Two Kisses for Maddy_ A Memoir of Loss & Love - Matthew Logelin [92]
Now, just two years later, I was in Los Angeles on a block with Spanish-style houses and palm trees, staring at an empty roof. I wished I could go back in time and cover it so thickly with lights that Liz would have been able to see it all the way from the plane to Minneapolis. I wished I hadn’t been such an ass about it.
A week before Christmas, I dressed Maddy in a red and white striped onesie and brought her to the parking lot of the Target in Eagle Rock to buy a tree. Even though it was a pain in the ass to drag home by myself, especially with a baby in tow, even though there would be pine needles all over the floor that I would have to clean up, and even though we weren’t going to be there on Christmas Day, I wanted Madeline’s first Christmas to be as much like it would have been with Liz around. My kid looked like a fucking candy cane, but I knew her mom would have loved it.
As happy as I tried to be for Madeline, the shopping trip was excruciating. There were dads and moms and kids everywhere, pointing and running and laughing, and my heart was just…broken. Obliterated. Ground up into a fine paste. Their Christmases would be perfect, their families intact. They may not have appreciated that, and I daydreamed about telling them that they should. I wanted to give up on the holiday, to just say fuck it and drive home. Maddy wouldn’t remember this Christmas anyway, and besides, we’d be in Minnesota in a few days.
But I stayed. I chose a tree and dragged it over to the car, because none of this was for me. All I could think about was how I had always given Liz shit about loving Christmas. Why the hell couldn’t I just let my wife enjoy the holidays? I mean, I still hated this shit—I wasn’t suddenly going to go out caroling for the neighbors. This was for Madeline; this was what Liz would have done.
As I struggled to get the immensely cumbersome thing into the living room, the needles scattering everywhere, I heard her: “Matt, of course we’re going to get a tree. It’s for Madeline! She needs to know about Santa Claus.”
So I bought the goddamned tree, and I told Madeline about jolly St. Nick. And a couple of days later we were on our way to the airport.
* * *
Every Christmas Eve when we got back to Minneapolis, Liz’s parents picked us up from the airport, we stopped over for a snack, and then she and I headed over to Nate’s. Going to his place was a big part of our end-of-December tradition, and when I got to his front steps this year, I froze. I saw Liz standing at the top of them, looking at me as she did when I snapped that photo of her with the Polaroid camera she bought me for my thirtieth birthday. Flushed, glowing, happy. It was one of those eerie time-machine moments where everything was wrong, but I couldn’t fix it. Everything at Nate’s was the same as it had always been, but all without Liz. And so the most basic action, something I had done hundreds of times before—just bounding up those stairs—felt impossible.
I had expected the family stuff to be difficult. I had expected it to be impossible to sit in my mother’s living room exchanging gifts, imagining that Liz was sitting on the couch while everyone cooed over our daughter and gave her enough presents for the next ten Christmases. I had not expected it to break my heart to walk up to Nate’s porch on Christmas Eve.
What the hell could I do? I went inside. I had a couple of beers. I cracked some jokes. I did what we had done every year. I needed my friends to talk to me like it was okay, and like I was okay. I didn’t want sympathy. I just wanted to laugh.
When it was my turn to get more beer, I went to the refrigerator and on the door, I saw a picture of Liz smiling and pointing at her pregnant belly