Fragments of Light

by Michele Phoenix

  I nodded.

  “But I’ve got to tell you that what he did yesterday doesn’t look like weakness to me. It looks like a whole heck of a lot of courage.”

  Her statement didn’t sit well with me, so I let it drop and tried to steer the conversation away from Nate. I looked at my seventy-six-year old friend on the bed next to mine and marveled at the recovery she’d made since the mini-stroke that had temporarily short-circuited her brain. “How much do you remember of your TIA, Darlene?”

  “Not much,” she answered, squinting as she tried to recall the details. “I remember reading the letter and . . . I guess that’s it. Lights out. Next thing I recall is that handsome doctor shining something in my eyes.”

  I sat up and faced her, cross-legged on my bed. “Darlene, right before you started losing your speech and orientation, you got angry. I mean, really angry. You don’t remember it?”

  “Who was I angry at?” she asked, confused.

  “Your father. And your language got . . .”

  She raised an eyebrow at me. “Not Sunday school worthy, I presume.”

  “You sounded so hateful, Darlene. I actually wondered if the emotions caused the stroke. It just didn’t seem like you.”

  Darlene’s eyes had a faraway look. After a while, she nodded and said, “Some of it is coming back.” She pushed herself up and frowned, looking down and away. “Mostly I remember the—what’s the word for it? The rage, I guess.”

  “There was plenty of that.”

  “I remember what it felt like,” she said. “This burning feeling in the pit of my stomach. The same kind of thing I remember from all those times Mother tried to talk about my father with me. This boiling-up rage.” Her eyes widened. “I did say some choice words, didn’t I?”

  I smiled. “You did.”

  “Do you know how often my mom had to wash my mouth with soap when I had my daddy episodes?”

  I considered all that had happened in the hours preceding Darlene’s seizure. “You had every reason to be upset yesterday. Yes, we found a few treasures, and yes, that letter seemed to indicate that your dad did love and want you . . . but that little girl Cal McElway wounded still hasn’t gotten any answers that explain his departure.”

  Her eyes moved to the bedside table, where the crumpled-up letter I’d retrieved from Lucy’s nightstand lay. Something vulnerable and sad came over Darlene’s face as a hand fluttered to her chest. “Maybe it wasn’t the stroke speaking. Maybe . . .” She hesitated. “Maybe that was the real me.”

  “Darlene. Of all the traits that define you—”

  “But it’s in there, Ceelie. All that anger under this cotton candy hair,” she said, frowning. “It may not define me, but it sure has motivated me.”

  “And yet you launched into this hunt for your father. At a time when you should have been sitting back and taking care of yourself, you set off to parts unknown in the hope of uncovering something about the man who gave you life. That doesn’t sound like anger, Darlene.”

  She blinked away tears and reached for the letter, smoothing it out with her hand. “After seventy-six years of doing nothing. Asking no questions. Refusing to entertain the idea that the man was anything more than—” She stopped herself and a rueful, disappointed smile softened her features. “Whoever said ‘better late than never’ hasn’t walked in my shoes.”

  Chapter 25

  We drove up to Darlene’s retirement home midafternoon and saw Justin’s Explorer in the parking lot outside. Once we’d unloaded her things and installed her in her favorite spot on the couch, Justin sat on a footstool across from his mother and took her hand in his.

  “Is this the part where you tell me that you love me but my whims are killing you?” she asked before he’d had the chance to get a word out.

  He rolled his eyes. It seemed to be a family trait. “This is the part where I ask you how you’re feeling.”

  “I’m fine.”

  He stood and reached for his coat. “Good, then I’ll head back to Wisconsin.”

  Darlene laughed. “Oh, stop being dramatic and sit yourself back down,” she said, waving for him to come back to his perch on the footstool.

  Justin winked at me. “Manipulation works both ways,” he said, dropping his coat back on the edge of a chair and returning to his mother’s side. “Now—tell me what’s been going on, Mom.”

  I edged toward the door. The trip had been taxing, and Justin deserved some time alone with the woman who’d declined to inform him of her plans and suffered a medical emergency while she was away.

  “Do you really think I’m so far gone that I don’t see you slinking toward the exit?” Darlene asked, her hand on Justin’s arm to pause their conversation.

  “I just thought you and Justin might—”

  “Nonsense. You were a coconspirator in the whole thing. Might as well stick around for his lecture about going on a road trip with stage four cancer.”

  Justin flinched a little at the bluntness of her words. “No lecture,” he said to her before turning to me. “And I’d love for you to stay. Not as a coconspirator, but as one of Mom’s friends. I brought some things along that you might be interested in too.”

  Darlene’s eyes lit up. “That binder you talked about?”

  “When you were in the hospital in Missouri suffering from a mini-stroke on a trip you deliberately hid from me so I wouldn’t stand in your way? Yes. That’s the binder I’m talking about.”

  Darlene patted his hand and shook her head in my direction. “One of Justin’s gifts is embedding recriminations in perfectly civil conversation so you’re never fully aware that you’re being sermonized.”

  I moved to a chair across from the couch and sat. Everything in me wanted to go home, crawl into bed, and sleep off the stress of the last three days. I’d been aware before our departure that I hadn’t fully regained my pre-cancer energy and endurance, but I had counted on taking things slowly for Darlene’s sake. Her emergency had undone all that. I felt weary to the point of tears.

  But Justin had information about Cal and, for reasons I still couldn’t quite understand, learning the veteran’s fate had become paramount to me.

  A few minutes later, we all had cups of tea and Justin reached into his backpack for a green, three-ring binder.

  “How long have you had that, son?” Darlene asked.

  “My whole adult life. Which you spent telling me to shut up about Grandpa,” he added when his mom opened her mouth to protest.

  I smiled at the love hovering like sun flares over their banter. Darlene made a face but stayed silent while Justin opened the binder.

  “Thankfully for both of us, Nana was a lot less hostile to the idea of talking about Cal McElway than you were when I was growing up.” He frowned. “I’m not exactly sure when he became such a big piece of our relationship, but it felt like something special she and I shared. I heard some of the stories so many times that I could write them down nearly verbatim by the time I started compiling this collection.”

  “And when was that?” Darlene asked, mock-offended to have been left out of the bonding.

  “College. I took a history class that dove pretty deep into Operation Overlord. It made the Normandy invasion feel like more than just family lore. Then Nana died and . . . I guess I decided that I needed to document what I knew of The Man Who Shall Not Be Named while I still remembered most of the details.”

  He opened the binder’s clip and took a few pages from the top. “Here’s a letter that came in . . . July 1944, so just a few weeks after Cal came back.” He skimmed the letter and read a portion out loud. “‘I am directed to inform you that you are entitled to a Purple Heart in the name of the president of the United States and the secretary of the army for an injury sustained in action against an enemy of the United States on June 7, 1944. The medal is being forwarded to you under separate cover. Sincerely yours,’ yadda, yadda.”

  Justin handed the letter to Darlene, then took another from the binder.


  “And this one,” he went on, “informs dear old granddad that he’d also be getting a Silver Star.” He held it away from him and squinted at the faded ink. “‘Private First Class Callum Ian McElway, 506th PIR. You have been awarded the Silver Star for gallantry in action. Please accept my sincere congratulations on your heroic actions. You have upheld the high standing of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment without thought of your personal safety. It is the character and courage of men like you that make the United States Army the powerful fighting machine that it is. You will receive your medal at an appropriate ceremony in the near future.’”

  Darlene’s head was up. Her eyes were wide. “Wait, wait, wait, son. You’re running through this like you’ve known it all your life—which you have. But give a dying woman a moment to take it in.” She looked at Justin, eyebrows drawn together in concentration. “So he was injured. I know that’s why they sent him home. How? Where?”

  “Bullet through the right arm. Tore things up pretty bad. Broken ankle. Broken ribs. Concussion. Nana never knew how or where it happened.”

  “And the Purple Heart he got for his injuries—where is it now?”

  “Framed on my bedroom wall at home,” Justin said with a sheepish grin. “It was one of the items Nana kept in a shoebox in her closet all those years—along with the framed picture she said you made her take down.”

  Darlene pursed her lips. “We’ll get back to that later,” she said before turning her attention to me. “You—what do we know now that we didn’t before?”

  I laughed. “Okay then.” I reached for the letter Justin was still holding. The folds in the yellowed paper had begun to tear and the ink was faded, but its contents were pure gold. “Well, we know from this that he was a private first class in the 506th and that he earned two medals.” I looked at Justin. “The Silver Star is for . . . ?”

  “Acts of gallantry. Something he did that was above and beyond the call, in service of others. Usually demonstrating extraordinary courage.”

  “A big deal, in other words,” Darlene said. The conflicted expression I’d come to recognize descended over her face again.

  “Are you okay to go on?” I asked, fearing a repeat of what we’d been through in Hannibal.

  “I’m fine.”

  She seemed okay, so I nodded at Justin to continue.

  “It’s a pretty high honor,” he said.

  “And is that one framed on the wall of your boudoir too?” Darlene asked her son.

  He laughed. “What, am I a seventeenth-century courtesan now? And no, it isn’t. It’s in my office.”

  Darlene threw up her hands and mock-glared at him.

  “The medal itself actually came in the mail right before Cal left, along with a citation outlining why he was receiving it. Nana said he’d refused to attend any kind of ceremony, so the US Postal Service did the honors.” He flipped to the last page of the documents in the binder and removed a piece of paper in a clear plastic sleeve. “This is where things get murkier,” he said, handing it to Darlene. She took one look at it and handed it on to me. It was the top part of a letter addressed to Callum Ian McElway.

  The document was marked confidential and had “Award of the Silver Star Medal” written across the top of the page.

  Only three more lines of text were legible above the charred edges of the partially burned paper. I read them out loud for Darlene. “‘Callum McElway, private first class. For gallantry in action on June 7, 1944, eight miles west of Sainte-Marie-du-Mont. PFC McElway, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, with complete disregard for his own safety, in an effort to spare . . .’”

  I looked up. “The rest is gone.”

  Justin nodded. “Nana found it in the AGA—that’s what she called her wood-burning oven—a couple days after he disappeared.”

  “Abandoned us,” Darlene corrected him.

  “I’m sure that’s what it felt like,” he conceded. He flipped through the rest of the pages in the binder. “As I told you on the phone, the rest of his records went up in smoke too—in the Missouri fire. Nana and I did our best to find out more, but . . . well, that was nearly forty years ago—we were dealing with microfiche, not Google. When I was compiling this stuff, just out of college, I called around to find out if there was any trace of him in veterans records, but that was a dead end. And then . . . life happened. I got busy and didn’t try again. So the rest of the documents in here are transcripts of Nana’s personal accounts, plus printouts of D-Day stories that piqued our interest.”

  “You were a good grandson to her,” Darlene said.

  “She was a pretty fantastic grandmother too.”

  “Even if she did go off on covert library operations without informing your mother of what you were really doing.”

  He seemed to be remembering their time together. “Every so often we’d be looking at WWII articles, and she’d say, ‘That sounds like my Cal.’ So we’d print out the pages and she’d retell the story with him as the lead—this grand, romantic warrior risking his life for the sake of others.”

  He glanced at his mom. “She never said one negative thing about him. In all those conversations. In her mind, he was still a hero and an honorable man. I realize that’s not the way you’ve pictured him.”

  Darlene frowned and took the charred paper from me. “How could a man be selfless enough to earn a Silver Star and heartless enough to . . . ?”

  Justin nodded and pinched his lips together for a moment. “Walk out on his wife and daughter?”

  “A daughter, we know from Lucy’s letter, that he loved,” I said.

  Darlene considered my words for a moment before saying, “Correct.”

  “I’m sorry, Mom. I wish I knew more.”

  She sighed. “Part of me wonders if it would be easier to just keep seeing him as a monster. Keep it nice and tidy in my mind.” She motioned toward the letters and the binder. “All this . . . honor stuff. It just frustrates the heck out of a little girl who spent her lifetime convinced the man was a good-for-nothing—”

  “Don’t say it, Mom.” Mother and son exchanged a small smile.

  “I should have been the one listening to her stories,” Darlene said after a moment. She shook her head. “I was so determined to blame him that I shut her down. Every time she mentioned his name, I shut the poor woman down.”

  “I think she understood,” Justin said softly. “And honestly, Mom, I’m confident she made sure I knew her stories so I’d be able to pass them on to you when you were ready.”

  Darlene sat back and fiddled with her wedding ring. It turned loosely on her finger, reminding me that this woman absorbing information she’d resisted most of her life was fighting a battle she wouldn’t be able to win.

  But behind the fatigue and regret in her eyes, I saw a steely resolve. To ask more. To know more. To extend understanding to her mother even though it came years after she’d died.

  “Do you want to take a break, Darlene?” I asked.

  She looked at me with troubled eyes, then turned to Justin with a weary smile. “What else did she remember about him?” she said, wincing a little as she shifted her position on the couch. “And maybe just give me the bullet points for now. This ingrate daughter is ready for a nap.”

  “Wounded,” I corrected. “This wounded daughter.”

  She nodded at that and motioned for Justin to go on.

  “She loved him,” he said.

  “You’re such a romantic.”

  “Mom—she loved him. Every time she spoke about him, there was something nostalgic about it. I kept looking for resentment or frustration. But it’s like she knew that whatever drove him away was too big for him to handle.”

  Darlene frowned, but it looked more like curiosity than frustration. “They met in Chicago, right?”

  Justin seemed surprised. “So you do know something about them.”

  “Cal was part of Mother’s story too. Some of it I had to hear if I was going to know my mom.”

/>   “They did meet in Chicago. He’d come up from Fort Benning on his last hurrah a few weeks before heading overseas and she was working at the Amertorp factory in Forest Park at the time. Doing her part for the war effort at age eighteen by making torpedoes, while he was preparing to deploy at age nineteen.

  “The way she told it, they met at the Servicemen’s Center downtown one Saturday evening—this huge place on Michigan Avenue that could hold twenty thousand people at a time. It was a thing of legend in the military, and soldiers came hundreds of miles just to hang out there and drink, or dance with pretty girls while a big band played.”

  “Enter Claire Asbury.” There was something soft in Darlene’s gaze.

  “Claire meets Cal,” Justin said. “They dance. She finds out he’s shipping out. They spend the next two evenings together—they’re both smitten. He asks her to marry him before he takes off and she amazingly says yes.” He smirked a bit sadly. “Your basic ‘boy meets girl, boy marries girl, boy goes to war, earns a Silver Star, comes home to a daughter he’s never met, and disappears three months later’ story.”

  I looked over at Darlene and saw a pallor to her skin that hadn’t been there a few minutes before.

  “Time for that nap?” I asked her.

  She looked at her son. “Do you mind?”

  “You should have taken it before I launched into the convoluted history of Cal McElway,” he said.

  I got up and retrieved the throw blanket from the back of the couch as Darlene scooted down and got comfortable. “I’m going to head home. So glad you’re feeling better, Darlene,” I said, draping it over her.

  She reached for my hand. “You’re a good friend, Cecelia Donovan. I’m sorry I messed up our trip with my stupid TIA.”

  Justin walked me to the door and opened it for me. “Thank you,” he said. “For being that good friend.”

  I hunched a shoulder. “It’s far from a sacrificial thing.”

  “Even so. You were there when the stroke happened and you got her the help she needed. Plus, you took a road trip with Darlene Egerton. I’d nominate you for a Silver Star too, if I could.”