Page 12 of The One Day You Were My Husband
“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?”
I stop dead in the middle of the kitchen, bowl in hand.
“Oh my…oh,shit.”
I look behind me, as if Maya is somehow in this room, not five thousand miles away, walking by a frozen lake. How has this not occurred to me? Johan is a Roof owner, too, and the conference is in his city. How could I not have thought of this?
I didn’t think about this because, until a few days ago, I believed Johan would be in Thailand for the rest of his life.
“Oh God, Maya. I’ve enrolled, I’ve paid…But I—No. I can’t go, can I? I cannot possibly go.”
“No, you can’t,” she agrees. “Hey! Biscuit! Come back! BISCUIT.”
My inability to travel since becoming a mother has prevented me visiting my sister for years. I haven’t even met Biscuit. I feel Maya’s absence from my life as keenly as I felt it the day she left to go and start a new life with her partner, Eagle, back in 2010, when I’d just met Johan.
“I could contact the conference organizers and ask if he’s going?” I suggest weakly. The thought of seeing him fills me with unquantifiable anxiety but I’m angry, too. Stockholm was meant to bemytime.
“Still no,” Maya says briskly. Her “no” has the sliding vowel sound of her permanent home, a reminder that she has bedded into American life, that I will never get her back.
“And Carrie. No matter how badly he did you over, no matter how badly he broke your heart, your trust, your career and, let’s face it, your life, for a while—before all of that happened, you loved him like he was the last man on earth. You adored him.”
I close my eyes. Out of nowhere, a memory has sprung of Johan and me lying in bed one morning. Our faces were close.
Your eyes are so beautiful, he said.Exactly the same color as my childhood cat’s.I asked him if this was a compliment.Oh, yes. She was crazy beautiful.
We lay there for what felt like hours, staring at each other, smiling. Then he opened his mouth to speak, and I thought he was going to say something serious likeI love you.But instead he just said,Meow.And he placed a thumb carefully by the side of my eye, stroking my skin delicately, like you might stroke a cat’s paw.Meow.
“Don’t underestimate how much that could derail you,” my sister says. “If you somehow saw him. Or even if you didn’t. Just being there in the same city would be enough.”
I open the kitchen door quietly to check that Robin hasn’t crept downstairs, but the hallway door is still closed. My husband has never crept anywhere in his solid, no-nonsense life; it’s only my guilt that drives me to check.
“Have you told Mum?” Maya asks.
“Yes. She was gobsmacked. She actually got quite tearful.”
“Seriously?”
“Mmm.”
“That’s considerate of her,” Maya says. “Getting all misty-eyed about your ex-husband without any thought for you.”
“Oh, Maya, give her a break. Of course this is emotive! She dropped everything and flew to Thailand to help him!”
“Until she decided she wasn’t going to help him anymore and bundled you back on the first plane home.”
