Two Kisses for Maddy_ A Memoir of Loss & Love - Matthew Logelin [99]
Sonja kept trying to give me time alone with A.J., but I didn’t need a best-friend comfort zone. I needed to feel capable—to feel in charge. I had spent the past year being worried about and catered to, and now I wanted to spend some time thinking about someone else.
“Come on, guys,” she said in the mornings, while we idled over café con leche and freshly cut mango. “Go explore the village. Go hang out. I’ve got the girls.”
“No, no,” I would retort. “You guys go. I’ve got them. I want to do some writing, anyway.”
On March 24, Sonja baked a cake for Maddy’s birthday. It had white frosting, rainbow-colored sprinkles, and a Winnie-the-Pooh–adorned candle in the shape of the number one. She had brought all of the supplies with her from Minnesota—I had no idea she’d planned anything at all. It was like she knew I was going to forget this detail. I stared at the candle. My baby wasn’t five or seven or eleven months anymore, I thought to myself. She was one. One whole year old. It didn’t seem possible. She was no longer the fragile creature I had worried over, the tiny baby behind glass with tubes and electrodes protruding from her body. She was a hearty, healthy, happy child. I thought about the year that had just gone by, and I couldn’t even begin to fathom how we had gotten here. I mean, most of the details were clear, but for the first time I wondered how the fuck we actually did it. We made it here together, but I felt like Madeline had done all the hard work. She’d had to eat, grow, and build new synapses—she’d had to be my everything through the most difficult year of my life.
I smiled through the tears as we sang “Happy Birthday.” I couldn’t help it—my mind drifted to Liz. I kept thinking that Maddy should be hearing her mom sing this song to her. I shook the thoughts from my head and helped her blow out her candle. Then I hung back and let Madeline tear into her birthday cake—the one I forgot, the one that Sonja remembered. In the process, she somehow wound up sitting on it; I shook my head with mock disgust, but I couldn’t be angry because my daughter had just tasted cake for the first time and was wearing one of the biggest smiles I’d ever seen on her face. Looking at her at that moment, I remembered what my mom used to say when she was trying to convince me and Liz to give her a grandkid. “You’ll never feel love like the love you have for your child.”
After Madeline had gone down for the evening and everyone else had said good night and gone to bed, I wandered out to the patio to enjoy a Pacifico and looked up, searching the sky for anything familiar. I rubbed my ring finger, tracing my scar where I knew it was, even though it was too dark to see it. And then I went to sleep, thinking of Liz, thinking of what I had lost, and thinking of what I had gained.
When I woke up the next morning, it, of course, was March 25. Fifty-two weeks since Liz died. Three hundred sixty-five days since my world imploded. I didn’t know how I should have felt as I lay in bed, watching the ceiling fan make the brightly colored tapestry flap against the wall. I felt numb again. How strange that an accumulation of days and weeks could somehow add up to one year since my beautiful wife died, one year since my beautiful daughter was born. Madeline was still asleep, but I picked her up from the twin bed next to mine anyway. She remained sleeping as I held her close to my chest and lay back down in my bed. I needed my baby.
I woke up to her hungry whines. I wasn’t sure how long I’d fallen back asleep for, but it felt like years. I got up and walked out to the kitchen to boil some milk for Madeline. A.J. and Sonja were drinking their coffee on the couch