Page 11 of The One Day You Were My Husband
I open it up and stare numbly at pictures of squid boats from outer space until Maeve runs into the kitchen at speed, pulling down her pajama bottoms as she heads for the downstairs toilet, shouting, “HELLO, MUMMY, I NEED A POO.”
—
I fill up a watering can in the old granite trough by our front door, grateful for the frosty sting of 6:03 a.m. I water all the house plants while Maeve does her morning business and sings opera, and Raffy slides sleepily into the living room and curls up under a blanket on the sofa, telling me he will have to take the rest of the term off school because of his breathing.
He sounds better. In spite of my mental state, I’m grateful for the simple relief of a healthy child. The first twenty-four hours after an asthma attack tell me a lot about how quickly he’ll recover. We do his inhaler and have a cuddle while Maeve designs a “Moroccan cafe” on at least twenty sheets of A4.
Robin leaves for the 7:20 train to London. Maeve refuses to let me brush her hair.
“I want Daddy to do it!” she shouts, on the brink of tears. “You always hurt me!”
“I’ve told you a million times, you need to go to bed with a ponytail. Otherwise this is exactly what happens,” I reply, as if that will soothe either my daughter’s mood or her tangled hair.
“I want Daddy…” she wails, then runs off to get my phone, the password for which she has somehow learned, and tries to FaceTime Robin. When I ask her to come and have her breakfast she just yells “DADDY!” in my direction. Minutes later, she has forgotten the whole thing and is sitting on my knee, applying sticker gems to my nose while I force myself to eat a banana.
Neither of them make their beds.
While I’m running around after them, I call the paeds ward at Torbay and get Raffy an appointment for twelve forty-five. He’s upset that I’m making him go to school this morning, but really, his breathing is fine. He announces he needs to do his own poo just as I am loading them into the car. “It can’t wait,” he preempts, because I am a selfish mummy who’s asked her children to delay their urgent poos far too many times.
A short while later, I drive them across the moor in a dream. It’s crystal clear up there—a bracing concert of greens and browns and spiky yellow, tors in dark points staggering off toward the horizon. I connect to none of it.
I get Maeve and Raffy to school. I chat to Veronique, one of my mum friends, as I walk back to the car park; we talk about the rumors of a new restaurant in town, about the car that’s still sitting overturned in a ditch on the moor after last week’s snow. The greengrocer being taken over by a hipster couple who are filling the window with Christmas kimchi kits and obscure squashes. Vero predicts they won’t last and I just make vaguemmmsounds, because I don’t know what to say that doesn’t concern the man I once married in Thailand.
I’m longing to call my sister, but she’s in Colorado and it’s at least another five hours before she’ll wake up. I text Dell, who’s probably prepping for theater already, and of course she doesn’t reply.
The only other person in my life who knows about Johan is my mother. I call her and she doesn’t answer—she never bloody answers—but I leave a voicemail. She may not connect to my life as a stay-at-home mother, but she’ll be extremely interested in this.
I long to be able to call Dad. To just go around to his house and talk through the whole thing with him. He’d have known what I shoulddo, before this savage illness took over his mind. He’d have known what to say.
The air around me seems thinner, like I’m at high altitude. I check my emails and of course there’s nothing from Johan, because he got out of Thailand six years ago. Why would he choose today to write to me?
Hungry for distraction, I look up the website Dell sent me yesterday listing the most popular medical foundation programs. She’s been trying to persuade me to come back to London to retrain. The website ranks surgical specialties with emojis. General Surgery—my specialty—is the most popular, with not just one but two fire emojis.
I start the engine and drive home. This is how I will deal with today. I will concentrate on my return to work. To the two-emoji specialty that I buried myself in when I came back from Thailand without Johan, all those years ago. It worked then, and it will work now.
Five.
“You cannot go to Stockholm,” Maya says. “Not if Johan lives there. No way, Carrie. Just no.No!”
She shouts the last word, which might in other circumstances have made me laugh. Maya is a pretty spiritual person these days, but fragments of her old self continue to escape even now, small pieces of shrapnel from the explosive child I once played My Little Ponies with.
“I’m not going to see Johan,” I say. There are three closed doors between me and Robin—it’s the only way we can stay warm in this old house—but I’m barely talking above a whisper. “I’m going for the holiday let conference and a meeting with an old boss. That’s it.”
“No! You’re happy with Robin! And, Carrie, you’re a mother! Just stop it.”
“Stopwhat? I have no intention of seeing Johan! And even if I happened to bump into him, of all the millions of people I could bump into, I’d walk in the other direction. Besides, you’re right: I am happy with Robin. With my family.”
“So have you told Robin about this?”
I’m silent for a few moments. “No. But that doesn’t mean—”
“Oh, Carrie. Come on.”
We go back and forth for a while. When she called earlier I was doing my Father Christmas shopping, sharing my highlights from their present lists with Robin. “Pow gow stick” is at the top of Maeve’s list. “Potaree making kit” is Raff’s. Robin’s since gone upstairs to wrap some presents, but I suspect he’ll be reading his new Aristotle book. It arrived yesterday and, at nearly 2,400 years old, is apparently one of the most important astronomical texts of all time.
It’s been a few days since I found Johan online and in that time I have achieved very little, other than somehow keeping a lid on my still-unfurling shock. I’ve tried to expend my energy on managing Raffy’s asthma, Maeve’s anxiety about her best friend moving to Scotland and, of course, Dad’s move to the residential home. But, shamefully, I’ve also relapsed into reading and rereading the few things that are available online about Johan. I don’t know who I resent more for this wasted time, him or myself.
Once Robin went upstairs earlier with a bag of presents and the Minions Christmas wrapping paper he proudly sourced online, I gave in and told my sister the whole thing via text message. Maya claims to use her mobile “only seldom” these days, but six minutes after I messaged her my own phone started ringing.
