Fragments of Light

by Michele Phoenix

  She turned partially toward the soldiers behind her and added, “And you who fought to free this land from Hitler’s grip, I welcome you with highest honors. We meet today to express our gratitude to you.”

  The crowd clapped. They clapped for a long time. I realized in a visceral way that I was just feet away from men who had brought both courage and vulnerability to Normandy seventy-six years before, as Cal had, many of them too young to understand the horrors they’d encounter. I looked around at the children and teenagers standing among the spectators and wondered if they could fully understand the price these men had paid for the liberties they took for granted.

  Nate hadn’t said anything since we’d found our place on the ground, facing the veterans. I glanced at him and found his eyes fixed on one of them. He too was in a wheelchair. He wasn’t smiling. He didn’t seem to be engaging with what was going on around him. His gaze had the faraway look of someone whose memories were too close to the surface.

  Nate caught me watching him. “I think Cal would look like that,” he said, hitching his chin toward the veteran in a United States Navy hat. “If he’d come back at their age—he’d have looked like that.”

  I agreed with his statement. In all the imagining I’d done about an elderly Callum McElway, I’d always seen him somber. Weighed down. Troubled. Though I could recall every detail of the picture of Cal on the farm—the youth and vitality he exuded—there was something melancholy I associated with his name. Whatever had scared him, forced him, or propelled him away from his wife and daughter, had to be significant and dark.

  The Veteran Relations coordinator was still speaking, explaining that children and teenagers from local schools had raised money during the year to ensure that organizations like La Belle Génération and Veterans Back to Normandy could assist the heroes returning to France.

  “We’d like to invite those students to come forward and meet the veterans whose travels they funded.”

  The spectators stepped aside as young people formed a line and moved down the row of former bombardiers, rescue swimmers, and paratroopers, shaking their hands and expressing their thanks.

  Nate and I drifted away from the crowd by unspoken accord and walked toward the sea of white crosses. The cemetery was not a morbid place, as I’d expected it to be. I was surprised by the sense of peace and calm that rose from its bright-green grass and granite crosses toward a suddenly blue sky.

  A paved sidewalk led to a small protrusion overlooking the beach. We made our way there and took the time to take in the details of the map of D-Day landings etched into a stone table. I tried to imagine what had happened in the water and on the sand below us, then stopped myself. It was too brutal—even in retrospect.

  Maribeth found us there a few minutes later. “Charles, I’d like to introduce you to two friends of mine. This is Cecelia and Nate Donovan.” She patted the veteran’s shoulder. “And this is Charles—decorated veteran who fought in Normandy, earning him a couple of shiny things he’ll be wearing on his uniform on Saturday. After that, he moved across France into Holland and earned some more shiny things by getting shot in the butt during Market Garden and sent home.”

  Charles chuckled and leaned forward in his wheelchair to shake our hands. “Hip, Maribeth. We call it being shot in the hip.”

  She shrugged nonchalantly and pointed at the bench where the pregnant woman I’d met earlier sat, legs extended, arms wide, in a comically exhausted pose. “And that’s his granddaughter, Gina.”

  A couple children hurried up to Charles, holding out pieces of paper for him to sign. Maribeth turned his chair toward them and pressed its brake on. “This is one of the reasons so many come back year after year,” she said quietly to us. “To be welcomed like heroes. Returning to places like these . . .” Her voice trailed off as she turned to look out over Omaha Beach. “More than a thousand men died on this beach alone. There are nine thousand just like them buried here today.” She smiled a bit sadly. “Hard to imagine unless you were there to see it for yourself.”

  Charles had finished signing autographs and said over his shoulder, “It ain’t nice to talk about a hero behind his back.”

  She laughed and turned him so he was facing us and the view beyond the parapet.

  “Were you . . . ?” I hesitated. I wasn’t sure if there was some kind of protocol about being too direct or too specific with the veterans who came back.

  “Did I fight down there?” Charles asked, motioning toward the shore with a gnarled hand. “Not me. Bunch of the guys I trained with did, though.” He sat up straighter. “Nah, me and my buddies, we came in from the sky.” He motioned for Maribeth to push him closer to the landing map and she obliged. “June 6th, 1944. We were supposed to drop right around here,” he said, pointing with a crooked finger at an area between Boutteville and Sainte-Marie-du-Mont. “Sneak in behind enemy lines. That was the plan. Turns out our sneaking didn’t exactly work out.”

  Charles took off his cap and scratched the sparse white hair beneath it before putting it back on. “By the time we got across the Channel in the wee hours, the Krauts knew we were coming.” He squinted up at the blue sky above us. “Shelling and flak like you wouldn’t believe. Messed us up good.”

  Nate leaned over the map. I could tell that his mind was on the logistics of such a massive mission, foiled by weather and German counterfire. “So where did you end up landing?” he asked.

  “War aficionado, huh?” Charles asked.

  Nate looked at me. “I am now.” Then he smiled at the veteran. “How far off target were you by the time you hit the ground?”

  Charles dismissed the question.

  “That’s not what matters. What does matter is that I met up with other troops in time for the Battle of Carentan. Now that’s a location I can point to on a map.”

  I crouched down next to him, peering into his deeply lined face. “I’m guessing you have some hair-raising stories to tell.”

  “Or not tell,” Gina said. She’d walked over to us from the bench and was leaning against the map’s stone table. She looked at her grandfather sideways, feigning disapproval. “We know about the flight over, right up until he jumped out of the plane, and we’ve heard about the Battle of Carentan and all that happened after, but everything between those two events—not a word from this stubborn veteran.”

  “You gotta understand,” Charles said, his eyes on the landing map, his voice a bit defensive, “that night . . . It was chaos. And by the time my stick jumped, our plane was flying so fast and so low that we were lucky to make it down in one piece, let alone know where we were. All I did for that in-between time,” he said, looking pointedly at his granddaughter, “is figure out a way to stay alive and get back with the others.”

  I stood and stared at the map as if it held the answers we’d come to find. I’d somewhat narrowed down the location of the castle we’d seen the day before by the town names carved into its surface. “So you were supposed to drop here,” I said, pointing. “But you said you overshot your target.” I looked up at him and was surprised to see the deep frown on the veteran’s face. I tried for a softer tone. “Do you think you were over here? Nearer to Carentan or back toward Utah—”

  He cut me off so abruptly and vehemently that I felt a shiver go down my spine. “Why do you need to know that?” The jovial storyteller had been replaced by a combative old man who suddenly had the look of a cornered animal.

  “I—” I looked at Nate for support, startled.

  “We’re trying to get some information about a man who jumped the same night you did.”

  “He landed near a small castle, several miles off-target,” I filled in. “That’s why I was asking. Just wondering if you and he might have . . .”

  I saw the look on Nate’s face change from curiosity to excitement. “Wait,” he said, staring at the cap the veteran was wearing. “Charles, were you with the 506th?”

  Some of the color seemed to seep out of Charles’s face. He took a brea
th and coughed as he blew it out, so much tension suddenly gripping his body that it made his cheeks quiver. “It doesn’t matter!” he said, his voice higher now and strained, squinting at Nate with something that looked like panic on his face.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Gina step toward him. “Gramps . . .”

  He pointed a finger at Nate, then at me. “It doesn’t matter where I landed or what—what—what happened!”

  Gina was by his side, crouching down and squeezing his arm with her hand, using a soothing tone of voice to try to get his attention. “Gramps—hey. It’s okay.”

  But he was not hearing her. “I’m done here!”

  Maribeth’s wide eyes were skipping from Charles to Gina and back again, clearly as shocked as I was by the vitriolic response. She leaned over his shoulder, “Charles, would you like to—”

  “Take me back to the van,” he ordered.

  “But—” Gina tried.

  He craned around until he made eye contact with Maribeth. “You gonna take me back to the van or what?” he barked.

  Gina stepped back in consternation and Maribeth put up a hand in a calming manner. “I’ll take him back,” she said. “The first van is supposed to leave shortly anyway.”

  Gina looked horrified and contrite. “Maribeth, I’m so sorry.”

  Charles wasn’t done. As Maribeth released the wheelchair’s brake and began to push him back toward the parking lot, he yelled, “I got the Krauts—that’s what I did! It doesn’t matter what happened!” he yelled again as they turned the corner toward the van.

  “And that,” Gina said, her face red with embarrassment, “is what used to happen every time we asked him about the war. He’s been better the last couple of years. That’s if he brings up the topic himself and cherry-picks what he wants to tell us. But those two days between the landing and Carentan?” She nodded in the direction he’d disappeared. “Full meltdown—every time.”

  “We didn’t mean any harm,” Nate said, shaking his head in confusion.

  “I know you didn’t.” She sighed in a defeated way. “That man back there—at the monument? That’s the real Charles. Proud of his service and loving the attention. This version you just saw? For all their bravado, it’s a pretty stark reminder that survivors of war are among the wounded too.”

  Chapter 32

  Charles’s outburst stuck with us as we continued our visit of the cemetery, awed by the vastness of the memorial’s grounds and sobered by its significance. We went back to the colonnade where the day had started to read the maps and narratives flanking its bronze statue, strolled along the Wall of the Missing, then circled back to the path overlooking the beach and found a bench facing rows of white crosses on their manicured lawn.

  “Every one of those crosses . . . ,” Nate began.

  I nodded. “A Cal McElway. A Charles. Brother, father, son, sister, daughter who didn’t make it back.”

  He smiled a bit sadly. “How are those creative juices doing?”

  “Flowing strong,” I answered. “Overwhelming, actually.”

  “It’s a lot,” he said.

  “I wonder if Cal would have preferred to die and be buried here than . . .”

  “Possibly.” Nate seemed to consider it for a moment. “Probably,” he amended. “Beats dying alone out in a field in Missouri.”

  I tried for humor. “Normandy, Missouri . . . ech.”

  Few things about Nate had thrilled me more when we met back in the nineties than making him laugh. As I shrugged in feigned nonchalance and he chuckled, I realized how fresh that thrill still felt.

  “If anything, there’s too much,” I said on a serious note. “Too many stories. Too many tragedies and untold victories. I’m supposed to be here to add the finishing touches to an essay about Cal and Darlene, but with all this to take in . . . And people like him—wearing their memories on their faces,” I said as I noticed the somber veteran from earlier standing up from his wheelchair, with some help, to salute a cross. “It’s almost too much.”

  “Story therapy,” Nate said, repeating Maribeth’s words as he followed the direction of my gaze. “The veterans may come back because they’re welcomed so warmly, but I’m guessing part of their healing needs to happen here too.”

  The birds trilled in the trees around us. A child in an American flag dress ran between the rows of crosses, her father in hot pursuit. Teenagers clustered around a veteran sharing his memories on a parapet a few feet from us.

  “Because their story is given a voice here,” I said.

  I felt more than I saw the shift in Nate’s disposition. “So . . .” He seemed to hesitate as he straightened on the bench next to me.

  “Are you about to say something awkward?” I looked at him and he hunched a shoulder.

  There was determination under the grin he shot me. “I told you my story,” he said. “We sat in a hospital and I imposed it on you. Poor, wounded Nate, forced to run away like a coward because things were so hard.”

  “Your timing kinda sucked.”

  “It did.” He looked at me sheepishly. “I guess I was determined to get it out.”

  “You certainly were,” I said. I tried to smile to mitigate the darkness the memories were fueling.

  “I experienced your cancer as a caretaker. A bystander. But you’re the one who lived it,” Nate said. He looked across the cemetery. I could tell he was trying to find the right words. Part of me feared what they would be when he did. Something guilt-ridden fell over his features. “I haven’t heard your story. I never asked for it.”

  Vague feelings began to stir. Fear. Relief. Caution. “You lived my story with me, Nate. You went to my appointments. You took care of the house. You managed our calendar . . . You shaved my head when my hair started falling out and you cleaned up my messes. You lived it all.”

  He shook his head, his forehead furrowed and his eyes intense on mine. “I saw it. I witnessed it. But I was on the outside looking in . . . It’s not the same.”

  His words surprised and silenced me. I tried to unravel their complicated truth—their connection to my pain, my survival . . . and to Darlene. “Loving can be just as brutal as it is beautiful.”

  Tears blurred my vision. “I know it’s hard for the caretakers too,” I said to him.

  He shook his head. “That’s not my point.”

  I sighed and tried to measure the emotional toll a retelling would take. “This may not be the right time to get into it, Nate.”

  He looked at the neat rows of crosses and Stars of David standing at perfect intervals between us and the reflecting pond. Then he turned his eyes on me with startling intensity. “Or maybe it’s exactly the right time.”

  I didn’t say anything as several minutes ticked by.

  “Story therapy ain’t for the faint of heart,” I finally mumbled.

  I looked at him. He looked back at me. Then I started to speak. Reluctantly—tentatively—feeling silly for walking him back through what we’d faced together. He kept asking deeper questions, encouraging me to go on. We got to the days right before surgery—the uncertainty I’d felt.

  “You were scared,” Nate said. “You kept asking me if the mastectomy and reconstruction . . . if they’d change the way I saw you.”

  I couldn’t help but make a face. “And then you left me.”

  “But not because—”

  “Tell that to a woman who’s just had her breasts cut off, put on fifteen pounds, and watched her hair fall out.”

  The silence between us grated across old wounds. “I left because I’m a jerk,” he finally said. “Not because—”

  “Every fear I had—other than dying—became a reality that day,” I said, interrupting him as tears fell from my eyes. “Just like that.” I snapped my fingers. “And every text and lawyer’s document after that was just more evidence that I was somehow not good enough anymore. Unworthy and repulsive.” I looked him straight in the eye and hoped he saw how torn I was, how torturous my inner confl
ict between terror and trust. “You added emotional annihilation to the medical trauma. You’ve explained it to me and I’ve heard your words, but to be honest, I’m having trouble getting past what it did to me.”

  He hung his head.

  I let mine fall back and stared at the sky for a few breaths.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. He squinted off into the distance as a muscle spasmed in his jaw. “There’s no valid explanation for what I did to you. To us.”

  “That’s why I don’t know what to think,” I said, finally voicing the hesitation that had hobbled our conversations since we’d started talking again. “We can be in the same room together now. We can travel across the ocean. We can traipse around Normandy on a quest to find a veteran. We can go through the motions of telling our stories, but, Nate, I’m just not sure we can really get beyond what happened. The abandonment. The humiliation. It might be too big.” I shook my head. “Sometimes I almost forget—for just a moment—and then . . .”

  He looked at me but didn’t say anything. We both turned to face the crosses again, leaning back as our eyes followed the visitors walking the cemetery’s paths.

  The silence felt stifling.

  After a couple minutes passed, I sat up straighter and said, “Meanwhile, we have a mission to finish.” I hoped my voice sounded more purposeful than wounded. “And crêpes to eat in Sainte-Mère-Église tonight, as per Flo’s instructions, so . . .”

  “So.” Nate stood, something like determined optimism on his face. “Let’s go get us some crêpes.”

  It wasn’t until we parked our car and looked up at the church steeple that we realized what an iconic location the bustling town was.

  “Wait,” Nate said, pointing up. “Is this the place where that guy got hung up on the steeple in The Longest Day?”

  I looked where he was pointing and saw a mannequin in a paratrooper’s uniform hanging from a canopy snagged on the tower. “Sure hope that’s not the original John Steele . . .”