“He says the force of the explosion and the shrapnel are what make it so hard to improve the scars, but he seems to feel confident that I’ll be happy with the result. I’m going back to New York over Christmas, have the surgery and spend a few days in the hospital.”
“How long will you be there?”
“For two or three weeks after the surgery, depending on how it goes.”
“Fantastic! I’m going home to Ireland for Christmas, which I’ll regret the minute I get there. My sisters and nieces and nephews drive me crazy. But I’m coming back to New York for the New Year. Will you spend it with me?” She was touched that he would ask her.
“Yes, I will, unless you get a better date by then. You can cancel me if you do, if some little hottie crosses your path between now and the New Year.”
“You’re hottie enough for me.” He laughed at her. “We can get shit-faced together, or go watch the ball drop in Times Square or something, on New Year’s Eve. Where are you staying?”
“They have guest apartments for patients like me, from far away, who want to be ‘discreet.’ And you won’t believe this, he and his partner are doing the first surgery for free, as a gift, to honor what happened to me.”
“That really is amazing.” Doug was happy for her. “I’m so glad it worked out. My friend raves about him.”
“And he has a partner who does bodywork. He’s going to clean up some of the worst scars for me. This is the best thing that has happened to me since the attack.”
“Do you want to have dinner with me tomorrow night?” he offered. “I can’t tonight. I have a date.”
“I’d love to. And I’m too tired to go out tonight anyway. I just got back a few hours ago.” She sounded sad again. “It’s hard coming home to the apartment without my mom here. I keep thinking she’ll walk out of her room, or I’ll run into her in the kitchen. It still feels so unreal. Like it’s a terrible joke or something, and she’s going to walk in and tell me she was only kidding. But it’s just me here, alone in the apartment.”
“I felt like that after my father died too. Every time I went home to Dublin, I expected him to be there. I still do. Death is a hard concept to grasp, the idea that people disappear and vanish into thin air, and you never get to see them again.”
“Yeah, that’s how it is.” He always understood. He was a fantastic friend. “Thank you for the referral. I really like both doctors. One is kind of movie star handsome and very smooth, and the other one, who does the bodywork, is this little teddy bear of a guy. They’re both really nice, and I can’t believe they’re doing this for free.”
“Some people want to put good energy back into the universe by doing good things. What happened to you and your mom was so wrong in so many ways. People feel helpless to fight it, so they do the best thing they can think of. It doesn’t change what happened, but it’s nice to know there are people like that in the world. It almost makes up for the others.” It wouldn’t bring her mother back, but it touched her, profoundly.
* * *
—
She got busy in her mother’s closet again that night, and weeded out some things. She made piles of what she wanted to keep, and maybe use or wear herself. She made other piles of things to give away. She set a goal for herself, to get her mother’s belongings put away by Christmas. Then she was going to streamline the apartment a little, move some things around, get rid of others, and make the apartment hers. There were a few things Véronique and her mother had never agreed on. For now, she still felt like she was living in her mother’s apartment and not her own. She hadn’t decided yet what to do with her mother’s bedroom. She didn’t want to sleep in it, and it made her too sad to take it apart and turn it into something else. But having it intact was part of what gave Véronique the feeling that her mother was going to walk through the front door any minute.
* * *
—
Dinner with Doug the next night was fun, as it always was. He’d been having a good time since she left, and had seen the young model again, and several others. He dated a lot of models. Véronique was one of the few who hadn’t fallen for him. They had dinner at an Italian restaurant, and he told her the latest gossip from the fashion world. Hearing it made her miss it a little, but more and more she was feeling separate from it and as though the things that were so important to them meant absolutely nothing in the real world.