Beautiful(10)

“Do you know anything else about her?” the assistant surgeon asked him. They were up against a huge challenge, and were still talking about it as they left the operating room. They both felt drained after eight hours of surgery, and they felt great compassion for her, especially at her age, and seemingly with no one to support her.

“Very little,” the chief surgeon answered. “The only contact is her mother’s legal partner, and he hasn’t told me much about her, other than that she has no relatives. He sent the photographs, and no further information. The photographs speak for themselves. She’s an incredible beauty, and one of the biggest models in the world. What else is there to say?”

“It would help to know something about her character, how strong she is.”

“She just lost her mother. That will be hard enough. And apparently there was a friend with them, who died too. Now her whole identity is altered.”

“But at least she’s alive,” the assistant reminded him.

“Sometimes that’s not enough. I don’t consider myself a vain man, but I’m not sure how well I’d do if I lost half my face.”

“The structure is still there. It’s all the soft tissue that’s the problem. At least the bone structure of her face is reparable.”

“It’s the rest I’m worried about, and she will be too. It will take a lot of guts to deal with something like this.” They were both still troubled by it when they left each other after the surgery, and the head surgeon took the before and after photographs home with him that night to study them some more and try to decide what to repair in the next surgery. They had a long road ahead of them, and so did she. And she had the trauma to deal with as well.

Véronique asked very few questions after the surgery. And Dr. Moreau, the chief surgeon, wondered if she was afraid to. It was as though her mind didn’t want to go there, and he decided that maybe it was just as well for now, but she couldn’t hide from it forever. One day she would be back in a world full of mirrors, and would have to deal with people’s reactions to how she looked. On the other hand, they had seen patients who had lost all four limbs, which might be even harder. She would be able to lead a normal life, she just wouldn’t look the way she looked before, but that was huge, particularly after all the adulation of being a model. Her beauty had been a given before, and now it had been stolen from her.



* * *



—

The whole team was aware of what she would be facing, and they got a taste of the reality that would confront her once she left the hospital. There was no way of knowing who did it, but in July a story ran in a minor British tabloid saying that her face had been destroyed in the attack, and her career was over. Miraculously, no one else picked it up or believed it. Like saying she had an affair with an alien. The tabloid that ran it was known for its lack of credibility and untruths. But it was also obvious that someone at the hospital had been paid for the story. No one outside the hospital knew about her face. Bernard was furious about it, and the head of the hospital apologized and promised to be more vigilant. At Bernard’s request, she never saw it. She was cut off from the world without a computer, and wasn’t reading the newspapers, magazines, or even watching TV. But it gave the whole medical team a foretaste of what would happen when she went back to Paris, paparazzi chasing her, ordinary people taking photographs of her with their cellphones. Overnight, she would become a freak, and a victim of people’s curiosity and baser instincts. Véronique didn’t even have a cellphone at the hospital and didn’t want one. Hers had disappeared in the explosion. She was still too sick to care, and she said that without her mother, there was no one she wanted to call. She didn’t need to call her agent, since she couldn’t work, and Bernard had notified them she’d be off for a while, without further explanation. She was also in deep mourning for her mother, so she didn’t want to talk to friends and other models. She had nothing to say. Her grief was all encompassing, and with no contact with the world, she was safe for now, but it wouldn’t last. Her half-damaged face would identify her as a victim forever. They were going to suggest to her that she wear a surgical mask when she went home and use it whenever she went out, at least until the surgeries on her face were complete, and maybe even forever if she couldn’t deal with the inevitable stares and comments.



* * *



—

Véronique never saw the second-rate British tabloid magazine with her photo on the cover. The photograph had been torn in half lengthwise, so all she had was half a face, and inside the magazine was the whole story of the explosion, and that she’d been in it. Véronique would have hated the story, it made her an object of pity, but fortunately she never knew about it and was spared the humiliation of public exposure. The day would come when she’d have to know the truth, that half her face had been ruined, and the other half was a cruel reminder of what it once had been.



* * *



—

The summer went by slowly and painfully for her. Doctors and nurses came and went on vacation. She was still in the hospital, with assorted aches and pains resulting from her wounds. And she had another operation every two weeks. She’d have four more by the end of the summer. The plastic surgeon wasn’t satisfied with the results, and she healed slowly, which made it harder to see progress. Her face had improved slightly, but not enough. She still hadn’t seen it yet herself, and had no idea how far they’d come. The bone structure in her face was aligned again, but much of the tissue over it was deeply damaged.