Page 77 of The One Day You Were My Husband
I laugh, unwrapping my boxed spring salad “with added ferments.”
“How’s it going?” my husband asks. “When do you think you’ll get back into theater?”
“I’ve already been in,” I tell him. “We had an emergency this morning.”
I put down my fork because it feels disrespectful, suddenly, to be chatting with my husband about sausages and bogies when a life has ended. Somewhere in this hospital, that woman’s body is being prepared for the morgue, a body that was fighting spiritedly just an hour ago. I saw her heart beating. I saw her trying to live.
“Did it go wrong?” Robin asks quietly.
I nod, even though he can’t see me.
“Did the patient die?”
I nod again.
“Oh God, Carrie. Are you OK, darling?”
I take a long breath. Then, for the third time, I nod, only this time with energy. “Yes, I am—really and truly. This is exactly where I’m meant to be, Robin. And it’s exactly what I’m meant to be doing.”
—
Robin and the kids are booked to fly over during my second week in Stockholm, while Maya comes to stay during the first. She didn’t return to the States in January because of Dad’s COVID; he’s still in poor shape and his Alzheimer’s has progressed at a distressing rate. I was expecting this, as a clinician, but the reality has been devastating. I dread Maya’s return to Colorado.
The longer she’s stayed in the UK, the more certain I’ve felt that something is up between her and Eagle, but she insists all is fine. Tonight, though, she dials my concern right up by unpacking a bottle of rum and several mixers on arrival. “Cocktails,” she says briskly, as if this is something we normally do together.
Eagle and Maya gave up drinking when they were trying to have a baby. They didn’t try for long—probably about eighteen months, but the experience was sufficient for them to conclude that children were not meant to be part of their story. They decided not to resume drinking and I have to say, I think Maya’s been much better off without it. She drank to blackout in her teens and early twenties. There was one awful morning when she called me in tears, alone in an unknown house, terrified she might have been taken advantage of by some man whose identity she would never discover. To this day she has no idea what happened.
“Is this OK?” I ask, because I feel like I must.
“Yes!” Maya says, extracting a rolling pin, which she uses to smash up bunched ice in a bag. “I relaxed the rules a while back. I’m fine!”
“Oh right…But—the thing is, you…” I hesitate. “You told me that if you ever decided that drinking might be a good idea again, I was to stop you.”
Maya snorts. “And you told us that if you ever tried to go back to surgery, we were to stopyou.”
There’s little I can say to that.
“People change, Carrie. As you well know. Not drinking was the right thing back then,” Maya says, dropping crushed ice into two highballs and getting some mint out of her bag. She always loved mojitos. “But I’m settled now. I’ve changed completely. The odd drink here and there just isn’t the threat it once was.”
I think back to the countless cases of liver failure and cirrhosis I saw when I was training in hepatobiliary. There was one woman who’d committed to complete abstinence from alcohol for six months so she could receive a transplanted liver.I’m finally learning to live, she’d said when we’d seen her in clinic five months into her sobriety.I don’t ever want to drink again. Just six weeks later, a suitable liver had become available. When she came in for a pre-op assessment the following week, she was drunk. I heard she’d died six months later. She had two children under ten.
“Stop it,” Maya laughs. “Stop comparing me to whatever patient horror stories you’ve got stored in there.”
I laugh.
“Honestly. I just want to have a couple of cocktails with you. I had a glass of wine on Christmas Day and I haven’t even thought about alcohol since. I’m not an alcoholic, Carrie; that’s not why we gave up. I know I was a bit crazy when I was young but I was way past that when Eagle and I were trying for a baby. I barely touched it.”
“And you’re sure everything’s OK with you and Eagle?”
My sister puts down the spoon she’s using to muddle brown sugar and mint. “Carrie! I’m making one cocktail.”
“You’ve stayed an extra two months! I can’t not ask!”
“I stayed because of Dad,” she says. “As you well know. You’re beginning to sound like me. Sticking your nose into areas where it’s not welcome.”
We both laugh, and she serves me a mojito. “Now,” she says, “I want some gritty emotional drama. Tell me how you’re feeling about living four miles from Johan, for starters.” She drops a final wedge of lime into my glass. “I mean, seriously.”
I take a risk. “It’s actually four point two-six miles to his office from here.”
