True Love

by Lurlene McDaniel

  Seventeen

  “Hello, Carley. I’m Dr. Chaffoo.”

  “Hi,” she said, shaking the hand of the plastic surgeon. She took a seat beside her mother on the leather sofa in the doctor’s plush office.

  The doctor was good-looking, with a wide, generous smile, blue eyes, and brown hair flecked with gray. He didn’t wear the white lab coat so typical of other doctors she had known, but instead was dressed in a well-tailored navy suit, crisp white shirt, and a colorful silk tie. Her mother had assured Carley that he had come highly recommended, and together they’d driven the thirty miles into Knoxville to meet with him about the possibility of reconstructing her face.

  “I’ve obtained your medical charts and read through them,” Dr. Chaffoo said, leafing through a thick manilla folder on his gleaming mahogany desk. “I’ve also talked to your oncologist and have a very thorough picture of what you went through four years ago.”

  “The question is,” her mother interjected, “can you help my daughter? Can anything be done to give her a more normal appearance?”

  “Is that what you want, Carley?”

  “More than anything.” Carley felt both anxious and excited. She was afraid to get her hopes up, yet she longed for him to tell her she was “fixable.”

  Dr. Chaffoo stood, came around his desk, raised her chin with his forefinger, and scrutinized her face. It made her feel self-conscious. She disliked anyone staring at her too intently. Gently he smoothed his thumb along the sunken contours of her cheek, eye, and nose, then returned to his chair. “In a few minutes I’m going to take you into another room where I have an imaging computer and a camera set up. But first let’s talk about the realities of reconstructive surgery. No matter how much plastic surgery you have done, you’ll always have a scar on your face and some residual effects of your cancer surgery. I can’t make you perfect.”

  Carley felt her hopes sag. No one could help her.

  “However,” the doctor continued, “I can make you look a whole lot better.”

  “Tell us,” her mother said.

  “What plastic surgeons try to do with this type of malformation is add symmetry back to your face. As it is now, anyone who sees you is automatically drawn to the defect because your face is out of proportion. If we fill in the caved-in areas, your cheek can look fuller, your eye can be elevated to align with the other, and your nose can be reconstructed to give you a more normal appearance.”

  Her mother asked, “But bone and tissue were removed during her cancer surgery. They told us it can’t regrow. It’s gone forever.”

  Carley looked straight at the doctor. “What do you use? Silly Putty? Paper and paste? Play-Doh?”

  Dr. Chaffoo laughed heartily. “Good suggestions, but your body would reject such foreign substances. No … whenever possible I’d use your own body tissue, fat, and bone. Some silicone plastic if necessary.”

  “My tissue? How?”

  “First I’ll send you to a radiology lab and have a three-dimensional CAT scan made of your head. This type of X ray will help me see you on the inside before I operate. It will give me exact dimensions of your nasal and cranial areas and offer me a model to follow for rebuilding. An old photograph of you will also be used for comparison.”

  “Like The Terminator?” She remembered her photo as a twelve-year-old, and a movie she’d once seen about a robot made to look human.

  He laughed again. “I’ll be able to see the extent of the area needing work, and that will help me gauge the amount of material I’ll need to harvest for your surgeries.”

  “How many surgeries?” her mother wanted to know.

  “Probably three. Each one about six months apart with two to three hours in the operating room and one to two days in the hospital for recovery.”

  Carley’s hopes dipped. She hadn’t expected it to take so long. “But that could take over a year and a half. I’ll be a senior by the time I look acceptable.”

  “But you’re so young,” the doctor said. “Over the course of a lifetime what’s eighteen months?”

  My entire life in high school, she thought, but didn’t say it. A normal social life would still elude her. And being able to meet Kyle face-to-face was a dream gone up in smoke. Secretly she’d harbored the hope that fixing her face might take less time and therefore give her another opportunity to work something out with him.

  “You said you could use tissue from my daughter’s own body. Tell us about that part.” Her mother didn’t even sense Carley’s disappointment, but pressed the doctor for more details.

  “I can take cartilage from behind your ear to replace nasal cartilage.” He tugged on his ear to demonstrate flexibility. “Your ear will be fine and look perfectly normal.”

  “But what about bone? Could you take some from my leg?” She held up the leg in the cast. “I’m sure there’s plenty to go around.”

  “Actually I’d use a calvarial bone graft—that’s bone taken from your skull and grafted into existing bone in your cheek to provide a floor for fat I’d take from your abdomen or buttocks. The fat will plump out the area.”

  She stared at him. “You’re going to take a chunk out of my head?”

  “The skull’s thick. You won’t miss the fragment I’ll take.” She remembered what it had been like to be bald from chemo. It had taken years to grow her hair long again. As if reading her mind, Dr. Chaffoo said, “Don’t worry, I won’t have to shave your head. I’ll take bone from in back of your hairline. You can brush the rest of your hair over the area. I’ll insert the bone through an incision in your gum line.” He raised his lip and pointed to the area above his upper teeth. “And the bone to enhance your eye area can be inserted through an incision under your eyelash line.” He ran his finger along the lower lashes of his left eye.

  Carley thought the whole idea sounded bizarre and creepy, and it made her stomach feel queasy. She glanced at her mother, who didn’t look especially pleased with his descriptions either. “Sounds like fun,” Carley said drolly. She recalled how horrible she looked following her surgery for the removal of the cancerous tumor.

  “The stitches are exceedingly fine. I do them with a microscope.” The doctor stood. “Come with me, Carley. I want to show you something.”

  In another room he took color photos of her, front and side views, and sent the picture electronically into a nearby computer. Her image popped up on the screen and she grimaced. She thought she looked ugly. “Well, Mom, if the FBI ever puts these on the walls of the post office, I’ll sue,” she quipped.

  “Watch this,” Dr. Chaffoo said.

  Carley leaned over his shoulder and watched as he moved the computer’s mouse on its pad. Every few seconds she heard it click and slowly watched her face transform on the computer screen. With wonder she saw her left eye shift upward and the space between her nose and eye socket fill in. She watched the bridge of her nose swell and smooth, until her nose looked straight and perfectly formed. She saw her cheek plump and fill in like a round, full apple.

  Minutes later Dr. Chaffoo leaned back in his chair and said, “Well, there you are, Carley. This is how I can make you look.”

  Beside her she heard her mother’s breath come out in small sobs. And seeing the transformed image, Carley could scarcely catch her own breath. “I—I look all right. I look like a regular girl,” she whispered. Slowly she raised her hand and touched the glass of the monitor. She traced her fingertips over the screen, over the full-faced view of her picture. For the first time in years Carley Mattea was pretty.

  Through a mist of tears she said, “Please make me look like that. Please give me back my face.”

  She decided to begin her series of surgeries over the upcoming spring break. “My teachers are accustomed to my spending time in the hospital,” she told her family. “Why break the pattern? If everything goes okay, I can have the second surgery over Christmas and the final one next summer.”

  Dr. Chaffoo scheduled her CAT scan for the end of February, but now
that she knew she could look normal, she was anxious to begin the process, in spite of her dread of the actual surgeries.

  Carley was working in the backroom of the bookstore on a Saturday afternoon with Janelle. Together they were unboxing books and chatting about Carley’s upcoming transformation. “I think it’s super,” Janelle told her. “Too bad you had to wait so long.”

  “It’s a little scary,” Carley said. “And I sure don’t look forward to more hospital time. Maybe they’ll give me a discount. What do you think?”

  Janelle giggled. “It’s doubtful. Listen, I’ll do your makeup when it’s all over. Better yet, I’ll treat you to a makeup artist.”

  “You will?”

  “Absolutely. Only the best for my kid sister.”

  Carley dragged a box of books to a nearby shelf and, with her back to Janelle, began to stack the volumes on the shelf. “I’ll be glad when this cast comes off too. Dr. Olson says another week—on Valentine’s Day if you can believe it. You know, Janelle, this is the first time I’ve looked forward to Valentine’s Day in years. Because once it’s behind me, I can go for that CAT scan.”

  “Carley?”

  She heard Kyle’s voice from the doorway and froze. She heard Janelle pause before saying, “No. I’m Janelle, Carley’s sister.”

  “But I thought—”

  Carley’s heart pounded and her knees quivered. Silently she prayed that Janelle would send him away. But even as she prayed, she could feel his gaze on her back.

  Janelle said, “I know what you think. But it isn’t true.” Janelle took an audible breath. “That’s Carley over there.”

  Carley gripped the side of the shelf to keep her knees from buckling. Then she heard Janelle leave the room and close the door quietly behind her.

  Eighteen

  Carley kept her back to Kyle and her gaze locked onto the covers of books inches from her nose. Her spine felt rigid. She heard him move across the room and stand directly behind her.

  “Carley? Is this really you? Why did you introduce your sister to me and my friends and tell us it was you? I didn’t even know you had a sister! What’s going on? Tell me.”

  “Why did you come?” She ignored his deluge of questions. “You told me you would leave me alone after you came to the coffee shop.”

  “I wanted to see you,” he said simply. “I figured if I came to the bookstore while you were working, your boyfriend wouldn’t be a problem.” He paused, then added, “But that guy in the coffee shop wasn’t really your boyfriend, was he? He’s your sister’s boyfriend.”

  She saw no way around telling him the truth. “Yes. Jon is Janelle’s boyfriend.”

  “Would you please turn around and talk to my face?”

  She refused by shaking her head. “Would you please go away and leave me alone.” It wasn’t a request, but a demand.

  “I won’t go without talking to you face-to-face.”

  “There’s nothing to say, Kyle.”

  “Why won’t you look at me? I know it’s you. I can smell your hair, all clean and sweet, like flowers. I’ll never forget the way your hair smells. Please turn around.”

  She felt as if a knife was twisting in her heart. She had come to the end of the road. There was absolutely no way to avoid the inevitable any longer. No way to continue to hide the truth from him. She tasted the bitterness of defeat. Softly, with voice trembling, she asked, “Why do you think I don’t want to look at you, Kyle?”

  “I have no idea. But it’s driving me crazy.” She felt his hand on her shoulder.

  “Do you think my sister’s pretty?”

  “Sure, but— Is that what this is about? You think you’re not pretty?” He sounded incredulous. “I don’t care what you look like.”

  “Really,” she declared. Then slowly she turned, until she was looking him in the face. He was inches taller, but she raised her head so that he could see her fully. Slowly he removed his sunglasses. His skin looked pink around his eye area, and moist with an ointment of some kind. His lashes and eyebrows, which must have been burned off in his accident, were beginning to regrow in a dark stubble. His eyes were a shocking shade of intense blue.

  As Kyle peered down at her, his expression was first one of shock, followed by disbelief and stunned silence. He took a step backward. “What happened to you?”

  She clenched her fists, digging her nails into her palms, hoping that the physical pain would replace the emotional pain and keep her from crying in front of him. She’d thought she’d prepared herself for such reactions, but she wasn’t prepared. She remembered all the times he’d taken her hand and his face had lit up with a smile. But now he was seeing her in all her ugliness, all her deformity. “Cancer. When I was twelve. They cut it out, but left me looking like this.”

  “Cancer? Are you all right now?”

  “I’m free of cancer,” she said, but knew she’d never be “all right” in his presence again.

  “But why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you say something while we were in the hospital?”

  “I couldn’t think of a good way to work it into the conversation.”

  His expression clouded, and anger formed lines around his mouth. “You should have told me.”

  “I liked having you think I was normal. It was a nice change for a boy to talk to me and treat me as if I were a real person. Instead of a freak.”

  “You aren’t a freak,” he said sharply.

  “I’m hardly material for a modeling career, now, am I?”

  “Why do you have to handle everything like it was a big joke? This isn’t funny, Carley. You lied to me. Worse—you carried off a sneaky scheme to keep me from the truth. If I hadn’t come here today, I’d have gone the rest of my life thinking you were somebody you weren’t!”

  She understood his anger, but she had no tolerance for it. “It was my face. My life. I didn’t owe you anything. Stop criticizing me.”

  “You made out like we were friends. Like you cared about me.”

  “I did care. I—I just didn’t think my physical appearance was any of your business.”

  He stepped closer and she felt the bookshelf against her back. “You didn’t trust me,” he snapped. “You figured that what you looked like would determine if I liked you or not. That wasn’t fair!”

  “I’ve seen the way guys look at me, Kyle,” she fired back. “Can you believe that not one of them has ever looked me in the face and asked to be my friend? Or my boyfriend?”

  He took her by the shoulders. “Well, I’m not like other guys.”

  “Right.” She twisted out of his grasp. “If Steve and Jason had actually seen the real me that day in the hospital and said to you, ‘Man, that girl is ugly,’ what would you have done? Would you still have wanted to hang out with me? Would you still have asked me to your school’s dance?”

  He glared at her. “We’ll never know, will we?”

  She pulled herself up to her full height. “I know. Tell me, aren’t you the tiniest little bit disappointed that I’m not the ‘babe’ you thought I was? Isn’t there some small part of you that isn’t totally shocked and disappointed? Remember, I saw your face just a while ago when you first looked at me. And I remember all the times you told me you thought I must be pretty.” Now she was angry, and tired of being defensive about what she’d done. Kyle would never understand, could never understand what it had meant to her ego to have him believe she was attractive.

  “All right, so long as we’re finally being honest, yes, I’m disappointed. I’m sorry you’re not what you wanted me to believe you were. I’m sorry you had cancer and that your face is messed up. I’m sorry I said things in the hospital to make you think your looks were important to me.”

  His words brought her no satisfaction. What had she expected him to say? “Then I guess we both got something out of this whole thing, didn’t we? For a while you got to think I was pretty and I got to think some guy liked me. Too bad illusions can’t be real life.”

  He gla
red at her without speaking, but she didn’t care. As far as she was concerned, their discussion was ended. There was nothing left to say. Slowly Kyle slipped his sunglasses back onto his face. She wondered if the glare of the overhead lights had begun to hurt his eyes, started to ask, but thought better of it. No use letting him know how much she still cared about him. Better to make a clean break and put him out of her life once and for all.

  He asked, “Do you know what I learned when I was blind, Carley?” She shook her head, not trusting her voice. “I learned how to see. Corny, huh? I learned that vision can be a handicap because it allows us to make judgments based on what our eyes show us.

  “Don’t get me wrong, I’m very happy I have my vision back. I’m not sure I could have made it through a lifetime in the dark. But in some ways it would be good if everyone could spend some time without their vision. It teaches you what’s important.”

  “Just like being disfigured teaches you,” she countered. “But I’d rather have read the lesson in a book than experienced it.”

  He ignored her barb. “Do you know what blindness taught me about you?” He didn’t wait for her to answer. “It taught me to see you from the inside out.”

  “Ugh—with all my blood and guts?” She’d tried to crack a joke.

  He refused to be diverted. “I didn’t come here today to embarrass you or to hurt your feelings.”

  “So why did you come?”

  “All I wanted was to say thank you for helping me through my time in the hospital. And to see your outside and how it fit with your inside.”

  “I’m sorry the match-up didn’t work out,” she said.

  “You’re right, it wasn’t what I expected.” He turned toward the door. “It wasn’t what you led me to expect.”

  Tears stung her eyes, but she refused to let them escape. “I’m not sorry,” she insisted. “Not one bit sorry that you once thought I was pretty. It was the first time in my life someone did.”

  “Well, I’m sorry,” he said, pausing at the door. “I’m sorry you didn’t trust me enough to tell me the truth.”