Chapter Thirty-One
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?
She couldn’t, is what I keep coming back to. Unless there was a far greater deception going on. Unless Mum is the reason Johan still won’t tell me what happened. Unless it’s my own mother who he expected to have told me everything.
Is she the one person I should have been looking at all along?
Impulsively, I call Johan via the Roof app, but he doesn’t answer. I take a large stick and start bashing at the reeds by his wooden jetty, but it doesn’t help. I just need to talk to Mum.
The afternoon passes and the air becomes icy.
I march up and down the root-snagged path from Johan’s deck to the sauna shed, watching the clouds zip across the brilliant winter sky, the reeds moving frenziedly.
At one point, in desperation, I go inside the sauna, sorting manically through the life jackets and old oars stored in the vestibule as if trying to find a secret letter. A sign. Something that might help me.
I find a spider and an old bottle of sunscreen, dried white cream plastered around the neck. It’s covered in old greasy finger marks, probably Johan’s. I hold it in my hand. He had his whole life ahead of him. His career. His relationship with me.
Could my mother really have been the person responsible for bringing an end to all of that? Has she held the answers I longed for, all these years? Was her help and hard work in Thailand no more than a smoke screen?
No, my heart wants to tell me. But the truth is: I don’t know. I am a woman of nearly forty who has never truly known her mother.
—
Raffy calls. Performing your first Hartmann’s procedure has nothing on talking to a child you feel you’ve betrayed. A sweet, funny child who cannot contain his excitement about his trip to Sweden on Monday, where he’ll get to spend three illegal bunked-off-school days with Mummy and Daddy.
I make myself smile as my son—my beautiful, gentle little boy—tells me about how he’s going to be allowed to stay up super-duper-wooper late on Monday because their plane doesn’t land until bedtime and THEN they have to get to Mummy’s apartment and THEN have dinner and THEN do some PLAYING!
Maeve is apparently teaching herself to spin three Hula-Hoops at the same time outside.
I make myself smile and laugh; I match Raffy’s little whoops of excitement with my own. I clap my hands when he claps his and I have never hated myself more.
Robin is showing visible signs of stress.
He’s terse, distracted, snappy with the kids.
And I’m not surprised; I should never have agreed to disappear for two weeks when he has a full-time job and we don’t have any support.
Nicola was going to do the odd school run, but she’s of course unavailable with Dad in hospital.
When he asks me how the cabin is and I say it’s lovely, he blows through his mouth like people do when they’re trying not to explode. “Sorry,” I add, but it doesn’t help.
“So has Maya gone with you?”
“No. She’s gone home.”
“Of course. Sorry. Well, nice for you to get some downtime.”
This poor exhausted man.
I cook an omelet with some winter herbs from Johan’s garden, using olive oil in a stone bottle that I know he will have chosen. Five minutes later, I put the whole thing in the bin. I can’t imagine ever eating again.
—
Mum calls just before 4 p.m. The sun has gone and the sea is now a pewter field of angles and flattened light; the color and depth of the water is long gone.
Soon it will be totally dark, but there are illuminated buoys lining the boating channel and a couple of distant summer houses have their lights on.
I’ve lit a fire. Robin taught me how to do that.
My mother’s voice is wary, and I can tell straight away that she knows why I’m calling. I hardly ever call her anyway, because she never picks up, but multiple calls from Sweden in one afternoon must have triggered all the warning systems.
“I ran into Kerstin. Johan’s mother,” is how I open. “Do you know why I’m calling?”
“Oh,” she says quietly. “Carrie.”
But then the tears come and I can’t speak. Sobs rock my body.
Mum is silent through the whole thing, waiting for me to wind down. She says nothing until my sobbing comes to a halt, which means that there is no mistake. She has been expecting this call for many years.
When I have blown my nose she says, “Carrie, where are you?”
“I’m at Johan’s summer house near Stockholm.”
Then, after a pause, she asks, “And what did his mother say?”
“She said Johan was smuggling drugs into Thailand for you.”
“I see. And do you believe her?”
I close my swollen eyes. I have been delusional about Mum, Maya was right.
I have forced myself to overlook her abandoning us as children, forced myself to see the best in her because the alternative was too much to face.
Again and again I’ve ignored, smoothed over, been bought off, but not even I—fool that I’ve been—can move past this.
“Carrie?”
“Of course I don’t want to believe it. But where would Kerstin have got this from if it wasn’t true? She’s a good mother, a real mother. And I trust her.”
I hear something that sounds like a snort from the other end, which makes me want to smash my phone through the windows, right out into the freezing sea.
“Carrie. I did not send Johan into the country with methamphetamine. Of course I didn’t. You can’t really believe that, can you?”
“I can.”
“I sent Johan into the country with antibiotics for a rape charity. Prawat’s charity, in fact. I did not ask Johan to transport illegal drugs. I know nothing of that world. I know only its victims, the lives that are destroyed by it. I have spent many years of my life advocating for them.”
I sit down on a faded velvet chair.
Mum carries on. “I sent him in with antibiotics, and, yes, there was a small risk attached to that. I knew he didn’t have a medical license, I knew there could be an issue at customs, but this is something that happens all the time and never amounts to anything once the intention is explained.
I warned him of that. But, Carrie. The important thing for you to understand is that I did not send him in with anything illegal. ”
She pauses. “I’m shocked you’d think I would.”
“Because you’re such a great mother?” My voice catches. “You walked out on us when I was ten years old. Why should I trust your maternal instinct now?”
She doesn’t reply and I know I’ve wounded her.
“The main question here is why you asked Johan to go into Thailand with anything. Even antibiotics. Thailand, of all countries. How could you?”
Mum is quiet for a long while. “I did leave when your father asked me to. I am not perfect. Do I regret it? Yes. But, it was the best I could do at the time.”
I press a hand on my chest.
“Please, just tell me what happened.”
Mum sighs. “A medical charity in Myanmar supplied the antibiotics that Johan took to Prawat’s brother’s shop in Chinatown. You were with him. Chinatown is an easy place to make such a transaction; Prawat’s brother handled a lot of the aid we used to bring in.”
I wait for her to go on.
“As I understand it, Johan was about to hand the parcel over to Prawat’s brother at his shop. Then a woman came and intervened. She knew there were illegal drugs in Johan’s bag; she’d been waiting for them. She took Prawat’s brother completely by surprise.”
“So you’re telling me you don’t know who that woman was? You don’t know about the other drugs?”
“I can only tell you about my part,” Mum responds stiffly.
“Well in that case, perhaps you can tell me why you couldn’t deliver these antibiotics yourself, if you cared so much about them? Why couldn’t it have been someone connected to Prawat’s charity? Why Johan?”
“Johan was coming from Myanmar,” Mum says. “They cost a quarter of the price there. He was right there in Rangoon, and he was coming to Thailand at precisely the time the charity was running out.”
“How convenient.”
She ignores me. “Johan had told me all about carrying his dive kit through an airport. How customs officials never knew what to do and normally just waved them through in the end. It was an easy solution to a serious problem. I have spent my life finding simple solutions like this; it’s what I do.
This is what Prawat does; this is what thousands of people do every day to get help to those the system has forgotten.
Prawat has had people bring antibiotics, emergency contraceptives, vaccines into the country for these women hundreds of times since, without incident.
And he will continue to because he has been called to help others and so he does. It’s the same for me, too, Carrie.”
What a Samaritan, I want to say. And how inconvenient that the one time it goes wrong, it’s your daughter’s husband who loses everything.