Chapter Four
Four.
I book my flights to Stockholm while Robin plays with his new camera lens. Life, in that moment, is simple and good.
After paying for the flights I go up to check on Raffy, waking him just enough to take some more salbutamol.
Heavy and sleepy, he doesn’t protest. I curl myself around him while he falls quickly back to sleep.
I inhale the sweetness of his hair, his oaty breath. “I love you,” I whisper, kissing him.
A few moments later Robin comes up.
“Are you happy with his breathing?” he whispers. In the darkness I see the lighter shape of my husband’s arm, feeling around for Raffy’s body.
“Yes. For now. But I won’t stop checking him.”
Robin’s hand lands gently on his son’s belly. “Let me share the burden, Carrie. I might be up for the meteor shower anyway.”
But he knows I won’t. He knows this miserable use of my medical training, this sleepless vigilance, is how I manage the anxiety that sits in the heart of any mother who’s been in NICU watching her child trying to live.
We gently reinsert Maeve’s legs into her bed, because they’re sticking out at ninety degrees. We tuck one of her unicorns under her arm and both of us kiss her. She’s always busy in her sleep, this sweet girl, and her little forehead is always damp with perspiration at night.
We return downstairs and I start searching for accommodation.
The fire, which I lit hours ago, murmurs gentle stories in its stove and the fizz is lovely.
I allow my gaze to slide off around our sitting room: the bulging, plaster-blown walls, the fireplace lintel with its centuries-old taper burns, the groaning beams.
The main purpose of my trip to Sweden is to go to a conference held by Roof, the competitor to Airbnb that markets our holiday let.
Every year, Roof invites all its European hosts to a conference where we learn about everything from specialist insurance to property photography.
Normally I don’t go, but this year I was ready.
The fact that Yanika Hatziz lives in Stockholm was a bonus.
All of the Roof hosts in Stockholm are offering subsidized rates on their apartments, but they’re still pricey.
I look at cheaper options further out and then, on a whim, increase my search area to include the wider archipelago surrounding the city.
I once read a novel about a politician staying in a summer house by the Baltic sea, investigating a suspicious death.
I love the idea of a little coastal hideaway.
I immediately fall in love with a little summer house near Trosa but, really, it’s too far out.
And then Robin, who’s been quiet for a while, sends me a booking confirmation for a very trendy-looking hotel in Stockholm, almost next door to the conference venue.
He’s paid for it himself: a superking bed and a vast bathtub that I can soak in, alone, no children coming in to scream or drop crisps in my water, no laundry spilling out of the basket or skids in the toilet.
He smiles when I thank him, tells me he wants me to have the most comfortable trip possible, then goes off to load the dishwasher.
Before turning my attention to travel insurance I take one last look at the cabin that caught my eye.
It’s beautiful. Stylish and peaceful, photographed by someone who knows how to make a camera sing.
There’s a large red pendant light over a big scrubbed table, bunk beds with thick woolen blankets, views straight out over a flat silver sea.
I scroll down to read the description, because I love this house.
That’s when I see it. A photo of the host, the name Johan. A mild sensation in my chest: he looks a bit like a Johan I once knew.
I start reading the description. “This cabin has been in my family for three generations…”
My eyes track back to the photo, because it looks so very much like him that I want a longer look. How novel, I think to myself; how funny. A Johan look-alike, hosting a cabin by the sea near Stockholm.
I reread the name Johan, allow myself to look at the thumbnail photo of a man in a green T-shirt, laughing at something off camera. He looks so much like the man I married. He has longish hair, tied up, and even though the picture is tiny you can see he has knockout blue eyes.
The similarities are actually uncanny.
Suspiciously so.
I move in closer to the computer, zooming as far as I can.
Hollowness spreads rapidly in my chest.
I look away, then back at the screen, and my hand flies up to my mouth as if to stop myself shouting out, because it’s him.
Johan Kullberg. The man I was married to for all of four hours. The man I believed to be my one great love. It’s him.
—
I don’t sleep.
I stay up all night, staring at Johan’s name on my computer screen, zooming in on the pictures of his house, pressing a hand hard down on my sternum to stop my heart erupting through my chest wall.
Disbelief, paralysis. A moth fluttering at the windowsill, bars of moonlight rolling silently across the living table.
I make my hourly trips to Raffy’s bedside as if in a dream.
It really is Johan. He got away. He got out of Thailand. And after all he put me through, he never found it within himself to pick up the phone and tell me.
—
When Robin doesn’t appear at 2 a.m. for the meteor shower, I give in and google Johan’s name.
I made a promise to myself when Robin and I got together that I would never google Johan again.
It was disrespectful in a very obvious way to Robin, but it was harmful to me, too.
No matter how many times I looked him up, the facts didn’t change, and my despair only grew in scope.
Johan had betrayed and then abandoned me.
He had put my career at risk and he’d consigned me to years of grief.
Google did not hold any information that could change this.
He’s a recently qualified architect, I read. He lives in Stockholm. He has a partner and son. His employer’s self-conscious website says he’d write songs and go running if he had time for hobbies, but for now he’s taking on a broad portfolio of design projects and being a dad.
In the spasm of disbelief at seeing him here, leading a normal life, a thread of anger begins to unspool. He is an architect. A dad. A decent, upstanding family man with aspirations and a network of friends and colleagues. What a great-sounding guy!
The anger spreads like a mold spore. This comfortable new life he’s built for himself, without any thought for me. No email of explanation. No apology. How could he not have told me he’d got away? How am I finding out like this? How?
Google brings up four photos of him. Two from the time before he was dragged off by armed men, reported in the Swedish press: the Johan I married, the smiling, beautiful, free young man, full of tall stories.
One photo of him—thin and ill-looking with what look like blisters, or maybe bruises, on his face—from a Swedish newspaper article in 2016, when he apparently flew back to Sweden to start his life over. I don’t spend much time looking at this one. It’s too painful.
Tears of anger, of humiliation, are gathering. Even if Johan couldn’t find it in his heart to contact me, how could his parents have failed to? Six years have passed since he flew home. Why is it that not one person in that family cared enough to reach out to me?
And how has any of this come about in the first place? We’d been told there was no possibility of him getting out of there alive. What changed?
A tear escapes and runs down my cheek. I read and reread the articles but the Swedish language skills I talked so cheerfully about a few hours ago elude me and I falter, derailed by irrelevant conjugations.
The final picture of him is on the website of his architectural firm. Thoughtful, half smiling, an expression I once cherished. He’s wearing a T-shirt. He never really loved shirts.
The photo is black and white but I can still see his freckles, the impossible blue of his eyes.
He has a beard, something I’ve never been sure about.
He is still deceptively beautiful. After all that has happened to him, after all these years, he is still very clearly the sort of man who causes people to stop and stare.
Six years back in the world. Clean water and real food.
Freedom, safety. And a child. He has a little boy.
A small Johan. I imagine stubby fingernails and wild curls.
A stout little bottom, a freckled nose, that same way of seeing beneath someone’s skin.
I catch myself smiling, but the shock soon washes back in.
There is nothing sweet or redemptive about any of this.
Has he looked me up, stared at pictures of me online, like I am doing now? Does he care?
Abruptly, I close the laptop, stand up, sit down.
I have to remind myself that I wouldn’t have responded even if he had contacted me.
The truth is that by the time he somehow escaped the sordid mess he created in Thailand, I was in love with someone else, someone trustworthy and kind.
I had rebuilt myself, drawn a line. I would not have allowed Johan anywhere near my life if he’d reached out.
I go upstairs and check on Raffy again. I cuddle him and then I cuddle Maeve and I whisper “Sorry,” into their hair, again and again.
I had no business googling Johan. I am a mother.
A wife. These two children, these infuriating, noisy, perfect little souls; and their dear father, my rock; our drafty old cottage on the southern slopes of the moor—they are what I chose.
Not Johan, whoever he really is. I am sickened by my actions.
Too agitated to consider sleep, I steam clean the kitchen floor, spray down the food cupboards, scrub the bin.
I make a solemn promise to my family that I will never look Johan Kullberg up again.
I wash windows, trim browning plant leaves, then pause at 4 a.m. to fuel myself with strong tea, because I’ve barely eaten since lunchtime and I’m shaking.
Sometime before five, I sit back down at my laptop.
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 vague mmm sounds, 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 should do, 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.