She bought her ticket for the TGV high-speed train to Paris, and watched the countryside rush past as she sat rigid in her seat, suddenly terrified that there would be an explosion on the train. She was shaking and she could easily imagine it happening. Images of the Zaventem attack kept flashing through her mind. There were beads of sweat on her face by the time the train slid into the station. She rushed from the train, and took great gulps of air to calm down the moment she got outside. Having survived the trip, it felt wonderful to be back in Paris. She hailed a cab, and on the drive to the seventeenth arrondissement, she saw all the familiar landmarks and nearly cried. She had thought she would never see her home again. So many times she had thought she would die in the hospital, and wished she had. She sat staring at her building when the cab stopped in front of it, and didn’t get out for a minute.
“Is this the right address?” the driver asked her, and she nodded. He was puzzled by why she didn’t get out. Most of his passengers were in a hurry, this one wasn’t. She seemed to hesitate, as though she wasn’t sure what to do next and was in a foreign land. She was savoring the moment and, at the same time, dreading having to enter the empty apartment.
Bernard had sent her a set of keys that Marie-Helene kept at the office for emergencies, since all of their keys had been lost at the airport. She held them now in a shaking hand, paid the driver, and finally got out. She entered the numbers for the outer door code, pushed the heavy iron doors open, and walked inside. She used an electronic badge for a second door, and slowly walked up the stairs to her mother’s apartment on the second floor. The building was silent and empty at that time of day. There was a guardian who must have been having lunch. Véronique slowly unlocked the front door with shaking hands, and turned off the alarm in the unlit entrance hall and looked around. Everything was as her mother had left it. There was a navy blue wool jacket sitting on a chair, an umbrella in a stand. All the familiar antiques that Marie-Helene had inherited from her parents and Véronique had grown up with.
The woman who came to clean had kept the apartment dusted and in good order. There was a stack of mail, which Bernard’s secretary came to pick up every week and went through, paying bills, opening correspondence, and throwing junk mail away. The door to her mother’s little study was open and there was no sign of activity. She could see the living room with all the familiar furniture. The shades were drawn throughout the apartment. It all had a dry, brittle feeling to it, like a fallen leaf. The dining room was empty, and her own girlhood bedroom was down a hallway next to her mother’s, with the kitchen at the end of the apartment. It was all there, but there was no sign of her mother, just as she had feared, and she had never felt so alone in her life. She sat down on a chair in the entrance hall, her legs were shaking hard, and she started to cry like the abandoned child she felt like. She pulled off the surgical mask, and her tears flooded her face and drenched her scars. She cried until she had no more tears to shed, and walked down the hall to her mother’s bedroom. The bed was made and her slippers were underneath the night table. They were pink satin with a little ball of fluff on them. Véronique had bought them for her for Mother’s Day the year before. It seemed like a lifetime ago.
She walked into her mother’s small dressing room, and saw all her clothes hanging there, all the familiar things she had seen her mother wear, her business suits, her casual clothes for weekends, her favorite sweaters, the black velvet dress she wore on Christmas every year. It took Véronique’s breath away. And when she walked into her own room, it was piled high with boxes, all the things that had been sent from her apartment. It was all here. She had come home again. But her mother was gone forever. She knew that now. Her fantasy hadn’t happened. Her mother wasn’t waiting for her. Her footsteps echoed in the empty apartment as she walked into the kitchen. She had no idea how she was going to survive living here without her mother. But she had to. She caught a glimpse of herself in a mirror in the hallway when she went back to her bedroom, and she saw the truth boldly staring at her, who she was now. She was no longer the girl people would stare at when she walked down the street because she was so beautiful, or whom they recognized because they had seen her in a hundred magazines. She was a stranger, even to herself. Half of her face was a reminder of those easy, happy days, and the other half was her reality of her present and her future. She was the girl who had survived a massive explosion, and had deep ugly scars to show for it. She would have to live with their shocked faces in future, and the jumbled memories of the worst day of her life, when she had lost her mother. Losing her beauty was the least part of it, and she would gladly have traded that if her mother had survived. But she hadn’t. And in her wounded heart and soul, Véronique hadn’t survived it either.