Marvin shoved me away with all his strength, jabbing his finger at me and screaming, "I hate you, you stinky mom!"
Then he turned, sobbing, and ran toward the hospital exit.
"Marvin!" Joy hurried after him, but not without throwing a complaint back at me. "He just wanted to go to the amusement park. Would it have killed you to give in for once? No, you had to go and upset him."
Justin's face went cold too as he laid it on me. "Happy now? It was supposed to be a good day, coming home, and you turned it into this."
"Forget it. There's no point talking to you. You'll never change anyway. Just wait here. I'll go get Marvin, drop him and Joy at home, then come back for you."
I stood there and watched him pull Joy into the car and drive off, and the world went dark in waves. I nearly dropped where I stood.
I'd known about Joy before I ever married Justin. But he'd promised me he would never contact her again.
One hospital stay. That was all it took for him to get back in touch with her, and then to move her into our house without a shred of shame, calling it looking after Marvin.
Right.
Of course the one a man can never let go of is his first love. Especially when that first love is the one he's always put on a pedestal.
And Marvin. Just thinking of him drove a needle straight through my heart.
He was born with a sensitive constitution, so I had to quit my job and stay home to care for him.
I remember the year he turned three. He spiked a high fever in the middle of the night, and I didn't close my eyes for two full days and nights at the hospital, praying to every god in heaven to take my life in exchange for his.
His first day of preschool, I couldn't bring myself to leave, so I stood outside the gate.
His meals, I built from nothing, learning bit by bit, my hands cut and burned more times than I could count.
Eight years. Eight whole years, and I don't even know how I got through them.
Because of how I cared for him, his sensitive body never once flared up in those eight years. But I wore myself down until I ended up in the hospital.
I thought the discharge would finally be the sweet after all the bitter. Instead, there was no place left for me at home.
Maybe the moment I decided to quit and give myself fully to caring for Marvin, this ending was already written.
For eight years, Justin had less and less patience for me. I knew it perfectly well. But I told myself that as long as he still loved Marvin, as long as this home still mattered to him, a little hurt on my part didn't matter.
Only now do I understand. It wasn't that he resented me staying home. He resented me, the person. The one he'd loved all along was Joy.
I cared for our son and kept the house running smoothly, never troubling him with a single thing, and it never bought me his love.
Marvin too. I didn't ask him to love me much as a mother. I only asked that he understand me, that he not break my heart. In the end, even that was asking too much.
In a single month, Joy had completely replaced me as wife and as his real mother.
I stumbled out of the hospital with no idea where to go.
Home? There was no place for me there anymore.
"Care to take a look? We're recruiting brand licensing partners."
Someone pressed a flyer into my hand in the haze. Before I could react, Justin pulled up in front of me and stopped the car.
The first thing he did when he got out was scold me. "Who told you to wander off alone? Don't you know your body's still not back to normal, fresh out of the hospital? Could you give me a little peace for once?"
I looked at him, at that face I'd once loved so much, now a stranger's.
I couldn't hold on anymore. The world went black, and I fainted.
When I opened my eyes again, I was lying in our bed at home, voices drifting in from the living room.
The first was my son's, sulking. "Daddy, why did you bring the stinky mom back? You could have just left her at the hospital. Then I'd get to stay with you and Mommy Joy forever."
The tears slid down my face.
The son I'd carried for ten months and watched over with my heart in my throat for eight years was telling them he didn't want me.
