Page 70 of The One Day You Were My Husband
“You left me devastated, Johan. You cut me off without any real explanation. You robbed me of years of happiness and very nearly my job. You seemed not to care that I’d spend the rest of my life driven mad wondering what had happened.Thenyou got a pardon and restarted your life, and you didn’t even tell me. You didn’t send me so much as an email.” My voice drops. “I just…just like before, it’s hard to believe that the Johan I knew could behave in such a way.”
I push the wine away. I don’t want that either.
Johan looks like he’s trying to understand what I’ve just said. “But Carrie. You know what happened.”
“I don’t know a fuckingthing! Beyond that you were guilty, that you really did smuggle drugs into Thailand, and that you were fucking someone else the whole time. That’s all I knew, Johan. That’s all I have ever known. Until six weeks ago, when I read on a Swedish website that you actually weren’t guilty. What thehell?”
“Oh, God,” he says, his face pale.
I don’t say anything. I just wait, steeping in my unspent rage.
“Do you mean nobody told you? Your—I mean, nobody talked to you about it?”
“Who?! Who was going to tell me, if you didn’t?”
Johan puts his head in his hands. “That is awful,” he says. “I can’t believe you didn’t…Oh, God. All these years.”
“Just tell me what happened.”
Johan stretches, then yawns. He’s not just nervous; he’s terrified. I look away as his jumper rides up and reveals a slice of belly.
He shifts some more in his chair, then pulls it into the table so he’s closer to me. “I was not a drug dealer. Was I guilty of carrying some pills? Yes. But I was not a drug dealer. Of course I wasn’t.”
“Of course? What do you mean, of course?”
“This is hard for both of us,” he says carefully. “I get it. But please be patient with me. I was not expecting this.” He sighs. “What I meant was, of course I wasn’t a drug dealer because—well, firstly, that’s not who I am, or ever was. And secondly, I meantof coursebecause as far as I was concerned, you know all about what happened. I’m still trying to get my head around the fact that you don’t.”
“Youtoldme you were guilty. You insisted upon it. You can’t expect me to believe something different just because you somehow received a pardon.” I realize my fists are balled under the table. “Just tell me thetruth! Please, Johan!”
“I am telling you the truth. I have never sold so much as a milligram of an illegal drug. I wouldn’t have. That is the truth.”
I stare at him. “But how am I supposed to believe that? After you insisted you were guilty? After you willingly took a prison sentence?”
Johan closes his eyes.
“The very last thing I heard about you was when Prawat called and said you’d been sentenced to twenty-five years in Bang Kwang. He said you’d been involved with the crime ring for ‘a while’ and that you had a girlfriend within the organization. After that: nothing. Not a word from you, your family, nobody. Just the rest of my life, stretching on ahead, knowing that the man I had fallen in love with was not only acriminal, but that he’d been lying to me from the beginning. Abouteverything. And not only that, but that he never wanted to see me again.” My voice is beginning to crack. “It broke me, Johan.”
His eyes open. “A girlfriend,” he says slowly. “That got back to you?”
“Was it that woman in Chinatown? The one who came into the shop when you were supposedly delivering jaggery balls?”
“You don’t even know what was happening in that shop?”
I shake my head, and once again I’m on the brink of tears. For twenty-seven-year-old me, crying into thin hotel pillows, begging consular staff, police, court officials,anyonewho might speak a word of English, for help.
“I don’t know anything. All I have to go on is this conversation now. You’re telling me that everything I’ve believed for more than a decade is in fact untrue, that youdidn’tdo it? That you are actually just a really nice guy? Would you believe any of that, if you were me?”
He shakes his head, but I think it’s more a stress reaction than an answer to my question.
“Why should I believe you?” I ask quietly. “Why should I trust anything you say?”
“I wouldn’t trust me, if I was in your shoes,” he says after a long pause. “But I hope you will come to believe what I’m saying one day. Even if that’s not today.”
I rest my head in my hands. A part of me does believe him already, I realize; but I think that’s the part that never wanted this to be true in the first place. The part that once loved this man.
“Why are you so surprised that I don’t know what happened?” I ask. “Who were you expecting to tell me you’d been pardoned? The Swedish government? The Thai justice authorities? Neither of them gave a shit about me.”
He stares at me for a long time. “Oh, Carrie,” he says at last. “All these years you’ve been in the dark. It’s awful.”
