Two Kisses for Maddy: A Memoir of Loss & Love (5 page)

and beautiful.

Eventually a doctor entered the room, waking Liz to tell her the same things about Madeline that I had already shared, and to confirm what she had been told earlier: she had to remain in the hospital bed for twenty-four hours before she could get up to see, feed, or touch Madeline. He informed us of our daughter’s schedule: “She’ll be fed every three hours through the tube in her mouth. Matt, you can come in and feed her anytime. You’ll also be able to change her diapers.” For the first time in my life, the idea of changing a diaper sounded like the greatest thing in the world.

By the time the doctor left, Liz’s whole demeanor had changed. I think she felt better hearing the information from a real doctor rather than just from me, but she was still extremely disappointed that she couldn’t be with Madeline immediately. “She’s not even going to know her mom! She’ll already be so attached to you by the time I get to see her.”

I assured her that would not be the case, and added, “You’ve been waiting seven and half months for this moment. What’s another twenty-four hours?” She smiled at me, and I felt like I had successfully deflected her concerns. We had spent thirty-three weeks worrying about nothing but the health of our daughter, and here was another doctor telling us that she was doing well. And soon, Liz would hold our baby.

For the rest of the afternoon and into the evening, I shuttled between the NICU and Liz’s hospital room. I found it hilarious, but Liz had a serious fear that our child would be ugly, though deep down I think she knew Madeline would be gorgeous. Nonetheless, each time I came back from visiting Madeline, Liz insisted on seeing the latest photos and asked me if she was beautiful. I promised that she was, and I showed her the photos, sharing details about each of my successive trips. I told her about using a syringe to slowly push what the doctor called a “baby cheeseburger,” a high-fat liquid formula, through the feeding tube directly into her stomach, and I teased her mercilessly that I was one, two, three diaper changes ahead of her and that she would have to catch up when we all finally made it home.

When our expected company arrived at the hospital, they came in and hugged Liz, talking to her for a short time. It was obvious who the grandparents were really there to see, so we left Liz alone and I walked them down the hall. Because of NICU visitor restrictions, I had to accompany each of them, one at a time, to see and touch their grandchild, while the other two looked in at us through the window. Sometime between my last visit and this one, the oxygen tube had been removed from Madeline’s face and the tube in her mouth had been moved to her nose. Much to my relief, the straps had left no visible indents on her head or her cheeks.

We went back to say good night to Liz before I walked her parents, Tom and Candee, and my mom to the rooms they had booked in the hotel attached to the hospital. I stopped in to check on Madeline one last time on her first day of existence before heading to Liz’s room to sleep. I knew there would be a lot of late nights coming up, so I decided to take advantage of the NICU nurses, telling them that I wouldn’t be coming in for any of the overnight feedings. March 24 had been a big day. I needed some rest.

Chapter 6

the proud parents will continue to update everyone on our beautiful baby.

look forward to even more good news.

(i know we will).

I
woke up before Liz early the next morning and sneaked out to go see our baby. When I arrived, the nurse asked if I would like to hold her this time.

I couldn’t believe I was going to be able to hold Madeline. I hadn’t asked, but I had assumed I wouldn’t be able to do so for a few weeks. She still had the wires attached to her body, and the feeding tube was still present. “Yes, but how?” I said.

“Very carefully,” the nurse replied. I watched as she opened up the side of the Madeline’s incubator and slid the wires and feeding tube through the openings at its bottom end.

I sat down in a blue rocking chair, and for the first time in my life I held my daughter. I was surprised by my reaction. I’m generally not very emotional, and if ever I felt the urge to cry in public before, I certainly would have suppressed it. But when I held Madeline, I just let the tears fall. I suddenly recognized the feeling that overcame me—it was the same wave of contentment and relief that hit me when she had come out screaming the day before. With her temporarily out of that incubator and in my arms, I knew she was going to be fine. And I couldn’t wait to tell Liz.

I finished up Maddy’s feeding and headed back to Liz’s hospital room. She was awake when I got there. “How is she doing?” she asked, eyes wide with the kind of anticipation she usually reserved for the moment the dessert menu was recited to her at her favorite restaurant.

“I got to hold her,” I said, smiling wide enough to show my teeth (something I rarely did).

She immediately sat up, wincing a bit from the pain she felt coming from the incision in her abdomen. “You did? I’m superjealous! Tell me all about it!” For the next few minutes I sat next to her in bed, and as the room filled with sunlight I told my wife all about holding our healthy baby girl in my arms.

We spent the morning doing all of the mundane things that new parents do the day after their child is born: We chatted with family members. We filled out insurance and hospital paperwork. We applied for Madeline’s Social Security number and birth certificate. We debated whether we should rent or buy a breast pump. We decided which day to attend the recommended baby CPR class. We discussed what it would be like at home, just the two of us with Madeline, with no help from the nurses and doctors.

The sense of relief I felt about having our baby out in the world overwhelmed me, but now I felt a new nervousness at the tasks that lay ahead. We were now responsible for this kid’s life. Unlike some of the other major events in our lives, I planned to take an extremely active role in raising our daughter, but I sort of felt that as a man, I didn’t have that motherly instinct. I knew I had a lot to learn, but I was confident that Liz was ready and prepared, and that she’d be able to lead the way. Together, the two of us would be able to handle any challenge.

Midday, my mom called and asked me if I was ready to go to Tiffany’s to pick out a gift for Liz. She knew that I had planned on surprising Liz with a piece of “thank you for enduring this hellish pregnancy” jewelry, but that I hadn’t yet had a chance to get anything. I thought that jewelry would be the absolute best way to show her that I cared, that I appreciated her, and that we were creating new memories to cherish for the rest of our lives. I also owed her a couple of pieces.

A few months earlier, just after we had learned that our baby was a girl, we decided to paint the nursery green. We chose a lovely, light, bright green partly because we liked the color, and partly because the idea of too much pink made me ill. And if our next kid was a boy, well, the room would still be gender-appropriate.

We wanted to make painting a family affair, so we waited until Tom, Candee, and Liz’s sister, Deb, were in town, and we invited them to join us. The evening after they arrived, we were standing on our porch, having just come back from dinner, excited to begin coating the bare white walls with broad strokes of Corn Husk Green. I was fumbling to find my keys when I realized that something about our house felt…wrong. Through the sheer fabric of the curtain in the living room, I could see that some things were out of place. The television and the stand upon which it sat were away from their usual spot against the wall, and the floor looked more cluttered than we had left it. My first thought was an earthquake.

Had I been thinking rationally, I would have wondered why every light was on, and I would have noticed the unfamiliar car parked directly in front of my house—unusual on our nearly empty street.

“Stay outside,” I said to Liz and the assorted Goodmans. At that point, Liz was a little over five months pregnant, and I didn’t want her stress level to increase, so I planned to do a quick cleanup before she entered the house. As soon as I pushed the door open, it was clear that the mess was not a result of any tremors. In the middle of the living room floor was one of Liz’s suitcases, opened wide and half filled with electronic items. The door to our office was open, and so were all of the desk drawers, the contents spilled out everywhere. Right behind me was Tom, his eyes huge and his eyebrows nearly touching his receded hairline.

“What’s going on?” he shouted from the living room.

“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! My camera!” I yelled. Actually, four cameras were missing, including the one I had purchased just a few months earlier to replace one that had been ripped out of my hand by a thief on a motorcycle in Ho Chi Minh City. “We’ve been burglarized!” So much for the whole not-wanting-to-stress-Liz-out thing.

“Just stay outside!” I didn’t know how bad the rest of the house was going to look.

I walked into the hallway and saw the door to Madeline’s future room wide open. I could feel the cool air of the Los Angeles winter evening blowing down the hallway. Our bedroom looked like something out of a bad TV movie: the drawers were pulled from the dressers and everything had been dumped out. I looked toward the open French doors at the back of our bedroom, the white curtains billowing inward. I was in a daze.

“Matt! Come here!”

Liz was at the porch railing looking through the grapevine that runs up the trellis attached to our house. With her hand on her hips like any good mother about to scold her child, I heard her yell, “Excuse me! Excuse me!” A little blonde woman, not quite five feet tall and more than halfway through her pregnancy, standing there yelling at the two men who had just ransacked our home.

Since we had surprised them mid-burgle, they easily went out through the back door. But they exited into our fenced-in yard, which appeared to be a problem for them, since their getaway car was parked directly in front of our house—their only route to freedom was through our side yard, right past the spot where Liz was standing. I think we were all a little surprised by their nonchalance as they strolled around the house.

“Get the fuck in the house!” I shouted at Liz. My fear evaporated and I bolted into action, running down the stairs and using my BlackBerry to type out their license plate number while Tom called 911. The dispatcher assured us that the police were on their way, so we went inside to figure out exactly what was missing. There were some obvious things: my cameras, Liz’s laptop, and a few other small electronic items. They had been out in the open and easy to grab. As I dug through the mess in our office, I heard Liz’s voice from the bedroom. “They got all of my jewelry.”

My chin hit my chest and a wave of sickness came over me. I swallowed hard to keep the vomit from coming up, and I walked toward my wife. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, looking at the pile of clothes on the floor. All of the jewelry I’d purchased for her piece by piece for nearly every holiday since we’d been together—twelve years’ worth of memories—was now gone.

“Babe, I’m so sorry. I’ll replace it all, even if it takes me another twelve years. I promise.”

“It’s okay. It’s not the jewelry. It’s the reminders of the times and places.”

“We’ll always have those, but I’ll still replace everything.”

The LAPD arrived, and the officer in charge busied himself with his investigation. “We’ll send someone out to fingerprint the house in the morning,” he told us. “Try not to touch anything.”

“What are the chances you’ll catch these guys?” All I could think about was Liz’s jewelry. Sure, I might enjoy replacing those cameras, but to Liz, the missing pieces were not about precious metal and stones.

“We’ll do our best, but Los Angeles is a big city and there’s a lot of crime.”

In other words: Forget about your shit. It’s gone forever.

“Fuck, I can’t believe this,” I yelled, as the officer drove off in the same direction the burglars had gone just an hour earlier. Liz was standing next to me on the sidewalk, her shirt slightly pulled up and exposing a couple of inches of skin, her hands on her lower back, holding the pain of her pregnancy.

“Matt. It’s only stuff. None of us were hurt. We should be thankful.”

I knew she was right, but I was still seething. I walked her up the stairs and into the house, and we called a cab to take her family back to their hotel.

“Sorry, guys. I guess we’ll have to paint the baby’s room tomorrow.”

As is the case in most home invasions, I felt violated. Not because the asshole burglars had made off with our shit. And not because they poured the contents of our underwear drawers onto the floor while trying to find whatever treasures may have been hidden inside. No. I felt violated because the burglars had entered the house through my future baby’s bedroom. I was scared and angry just thinking about what would have happened if we had been burglarized when she was in there. At that moment I felt like getting the hell out of Los Angeles.

Liz was exhausted and went to bed.

“I’ll be in a little bit,” I said, lying to her. I knew that there was no way I could sleep that night, but I didn’t want to tell Liz why. What if they came back? I wanted to be prepared for them if they did. I was in full alpha-male mode, ready to protect my family.

Problematically, I didn’t have any real weapons that would effectively hold off a gun-wielding revenge seeker. I did have a baseball bat, a couple of kitchen knives, and a belt with a heavy buckle that I could whip at them if they walked through the front door. I brought my arsenal with me into the living room, just in case, and stayed awake all night on the couch, staring out the picture window toward the street.

It wasn’t until the sun came up that I realized how ridiculous I was acting. This was not a movie, and the burglars were not going to come back for retribution. I put my weapons away and crawled into bed with Liz. “Glad you could make it,” she mumbled without moving, and then fell back asleep.

Less than an hour later, I woke up to her phone ringing. I pulled a pillow over my head and tried to go back to sleep, but she smacked me on my back, so I rolled over. With the phone still up to her ear, she hit the mute button and said, “They caught the guys and they have our stuff at the police station!” We were both ecstatic. I listened as she finished up the phone call, telling the officer on the other end that we were on our way to the station.

When we got there, we were introduced to an extremely friendly burglary detective.

“I used to live on your street, just up the road from your house,” he said. “It’s a pretty safe neighborhood.”

I don’t know why, but his statement made me feel better. He directed us to a couple of tables set up in the middle of the room.

“On these tables are things we’ve recovered from several burglaries. Do you recognize anything as yours?”

Liz glossed over the items then looked up at the detective and said, “You didn’t happen to recover any jewelry, did you?”

“No, we didn’t. What are you missing?”

“Several necklaces from Tiffany’s and some gold bangles that my husband bought for me in India and Nepal.”

“We’ll let you know if we find anything.”

I felt sick again. The police had almost everything else, including a deck of cards we picked up at the King Tut exhibit at LACMA a few years earlier, and a plastic case filled with gold-foil stickers used to seal thank-you cards. But no jewelry. I grabbed Liz’s hand.

“I’ll replace everything,” I told her again.

She just looked up at me and smiled.

Sitting at the edge of my wife’s hospital bed just a day after she had brought our child into the world, it seemed obvious to me that now was the perfect time to begin to her collection of new memories. I felt that I should go, right now, and fulfill this promise I had made to her. But as soon as I ended the call with my mother, Liz said, “You’re not leaving me.” She was stern.

“But Liz, I need to get some lunch. I haven’t eaten in more than twenty-four hours and I’m fucking starving!”

Trying to plan a surprise for this woman hadn’t gotten any easier. I knew I’d be gone for less than an hour, and I figured that she would be asleep while I was out anyway, so what would it matter?

Liz’s eyes widened, and I could hear her breathing through her nose the way she always did when she was trying to control her anger toward me—this was also a pretty good indication that she was about to let me have it. “Matt. Don’t you dare leave me here alone! What if the nurses are ready to take me to see Madeline and you’re not here?”

Shit. I really wanted to do something nice for her, but as she yelled at me I realized that my plan really couldn’t have been more thoughtless. Here was my wife, about to stand up for the first time in five weeks, about to hold our baby for the first time ever, and I wanted to go buy her something to make her think I was the perfect husband. But to be the perfect husband, I really just needed to be there with her. She could always make me see what was truly important, even if it took me a little while to get there. I called my mom back and told her that I was going to stay with Liz instead. “Lunch” would have to wait until tomorrow.