Two Kisses for Maddy_ A Memoir of Loss & Love - Matthew Logelin [91]
Chapter 24
but these two days,
they may be the worst.
why?
i have no idea.
fuck…
i’m trying
and i’m sorry,
but it just
doesn’t feel like
christmas without
her.
One of my favorite photos of Liz is from just before our last Christmas together. She had just started showing, and she looked so goddamned gorgeous, tiny and blonde and just a little bit pregnant, standing on the steps outside my friend Nate’s house and smiling down at me from the top stair. Just after I took it, she waved good-bye and left me there to have fun with my old friends while she went back to her parents’ house to get some sleep. She picked me up, still in the throes of my Christmas Eve hangover, the next morning.
Liz thought Christmas was amazing.
“Matt.” I could almost hear her voice, a mixture of plaintive and bossy. It was the same thing every year. “We will hang Christmas lights.”
“Fuck that,” I would say, resorting to the sort of persuasion that never worked, adding an equally convincing groan or eye roll.
Christmas in Los Angeles felt fake enough, especially for a Midwestern native used to snow starting in November and lasting all the way through spring. With its always-blooming flowers and ever-blue sky, Southern California just never felt like the right place to have pine needles on the floor. It was weird to wear shorts to pick up a tree. Besides, we headed to Minnesota for Christmas every year—we wouldn’t even be around for the actual days requiring the tree. This was my most valid argument.
“Matt,” she would say again—she was fond of using my name when making a point—“Matt, we will hang Christmas lights. We will have a tree. It is Christmas. I don’t care that we are going to Minneapolis. I want a tree.”
And so we found ourselves, every year, in the lot at Target buying a tree that (1) was fucking annoying to drag home, (2) would shed its needles all over the house, and (3) definitely would not be seen on Christmas. But this was just another example of us. Yes, Liz could be cynical, but when it came to the holidays, she was 100 percent sincere. She went crazy for that shit, using her own brand of merry peppiness to counteract my Grinch-like attitude.
“We can hire someone to put the lights up,” she had said just a year ago.
“And we’ll have to hire someone to take them down again,” I responded. “Liz! We don’t need lights!” I could also use her name to make a point.
Now here I was, a year later, looking at our bare roof by myself and I could not believe that I had been such an ass as to deny my pregnant wife some fucking lights on her last Christmas. Fuck, I thought. What was wrong with me? What would have been the harm in letting someone decorate our house? I wouldn’t have had to do any work, and Liz would have paid for it. Why did I put up such a fight?
The year before that, though, I had been in Bangalore during the holidays, and Liz had flown out to see me. It was our first Christmas away from our families, and I wanted her to be her usual happy holiday self. I decided to surprise her because I felt bad about taking us so far away during her favorite time of the year. I went out in the city and bought a shitload of decorations. I got a little tiny Christmas tree, maybe a foot high, sparse branches—it was fucking ugly, with a wooden base that was painted yellow, red, and green, like some Rastafarian Charlie Brown Christmas tree—and these gorgeous cardboard stars that folded out with holes so light could shine through. They were all over the city at this time of the year. My tiny apartment on this noisy street in Bangalore was about as far away from snowy suburban Minnesota as we could get.
I picked Liz up from the airport and brought her through the raucous calling of car horns, through the thick