Fragments of Light

by Michele Phoenix

  His jaw tensed as his eyes hardened. They locked with mine—defiant and scared.

  “Otto.” It was all I had to say. A brutal softening descended over Buck’s features. Capitulation. Guilt. Relief. He stared at me as if his worst deeds were written on my face, accusing him—condemning him.

  “I—I was young,” he stammered.

  “I know you were.”

  “I was hopped up on adrenaline and booze. I didn’t know what I was doing,” he said, half-groaning, half-pleading as he reached toward me with shaking hands.

  “I know,” I said hurriedly, pressing my fingers over his. “I believe you—I do.” I tried to infuse my expression with gentleness. “And, Charles—Buck—there’s somebody here who believes you too.”

  I rose and stepped aside. Charles’s eyes darted around, then settled on the tall, elderly woman who stood, hands clasped in front of her, smiling at the veteran. There must have been something about her—something in her big brown eyes—that pierced through Buck’s defenses to the memories beyond.

  His face crumpled and he reached blindly for Gina. She squeezed his shoulder, frowning in confusion. Lise took a few steps and knelt down in front of the weeping veteran.

  “Buck,” she said softly, taking his hand in both of hers. “Buck,” she repeated when he kept his eyes averted, tears streaking down his face into the starched collar of his shirt. “Buck.” Her voice was firmer now. Coaxing.

  Charles’s gaze took an eternity to rise to meet hers. When it did, she leaned in close enough that he could see the forgiveness on her face. She held up the Walking Liberty coin his friend had given her and smiled at the recognition in Buck’s eyes.

  Then she pressed it into his palm and said, “Thank you, Charles Mancuso, for liberating France.”

  Epilogue

  Lise and Buck were still talking when we left the museum. We wandered toward the dunes lining Utah Beach, past several monuments honoring the American soldiers who had landed there seventy-six years earlier.

  After we found a spot overlooking the water and sat on the sand, I tried to wrap my mind around the journey that had led us to this place—the choices and discoveries and surprises and planning and dumb luck that had pieced together the bridge between past and present, between lostness and a fullness that took my breath away.

  Nate sat quietly beside me, and I wondered if his musings mirrored mine.

  “‘History’s stains illuminate the future,’” he said in a pensive tone after a couple minutes had passed.

  I looked at him. “Quoting Cal?”

  “I am.”

  “Because you agree or . . . ?”

  “Because I want a future,” Nate said. Boldness and hope washed over his face. “And because I’m feeling particularly courageous right now.”

  I smiled. “I guess it’s a contagious thing.”

  We sat close enough for our arms to touch, facing the sand and water where so many lives had been sacrificed to change the course of history.

  “I told you what Darlene said about courage, right?”

  “I don’t think you did,” Nate said, frowning as he tried to recall.

  “The opposite of courage isn’t fear. It’s resentment,” I paraphrased.

  He let that settle for a beat. “Dang, she’s good.” There was warmth in his voice. “You think she got her philosophical savvy from the father she never knew?”

  “Maybe she did.” I pondered the father-daughter dynamics that had brought us to this place. “Both of them died after a lifetime of resentment,” I said to the man whose vulnerability and strength had been constants in the past few days. “Cal at himself and Darlene at Cal.”

  I looked at the sliver of sun shining a trail of light from the horizon to the water’s edge. I wasn’t sure how to formulate what I wanted to say. “Resentment is exhausting. And corrosive. I just—I don’t want to live that way.”

  Nate said nothing for a while. Then he repeated, “I want a future with you, Cee.”

  I smiled. “So you’ve said.”

  “I want a future that is brave.”

  “Brave,” I repeated. Testing the word. Savoring its power.

  “Brave like Darlene,” he continued, “the woman who laughed through her cancer and kept on loving others until the day she died.” He looked directly at me. “Brave like the survivor who asked her nearly-ex-husband to go with her to Normandy when his stupidity and selfishness had caused her so much pain.”

  I was caught off guard by the impulse to disagree. This man who’d flown to Normandy with me on a whim was more the man I married than the one who’d walked away. His abandonment had inflicted agony—the kind that might still take a miracle to undo—but after months of a livid, debilitating resentment, I understood how my cancer might have broken him too, and how fragile we already were before it even struck.

  I reached for Nate’s hand but paused before I touched it. I thought of the rejection that had upended my life, my outlook, and my self-esteem. I remembered Claire and the forgiveness she’d chosen. And I considered the man sitting beside me, whose penance since we’d reconnected had been sustained and sincere.

  The tips of my fingers brushed the top of Nate’s hand, jolting us both. He turned it over and laced his fingers through mine, his grasp sturdy and sure. The enveloping warmth. The roughness of the callouses on his palm.

  It felt like coming home.

  I looked up into my husband’s face. “Those monuments behind us, they’re a testament to the brutality of war,” I said. “It nearly destroyed this part of France. Entire towns bombed off the map, civilians massacred—all in the pursuit of freedom.” I hunched a shoulder. “But France came back. It built on the ruins. It let its stains illuminate its future, and look at what this beach is like today.”

  I hitched my chin toward the teenagers sitting around a bonfire a few feet from us and the man walking back to the parking lot, a towel-wrapped child in his arms. “I want that, Nate. I want a rebuilding kind of brave.”

  I thought of Darlene’s brick-carrying gnome—of the restoration she’d sought as she overcame then succumbed to her cancer. It felt right to have left her ashes in the ground next to the cross that marked Cal’s life of wounded sacrifice. Nate had dug the shallow hole with his bare hands and gently tucked the urn into the moist Norman earth before covering it again—a father and a daughter finally reunited, despite the many decades of their joint but distant pain.

  The sky was fading to a golden red as small waves swept onto the sand of Utah Beach. “Stay here,” Nate said, startling me as he got to his feet, kicked off his shoes, and strode to the water’s edge. He seemed to be looking for something specific and walked back and forth, picking up and discarding, over and over until he was satisfied.

  He returned to our spot in the dunes with two fairly thick sticks and sat down next to me again, tearing up a couple tall reeds.

  “Finally putting your Boy Scout training to use?” I said, confused by what he was doing.

  He gave me a look and started to bind the sticks together with the reeds. When he was done, he moved to a spot at the edge of our dune and planted his makeshift cross in the sand.

  Then he faced me, his hands on his hips in a determined stance. “The crosses in Normandy are as much about courage as they are about death,” he declared. “And you know what, Cee? Survivors deserve crosses too.”

  I blinked at the tears suddenly blurring my vision. History, hope, and healing saturated that moment.

  But Nate wasn’t finished. “I never learned how to carve letters in Boy Scouts, but if I had, this cross would read: ‘A hero stood here. Cecelia Donovan. Born in 1977. Fought cancer in 2019. Beat the beast in 2020. Lived in that victory for the rest of her life.’”

  My smile was tremulous. “That’s a lot of lettering for such a small stick,” I said. “And it really ought to read: ‘Nathanael Donovan fought by her side.’”

  The light in his eyes dimmed. “But then he walked away.”

&
nbsp; “And then he came back.”

  He nodded and quietly repeated, “And then he came back.”

  From the void in my heart where Darlene would always live, I heard her voice, hoarsened a bit by the toll of overcoming, say, “Puff out your chest, girlie. Own this victory.” I looked up at the sky and hoped she was watching.

  “I know that the last few years weren’t great,” I said after a moment. “Even before my diagnosis. And I know that you and me being so strong in some weird way made our ‘together’ weaker . . .” I let my mind drift back over the decades I’d spent with Nate. It was all so complex. So natural and joyous. So messy and mundane. So prone to damaging, indiscernible change.

  “I want a future too,” I finally said. It was a simple statement. Clear-minded and earnest. Powerful enough to mark an end. And a beginning.

  Pulling out my phone, I found the old Bryan Adams song Nate had played at O’Hurley’s on the night we first met. I stood and propped it against the cross he’d made—a memorial to our complicated, intertwined grief—and held my hand out to him, mouthing the words as they began to play.

  “‘Look into my eyes . . .’”

  Nate exhaled and hung his head.

  “‘And you will see . . .’”

  I lay a hand on his shoulder and he looked up.

  “‘What you mean to me.’”

  He hesitated only a moment before taking me into his arms. It felt breathtakingly familiar and startlingly new. I leaned into his embrace without reservation, wrapping my arms around his waist as he pulled me closer still. And we began to sway.

  “So . . . ,” he whispered a minute or so later, tightening his hold, the warmth of relief in his voice. “Are you saying . . . ?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay.” I could almost hear his lopsided grin when he added, “And does this mean . . . ?”

  I pulled away just enough to see his face, to reach up on tiptoe and let my lips brush his. The contact jolted me. A rush of recognition tinged with mystery. Caution and desire dueled in my mind, but it was love—the kind that aches, endures, and somehow still believes—that coaxed a reborn courage from my grief.

  As I stared into the sureness of my husband’s steady gaze, a leaden darkness fluttered toward light.

  “I want to be us again,” I said to Nate—to the man who had fled and the man who had returned. “A new us. A reconstructed us.”

  I heard my sweet friend say, “Give time the time it needs,” and added—just in case, “But you have to understand that I need to take it slow. Slow enough to wrap my mind around everything that’s happened.” I sighed. “Slow enough to crawl back into this body I don’t recognize.”

  He swallowed hard as something galvanizing flashed across his face. His breath brushed warm against my skin. “You take the lead,” he said. He seemed to hesitate, then added sheepishly, “But just so you know, I’ve been carrying your ring around ever since you gave it back to me. So when you’re ready—whenever that is . . .”

  I smiled and nestled in, pressing my scarred survival closer to his steady strength, and said, “Hey, Nate—shut up and dance.”

  A Note from the Author

  I am a three-time cancer survivor.

  Just over two years ago, I awoke in the hospital and listened dumbfounded as my surgeon informed me that the mastectomy I’d chosen to prevent a recurrence had actually revealed several malignant tumors. I was at a loss—battered and disbelieving.

  It took a while for it all to sink in. Nights were the worst. Prognoses seem harsher after dark. Rosy denouements more difficult to envision. Yet in those days following surgery, the same gentle voice that had whispered serenity to me as I’d made the decision to go under the knife was still there. I heard it in the kindness of nurses as they worked to steady my pain and ease my fears. I felt it in my GP’s hand on my arm, as she came by early the first morning to sit by my bed and pray for peace. I sensed it in the Christmas lights and carols, dimmed by pain and uncertainty, but still radiant with the promise of God’s overwhelming and sufficient love.

  Survival is miraculous. It is also torturous. The weeks I spent waiting for pathology results and a treatment plan were hard. And even when the tests finally came back with optimistic conclusions, I couldn’t fully celebrate. I’d been staring death in the face for so long that I didn’t know how to look away.

  When I began writing Fragments of Light, I knew I wanted to explore the unspoken consequences, emotional and physical, of breast cancer. But I also wanted the novel to be about “brave”—the kind that shows up in so many ways, under so many circumstances, in so many different lives. The first voice I “heard” was Lise’s. A seven-year-old daring to be hopeful when her world told her to be scared. Then I heard Ceelie’s. It sounded an awful lot like mine, at times, but without the anchors and buffers of a sustaining faith. I thought Nate would be her bulwark right up until he chose to walk away. His determination to earn back Ceelie’s trust surprised even me. Then Darlene entered the story. She breezed into Ceelie’s hospital room unforeseen by this author. And she transformed the novel’s trajectory.

  A serendipitous invitation to be the translator for The Girl Who Wore Freedom, a WWII documentary filming in Normandy, completed my cast of overcomers. As I witnessed the expressions of veterans standing on the parapet overlooking Omaha Beach, reliving the day that changed the world’s history, and as I heard them recount their memories surrounded by the citizens of a liberated France, Cal, then Buck, entered my imagination.

  I let the elements of Fragments of Light steep for a while and wondered what bravery would really look like for the war survivors, the cancer conquerors, and those who loved them if they didn’t have the kind of faith that fosters peace—that heals the natural resentment of suffering, failure, abandonment, and loss.

  Claire wasn’t in my planning for the book. But she became the anchor point I was hoping for. “Cease from anger, and forsake wrath” isn’t just the sentence a fictitious character underlines in her Bible. It’s a life-enhancing and life-restoring invitation to take back the reins torn from our grasp by the perpetrators of harm. It’s an exhortation to turn our gaze from the inflictors of our pain to the promises of the One whose love bandages the most maiming of our wounds.

  I wondered—could the faith of a woman bruised in marrow-deep ways yield generational healing simply by the power of the verse she chose as her survival guide?

  I believed it could. And in my mind, it did. I envisioned Ceelie later going back to Claire’s Bible to consider the other verses Darlene’s mother had underlined—the admonishments and covenants that had given Claire’s broken life a sense of serenity and meaning.

  I like to think Ceelie found God there. And an even deeper, more lasting kind of healing.

  Discussion Questions

  The original title of the book had the word brave in it. How do you see each of the principal characters demonstrating bravery?

  What do you see in Ceelie’s thinking and decisions that are a consequence of surviving breast cancer and having a mastectomy?

  As Nate tries to repair their relationship, what does he say or do that eventually makes reconciliation possible?

  What do you see in Nate and Ceelie’s story that might have led to their estrangement even without her cancer?

  Looking back, what might have preserved Nate and Ceelie’s marriage?

  What do you think motivated Cal to abandon his family two months after getting home? And what do you think motivated him to leave his farm and return to France?

  Is Cal a hero?

  What made it possible for Lise to honestly thank Buck for fighting in WWII?

  In what way did the verse “Cease from anger, and forsake wrath” change Claire’s life?

  How can a person realistically “Cease from anger, and forsake wrath”?

  How might Darlene’s life have been different if she’d understood sooner that “the opposite of brave isn’t fear—it’s resentment”?

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p; What do you see as healing moments in Ceelie’s journey?

  How do you see Nate and Ceelie’s story playing out in the future?

  Acknowledgments

  My deepest thanks to those who breathed life into Fragments of Light.

  Those who inspired:

  A huge merci to the warm-hearted people of Normandy for rekindling my love for France, the land of my childhood. You may be its most compelling ambassadors.

  To Jean-Marie, Dany, and Flo, for reminding me of the extraordinary power of open-armed kindness. Votre amitié m’est précieuse.

  To Team Tom, for making me feel welcome despite the frantic pace of Staff Sergeant Rice’s anniversary adventures on the soil he liberated.

  To Denis, for allowing me to tag along (in a WWII command vehicle!) with Tom and members of the 101st Airborne as you retraced his D-Day steps.

  To Francine, for opening your family’s photo albums and bringing history to life as you recounted all that happened in your château in 1944.

  To ninety-two-year-old Albert, for letting this stranger hear your story and witness your tears when we met on a sidewalk in Carentan during the reenactment of its liberation.

  To The Girl Who Wore Freedom, for inviting me to be your translator as you filmed the documentary in France.

  To the American veterans and French survivors of the German occupation I met in Normandy, for the life-changing and novel-inspiring impact of looking into your faces and watching the memories dance in shadows and light in your eyes.

  To Mom, for traveling with me to the seventy-fifth commemoration of D-Day and for being just as deeply moved as I was by the people I love.

  Those who healed:

  Words are insufficient to adequately thank Drs. Steven and Noemi Sigalove for saving my life and rebuilding my future.

  Dr. Ferris, for caring for this oncology patient with uncommon compassion.

  Dr. Chang, for performing a miracle with the lymphedema surgery you pioneered.