Fragments of Light

by Michele Phoenix

“You know how laughable that sounds, given what happened next, right?”

  “I do.” When I didn’t say anything more, he went on. “For a few months there, it felt like cancer was bringing us back together. And then you started getting better—which was incredible to watch. Your trademark strength came back. You were making plans again.”

  “So . . . you decided I was well enough for you to walk away?”

  He paused for a long moment before speaking again. “Brace yourself. This is going to sound wrong no matter how I say it.”

  I hitched my chin a bit higher. “Go on.”

  “I felt unneeded again. It felt like I’d gone from being your husband—your partner in survival—to being your roommate again. The videographer of your happiest moments.”

  I could feel myself frowning. “What are you saying?”

  “When I left you that day and came back for my suitcase—I’d never seen you like that before. Never. Your tears, the—the intensity of your emotions. It got to me. And I started to wonder if maybe I’d read you wrong,” he finished.

  I leaned in on an impulse. Just a little. Then I caught myself and sat back again. “I’ve been married to you for more than twenty years. What better proof is there that I was in it for the long haul?”

  “I know,” he admitted, blowing out a breath. “But that’s the moment I realized I’d made a mistake. It took me a while to admit to myself that a divorce was the last thing I wanted—the most egotistical thing I could possibly do. I just didn’t know how to walk it back. With all I’d said to you. With all I’d done to you. I don’t think I completely understood how deeply I’d harmed you until that day in the old house—or, I guess, how much our marriage meant to you.”

  “How could you not?” Even before he answered, I realized my own failure—the scant evidence I’d given him, even in the months before my diagnosis, of how much what we had mattered to me. Of how much he mattered.

  Nate raked his fingers through his hair. There was frustration in the gesture. “I was a jerk.”

  “Yes.” I wasn’t sure what more to say. One part of me wanted to acknowledge the role I might have played in our dismantling. The greater part needed to trust again before I spoke.

  “Ceelie.” My name on his lips made something flutter in my chest. “Please—let me prove to you that that jerk wasn’t me,” he said. “It was fear. It was weakness. It was battle fatigue. It was panic . . . It was cancer. But it wasn’t me.”

  I looked into his face through the tears blurring my vision. As he’d spoken, I’d heard his words, but my focus had broadened to encompass Darlene too, and the unbearable weight of her imminent death. It bound my breathing. It strangled my heart. It darkened the corners of my mind until it felt like I’d pass out from the grief.

  The intensity of protectiveness, helplessness, and loss Darlene’s waning life had engendered in me was so much more than what I’d felt as I’d waged my own fight against the merciless disease. I saw my devastation reflected in Nate’s gaze and began to fathom the assault he too had endured. Because of me. For me.

  “Prove it to me,” I said, shaking with fear and resolve.

  He didn’t reach for my hand. He sat facing me, immobile, something soft and steely in his gaze. “I’ll try,” he whispered, his eyes on mine unwavering and true.

  Chapter 27

  Darlene died in the middle of the night ten days later. It wasn’t the brain tumor that took her. It wasn’t the metastasis to her lungs. Winston, the Jamaican nurse who had been one of her caretakers, suspected that she’d just allowed her life to seep away. “It’s the way it is sometimes,” he told me in his sunny, warm accent. “They tell their body that it’s time to go and just like that . . .” He brought the fingers of both hands together, then blew on them and let them drift apart. “The spirit leaves. She died in peace, Ms. Donovan. Of this, I am sure.”

  I hoped he was right.

  Though she’d seemed determined, in her final days, to focus on the aspects of her life that were beautiful and memorable, there were still times when Cal’s name had come up. But it hadn’t been accompanied by the angry outbursts I’d witnessed before. Those had been replaced by a quiet sense of dissatisfaction at not being able to know more.

  Our final conversation had been about Nate and the tentative steps we’d taken toward each other. We’d gone to coffee a few days after our encounter in his driveway, but I’d come away from our hour at Starbucks feeling frustrated and hollow. The interaction had been stilted, the questions either too vague or too pointed. The toxic sludge of my illness and his choices roiled in the chasm that yawned between us. I just wasn’t sure we could ever find our way across it.

  Nate had awkwardly kissed my cheek as we parted on the sidewalk. I’d been walking away when he said, “Maybe it’ll be easier next time.”

  I kept moving and mumbled, “Maybe,” over my shoulder.

  “Well, it was a good first step,” Darlene had told me the next day.

  “Is that what it was?”

  “Listen, you’ve gone from being married to fighting cancer to nearly divorced and now back to maybe-married in a matter of months. It’s going to take some weirdness to get back to normal.”

  “If we do get back to normal.” The hope I’d felt after our conversation in my car had dissipated quickly. The old doubts and anger hadn’t taken long to stir again, and I’d lain in bed that night—and every night since—wondering how I could possibly have thought reconciliation was achievable.

  Darlene seemed to have no such reservations. She made a check mark in the air with her finger. “First awkward date—done. It’ll be onward and upward from here.”

  I’d had to cancel our second date.

  Instead of sitting at a table in a downtown restaurant, I stood at the back of St Andrew’s while guests formed a line that curved around the front of the sanctuary. There was no casket. In its place was a table draped in pink satin on which photos of Darlene and some of her favorite objects were displayed.

  She’d made the change in funeral plans just a week before she died, and she’d announced it with her usual Darlenian flair. “Why would I want the last image in people’s minds to be of dead-me in bad makeup and flat hair?”

  She’d opted for cremation and declared that the service celebrating her life would be corpse-free and joyful. Though Justin and the funeral home had followed her instructions to the T, there was still a somber pall over the room. Darlene had lived seventy-six years as a vivacious shooting star and had left in her absence a tangible ache.

  The room was filled with people who had brought color to the kaleidoscope of her life—her yoga friends, her bingo buddies, her nurses and doctors, her neighbors, and her former colleagues. They congregated in small groups, occasional laughter piercing through tears and solemn silence as stories of Darlene found new life in the retelling.

  I’d done my grieving by her bed after Winston had woken me with a phone call and told me to come quickly. I’d held her hand as the space between her breaths had lengthened, then deteriorated into a guttural rattle. I’d begged her to hang on until Justin could get there. I’d told her that she’d brought joy and beauty to a season of pain. And I’d admitted that I didn’t know what I’d do without her in my life.

  Then Justin had arrived. He told me to stay when I got up to give him space, so we sat on either side of the tiny, indomitable woman we loved and whispered to her that it was okay to let go.

  I’d grieved some more as I drove home early that morning, pulled over on the side of the road, my head on the steering wheel as I tried to catch my breath. And the waves had kept coming as days passed—broadsiding me in the grocery store, on the sidewalk, and in my sleep.

  Now Justin stood at the front of the sanctuary, next to the table that held a dozen or more objects meant to express his mother’s life and spirit. We’d chosen them together—the brick-carrying gnome, a couple of her favorite pictures with Gus, the Bible in which her mother had kept the snapshot
of Darlene and Cal. Justin had asked friends coming to the funeral from Wisconsin to bring two more items from his home. The framed Purple Heart and Silver Star stood on small easels next to Claire’s Bible. Parents reunited by the death of their daughter.

  I went back to work that Monday and tried to bandage loss with busyness. Joe told me that he still wanted to publish the Cal McElway editorial and I asked him if I could make it about Darlene too. He looked at me over the rim of his glasses. “If it wins us a Pulitzer, you can make it about Donald Duck.”

  So I’d set to work distilling Darlene’s energy and determination into words on a page, describing her single-minded effort to find her father during her waning months and morphing a story about a lost veteran into the account of a daughter’s complicated loyalty.

  I extended my hours to bring order back to the Sentinel and assured Joe that my traveling days were over.

  “Fat chance,” he mumbled. “Now get out and close the door so I can get some work done.”

  A week after the funeral, Justin turned up at my apartment.

  “I’m on my way home,” he informed me, standing in my entryway. He’d stayed in town to take care of the chaos the end of a life precipitates. The will. Darlene’s mostly empty but still unsold home. Her funeral bills. Her things at Sunny Cove. He looked weary and relieved to be leaving town but told me he’d be back in a couple weeks to address what he hadn’t had time to tackle yet.

  “This is for you,” he said, handing me a dark-green canvas bag. “Three things Mom asked me to give to you.”

  I held the bag open and peered inside. Then I reached in and pulled out the brick-carrying gnome. Tears came to my eyes. I placed it carefully on the console against the entryway wall. Claire’s Bible was in the bag too. And a small, black urn adorned with flowers painted in gold.

  I looked up at Justin. “Her instructions were one urn for me and another small one for you. So . . .”

  “Her ashes?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I know it’s a bit—morbid. But Mom wanted you to have them.”

  I looked at the urn, at a loss for words. “Justin . . .” I tried to smile but knew I fell short. “I’m not sure whether to be sad or horrified or honored.”

  His smile was as unconvincing as mine. “She said you’d know what to do with them.”

  “She did?”

  “You’ll figure it out,” he said with the kind of calm assurance that seemed to define him. “When I was little and things would frustrate me, she’d tell me to give time the time it needs. I’m guessing that’s true for death too. Right? Give time the time it needs.”

  I placed the urn on the mantel above my fireplace after Justin left. Then I moved it to the bookshelf in the hall. After an hour or two passed, I took the urn to the laundry room and left it between bottles of detergent and bleach in the utility closet. I turned off the light, closed the door, went to bed, and found it impossible to sleep.

  I checked the top shelf in the laundry room the next day as if the urn might have disappeared overnight. I wasn’t sure what it was about it that made me so uncomfortable—except that it contained the utterly lifeless ashes of a person who had been the definition of vitality. Or perhaps it was Darlene’s assurance that I’d know what to do with them.

  I didn’t.

  I contemplated sprinkling them in the backyard of her home, where memories of Angus and raising Justin still lingered. But that house would soon be sold. I thought of driving them to Kinley and scattering them on Cal’s farm, but that felt more like an indictment than closure.

  Returning to the living room, I put the urn on the end table by my favorite chair with the ridiculous expectation that it would speak to me when the moment was right. The gnome and Claire’s old Bible were there too. Its leather cover was worn and scratched, the gold edging of its pages rubbed off in spots. I picked it up and leafed through it. Darlene had told me that Claire always kept it near her—that it seemed to bring calm to her complicated world.

  I bent its soft cover and let the pages flip, catching glimpses of underlined passages and notes in the margins. There was a spot near the middle where the whir of pages paused. I let the Bible fall open. Several verses of the Psalms were underlined, but there was one around which Claire had drawn a bold frame. While the rest of her notes were in pencil, this rectangle was in thick, blue ink and looked as if she’d gone over the lines several times.

  “Cease from anger, and forsake wrath.”

  I closed the Bible and started leafing through it once more to see if it would open to that page again. It did. I held it upside down, gently shaking it by the spine, and when I flipped it over . . . Psalm 37. “Cease from anger, and forsake wrath.”

  I tried to picture Claire, abandoned wife and single mother, preserving her serenity by choosing healing over hatred. Then I thought of Darlene, of the simmering anger that had haunted her joy and singed her spirit for seventy-six years.

  I wondered what it would have taken for her to find peace.

  Goose bumps rose on my arms as something otherworldly washed over me. I glanced from the Bible in my lap to the urn sitting on the table next to me and heard Darlene’s voice as clear as day saying, “Maybe after death, I’ll finally get my answers.”

  An overwhelming mandate echoed in the spaces left hollow by my grief. It was laced with so much certainty that I could not dismiss it and filled with so much purpose that I would not silence it.

  “I quit!”

  I walked into Joe’s office with enough confidence and vigor to flutter the top pages of the stack next to him. It took him an inordinate amount of time to put down his pen, release a long-suffering breath, and look at me over the rims of his half-moon glasses.

  “You’re not really quitting,” he said, gravel-voiced and unsurprised. “You didn’t really quit in September. Or in November. Or in January. And you’re sure as heck not quitting now.”

  I tossed a key onto his desk. “Watch me.”

  He glanced at it and grunted. “That’s not your office key.”

  “Couldn’t find it.” I ignored his sigh. “But I figured my locker key from Miss Irma’s Workout Garage would send the same message.”

  “For the love of Pete!” he growled, throwing down his pencil.

  “Hold your fire,” I said, putting up a hand. “Quitting is option number one. Option number two is giving me another week to finish the story about Darlene’s father.”

  He rubbed his forehead and let out a sigh that sounded like a groan. Then he looked up at me. “You’re aware that we’re functioning on a skeleton staff, right?”

  “I’m aware.”

  “So where do you need to go in such a hurry?”

  I spent the next few minutes ignoring his incredulity and negativity. I explained my reasoning and recounted Darlene’s frustrated attempts to learn more about the man whose absence had cast a shadow over the entirety of her life.

  “I know it sounds harebrained. I know it’s spontaneous. But sometimes you’ve just got to pull a Darlene. When she got a bee in her bonnet, she went for it. She dropped everything and did it.”

  “She didn’t have an employer whose sanity and efficiency were dependent on her actually showing up for work between those harebrained schemes!”

  “I promise it’s the last time. Just another week—ten days. And I have this feeling the story will be worth it.”

  He looked at me over the top of his glasses. Joe had always been a gut-instinct guy. That and hard work had built the paper into what it had become. “Your gut’s telling you to do this?”

  “It’s barking orders like a drill sergeant, Joe.”

  “And this isn’t you just trying to distract yourself from—you know—Nate and Darlene and . . . stuff.”

  I caught myself smiling. “No, you softie, this isn’t about me running away from things that hurt. It’s about looking in the last place that still could hold some answers.”

  “The last time you did something like this,
you came back in worse shape than when you left,” he said gruffly. He tapped his glasses on the desk and stared me down for a while. Then he said, “When you get back, I’m going on a vacation. To Maui or some other place with palm trees and piña coladas.”

  I felt excitement trickling up my spine. “Does this mean I can go?”

  “One, you’re not getting a penny from me. The article you’ve been working on is good enough to publish as it is, so no more Sentinel funds for this trip.” He was trying to be harsh, but there was a twinkle in his eye.

  “And two?”

  He slid my locker key across the table to me. “Miss Irma says she misses you. Maybe hit a treadmill or two when you come back.”

  Chapter 28

  I drove straight to Colones Lane after work. Then I sat in my car for several minutes, taking deep breaths and remembering Darlene’s words about courage and resentment.

  Nate and I had decided during a phone call after Darlene’s funeral that going on dates was an awkward and unhelpful thing. There was something artificial and contrived about meeting at a coffee shop for “casual” conversation after twenty-four years of marriage. He’d convinced me, in his soft-spoken way, that getting together in a more informal context might be a better approach.

  I would have stayed in my car a while longer after parking outside his townhouse, but my peripheral vision caught Nate’s front door opening. I looked up to find him watching me.

  “Thought you might be contemplating dashing before we dined,” he said when I joined him on the front stoop.

  “I might have been,” I said. He stood aside and I stepped in. His home was small, narrow and deep, and sparsely decorated. The only personal touches I could see when we entered the gray-painted living room were his old Crosley record player on a side table and the orange and blue of a Chicago Bears blanket thrown over the back of a tan recliner. Everything else felt sterile and unlived-in. Practical and soulless.

  A minute later, we were seated across from each other on uncomfortable chairs, holding glasses of red wine. I looked at his hand and, not for the first time, wondered why he hadn’t taken off his ring. I picked at a hangnail and let my eyes skim the room.