The One Day You Were My Husband (22)

I looked at Dell, at her little pixieish face, those trendy thick glasses she always wore, the short red hair that always made her look more like a thespian than a trainee surgeon. I looked at my friend and willed myself to be More Dell, or More Maya—to take a risk and just follow my heart. But how? I was nothing like either of these women. I would never do something that could compromise my job.

“Take the risk,” she urged. “I don’t know how many chances we get in life, but Carrie, there won’t be many.”



* * *



—

He appeared again the next day.

I’d been on ward rounds but had taken fifteen minutes outside to get some fresh air before heading back into the stale oven of the post-op ward.

And there he was. Sitting on a concrete plinth to the side of the main hospital building because there weren’t any benches, drinking a coffee in the lemon light of a winter morning. He had a book in his hands, something in a foreign language. He was wearing an orange beanie hat and a thick lumberjack coat. He was divine.

“Doctor Carrie,” he said easily, as if he’d bumped into an old friend, and I found myself smiling in a way I never did at work. When I stopped smiling I just looked at him, uncertain as to what to do or say.

“Swedish fairy tales,” he said, holding up the book. The sun caught the cover for a second, dazzling me. Behind him, steam rose from a grille in the wall. “My mother used to read them when I was ill. I kept thinking about Deniz and wondering if anyone was visiting her.”

He was Swedish, then. Johan. It should probably have been obvious.

He looked right at me with those eyes. A neonatal ambulance swung in behind him, a sight that normally filled me with apprehension, but—shamefully—I barely noticed.

“Turns out she hasn’t had any visitors at all. She had one of the nurses phone me yesterday.”

“So nice that she had your number. And now she’s got a visitor. You’re very kind!” I cursed myself for sounding so formal, so bloody doctorish. But he didn’t seem to notice. He merely moved over on the plinth so I could sit next to him, which I did. It felt too good to be true that he was here again, that I hadn’t had to break any rules to see him.

“I’m sure you guys are doing a great job doctoring Deniz,” he said. “But it’s the other things. Human things, Doctor Carrie. Holding hands, cold flannels for fevers, stories.”

“Your English is impeccable,” I said vaguely. Nobody had ever used my name in that way but I liked it. It felt lustrous and intimate. “Did you grow up bilingual?”

“I did. My dad’s Swedish but he grew up in Canada.” Perhaps sensing that I wasn’t sure what to do with myself, he handed me the book. It was beautiful, a fairy tale in itself.

“Nere vid ?lven,” I read. “…Never Been Alive?”

“I mean, no.”

“Nearly Bit Alvin?”

“Still no.”

“Night of—”

“Stop! It means ‘Down by the River.’ You must never pursue a career as an author.”

“At school I wrote a story about a girl who opened up her own head so she could read her brain in a mirror.”

“Good God,” Johan said. “What did her brain say?”

“It said, you have a tumor in your bowel, you need to go and see the doctor.”

“Seriously?”

I was laughing now. “I’m afraid so.”

“And you were what age?”

“Ten. I’d been teaching myself medicine for a while by then.”

Johan let out a cloud of breath. “Did they call your parents?”

“Yes.”

“And what did they say?”

“Mum found it funny. Dad tried to convince himself I was just a keen medic in waiting, although I think he was worried. But he got busy throwing Mum out of the house and divorcing her soon after. I think he forgot.”

“Oh. That’s not so funny.”

“It wasn’t.”

“So your Dad brought you up on his own?”

“From the age of ten, yes.”

He nodded thoughtfully but didn’t push me further. “My name is Johan,” he said after a pause.

“I know. I’m Carrie.”

He laughed. He seemed to be someone who did a lot of laughing. “I know. Doctor Carrie Cole.” He leaned over and picked up my lanyard, smiling. My ID facial expressions, Maya always said, were only just the right side of frightening.

“Severe,” Johan said, carefully replacing it without touching me.

“Very severe. As you saw with that poor policeman.”

“Oh, he was an asshole. But I don’t think that was normal Doctor Carrie I was watching then. It felt like the supermax version.”

“I…I hope so.”

“She was great! If I was dying and everyone had abandoned me, I’d want that version of Doctor Carrie striding in with her defibrillator, or whatever you’re using in an emergency. Either way, I’d want you.”

In spite of what Maya believed, I had actually had a proper boyfriend at med school. It had even progressed far enough for him to introduce me to his parents, but I’d ended it soon after. He wanted to be a neurologist. They’re full of abstract ideas and theories, neurologists. Surgeons, on the other hand, are precision craftspeople, trained very specifically to go in and fix things. We would never have worked out.