Beautiful(9)

Bernard Aubert came from Paris the next day, and they cried together. Véronique couldn’t believe what had happened. She was willing to have sustained all the damage she had, if only her mother were still alive. Véronique couldn’t imagine her life without her. She was decimated by grief. She was able to speak in a stronger voice by the next day.

“And Cyril?” she asked Bernard, and he looked blank. “Cyril Buxton, he was with us. He’s a friend of mine. He spent the night with us in Brussels, and he was flying back to London as soon as we took off. He was standing with us when it…happened.” She faltered on the last word and couldn’t make herself say the word “bomb.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ll look into it. I didn’t know anyone else was with you.” He was surprised. After he left her, he checked the official list of casualties they had at the hospital, and found that Cyril was on it. When he inquired, he was told that like Véronique’s mother, he had died in the initial explosion. His family had already claimed his remains. Bernard spent the night in Brussels, and told Véronique the next morning. She was shocked and saddened, and couldn’t understand why she had survived and they hadn’t. Bernard explained it as the hand of destiny, not having any better answer. She was deeply depressed about all of it, understandably, especially her mother, but she was sad about Cyril too. He was such a sweet, innocent, fun-loving boy, and didn’t deserve to have his life cut short. None of them did, and she felt terrible for his parents, losing their only child.

“He was twenty-seven years old,” she said to Bernard. He looked a dozen years older since his law partner had died. He brought up the painful subject of what to do with Marie-Helene’s body. A decision had to be made. Sobbing, Véronique decided to have her cremated, and have the ashes sent to Paris. Bernard promised to keep them until Véronique came home, and they could make arrangements for a memorial service then. It made it all seem even more final. Véronique cried for hours after he left. She was crying for Cyril now too.



* * *



—

Two days later, Véronique was back in surgery, on her face this time, for the first of many reconstructive surgeries. Bernard had supplied the photographs they asked for. Marie-Helene’s office was full of framed photographs of her beautiful daughter. He sent them directly to the plastic surgeon, who sat staring at them for a long time before the day of the surgery. He had been given an impossible task to restore Véronique to anything like she had looked before the explosion. There was no way he could even come close, and they had not yet told Véronique how extensive her injuries were, or how her face had been altered, and she couldn’t see it under the heavy bandages.

He had made meticulous drawings and diagrams of what he had to repair and how to go about it, and he stood studying her carefully for a long time, as she lay on the operating table, once she’d been anesthetized. The surgeon assisting him looked at her too, and the two physicians exchanged a long glance.

“It would be a fascinating challenge if it weren’t so tragic,” the senior surgeon said quietly to his colleague. “It’s as though someone drew a line down the center of her face, destroyed one half, and left the other intact.” The wounds on one side had been superficial, and had healed in the past three months under the bandages. The other half was unrecognizable for the moment, but even once it was repaired, the surgeon recognized that there would be two or possibly three deep scars intersecting her face. There would be no way to remove them entirely. He studied her photographs again, and began the surgery. It was painstaking minute work, and he was satisfied after eight hours in surgery that they had done as much as they could for the moment. They bandaged her face again, and she was moved to the recovery room, as the assisting surgeon stayed to talk to him.

“What do you think?” he asked him. The chief surgeon was one of their best and had performed some near miracles in the past, but he wasn’t a magician.

“We can only do what we can. I’m going to try everything we’re able to do, but it would take a miracle. The scars are too deep.” Half her face had been destroyed by shrapnel. “I don’t know how the other side remained so untouched. It must have been the angle at which she was standing when it happened, or some odd quirk of fate.”

“You know who she is, don’t you?” his colleague asked and the chief surgeon nodded.

“I didn’t at first, but I realized when I saw the photographs they sent me, and I did some research. She’s one of the biggest models in the world, or she was until now. She’s incredibly beautiful. It really is unbelievably cruel to see what happened.”

“When are you going to tell her?” he asked him.

“When I have to, and when we’ve done some more repair work on the worst of it. She knows there was damage to her face. She just doesn’t know how long-term it is. She hasn’t asked much about it, but she hasn’t been awake for long, and she’s been more concerned about her mother, who died when it happened. But eventually, this is going to be a big issue for her. Her modeling days are over. And if that was integral to her identity, and I assume it must have been, we’re going to have a big problem. It’s a very big deal to be an extraordinary beauty at one moment, and then sustain this kind of damage. Her whole self-image will be shattered, who she is, what she does, how she sees herself, how others see her, her whole career. This will be an enormous crisis for her. She’ll have to rebuild her whole personality and identification system, not just her face.”