Page 46 of The One Day You Were My Husband
“Somebody get the groom a drink!” Mandi yelled when I ended the call. She was pointing at me. “She has been on the phone for too long!”
I hesitated. I’d taken a couple of photos of our wedding dinner but I didn’t yet have one of Johan and me as bride and groom to send to Dad. “I’m just going to get my camera…” I began, as Mandi held out a large cocktail.
Then—“Fuck it,” I said. “I’ll have a drink first.”
I took the cocktail and rejoined the party, promising myself I’d get someone to photograph us later.
It never happened.
Our one day of marriage was recorded only by the cameras of strangers whose names I don’t remember, whose contact details I never took. To this day I still don’t know what we looked like together in our wedding outfits, Johan and Carrie, bound up in all that joy.
—
Later, the music was turned right down. Night drew curtains around us and the mood changed. Our wedding became a sea of candles, fairy lights, and beautiful music, none of which I’d heard before. Johan tried and failed to build a small bonfire on the still-wet beach. Mandi finally passed out on one of the day beds and Rodrigo, a Brazilian gentleman of indeterminate age, assumed responsibility at the bar. The staff were smoking weed by the pool, giggling frequently. Johan was with them, lying back against one of the triangular pillows dotted around, alternately watching the stars and me. He wasn’t smoking. “I’m already happy,” he said whenever they tried to pass him the joint.
I was being taught Ashtanga yoga by a pixie-like Welsh girl called Jess. She told me Ashtanga was a lifelong journey of learning, that therewas no moment at which anyone “got it”; but she also acknowledged that I was an unusually poor student.
Then Johan was next to me, sliding an arm around my waist. “Hello, wife,” he whispered.
“I’m busy,” I told him, trying without success to stick my leg straight out in front of my body.
“Oh, wife,” he sighed, laughing into my hair. “Did I mention that I expect dinner on the table by six p.m.?” His breath smelled of mojitos and, God, he was so beautiful.
“You’re going to be bitterly disappointed,” I sighed, giving up on the Ashtanga at last. I cast about for my drink, and Johan handed me his. I took a long sip and then winced; Rodrigo was not fucking around back there behind the bar. He’d changed the soundtrack to reggae now and was swaying to the bass while pouring most of a rum bottle into a cocktail mixer.
“I have only three meals in my repertoire, and two are frozen,” I said. “But I do offer upper GI surgery and hot sex.”
He laughed, kissed me. Together we examined the rings on our fingers. How they looked with our hands together, apart. “We’re married,” I said. “We’re married! Just look at this! Look at our beautiful wedding!”
We stared out at the lone squid boat, a bright flare of hope bleeding into the liquid black.
We heard the opening bars of “Something About the Way You Look Tonight,” and I turned to look at my husband. He looked up at the speakers, then back at me. He tipped his head slightly, as if to say,Shall we?And I smiled:Yes.
How I wish I’d known that we were in our final few minutes together. There would be no frozen dinners in our London flat, no gratis surgery.
—
The police task force was already approaching as we began to dance in the cooled sand. They were wending their way along the coast toward us, silent pathogens: two miles, then one mile, then here.
They arrived without sirens as I leaned into my new husband, as he moved his hands across my back. The first we knew of them was the strobing of the beach in red and blue light.
We recognized them as police vans only when they came to a dramatic halt next to reception. The small statue of Buddha sitting in a miniature pool was obscured by the dark-green khaki of armed men running, shouting. There was a family in one of the bungalows; the parents had put their two children to bed earlier and had been by the pool together, talking quietly, holding hands. Now they ran, wild-eyed with fear, to protect their children.
A kid’s bike was hurled into the bushes by one of the policemen. Rodrigo, behind the bar, had his hands over his head. For a moment I thought they’d come for him; he suddenly seemed like someone who knew all too well what to do when a task force arrived.
Jess, the Welsh yoga teacher, was screaming, crouched down behind a sun lounger. And then it was me screaming as I realized it was my new husband they were here for, as they ran toward us, shoved me to one side, and grabbed him, a terrible miscellany of guns pointing at his head. At Johan.
They threw him up against the wall of the meditation room, yelling. Seconds later, he was being dragged up past the bar, past reception. Trying to follow them, I was thrown back with great force by one of the officers, then held back by Mandi. I had no trouble shaking her off and running to the van they were putting my husband in. But—and I would replay the moment for hundreds of hours to come, hundredsof days—it was already done. He was already in; the door was shutting on his terrified face and the policemen were jumping back into the van. I remember the driver removing his helmet as it began to pull away. His combat helmet, worn alongside a bulletproof vest and a belt of weapons to arrest an unarmed man to whom I’d just saidI do.
They drove at speed up the drive, me following, and then they pulled away on the main road.
And thus it was done. Atomized, incinerated. The one day Johan Kullberg had been my husband.
Sixteen.
Now: Stockholm, January 2023
Twelve and a half years after that night, I find myself in Stockholm Arlanda: my first time in a foreign airport since becoming a mother. My phone takes a while to pick up a local signal, and a sudden desperation to connect with my children vaults in my chest. I’ve never been this far away from them.
