Two Kisses for Maddy_ A Memoir of Loss & Love - Matthew Logelin [71]
Already jet-setters, a few days after we got back to LA, Maddy and I flew to New York City to visit a friend of mine.
We had a room booked at the Waldorf Astoria, the same hotel where Liz and I had stayed on our way to Greece to celebrate the beginning of our marriage. It was just another stop on the list of places that I wanted to visit—to revisit—with Madeline. The doors were still ornate and the entryway was still grand, but just three years later, she was gone, and I was here with our daughter, just the two of us. Madeline was nestled against my chest in a Baby Bjorn, and I held her hand as the bellhop opened the door and led us up the staircase.
The memories flooded back with such force that without Maddy’s little fingers in mine, I might have drowned. I had held her mother’s hand when we walked up the very same staircase on the first night of our honeymoon. We weren’t giddy, though—we were stressed. We were to stay in New York for fewer than twelve hours before our next flight, and the airline had lost our luggage. Since Liz was such a frequent business traveler, we were spending a night in one of the world’s fanciest hotels for free, but because our bags were missing we didn’t get to enjoy the massively excessive three-room suite. Liz was teary, worried about arriving in Greece without all of the clothes she had purchased specifically for our honeymoon. I spent the night alternating between consoling my new bride and calmly arguing with customer service agents in the hopes of finding some sort of resolution.
After more than a few hours of this, Liz went to sleep, but I continued working the phones until I found a sympathetic ear on the other end. Instead of granting us the usual policy-mandated few hundred bucks for lost luggage, the agent told us to go out the next morning and have a shopping spree, courtesy of the airline. We could each spend one thousand dollars, and as long as we sent him the receipts, he would personally see to it that we were reimbursed.
And so we did just that. We had less than an hour to complete our shopping spree before we were supposed to head back to the airport to catch our flight to Athens, so we went to Macy’s, where we each bought a new suitcase and hurriedly filled them with as many items as we could.
Before we checked in for our next flight at JFK, we stopped by to check the lost luggage area just in case ours had surfaced. Sure enough, sitting in a corner were our two suitcases. While we waited for our flight to board, I called my contact at the airline to tell him that we had found our luggage.
“That’s great news!”
“We’ll return all of the stuff we just bought when we get back from Greece.”
“No, keep it. You deserve it after everything you’ve been through. Consider it a wedding gift from the airline.”
When I relayed the story to Liz, she smiled.
“Not a bad way to start our honeymoon, eh?” I said, smiling back at her.
“It’s as perfect as I could have imagined it.”
But this time at the Waldorf, things were a lot less perfect. After we got everything into our room, I transferred Madeline to her stroller and headed down to the restaurant on the ground floor for a little late dinner after our long flight. All eyes in the bar fixed upon me as I wheeled in my sleeping child and parked her stroller against the wall. I sat in a chair next to her and pulled out a book to keep me company.
The waitress came over to me a few minutes later. “What can I get for you?” she asked, a gray-haired woman probably in her late fifties. As I pondered the menu, she said, “Cute kid. Where’s her mother?”
Come on. It was the fifth time that day that someone asked where her mother was. Was it that unnatural for a man to be out in the world, alone with a four-and-a-half-month-old baby? Maybe. I tried to think about the last time I noticed a father traveling alone with a child as young as Madeline, and couldn’t remember ever seeing it. And then I put myself in the shoes of the waitress, and realized the scene was probably pretty odd—a scruffy-looking dad and his baby girl, hanging out