The One Day You Were My Husband (81)

I don’t say anything. Behind Kerstin’s car, the late winter sun is drizzling through the bare branches of a willow tree. I feel sick.

“What do you mean?”

After a bemused silence, Kerstin’s face changes.

I watch her, trying to understand what’s happening. Then I see it. Sympathy. Kerstin is feeling sympathy for me.

“You really do not know?”

“Know what?”

I force myself to sit back down in my driver’s seat, legs out of the hire car.

“Carrie…” Kerstin says uncertainly. But then she does it again, the self-collection thing, and finally she opens her own car door. We sit opposite each other in the shelter of our metal boxes, the Baltic Sea moving busily behind us.

“Johan was carrying drugs into the country for your mother,” she says. “I am amazed you do not know this. But it is true. I think this is why your mother flew out so quickly—she arrived before me and Fredrik. She worked nonstop to help him. But there was a good reason for that. She had a very bad conscience.”

Kerstin watches me for a while, but I can’t say anything. What she is telling me makes no sense, but I fear instantly that it’s true.

“I cannot forgive her,” Johan’s mother says, but I can barely hear her.

Memories swarm like feeding fish at the edge of my consciousness. I remember Mum calling me Sayang, a term of the very deepest endearment she’d used about twice in my entire life. Mum’s sleeplessness, her relentless energy, the fire that was in her. She had thrown everything she had at Johan’s release. And when she failed, she’d given me her flat.

“I cannot forgive her,” Kerstin says again. Near us, two birds are calling to each other. They sound musical, happy, two flutes in a major key.

“But I am sorry to have to break this news to you,” she adds, more gently.

I just shake my head. I stare at my trainers, which need a clean. I think about how we are a household that no longer has baby wipes, now the kids are older. How they used to fix dirty trainers and a thousand other things besides.

The birds are still calling. Kerstin is repeating her request that I go and stay somewhere else, although she no longer sounds angry. Out on the water, there is the sound of a speedboat cutting through the waves, following the boating channel out to sea.

I can’t wrench my eyes away from the marks on my trainers.

Eventually, when I don’t respond, Kerstin shuts her car door and starts the engine. “Please, just go,” she shouts.

She drives off, and I’m alone with the birds and the gentle movement of leafless weeping willows.





Thirty-one.




Mum doesn’t answer the phone even when I ring her a second, third, fourth time. I walk around Johan’s summer house and pace back and forth on the deck. The angled winter light stirs up a lively ballet on the surface of the sea, the wind gutsy and playful.

I should be cold, but I can’t feel my body at all. I go inside.

This place is full of Johan. He’s in every worn floorboard, every picture on the wall, and I connect to none of it.

My mother being involved in his arrest has never crossed my mind. Not once. The nightmare of Thailand was her specialty: fighting the good fight, chasing justice. For a few weeks I had the unusual experience of feeling lucky to have her, a mother who knew how to handle something that lay way beyond the comfort and predictability of most peoples’ experiences.

Yet Kerstin’s words are impossible to ignore.

I go back outside. I pace and pace. To the barbecue, back to the door. Barbecue, door. Barbecue, door.

Mum is a poor mother; she was never designed for the job. But, drugs? She spent most of her time in Thailand trying to work out what had happened. How could she possibly have been responsible?

She couldn’t, is what I keep coming back to. Unless there was a far greater deception going on. Unless Mum is the reason Johan still won’t tell me what happened. Unless it’s my own mother who he expected to have told me everything.

Is she the one person I should have been looking at all along?

Impulsively, I call Johan via the Roof app, but he doesn’t answer. I take a large stick and start bashing at the reeds by his wooden jetty, but it doesn’t help. I just need to talk to Mum.

The afternoon passes and the air becomes icy. I march up and down the root-snagged path from Johan’s deck to the sauna shed, watching the clouds zip across the brilliant winter sky, the reeds moving frenziedly. At one point, in desperation, I go inside the sauna, sorting manically through the life jackets and old oars stored in the vestibule as if trying to find a secret letter. A sign. Something that might help me.

I find a spider and an old bottle of sunscreen, dried white cream plastered around the neck. It’s covered in old greasy finger marks, probably Johan’s. I hold it in my hand. He had his whole life ahead of him. His career. His relationship with me.

Could my mother really have been the person responsible for bringing an end to all of that? Has she held the answers I longed for, all these years? Was her help and hard work in Thailand no more than a smoke screen?

No, my heart wants to tell me. But the truth is: I don’t know. I am a woman of nearly forty who has never truly known her mother.



* * *



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Raffy calls. Performing your first Hartmann’s procedure has nothing on talking to a child you feel you’ve betrayed. A sweet, funny child who cannot contain his excitement about his trip to Sweden on Monday, where he’ll get to spend three illegal bunked-off-school days with Mummy and Daddy.