The One Day You Were My Husband (11)

The final picture of him is on the website of his architectural firm. Thoughtful, half smiling, an expression I once cherished. He’s wearing a T-shirt. He never really loved shirts.

The photo is black and white but I can still see his freckles, the impossible blue of his eyes. He has a beard, something I’ve never been sure about. He is still deceptively beautiful. After all that has happened to him, after all these years, he is still very clearly the sort of man who causes people to stop and stare.

Six years back in the world. Clean water and real food. Freedom, safety. And a child. He has a little boy. A small Johan. I imagine stubby fingernails and wild curls. A stout little bottom, a freckled nose, that same way of seeing beneath someone’s skin. I catch myself smiling, but the shock soon washes back in. There is nothing sweet or redemptive about any of this.

Has he looked me up, stared at pictures of me online, like I am doing now? Does he care?

Abruptly, I close the laptop, stand up, sit down.

I have to remind myself that I wouldn’t have responded even if he had contacted me. The truth is that by the time he somehow escaped the sordid mess he created in Thailand, I was in love with someone else, someone trustworthy and kind. I had rebuilt myself, drawn a line. I would not have allowed Johan anywhere near my life if he’d reached out.

I go upstairs and check on Raffy again. I cuddle him and then I cuddle Maeve and I whisper “Sorry,” into their hair, again and again. I had no business googling Johan. I am a mother. A wife. These two children, these infuriating, noisy, perfect little souls; and their dear father, my rock; our drafty old cottage on the southern slopes of the moor—they are what I chose. Not Johan, whoever he really is. I am sickened by my actions.

Too agitated to consider sleep, I steam clean the kitchen floor, spray down the food cupboards, scrub the bin. I make a solemn promise to my family that I will never look Johan Kullberg up again. I wash windows, trim browning plant leaves, then pause at 4 a.m. to fuel myself with strong tea, because I’ve barely eaten since lunchtime and I’m shaking.

Sometime before five, I sit back down at my laptop.

I open it up and stare numbly at pictures of squid boats from outer space until Maeve runs into the kitchen at speed, pulling down her pajama bottoms as she heads for the downstairs toilet, shouting, “HELLO, MUMMY, I NEED A POO.”



* * *



—

I fill up a watering can in the old granite trough by our front door, grateful for the frosty sting of 6:03 a.m. I water all the house plants while Maeve does her morning business and sings opera, and Raffy slides sleepily into the living room and curls up under a blanket on the sofa, telling me he will have to take the rest of the term off school because of his breathing.

He sounds better. In spite of my mental state, I’m grateful for the simple relief of a healthy child. The first twenty-four hours after an asthma attack tell me a lot about how quickly he’ll recover. We do his inhaler and have a cuddle while Maeve designs a “Moroccan cafe” on at least twenty sheets of A4.

Robin leaves for the 7:20 train to London. Maeve refuses to let me brush her hair.

“I want Daddy to do it!” she shouts, on the brink of tears. “You always hurt me!”

“I’ve told you a million times, you need to go to bed with a ponytail. Otherwise this is exactly what happens,” I reply, as if that will soothe either my daughter’s mood or her tangled hair.

“I want Daddy…” she wails, then runs off to get my phone, the password for which she has somehow learned, and tries to FaceTime Robin. When I ask her to come and have her breakfast she just yells “DADDY!” in my direction. Minutes later, she has forgotten the whole thing and is sitting on my knee, applying sticker gems to my nose while I force myself to eat a banana.

Neither of them make their beds.

While I’m running around after them, I call the paeds ward at Torbay and get Raffy an appointment for twelve forty-five. He’s upset that I’m making him go to school this morning, but really, his breathing is fine. He announces he needs to do his own poo just as I am loading them into the car. “It can’t wait,” he preempts, because I am a selfish mummy who’s asked her children to delay their urgent poos far too many times.

A short while later, I drive them across the moor in a dream. It’s crystal clear up there—a bracing concert of greens and browns and spiky yellow, tors in dark points staggering off toward the horizon. I connect to none of it.

I get Maeve and Raffy to school. I chat to Veronique, one of my mum friends, as I walk back to the car park; we talk about the rumors of a new restaurant in town, about the car that’s still sitting overturned in a ditch on the moor after last week’s snow. The greengrocer being taken over by a hipster couple who are filling the window with Christmas kimchi kits and obscure squashes. Vero predicts they won’t last and I just make vague mmm sounds, because I don’t know what to say that doesn’t concern the man I once married in Thailand.

I’m longing to call my sister, but she’s in Colorado and it’s at least another five hours before she’ll wake up. I text Dell, who’s probably prepping for theater already, and of course she doesn’t reply.

The only other person in my life who knows about Johan is my mother. I call her and she doesn’t answer—she never bloody answers—but I leave a voicemail. She may not connect to my life as a stay-at-home mother, but she’ll be extremely interested in this.