Two Kisses for Maddy: A Memoir of Loss & Love (19 page)

Chapter 22

i miss a lot of

things about the

woman i love,

but it’s her

voice that

i miss the most.

i know i can

still hear it

if i want

to, but right now,

i don’t think

i can handle it.

I
have a video of Liz that I shot in the hospital when she was being wheeled away to the delivery room. Now it was October, and I still hadn’t watched it. It was still too soon for me to sit there and hear her voice, to see her smile, to listen to her talking and laughing. I wasn’t ready, and I didn’t know if I would ever be. But I had to save it for Madeline, because I was sure that she’d someday want to know what her mom’s voice sounded like. I missed that voice so much, but I was still actively avoiding it. I hadn’t cleared the messages from our answering machine, and I also once inadvertently hit the speed-dial key that connected me to her cell phone. When I figured out that the faint female voice in the room was coming from my phone, I held it to my ear, realized what I had done, and immediately disconnected.

But a few of Liz’s friends were in the habit of calling her cell phone and listening to her outgoing message again and again. This was unthinkable to me. I could not handle the familiar rise and fall of her voice, how her sentences began and ended, or the way she whispered over the vowel sounds. I was afraid that hearing her speak would make her seem alive again. And I would have lost my shit.

One afternoon her phone rang while I was in the middle of doing some laundry. I ran into the living room, hoping to silence it before the ringing woke Madeline. The number was blocked, and I paused, taking a deep breath before answering another call from another person who hadn’t yet heard the terrible news.

I cringed every time it rang; there had been too many instances since her death when I’d answered it and had to confirm what some distant friend thought was a horrendous rumor, or break the news to a professional contact who had heard nothing of the awful truth. Every time I had to tell someone else, it was like entering some kind of sadistic time machine, sending me back to that very moment in which I realized she was dead.

“Hello?”

“This is Detective Berryman from the LAPD. Are you missing a BlackBerry?”

“Uh, I don’t think so.”

“Well, the number I just dialed was at one point associated with the phone I’m holding in my hand.”

I told him I was on my way and hung up without saying good-bye. When our house had been robbed, there had been so much chaos—and so many more important things taken—that we had never even realized that Liz’s old BlackBerry had been stolen. The detective had called about a phone, but I was hoping there was more. I would have liked nothing better than to dig through a pile of unclaimed items and discover Liz’s missing jewelry.

I headed to the police station just a few miles from my house. When I arrived, I immediately started crying, fucking destroyed that Liz wouldn’t see the jewelry I was about to recover. I was not what a roomful of manly men in ties and suspenders needed or expected to see when they were busy doing their work in one of the worst parts of Los Angeles.

“I got a call about a stolen BlackBerry,” I said through my sobs.

A uniformed man behind the desk gave me a confused look and silently got up from his desk to escort me through the station. I thought for sure that he would call me something nasty under his breath, but I think—more than anything—that he was bewildered into silence.

I calmed myself down by concentrating on my breathing. In the back room, at the same evidence table where I had stood with Liz last January, I immediately recognized the detective who had helped us then. He handed me the phone and I thanked him; I also asked about the jewelry that was still missing. Months had passed since the break-in, and maybe, just maybe those pieces were here. I knew Liz would want them back with me. With Madeline.

“We’ve got this,” he said, “but there was nothing else.” My front crumbled and I started crying harder than Maddy with a wet diaper. The detective just looked confused. I could see him wondering how the loss of a few trinkets could break down a grown man like this.

“My wife,” I explained, “who I was with last time. She died.”

He looked stricken. I took the phone and went home, without Liz’s jewelry. Without Liz.

For a long time keeping Liz’s cell phone on felt like the right thing to do, continuing to pay the bill every month just to keep active the number that I knew by heart. It allowed me a real attachment to her, but after this incident I wanted to cancel her phone service—it just seemed like the right time. I was worried that if I did, though, I would be losing another piece of her—that I would be erasing more from my memory by essentially deleting this from my life, and I would lose that opportunity to hear her voice should I ever want to.

But it wasn’t the phone number that helped keep me connected to Liz. I thought about her and talked about her all the time. I wrote about her daily and continued to live in the house we bought together. She was still a part of almost every move I made. Those were things that mattered. Besides, she would surely call me an idiot for paying sixty-five dollars a month for the privilege of preserving an outgoing voice-mail greeting that I never even listened to.

Turning off her phone helped me realize that it was time for me to move through this mess in other tangible ways. I had yet to do
so
much in this regard. Liz’s clothes still hung in her closet, and there were still two baskets of crumpled clothes inside (one to be washed, one to be sent to the dry cleaners). Her jewelry and perfume were still atop the dresser that was still filled with her neatly folded clothes. Her razor still sat on the ledge in the shower, right next to her shampoo bottles. These things were so small and I was so used to them that I could overlook them, like they blended into the scenery or something.

But her car was still parked out front, and that big hunk of salmon-colored metal was difficult to ignore. I hadn’t really been driving it, and sometimes my parents or Tom and Candee would use it when they were in town, but it caught my eye each and every time I looked out the giant picture window in our living room, and it assaulted me every time I pulled up to the house. I hated seeing it. Before she died, Liz’s car was the one definitive sign that she was home; now each time I saw it I had an instant reaction, thinking this was all a fucking nightmare. I wasn’t actively changing anything inside or outside the house—I just wasn’t ready. But the idea of letting Liz’s car go actually came from a total stranger.

During one visit from Liz’s family, I noticed a man in the street through my living room window. We were all hanging out, and suddenly I saw some sketchy dude peering into Liz’s car out front. He was walking around it, trying to open the doors, and kicking the tires.

I walked outside, and said, “Can I help you?” Pleasant words, aggressive tone. This guy smiled back at me, totally harmless, and said, “Is this car for sale?” I was confused. I didn’t expect those words from his mouth. And I certainly didn’t have an answer prepared. I kind of felt like an asshole—I came at him like a man whose car was about to be stolen, and he couldn’t have been nicer.

Finally some words came to me. “I’m not sure,” I said, trying to hide my fluster. “I don’t think so. I mean, maybe.” Not articulate, but words nonetheless.

“I’ll give you two thousand dollars. Cash.”

I took his number and went back inside. I was still confused. I really hadn’t planned to sell Liz’s car, maybe ever, but I was planning to get rid of mine. In fact, I had been to the dealership with Tom that very morning. Bending over to put Madeline into my little old Honda Accord was starting to hurt my back—it was time to suck it up and get a “dad car.” I felt so fucking old.

When I told Candee and Tom that somebody wanted to buy the car, I spun it like it was a terrible idea, like there was no way I would sell it—no reason to.

“Really?” said Tom. “What else are you going to do with it? Are you going to drive it?”

“No,” I said.

“Wouldn’t it help pay for your new car?” asked Candee. “That you need for Maddy?”

“Well, yes,” I said. But I didn’t know if I could really do it. Fuck, I thought. Maybe I should keep it for Madeline or something, so that she can drive her mom’s car when she’s finally old enough to get her driver’s license. When I said this out loud, the suggestion was met with uproarious laughter.

Well, okay then. As much as I wanted to hang on to this relic of Liz’s, I knew that the car was not serving much purpose beyond acting as a scenic obstruction to my front yard. I’d only used it back in July when my car was in the shop.

That had been fucking awful.

Maddy and I were on our way back from a playgroup and were driving down the freeway when someone smashed into us, causing my car to completely spin out. We wound up facing forward, and luckily we weren’t hit by any oncoming traffic. The other driver sped off. My car was a mess, but we were okay, and I called the cops so I could obtain a police report for insurance purposes.

When they came, one of them said, “Why didn’t you follow the woman who hit you?”

“Excuse me?”

The officer repeated her question, and I just couldn’t believe it. With a baby in my back seat? Who am I, Steve McQueen? Admittedly, a few years prior, I would have done exactly that—stepped on the gas and chased that fucker down. But now, my kid’s safety was more important than being a vigilante.

After I dropped off my beat-up sedan for repair a few days later, I decided to walk back to the house with Maddy. It was close enough and no one was around to give us a ride. I didn’t think it was worth getting a rental car, since I didn’t really need to leave the house. Besides, Liz’s car was sitting out front in case I did.

The first time I drove it was to Casita del Campo for dinner and a drink with friends; Madeline was set to spend the evening with Anya. I managed to ignore the familiar feeling of sitting in the car until I dropped Maddy off, but when I pulled away I could not help but freak out. It was just so fucking weird to be alone in Liz’s car. She and I had made so many memories in the ugly piece of shit. They raced through my head, each bringing my heart up to my throat in a fresh way.

This was the car Liz’s uncle had shipped out to LA from Minneapolis when she finished college. We rode in it nearly every weekend to Runyon Canyon to hike. It had taken us to that party in Hermosa Beach where she met my oldest friend, Alex, and she had dragged me in it to that horrifying Jessica Simpson concert at Universal Amphitheater. She brought this car to Dr. Nelson’s office to get the ultrasound that confirmed she was pregnant. Liz had driven this roller skate for seven years. She’d even named it “the Little Zipper.” What a stupid-ass name.

Being in the car now was making me crazy. It was the first time I’d been in the driver’s seat since before Liz died, and there were physical reminders of her everywhere. Her fine blonde hairs were still on the cloth upholstery, and her favorite Top 40 stations were still programmed on the radio. It hit me hard that she had sat in this seat, used this seat belt, looked in these mirrors, operated this gearshift, and pressed her small feet against this brake and this accelerator. In the house, I had finally acclimated to our stuff so that I no longer thought
She used this apple corer
every time I wanted to cut up a piece of fruit. But here, it was impossible not to pay attention because it was all around me. I was literally inside of it.

When I was adjusting Maddy’s car seat, I saw an opened can of Diet Coke in the backseat beverage holder. Liz had loved Diet Coke. It was her drink of choice—no coffee, just that goddamned diet “pop” all of the time. (She was a good Midwesterner.) Seeing the red and silver thing just sitting there shook me—Liz drank from this can; she held it in her hand and put her mouth on it. I wrote about it on the blog, how it had messed with my mind.

After that, Tom called to tell me that it was his soda—he had left it there. He waited for my reaction, and when I started laughing, he laughed with me.

On a trip to the grocery store that week, the odometer caught my eye. I looked down at a red light for no particular reason, but I would have been blind to miss it: I caught it at 77,777 miles. Liz’s favorite number, five in a row. That hit me hard. If I had looked at the next light, the number would not have been nearly as jarring. I didn’t think this moment had some grandiose meaning, but I wondered how someone else might interpret it. Many would say that this was a sign from Liz, that she was still with me even though she was dead. I thought that kind of thing was utter bullshit; I knew it was just a random coincidence and that my mind was trying to assign meaning to it. But sign or not, it was definitely fucking weird.

It was time. I had to get rid of Liz’s car—it was the right decision. I called the guy up and told him that two thousand dollars was a fair price, and that he needed to pick the car up immediately. He came over the next day to drop off a check and get the keys, but he said that he’d pick it up in a few days.

“I’m going to New York in three days,” I told him. “I need it gone by the time I get back.”

As the lone soul who had wanted the car to remain, I now felt strangely insistent that it disappear as soon as possible. I’d made the decision to sell it, and I wanted it gone before I found a reason to change my mind.

I knew the morning we set out for New York was the last time I would see Liz’s car. Before we left for LAX at five o’clock, I stood on my quiet, empty street with Maddy asleep in my arms, just staring at it. If any of my neighbors had seen me, they probably would have thought I was out of my fucking mind. It was bad enough that I had left this ugly, goddamned thing just sitting outside my house for the past seven months, taking up a precious parking spot. I waved at the car, and headed out to the airport. I wasn’t sad. I was mostly mad at myself for acting like a jackass and waving at an inanimate object.