Fragments of Light

by Michele Phoenix

  “Bravo, Lisou,” Sabine said softly.

  The girl’s exuberant smile, missing a front tooth, seemed a sharp contrast to the direness of the circumstances. Albert reentered the room and handed a bundle of clothes to Sabine without a word. Then he took the green nylon from Lise’s arms and strode out again.

  “He will bury it outside,” Sabine explained to Cal. “With your uniform and your things.”

  “No,” Cal said. “You can bury the parachute and harness, but I’m going to need my gear.”

  “We will see.”

  He reached out and grabbed her hand. “I’m going to need my uniform, my rifle, my ammunition, and my gear,” he said more forcefully.

  Sabine hesitated, then nodded imperceptibly. Her gaze glanced off her sister, who still stood in the entrance to the living room, and settled on the villagers who had been watching their interaction in silence. “But I will not endanger my people to preserve your things,” she said in a low voice. “We will hide them in a safe place until you’re strong enough to leave.”

  Sabine helped him out of his shirt and into a wrinkled beige button-down. To his surprise, she seemed to blush a little as they worked together to pull on a pair of stained work pants. It was the only time he’d seen her act her age since she’d found him in the backyard.

  Sabine handed the bundle of Cal’s clothing over to her sister with instructions.

  “Wait!” Cal said as Lise scurried toward the door.

  “I told you. She will hide it,” Sabine insisted.

  “Inside jacket pocket. Left side. There are things in there I need to keep on me.”

  She translated for her sister, and the girl took some envelopes and a small, worn picture out of the pocket he’d indicated. She handed them over, standing as far away from Cal as she could. Then she turned and ran out of the room.

  Chapter 9

  I reached for the aged picture Darlene had handed me and held it close to read the faded inscription in the margin underneath it. One word: Daddy. It was a sepia-toned snapshot of a man in a plain T-shirt and a baby girl in a lacy dress. He held her in the crook of his arm, and she looked up at him with just a hint of a smile on her face.

  “Your dad?”

  Darlene nodded. “Callum McElway. I found it in Mother’s Bible—years ago now. It was tucked into the pages.”

  I glanced at the picture again. “You haven’t talked about him.”

  “I had my reasons.”

  “Care to share them?”

  “Let’s start with this: he was a feckless husband and a deadbeat dad.” Her expression wasn’t much softer than her words. She took a deep breath and went on. “Honestly, I never knew much about him. Never wanted to. ‘Feckless’ and ‘deadbeat’ didn’t exactly fill my daddy-void, but they did make it more of a seething than a yearning thing, which felt like a less maiming condition.” She reached for the bundle of letters she’d brought and undid the ribbon that held them together. “Then I got these three years ago. Of course, I didn’t read them until just recently.”

  I took the papers she extended to me. Six envelopes. Handwritten addresses.

  “Four from Mother, Claire McElway, spanning about eighteen months,” Darlene explained. “And two from his mom, Lucy, my paternal grandmother, I guess. Sent from Missouri.”

  “Tell me what you need, Darlene.”

  She sighed. “I’m actually not sure where to start. I never knew much more than bullet points about my father. He married Mother on a whim right after they met, then shipped out to England. She found out she was pregnant a few weeks later and had me while he was still overseas. He fought in World War II, then came home when I was about six months old. A hero—that’s what Mother called him.” Darlene looked up at the ceiling for a moment, as if she was bringing the details back into focus. “He left us two months after that, so I have no memories of him except for that picture. It was in a frame on the mantel as far back as I can remember, before Mother took it down to keep it in her Bible.” She raised an eyebrow. “Charming-looking rogue, isn’t he?”

  “Agreed. Even by modern standards.” I took in the details. Dark hair. Strong jawline. Slightly hooded eyes.

  “Every so often, I’d catch her pausing by the fireplace, when she didn’t think I was looking, and laying a hand next to the picture. Like she was paying her respects or, worse, missing him.” Darlene looked at me. “It bothered me—for reasons my young mind didn’t fully understand.”

  “His eyes look . . .” I shook my head, unable to put words to the expression on Callum’s face.

  “My father was a paratrooper who dropped into France on D-Day, 1944. He came back”—Darlene made air quotes with her fingers—“a ‘troubled man.’ That’s what Mother called him. I translated ‘troubled’ to mean impulsive and irresponsible. But I had nothing to base that on.

  “I have a vague recollection of Mother trying to tell me about him. Sometimes at bedtime. Or when we went for walks in the park on Sunday afternoons. And I remember getting mad when she did. Just this deep feeling of—I don’t know—anger. Rebellion. Resentment, maybe. I didn’t want to hear about him. He’d left us, and I didn’t feel he had a right to intrude on what was left of our family anymore.”

  Darlene laughed softly and shook her head, her eyes on nothing, remembering. “I had an overdeveloped sense of justice for one so young, don’t you think?”

  “It doesn’t surprise me at all,” I said, my eyes still focused on the picture I held. Curiosity stirred in parts of my mind I hadn’t tapped into in recent months. It felt invigorating.

  “There was one day—I must have been ten or eleven. Mother had been sick for a while, in and out of the hospital with a case of pneumonia that hung on for weeks. Maybe that spooked her a bit. I remember her sitting me down and telling me that it was time for me to listen. That this man I didn’t want to hear about was part of my history and that I was the only one who’d be able to pass it on.”

  Darlene looked at me with a bit of sheepishness. “I yelled at her to be quiet. Can you imagine? In that era, for a child—a daughter—to behave that way toward her mother. I remember her looking shocked. Tears in her eyes. But they sure didn’t keep me from screaming that I hated the man in the picture and that I never wanted to hear about him ever again.” Darlene took a deep breath and blew it out. “Overdeveloped sense of justice—underdeveloped sense of compassion.

  “Mother cried, but I didn’t care. We’d been through so much—so much. Living hand-to-mouth and putting up with the stigma of being a single mother. If my father had died in the war, we’d have been deserving of kindness and compassion. But my father had walked out, and that was an entirely different scenario in those days. That’s why I started telling my school friends that he’d been killed fighting the Nazis. Darn well convinced myself that was fact too, for a while.”

  She paused for so long that I had to prompt her to go on. “Darlene?”

  She smiled a bit wistfully in my direction, as if coming back to the present, and continued. “You may have figured out by now that I was a bit of a dramatic soul, even then. So—that night Mother was so intent on talking about Dear Old Dad? I grabbed his picture off the mantel and tossed it in the fireplace. There was no fire in it, mind you, which took the wind out of the sails of my grand gesture, but it still felt good to hear the frame’s glass break. Then I stormed upstairs and yelled a few more things through my bedroom door. None worth repeating.”

  “So what you’re telling me is that you were a compliant, quiet child.”

  My friend smiled a bit sadly. “When my mom tried to talk it out later that evening—still crying—I told her that I never wanted to hear about my father again. I put all the venom I could muster into calling him a ‘mean man,’ which isn’t exactly stinging repartee, but felt satisfying to my abandoned-little-girl heart. The picture never went back on the mantel after that.”

  There was a fine sheen of perspiration on Darlene’s face, something that had become more common
since she’d started the immunotherapy she was taking. She patted the sweat away with thin, shaking fingers. “I suspect that’s when it found its way into the pages of Mother’s Bible.”

  I looked at the picture again—focusing on the man’s posture and expression. There was nothing that indicated “trouble,” except maybe for the tentativeness of the smile he directed toward his daughter.

  Darlene reached for the snapshot and held it up to the light coming in the window across from the couch. “I already knew he was a soldier, and those letters you’re holding tell me he trained for a long time to fight in Normandy.” She pursed her lips and frowned. “Then he came home, tried the husband-and-father thing, and I guess he decided that he wasn’t much for domesticity and nurture. That’s what I’ve told myself all these years. Fatherhood must have been boring to him after fighting the bad guys, so he took off. Mother said he loved me. I remember that much. Mostly because it exasperated me. But she also said he didn’t leave a note or any explanation when he took off. So much for love, right?”

  I struggled to form a precise picture of Darlene’s story from the scattered details I was hearing. “She never tried to track him down?”

  Darlene shrugged. “Not to my knowledge. Those were different times.”

  “You never asked her for more information—even when you got older?”

  “I think I’ve established that I hated the man sight unseen. Hate is one of those stubborn forces that time can’t always soften. Mortality, on the other hand . . .”

  Darlene’s dire reality seeped into the moment. “So that’s why you’re digging into this now. Because you’re sick again?”

  “Still,” she corrected. “Because I’m still sick. And because of those.” She pointed to the letters on my lap. “They’re so full of . . . This is going to sound corny, but they make him sound kind. Committed. A far cry from the scenarios I conjured up over the years. Besides, as Mother said back when she was fighting pneumonia, I’m the only one who can pass on that part of the family’s story and, well, the vultures are circling.”

  I moved across the room to sit next to my friend. I took her hand and clasped it firmly between both of mine. “I love that you’re doing this, Darlene,” I said. “It shows courage. And I think the timing’s just right.”

  “Pshaw.”

  Something struck me. “His mother—your grandmother,” I said, remembering Lucy McElway’s name on the return address of two of the envelopes. “Surely she would have wanted to keep in touch with her granddaughter even after your father left.”

  Darlene nodded. “My thoughts exactly. There may be five hundred or so miles between here and her place in Missouri, but wouldn’t a first-time grandmother have found a way to make the trip at some point, regardless of her son’s involvement? It’s a mystery I could have cleared up three years ago, when I got the letters Mother sent to him. But I was still too stubborn to look at the dang things. I just stuffed them in a box with other odds and ends and tried to forget they existed.”

  She reached for an envelope, gingerly parting the edges to pull out what was inside. A smaller, yellowed piece of paper slid onto the floor as Darlene unfolded one of the letters her mom had written to Callum. She wiggled her finger for me to retrieve it and found the passage she wanted to read.

  “‘We’ve received a few pieces of mail for you, Cal.’ This is my mother writing to her man,” Darlene explained as an aside. “‘I’m enclosing a letter from a Rhoda Bishop, of Kinley, that arrived just yesterday. Darling, I’m sorry. I know this will come as a shock to you. From all you’ve said of your mother, I know you loved her dearly, and to lose her while you’re still so very far away . . . I had hoped to introduce her to our baby when you returned, on that trip to your hometown that we’ve dreamed of together. My heart aches for you, my love, and for all that will not be. I know your mother died loving you as much as you loved her.’”

  Darlene lowered the letter and looked at me, an eyebrow raised. “So she died while he was deployed.”

  “February 22, 1944,” I read from the faded obituary cut out of a newspaper. “‘Survived by her son, Callum Ian McElway, and predeceased by her husband, Callum Lorne McElway.’”

  I handed the obituary back to Darlene and watched her insert the two items back into the envelope. “That doesn’t leave a whole lot of loose ends, does it.”

  She pursed her lips for a moment. “It certainly doesn’t.”

  “Darlene,” I said, realizing I hadn’t asked an obvious question. “How did you get these letters?” I looked through the envelopes again, fascinated by the neat penmanship and their survival all these years.

  “That, my dear, is where fate comes in,” she said, energy replacing the contemplation that had softened her voice. “Or dumb luck. Destiny. God. Whatever you want to call it.” She adjusted her position on the couch and the grimace she tried to hide reminded me again of the grim news she’d been given. “It started with a call from this woman in Normandy,” Darlene began, launching into a tale that took a few minutes to unfold. The woman worked for La Belle Génération, a French nonprofit devoted to flying D-Day survivors back to the place where they’d contributed to freeing Europe. “She called me out of the blue three years ago and asked if a Claire McElway still lived at my address. I told her Claire McElway had died a couple decades ago, but that I was her daughter and this had been her home. She told me her name was Maribeth and that she had in her possession letters written by Claire McElway to a certain Callum McElway back in 1944. That got my attention.”

  Maribeth had explained to Darlene that they’d been found in an historic building in a small Norman village during a renovation project. Workers replacing damaged parquet boards had discovered the letters hidden under the floor.

  “And this woman, Maribeth, sent them to you?” I asked, the mystery quickening my senses.

  Darlene nodded. “First, she asked me if my father was still alive. When I told her I sincerely didn’t know, she asked if I’d like to have the letters and if she could help me do some research to try to track him down. Initially, I said no to both. I’d long ago accepted not knowing the coldhearted man I imagined my dearly departed father to be. And the chances of him still being alive all these years later? Slim to none. But then I recalled my mom’s words about my responsibility to preserve our family’s history, as unappealing as it may be. That’s what changed my mind.”

  “So she sent you the letters.”

  “Yes. But no research. That’s what I told her. I’d let her know if a day came when I wanted to know more.”

  Darlene sighed. She closed her eyes for a moment, as if reliving the deliberations that had brought her to this point. “When I first got them, I just stashed them away. But it turns out the third go-round with cancer can make a person take stock. So I got them out of the old shoebox a couple months ago. I was drawn in by Mother’s words—the way she spoke of their relationship. I may never know what happened after the war, but what came before certainly felt real, the way she told it. I didn’t even read the letters from Lucy until just a couple weeks ago—probably because I was scared my grandmother’s words would make me feel sorry for the old deadbeat dad.”

  She smiled in a way that made me think her opinion had started to change. “I was what you’d call reluctantly intrigued. So I used my legendary technological skills and tried to sign up for one of those online ancestry services, but they lost me at ‘Please pick a username.’ Then I emailed my old friend Maribeth, who it turns out had gone ahead and done a little search of her own back when she found me, and she informed me that Cal’s military records went up in smoke in some big fire in Saint Louis in the seventies.

  “So I called up Kinley, Missouri’s post office, since it’s on my grandmother’s return address. I was hoping somebody there could tell me if any McElways were still around.”

  “It’s almost like you wanted to learn more about your dad, Darlene,” I teased.

  She rolled her eyes at me. “That
immunotherapy treatment must be making me soft.”

  “What did you find out?”

  “Well, a lovely lady informed me that there are no longer any McElways registered there. And then she refused to tell me anything else—confidentiality or whatever. So I turned my attention to obituaries, which, granted, isn’t the most optimistic approach to locating the missing. Found lots of McElways. One Callum Lorne from Kinley, in fact—my grandfather, it turns out—but no Callum Ians.” Her eyes got a bit wider and she repeated, “No obits for a Callum Ian, Ceelie. Not anywhere on the Googlewebs.”

  I felt myself frown as I considered the possibilities. “Wait . . . you don’t think—” It seemed inconceivable. “You don’t think Callum McElway could still be alive somewhere?”

  She hunched a shoulder in a nonchalant way, but there was intensity, even excitement in her eyes. “Maybe. He’d be well into his nineties, but . . . maybe?”

  Something childlike came over her face. Something expectant and uncertain. “So I’m thinking . . .” Her voice trailed off. She shook her head and seemed to search for her next words. “Ceelie, if he’s still alive and I could meet him, if I could figure out who he really was—who he really is—before I . . .” She squared her shoulders and fixed a determined gaze on me. “I’ve been angry at him my entire life. Even when I was thriving, there was this deep-down acid that bubbled under the surface every time I thought of him. I want to die acid-free. And I want to honor my mother by doing so.” She raised an eyebrow. “Seems like a worthy last wish, right?”

  I looked from her face to the yellowed vestiges of a bygone era still in my hand and felt curiosity and compassion stir. “What can I do?”

  She pointed at the letters and said, “You told me you started out wanting to be an investigative journalist. Well, I want you to keep these letters. Give them a look. And if you’re still game once you’ve had time to think it through—I’d like you to consider launching a search for a World War II veteran by the name of Callum Ian McElway.”