Two Kisses for Maddy_ A Memoir of Loss & Love - Matthew Logelin [86]
After that, Tom called to tell me that it was his soda—he had left it there. He waited for my reaction, and when I started laughing, he laughed with me.
On a trip to the grocery store that week, the odometer caught my eye. I looked down at a red light for no particular reason, but I would have been blind to miss it: I caught it at 77,777 miles. Liz’s favorite number, five in a row. That hit me hard. If I had looked at the next light, the number would not have been nearly as jarring. I didn’t think this moment had some grandiose meaning, but I wondered how someone else might interpret it. Many would say that this was a sign from Liz, that she was still with me even though she was dead. I thought that kind of thing was utter bullshit; I knew it was just a random coincidence and that my mind was trying to assign meaning to it. But sign or not, it was definitely fucking weird.
It was time. I had to get rid of Liz’s car—it was the right decision. I called the guy up and told him that two thousand dollars was a fair price, and that he needed to pick the car up immediately. He came over the next day to drop off a check and get the keys, but he said that he’d pick it up in a few days.
“I’m going to New York in three days,” I told him. “I need it gone by the time I get back.”
As the lone soul who had wanted the car to remain, I now felt strangely insistent that it disappear as soon as possible. I’d made the decision to sell it, and I wanted it gone before I found a reason to change my mind.
I knew the morning we set out for New York was the last time I would see Liz’s car. Before we left for LAX at five o’clock, I stood on my quiet, empty street with Maddy asleep in my arms, just staring at it. If any of my neighbors had seen me, they probably would have thought I was out of my fucking mind. It was bad enough that I had left this ugly, goddamned thing just sitting outside my house for the past seven months, taking up a precious parking spot. I waved at the car, and headed out to the airport. I wasn’t sad. I was mostly mad at myself for acting like a jackass and waving at an inanimate object.
When we got home from New York a few days later, it was after midnight and the street was just as quiet as when we had left. The car was gone. I looked at the inscriptions on my inner wrists—it was as if Liz had scribbled on me just that morning with a Sharpie. I had decided to get the numbers that represented the two most important dates of my life inscribed on my skin a few months earlier: 24 on the left, 25 on the right. I hadn’t even pondered it for very long; it was a random idea that felt so right that I headed out to get them almost immediately. When I walked outside and saw Liz’s car parked behind mine that day, the idea crystallized in my mind, and I realized that the numbers had to be in Liz’s handwriting.
I found a sheet of paper in the drawer of her bedside table with equations she had scribbled, trying to calculate how long she could make her maternity leave last. I scanned the page and found crisp examples of a 2, a 4, and a 5, with her distinctive and elegantly looping cursive. They were the two most significant dates in my life, and they were the very first symbols that ever meant enough for me to have etched onto my body.
Even though I was beginning to let go of these tangible objects, I knew that I would never lose my connection to Liz. Sometimes I had to let logic overrule emotion—it didn’t make any sense to hang on to a rusty razor or a shirt she had given me that no longer fit. But I had memories, and I had Madeline. And thanks to these tattoos, I had a permanent reminder of my wife.
Chapter 23
we were excited to
show off the