Two Kisses for Maddy_ A Memoir of Loss & Love - Matthew Logelin [23]
When I hung up the phone, Liz was calmer, her tone soft. “Thank you for staying. I just don’t want to be alone right now.”
“I know. I hope you know I didn’t want to leave you. I just really needed something to eat,” I said, still trying to preserve the secret plan I would execute the next day. “Please don’t be mad at me.” I knew she wasn’t mad at me. In fact, it was obvious just how happy my small gesture had made her. I realized that the best gift I could have given her was being there with her and being there for her. And that was the only thing she wanted at that moment, and every moment before and after it.
“I just really want you to be here when I first hold Madeline,” she said.
Chapter 7
how?
why?
two questions
that mean nothing.
how will
we
survive without
you?
that’s the question
i will repeat to
myself until the
day i die.
Is she awake yet?” Pat, Liz’s favorite personal care attendant (PCA), stuck her head in the room.
We looked at my sleeping wife.
“Not yet,” I said.
“Okay, I’ll be back.”
It was the second time she had checked in. Liz had been clock-watching all morning, longing for 11:56 a.m., when the prescribed waiting time of twenty-four hours would be up. She was so eager that just when it was time, she fell back asleep, still exhausted from the big events of the day before.
With Liz resting, I sat up on the foldout armchair, shopping online for baby gear. We had only purchased a few things in anticipation of Madeline’s arrival—a couple of books, ten or fifteen outfits, a crib, and a manly diaper bag for me. We hadn’t gotten around to any of the other necessary items, since we figured we had at least another month and half to do so.
While I shopped, I listened to the new WHY? album for the thirty-fifth time that week through my earphones. I don’t usually fixate on one album like that, but there was just something about it. Some of the lines were hitting me in ways that few songs had in the past year. I attributed most of this to timing; after all, I wasn’t just listening to background music right now. I was hearing the music, really hearing it, during one of the most intensely difficult and important weeks of my life. One line in particular stayed in my head: “I’m lucky to be under / This same sky that held / The exhale from your first breath.” It described the feelings I had about the birth of our child better and more eloquently than I ever could have.
Over the next few hours, Pat stuck her head inside the room twice more to see if Liz was ready to go see Madeline, but each time Liz was still sleeping contently. I’d smile and wave to Pat from my chair, and she’d playfully put her left index finger up to her mouth to indicate that she was going to stay quiet and let Liz continue to sleep. I nodded in agreement, knowing that my wife really needed the rest.
Around two thirty, she finally woke up to the sound of the door opening. She knew precisely what Pat’s presence meant, and she was thrilled to see her. Liz sat straight up in her bed, waiting for the words she’d been longing to hear since yesterday, or perhaps since the moment she learned she was pregnant. I also knew what her presence meant, so I paused “By Torpedo or Crohn’s” by WHY? two minutes and fifty-eight seconds into the song, removed my earphones, closed my laptop, and set it on the floor between the bed and my chair.
Looking right at Liz, Pat, in a thick accent I’d been unable to place, asked if she was ready to go. At that moment, all of the pain, all of the anguish of the past seven and a half months was gone, replaced with the kind of elation I’d last seen on our wedding day.
“Yes!” she screamed.
“Well, okay, then. I’ll be right back.”
While Pat searched for one of her colleagues, I thought about calling our parents so they