Fragments of Light

by Michele Phoenix

  Several of the men had finally taken Sabine’s body to the field next to the woods to bury her. Cal had tried to hold Lise back with one arm as they’d carried the body outside, but she’d torn at his grip, desperate not to lose sight of her sister, and finally pulled free. Albert, who appeared much older than he had hours before and seemed held together only by unsteady resolve, had stepped into the doorway to block her exit.

  Lise tried to push past him, but only briefly. The Frenchman said something to her that Cal couldn’t hear and she came apart, melting into his chest, sobbing. Albert didn’t embrace the girl. He didn’t offer words of encouragement or comfort, though Cal could see something loving on his face. He patted Lise’s shoulder a bit awkwardly and pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, instructing her to wipe her face. Then he led her out of the room toward the kitchen.

  The light of a flickering flame tore Cal away from the morbid memory. Albert stood in the doorway, Lise at his side, their faces lit by the candle she was holding. Albert’s arm was in a sling, wrapped in clean bandages.

  It took a moment for them to see Cal in the corner, his legs drawn up, his injured arm strapped close to his body to limit movement. One of the village women had splinted it and wrapped it more tightly in the hours since the attack, and the bleeding had slowed to a barely spreading stain. She’d also placed a cloth compress over the deep gash in his chest.

  “We want to tell you something,” Lise said.

  Cal felt his heart constrict at the sound of her voice. He squinted up at the child whose sister he’d shot—whose life he’d altered in an irreparable way.

  “You didn’t mean to shoot Sabine,” she said without prompting.

  Something in Cal rebelled at the words. “Lise . . .”

  The girl took a couple steps into the room. “Albert says you were trying to protect us.” Her voice seemed hollowed by grief.

  He shook his head as if the gesture would dislodge the fog of guilt hampering his thinking. “I should have stopped them before they got inside.” He felt his nerves fraying at the futility of his words and clenched his jaw against the emotions threatening to overwhelm him. “I never should have let Sabine talk me into—”

  “Cal.” Albert had never said Cal’s name before. It brought him up short. He looked into the elderly man’s face and saw conviction there. “Tu voulais nous aider.”

  “What did he say?” Cal asked Lise.

  “He said you wanted to help.” She blinked back tears and took a quick breath. “It isn’t your fault.”

  Helplessness gripped Cal’s lungs, making it hard for him to breathe. “That won’t give you your sister back. That won’t—”

  Albert interrupted him, his voice firm, and Lise translated again. “You did not mean to shoot her,” she said. Then she added, “Please, Monsieur Cal. Don’t cry.”

  Only then did Cal realize there were tears on his face, running down his neck into the collar of his shirt. His breath came in short gasps and a groan of utter anguish escaped before he could quell it. He closed his eyes, dropped his head, and tried to control the waves of emotion slamming into him.

  He was vaguely aware of Lise’s hand tapping his shoulder as he wept, of the springs of the bed squeaking as Albert lowered himself to sit on it.

  After the worst had passed, he wiped his face with his sleeve and exhaled a long, stricken breath.

  When he was sure he could speak again, he looked at Albert. “What can I do?” Lise translated for him and Cal added, “To help you and Lise. What can I do?”

  Albert said something in French that made Lise tilt her chin up a notch. “We will be okay,” she said.

  Albert leaned forward and motioned for Lise to interpret for him as he spoke.

  She did as instructed. “There is bombing everywhere tonight. In all of Normandy, people are dying.” Albert waved his good arm toward Cal. “Some of them are soldiers like you, fighting against things that have made our lives . . .” She hesitated, searching for the word, and finally said in French, “Un enfer.”

  Cal recognized the word. Sabine had used it before. Hell.

  Albert spoke again, his gravelly voice barely above a whisper as his eyes bore into Cal.

  “Sabine was killed because of the Nazis,” Lise translated. She bit her lip when it began to tremble. “They are the guilty ones.”

  “On survivra,” Albert said.

  “We will survive, Monsieur Cal.” Tears balanced on her eyelashes.

  Cal let his head fall back against the wall. He was a soldier. A warrior. He’d boarded that C-47 in Upottery two days ago determined to find, pursue, and eliminate the enemy until France was free of its oppressor. What he had done instead . . . The memories added their disdain to already crippling guilt.

  “You must get up,” Lise finally said. “Albert will get your army clothes for you.”

  The old man reached out a hand to help Cal off the floor. “Merci,” Cal said in French, flinching as the movement increased his pain. He reached for the windowsill to steady himself and looked down to find Lise standing close, one hand in front of her. “You said your mother called it . . .” She seemed to forget. “What did she call it?”

  Cal saw the coin she held out to him. “Walking Liberty,” he said.

  “It was in the pocket of Sabine’s apron.” She blinked hard. “The one with the daffodils on it.” Pressing the half-dollar into the wounded paratrooper’s hand, the girl said, “You will take her with you, yes? You and Liberty . . .”

  Cal fought the emotions rising in his chest. The trust in Lise’s eyes was inconceivable to him. After what he’d failed to prevent. After what he’d done.

  Albert stepped back into the room from the hallway and handed Cal the Garand Sabine had hidden on his first day in the castle.

  “We must not be careful anymore,” Lise translated after Albert spoke.

  Cal felt shame burning in his mind, but nodded his agreement. He held the rifle up with his good hand, inspecting it in the light of Lise’s candle.

  Nearly simultaneously, a shot rang out, debris shattering the glass pane of the window beside him as a bullet lodged in the plaster just beneath it.

  Cal ducked out of sight, oblivious to the explosion of pain in his right arm and rib cage. He pulled Lise down with him as Albert flattened himself against the wall on the other side of the window. Only then did Cal hear the voice of a villager outside the castle crying out, “Non, non, non! Tirez pas!” and an American voice barking in an urgent, hushed tone, “Get down! Get down! Get on the ground!”

  Cal turned his head toward the window and yelled as loudly as he could over the adrenaline tightening his throat. “Hold your fire—we’re friendlies! Hold your fire!”

  It didn’t take long for the medic to declare Cal unfit for battle. The wound to his rib cage was fairly shallow and easily stitched up, but with his leg likely broken and his dominant arm in need of surgery to prevent permanent damage, there were no other options. The corpsman, a young man with eager eyes, told Cal to stay put for a few hours. He’d call for evac and Cal would be taken to the nearest field clinic, then probably on to England and home.

  While the medic and his unit took care of the few injured civilians still finding refuge in the castle, Albert included, Buck regaled the newcomers with a tale of heroism that strained the truth and always seemed to end with him as a reluctant and courageous victor.

  Cal had to leave the room when he launched into his account for the third time. It wasn’t worth contradicting his story.

  Knowing he’d probably be gone before Lise got up, he asked Albert if he could say goodbye to her. The Frenchman led Cal to the door of Lise’s bedroom. His gait was slow and weary as they climbed the steps. He was winded by the time they reached the landing. Just hours before, Sabine had said, “Daughters need a father.” Cal wondered if the old man had what it would take to care for a growing, orphaned girl.

  “Lise,” Albert said as they entered her bedroom. The girl stirred under her
covers, then twisted around and squinted at him. She frowned sleepily when she saw Cal standing there too. The fragility in her eyes, the sadness and the need, nearly undid him.

  Cal moved to sit gingerly on the side of the bed and reached into his pockets, taking out every remaining piece of candy and chewing gum he’d carried over from England. “I wish I could give you steak and fries,” he said to her, noting again her sunken cheeks and pale coloring.

  Lise’s eyes widened when she realized he was wearing his uniform. “You are leaving?”

  Cal nodded. “I am.”

  She moved so fast it startled him. When her thin arms came around his neck and she whispered a soft, “Goodbye, Monsieur Cal” in his ear, he felt a piece of his spirit begin to break—an intractable fissure, life-bending and marrow-deep.

  “I want you to keep this,” he said, pulling away to press the coin back into Lise’s hand. “Liberty is walking.” He took a moment to compose himself. “And she is determined and brave.”

  “Comme toi?” Lise asked. “Like you?” she said in English.

  Cal dropped his head. His eyes shone as he fixed them on the seven-year-old again. “No, Lise. Not like me. Like you.”

  Chapter 38

  There were tears in Lise’s eyes as she recalled their goodbye. “I didn’t ask him to come back. I knew Albert would take care of me—find a way for us to keep living without Sabine. And we did, for those months before Cal returned. It wasn’t easy, but we had enough.”

  “You didn’t have any family to take you in?” I asked.

  “Not really. I had some distant relatives. In Saint-Lô, mostly. But well over seventy percent of the city was destroyed during the Allied bombings and . . . their lives were blown up too. Those who didn’t die likely went into survival mode just as we did, without much thought for the rural cousins they never saw.”

  “How did you do it?” I asked, astounded that a little girl and her elderly guardian had managed to survive unaided for so long.

  Lise smiled at the memories. “We were creative. And the people of the village, the people we’d welcomed in on the worst day of our lives, showed their gratitude to us in many ways. The men worked in our fields with Albert, then with both him and Cal. We were given chickens and I sold their eggs. We planted large gardens and sold our produce at markets. I learned to barter for flour and yeast and made breads—I actually got quite good at it.”

  “But you were only seven,” I said.

  “Nearly eight. And eight in 1944 is not eight today. We had lived four years under the occupation, the three of us. Three years without our mother and over a year without Papa. I was young in age, but with us survivors . . . Our lives can’t really be measured in years.” She stood. “Come with me.”

  We walked out to the backyard again. Night fell late in June in Normandy. It was nearly nine, and still the sky was light.

  “I saw you looking at the tree when I arrived,” Lise said to me. “I wonder if you saw this too.”

  She led us to the lilac grove on the outer edge of the grassy expanse, where pieces of scaffolding were stacked. My breath caught as we followed her around to the other side.

  In the shadow of a tree in bloom stood a white, marble cross.

  “It looks just like the ones in the American Cemetery,” I murmured.

  “That was the goal,” Lise said. “A hero’s resting place.”

  Nate read the inscription on the stone. “How did he die?” he asked.

  “As quietly as he lived. He went to sleep one night and didn’t wake up. The doctor assumed it was his heart. He was, I think, somewhere in his fifties.”

  “Young,” I said as emotions broadsided me again.

  Nate peered more closely at the cross. “No date of birth,” he said.

  Lise shrugged. “We never knew what it was. He never told us. And in those years after the war when so many were moving, returning, or still missing, nobody thought to register or become legalized, so . . .”

  I took a couple steps closer and crouched down, noticing for the first time the small, silver frame embedded in the center of the cross. It was a picture of Cal and a young, dark-haired woman standing close. He smiled a bit cockily at the camera, his arm draped around her neck, while she laughed, her face upturned and luminous.

  “It never left him,” Lise said. “Not when he was here during the war and not after he came back.” She smiled wistfully. “He carried it in his breast pocket every day he lived. It only seemed fitting to make sure it stayed with him in death.”

  “The woman he left behind,” I said under my breath.

  Lise smiled a little sadly. “All these years I thought it was a girlfriend from before the war. Maybe someone he’d lost. I imagined that he’d run back to France, at least in part, to get over her. But I never thought that she was still alive. That she was his wife. And now, to think he had a daughter too . . .”

  I stood up and took a step back. The cross appeared to be lit from the inside, its gleaming white a stark contrast to the shadows of the lilac grove behind it. I thought of Darlene—of her mother too—and couldn’t help the anger that bubbled to the surface. A fierce protectiveness rose in me, a posthumous defense of my dearly missed friend.

  “How could he leave a woman who loved him and a daughter who needed him for—” I caught myself. There was nothing I could say that wouldn’t be insulting to Lise.

  “Perfect strangers?” she completed my thought. There was no rancor in her tone. Only sadness. “Unrelated people he’d only known for a couple of days under the worst of circumstances?”

  Nate spoke before I could answer. “I think it nearly killed him.” Intense emotions played across his face. “Leaving Claire and Darlene . . . I think—” He ran his fingers through his hair in a gesture of frustration. Or maybe it was compassion. He tried again. “What if he was so sure of his unworthiness that he convinced himself he was doing them a favor? That after shooting Sabine, he had no right to be a father and husband—no right to find happiness in raising his own child?” He stood there, hands on hips, his eyebrows drawn together as he tried to understand the reasoning of a man who had lived decades before, burdened by the kind of guilt he couldn’t fully grasp. “What if he believed that a life in exile was the just penalty for the horrors that happened in this castle that night?”

  Lise shook her head. “And yet he was a father to me,” she whispered. “He was young—just a few years older than Sabine—but in every way that mattered, he became my father.”

  Her eyes lingered on the castle for a moment, then drifted over the open fields framed by the gate in the stone wall, and on to the lilacs whose fragrance permeated the air around us. “This is where we found Cal the day he dropped into our lives. He’d crawled from the oak toward this grove, probably trying to get out of sight.” She stepped forward to lay a hand on the white cross. “This is where Cal’s ending began, where he entered a world so complicated and violent and upside down that good could not emerge from it unstained.”

  She looked at me, mourning on her face. “I knew that the Cal who returned to us was just a shadow of the Cal who’d rescued us. And now that I know all he chose to leave behind—the grief that sacrifice required . . .” She covered her throat with an unsteady hand.

  The moment felt sacred. I let it breathe, standing next to Nate in solemn reverence for the wounded veteran who lay beneath our feet.

  After some time, Lise wandered closer to the broken oak that somehow still radiated majesty. She caressed its bark with her hand and looked up toward the place where Cal had landed all those years before. The air was cool and I hadn’t dressed for nightfall. Nate opened an arm toward me and I stepped close without hesitation, leaning into his warmth.

  Lise’s voice was barely above a whisper. “Thousands of American soldiers died on D-Day.” She turned with tears in her eyes. “But how many of those who survived essentially died too? They just went on breathing for a few more years, like Cal.”

  “And B
uck,” I said, just as softly.

  Lise straightened at the name. “Buck—” She shook her head in disbelief. “Do you know him?”

  “We do,” Nate said.

  “Lise,” I began, remembering the commemoration at the American Cemetery, “you’ve met him too. You shook his hand at the Colleville ceremony yesterday.”

  We found Charles in his wheelchair, sitting under the wing of a B-26 Marauder displayed in the Utah Beach Museum. He’d dressed up for the occasion. His uniform looked crisp, his medals meticulously aligned on his chest. He saw Nate and me coming and looked ready to bolt, but Gina saw us too and made a bit of a statement by deliberately depressing the brake pedal on his chair.

  I got down on my haunches next to him, unconcerned that neither Nate nor I were dressed for the cocktail party. Lise was known well enough in these parts that she’d gotten us in at the entrance. I knew she stood behind me, listening.

  “I told you I was done,” Charles said gruffly.

  “I’m not here to beg for more stories,” I assured him. I’d spent the night thinking about what I wanted to say to Buck, the warrior whose memories were so filled with honor and shame. And I’d spent it grieving for Cal—for the self-inflicted exile, the atonement he’d chosen for what he’d done during the darkest night of war. I still ached for the strapping young man standing with the woman he loved in the old photo he carried with him, looking into the lens with a smile entirely devoid of unworthiness and pain.

  As I crouched by Buck’s chair and took his hand in mine, I prayed he could feel the healing pulsing through my veins, feeding hard-won hope with every inhaled breath and exhaled sigh.

  “I know what happened,” I whispered, looking at him with all the compassion I felt.

  He scoffed. “No, you don’t.”

  “I do, Charles.”