Two Kisses for Maddy: A Memoir of Loss & Love (21 page)

I looked at the wall on my side of the bed. Hanging there was a photo from our high school days that Deb had given us as a wedding gift back in 2005. We were sitting on the dock at the Goodmans’ cabin, and I was demonstrating to Liz how she should put a worm on the hook at the end of the fishing line. I was laughing; she was squirming. It was such a perfect representation of our life together.

I looked around at the furniture, a bunch of rickety used shit we got from one of Liz’s coworkers. We both hated it and had vowed to replace it as soon as we had the money and time to do so. It would be my next redecorating project.

I could see a note on her dresser, the one I had written to her promising a new necklace from Tiffany’s for Valentine’s Day. I’d been so busy with work and with taking care of her that I hadn’t been able to pick one up in time. Liz understood, and she was just grateful to have me around to wait on her during her bed rest. But she sure as hell would have collected on that as soon as our life had stabilized.

Everything in the room was so familiar, yet it felt then that I’d discovered a set of ancient ruins after hacking my way through the thickest of jungle plants.

I looked at the bed. Damn, that thing looked comfortable, especially after so many months on the couch. We had been so happy to finally have a king-sized bed after years of sleeping together in the full bed I purchased back in grad school. I used to imagine us, the three of us, watching Saturday morning cartoons in this bed, but not
Pokémon
and all that other modern anime shit, no. I wanted Madeline exposed to the cartoons I watched as a kid:
The Jetsons
,
The Smurfs
,
Woody Woodpecker
, and of course, the good old-fashioned violence of
Tom and Jerry
. I sat down on the edge of the bed and let the numbness overcome me. I wasn’t sad, and I wasn’t crying. I sort of felt relieved that I had finally walked back in here.

I brought Madeline’s bassinet in from the living room and placed it next to what was my side of the bed. My side of the bed now was what used to be Liz’s side of the bed. Without waking Maddy, I moved her from the car seat to the bassinet and covered her with the blanket my mom had given her. The ceiling fan was spinning fast enough to distract me from the silence; I lay there, doing my best to count the revolutions.

I couldn’t help but feel proud. Over the past week I’d managed to survive the barrage of memories that came with Thanksgiving and another trip back to Minnesota. I had given away a big chunk of money to help someone else. I had once again traveled alone with my child. And now, I was finally back in our bed. As I drifted off to sleep, my phone rang, scaring the shit out of me. I looked at the clock before I answered. It was 1:25 a.m.—no one ever called me that late. But it was A.J., letting me know that Sonja had just given birth to a beautiful baby girl, Emilia. I congratulated him and told him I’d call him in the morning. I hung up smiling, knowing the happiness that had just entered their lives.

Chapter 24

but these two days,

they may be the worst.

why?

i have no idea.

fuck…

i’m trying

and i’m sorry,

but it just

doesn’t feel like

christmas without

her.

O
ne of my favorite photos of Liz is from just before our last Christmas together. She had just started showing, and she looked so goddamned gorgeous, tiny and blonde and just a little bit pregnant, standing on the steps outside my friend Nate’s house and smiling down at me from the top stair. Just after I took it, she waved good-bye and left me there to have fun with my old friends while she went back to her parents’ house to get some sleep. She picked me up, still in the throes of my Christmas Eve hangover, the next morning.

Liz thought Christmas was amazing.

“Matt.” I could almost hear her voice, a mixture of plaintive and bossy. It was the same thing every year. “We will hang Christmas lights.”

“Fuck that,” I would say, resorting to the sort of persuasion that never worked, adding an equally convincing groan or eye roll.

Christmas in Los Angeles felt fake enough, especially for a Midwestern native used to snow starting in November and lasting all the way through spring. With its always-blooming flowers and ever-blue sky, Southern California just never felt like the right place to have pine needles on the floor. It was weird to wear shorts to pick up a tree. Besides, we headed to Minnesota for Christmas every year—we wouldn’t even be around for the actual days requiring the tree. This was my most valid argument.

“Matt,” she would say again—she was fond of using my name when making a point—“Matt, we will hang Christmas lights. We will have a tree. It is Christmas. I don’t care that we are going to Minneapolis. I want a tree.”

And so we found ourselves, every year, in the lot at Target buying a tree that (1) was fucking annoying to drag home, (2) would shed its needles all over the house, and (3) definitely would not be seen on Christmas. But this was just another example of us. Yes, Liz could be cynical, but when it came to the holidays, she was 100 percent sincere. She went crazy for that shit, using her own brand of merry peppiness to counteract my Grinch-like attitude.

“We can hire someone to put the lights up,” she had said just a year ago.

“And we’ll have to hire someone to take them down again,” I responded. “Liz! We don’t need lights!” I could also use her name to make a point.

Now here I was, a year later, looking at our bare roof by myself and I could not believe that I had been such an ass as to deny my pregnant wife some fucking lights on her
last Christmas
. Fuck, I thought. What was wrong with me? What would have been the harm in letting someone decorate our house? I wouldn’t have had to do any work, and Liz would have paid for it. Why did I put up such a fight?

The year before that, though, I had been in Bangalore during the holidays, and Liz had flown out to see me. It was our first Christmas away from our families, and I wanted her to be her usual happy holiday self. I decided to surprise her because I felt bad about taking us so far away during her favorite time of the year. I went out in the city and bought a shitload of decorations. I got a little tiny Christmas tree, maybe a foot high, sparse branches—it was fucking ugly, with a wooden base that was painted yellow, red, and green, like some Rastafarian Charlie Brown Christmas tree—and these gorgeous cardboard stars that folded out with holes so light could shine through. They were all over the city at this time of the year. My tiny apartment on this noisy street in Bangalore was about as far away from snowy suburban Minnesota as we could get.

I picked Liz up from the airport and brought her through the raucous calling of car horns, through the thick smell of diesel smoke, into a place that was completely unfamiliar at a time of year when we were used to going home. When she opened the door and saw the fully decorated room, she started crying, dropped her purse on the ground, and jumped into my arms. The only thing that might’ve surprised her more would’ve been seeing her entire family waiting inside.

Now, just two years later, I was in Los Angeles on a block with Spanish-style houses and palm trees, staring at an empty roof. I wished I could go back in time and cover it so thickly with lights that Liz would have been able to see it all the way from the plane to Minneapolis. I wished I hadn’t been such an ass about it.

A week before Christmas, I dressed Maddy in a red and white striped onesie and brought her to the parking lot of the Target in Eagle Rock to buy a tree. Even though it was a pain in the ass to drag home by myself, especially with a baby in tow, even though there would be pine needles all over the floor that I would have to clean up, and even though we weren’t going to be there on Christmas Day, I wanted Madeline’s first Christmas to be as much like it would have been with Liz around. My kid looked like a fucking candy cane, but I knew her mom would have loved it.

As happy as I tried to be for Madeline, the shopping trip was excruciating. There were dads and moms and kids everywhere, pointing and running and laughing, and my heart was just…broken. Obliterated. Ground up into a fine paste. Their Christmases would be perfect, their families intact. They may not have appreciated that, and I daydreamed about telling them that they should. I wanted to give up on the holiday, to just say fuck it and drive home. Maddy wouldn’t remember this Christmas anyway, and besides, we’d be in Minnesota in a few days.

But I stayed. I chose a tree and dragged it over to the car, because none of this was for me. All I could think about was how I had always given Liz shit about loving Christmas. Why the hell couldn’t I just let my wife enjoy the holidays? I mean, I still hated this shit—I wasn’t suddenly going to go out caroling for the neighbors. This was for Madeline; this was what Liz would have done.

As I struggled to get the immensely cumbersome thing into the living room, the needles scattering everywhere, I heard her: “Matt, of course we’re going to get a tree. It’s for Madeline! She needs to know about Santa Claus.”

So I bought the goddamned tree, and I told Madeline about jolly St. Nick. And a couple of days later we were on our way to the airport.

 * * *

Every Christmas Eve when we got back to Minneapolis, Liz’s parents picked us up from the airport, we stopped over for a snack, and then she and I headed over to Nate’s. Going to his place was a big part of our end-of-December tradition, and when I got to his front steps this year, I froze. I saw Liz standing at the top of them, looking at me as she did when I snapped that photo of her with the Polaroid camera she bought me for my thirtieth birthday. Flushed, glowing, happy. It was one of those eerie time-machine moments where everything was wrong, but I couldn’t fix it. Everything at Nate’s was the same as it had always been, but all without Liz. And so the most basic action, something I had done hundreds of times before—just bounding up those stairs—felt impossible.

I had expected the family stuff to be difficult. I had expected it to be impossible to sit in my mother’s living room exchanging gifts, imagining that Liz was sitting on the couch while everyone cooed over our daughter and gave her enough presents for the next ten Christmases. I had not expected it to break my heart to walk up to Nate’s porch on Christmas Eve.

What the hell could I do? I went inside. I had a couple of beers. I cracked some jokes. I did what we had done every year. I needed my friends to talk to me like it was okay, and like I was okay. I didn’t want sympathy. I just wanted to laugh.

When it was my turn to get more beer, I went to the refrigerator and on the door, I saw a picture of Liz smiling and pointing at her pregnant belly in our backyard. Just below the photo were two dates separated by a hyphen. It was the program from her funeral, and it was the last thing I needed to see right then. I grabbed the beers and went back out to the living room, the sounds of vintage Paul Westerberg crackling through Nate’s shitty bookshelf stereo speakers. I clanked bottles with the guys, and sat down without a word.

This gathering was without question my favorite part of Christmas—no decorations, no overzealous happiness. Just good conversation and drinking with friends. When I was there, I didn’t feel different. Sure, things were different, but I was somehow the same. The night before I descended into the maelstrom of family, my child was safe with her grandparents, and I was safe in the circle of my friends.

I remembered how Liz would roll her eyes when she hung out here with us, hearing the same stories a thousand times. I loved that. She would get tired early and want to get home while the rest of us reverted to our college selves. And I’d keep saying, “Just a few more minutes, just a few more minutes,” until she’d really had enough and left me there to sleep on the couch, summoning me the next morning at eight with a phone call or a text message, ready to drag me into the day of Christmas festivities.

Just like last year, I woke up on the couch. Just like last year, I woke up to a phone ringing a bit too early for my liking. And though I knew that it was my mom calling and not Liz, I felt ready to join my family and to spend my daughter’s first Christmas with the spirit my wife would have wanted me to have.

Chapter 25

she

was here.

she

has been here.

I
had been joining the Goodman family on their yearly vacations to Mexico since I was nineteen years old. To me, back then, they were a revelation. My family didn’t travel this way. We’d go up north sometimes with my mom to my grandpa’s cabin on Lake Mille Lacs, or canoeing in the boundary waters with my dad, but there were no group outings to Mexico. We didn’t explore the ruins of ancient civilizations or swim in the Gulf. We’d had our own kinds of adventures, like shooting cans with BB guns and catching crayfish, but traveling outside the country was just never in our playbook.

This annual trip was an incredibly important tradition for Liz’s family. Candee’s side was mostly based in Minnesota, so it was easy for them to gather together for holidays and reunions, but Tom’s was scattered all around the country, east, west, and north. The yearly trip to Akumal was how they stayed connected and close. Once it was clear that Liz and I were in love, I became part of the family—and thus part of the family trip. Every year, thirty of us would fly down, hang out together on the beach, and relax.

Now we were here, but Liz was not. I had spent plenty of time with her parents and her sister many times over the years, but this was really the first time I would be with Tom’s extended family since the funeral, and it shook me. Knowing I’d see these familiar faces without Liz was difficult to comprehend. Being in Mexico at all felt like a really big deal. I had learned how to navigate Minnesota and Los Angeles, but this trip was my first attempt at visiting the places we shared abroad. If I could do this, I knew, I could do anything.

So much had changed since Liz died. It was fucking insane, really. Now, on this trip, two important things were happening simultaneously, and I was doing both in her honor. The first was that I was here with Maddy, sharing more things and places that her mother had cherished. The second was that we were about to officially launch the Liz Logelin Foundation. After Rachel and I decided to really go through with the nonprofit, we organized a board of directors to get it off the ground and keep it running: me, her, Liz’s parents, Anya, Elizabeth, Jackie, A.J., and a few blog readers. Even though one-fourth of the board was in Mexico, business had to happen anyway.

If Maddy was my first priority, the foundation was now the clear second. This meant that not even the lure of the sparkling blue waters or the temptation of a cold Pacifico on the beach could keep me off the phone when work needed to be done. Maddy played in the sun with Deb while I ducked off to the corner to discuss website details with A.J.

“It’s launched,” said A.J.

“I can’t see it,” I said.

“Shit, you should be able to see it now!” The trip was nearing its end, and A.J. had been busy in the States making sure the site was going to go live on time. He had been working diligently for the past few hours while I sat on the beach watching my daughter try to decide if she liked the taste of sand.

“I can’t see it because there’s no Internet access,” I said. “Don’t forget I’m in Mexico, fucker.”

“Funny,” he said.

“Thank you so much, A.J.” My tone was serious now, as was I. We never would have gotten the site up in time if it weren’t for that guy. If it hadn’t launched that week, we would have missed out on a ton of important media attention that would help shine a light on the cause we were working so hard to illuminate.

“What now?”

“Now we wait and see,” I said. I was eager to find out what kind of traffic we would get, and if people would embrace our new nonprofit. But there was nothing I could do about it from that beach in Mexico, so I was determined to make the rest of our vacation exactly that: a vacation.

We gathered up the family, strapped Maddy into her car seat, gave her a bottle of bottled water, and drove south to Tulum. We stopped along the way, posing for ridiculous photos at the side of the road, like one of Maddy perched in front of a huge mural depicting a woman in a yellow bikini and a monkey in a striped baseball cap holding beer bottles.

Now we were taking Madeline to another one of the geographical markers on the mental map of my life with Liz. And just like everywhere else, in Tulum, time had moved on without us. The town had exploded. There were more tourist stalls than I ever remembered, many more, and a whole new slew of restaurants with every kind of cuisine imaginable.

This part of the trip wasn’t for me. We drove down here so I could show Maddy the incredible, ancient ruins full of bloody history and legions of untold stories that her mother and I had explored together. Back before they were fenced in, we would climb up the steps of the main temple and walk into the great palace—and to a Midwestern kid, well, that was just incredible. I was a teenager, I was in love, and I was learning how much I enjoyed things like travel and discovering other cultures, which, until I met Liz, I hadn’t even thought about at all. When I was nineteen, the puzzle that was my world was just being assembled. At age thirty, it had been blown apart, and now I was trying to fit everything back together smoothly.

I unbuckled the car seat and carried my daughter into an open-air restaurant, asking the hostess for a seat in the shade. Maddy was playing with a new toy that Tom and Candee had brought for her, a little hammer that said “ouch” when you hit it against something. She gripped it in her palm and pounded me lightly on the shoulder while the waiter set up a high chair.

Settling in, we ordered guacamole and chips while Maddy’s strange little anthropomorphic hammer looked at me with its big eyes, saying “ouch, ouch” over and over again. Maddy laughed and I laughed with her. I thought of how Liz would have loved to sit there with us, would have loved to laugh with me at the tourists with their money belts and fanny packs, and then laugh harder about how we were tourists judging other people for being tourists.

The chips came, and we ate them while Maddy gummed the mesh bag with the mashed-up banana I had packed for her. I could feel Liz in Tulum, but I was solidly in this moment, sharing with our daughter this place that we had loved together.

Sitting there, I was suddenly cast into the past. I recalled it being hot, too hot to hold hands, but I couldn’t pinpoint exactly what I was remembering. I could feel the memory’s roundness, how our palms were too damp to cling, but I’d misplaced the latitude and the longitude. I couldn’t give it a date or affix it firmly to any specific trip we’d taken here before.

I knew that I had been here with her, but I didn’t know when. The when became bigger and more important the longer we sat there waiting for our lunch, and even though I was chatting, even though I was answering and asking questions, even though I was feeding Maddy, my mind couldn’t stop asking the question over and over again.

When?

I was smiling, but I was sad and I was angry. What the fuck was I going to do when Maddy asked me questions about her mom? I couldn’t place this moment. What else would I forget? What else had I already forgotten? A shit pile of memories lost to time and buried by new ones without her in them. I felt as though my brain had a limited capacity to remember.

When Liz had been alive, it was limitless.

Or maybe it just seemed that way. Back then, I just hadn’t felt like I needed to remember the small details of every experience, because we would have forever together and a lifetime more of them. But now, I had to remember everything to be the keeper of the past for our daughter. I wished I had recorded it all so that those stories I didn’t think to preserve would have been waiting for me—waiting for Madeline. I was terrified they were all gone.

I tried to tell myself that was why I was sitting here with Maddy, because a place and the company can hold the memories, too. But I felt like I was losing Liz more with every breath that took me further away from her last.

We were eating chips and an array of red and green salsas, laughing at Maddy as she hit her blue hammer against the table. The sun was bright in the blue sky, my daughter beating a staccato rhythm, but I was lost in what was missing, in this vague idea of
not being able to hold hands because it was too hot
. My palms were slippery now.

If Liz were here, I would make her hold my hand, even if the sweat dripped off of them like we had just emerged from the ocean.

A few days later we were on our way to the lagoon, and Liz’s voice popped into my head.
Don’t be such a pussy.
It then added,
Don’t be such a bitch.

Liz had loved this lagoon, especially for snorkeling. The saltwater from the ocean mixed with the freshwater streaming out of the nearby jungle, providing a bounty of creatures we could spy on until our eyes bugged out behind our plastic goggles or until the skin on our backs was red and raw from the strong sun—whichever came first.

I held Maddy in my arms as we approached, smoothing a bit of sunscreen that hadn’t absorbed into her tiny white shoulders. Usually on these journeys, Liz would be looking out for me, making sure that I had remembered the SPF 15. Now I had to make sure I wouldn’t burn, and I was responsible for keeping Maddy as covered up as possible, too. I was using SPF 65, just to be safe.

On the path to the water, I felt dulled without Liz’s excitement, her bubbling laughter as she skipped ahead. More changes were all around me, unexpected changes, like the tacky sculptures placed at odd intervals among the plants, making it look more like a mall with a jungle theme than a place of natural beauty.

Candee found a spot for us to drop our bags and held out her arms for Maddy. I handed my daughter over and then stood there in the sunlight and silence, thinking about the difficulty of being there without Liz. What Tom must be thinking. What Candee must be thinking as our baby squirmed and chattered in her arms. What Deb must be thinking as we prepared to enter the water. How could we be here without her? How could any of this exist without her? Why are we not all crying every second of the day?

I knew how fucking useless these questions were, because I knew what the answers were. Taking trips together, eating at the restaurants we loved, swimming in the lagoon, giggling with Maddy, finding ways to smile when all we wanted to do was break down and wail. I knew already that these were not coping mechanisms; they were survival techniques. Without them, I might not have made it to this point. I would have just stayed in my house, like many of the widows I knew, losing weight until I was more skeleton than human, moping around until I was just an outline of the person I had been before Liz died.

I stepped carefully down the stairs that hadn’t been there two years ago and shivered as my legs slid into the cold water. I put the fins on, standing awkwardly on one foot and then the other, then picked up my snorkel and mask, fitting it over my head easily and securely.

It felt simple and natural, exactly the opposite of the first time I had gone snorkeling with Liz so many years ago. She was an old hand at the sport, while I was just a simple guy more used to catching fish on a frozen lake than dressing like an alien in order to peer at them below the water’s surface. I remembered being in the lagoon with her, and while she’d floated, peaceful and steady, I had been flustered, anxious, uncoordinated, and completely unable to breathe through the mouthpiece. Water got into my goggles and into my lungs, and I came up spluttering repeatedly, the taste of saltwater making me gag.

Liz had lifted her head up. Bobbing in the waves, she pulled off the breathing apparatus and looked at me with her big blue eyes.

“What the fuck?” she’d said. She was laughing and I was trying to breathe again. “You suck at snorkeling?”

“I have no idea what I am doing,” I’d said. “I think something’s wrong with mine.”

She had taken it and looked it over. “There’s nothing wrong with it. Toughen up!” It was such a Liz thing to say. “I’ve been doing this since I was a child,” she’d added for good measure.

As soon as she’d said it, the mental picture had come: a little blonde mermaid zipping around scaring the fish. I rolled my eyes at her, and she rolled hers at me in response, placing the strange device back into my wet palm and pulling her mask down over her face.

Now, I pulled my own mask over my face, partly because I wanted to jump in, and partly so that Liz’s family wouldn’t see my face tightening like I was about to start bawling, although crying in the water actually made a lot of sense if I wanted to keep my feelings to myself.

Liz was always on me to learn how to do things and to push myself in new and unfamiliar ways. She was my guide into a world I had never been in, sometimes literally in locations, other times figuratively when it came to activities that I had never even considered before I met her. As I thought about her, I rubbed the scar that ran down the inside of my left ring finger. It was a faint reminder that she never hesitated to tell me to “take off the skirt” if she thought it was warranted.

It was exactly the kind of memory I wanted to hold on to forever, and I knew that even if I ended up a doddering old fool in a nursing home with all of my brain cells compressed and inactive, the scar would remind me of how much fun we had together, and of how much I had grown during the years she shared and shaped my life.

Just a few years before we were married, we had been swimming and playing around in the ocean with a football on another of these annual trips to Mexico.

She had tossed the ball to me, and it wobbled through the sky, haloed by the sun against the azure Akumal skies. I’d reached up to catch it like a valiant wide receiver in the last seconds of the game, but I fell backward into a jagged bunch of coral. The football flew over me, my hands flew back behind me, and I very painfully cut my finger. I mean, that shit fucking
hurt
. The saltwater rushed over the fresh wound, terrorizing my newly severed nerve endings. It was a clean slice, and it was bleeding like crazy.