Two Kisses for Maddy_ A Memoir of Loss & Love - Matthew Logelin [68]
When we arrived back in Los Angeles, I was jarred into the present. One of Liz’s friends had arranged for a housekeeper to come in and give our house a thorough cleaning while we were gone in Minnesota, which it had not had since Liz died. When I set our luggage down in the living room, I was surprised to see a path carved through the piles of unopened packages that had been arriving from blog readers. The outpouring of kindness had been unreal—and now the boxes were stacked neatly, which was a massive improvement.
With Madeline in my arms, I walked through the house as if for the first time. The kitchen was immaculate: the sink free of dishes, bottles behind the cabinet doors, counters clear and devoid of anything but small appliances. I walked into the hallway. The kitchen door closed behind me and I stopped in my tracks; one of Liz’s black elastic ponytail holders on the doorknob had caught my eye. She had left one on every doorknob in the house so that anytime she needed to throw her hair back she could do it without having to dig one out of a drawer in the bathroom. They’d always been there, but seeing the little bungee cord now—without being distracted by messiness—was like being stabbed in the heart all over again. Like when I saw her car parked out front, for a brief second it felt like Liz was still here. Like she was just in another room and would be coming back shortly to put her hair up in a ponytail. I missed her so fucking much, and those little black things were a big enough reminder to set my heart racing.
I wanted to run away, but with a sleeping baby in my arms, where the hell could I go? Exhausted, I opened the door to my bedroom. When I walked inside I was completely awestruck. It looked like our bedroom again. Since Liz had died, only the color of the walls had changed. They had been covered in a sponged-on yellow when we bought the house, giving them the appearance of having been pissed on. It really was like urine—that was Liz’s interpretation of the color. I vowed that when industriousness got the better of me I would paint the bedroom, because that was what Liz had wanted, and I may have been the first man to arrive at Home Depot with a pillowcase to match to a bucket of paint. But regardless of the color on the walls, the housekeeper had made the room look exactly like it had the day Liz went into the hospital. The books on the nightstand were perfectly lined up. The clock that used to blink 12:00 was plugged in and reset. The piles of clean clothes stacked against the dresser and the shirts hanging from the doorknobs were no longer visible. I’m not sure where there had been room to stash everything, but I was pretty sure I didn’t want to open any closet doors to find out.
But more than any of these small details, seeing the made bed really put me over the edge. Since Liz died, I hadn’t made the bed at all. Yeah, I’d washed the sheets and done a half-assed job of putting them back on and throwing a comforter over them, but never the right way—never the way Liz would have done it. Now on the bed were the three big square pillows that matched the comforter, the ones she never let me use because, as she explained, they were for decoration only. They had been on the floor since Madeline had come home from the hospital. There, on Liz’s dresser, was the silver tray with peacocks on the handles that held seven bottles of perfume. Next to it was the black velvet jewelry stand that she had purchased in downtown Los Angeles, displaying her newest bracelets and necklaces. I stared at all these things until my eyes started to burn, then closed them tight and tried to remember what Liz smelled like and when she had last worn each piece of jewelry. I strained my mind, and it returned nothing.
All of a sudden, the room that had been a place of comfort became completely suffocating. Seeing everything