Fragments of Light

by Michele Phoenix

  I smiled, but it felt forced. Fatigue had yielded to exhaustion. The lack of sleep, the fear for Darlene, the encounter with Nate . . . All too much too close together. I needed to get home.

  I filled Justin in on the appointments we’d made for his mom and assured him I’d drop by in the morning.

  As I was turning to walk away, I asked him one more thing. “Your grandfather—did your grandmother have any theories about his abrupt departure?”

  He shook his head. “She really had no idea. She knew he was suffering, in more ways than one, but for him to up and leave . . . The way she told it, he never mentioned France after the war—never spoke of D-Day or what he saw over there. He had nightmares. A lot. She said she didn’t get good sleep for the months he was home. He couldn’t get through a night without waking up in a cold sweat. But—it’s that generation, right? He was completely mute about it. No matter how many times she asked. So she just . . . stopped asking.”

  He scratched his head in a weary gesture and I realized how heavily Darlene’s dire prognosis must be weighing on him too. We’d been so busy chasing the ghost of an army veteran than I hadn’t stopped to consider how the end of Darlene’s life would be impacting her son. “She loves you so much,” I said to him.

  He smiled. “I know. For all her stubbornness about speaking of Cal, she was never shy about her feelings for me.”

  “It must have been so hard for your grandmother to keep her memories to herself.”

  He hunched a shoulder. “She actually saw some of her husband in her daughter. And she wondered if some of the trauma that had crippled him had somehow been passed down to his offspring. They’ve done studies about that, you know. And . . .” He shook his head. “The way Mom would rage when his name came up—even as a little girl—Nana knew there was something deep there. It’s just that, in those days, nobody knew what to do with it.”

  “Did Cal rage too?” I asked.

  “Not at anybody, to her knowledge. But there were things he did . . . Like disappearing for three days after that letter came telling him he’d earned a Silver Star. She said he was drunk out of his mind when he stumbled home. And then the actual Silver Star was delivered—because he refused to attend the ceremony—and two days later, he was gone. Found the citation and the medal in the AGA when she went to light it. As far as she could tell, he only took the clothes on his back. Left no note. No explanation. Nothing.”

  “I can’t imagine.”

  “But she had a kid, right? She had to provide for the baby and they didn’t have a whole lot of buffer in the bank. So she went back to factory work. It’s what she knew. Family members watched my mom and . . . somehow they made it.”

  The silence that stretched between us was taut with unanswerable questions. When Justin spoke again, it was with a hesitant voice. “The doctors—did they say how bad that tumor is?”

  I didn’t know how to answer. “It’s not good,” I finally said on a sigh. “They might need to do a biopsy to figure out what it is, but combined with the metastases to her bones and lungs . . . It’s not good, Justin.”

  He nodded. “Okay.”

  Tears came to my eyes and I tried to blink them away. “I so desperately wanted to get her the answers we went for. About Cal.”

  “It’s still a pretty gaping wound,” he admitted.

  I filled him in briefly on what we’d learned from Brenda and answered the questions he had. “Maybe a daughter who grows up feeling so unloved by her father that he could leave in the middle of the night without a second thought . . . and then finds out, like we did this week, that he lived for months just a few hours away without making any contact—maybe that kind of thing anchors at a deeper level than you or I can imagine.”

  “So you think he died out there on the farm?” he asked.

  “All evidence points that direction. And if there’s nothing about him in any of the veterans records after 1944, like you said, I’m guessing he did.”

  He sighed heavily and leaned against the doorframe. “I just want her to die at peace,” he said.

  The finality of those words crushed the breath from my lungs.

  Chapter 26

  Justin headed back to Wisconsin a few days later. He’d spent nearly a week accompanying Darlene to her appointments and planning with her for the next phase of cancer’s savage march.

  She called me anytime she learned a new piece of medical information or had to make another decision, and though the calls were generally brief and cheerful, I still felt their wear and tear on my spirit.

  Where fighting my own battle had been a full-throttled rejection of cancer’s worst intentions, walking with Darlene through her fight for survival—and her capitulation—had struck me in a completely different way. With my own illness, I’d been the warrior. The decision-maker-in-chief. The strategy-builder and torture-chooser. I was the one who decided to put my body through the ravages of chemo. I was the one who monitored the side effects and let Nate know if I needed medical help. I was the one looking down the road at desired outcomes and potential dangers, weighing the untenable against the unfathomable and choosing to live with whatever consequences my choices yielded. There was fear—a deep-rooted fear—that I would make the wrong decision and suffer through an agonizing end of life. There was anger too—a full-blown rebellion against the disease forcing me to view the future through a grid of “ifs” that felt like Damocles’s sword poised above my head, ready to strike.

  I’d dug down to my most primal courage during those months and marched through cancer’s minefield, clinging firmly to the hope that somehow I’d beat the odds.

  Caring for Darlene was subtly different. While my own battle had been a series of laser-focused “next steps,” I saw my friend’s through a wide-angle lens, a devastating landscape of hazards and dread and loss. There was still fear. There was still anger. But both were couched in a kind of stricken grief that felt debilitating and marrow-deep. I was realizing more clearly every day that one’s own survival—one’s own overcoming—is a different burden than witnessing the suffering of someone dear and the blistering awareness of what a loved one might still endure.

  To Joe’s frustration, I cut back on my hours at the Sentinel to spend more time caring for Darlene after Justin returned to his job in Wisconsin, as he was unable to miss more work without risking being fired.

  Darlene appeared immune to the worry that had slowed my thinking and my planning to a crawl. She spoke of dying nearly as easily as she described the latest episode of her favorite TV show. To me, surrendering for Darlene the stubborn hope that had propelled me through my own battle felt more torturous than any of the treatments I’d endured.

  “Stop it, Darlene!” I snapped at her one morning when her laughing account of choosing a casket had eroded the last of my patience, exposing the grief I’d been wearing like a cloak.

  She looked at me with surprise, penciled eyebrows raised, from the depth of her La-Z-Boy. She was smaller and frailer than I’d ever seen her, and her mental confusion was becoming more obvious every day. Hearing her speak of the pink satin in her casket had made her death all too vivid in my mind.

  “Well, that was a bit abrupt, young lady,” she said, crossing her hands in her lap and tilting her head sideways at me. “Care to share where that little outburst came from?”

  I hung my head and bit my lip to keep from crying. “I’m sorry.”

  “Honey, we’re well past the pussyfooting-around stage. You said it because you thought it. Now unpack it.”

  I shook my head and hoped my eyes conveyed remorse when they met hers. “There’s nothing to unpack. I’m sorry. I’m tired and I’m scared for you and . . .” Anger—at myself and at the circumstances—bubbled to the surface. I stared at the ceiling and blew out a loud breath before looking back at her. “And you’re dying.” A lightning bolt of horror shot through me at the words. It was the first time I’d spoken them aloud. “You’re dying and I’m complaining about being tired and
worried. What kind of despicable person would do that?”

  Darlene laughed. It was a lilting, joyous sound, roughened by her body’s battle, but still luminous and sweet. “Despicable!” she repeated, laughing some more. She wiped her eyes with the back of her fingers. “Oh, honey, of all the words to use.”

  She shook her head and considered me for a while. Then she motioned for me to come nearer. I knelt on the floor next to her chair and took the hand she extended. “You listen to me, Ceelie Donovan,” she said, her grip tight on my fingers. “You are not despicable. You are not any of the things your mind is accusing you of.”

  Her face softened before she went on. “You have gifted me with your presence since the moment we met at Central DuPage Hospital. You have stood by me and supported me and brightened my life. You have saved me from myself on more occasions than I care to count, and you have hoped even when I knew it was too late. Ceelie, you have loved me. And I know from having loved my mother and my sweet Angus right up to their last breaths that loving can be just as brutal as it is beautiful.”

  She let the words linger in the space between us.

  “I need to talk about dying because it makes it less scary,” she said after a while. “I need to go on about the pink satin in my casket. I need to tell Justin what I want in my eulogy and the ladies at St Andrews that I will not allow them to serve cucumber sandwiches at my funeral. I need to imagine out loud running into Cal when I get to the pearly gates, because I hate leaving this life without knowing more about him. Maybe after death is when I’ll get my answers. Right? A girl can hope . . .”

  “I’ll keep trying,” I told her. “Even after you’re gone, I’ll keep trying.”

  “No need for heroics, sweetie. It is what it is.”

  She paused and looked at me for a moment. “I know it feels very different to be witnessing death, as you are now, than facing it—which you’ve done too. Just tell me to shut up when my talking about it gets to be too much.” She smiled a bit wryly. “Just maybe do so before you lose your cool and snap at me again.”

  I bit my lip in remorse. Then I brought her hand to my cheek and contemplated what my friend had said. The beauty and brutality of caring for the dying washed over me in a nearly palpable, heartrending wave. The yearning to make things better. The ache of knowing there was nothing that would help.

  I tried for a smile when I looked at my friend again. “I want to be brave like you when I grow up, Darlene.”

  “Oh, honey, you should aspire to so much more. The way I’ve lived my life might have had moments of bravery, but what I harbored for decades about my father—that’s the opposite of brave.”

  I gripped her hand more tightly and leaned in close so she’d see the intensity I felt. “You are brave, Darlene. You prove it every day.”

  She cocked her head to the side as if she was considering my words. Then she said, “Turns out the opposite of brave might not be fear.” She looked at me with somber certainty. “I think it’s resentment, Ceelie. The opposite of brave is resentment.”

  Two hours later, having finished lunch with Darlene and talked about the weather, her will, heaven, her gnome collection, and the man down the hall who seemed sweet on her—“I sure hope the lad likes short love stories”—I turned her old PT Cruiser onto Colones Lane.

  I’d found Nate’s address on a document I’d received from his lawyer a week or so before. It was a motion to dismiss. Nate had made it official. From his side at least, the divorce was off.

  I pulled over in front of the townhouse he was renting and turned off the engine. It was hard to define the broad, warm, frightening force at the back of my mind that had prompted the detour to Geneva on my drive home, and I wasn’t sure what to do now that I was there.

  Nate’s truck was nowhere in sight. There were no lights on inside the house. After another minute passed, I turned the key in the ignition and pulled away from the curb, nearly broadsiding his F-150 as he turned into the driveway. I slammed on the brakes and Nate jerked his steering wheel, almost driving off the asphalt. He came to a halt at an angle in front of his garage door. We sat in our vehicles, engines idling, for what felt like an eternity. I saw Nate reach up to adjust his rearview mirror, his eyes trained on me.

  When he turned off his engine, I did the same. Then we sat there a while longer.

  It was Nate who finally exited his truck and strolled down the driveway toward me. I watched, panic gripping me. Everything about him was familiar. His gait. His curious frown. The messy, wavy, graying hair. My mind filled in what I couldn’t yet sense. The smell of pine, paint, and drywall on his clothes. Construction dust under his fingernails and in the creases of his neck. I felt his presence as much as I saw it.

  He walked around to my door and stood there. I sat immobile. He tapped the window with his knuckle and I rolled it down, keeping my eyes fixed on a spot in his driveway.

  “Hi,” he said in that baritone that had spoken the score of our twenty-plus years together. There was something perplexed in his voice. When I said nothing, paralyzed by uncertainty, he added, “Would you . . . like to come inside?”

  I shook my head. “I’d rather stay here if you don’t mind.”

  He paused. “Okay.”

  A couple cars drove by. It was a quiet neighborhood not far from the Fox River. Modest and homey. Much like Harbor Lane.

  “Darlene is dying,” I said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’ve been spending a lot of time with her.”

  “I figured you were.” The curiosity was still in his voice. He spoke softly. Patiently.

  “Cancer sucks.” I felt a tear running down my cheek. Then another. “Death is brutal,” I quoted Darlene. It made her feel more present.

  Nate’s voice was compassionate when he asked, “Why are you here, Cee?”

  “I hate what you did to me.”

  He walked around the car and opened the passenger door. He dwarfed the interior with his presence. “I hate myself too,” he said. “It was—it was beyond cruel. I know that. And it wasn’t me.”

  I looked at him as tears ran down my neck. “But it was you,” I told him.

  “Maybe. Scared-to-death-me. Exhausted-beyond-sanity-me. Desperate-me.”

  I nodded. I didn’t want to understand. I didn’t want to empathize. I didn’t want to excuse or justify. But the part of me that was watching my friend die was beginning to differentiate between commitment and terror. Between compassion and self-preservation. Between courage and devastation.

  “How can I know that you’re still the other Nate? The one I married. The one I . . .” I swallowed the sob rising in my throat. “The one I thought would stick with me in sickness and in—”

  “Let me prove it to you.” There was a hint of energy in his voice now. Something that sounded like life.

  “I can’t be hurt again,” I said. The sobs I’d been subduing broke through. “You can’t hurt me again. You can’t walk away. You can’t hurt me that way again, Nate.”

  He seemed at a loss. The sincerity on his face—the tears in his eyes—dueled with something that looked like self-loathing. “I wish I could explain it . . .” He shook his head as if to clear it. “Being out from under the shadow of your cancer felt . . . felt like being alive again. But when the rush faded, I realized that I had nothing left. That we had nothing left. The man who did that, that wasn’t me. That was . . .”

  I knew my smile was sad and tremulous. “Claustrophobic-you?”

  He reached for me—he always had when we were arguing, as if he was trying to maintain connection even when we intensely disagreed. I pulled away. Viscerally unsure and anguished. I fought the weakness softening my resentment and stared at the man I’d trusted for more than two decades.

  He read my body language and paused before going on. “That time I went by the house to get some things and you were there . . .”

  I remembered it well. Those final moments felt humiliating to me. Sliding to the floor after he h
ad left, pain pouring out of me in tears and moans and unbearable lostness. Nate walking back in to get his bag and finding me there.

  “I’ve always known you’re strong, Ceelie. I knew it from the first time I met you. And in all those years before cancer hit . . . The way you got through our poor-as-dirt phase. Pursuing your goals and willing them into reality—no matter what got in the way. Pouring every ounce of yourself into the Sentinel. Climbing the ranks. Even making your peace with infertility.”

  “We made that last decision together.”

  “We did,” he conceded, something sad flickering across his expression. He seemed to pull himself back together and went on. “You were so strong, Cee. You are so strong. And we had a good life.”

  I let the silence stretch between us. I lacked the energy to prompt or question him.

  “You were doing your thing and doing it well,” he said a minute or two later. “I was doing mine and mostly loving it. Home was the place where our two worlds met, but everything else in our lives felt separate.”

  Something indefinable stirred in me as Nate spoke. First, there was a sense of agreement—I too had realized even before my illness that we’d begun to drift a little. Then there was the guilt of wondering what I’d missed or just ignored. Close on the heels of that was a mix of confusion and resistance. I didn’t know where Nate was going, but I suspected he was about to indict me for the fracture in our marriage. “What are you getting at?”

  Nate sighed and held up a hand. “I’m not saying this right.”

  I tried for a smile and knew I failed. “But points for trying.”

  He contemplated me for a moment. Then he closed his eyes, frowning, as if he was trying to formulate complicated thoughts.

  “Then came cancer,” he finally said. “The fear, the—the torture of surgery and treatments.” He shook his head. “You needed me. And I stepped up because . . . because I wanted to and because I loved you.”