses back on and adjusted the papers in front of him. I sat there waiting for him to grant my request. “You sure about this?” he asked, not looking up.

  “I need it, Joe. Darlene needs it.”

  “One week.” He sighed. “Not a day more.”

  I put a hand to my chest and felt my heart pounding. “If I didn’t think it would scar you for life, I’d hop over this desk and hug you.”

  “Number one, you haven’t hopped in years. And number two, ‘hashtag MeToo,’ Ceelie. Keep your grubby hands off me.”

  I laughed. The brightness of the sound surprised me.

  “One week,” I said as Joe pushed his glasses higher, picked up his pen, and went back to editing his article.

  My doorbell rang late in the evening, three days before Darlene and I were set to leave on our quest to find Cal. I glanced out the window and down into the street, then stepped back. From the second floor, all I could see of the person standing at the door was the top of his head. It was all I needed.

  For a moment, I contemplated pretending not to be home. Nate would ring the doorbell a couple more times and be gone.

  Or I could suck it up and answer the door.

  I had discovered in the weeks since Nate’s abrupt exit from our marriage how many emotional forms abandonment could take. It morphed in an instant from grief to anxiety, from immobility to hyperactivity. It cloaked itself in numbness only to erupt in irrational fury the next moment. Nate had taken the most important relationship of my life from me. He’d taken my friendships too, as those who loved us both seemed paralyzed by the fear that spending time with one of us would look like choosing sides. He’d taken my sense of certainty, the illusion of permanence that had lent a sort of foundational stability to my life. He’d taken my ability to trust myself, my confidence in my instincts and perceptions. I’d been so sure—so sure—that what we had was not only resilient but finally growing stronger.

  Nate’s abandonment still ran through my days like a barely perceptible current, a subtle and persistent burn that reminded me at every turn of how stupid I’d been and how angry I still was.

  With resentment fueling that moment of courage, I walked over to the intercom next to the loft’s door. As broken as I felt, I wanted to prove to Nate that I wasn’t.

  “What do you want, Nate?”

  There was a beat of silence, then, “Can we talk?”

  “We’re talking now.”

  “This is important.”

  “Write a note to my lawyer. You have her address.” There was something both satisfying and mortifying about giving in to infantile impulses.

  “Ceelie . . .”

  “I can’t think of anything we need to talk about. If this is about the financial disclosure, I’m working on it. It just takes a while to itemize twenty-four years’ worth of assets and income.”

  “Please let me in, Cee.”

  “No.”

  The silence this time lasted so long that I went to the window again. Nate was still there, hands in his pockets, head hung low. Something in his stance weakened my resolve. I went back to the intercom. “What’s this about?”

  “I’d rather discuss it face-to-face.”

  I pressed the unlock button almost in spite of myself. The door downstairs clicked open and shut again. Nate’s footsteps on the stairs to the loft were a familiar rhythm. They stopped on the landing outside the door.

  He looked shorter. That was my first thought upon seeing him up close. He wore his old leather jacket over grungy jeans and a lived-in hoodie. His construction uniform. But none of that registered as much as his stature. This was not my sturdy, six-foot-something husband standing there looking at me. His features seemed sunken, his shoulders less square, his frame less solid. I took satisfaction in the vaguely haunted shadow in his gaze.

  When I stepped aside, Nate walked in. He paused for a moment, taking in the small space. His eyes lingered on the large, sculpted-metal depiction of mountains hanging above the secondhand couch I’d bought at a Red Cross store. It was the only decorative piece I’d taken from our home, because it affirmed to me that someday, somehow, I’d make it to Switzerland.

  “Why aren’t you down south?” I asked.

  “I needed to see you. To tell you what I’ve been thinking since . . .”

  “Since what?”

  “Since the last time I saw you.”

  The encounter flashed through my mind. Nate finding me at home when he’d come back to get more of his stuff. Packing his suitcase. Announcing he’d be spending a few weeks on the Rend Lake build. Me losing it after he left and Nate walking back in to find me devastated, wailing with loss and grief.

  “What happened to the cabin project?” I said.

  “It’s moving along without me.” He took another step or two into the room, then stopped abruptly and turned to me. “I didn’t feel like this could wait.” He took a deep breath. “I think I made a mistake.”

  I racked my mind for what he might mean. “With the paperwork?”

  “With us.”

  Something odd tingled down my spine. It wasn’t anger. It wasn’t hope. It was a jagged sort of energy that left me feeling like an already precarious moment was about to become maiming.

  I inhaled and held my breath for a beat, hearing the blood pounding in my ears. Then I let it out and looked Nate straight in the eyes for the first time since he’d arrived. “You can’t be serious,” I said. There was gravel in the sound.

  Nate opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again. He hung his head and shook it, hands on hips, visibly tense. “I’ve been thinking—” he began in a hesitant voice. That alone got my attention. Nate wasn’t hesitant. Ever.

  “I’m happy for you,” I interrupted. “While you’ve been thinking, I’ve been moving out of our house, having more surgery, figuring out how I’m going to afford living on my own, and finding out my friend is dying.”

  Nate was still looking down. A faint flush colored his cheeks.

  “So I’m not sure what this is really about, Nate.” Anger slashed through any semblance of civility. “But if you’re here to process out loud or find closure or . . . whatever . . . you’ve come to the wrong place.”

  He stared at the metallic wall hanging for a moment, as if he was trying to understand what I’d said. It struck me how awkward the scene must have looked—the two of us standing just inside my door, Nate’s hands in his pockets now, my arms crossed in front of me, neither looking directly at the other.

  “Darlene’s dying?” he finally asked.

  I didn’t want to discuss it with him. My friend’s illness was a grief too intimate to share with this man who had
severed our oneness. “That’s none of your business anymore.”

  He looked at me. “I still care.”

  “Forgive me, but my lawyer’s bills indicate that you don’t.”

  We stood in silence a while longer, stuck in the no-man’s-land between the coolness of the entryway and the warmth of the living room.

  “It’s been . . . ,” he began. He looked up at the ceiling and let out a long breath. “I was angry,” he finally said, something sincere in his tone. “Not at you. I’m not sure at what, actually. I said things . . .” He shook his head as if to clear it. “I’ve been thinking, a lot, and I guess I want to . . . I just want to talk.”

  Cynicism chilled me. This man who seemed to be reconsidering the decision that had upended my life had not just walked out on me. He had brutalized my reality.

  A part of myself I couldn’t control—the impulsive, idealistic part that wanted to believe in miraculous outcomes—fluttered its way to the edges of my consciousness, spoiling my anger with “what-ifs” and “maybes.” I couldn’t trust it. Truth be told, I blamed it for the illusions that had left me so eviscerated. I’d finally disavowed its lies and futile hopes.

  “You want to talk?” I said to Nate, as the bile of pent-up anger seeped into my voice. “You were angry and you’ve been thinking and you want to have a chat about what? Leaving me? About telling me you were tired and outta here while we sat in a parking lot? You want to talk, Nate? After not saying a single word to me in weeks, except for that time you came home hoping I was at work? We’re this close,” I said, holding up my fingers an inch apart, “to finalizing a divorce you dumped on me when I was still neck-deep in cancer recovery, and now you decide you want to talk?”

  He said nothing as my words struck him, all sharp edges and disbelief. Then a thought that had been hovering at the periphery of my consciousness for weeks struck me again with aching clarity. “There was someone else, wasn’t there?” I said before I could stifle the impulse.

  I’d known Nate long enough to recognize the flash of shock in his eyes, quickly replaced by unnerving sincerity. I ignored it.

  “Was it Julie?” The name surprised me. I hadn’t intended to blurt it out. I hadn’t even considered the role she might have played in Nate’s departure until that moment.

  He frowned and shook his head. “Cee . . .”

  I’d only met Julie once. She’d started her five-month stint as Nate’s interim administrative assistant just weeks before my surgery, and she’d been behind the desk facing the office door when I’d dropped by for lunch one day. She was younger than me—probably in her late twenties. I’d commented on her thick eyelashes and she’d let out a warm, round laugh and told me they were on sale at Walgreens. She was the epitome of the all-American girl. Soft and fresh and sunny. Nothing like me—not pre-cancer-me and certainly not the post-cancer incarnation of the person I used to be.

  “Why didn’t I see this before now?” I said, more to myself than to Nate.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Ceelie. She’s a temp. Nothing more.” A frustrated edge was creeping into his voice. “How can you even think that?”

  I wasn’t hearing him. Not in any way that mattered. Every insecurity I’d carried around since adolescence—since the infertility and cancer that had followed—was roaring at me more loudly than reason. The movie playing in my head was so real that the confused expression on Nate’s face, the disbelief and discomfort in his tone, couldn’t dissuade me.

  “So it didn’t work out with your perky secretary and now you’re crawling back to second-best?” There was venom in my voice.

  “That’s not what this is,” Nate said, tortured and intense. “Nothing ever happened with Julie. Never even a hint of anything.”

  “And you expect me to just—” I stopped myself. I didn’t have it in me to explain to the man I’d married how impossible it had become for me to believe anything he claimed, no matter how forcefully he said it.

  I walked the few steps to the console just inside my door on unsteady legs and pulled its drawer open. The wedding ring I’d dropped into a plastic organizer, alongside batteries, spare keys, and rubber bands, glinted in the light from the still-open door. I picked it up with shaking fingers, fighting the nausea clawing at my gut.

  “Please leave, Nate,” I said, holding it out to him. “I believed you once. What was it you said back then? Oh yeah. ‘I do.’ That’s what you said. So don’t expect me to believe anything you feel like saying to me now.”

  “Can you at least let me try to expl—?”

  I reached for his hand and pressed the ring into his palm. Then I stood back and averted my eyes. “Just go.”

  Nate opened his mouth as if he was about to speak. Instead, he turned without a word, walked down the stairs, and let himself out.

  Chapter 12

  “That was close!” Buck leaned against the wall by one of the front windows, weapon in hand, grinning at Cal as if they were players on a football field reviewing their game. He’d survived their jump with just a cut to his forehead and, now that Sabine had cleaned the dried blood from his face, looked no worse for wear.

  Cal hobbled over to a chair and lowered himself onto its armrest. “Glad you recognized me before you started shooting,” he said, the pain in his ankle coming into focus as adrenaline subsided.

  Buck jutted his chin toward the courtyard. “Saw the old coot with a rifle out there and figured nobody here was up to any good.” He glanced around the room, taking in its faded grandeur. “How’d you end up in a castle while I was trudging thigh-deep through swamp water, you lucky mongrel?”

  “I landed in a tree out back,” Cal said. “The ‘old coot,’” he added, emphasizing Buck’s terminology, “dragged me and my busted ankle to safety after Sabine found me.”

  Buck leered. “The girl who cleaned me up? She’s a looker, that one.”

  Cal shot him a glare. “She’s a kid.”

  He knew Buck wasn’t listening. The same battle-thirst that had defined the paratrooper during training was coming off him in waves. There was something manic in his eyes.

  Buck scanned the room’s occupants with an enthusiastic sort of suspicion—the kind that dared anyone to step out of line. They returned his stare with equal wariness. This American who had held one of their own at gunpoint would not easily gain their trust.

  “How d’you know these people are friendlies?” Buck asked Cal, apparently unfazed by the cool reception.

  “I wouldn’t be sitting here if they weren’t.”

  Buck left his position at the window and a villager stepped in to take it. There was a renewed sense of foreboding in the castle, as if his appearance had reminded its occupants of how very unprotected they were. He lowered himself onto the couch across from Cal and dropped his boot-clad feet onto a delicate coffee table with a thud. Then he reached for the bottle of Calvados Sabine had left after using it to clean his wound. He took a swig and let out a loud, satisfied breath. “These Frogs sure know their way around booze,” he said, contemplating the amber-colored apple liquor as he settled back against the striped upholstery of the antique furniture.

  “How’d you get here, man?” Cal asked, still stunned to be sitting in a room with someone he’d last seen leaping out of their C-47 under punishing fire.

  “Dumb luck! That jump was like buckshot, right? By the time we landed, we were so scattered there was no way we’d regroup. So I just kept on moving and hoped the fighting would wait for me.”

  “I’m guessing there’s plenty left for you,” Cal said, his smile devoid of humor.

  “Gonna get me some Nazi scalps.” Buck’s grin turned into a full-on smile as he raised his semiautomatic and took aim at the wall. “Line ’em up and mow ’em down.” He pretended to shoot, making gunfire sounds as he blasted whoever he was seeing in his mind.

  “Buck!” Cal snapped, conscious of the townspeople looking on.

  The paratrooper lowered his weapon and brought the bot
tle to his lips again, eyeing his audience. “You really sure about ’em?”

  “They took me in, didn’t they?”

  “Took your uniform too,” Buck noted, nodding at his civilian clothes.

  “So I’d blend in if the Germans come back. You should probably change too.”

  “That’s what the girl said . . . right before I told her to shove off.” He frowned. “Wait. Did you say, ‘if the Germans come back’?”

  Cal weighed his words before speaking. “They requisitioned this place for their HQ a few months ago.” When Buck frowned, he added, “The way Sabine tells it, there was nothing anyone could do about it.”

  “Where’d they go?”

  “Took off for the battery last night and haven’t been back. Not sure if we took it, but it sounds like we put up a good fight.”

  Buck leaned forward to slap Cal’s leg, making him wince. “Come on, man. Enough pussyfooting around—we’ve gotta get back out there and give those Nazi punks what they deserve!”

  “I know,” Cal said, his voice somber. “I was planning on leaving tonight. Maybe head toward Carentan and hope to intersect with some of our unit on the way there.” He hesitated, frowning in frustration. “But if I can’t put any weight on my leg . . .”

  Some of the enthusiasm went out of Buck’s posture. “That bad?”

  “I thought it was a sprain, but I don’t know.”

  Buck took another swig from the Calvados bottle, then held it up to peer at the half-liter that remained. “How’s this?” he said. “I’m gonna give you until the last drop of this Kickapoo Joy Juice. When it’s gone, so am I. And if your bum leg lets you, so are you.”

  Cal’s helplessness felt like just one more wound. A few hours before, when he and Buck had been on the plane dodging flak over the Channel, he’d imagined that he’d be neck-deep in battle by now. He wanted to fulfill the mission he’d trained for. He wanted to engage the enemy alongside his comrades and bring an end to the reign that had terrorized Europe. But in his state, he wouldn’t run into battle, he’d hobble. The handicap felt like failure, an affront to all he’d become in the nearly two years since he’d reported to Camp Toccoa, then gone on to train at Fort Benning.