Beautiful(8)

Bernard went back to Paris on the train that night, with a heavy heart after what he’d been told. They had promised to call him as soon as they had further news. Once home, he called the hospital every few hours for news of Véronique. She was not expected to regain consciousness for several months, after many additional surgeries. After those to save her major organs, there would be the cosmetic ones. The doctor had said that it would be impossible to determine for some time the degree of visible damage to her face and body, but they expected it to be severe. It was possible that Véronique might be unrecognizable if she survived, even after reconstructive surgery. They had said that they would need photographs of her eventually, if she survived, to replicate her face as closely as they could. But he warned Bernard not to expect a miracle. She would look very different if she survived. Finding photographs of her was the one thing that would be easy. All they had to do was buy any magazine on the stands, and she would be in it. They didn’t sound optimistic about the results they could achieve, given the extensive damage that she had sustained in the blast. She had been standing shockingly close to the bomb when it was detonated.

He lay awake all night and felt sick every time he thought of her. She was so young to be in such a dire situation with so much damage. He realized too that they had not made the connection to who she was, which was just as well. The last thing they needed was to have the press all over her, saying that her face had been destroyed. They had bigger problems on their hands without the press adding more drama for Véronique to have to cope with when she regained consciousness. He just prayed that she would. She was going to have so much to deal with, as well as the heartbreak of losing her mother. Bernard was the executor of Marie-Helene’s estate, all of which had been left to the benefit of her daughter. Véronique would be well cared for forever, but what kind of life would she have now if her face was destroyed? She was such a young, beautiful girl. Véronique had lost her mother and her career in a single instant. Bernard couldn’t imagine it, as he sat awake long into the night, with the tears sliding down his cheeks.





Chapter 3


The world was still reverberating with the attack on the Brussels airport when Véronique underwent her second surgery, and then her third and a fourth. She had held up so far, and after the third surgery, her internal organs were less compromised. The areas near her arteries had been cleared, her liver had suffered the greatest damage but could regenerate in time. The wounds on her body were deep, but she had lost no limbs, unlike many of the victims, both in Brussels and in Paris, who had lost arms and legs and hands and feet, either in the blast, or from gangrene in the days immediately after.

Marie-Helene’s law partner continued to get daily reports, which were not encouraging. Marie-Helene’s remains were in a military morgue in Brussels, with so many others waiting for instructions from the families. Bernard did not want to make any decisions about Marie-Helene’s interment until Véronique was conscious and could make those decisions herself, if she was alive to do so. And if not, he would bury them together.



* * *



—

In June, three months almost to the day after the bomb explosion at Zaventem Airport, the surgeons at the military hospital made the decision to take Véronique out of the medically induced coma, take her off the respirator, and let her breathe on her own. She was very foggy at first, and didn’t understand where she was or why she was there, and by the next day, she remembered the blast and where they had been going. She was still in ICU where she could be observed by a team of nurses, with immediate help available if she suffered an unexpected complication, which was still a possibility. She wasn’t fully out of the woods yet, and wouldn’t be for some time.

One of the nurses came to move her in her bed, and Véronique looked at her with wide eyes, her face still heavily bandaged. She looked like a mummy, with the bandages covering her head as well, and an eye patch over her injured eye. They had saved the eye in one of her many surgeries, but did not know yet if she would lose her sight in it.

“How’s my mother?” she whispered to the nurse who was gently shifting her position. She had not been out of bed in three months, and was even thinner and light as a feather. The one eye she could see out of looked anxious, as the nurse said something reassuring, and called the doctor when she left Véronique’s cubicle. This was the moment they had already discussed with a team of psychiatrists. A psychiatrist appeared in her room an hour later. She was a woman in her early fifties. She had a motherly style with her patients. They had been facing new challenges with more than a hundred civilian patients to deal with, which was very different from treating war-torn soldiers, injured in military action.

“How are you feeling, Véronique?” the psychiatrist asked her. She nodded and didn’t answer. She hadn’t talked in a long time, her voice was a croak when she tried to speak, and her throat still felt raw from the respirator. “Are you in pain?” the doctor asked her, and she shook her head. Her hands were bandaged too, from the wounds she had sustained on her hands and arms.

“How is my mother?” she asked again. It was the most pressing question on her mind. The doctor looked at her quietly, and as gently as possible explained that Marie-Helene had not survived the bomb. Véronique began gasping for air as soon as she said it. She couldn’t breathe and couldn’t speak. The psychiatrist stayed with her, speaking calmly to her for two hours, and they finally sedated her. It was a fact that had to be faced and they thought she was well enough to hear it now. But they had no way of knowing how close Véronique had been to her mother and all that she meant to her.