The One Day You Were My Husband (12)
I long to be able to call Dad. To just go around to his house and talk through the whole thing with him. He’d have known what I should do, before this savage illness took over his mind. He’d have known what to say.
The air around me seems thinner, like I’m at high altitude. I check my emails and of course there’s nothing from Johan, because he got out of Thailand six years ago. Why would he choose today to write to me?
Hungry for distraction, I look up the website Dell sent me yesterday listing the most popular medical foundation programs. She’s been trying to persuade me to come back to London to retrain. The website ranks surgical specialties with emojis. General Surgery—my specialty—is the most popular, with not just one but two fire emojis.
I start the engine and drive home. This is how I will deal with today. I will concentrate on my return to work. To the two-emoji specialty that I buried myself in when I came back from Thailand without Johan, all those years ago. It worked then, and it will work now.
Five.
“You cannot go to Stockholm,” Maya says. “Not if Johan lives there. No way, Carrie. Just no. No!”
She shouts the last word, which might in other circumstances have made me laugh. Maya is a pretty spiritual person these days, but fragments of her old self continue to escape even now, small pieces of shrapnel from the explosive child I once played My Little Ponies with.
“I’m not going to see Johan,” I say. There are three closed doors between me and Robin—it’s the only way we can stay warm in this old house—but I’m barely talking above a whisper. “I’m going for the holiday let conference and a meeting with an old boss. That’s it.”
“No! You’re happy with Robin! And, Carrie, you’re a mother! Just stop it.”
“Stop what? I have no intention of seeing Johan! And even if I happened to bump into him, of all the millions of people I could bump into, I’d walk in the other direction. Besides, you’re right: I am happy with Robin. With my family.”
“So have you told Robin about this?”
I’m silent for a few moments. “No. But that doesn’t mean—”
“Oh, Carrie. Come on.”
We go back and forth for a while. When she called earlier I was doing my Father Christmas shopping, sharing my highlights from their present lists with Robin. “Pow gow stick” is at the top of Maeve’s list. “Potaree making kit” is Raff’s. Robin’s since gone upstairs to wrap some presents, but I suspect he’ll be reading his new Aristotle book. It arrived yesterday and, at nearly 2,400 years old, is apparently one of the most important astronomical texts of all time.
It’s been a few days since I found Johan online and in that time I have achieved very little, other than somehow keeping a lid on my still-unfurling shock. I’ve tried to expend my energy on managing Raffy’s asthma, Maeve’s anxiety about her best friend moving to Scotland and, of course, Dad’s move to the residential home. But, shamefully, I’ve also relapsed into reading and rereading the few things that are available online about Johan. I don’t know who I resent more for this wasted time, him or myself.
Once Robin went upstairs earlier with a bag of presents and the Minions Christmas wrapping paper he proudly sourced online, I gave in and told my sister the whole thing via text message. Maya claims to use her mobile “only seldom” these days, but six minutes after I messaged her my own phone started ringing.
“You’re not saying anything. Say something,” my sister prompts. I hope she doesn’t speak to her therapy clients this way.
I sigh. “Maya, this trip means a lot to me. Why shouldn’t I go to Stockholm and do the conference and meet up with Yanika and eat some meatballs and enjoy my first break from my children in years? Johan took so much from me. Why should I allow him to ruin this, too?”
“But Carrie. He already has. He lives in the city you want to visit and he’s in your head nonstop—why didn’t he tell me he escaped Thailand, who’s this woman he married, why did he retrain as an architect, why did he do what he did, why is this happening, what does it mean? Do you honestly think any of that’ll go away if you go to Stockholm? Because, trust me, it’ll get a lot louder.”
The longer she speaks, the more I have to accept the truth in what she’s saying. I’m not going there to track down and confront Johan, of course, but it’s still too dangerous. What’s to say he doesn’t live near my hotel? How can I guarantee that I won’t bump into him at Stockholm Central station? In a coffee shop? Walking down the street with his family?
I get up to make myself a bowl of cereal. I’ve barely eaten this week. Being unable to eat is a red warning flag for me, the first casualty of an overloaded system. I’m childishly determined to prove, with this miserable container of beige food, that I’m fine.
“I am not going to bump into him,” I insist doggedly, even though I know I’ve lost this fight. “Things like that don’t happen in massive cities.”
Maya pauses. I can hear birdsong on the other end of the phone. Colorado birds, taking a lunchtime song break in the foothills of Grand Mesa. Her dog barks and it echoes across the vast, still body of water she lives next to.
“Carrie. You haven’t thought this through, have you? What if he’s at the conference himself?”