Page 52 of The One Day You Were My Husband
Mum was still tapping away at the phone. “Do you think he’ll tell you the truth when you see him?”
“I have no idea,” I said, after a pause. “For the most part, I still don’t believe any of this. I think they’ve made a mistake. But…”
“…But it’s hard to understand how this could be happening if there’s no truth in it.”
I nodded.
And then, suddenly, there he was.
“Johan…” I shot up from the concrete bench, but Mum pulled me down.
“Take it easy,” she whispered. “If they think you’re going to make trouble, they’ll hold him somewhere else.”
My body froze as he was walked toward the cells. Handcuffed, an armed man on either side of him.
Johan, I called silently.Turn around.
He heard me, of course, even though I hadn’t made a sound. He stopped, turned in my direction, and there he stood. He was still wearing the clothes he’d been wearing three days ago, in that other life, when we’d stood opposite each other on a beach and saidI do.
I love you, I mouthed desperately, as the guards told him to move. He continued to stare at me as they chivvied him on toward the cells. His face was blank. My stomach folded as I spotted some blood on his T-shirt, but there were no obvious cuts on him—or at least the parts of him I could see. His soft striped T-shirt. His wedding outfit.
Are you OK?I mouthed.
They paused for a second, the guards, talking and fiddling with keys.I’m sorry, he mouthed.I love you.
Then he was gone.
—
For the first few days I had complete faith in my mother. She was the one person who made impossible things possible, who defied odds. She was the invincible Adelina Ghali, who chained herself to railings, glued herself to buses, marched into embassies and even government offices when she could pull it off. She got help for those who needed it most and she was never defeated.
But as the days passed—as doors remained closed, as our visits to Klong Prem remand prison passed without any sighting of Johan or any further explanation of why he had been arrested on a drug-trafficking charge—my confidence in her powers began to wane.
And when she suggested, five days in, that we try waiting outside the courthouse cells until we saw him again, it began to dawn on me that she really might be out of ideas. That we really might not be able to get him out of this.
Nineteen.
Now: Stockholm, January 2023
Yanika has not aged a day, but I hesitate as I see myself suddenly through her eyes. Jeans, an old woolen coat, handbag full of mess. A surgeon should be neat and sharp angled. She still is.
“So what happened?” she asks, when we’re both seated. No preamble. “Why did you quit?”
The Lebanese restaurant she’s chosen is every bit as un-Swedish and maximalist as I remember from my online foray. Garlands of plastic leaves hang down from the ceiling among hundreds of glass pendants, fringed lights, mirrors. Arabic pop plays loudly and there is an abstract print of a naked woman behind me, which feels a little off the mark.
But when I bite into my first falafel, it’s quite literally perfect.
“My twins were delivered at twenty-six weeks,” I reply. “I was in a level 3 NICU for months and they’ve both had the inevitable complications. It was challenging for a very long time.”
I had rehearsed this line on the way here, walking carefully through the compacted snow of Vasastan. This three-sentence précis of years of hell and hopelessness. Yanika does not have children, but I suspect she’d have little tolerance for my story even if she had. Brief and factual is the way with Yanika.
She sits back. “Christ, Carrie,” she says, to my surprise. “What a time you must have had.”
The way she saysChristin her full Greek accent makes me smile. I have missed that accent. I’ve missed everything about her.
“Also severe HG in my pregnancy. I thought I was invulnerable, but it turns out I was not. I’ve been feeling more and more like my old self in recent months, though. And I’m missing the work now. Hugely.”
Yanika is eating hummus from her knife, watching me intently. “Things have changed,” she says. “It’s a different world to the one you left.”
