Beautiful(6)
“Stop talking about your trip!” Cyril grumbled, as they cleared up after dinner. “I’m green with envy. I’m going back into slavery in grisly, dark, freezing cold London. It’s in very poor taste for you two to gloat about it. You have no compassion whatsoever.”
“No, I don’t,” Véronique said as she kissed him, “I’ve worked my ass off for the past six weeks.” Her mother worked hard too.
They all went to bed early, Cyril and Véronique in the apartment’s second bedroom, and met in the kitchen the following morning at six, while Marie-Helene made coffee and toast for all three of them. They were all half asleep, and no one chatted as they had the night before. They went back to their rooms to shower and dress, and were ready right on time. Marie-Helene and Véronique with a small suitcase each to check in, and Cyril was wearing a proper business suit, white shirt, Hermès tie, and a navy cashmere overcoat. He looked very handsome.
“You look very nice when you go to work,” Véronique complimented him as they got into a cab to go to Zaventem Airport.
“Thank you,” Cyril said glumly, and looked as though he wished he were going anywhere but back to London. Marie-Helene and Véronique were speaking softly to each other about their trip. He had a small suitcase with him too, and had left some clothes at Véronique’s apartment in Paris. He carried the bags into the terminal for them, and accompanied them to their check-in, in true gentlemanly fashion. He had time to get to his own plane after that.
“That’s very sweet of you,” Marie-Helene thanked him, as they stood in the check-in line together. It was five to eight, and they were perfectly on time. He stood patiently behind them with the bags.
“What do you think if we…” Véronique said to her mother, and never got to finish her sentence. As she said it, at two minutes to eight o’clock, there was the sound of a massive explosion. A bomb exploded several feet from where they were standing in the departures terminal. The bomb blew a huge hole in the building, as parts of the roof and beams came crashing down on them. Twisted metal and broken glass rained on the waiting passengers in line. People were screaming and running in all directions to get away from the heart of the explosion. Within seconds, a second bomb exploded at the other end of the departures terminal. There were bodies and injured people on the floor everywhere, some of them with huge pieces of steel lying on top of them, several of them obviously dead. Dark smoke was heavy in the air. Véronique looked around her to find her mother and Cyril, and couldn’t see them anywhere in the thick black smoke that surrounded them, and then she realized, when she tried to run, that she was lying on the floor under a heavy slab of metal that was crushing her. She could not move or go anywhere or even make a sound. She could hear screaming and shouts in the distance, and sirens shortly after. She couldn’t feel her body, and was dazed and in shock. No one could see her where she lay and no one came to her aid. All she could do was hope that Cyril and her mother were okay. She felt strangely light, as though she were floating, and the sounds around her faded into the distance as she drifted in and out of consciousness. She kept waiting to hear her mother’s voice near her, and called out to her a few times, but no sound came from her mouth, as she lay under the beams and pieces of the roof of the terminal.
It seemed like hours before she heard voices coming closer, but it didn’t sound like her mother or Cyril. They were men’s voices. She felt her body get even lighter and she was sure she was floating away, and then there were bright lights in her eyes, but she couldn’t distinguish forms or faces. She wondered if she was dying or had already died. She heard a voice speak distinctly in French.
“No, she’s dead,” someone said decisively, and then she felt hands on her neck and heard more shouting. Whoever they were talking about was alive and not dead, and she had no idea who it was, and had no awareness that they were talking about her.
She heard heavy metal grinding sounds, and machinery that sounded too loud in her ears, and the weight she had felt for what seemed like hours lifted off of her, and someone said, “Oh my God…” and then she felt herself being lifted up and laid down somewhere. It didn’t hurt when they moved her. She was completely numb. A woman’s voice asked her name and she told them.
“My mother…Cyril…” she whispered, as she had the sensation of flying or moving very quickly, as the paramedics put her on a gurney and rushed her to an ambulance. She was covered with blood, with shrapnel wounds covering her entire body, which she wasn’t aware of. The clothes she had worn were only shreds after the explosion. The floor around her was littered with hundreds of injured, moaning people, and body parts, which had flown through the air and landed helter-skelter everywhere.
She had no way of knowing that a third bomb had exploded at Maelbeek metro station an hour after the attack at the airport. Sixteen people lay dead at the airport, and another sixteen at the metro station. Between the two locations, first responders were dealing with three hundred and forty severely wounded people, with unimaginable injuries from the homemade bombs, made of household chemicals and peroxide and filled with nails and bolts and pieces of metal to intentionally tear bodies apart and cause even greater harm than just from the explosion. There was so much blood on Véronique’s face that no one could have identified her, even her own mother. Their bodies had not been identified yet, but Marie-Helene and Cyril had been killed instantly in the first explosion and their bodies still lay beneath the rubble. It was a miracle that Véronique had survived it. She looked so severely damaged and so lifeless that the paramedics on the scene were sure she was dead when they lifted the piece of the roof off of her. They were certain that she had suffered countless broken bones and massive internal injuries, and her face was unrecognizable under all the encrusted blood, with gashes all over her face and body. She was lying almost naked when they discovered her. She slipped into unconsciousness as soon as she whispered her name in answer to the question.