Beautiful(13)
She read the letter several times again that night, and looked at the photographs of Bill Hayes and her mother. Her parents. She wondered what kind of man he was, cheating on his wife with a mistress, and having a child with her, and then abandoning them in favor of his political career. If nothing else, he sounded very selfish. She spent the rest of July and all of August thinking about it between her surgeries. She was due to be released in September. If her father had health problems, she wanted to meet him before he died. She had a lot to think about now that she knew about him and she was grateful for her mother’s letter and the truth at last.
* * *
—
Things seemed very slow at the hospital in July and August, with many of the doctors away for their summer holidays. She had two more surgeries to remove more shrapnel in July, and another long plastic surgery on her face and a shorter one in August. She had been in the hospital for five months by then, and had improved enough to start feeling restless and cooped up. She still had odd, inexplicable aches and pains from the shrapnel throughout her body, and was told she’d have to live with it. She could see shapes and light and dark with her injured eye now, which they said might not improve. Technically, she could drive with an eye patch, but she didn’t feel safe driving with impaired vision, whether legal or not. She still needed another surgery in a few months, but the ones in August were the last ones for now. She wondered how long it would take so one couldn’t see the scars. She knew that plastic surgeons could perform miracles.
When the bandages came off in early September, she got her first glimpse of the truth. She had two deep scars that ran across the right side of her face, and a third smaller one below it. They said there would be some improvement, and they would pale, but they couldn’t be fully erased. She just stared at them in the mirror and cried. Half her face was untouched and the other half badly scarred. The reality was shocking when she saw it. She almost fainted when she first saw the injured side in contrast to the unscarred half of her face. It looked like a bad before and after photo. She realized then that this was her face now. Half perfect and half damaged, like a terrible curse someone had put on her. The psychiatrist spent hours with her while she cried. She tried walking around the hospital in the surgical mask they gave her to conceal her scars and felt smothered and like an invalid.
When she got back to her room, she stood in front of the mirror again, crying, and refused to talk to the psychiatrist the next day. She was tired of all the doctors and nurses, the bandages, the smell of the hospital, the pain after each surgery, and the terrifying sight her face had become. How could she see anyone or leave her house? She would have to wear the face mask forever. The surgeon said the scar would become less vivid in a few months and the smaller scars would disappear, but the three deepest ones could not be repaired more than they were.
She had disappeared from her life after the explosion and had seen no one except Bernard Aubert. But how would she go back now? And she didn’t have her mother to lean on. She wanted to run away and hide. But wherever she went, her half-ruined face would be with her. She couldn’t imagine facing anyone with it, or leading a normal life again. Not only was her career over, but all semblance of a life.
She was sitting in her room, contemplating her future, and the prospect seemed grim, when the phone rang. She assumed it was Bernard, since he was the only one who called her. No further information had been given to her modeling agency, other than that she had been at the Brussels airport and couldn’t work for several months. And there was no work anyway in the summer, so they hadn’t called. She had turned off the phone in her hospital room and hardly turned it on in five months. Many people had written to her about her mother, and she hadn’t had the energy yet to answer them, although she’d been touched by their messages when Bernard forwarded them to her. Many of them were unaware that Véronique had been injured, and she had no desire to explain it to them, especially now. Bernard’s secretary picked up the mail at the apartment every week, paid the bills, and sent the rest to her.
She picked up the phone in her room, expecting to hear Bernard’s voice, and instead a young female voice said a cautious hello.
“Véro, is that you?” It took her a minute to place it and then realized it was Gabriella Foch, a girl she had gone to school with, who had moved to Brussels with her parents five years before. She was startled to hear her voice.
“Gabriella?”
“Yes. I was just reading in a Belgian magazine about the attack on Zaventem, and I saw your picture. There was a whole page of little photos the size of postage stamps of all the victims, and there was one of you, and I read your name. I couldn’t believe it. I’m so sorry about your mom.” They hadn’t been close, but had been in the same class for years and she was a nice girl. “It said that all the victims were taken to the military hospital. I thought I’d just try to see if you were still here. It said that many people are. Are you okay?” Véronique paused, not sure what to answer. Something polite or the truth?
“Yes, I’m okay. I’m going home in two weeks.” She didn’t say that she’d had twenty-six surgeries and half her face had been destroyed, and there would be shrapnel in her body forever. But others were worse off, without limbs, and she was alive. The psychiatrists kept stressing that, but she wasn’t sure now if having survived was a blessing or a curse.