Chapter Thirty
Thirty.
Maya packs the next morning, readying herself for the long trip back to Devon, to our ailing father.
“I think there’s a part of you that’s still wondering,” she says as we hug goodbye on the curb outside my apartment building. “I’m not stupid, Carrie. Please be careful. You have absolutely no grounds to trust Johan, even if he wasn’t guilty. So much of it still doesn’t add up.”
I long to bring her into what I’ve done.
To have someone—just one person—on this dangerous ride with me.
I resolve to call Dell later. She’s just about the only person I know who will listen without judgment when I tell her I’m going to stay in Johan’s cabin.
Because I can’t fool myself into any sort of narrative about closure. This is an act of opening.
—
After a hire-car satnav error that sends me thirty miles through a corridor of unrelenting pine trees, I arrive on the peninsula where Johan spends his summers.
The airy expanse of green countryside is a relief after the pines.
Red tin-roofed agricultural barns are placed at intervals, as if in a children’s storybook. Even the cows are neat.
I spend the final ten minutes bumping down a gravel track through an older forest. Deer scatter like birds in front of my car: it’s like driving on the moor at night.
Many driveways lead off through trees to other summer houses, marked by neatly labeled postboxes and clean, shining bins, and I remember what Robin said before I set off about Sweden, about how they just have their act together in a way we don’t.
As if reading my thoughts, Robin phones me at this very moment. “I just called on the off chance that you weren’t in an operating theater,” he says. “I’m waiting for a Zoom and I’m bored.”
I laugh. Robin’s ability to Just Be is worse than mine. It was no accident that he chose a career requiring him to be available to people in multiple time zones.
“I’m driving through a forest toward this cabin I’m staying at,” I tell him. “I’m later than planned; I got lost.”
“Remind me what this weekend trip is about?”
“I just needed a rest. It’s been intense.”
A filament of guilt grows in my stomach. I cannot imagine how badly it would hurt Robin if he knew whose cabin I’m on my way to for “a rest.”
“I miss you,” he says. He sounds sad suddenly, which I wasn’t expecting. Robin doesn’t do sad, but his voice is flattened, as if he’s just received bad news.
“Are you OK?”
He sighs. “Yeah. I just miss you. And I know I sound like a stuck record, but I…I saw you disintegrate, Carrie. I saw you at your lowest and it was really frightening. So I can’t help worrying about you being out there alone, working in a really stressful environment for twelve hours a day without any kind of transition.
And then there’s this situation with your dad.
Are you sure you don’t want to fly home with Maya? Nobody would judge you.”
“I am sure,” I say, and it’s true. In spite of all the things he’s outlined—and they’re all entirely reasonable—I’m growing in strength each day.
I feel more and more like the Carrie I left behind years ago, and I’ve missed her.
“If Dad’s in any serious danger, they’ll call me. I’ll be back like a shot.”
Robin is quiet for a moment. Then he says he’s here for me if I need him. Seconds later, his Zoom starts and he says goodbye.
—
As I turn onto the scrubby winter grass of Johan’s land, there’s a car leaving. My heart jumps to my throat for a moment, but it’s just the last guest, a woman of retirement age in a station wagon. She opens her window as we pass.
“Forl?t! Jag skulle precis skaffa barnens v?tdr?kter—” she begins, but changes swiftly to English when she sees my apologetic expression. “Sorry. I just came to get a kid’s wet suit,” she says. “I hope that is OK? My son said the guests don’t have children…?”
My breath catches in my throat.
“I…I do have children, but they aren’t…”
I watch her face change. She whips off her glasses to stare at me.
“Carrie?”
I stare back, stricken. This cannot be happening. Johan told me the place was entirely empty, yet here is his mother. My long hair, now with lighter streaks, didn’t trip her up for a moment.
“Kerstin,” I say. My voice falters. “I—I’m so sorry, I didn’t expect to see you. Or…anyone.”
His mother stares at me. She has aged a great deal since I saw her last, perhaps unsurprisingly. Her hair is still long but it’s entirely white, and her elegant hands are now snarled and bent at the wheel. Her face, deeply lined, is still attractive as it always was, and in it I see Johan clearly.
She doesn’t reply. She just covers her mouth with a hand, visibly disfigured by rheumatoid arthritis, and then closes her eyes, leaning her head back on the headrest.
I don’t know what to say or do, so, quietly, I just say, “I know.”
After a long time, she opens her eyes. “What are you doing here?” she asks. “Does Johan…did he…are you two in contact? He let you stay here?”
Reluctantly, I nod. “We bumped into each other a few weeks ago, while I was at a business event in the city. We aren’t really in touch, we just exchanged a few messages…Kerstin, I’m sorry. This must be very unsettling for you.”
She shakes her head lightly, as if asking me to stop talking.
“I’m happily married,” I say into the silence. My relationship with Robin feels like the only thing on my side right now. “I have two kids.”
“Keep away from Johan,” she says, turning to me. Those sharp blue eyes have not aged, even though the rest of her has suffered. “Carrie. I mean it, keep away. Johan and Freja are very happy. But he still has healing left to do. You must leave him alone.”
She says werry, and for a moment I am plunged back into those heady first days when I was learning Johan’s voice, his body, his unique Johan worldview.
I remember him explaining to me about how the W sound was a common overcorrection for Swedish people who speak advanced English, and I wanted to listen to his voice every moment for the rest of my life.
“Carrie.” Kerstin’s voice is stronger. “Turn around and drive home. You should not be staying here. There are hundreds of summer houses you can rent.”
She’s right. But this is triggering something; a small fire of defiance is building.
“You should go,” she adds, as if I didn’t hear the first two times.
“Why are you speaking to me like this?” I ask. My voice is clear and firm. It’s the voice I used when I was running an operating theater. “Why the hostility, Kerstin?”
She turns off her car engine.
“And while we’re on the subject. Why the hostility back then, when Johan was imprisoned? Why was I always held at arm’s length? I did nothing other than love your son. Nothing.”
“I don’t want to talk about this,” Kerstin says. She won’t even look me in the eye.
“What happened to Johan destroyed me. I let him go, because he gave me no choice, but it smashed my life to pieces. And I still don’t even know what happened, because none of you had the courtesy, or indeed the kindness, to tell me.”
Kerstin shifts away from her car window, suddenly alarmed, and it’s only then that I realize I am halfway out of my car, as if preparing for a physical confrontation.
But she collects herself quickly. I remember her doing this before, in Bangkok.
She rolls her shoulders back ever so slightly and says, “Carrie. Please do not play the innocent victim.”
“All I did was love your son!” My voice is too loud. “What on earth do you mean, please don’t play the innocent victim?”
Kerstin holds up a hand as if to say Stop.
I do stop shouting, but I’m not done. “I did everything in my power to help him. And my mother did the same. She walked out of her job and flew to Thailand to try to help get him out. So what, exactly, is your problem with me?”
“My problem is your mother,” Kerstin snaps. “Yes, she tried to help Johan. But she would never have had to step in if she had not got Johan into trouble in the first place.”
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?”
“Know what?”
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 this is 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 me Sayang, 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.