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I’d looked down again. The scar was about an inch long, starting in the middle of my finger, and stopping just above the platinum ring that bound me to my wife.

“Toughen up,” she had said to me then.

I thought about her words, and then I dove in and swam to the middle of the lagoon.

I could hear her family entering the water at the shore, but I didn’t wait for them. I knew Madeline would be safe with Candee. Treading water, I spit into my snorkel mask, rubbing the little white bubbles around and around on the inside of the lens, a trick that Liz taught me to keep the plastic from fogging over. I rinsed the mask and placed it over my face, tightening the straps until I could feel them digging into the sides of my head, and took off toward the ocean.

I swam and swam, remembering the unofficial races we used to have here. They had silent starts—Liz would swim past me, stirring up what little competitiveness I had in my body. Jesus, she was so much better at this than I am. She had been a swimmer in high school and college, whereas I had been out of shape since at least 1996. I glided through the water now, kicking my flippered feet, and here in this place, with so many memories, with quiet, clear water enveloping me, and the song “In the Aeroplane over the Sea” running through my head, I felt an incredible peace—a peace I hadn’t felt since last March.

In the next few seconds, I learned that no matter how pure one’s sudden inner calmness, and no matter how much spit one smears on the plastic, it’s absolutely impossible to see anything while weeping inside a snorkeling mask.

I resurfaced, slipped it off my face, and used my salty, wet hands to wipe my eyes. Then I swam back toward where Madeline was splashing around with Tom and Deb. Candee was sitting on a towel at the shore, beaming from behind her oversized sunglasses.

I swam up to Deb and held out my arms to Maddy. “Oooooooooh,” she called, reaching toward me.

She came to me, slippery and squealing, my little blonde mermaid.

Chapter 26

that sunset-

sunrise cycle is so

emblematic of this

whole fucking mess.

sadness about

the darkness, the loss of light,

but happiness about

the return of

the light…

then the sun

sets again and

we’re left with

the darkness that

invades our world

every night.

and then the sunlight,

oh that sunlight.

it is so

fucking beautiful.

I was determined that March 24 would be a day of celebration. Few things were more important to me than making sure that Madeline’s birth date and Liz’s death date were separated in my mind and in the minds of everyone who interacted with her. I knew this would become more important as my daughter got older. No child should be deprived of something as special as a birthday, especially after being deprived of her mother.

Just as I’d had to get away for what would have been our third anniversary, I knew I had to get away for this, too. From the day that Liz died, I had been great about sharing Madeline with our friends and family, trying to ensure that she was around to help them with their grieving processes. But for Madeline’s first birthday and the one-year anniversary of Liz’s death, I had to do it alone. I wanted to be the one who made her first birthday as amazing as possible; I wanted to be the one who made the decisions about how it would be celebrated.

Well, sort of alone. I talked to A.J., asking if he, Sonja, and Emilia would like to join us in our travels. Liz and I had been talking to them about a trip like this for years, but we had never gotten around to going. There was always next year, soon, or someday, but now we all knew that the future was not guaranteed. So instead of their usual spring ski trip with A.J.’s family, we all went back to where Maddy and I had been just a few months earlier. Back to Akumal.

The truth was, we could have gone anywhere in the world to celebrate my daughter’s birthday—we could have gone to Egypt