Beautiful(11)
She had no distractions, and couldn’t read easily with the injury to her eye. Her good eye functioned but tired quickly.
She thought about her mother all summer, and the positive things she would have said to get her through a terrible experience like this.
She was thinking about that when Bernard came to see her one day. He was leaving the next day for his summer vacation, which he spent in Brittany every year. He felt that it was time to share her mother’s will with her, and there were things she needed to know about Marie-Helene’s estate. He had warned her that he was going to bring it with him. She was dreading it, it made her mother’s death all the more real. Véronique thought about it every day anyway, and about Cyril, and the horrifying circumstances in which they’d died. She wanted to write to his parents, but hadn’t been able to make herself do it yet. Since he was an only child, she could just imagine how hard it had hit his parents. She wondered if they blamed her because she had been with him at the time. She felt guilty herself because she was alive and he wasn’t. Although being alive was a question of degree at the moment. She still felt dead inside, and at times she wished that she had died too in the explosion.
The psychiatrist came to see her almost every day to talk about it. She felt like a prisoner now. All the medical staff was leaving on summer vacation, like the rest of Europe, and she was still in the hospital enduring surgery after surgery. The terrorists had committed the crime, and she and the other victims were being punished for it. She wanted to go home, but she was afraid to, and she knew it would break her heart to walk into her mother’s apartment and find her not there, in the home where Véronique had grown up. In her fantasies sometimes, she told herself that her mother was in Paris, and she would see her when she went home, and then the truth would come crashing down on her like the airport roof caving in on her again. It was becoming harder and harder to escape the truth.
When Bernard came to see her, he was carrying a very large manila envelope, and he spread the contents out on Véronique’s hospital bed. She had been moved to her own room by then, and was no longer in ICU. It was actually lonelier being in a single room. She didn’t see all the activity of the intensive care ward and the people in it, and lay lost in her own thoughts most of the time. The psychiatrist thought she needed quiet time to process what she had to deal with. She believed that she still needed reconstructive surgery on her face, but she didn’t yet know that little could be done to restore her. She no longer had the strong support of her mother, nor the distraction of the successful career she was used to. Everything in her life had changed, more than she even knew.
Bernard had brought a copy of her mother’s will, which was not surprising. She left everything to Véronique, including her apartment in the seventeenth, which was Véronique’s now. It was not luxurious, but it represented a solid investment, and a tangible asset with some value. She had few other possessions, but he had brought her bank statements as well, which were a big surprise to Véronique, and had been to Bernard too. There was a bank account, which a cover letter in the will explained had been left to Véronique by her father, for her support and education well into the future. And instead of using it for that purpose, Marie-Helene had preserved all of it, invested it wisely, and supported Véronique herself from what she earned in her successful law practice. Véronique’s father had left her a million dollars, which astounded her. Marie-Helene had less than that put aside herself from her earnings over the years, and the value of the apartment. And in a separate account, Marie-Helene had put the money that Véronique had earned as a model, right from the beginning, which was just over two million dollars. She had invested that well too, and it had grown considerably. So between her father, her mother, and the money she had earned herself, she had well over three million dollars, closer to four, as well as her mother’s apartment. And she had her own apartment to sell too. She didn’t need two apartments. Selling her mother’s apartment seemed like a sacrilege, and she wouldn’t do it. She had decided to move back in, and sell her own small apartment in the seventh. She had more than enough money to live well on. Thanks to her father, her mother’s careful management, and her own hard work, she was very well set, and what her mother had left her in money and real estate was icing on the cake.
There was a large manila envelope of photographs of Marie-Helene with Véronique’s father, and a number of him holding Véronique when she was a baby. There were many framed at the apartment, but dozens more in the envelope, with Marie-Helene beaming beside him, which Véronique was happy to have, as an illustration of her history, and tangible proof that she had had a father. She looked very much like him, which Marie-Helene had always said. And the money she had left in various guises was a real windfall. His name was Bill Smith, and she felt like such an orphan now, she wondered if she should change her last name to Véronique Vincent-Smith, to honor both her late mother and her father. It was something to think about.
Other than the financial statements, which were very neat and well organized, there was a letter in a sealed envelope. Reading it would be like getting a message from her mother from the grave. It seemed morbid and intimidating, and yet she was hungry to read it, and hear from her mother one last time. She wondered when she had written it and what it would say. Her mother had no deep secrets to reveal that she knew of. She led a quiet, transparent life, so Véronique assumed that it was just a tender goodbye, written long in advance, perhaps at an emotional moment. It would be hard to read but she was eager for it, and decided to read it after Bernard left, so she could savor it when she was alone, and cry if she needed to. She put the sealed envelope on the table next to her hospital bed, to read when he was gone. She put the rest back in the envelope, thanked Bernard for bringing it, and slipped it into a drawer in the night table so it was near at hand.