Fragments of Light

by Michele Phoenix

  “How kind of you.”

  “There are no excuses.” He let that settle. “There is nothing I can say now that can minimize what I did to you. To us.”

  “Or that can explain why it’s taken you this long to even try,” I said.

  He looked at the ceiling and blew out a breath. “I did try. I came back from the lake project precisely for that.”

  I remembered our recent encounter in the loft, when he’d said he made a mistake and I’d sent him packing with my wedding ring.

  “You were angry,” Nate said. “You are angry. And you have every right to be.”

  A red-and-green foam ball rolled under our table and a little girl chasing it, pigtails bouncing, followed close behind. Nate found the ball and handed it back to her with a wink. She scrunched up her nose in a smile and ran off again.

  He watched her go, then said, “The day you ended your treatments—”

  “Darlene calls it the Shake Shack Shocker.” He seemed perplexed. “She believes a cute moniker can mitigate the awful.”

  He still looked confused but let it drop. “The day you ended your treatment honestly is a blur to me.”

  I bit back a retort.

  “I remember the bell-ringing and the celebrating, but . . . what I remember most clearly is this all-consuming . . . I don’t know. Exhaustion. Relief that it was over, for sure, but also a mind-numbing combination of freedom and fear.”

  “You’re going to have to explain that.”

  He frowned. While he tried to organize his thoughts, a voice came over the hospital’s PA system calling a code blue on the floor above ours. I only vaguely heard it. It felt like every fiber of my being was trained on Nate while my heart wavered between curiosity, resentment, and the burn of rejection.

  “The worst was over,” Nate finally said. “That’s what the chemo bell told me. The worst was over and you were going to survive. The freedom of that . . . I saw it in you too.”

  “Right.”

  “But as we drove to get you that milkshake, this gut-level battle fatigue set in.”

  Cynicism rose in me like bile. “And you decided that your fantasies of leaving me might as well happen right then and there.”

  “I panicked,” he said again. “Battle fatigue combined with sheer terror.”

  I was confused. “But you said it—the worst was over.”

  “Yes. Yes, the worst was over. And I felt like I had nothing left to give. The counselor I’ve been seeing—”

  “Wait—counselor?”

  He looked surprised that I didn’t know, then seemed to realize how sparse our communication had been. “I’ve been seeing her for a few weeks—mostly by Skype while I was down south.”

  This was disorienting to me. I couldn’t imagine Nate—pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps-Nate—seeking a counselor’s help. “Go on.”

  “She calls it post-traumatic claustrophobia.”

  “Cute.”

  He lifted one shoulder and let it fall again. “Accurate, I think. It’s a fear response, she tells me. And not uncommon in caregivers, whether they identify it or not.”

  “Get your story straight, Nate. Fear or claustrophobia?”

  “Both. Fear that I wouldn’t know how to do normal life anymore. Fear that the doctors were wrong and you’d get sick again. Fear that my body and mind would explode if one more crisis or obligation happened to me. All that fear led to this feeling that I had to get out. That I was about to lose it and I had to get away. To stop caring. To stop cheerleading. To stop spending my days trying to ignore or live above or stuff down the terror and stress and dire predictions and life-altering changes that kept happening to us.”

  “So it’s my fault.” I felt anger fluttering closer to the surface and breathed deeply to control it.

  “It’s not your fault. It’s cancer’s. Cancer and the toll it takes.”

  “Cancer didn’t pack your bags for you.”

  The words seemed to hit their target. “You’re right.”

  “I didn’t see exhaustion or fear. I just saw this brutal, ice-cold determination on your face.” I paused. A nauseating bitterness settled in the pit of my stomach. I couldn’t help myself. “So did you go straight to Julie or wait a minute before making the leap from your wife to your girlfriend?”

  Nate leaned in, elbows on the table between us, and with his gaze boring into mine, said, “Nothing ever happened between me and Julie.” Each word was weighted with conviction. “She left months ago—when Agnes came back from maternity leave. Nothing happened, Ceelie. Of all the crappy things I’ve done to you, that’s not one of them. You’ve got to trust me on this.”

  “Well, she did have a full head of hair and the boobs God gave her.” There was no satisfaction in seeing Nate flinch.

  “This is not about your mastectomy, and it’s absolutely not about Julie,” he said again, this time even more earnestly.

  I hated that I knew my husband well enough to recognize truth when he spoke it. I didn’t want to, but in that small part of my heart that hadn’t been hardened by abandonment, I believed what he was saying about Julie.

  But there was no relief in the realization.

  The specter of an affair had fueled an animosity that had kept me from succumbing to my grief. Without it, all I had left was scenarios indicting me.

  “It’s not about your surgery,” Nate said again, as if repeating the words would convince me that my most intimate fears were unfounded.

  “You barely touched me afterward,” I said, surprising myself, my voice hoarse with defeat.

  “I did.” The ferocity of his previous disclaimer was gone. He sounded more defensive and unsure.

  “Oh, please, Nate. A half-hearted hug and a pat on the back don’t count.”

  He hung his head. For a moment, I hesitated to be any more vulnerable than I’d already been. I didn’t want the man who’d left me to have access to my most intimate wound. But I’d already revealed so much that self-preservation seemed futile. “How was I supposed to make peace with my altered self when the person who was supposed to love and want all of me was so turned off by who he saw post-surgery?”

  “I wasn’t—” Nate stopped himself and seemed to be reaching deep for the words he wanted to say. “I was afraid of hurting you.”

  I opened my mouth to say something sarcastic, but he went on before I could.

  “And—” He paused. “I wasn’t sure you wanted me to touch you. It had been weeks, Cee. I could check your incisions and flush your drains any time you needed it done, but when I . . .” He frowned and seemed to struggle with finding the right words. He finally said, “That afternoon at Blackwell . . .”

  I immediately remembered the day he was referring to. We’d gone for a long walk at a nearby forest preserve, following doctor’s orders to get as many steps in as I comfortably could in the weeks following surgery. By unspoken accord, we’d found the small path we’d called Magic Lane when we’d discovered it years before. It led between bramble bushes to a small, grassy clearing few wanderers knew about. We’d sat close to the stream and chatted. The rare, warm, late-fall day felt so good that we’d eventually laid back, listening to the bird trills and soaking up the heady aromas of earth, grass, and sun.

  When Nate had come up on an elbow and looked at me, his finger tracing circles on the inside of my forearm, a sheepish smile on his face, I’d felt a trickle of dread. I was fully aware that my uneasiness was ridiculous. He knew the post-surgery version of me. He’d changed my bandages and been there for every checkup in the early stages of my reconstruction. Yet something in me feared—in a blood-chilling way—that I was not enough. Not anymore.

  Despite the assurances with which he’d countered each one of my fears, in the weeks leading up to surgery, about the mastectomy’s impact on my femininity, the prospect of being touched by my husband—of having sex with my husband—terrified me.

  “You looked horrified, Ceelie,” Nate said now as we sat across from each other
in a hospital lounge.

  I closed my eyes to the confusion in his gaze. The memory was still fresh. So was its sting. I realized in that moment how subtly a life-saving surgery had altered us both.

  “I was scared,” I said. As the words came out, I realized Nate had said the same thing.

  He smiled sadly. “So was I.”

  As much as I wanted to steer the conversation toward another topic, I heard myself say, “You never reached for me again. Not in that way.”

  He frowned and shook his head. “I’d gotten the message that you didn’t want me to. And—maybe I just needed more time too. To get used to . . . everything.” He saw something in my expression and hurried to add, “There was so much going on. In my mind. Between us. I was overwhelmed and didn’t know . . .” He shook his head. “I was scared too,” he finally repeated.

  The intimacy of our exchange—of his eyes on me—suddenly got to me. I felt vulnerable. Exposed. In its urgency to step back from the minefield of our wounded sexuality, my mind leapt back to Nate’s abandonment. The horror of the day he walked out and the untenable pain of the intervening weeks came crashing back. Memory relit the anger in me. It was oddly comforting.

  “You didn’t seem scared the day you left me.” The hard edge was back in my voice.

  “I was.”

  “It looked more like disgust. Worse—indifference.”

  That muscle flexed in his jaw again. “It’s the only way I could do it. I had to be completely disconnected or . . .” He closed his eyes for a moment before going on. “That’s the thing about the claustrophobia piece of this. I wasn’t thinking about our history or our vows or all we’d already been through together. It’s like someone was sitting on my shoulder screaming, ‘Run! Run! Run!’ into my ear and I was too worn out to outscream it. I just ran. I felt like my life depended on it.”

  So many of the men I’d known before Nate had been unwilling and incapable of expressing the abstract—thoughts, emotions, dreams. One of the first things I’d noticed about him on the day we met, when I was a college student at University of Illinois, was how verbal he was. But even for Nate, the degree of self-revelation I was witnessing was surprising.

  “I felt trapped,” he finally said. “I realize that now.”

  “Your ‘claustrophobia,’” I said with resounding rancor, “destroyed me.”

  He nodded.

  “At a time when I was finally beginning to feel like I’d have a future.” I fought the tears. I fought them hard. They overflowed my attempts to stem them. “Just when I thought we could get back to something resembling normal and breathe a little and hope—together . . .”

  “I walked away,” Nate completed my sentence while I swallowed past the sob in my throat.

  “You didn’t just walk away!” I nearly shouted, infuriation erupting from my pain. “You took a hammer to everything I’d hoped for and were gone before the last shard of my obliterated future had spun to a halt.”

  Nate’s eyes shifted to the handful of people who had turned to see where the raised voice was coming from.

  “You destroyed me,” I said again, more softly this time, allowing my tears to reveal just how broken I felt.

  A muscle in Nate’s jaw spasmed and he swallowed hard. The sheen in his eyes was not lost on me. “I am sorry, Ceelie.” He said it again. “I’m just so sorry.”

  I dug around in my purse for a Kleenex. “What do you want from me?”

  Nate said nothing as I wiped my eyes. I couldn’t look at him quite yet, so I got up and went to the nearest trash can to dispose of the tissue. Then I returned to the table and sat across from him. It felt like an hour passed before he spoke, but I knew it had only been a handful of minutes.

  “I just wanted to explain,” he finally said, his voice hoarse. “It’s why I’ve been trying to reach you. I want you to know that it’s not you. It’s me. My weakness, my failure, my fault.”

  I looked up at him then. “You deserted me, Nate. After all those pledges.”

  He nodded. “I can’t take it back. But . . . I had to tell you that it’s all me. And that I’m so sorry. And that if it were up to me, I’d want to see what we can recover from the broken pieces of what we were.”

  This time I let him touch my hand. That’s all he did. He reached across the table and laid the tips of two fingers on my clenched fist.

  I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what to think or feel either. So I stood and picked up my things. “I need to go check on Darlene,” I said quietly.

  “Do you want me to wait?” he asked.

  I turned and walked back to my friend’s room, knowing Nate would stick around a while longer and hating myself for feeling relieved.

  Chapter 24

  Nurses continued to monitor Darlene throughout the day and progressively removed some of the devices measuring her progress. The TIA’s side effects were gone by the time she was discharged, but the mass they’d found on her brain continued to be a concern.

  Nate wasn’t in the waiting room when we passed through, Darlene in a wheelchair. He’d sent a brief message to my phone.

  “Heard the good news. Heading home.”

  It was as abrupt a departure as his arrival had been, but the collision of my worlds, in addition to the trauma of Darlene’s mini-stroke, was still playing havoc with my thinking and emotions.

  The condition of Darlene’s release was that we hole up in our motel for another full day before driving the six hours from Hannibal to Saint Charles. We spent the time communicating with her doctors back home, getting an emergency appointment with her oncologist, and setting up an evaluation with the brain surgeon who would follow up from there.

  Darlene had barely mentioned the new tumor. When I asked her about it, she told me she had better things to consider—like the color of her next pedicure. So we’d left our room long enough to find a nail place that took walk-ins and she’d spent her time there brightening the atmosphere on an otherwise gloomy day.

  “Are you going to tell me about your Significant Scumbag?” she asked as we were driving back to the Travelodge.

  “Huh?”

  “Your Jerk of All Fails. Your old Ball and Pain. Your—”

  There was laughter in her voice, but I still said, “Darlene, are you having another TIA?”

  “Just trying to find a way around saying the Nate-word out loud.”

  I gave her a look. “How did you know he was here?”

  “Sent the nurse out to find you and she told me you were engaged in an intense talk with a dashing stranger. That new knob on my brain hasn’t grown so much that I can’t put two and two together.”

  “He’s not dashing.”

  “Did you used to think he was?”

  I felt myself blushing.

  “So he is. You’ve just lost the eyes to see it. Why’d your Indifferent Other turn up in the thriving metropolis of Hannibal?”

  I laughed. It felt good and completely out of place. “You got a lot more of those sabotaged idioms, Darlene?”

  “I’m here all night,” she said. “How did he know where you were?”

  “I called him,” I admitted, feeling embarrassed. “After you were admitted. I was sitting out in the waiting room and . . .”

  “Absence makes the heart grow fonder?”

  “Strokes make it grow more desperate.”

  She turned in her seat to get a better look at me. “So you asked him to come in your hour of need.”

  “I didn’t,” I said. “I called him because I felt like somebody else needed to know what was going on and I was . . . I was scared. And alone. I hung up the minute I realized the can of worms I’d opened. And the next thing I knew, he was walking into the lounge.”

  I pulled into the parking spot nearest our motel room and turned to find Darlene, penciled eyebrows raised, looking at me. “In a creepy stalker way or . . . ?”

  I got out of the car and walked around to open the door for her. “I think it was a ‘repentant ex-h
usband’ way.”

  “Really?” This seemed to intrigue her.

  “Really,” I confirmed, unlocking the door to our room and ushering her inside.

  She said nothing more as she hung up her jacket and propped herself against the stack of cushions on her bed. Then she looked at me with expectancy and said, “Tell me.”

  I spent the next few minutes walking her through what I remembered of the conversation with Nate. Exhaustion. Contrition. Julie. Some of what he’d said struck me differently as I repeated it to my friend.

  “And this leaves you thinking . . . ?” she prompted when I was finished with the retelling.

  I sighed. “This leaves me . . . I don’t know,” I admitted.

  “Did he seem sincere?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did he seem truly remorseful?”

  “Again, Darlene, I don’t know. I trusted the man implicitly for the better part of my adult life. I trusted him through infertility and career hiccups and cancer. And then the man I married for his dependability and caring heart just—” I couldn’t think of the right word to describe the shock of his departure.

  “Pulled a Casper.” When I looked at her in confusion, she added, “Ghosted you. But not in a friendly way.”

  “That’s some modern terminology you’re throwing around there, my friend.”

  She waved the comment away with comical hauteur. “So—where did you leave things?”

  “You mean, after he was done explaining himself? Nowhere, really. He just said he’d wanted to apologize to me now that he understood better what he did and why he did it.”

  “Sounds like a step in the Claustrophobics Anonymous handbook.”

  I laughed. The weariness of the last two days washed over me and I lay down on my bed facing Darlene, hugging a pillow in front of me. “When I married him, I thought he was the kindest and bravest man in the world,” I said softly. “I never dreamed that my battle with the Big C would reveal him to be so weak.”

  Darlene tsk’ed at that and shook her head at me. “I haven’t been a fan of the man. You know that.”