Page 65 of The One Day You Were My Husband
“If you visit again, I’ll refuse to come out. I know you’re stubborn but, Christ, will you just wake up? I’m truly sorry all this happened, but it’s over.”
Beside me, a young girl in pink shorts jumped down from her mother’s lap and started skipping around the cracked concrete of the yard, under the cover of the overhanging roof. Beyond her, the rain drummed down. Her father, sitting behind the barred window next to Johan, watched her, smiling, before suddenly covering his face with his hands. His shoulders shook.
I felt a sob rising in my own chest. Johan had smuggled drugs; there was no longer any point in me trying to convince myself otherwise. But I was damned if I was going to be packed off out of the country—out of this relationship—without any explanation.
“No,” I said. “You don’t get to buy me off by just ditching me like I’m a holiday fling.”
“I’m sorry it’s come to this,” Johan said. “Truly sorry. Like I said—I did love you. I wasn’t making that up, you’re right. But we’re done.”
Then, unbelievably: “I’m going to go now,” he said. “Look after yourself, Carrie. Have a good life.”
And he meant it. He got up and walked away.
The last I ever saw of him, he was waiting with his back to me while a guard handcuffed him and unlocked a barred door. He disappeared into a dark space behind and, with that, my brief time in the sun was done.
Twenty-four.
London, September 2010
There were a great many fights between Maya and my mother in those surreal first days back in London. Maya, who had flown over to look after me for a couple of weeks, felt I needed deep rest and relaxation. Mum insisted I needed to save my job first.
“I know it’s hard,” she told me the morning after we landed. “But you need to get your work situation under control.Thenyou can rest.”
She and Maya were drinking bottles of Johan’s Pucko from the fridge. I couldn’t eat a thing.
“Carrie’s job situation is out of her hands,” Maya said irritably. “She can’t just blast in there and ‘sort it out,’ Mum. This is medicine. Those decisions are made way above her pay grade.”
“You’re right,” I told her. “But showing willing and being visible go a long way in my world. A very long way.”
“Exactly,” Mum said triumphantly, which sent Maya into a silent rage. Thankfully, Dad called at that moment. I walked out on my mother and sister and went to meet him in Aldgate for a cup of Earl Grey.
“Don’t give up on your instinct,” he said. It was unimaginably comforting to see him, dressed in the same gray suit and yellow tie combination he’d been wearing for as long as I could remember.
“None of us could have seen it coming with Johan, Carrie. None of us—your instinct is still good. And if your instinct is to go back to work, then you go back to work. Ignore your sister and ignore your mother. Ignore me, even. But don’t ever give up on your gut.”
—
The hospital trust was reassured by my return to the UK. I had to attend three further meetings in the first week, during which various officials asked essentially the same questions, but Mum sat with me through each one. Yanika encouraged me to put together a presentation in which I laid out my exam scores, excellent portfolio, and some thirty references from consultants, junior doctors, nurses, and other hospital staff to show the trust “what an asset” I was.
I didn’t feel like an asset. For the first time since I’d started medical school, I felt like a highly visible liability. But something we’d done must have worked, because after a week, they told me they were satisfied that it was appropriate for me to continue at the hospital.
Autumn brightened the skies, and London felt fortifying and vital. I clung on to my new routine as if my life depended upon it. At 6:40 a.m. I’d be on the bike Johan had bought me, on my carefully planned route to work: Blackfriars, Embankment, the three royal parks, Edgware Road, done. Then the oblivion of the medical day: awkward medical students, cocky medical students, post-take ward consultations, phlebotomist chasing, blood chasing, scan chasing. Patients with loose cannulae and empty IV bags, patients wanting someone to bring them the slice of toast they requested three hours ago, patients wanting to know if they would live or die. There was never enough time, and withmy increased teaching responsibilities came new stress, but the hours I spent in that hospital were my survival.
Dad took me out for dinner every Wednesday night at the same Italian restaurant in Aldwych he’d been going to since he was a junior civil servant. He messaged me every morning with quotes from some book Nicola had bought him about gratitude. Dell was in touch daily, too; and Mum, although she’d gone back to her flat after a few days of trying and failing to coexist with Maya in mine.
My sister flew back to Colorado after two weeks. She compiled a list of therapists and made me promise to call one. I missed her the moment she left but was grateful to be on my own. It was the state I knew best.
Within five hours of my first emergency on-call shift, I’d taken out an appendix. On the cycle ride home that night, dodging Ubers and couriers and buses in the dark, I smiled.
But the grief bore down, day and night. It didn’t fade, and anger began to flourish in its foothills. Dell started taking me running with her in the evenings. “Keep you away from that bloody laptop,” she’d say, as we ran hard and fast into the night, breath fanning out above us as the temperatures dropped and dropped.
Not long before Christmas, I applied and was accepted for the job in Johannesburg. It would start the following autumn, when I finished my first registrar year at St. Mary’s. I should have applied last spring, like I’d wanted to. I should not have fallen in love and stayed in the UK.
—
Soon after my Johannesburg job was confirmed, Johan’s family flew over to London and emptied our flat. I learned of this only when I arrived home at eight in the evening to find the front door wide open.
His parents had already gone but Lucas was still there, vacuuming away the final traces of his big brother. My things were piled into a cheap suitcase that looked like it had been bought from Whitechapel Market that morning.
