* * *
—
She was wearing a hospital dressing gown and pajamas at the appointed time the next day. She hadn’t worn normal clothes since she’d been admitted. Hers had been torn to shreds in the explosion, and no one had replaced them. She didn’t need clothes anyway. She couldn’t go anywhere. But she realized that she’d need something to wear when she went home. She put the surgical mask in place just before Gabriella came. She brushed her hair back in a ponytail, and the cruel irony was that when she turned her face one way, she looked like herself, and if she turned in the opposite direction, the full horror of her injuries were all one saw. The damage was completely contained on the right side of her face. She adjusted the surgical mask again as she heard a knock on the door, and Gabriella walked in, looked as she had in school, barely older, in a pretty navy blue summer dress with a white collar. She smiled as soon as she saw Véronique and walked toward her.
“Can I hug you? Will I hurt anything?” she asked her, and Véronique smiled.
“No, I’m fine. I’m full of shrapnel still, but it’s better and hugging won’t hurt me.” Gabriella hugged her gingerly as Véronique realized that no one had hugged her or touched her affectionately in five months. The tenderness of it brought tears to her eyes. She saw then that Gabbie had brought her a small bouquet of pink roses. They sat down in the room’s only two chairs. “Do you want to go out to the garden?” she offered.
“Whatever you want,” Gabriella said gently. She thought her old friend’s eyes looked tired and sad. “Do you have to wear the mask?”
“It’s so I don’t get exposed to infection,” she said, looking distracted. Gabriella could only imagine what she’d been through, after reading the article about the explosion and the havoc it wrought on the victims.
“The whole thing is so awful. It makes you afraid to go anywhere. I knew two people at the metro station, but they managed to come out unharmed. I had a friend at the Bataclan in Paris in November. He lost an arm, but at least he survived.” She guessed that all of Véronique’s injuries must have been internal since she didn’t appear to be missing any limbs, but she could see scars on her arms from the hundreds of lacerations she’d had from the flying bits of metal and glass. It looked to her like Véronique had been lucky.
They took a walk in the garden, sat in the shade for a while, and walked back to Véronique’s room. It was a nice visit and Véronique enjoyed it, although it was odd talking to her through the mask. She felt smothered by it, and dishonest somehow, as though she was pretending to be someone else now, the old Véronique instead of the one she had become. She hated the pretense of it, as though she still looked like she used to. But in fact, nothing was the same now. She felt like a different person.
“I feel stupid wearing the mask,” she said in a soft voice to Gabriella.
“If it’s dangerous for you to be exposed to people’s germs, then you’re smart to wear it. You don’t want to get sick now.”
“It’s not that…and I’m not sick.” With a trembling hand and a simple gesture, she unhooked the paper mask from her right ear, and took it off, as Gabriella stared at her, with a full view of both halves of her face, the old and the new. Her eyes grew wide as she saw the scars on the right side, burst into tears, and couldn’t stop crying. What she saw was so devastating and so upsetting, she had been totally unprepared for what Véronique had gone through and the damage the bomb had done.
“Oh, Véro, I’m so sorry… Oh my God, how could they do that to you?” Véronique was crying too, and they sat talking and holding hands, but Gabriella’s reaction was what she had needed to know. How could she possibly let anyone see the face she had now? The answer was that she couldn’t. No one would be able to tolerate it.
“I suppose I was lucky. Some people lost arms and legs, or both. It’s only my face.” She tried to minimize it in her own mind too, but she couldn’t. The challenge she was facing was huge, and Gabriella had confirmed it.
“You were so beautiful,” she said almost enviously, and then caught herself. “You still are. Will it get better?” she asked in a hushed voice.
“A little, not much. They can do more surgeries to smooth down the scars, but they said they won’t go away completely. The scars are too deep. They want to let it heal for a few months. I might see a doctor in Paris. But they’ve done all they can for now. They told me to wear the mask, but I hate it. You’re the only person I’ve seen till now, except for the doctors and nurses and my mother’s law partner, but he didn’t see me without the bandages. If I don’t wear the mask, I’ll frighten children on the street,” Véronique said sadly.