Page 85 of The One Day You Were My Husband
Silence. I hear the sea lapping against rocks, reeds crackling in the stinging breeze.
“I’m sorry?”
“Please don’t,” Kerstin snaps. “Without your mother, none of this would have happened.” She pauses. “Do you know what it was like for him when he got out of prison? He screamed at night for months. I had to pay thousands in private medical fees to get him treated for an infection he’d had for two years. It had destroyed parts of his digestive system; there are still many things he will never be able to eat or drink. He lost a finger. Thousands in trauma therapy, in rehabilitation and physio. My son was broken. All because of your mother.”
I don’t say anything. Behind Kerstin’s car, the late winter sun is drizzling through the bare branches of a willow tree. I feel sick.
“What do you mean?”
After a bemused silence, Kerstin’s face changes.
I watch her, trying to understand what’s happening. Then I see it.Sympathy. Kerstin is feeling sympathy for me.
“You really do not know?”
“Knowwhat?”
I force myself to sit back down in my driver’s seat, legs out of the hire car.
“Carrie…” Kerstin says uncertainly. But then she does it again, the self-collection thing, and finally she opens her own car door. We sit opposite each other in the shelter of our metal boxes, the Baltic Sea moving busily behind us.
“Johan was carrying drugs into the country for your mother,” she says. “I am amazed you do not know this. But it is true. I think thisis why your mother flew out so quickly—she arrived before me and Fredrik. She worked nonstop to help him. But there was a good reason for that. She had a very bad conscience.”
Kerstin watches me for a while, but I can’t say anything. What she is telling me makes no sense, but I fear instantly that it’s true.
“I cannot forgive her,” Johan’s mother says, but I can barely hear her.
Memories swarm like feeding fish at the edge of my consciousness. I remember Mum calling meSayang, a term of the very deepest endearment she’d used about twice in my entire life. Mum’s sleeplessness, her relentless energy, the fire that was in her. She had thrown everything she had at Johan’s release. And when she failed, she’d given me her flat.
“I cannot forgive her,” Kerstin says again. Near us, two birds are calling to each other. They sound musical, happy, two flutes in a major key.
“But I am sorry to have to break this news to you,” she adds, more gently.
I just shake my head. I stare at my trainers, which need a clean. I think about how we are a household that no longer has baby wipes, now the kids are older. How they used to fix dirty trainers and a thousand other things besides.
The birds are still calling. Kerstin is repeating her request that I go and stay somewhere else, although she no longer sounds angry. Out on the water, there is the sound of a speedboat cutting through the waves, following the boating channel out to sea.
I can’t wrench my eyes away from the marks on my trainers.
Eventually, when I don’t respond, Kerstin shuts her car door and starts the engine. “Please, just go,” she shouts.
She drives off, and I’m alone with the birds and the gentle movement of leafless weeping willows.
Thirty-one.
Mum doesn’t answer the phone even when I ring her a second, third, fourth time. I walk around Johan’s summer house and pace back and forth on the deck. The angled winter light stirs up a lively ballet on the surface of the sea, the wind gutsy and playful.
I should be cold, but I can’t feel my body at all. I go inside.
This place is full of Johan. He’s in every worn floorboard, every picture on the wall, and I connect to none of it.
My mother being involved in his arrest has never crossed my mind. Not once. The nightmare of Thailand was her specialty: fighting the good fight, chasing justice. For a few weeks I had the unusual experience of feeling lucky to have her, a mother who knew how to handle something that lay way beyond the comfort and predictability of most peoples’ experiences.
Yet Kerstin’s words are impossible to ignore.
I go back outside. I pace and pace. To the barbecue, back to the door. Barbecue, door. Barbecue, door.
Mum is a poor mother; she was never designed for the job. But,drugs? She spent most of her time in Thailand trying to work out what had happened. How could she possibly have been responsible?
