Chapter Five
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.”
“Stop what? 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.
“You’re not saying anything. Say something,” my sister prompts. I hope she doesn’t speak to her therapy clients this way.
I sigh. “Maya, this trip means a lot to me. Why shouldn’t I go to Stockholm and do the conference and meet up with Yanika and eat some meatballs and enjoy my first break from my children in years? Johan took so much from me. Why should I allow him to ruin this, too?”
“But Carrie. He already has. He lives in the city you want to visit and he’s in your head nonstop—why didn’t he tell me he escaped Thailand, who’s this woman he married, why did he retrain as an architect, why did he do what he did, why is this happening, what does it mean?
Do you honestly think any of that’ll go away if you go to Stockholm?
Because, trust me, it’ll get a lot louder. ”
The longer she speaks, the more I have to accept the truth in what she’s saying.
I’m not going there to track down and confront Johan, of course, but it’s still too dangerous.
What’s to say he doesn’t live near my hotel?
How can I guarantee that I won’t bump into him at Stockholm Central station?
In a coffee shop? Walking down the street with his family?
I get up to make myself a bowl of cereal. I’ve barely eaten this week. Being unable to eat is a red warning flag for me, the first casualty of an overloaded system. I’m childishly determined to prove, with this miserable container of beige food, that I’m fine.
“I am not going to bump into him,” I insist doggedly, even though I know I’ve lost this fight. “Things like that don’t happen in massive cities.”
Maya pauses. I can hear birdsong on the other end of the phone. Colorado birds, taking a lunchtime song break in the foothills of Grand Mesa. Her dog barks and it echoes across the vast, still body of water she lives next to.
“Carrie. You haven’t thought this through, have you? What if he’s at the conference himself?”
I stop dead in the middle of the kitchen, bowl in hand.
“Oh my…oh, shit.”
I look behind me, as if Maya is somehow in this room, not five thousand miles away, walking by a frozen lake. How has this not occurred to me? Johan is a Roof owner, too, and the conference is in his city. How could I not have thought of this?
I didn’t think about this because, until a few days ago, I believed Johan would be in Thailand for the rest of his life.
“Oh God, Maya. I’ve enrolled, I’ve paid…But I—No. I can’t go, can I? I cannot possibly go.”
“No, you can’t,” she agrees. “Hey! Biscuit! Come back! BISCUIT.”
My inability to travel since becoming a mother has prevented me visiting my sister for years. I haven’t even met Biscuit. I feel Maya’s absence from my life as keenly as I felt it the day she left to go and start a new life with her partner, Eagle, back in 2010, when I’d just met Johan.
“I could contact the conference organizers and ask if he’s going?” I suggest weakly. The thought of seeing him fills me with unquantifiable anxiety but I’m angry, too. Stockholm was meant to be my time.
“Still no,” Maya says briskly. Her “no” has the sliding vowel sound of her permanent home, a reminder that she has bedded into American life, that I will never get her back.
“And Carrie. No matter how badly he did you over, no matter how badly he broke your heart, your trust, your career and, let’s face it, your life, for a while—before all of that happened, you loved him like he was the last man on earth. You adored him.”
I close my eyes. Out of nowhere, a memory has sprung of Johan and me lying in bed one morning. Our faces were close.
Your eyes are so beautiful, he said. Exactly the same color as my childhood cat’s. I asked him if this was a compliment. Oh, yes. She was crazy beautiful.
We lay there for what felt like hours, staring at each other, smiling.
Then he opened his mouth to speak, and I thought he was going to say something serious like I love you.
But instead he just said, Meow. And he placed a thumb carefully by the side of my eye, stroking my skin delicately, like you might stroke a cat’s paw. Meow.
“Don’t underestimate how much that could derail you,” my sister says. “If you somehow saw him. Or even if you didn’t. Just being there in the same city would be enough.”
I open the kitchen door quietly to check that Robin hasn’t crept downstairs, but the hallway door is still closed. My husband has never crept anywhere in his solid, no-nonsense life; it’s only my guilt that drives me to check.
“Have you told Mum?” Maya asks.
“Yes. She was gobsmacked. She actually got quite tearful.”
“Seriously?”
“Mmm.”
“That’s considerate of her,” Maya says. “Getting all misty-eyed about your ex-husband without any thought for you.”
“Oh, Maya, give her a break. Of course this is emotive! She dropped everything and flew to Thailand to help him!”
“Until she decided she wasn’t going to help him anymore and bundled you back on the first plane home.”
I sigh. Neither of us has an easy relationship with our mother—I don’t think anyone does—but Maya and Dad are particularly savage in the way they talk about her. Or at least, Dad was, until Mum became just a name in a sea of disparate memories.
“Mum only stopped helping Johan when we found out he’d lied to us all along. She was there for me, Maya. In my darkest hour—she came through. Don’t be so quick to forget that.”
Maya changes the subject. “What did she say about Stockholm? Does she think it’s a bad idea?”
“She thinks it’s a very good idea, actually. Meeting Yanika is far more important than a one percent chance of bumping into Johan were her words.”
“Typical.” I can hear barking in the background. “Biscuit!” Maya yells. “It’s a squirrel! Stop it!”
I add milk to my Rice Krispies, even though I don’t want so much as a spoonful.
All these years, and Johan can still seep in. He can still control my mood, my actions, even my ability to feed myself.
I tip the cereal into the food waste bin. Nobody will know. “I won’t go,” I say. “I’ll cancel. I…Maya, thank God I talked to you. This whole thing is madness.”
“It is. Oh, Carrie. You poor thing,” she says, all sympathy now she’s successfully intervened. “This is so huge. I can barely take it in. Are you OK?”
“Not really.”
“Are you eating?”
“Not really.”
“Oh, Carrie.”
“It’s been a little too much, on top of all the stress with Dad.” I pause. “Although, actually, it’s dialed down the worry about Dad slightly, which I feel awful about.”
“Stop it. You’re allowed to think about other things. Especially things as big as this.”
“I suppose so. Anyway, I’ll sort it out in my head. Eventually. I’ll cancel my flights right now. If my brain doesn’t implode first.”
“You are going to be fine,” my sister says firmly. “And your frighteningly large brain is not going to implode. Especially not over Johan bloody Kullberg.”
I smile briefly, pleased to hear her still using British swear words, and move the conversation on to Dad.
Nicola and I have found him a residential home and they want to move him in soon, between Christmas and New Year.
Dad has been living ten minutes’ drive from me for years.
I know it has to happen, but the looming reality of removing my father from his beloved home and taking him to a building full of strangers is simply agonizing.