Two Kisses for Maddy_ A Memoir of Loss & Love - Matthew Logelin [94]
“It’s launched,” said A.J.
“I can’t see it,” I said.
“Shit, you should be able to see it now!” The trip was nearing its end, and A.J. had been busy in the States making sure the site was going to go live on time. He had been working diligently for the past few hours while I sat on the beach watching my daughter try to decide if she liked the taste of sand.
“I can’t see it because there’s no Internet access,” I said. “Don’t forget I’m in Mexico, fucker.”
“Funny,” he said.
“Thank you so much, A.J.” My tone was serious now, as was I. We never would have gotten the site up in time if it weren’t for that guy. If it hadn’t launched that week, we would have missed out on a ton of important media attention that would help shine a light on the cause we were working so hard to illuminate.
“What now?”
“Now we wait and see,” I said. I was eager to find out what kind of traffic we would get, and if people would embrace our new nonprofit. But there was nothing I could do about it from that beach in Mexico, so I was determined to make the rest of our vacation exactly that: a vacation.
We gathered up the family, strapped Maddy into her car seat, gave her a bottle of bottled water, and drove south to Tulum. We stopped along the way, posing for ridiculous photos at the side of the road, like one of Maddy perched in front of a huge mural depicting a woman in a yellow bikini and a monkey in a striped baseball cap holding beer bottles.
Now we were taking Madeline to another one of the geographical markers on the mental map of my life with Liz. And just like everywhere else, in Tulum, time had moved on without us. The town had exploded. There were more tourist stalls than I ever remembered, many more, and a whole new slew of restaurants with every kind of cuisine imaginable.
This part of the trip wasn’t for me. We drove down here so I could show Maddy the incredible, ancient ruins full of bloody history and legions of untold stories that her mother and I had explored together. Back before they were fenced in, we would climb up the steps of the main temple and walk into the great palace—and to a Midwestern kid, well, that was just incredible. I was a teenager, I was in love, and I was learning how much I enjoyed things like travel and discovering other cultures, which, until I met Liz, I hadn’t even thought about at all. When I was nineteen, the puzzle that was my world was just being assembled. At age thirty, it had been blown apart, and now I was trying to fit everything back together smoothly.
I unbuckled the car seat and carried my daughter into an open-air restaurant, asking the hostess for a seat in the shade. Maddy was playing with a new toy that Tom and Candee had brought for her, a little hammer that said “ouch” when you hit it against something. She gripped it in her palm and pounded me lightly on the shoulder while the waiter set up a high chair.
Settling in, we ordered guacamole and chips while Maddy’s strange little anthropomorphic hammer looked at me with its big eyes, saying “ouch, ouch” over and over again. Maddy laughed and I laughed with her. I thought of how Liz would have loved to sit there with us, would have loved to laugh with me at the tourists with their money belts and fanny packs, and then laugh harder about how we were tourists judging other people for being tourists.
The chips came, and we ate them while Maddy gummed the mesh bag with the mashed-up banana I had packed for her. I could feel Liz in Tulum, but I was solidly in this moment, sharing with our daughter this place that we had loved together.
Sitting there, I was suddenly cast into the past. I recalled it being hot, too hot to hold hands, but I couldn’t pinpoint exactly what I was remembering. I could feel the memory’s roundness, how our palms were too damp to cling, but I’d misplaced the latitude and the