Chapter 48
Hospitals are places that make regular people go crazy, and where crazy people calm down. The time I spent in the hospital bed was the most peaceful period I experienced during that time.
But this peace did not last for very long. When a pair of hands waved away the dense fog that had been shrouding my vision for more than twenty years, I suddenly understood why so many playwrights enjoyed writing tragedies.
Tragedies filled life with tension. They made life more intense, profound, and deadly.
He said, “To you, I’m not a good father.”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t even look at him.
He remained silent for quite a while. I kept gazing out of the window, feeling like I could already guess what he was about to say next.
He was going to admit that he had never given me the care that he should have, then ask me to stay far away from Yan Yang.
But things did not unfold in the way I had expected them to. When I learnt the full story, I didn’t even know who was to be hated anymore.
That day, he sat next to my hospital bed, apologising to me and pouring his heart out.
From his words, I learnt that he had married my mother through someone’s introduction. After knowing each other for half a year, they each felt that the other was not bad. With parents on both sides also urging them to marry, they naturally ended up tying the knot.
Marriage wasn’t an issue; neither of them were people who had something against marriage. Their life after marriage was not bad either. Although they were not exactly in love, they treated each other with respect and progressed through life together with the intention of leading a good life.
In the third month of their marriage, my mother got pregnant. They were very happy.
The problems cropped up in the seventh month of my mother’s pregnancy. One night, he suddenly felt like he couldn’t breathe. As he struggled and woke up, he realised my mother was strangling him, her face contorted into a terrifying expression. He thought she was having a nightmare, but when he called her, she didn’t respond at all. In the end, he had no choice but to forcefully pin her down.
They could chalk it up to a nightmare when it happened once.
They could still chalk it up to a nightmare when it happened a second time.
But similar incidents occurred one after another. There were two instances when the moment he returned home after work, she started chasing after him with a kitchen knife while muttering to herself that he was out to get her.
He realised that something was wrong, and began to fear.
When her mind finally cleared and he brought this up, hoping to bring her for a check-up, she started to scream and shriek, smashing things like she had gone crazy and even hitting her own abdomen.
He was scared to death, afraid that she would hurt herself, as well as the child inside her belly.
He could only comfort her and carefully monitor her. Every day, his nerves were strung taut. Every minute was like walking on a tightrope.
He didn't dare to trigger her. At the same time, he started to put up his guard around her. Even when she went into the kitchen to simply take a pair of chopsticks, he was so scared that his body would be covered in a sheen of cold sweat.
He went to speak to his wife's family about this and showed them the videos he had secretly recorded. But afterwards, he couldn't shake the feeling that their reaction had been very strange. It seemed as if they were doing their best to hide something. However, she was already about to give birth. No matter what it was, he wanted to set it aside first. The most important task at hand was taking care of her. Absolutely nothing could go wrong.
Soon after, she gave birth without any hiccups. During her confinement, the parents on both sides all played their part to help out.
During that time, she practically never let the child leave her line of sight. As long as she was awake, she had to be carrying him.
He said, “At the time, I thought it was because she loved the child too much. She barely talked to us, but was always whispering something in your ear. When we moved closer to hear it, she would glare at us very warily.”
He continued, “I consulted a psychologist before. Because it wasn't convenient for her to go, the psychologist never met her and couldn't comment much. My colleague said a lot of women behaved this way after giving birth. They would be very dependent on their child. She said the husband should care for her a bit more, and it would eventually get better.”
As I listened to his words, I found it unbelievable. She had actually once cared so much about me?
“But the truth was not as simple as we had thought.”
Later on, a lot of frightening things happened. For example, she had suddenly screamed, then lifted me up before throwing me onto the floor.
Because of that, he finally learnt from her family that she had a mental illness. The whole family knew; only he didn't.
At the time, he had immediately wanted to divorce her and take me with him.
After recounting to this point, he stopped again. I looked at him. By this point, I was already feeling my hands and feet go numb, my head dizzy and my heart thumping.
“So what you're trying to say is that everything was actually her fault.” I couldn't tell if my words had actually left my throat or not. I just knew that when I said this, I had already dried up. “You're trying to say that you're innocent, and she's despicable.”
“No, I really don’t mean that.”
He raised his head to look at me. My vision was obviously blurry, yet I could still see the wrinkles on his face and the white hairs on his head so clearly that it hurt my eyes a little.
“It's right for you to hate me. You didn't hate the wrong person,” he said, “Back then, when I divorced her, I wanted to take you with me, but she threatened me with death. It wasn't her own death that she used; rather, the kitchen knife was already on my neck.”
He took a deep breath, then looked up at the ceiling.
“I was useless, selfish, and cowardly. I abandoned you.”