Two Kisses for Maddy_ A Memoir of Loss & Love - Matthew Logelin [96]
I stepped carefully down the stairs that hadn’t been there two years ago and shivered as my legs slid into the cold water. I put the fins on, standing awkwardly on one foot and then the other, then picked up my snorkel and mask, fitting it over my head easily and securely.
It felt simple and natural, exactly the opposite of the first time I had gone snorkeling with Liz so many years ago. She was an old hand at the sport, while I was just a simple guy more used to catching fish on a frozen lake than dressing like an alien in order to peer at them below the water’s surface. I remembered being in the lagoon with her, and while she’d floated, peaceful and steady, I had been flustered, anxious, uncoordinated, and completely unable to breathe through the mouthpiece. Water got into my goggles and into my lungs, and I came up spluttering repeatedly, the taste of saltwater making me gag.
Liz had lifted her head up. Bobbing in the waves, she pulled off the breathing apparatus and looked at me with her big blue eyes.
“What the fuck?” she’d said. She was laughing and I was trying to breathe again. “You suck at snorkeling?”
“I have no idea what I am doing,” I’d said. “I think something’s wrong with mine.”
She had taken it and looked it over. “There’s nothing wrong with it. Toughen up!” It was such a Liz thing to say. “I’ve been doing this since I was a child,” she’d added for good measure.
As soon as she’d said it, the mental picture had come: a little blonde mermaid zipping around scaring the fish. I rolled my eyes at her, and she rolled hers at me in response, placing the strange device back into my wet palm and pulling her mask down over her face.
Now, I pulled my own mask over my face, partly because I wanted to jump in, and partly so that Liz’s family wouldn’t see my face tightening like I was about to start bawling, although crying in the water actually made a lot of sense if I wanted to keep my feelings to myself.
Liz was always on me to learn how to do things and to push myself in new and unfamiliar ways. She was my guide into a world I had never been in, sometimes literally in locations, other times figuratively when it came to activities that I had never even considered before I met her. As I thought about her, I rubbed the scar that ran down the inside of my left ring finger. It was a faint reminder that she never hesitated to tell me to “take off the skirt” if she thought it was warranted.
It was exactly the kind of memory I wanted to hold on to forever, and I knew that even if I ended up a doddering old fool in a nursing home with all of my brain cells compressed and inactive, the scar would remind me of how much fun we had together, and of how much I had grown during the years she shared and shaped my life.
Just a few years before we were married, we had been swimming and playing around in the ocean with a football on another of these annual trips to Mexico.
She had tossed the ball to me, and it wobbled through the sky, haloed by the sun against the azure Akumal skies. I’d reached up to catch it like a valiant wide receiver in the last seconds of the game, but I fell backward into a jagged bunch of coral. The football flew over me, my hands flew back behind me, and I very painfully cut my finger. I mean, that shit fucking hurt. The saltwater rushed over the fresh wound, terrorizing my newly severed nerve endings. It was a clean slice, and it was bleeding like crazy.
“Fuck,” I’d hollered, holding on to my finger like it was going to fall off. “Fuck!”
I’d jumped up and down as if on fire. Liz had not been impressed by my performance. “Don’t be such a pussy.” She’d said it straight out. It had been one of those moments. It wasn’t that she didn’t care when I was hurt—nobody worried about me more than Liz—but she was a smart woman. She had known it wasn’t so bad. She had known it could have been a lot worse. At the time, I had thought