The One Day You Were My Husband (9)
Robin glanced sideways at me. “It must have been incredibly traumatic.”
I took off the binoculars and handed them to him. “I’m fine. Honestly. But I have to say I’m not fine with these offensively heavy binoculars. You should try a pair of surgical loupes. They attach directly to your head and they weigh almost nothing.”
“Don’t listen to her,” Robin told the binoculars. They were his grandfather’s 1960 Carl Zeisses and Robin’s favorite “workhorses.” “You’re very quick to make jokes, Carrie, but I find it hard to believe that time was anything other than awful.”
That silenced me for a moment.
“You’re right,” I said, because I wanted no secrets in this relationship. “It was. But it’s part of the experience of being human to suffer, isn’t it? I repaired the damage and I moved on. I’m a surgeon, remember.”
He wasn’t having it. “But how? How did you just repair the damage when it was all so violent and shocking? It was your wedding day.”
I thought again before replying. “My sister made me see a therapist for a while,” I said. “She had some helpful things to say. Then one day I asked her: What’s the formula here? What’s the clinical pathway to healing, in your experience? She said it was a balance between feeling your feelings in a ‘resourced state’ and gently reengaging with life. But of course she couldn’t tell me precisely how to find that balance, so I went ahead and devised my own formula. I allowed myself set times each day to deal with it, and I focused on being helpful and staying busy the rest of the time. Alongside all the usual self-care stuff. I made a plan and stuck to it, and it hurt for a very long time, but it worked. I healed.”
Robin said nothing. I squeezed his hand.
“As I said. I’m a surgeon. It’s how my brain works.”
It was the only noteworthy weakness I sensed in him, this anxiety about my previous life, and he only really stopped asking about Johan when I woke him up one morning, six months in, to tell him I loved him. I felt his body relax, right there, in bed.
To my surprise, he asked me to marry him on the spot. To my surprise, I said yes.
It makes sense when I think about it now. Yes, I had fallen in love with him, but I also just wanted a proper husband. A husband who was exactly who he said he was. Someone who’d be there for longer than a few hours.
* * *
—
Robin comes back in from the shed with some of the crémant I buy for Pig Shed guests. “No sign of the Geminids yet,” he says, yawning. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to face getting up.”
“I’m sorry?”
“The Geminid meteor shower. It’s happening around two a.m.” He drops the ice into the glasses. “I’m shattered, but this one’s set to be pretty spectacular. What should I do?”
“I love you, my dear nerd,” I say, after a pause. “Come here.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“Would you take any notice if I told you what to do?”
He admits he would not. Then he comes over and kisses me and we hold each other for a few moments, united and content. We have no idea what’s coming, what I’m about to find in an unsuspecting corner of the internet. I am benignly oblivious, as almost all of us are in the moments before our lives change.
Four.
Now: Devon, December 2022
I book my flights to Stockholm while Robin plays with his new camera lens. Life, in that moment, is simple and good.
After paying for the flights I go up to check on Raffy, waking him just enough to take some more salbutamol. Heavy and sleepy, he doesn’t protest. I curl myself around him while he falls quickly back to sleep. I inhale the sweetness of his hair, his oaty breath. “I love you,” I whisper, kissing him.
A few moments later Robin comes up.
“Are you happy with his breathing?” he whispers. In the darkness I see the lighter shape of my husband’s arm, feeling around for Raffy’s body.
“Yes. For now. But I won’t stop checking him.”
Robin’s hand lands gently on his son’s belly. “Let me share the burden, Carrie. I might be up for the meteor shower anyway.”
But he knows I won’t. He knows this miserable use of my medical training, this sleepless vigilance, is how I manage the anxiety that sits in the heart of any mother who’s been in NICU watching her child trying to live.
We gently reinsert Maeve’s legs into her bed, because they’re sticking out at ninety degrees. We tuck one of her unicorns under her arm and both of us kiss her. She’s always busy in her sleep, this sweet girl, and her little forehead is always damp with perspiration at night.
We return downstairs and I start searching for accommodation. The fire, which I lit hours ago, murmurs gentle stories in its stove and the fizz is lovely. I allow my gaze to slide off around our sitting room: the bulging, plaster-blown walls, the fireplace lintel with its centuries-old taper burns, the groaning beams.
The main purpose of my trip to Sweden is to go to a conference held by Roof, the competitor to Airbnb that markets our holiday let. Every year, Roof invites all its European hosts to a conference where we learn about everything from specialist insurance to property photography. Normally I don’t go, but this year I was ready. The fact that Yanika Hatziz lives in Stockholm was a bonus.