Travails of a Trailing Spouse

by Stephanie Suga Chen

  Carys responded, “Yes, well, true to form, we actually didn’t talk about it. It was a miracle that we managed to get out of the brawl, even though we were right in the middle of it, so when the police came and arrested Jason and Chad, I just said that none of us was involved, and Ian followed suit.”

  Sarah thought carefully, trying to picture what had occurred. “Yes, that is incredible – how did you and Ian not get pulled in? Weren’t the other guys jumping all over you?”

  Carys shrugged. “The other guys were after Ian, not me. And they were all drunk. I simply stepped back a few strides. And Ian? He’s never thrown a punch in his life. You think he’d risk getting that pretty face of his messed up?”

  Sarah forced a small smile; it was the first time her friend had ever mentioned her husband’s good looks.

  “In any event, he got out of the ruckus immediately, as did Janet, who vanished as well,” Carys finished. That explained the police not being able to locate the original couple who had started the whole brawl.

  “Did you speak to her afterwards?” Sarah asked.

  “No, I didn’t. But Ian did. We agreed that if the police questioned us, we would all tell the truth,” Carys said.

  “And what about that guy that Chad recognised from the bar? Was that just coincidental?” Sarah asked.

  “It must have been, I didn’t recognise him at all,” Carys said.

  “But wait, what does this have to do with the flowers?” Sarah asked, switching gears.

  Carys didn’t answer right away. “There’s more, I guess. Although not related to that night.”

  Carys got up to pour two glasses of water, handing one to Sarah as she took a sip out of hers.

  After that night, she said, it was clear that Ian and Janet were involved somehow, but still Carys didn’t ask him about it directly; it was as if the version of events she had told Sarah could somehow be true if she just kept repeating it to herself – that Janet had not appeared at Orchard Towers that night. Ian did lie low, no pun intended, for a couple of months, coming home at normal hours and even taking Carys with him to Bali for a short stay at a newly-opened sister property of his hotel.

  In April, though, on the day they were supposed to go watch Top Gun with Sarah and Jason, Ian confessed the whole relationship to Carys, as they were sitting in their living room, BabyTV playing in the background to keep Noah occupied. He had been seeing Janet for nearly six months, he said; he was in love with her, and he hoped that Carys could understand and agree to an “amicable separation”.

  Carys, stunned in that moment, although perhaps not surprised, said nothing; she simply stood up and sent Sarah a message that they weren’t going to be able to attend the movie that night.

  “I’m sure you knew something was going on,” Carys said, about that afternoon.

  “Yes, the sharpest of knives would not have been able to cut the tension in the room,” Sarah responded.

  A month went by, then two, three, with Carys not mentioning it once, and Ian also not bringing it up again. No one in the world can match Brits at their stoicism, Sarah thought. They continued their daily lives, Ian presumably carrying on the affair, and Carys acting like she didn’t know.

  In June, when the video surfaced, Carys finally had it out with her husband, unable to hold it in any longer that she was irate at him for parading this other woman in front of her, in front of her friends, causing not only a scene, but the arrests of Jason and Chad. She was relieved that the video showed nothing, but the possibility that another, more complete video could be out there hung over them like a dark cloud. To his credit, Ian didn’t fight back, admitting that it had been inappropriate of Janet to show up that night, and that he had been too drunk to deal with her in a manner that would have spared Carys any embarrassment.

  It didn’t change the fact, however, that he was still seeing her; she had a daughter, he said, and he was spending time with her as well. Again, would Carys please consider a separation, one that would cause the least amount of disruption to their son’s life?

  Carys refused to give him the ease of an “amicable separation”, to have his cake and eat it, too. A couple more months went by and Ian became more brazen, even telling Chad about the affair.

  “How did you know that he told Chad?” Sarah asked.

  “One day, Chad was just much nicer to me, not ribbing me like usual, and I just knew that he knew,” Carys said. “I asked him how he found out and he said Ian had flat out told him. He was a gentleman, of course, calling Ian a bastard.”

  Sometime along the way, Carys said, she confessed it all to Eliza. “I had been holding it all in; she was more removed from everyone, I felt like I could tell her without upsetting everything,” she explained and Sarah nodded in understanding. The last thing she was going to do was make her friend feel bad for not confiding in her. Eliza convinced her that she owed it to her son to at least try to see if she could work things out, Carys said, so she booked a room at a hotel (not Ian’s), told Ian that she was ready to talk, and asked Marilyn to pack her overnight bag to stay with Noah.

  Carys had got very drunk that night, almost comically so; never in her life had she attempted to seduce anyone, and yet here she was, 10 years out of university, in the bar of a hotel, married and with a son, doing just that, her husband the target no less.

  It might have worked, actually; they emerged the next morning out of the hotel, arm in arm and both smiling, kissing as they parted ways. Carys continued on to her school, teaching four classes in a row before heading home to see her son. They spent the next week resting at home, Carys thinking that perhaps the storm in their marriage had passed.

  All was not well, though, as two weeks later, Carys realised she had missed her period, and the test she had hastily bought at the pharmacy across the street confirmed it: she was pregnant.

  “Oh my God, Carys…” Sarah said. She could not imagine how her friend had been through so much, this whole time, without mentioning it once. “And I thought I was keeping things from you!”

  “And it was right around when I saw my old boyfriend, the journalist. Talk about imagining my life going a different way,” Carys said.

  Carys had kept the positive test in a Ziploc bag in her purse for nearly two weeks before finally telling Ian one night after he had finished reading Noah a few bedtime stories and had tucked him into bed.

  “What did he say?” Sarah said, drawing a quick breath.

  He was furious, Carys said. He accused her of planning it all like a wicked vixen, unwilling to let him go and be happy; instead, she was trying to force him to stay with her by pulling the “oldest trick in the book”, he had said. He asked her to terminate the pregnancy, saying that he wasn’t going to be “held hostage in this sham of a marriage”, and she had shot back, as sharp as ever, “You’re not the only prisoner in this nightmare,” fighting back the intense morning sickness that had developed only after she had learned that she was pregnant.

  They had argued every night that week; Janet, conveniently or inconveniently, was away at the company’s headquarters in London, allowing Ian to be home early nearly every night. As the days wore on, Ian’s pleas became more urgent; he knew the available window for an early, least-invasive, medical “solution” was quickly closing.

  If Sarah had been watching a movie of this scene, the actress playing Carys would no doubt be crying at this point, sobbing through the telling, while the actress playing Sarah would also be tearing up in sympathy, reaching to embrace her; but in real life, on that day, sitting in her living room, Carys was as poised as ever, calmly describing the disintegration of her marriage, while her friend sat less than a metre away, dry-eyed, listening quietly.

  “Sometime during my eighth week,” Carys said, “I lost the baby.”

  Sarah sat in stunned silence.

  She had had a miscarriage before having Noah, Carys said, so she knew the signs. It went almost exactly like the first, light bleeding turning heavier throughout the day,
some cramping, then passing the embryonic sac a few days later. She went in to see her ob-gyn, who did an ultrasound, and confirmed her empty uterus – the end of her pregnancy, and the end of her marriage.

  On her instructions, Ian moved out on Thursday, clearing out his things as Carys and Sarah were having burritos across the street. She had meant to tell Sarah everything, she said, but somehow couldn’t get the words to come out at dinner, and then the movie had sparked so much discussion about their helpers on the way home. Sarah again nodded in understanding.

  Carys’s doctor had recommended a D&C procedure to clean out the residual tissue, something she had not had to do the first time, but she went in yesterday to have it taken care of, she said, staying one night and arriving home earlier that morning.

  “Oh my God, you had it scheduled yesterday and didn’t mention it? Were you all by yourself? And Noah?” Sarah asked. “You could have called me.”

  “I know,” Carys said, “I was all right, Marilyn stayed the night with Noah. Eliza was with me during most of it, and she also picked me up in the morning.”

  Thus the flowers, Sarah thought. Now she understood it all.

  chapter 25

  VERY IMPORTANT PAINTERS

  THE LEES SPENT a quiet holiday in Singapore, having Christmas dinner with the Hendricks, enjoying a respectable, homemade feast prepared by Patricia and Aileen, although they did order the turkey pre-cooked from the local supermarket. The Sanderses were back in Atlanta and Carys had taken Noah to the UK to spend Christmas with her family, and hopefully put the year behind her. After her confession, Carys had also told Sarah that she had handed in her resignation, notifying her school that she would be leaving Singapore in March, right when the students broke for their spring holiday.

  A couple of months earlier, the mother of one of Eric’s classmates, an Indonesian woman named Ana, had invited Sarah and her family to join a volunteer trip renovating a school for disabled children in Medan, Indonesia, in North Sumatra, during the first week of January. It involved a group of 10 or so families that had been working together for many years, she said, some as far back as eight years.

  Since Sarah and her family were joining late, the organiser, Karin, a meticulous Swiss-Canadian woman, said she didn’t need to worry about fund-raising; the group had already raised more than its target of $1,000 per family. Sarah was impressed – it was a sizeable sum of money – and she asked Karin what kind of fund-raising activities they had done. Karin said that in addition to personal solicitations, they had put out a blurb in their children’s school’s weekly newsletter, and Ana had also sponsored an art auction and a high tea that had raised quite a bit of money; they had also reached out to the expat community in Singapore through an online group called “Singapore Expats Doing Good”, which Karin also invited Sarah to join.

  Sarah logged onto the page, and saw that it was the polar opposite of the “Expat Wives of Singapore” group that she had spent many evenings wasting her time away browsing. Sarah scrolled down the main page, amazed at the amount of activity that was going on – organisers who were seeking sponsors to support a Lunar New Year party at a group home, volunteers to teach new FDWs how to cook, families that could foster a child while his or her mother was getting back on her feet after escaping from an abusive relationship. Not wanting to shirk her responsibilities, Sarah wrote a cheque for her family’s share, planning on participating in any future fundraising activities, if there were to be any more.

  Before the kids were born, Sarah and Jason had volunteered with a large international non-profit organisation, spending nine days in El Salvador building houses with a team of 20 or so people who spanned the gamut in age, gender and profession. It had been more fun than either of them had expected; after each day of hard labour under the hot sun, they stayed up late playing drinking games with their new friends (including a couple who was on their honeymoon – talk about altruistic!), already planning the next build they were all going to do together.

  Sarah looked forward to a similar experience with the Medan trip, although she was a little worried about Eric being so little, especially after Ana told her that she would not be bringing her younger son, Eric’s classmate. Karin, however, assured her not to worry, that some of the older kids would be tasked with watching the little ones while the rest of the group worked.

  Sarah started attending the weekly planning sessions, where the team discussed various items that needed to get done before the trip, in particular, the T-shirt design. In the end, they decided to use a sketch created by one of the teenage participants, a silhouette of a person holding a paint roller on the front, and the letters “V.I.P.” stencilled on the back. Sarah explained to Eric and Ruby when they received their shirts at a pre-trip barbecue the Lees hosted at their condo pool, that the letters stood for “Very Important Painters”, and the kids would believe, for at least another few years, that that was what V.I.P. actually stood for.

  Their group of 10 families – 19 adults and 18 children in total – arrived in two groups at Kualanamu International Airport, met by Ana’s husband, whose family was from Medan and who was helping Karin and Ana arrange much of the on-the-ground logistics. He guided them through the chaotic arrival terminal, through a back lane to a carpark where a bus was waiting.

  Upon boarding the bus, Karin told them they were going to head directly to the school, where the students and staff were waiting to welcome them. As they had been warned, the traffic was bad in Indonesia, and given that it was a Saturday, the weekend markets that lined the side of the streets made the roads nearly impassable. Finally, after taking nearly two hours to travel 20km, they arrived at their destination.

  They were greeted at the door by a crowd of people, women in long skirts and hijabs, a few men in ties; music started playing as they walked into the main hall, which was set up with chairs on both sides of a wide aisle. They were shown to the front of the rows of chairs, Karin leading them to sit down.

  They watched as groups of students in uniform walked down the aisle, some holding banners, some singing and dancing along the way, then proceeded to the front of the hall; after all the students had marched past, the music stopped playing and a young woman stepped behind a podium and spoke into the microphone, using English to welcome the group from Singapore, eliciting a round of applause from the teachers and other adults who were sitting in the audience. She introduced several important people – the principal of the school, the board members, and the wife of the founder and chairman, a well-dressed woman with a slight snooty air whom Jason picked up on right away.

  “Is she in the right place?” he whispered to Sarah, pointing out her well-sculpted hair and heavy make-up. Sarah shushed him, but did continue to stare at the woman warily.

  Finally, the young woman introduced the founder and chairman of the school, her father, a short man with glasses whom Sarah had seen earlier shaking hands with Karin. After a few more rounds of introductions and applause, with Karin even having to take the microphone for a quick introduction, everyone was invited to eat some local Indonesian sweets which Ana said a local bakery had donated for their welcome.

  It was late afternoon by the time the group was shown the work they would be doing, painting the outer walls of the main, two-storey, rectangular building, two additional classrooms, and the basketball court. One of the fathers, a hardy Australian named Gregg, worked for a multinational paint company, and he had secured donations from his employer of all the paint, as well as arranged for a local crew from Medan to come a few days earlier to erect scaffolding and drop off all the supplies the group would need. Gregg kicked off the project by showing the group how to mix paint. It was mostly for show, Sarah understood, as much of the paint had already been mixed, and he would be charged with mixing any more that might be needed. But all the kids took turns with the paint stick, giving it a whirl as Karin’s husband snapped away with his full-frame DSLR camera.

  After the paint-mixing demonstration, the volunteer gr
oup lined up in front of the school, half the group on the scaffolding and half standing below, posing for pictures as the sun started to set. They shook hands with as many people as they could and boarded the bus for their hotel, Sarah and the kids already exhausted.

  They woke early on the second day, leaving their hotel at 7am to try to avoid the morning rush hour, arriving at a much quieter school compared to the day before; the students were not present that day, Sarah noted. They split up into groups, Gregg leading Jason and most of the other men to the outer walls, the older teenagers claiming the basketball court, and Sarah and the kids following Karin to one of the classrooms with a few other team members. Eric, who had been uncertain of what was in store for the day given how “nothing had happened yesterday”, a sentiment Sarah had to admit she also shared, picked up a piece of sandpaper and started rubbing the walls, declaring, “This is fun, Mommy!”

  By mid-morning, the walls of the classroom had been sanded and primed, and as they waited for the primer to dry, they munched on the multitude of snacks and drinks that Ana had brought and set out at various stations around the school. Sarah and the kids wandered out to check on the other painters, and saw that the basketball court team had finished priming the court and were also sitting around, idle like them. The team on the scaffolding were the only ones still working, using long paint rollers on the high walls.

  After waiting the recommended three hours for the primer to dry, during which Eric fell asleep on Sarah’s lap for a spell while Ruby was being entertained by some of the older children, Sarah’s team painted their classroom using a beige colour that matched the outer hallways. The basketball court team, however, hit a slight bump in the road as halfway through painting the court, they realised they didn’t have enough green paint to finish the rest of the court. Gregg, the paint professional, put in a call to the local office, who assured him that the rest of the green paint would be delivered to the school by the next day.