Fragments of Light

by Michele Phoenix

  Dedication

  For Tom Rice—WWII veteran and first-person historian.

  Thank you for embodying the valor and humanity of those who fought for freedom on one of history’s darkest and brightest days.

  For Deb—my fellow fighter and friend.

  Thank you for praying peace over me on the night I learned I had cancer and for waging your own battle with the grace, joy, and faith that are your defining traits.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part 1 Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Part 2 Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Epilogue

  A Note from the Author

  Discussion Questions

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Advance Praise for Fragments of Light

  Also by Michèle Phoenix

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Aubry-en-Douve

  June 6, 1944

  I was dreaming about carousels the night the sky got loud. Like the one Sabine drew for me that time I asked her what a fair was like. The white wooden horses with brown manes and gold saddles looked like they were running, but she told me it was just the carousel turning. I’d never seen one for real before, but Sabine was seven years older than me and she could remember things from before the Germans came.

  “We’ll see one soon, Lise,” Papa had promised me. When I asked him how soon, he’d kind of hunched a shoulder. Then he’d leaned in and touched my hair like you pet a dog. “Maybe really soon.” His voice had the fairy-tale softness I liked.

  I believed him that day, but I didn’t believe him anymore after a lot of months went by and the Germans were still in the village down the road. And I guess I really stopped believing I would ever see a carousel on the day I turned six and the gendarmes took Papa away. Two policemen and a German soldier rode up to our cart on their black bicycles when we were in the village trading leeks for beans. Papa got pale when they asked for his name. They accused him of being in the résistance and he told them that it wasn’t him, but the big policeman said someone had seen Papa talking with people in the cemetery after curfew. He yelled at Papa that he was a traitor and that the only place for traitors was Hitler’s camps in Germany. He was smiling and sweating when he looked at the people standing around us, like he wanted to make sure they were paying attention.

  The gendarmes handcuffed Papa’s hands behind his back while the German officer watched. Sabine and I didn’t know what to do. Old Albert was standing behind us and I could hear him growling really low. He took a couple steps toward the policemen, but Papa told him to stop. “Albert, non.” He said it really sharp, like when he’d tell the dogs to be quiet.

  Albert stepped back and put a hand on my shoulder. I heard him whisper to Sabine that she should take me home, but we didn’t want to leave Papa. He kept repeating that he was innocent, that they couldn’t take him away. It was just the three of us since Mum had died and we needed him at home. That’s what he told the gendarmes. When the German barked something at them and pointed his chin down the road, Papa started to scream, but they didn’t seem to hear him even then. The gendarmes were French like us, but he called them boches anyway, the word we were never supposed to say around them.

  I ran to Papa before Albert could stop me. I squeezed him tight around his waist and begged him not to leave, like I could keep him with us if I just hung on long enough. The German yelled something again and I felt Albert’s hands on my arms. He kept saying that I needed to let go. There was something shaky in his voice. It scared me so much that I didn’t fight him when he dragged me back to my sister.

  Sabine grabbed me and I could feel her arms trembling around me. She pleaded with the gendarmes to change their minds. She said we needed Papa with us, since Albert was so old and our farm was so big. She kept saying that they had the wrong person and he wasn’t a résistant. She looked around at the villagers like she wanted them to help, but they just looked away or stepped back.

  “I beg of you,” she said to the biggest gendarme, tears on her face.

  He didn’t answer her. Instead, he grabbed Papa and turned him around toward our village friends. “Be warned,” he shouted. “This is what happens to traitors!”

  Papa’s face was white and hard as he passed in front of us, with the two gendarmes and the German soldier pushing their bikes behind him. But there was something sad and scared in his eyes. “Prends soin d’eux,” he said to Albert. Take care of them. Albert nodded and stepped in front of me when I tried to follow Papa down the road.

  We didn’t say anything on the way home. Sabine went to the kitchen and sat at the table. Albert stood in the doorway like he didn’t know what to do. I went to my sister and leaned in so she had to look at me, and I asked her when Papa would be coming home. She just closed her eyes. I asked her again when we were making stew from the green beans we’d gotten in the village and the rabbit Albert had trapped. She still didn’t answer. I probably asked the same question a hundred more times that same afternoon, louder and louder. And at the end of the day, when I asked Sabine again before going to bed, I saw red blotches spreading on her neck. She slapped my face and told me to just . . . stop . . . asking.

  Then she looked really surprised and stared at her hand for a minute. I didn’t know what to do, so I just stood there until she said, “I’m sorry. Lisou, I’m sorry.”

  Her voice was sharp and hoarse at the same time, but when she used my special name, I knew she wasn’t really mad at me. She kissed my cheek where the skin still stung. She kissed it lots and said she was sorry again. Then she held me away from her and looked hard at my face. Her grip on my arms felt really tight.

  “We’re going to be fine.” I could tell she was talking to herself. She squinted her eyes shut for a long time, then she blew out a breath and her lips trembled like a loose rubber band. “The German work camps . . .” She shook her head and I could see tears teetering on her eyelashes. “I don’t know when Papa is coming home.” She covered her face with her apron, the one Mum used to wear, with the square pocket and the daffodils. I could see her shoulders shaking.

  Albert was old but he was strong. He kept the farm going after Papa went away, even after the Germans moved in, maybe two months later. They turned up with their horses and one fancy car and told us they were going to live with us. Albert said they should go back to the village and leave us alone.

  They beat him up bad.

  So we moved out of the upstairs bedrooms and into the apartment off the kitchen, where Aunt Sophie used to live.

  On the night the sky rumbled, I could barely hear the Germans’ boots running down the steps and out the front door. It was so loud, it felt like it was coming from underneath th
e ground. I sat up and looked around. The shutters were closed, but something orange shining around the slats made shadow-ladders on my wall.

  I tiptoed to the window. Normally the air would smell like dew and Mum’s lilacs and manure and ocean salt. But it just smelled like shooting that night. I could hear the big guns going off again and again in the battery the Germans had set up in a field behind my friend Lucien’s house.

  I undid the latch that kept the shutters closed. Then I poked a finger into the opening to make the crack just big enough to look through if I tilted my head sideways.

  The sky was bright over by the beach where we used to go before they took Papa away. There were all kinds of reds and yellows, and a glow on the ground like bonfires burning. I stepped back from the window and shook my head to make sure I was awake. Then I pinched the skin on the inside of my elbow just to be really sure.

  The rumbling was getting so loud that the floor shook under my feet. I peeked through the crack again and looked up, way up past the tip of the roof. It looked like a thousand giant, black trout swimming in the sky. It was so much like magic that I didn’t really hear the booming coming from the village anymore.

  “Lise!” Sabine was standing in my doorway when I turned around. “Come—come quickly,” she said, motioning for me to hurry up.

  I grabbed my blanket from the bed and my tiger too. He was ratty and nearly bald and one of his eyes had popped off a long time ago, but I knew where we were going and it felt safer when he was there with me.

  My sister took me under her arm and steered me down the stairs toward the kitchen.

  I asked her, “Did you see the planes?”

  “It’s the Allies,” she told me as she took a lantern from a high shelf and lit the wick. She tried to smile but didn’t quite manage. “They’re coming to help us.”

  All of a sudden Albert was there too. He yanked hard on the metal bolt that kept the door to the root cellar closed.

  “Are you going to hide with us?”

  He shook his head, pulled the heavy wooden door open, and motioned for us to go down the three steps into the cellar. “I’m going to watch for the Americans.” He grumbled it like he wasn’t scared at all. “They’ll need to know where the Germans are.”

  “Be safe,” Sabine whispered. She stared at him, then she pulled the door closed.

  I didn’t like the cellar. Even though it was carved out of a dirt bank on the back side of the house and wasn’t really underground, it still made me feel like I couldn’t breathe right. Albert had lined the walls with bushels of twigs when the Germans weren’t watching. “It’ll keep the bullets and shrapnel out,” he said. But on nights like this, it didn’t feel like anything would keep the shooting from getting to us.

  I went over to the stack of potato bags on the side wall and sat down. The crates on the dirt ledge above me were empty, but I still kind of remembered when they’d been filled with apples and carrots and potatoes.

  Sabine rattled the bolt into place, the one Papa had put on the inside of the cellar door. Then she turned toward me. I thought she looked frightened, but I could see something strong on her face too. Maybe even something happy, like when you know you’re going to have the deer Albert found in the woods for supper, but you can’t let the Germans know.

  An explosion rattled the empty jars in the basket on the ground next to me. I wondered if a bomb had fallen on someone I knew in the village ten minutes down the road. Like Lucien and his family. They didn’t have a cellar like we did.

  Sabine jumped a little at the noise and put a hand on her chest. “They won’t bomb us,” she said. “They’re after the battery and we’re too far away. They won’t try to hit us.”

  She looked at my face, then came over to sit down beside me. She wrapped an arm around my shoulders and kissed the top of my head. I looked up at her and got worried when I saw the look in her eyes.

  “Are we going to die?” I hadn’t meant to ask the question out loud.

  Sabine took a deep breath and let it out, loud and long. “No,” she said like she was still trying to believe it. “No, we are not going to die.”

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  Winfield, IL

  Modern Day

  I woke to the sound of beeping and whirring machines. Faint pink light stole around the blinds spanning the huge window that looked out over a horseshoe-shaped courtyard, its terraced vegetation manicured to appear natural and wild. I felt the inflatable wraps on my legs fill with air and press my calves, as they had every few minutes during the night.

  I’d woken each time, a bit disoriented by the “good stuff” still feeding into my veins from the IV pole next to my bed, and looked around the room, as I was now, trying to get my bearings. The night nurse’s name on the whiteboard. The remote on the mattress next to my right hand. The bathroom door just far enough away to remind me of my post-op weakness.

  It felt like there was a weight on my chest. Inside it. Around it. The zip-up garment keeping everything—whatever was left—in place felt both stabilizing and stifling. I pulled the blanket back a little and looked down, taking in the two drains extending from each side of my rib cage and the unfamiliar flatness. Every glance since I’d woken from surgery had been preceded by fear and followed by a strange sense of relief and lostness. Relief that it was over. That my shower-time grieving was done and the operation that would alter my life—in ways I still couldn’t fully understand—was no longer something lurking in the future.

  And lostness. The destabilizing sense that I’d been changed in subtle and overwhelming ways during those five hours in the operating room. There was a deep-rooted disquiet too—the kind that hums on the edge of consciousness, whispering, “You’ll find out” in a tone that is both threat and promise.

  I pushed myself up farther against the inclined mattress, winced at the discomfort in my pectoral muscles, and opted for an ungraceful scoot instead. My legs and glutes still functioned well, but everything above my waist felt pummeled and encased.

  I sighed. Closed my eyes. Breathed as deeply as I could without pain.

  “Are you sleeping or picturing yourself in a bikini on a Hawaiian beach?”

  A head of teased-high, pink-tipped gray hair poked around my hospital room’s door.

  “If it’s the latter . . . honey, dream away. I’ll come back some other time.” Darlene’s stage whisper held a smile—the kind that borders on outright laughter. It wasn’t just a tone of voice for her. It was the way she lived her life.

  She made a production of quietly closing the door and tiptoed toward the bed. “Don’t tell the nurses I snuck in!”

  I glanced at the digital clock mounted on the wall next to the TV. “What are you doing out and about before seven a.m.?”

  “Got my Zumba in a bit, but wanted to see how you fared overnight first. Besides,” she added, waving away her rule breaking with a slim hand, “the nurses know me. They wouldn’t kick out the human equivalent of a therapy dog.”

  She winked and pulled the computer stool closer to my bed. Her white sneakers squeaked on the linoleum floor as she turned to perch her tiny frame on the seat. Her peekaboo leggings and figure-hugging Nike shirt likely hadn’t been designed with a seventy-six-year-old woman in mind, but they looked—in all their sparkly pink-and-gray splendor—as if they’d been custom-made for Darlene.

  She glanced at the drains extending from my sides, then looked up at my face, lips twisted in disapproval. “I’ll gladly donate my entire estate to the inventor who can make those tubes obsolete.”

  I tried to smile. “How about you donate it to someone who can make the surgery itself obsolete?”

  She sighed and tilted her head to the side, taking a good look at my face. I saw her features soften as she leaned in to touch my arm—firm, but gentle. “Tell me how you’re feeling, Ceelie.”

  Darlene had ushered something that felt like confidence into Room 268 on the post-op floor of Central DuPage Hospital. Survivors carri
ed that with them, I’d found—the aura of possibility and overcoming. It’s what had first drawn me to her when we’d met in the waiting room of the Breast Health Center downstairs nine weeks earlier, both of us wrapped in pilling cotton robes, enveloped by muted colors, soft lighting, and barely audible elevator music.

  She’d been sitting by the coffee station when the nurse led me in and left me with, “I’ll come back for you once the doctor’s had a chance to look at your images.”

  “That’s code for ‘Just sit here and stare at a magazine page you’re not really reading while we figure out if you should be worried or not,’” Darlene whispered.

  I lowered the Vanity Fair I’d just picked up and looked across the waiting room at the petite woman with the cotton-candy hair and vibrant, almost indigo eyes. Her makeup was the epitome of 1980s chic—all purples and blues and stark lines. Her skin showed her age, but her eyes belied it.

  “Not your first rodeo?” I asked, tamping down the nervousness that always—despite my positive self-talk—seemed to overwhelm me on these yearly visits.

  “The nurses are on my Christmas card list. Does that answer your question?”

  My smile felt less strained this time. “Every year—every year—I tell myself that it’s just a routine check,” I said, letting some of my anxiety show, “and that millions of women go through this without anything bad coming of it, but still . . .” I shook my head. “I sit in this room that’s clearly designed for optimism and calm, and it’s all I can do not to write an obituary in my mind.”

  Darlene laughed and pointed at the speakers in the corners. “You think Elton John knew that his watered down Muzak would be the backdrop to so much mammography angst?” She extended her hand as she moved to the chair next to mine and said, “Darlene Egerton.” I felt a weight lift. There was something humanizing about sharing names.

  “Cecelia—Ceelie—Donovan.”