Two Kisses for Maddy

by Matthew Logelin

  “What are you doing?” she screamed like a mother who had just busted her teenage son with a stack of porn. “You must keep these on! Not wearing them can kill you! It’s happened before and it will happen again!”

  Liz just nodded as the nurse put the cuffs back on her lower legs, but as soon as the door closed behind her, Liz lost it.

  “Fuck her! I mean, I know she’s right, but she didn’t have to yell at me like that. How scary! God! What a bitch.”

  I let out an uneasy laugh as the words came from her mouth, and then I agreed with her. “Yeah, that nurse is a bitch.” But that was the last time Liz ever removed those leg cuffs without consulting a nurse. No matter how painful the procedure, no matter how awful and uncomfortable she felt, she knew she had to endure it—and she wanted to, because her only concern was delivering a healthy baby as close to full-term as possible. She made it her job, and once it became her job, it was her singular focus. That was just Liz. Once her mind was set on something, she not only had to complete the task but she had to do it as well as she possibly could.

  Even though we lived closer than a ten-minute drive to the hospital, I refused to let Liz spend even one night by herself. I was there as much as I humanly had time to be; this pregnancy was bringing us so much closer, and I just couldn’t let her do it alone. I slept on an extremely uncomfortable foldout chair, waking up at least once every hour when some random alarm would go off, or when Liz woke me up to tell me to cover my ears so she could use the bedpan. (I have a passionate, lifelong hatred for the sound of anyone peeing.) My schedule was the same every day: I left the hospital before six o’clock each morning, to avoid the daily parking charge, and headed home to take a shower and change my clothes. I spent most of my days at work thinking about our soon-to-be-delivered baby while replying to e-mails from Liz:

  Watching Titanic. You’re sooooo lucky you’re at work.

  Meatballs sound so good tonight. Can you pick some up before you come up here?

  I just had the BEST mani/pedi in my hospital room, thanks to Mari.

  I’m watching midget madness on Jerry Springer… AAAAHH!

  Good massage, onto my bath… Ah, the life of luxury I lead…

  I would leave my office after eight hours of being too distracted to accomplish anything, and stop home just long enough to grab our mail, pick grapefruit from our tree for the nurses, and gather flowers from our yard for Liz. I would pick up meatballs, mint chocolate chip ice cream from Baskin Robbins or whatever she was craving at the moment, and deliver it to her hospital room. We ate together, watched shitty television, listened to the music I thought she should hear, entertained guests during visiting hours, and talked on the phone to friends and family about how we were doing.

  Liz was often not up to taking visitors, sometimes because she felt nauseous, other times because she thought she didn’t look cute enough. Instead of telling them not to visit, though, she insisted that I was happy to entertain them, usually just outside of our room, in the lobby of the hospital, or in the cafeteria. When the phone calls became too much for Liz to handle and I grew unwilling to repeat the same mundane story to friends and family all over the world, I decided that I’d update my blog each evening so that everyone had a central source of information whenever they had a question or wanted to know how our baby was doing. It was a website that I’d had for years but rarely posted to—nobody but my mother checked it. Liz thought this was a good alternative to answering the endless stream of calls that flooded our evenings, but she insisted that I not post any photos of her lying in a hospital bed.

  As much as I complained at the time, I was happy to be there with Liz, especially learning things about her that I didn’t yet know. For example, I never knew that her lucky number was seven, or that she considered herself Catholic even though she wasn’t religious. In retrospect, it feels strange that we had never discussed these things before, but in the hospital we had nothing to do but talk. When we were apart, we hadn’t had the luxury of discussing mundane details, as we were in different parts of the world, where conversations were either expensive or difficult to conduct due to the constraints posed by different time zones. And these simple conversations were not urgent; we were looking forward to a long life together during which such details would eventually emerge.

  During our waking hours, when Liz was most worried, I put on a smile, used a confident tone, and assured her that everything would be okay as I sat next to her in her hospital bed, softly stroking her IV-free arm. “Our baby will be perfect…she has you as a mother.” That always brought a smile to her face. When she’d finally fall asleep, I’d sit on that back-ruining foldout chair and worry about how things would turn out. Yeah, she was going to have Liz as a mother, but she was going to have me as a father, and that couldn’t be good. I’d felt fairly sure of myself over the last seven months, but now that our child was closer to being born, I was far less certain that I’d be a good parent. More worrisome for our baby in the short term, however, was the unknown: her health. We had no idea what was really going on inside Liz’s womb, and this early in the pregnancy we didn’t want to know—really knowing could only come after delivery and it was too early.

  Liz had seemed so confident of the health of our child, but after she entered the hospital her entire outlook changed. She was visibly worried, looking ashen and sad when we were alone. It was quite a reversal of roles for us. I had always been the pessimist in our relationship while Liz was the optimist. But a lot of the concerns she had early in her pregnancy were no longer the stuff of ob-gyn warnings; now they were very real possibilities.

  While in the hospital, she had been reading a book about premature babies. One night she was so fed up with the negativity spewing forth from its pages that she sat up straight in her hospital bed and threw it to the other end of the room. “Fuck this piece of shit!” I looked up from my computer screen as the words left her lips and the book hit the whiteboard listing the names of her nurse and personal care attendant for the day.

  “That was one hell of a throw,” I said, and turned to see her shaking as though she’d just been retrieved from beneath the surface of a frozen lake. Clearly this was no time for one of my jokes. I picked the book up from the floor and crawled into bed with her, doing everything I could to hug the pain away. After she calmed down, I opened the book and flipped straight to the copyright page. “Liz, this book was published in 1978,” I said. “I guarantee things have advanced in the field of premature babies in the last thirty years.” That was enough to coax a small chuckle from her, and for one more day I felt like I had done my best work, supporting my wife and best friend.

  At night, when it got late and the visits from hospital staff became less frequent, Liz and I would fantasize about our future with our daughter. Liz talked of traveling the world, shopping for shoes and purses, mother-daughter spa trips for manis, pedis, and massages, and high tea at the ever-so-elegant Huntington Library. I talked of autumn nights at Dodger Stadium, shopping for records, father-daughter fishing trips to Alaska with her uncle Nick, and beers and Shirley Temples at the Polish restaurant down the street from our house.

  As soon as we could possibly find out the sex of our baby, we did. Well, that wasn’t my choice. I had this very romantic belief that giving birth should be one of the great surprises in our life, but Liz disagreed.

  “How am I supposed to have a baby shower without knowing the sex of our child?” Liz asked.

  “I don’t know. How about doing what Neolithic humans did?” I responded.

  “What’s that?”

  “Register for gender-neutral gifts.”

  At this, she rolled her eyes, which she often did in response to my sorry-ass attempts at humor. Deep down I knew that this was an argument I’d never win, because one of Liz’s finest traits was to obtain all available data so that she could have every last detail planned out. I knew it was important to Liz, so I followed her lead.

  When Dr. Nelson asked us if we were r
eady to learn the sex of our baby, Liz brought her hands together just under her chin, clapping expeditiously, the way she always did when she was excited, and let out a squeal that indicated she was indeed ready. With a few swipes of the transducer probe and a couple of tilts of the resulting photograph, Dr. Nelson said, “It’s a girl!”

  A girl.

  I used to scowl at the little girls at the baseball stadium, covered head to toe in pink Dodgers gear, jumping up and down in the aisles, waving pom-poms and screaming at the top of their lungs even when the ball wasn’t in play.

  “Little boys don’t do this kind of shit,” I’d say. “Can’t these girls just shut the hell up and watch the game?”

  “You’ll think it’s so cute when we have a little girl and she does it,” Liz would answer.

  “Maybe, but I think that’s what you want.”

  We both started crying as soon as we heard Dr. Nelson’s words. To be honest, it wasn’t just Liz who wanted a girl. I have no idea what the hell it was, but something in me changed the day we learned she was pregnant, and from that moment on I only pictured us with a girl in our lives. But it didn’t mean I wasn’t without fear.

  Liz envisioned a mini-Liz, which I was actively trying to avoid for a couple of reasons. First, I knew having two strong-willed women in my house would make it hard for me to get my way. Second, I wanted to turn our daughter into a tomboy to keep the boys away from her as she got older. Liz wasn’t exactly thrilled with this plan, but I told her it was better than my first thought.

  “What was that?” she asked.

  “Well, if she looks anything like you, we’re doomed, so I think we should consider giving her a nifty little ear-to-ear scar.”

  “Jesus, Matt. That’s not funny.”

  “I know,” I said. “It’s not a joke.”

  Of course, it was a joke, and I knew she knew it was, because she gave me that slight look of disapproval I saw whenever I made a crass comment. But that was my role in our relationship. I had to do something to lighten the mood, because as we lay there night after night, trying to ignore the hum of the heart monitor and other hospital equipment, the future we dreamed of seemed so far away.

  How the fuck did this happen to us?

  Chapter 4

  baby’s heart rate dropped around 3:30 a.m.

  everyone was concerned.

  dr. stopped by in the morning.

  and said that it may be best

  to have madeline come out and play.

  I always sort of imagined something out of a ’50s television show: Liz would shoot out of bed in the middle of the night, shake me awake, and yell at me to get her overnight bag and the keys to the car because the baby was coming. I’d say, “Are you sure? How far apart are the contractions?” and she’d say, “Trust me. This is gonna happen tonight.” I’d be nervous, trying to remember the breathing exercises we’d learned in those birthing classes. I’d put on an unmatched pair of shoes and trip on a few things on the way out the door like some slapstick comedian. I’d get her in the car and realize I had forgotten her overnight bag in the house. We’d rush to the hospital, get pulled over for speeding, and then, after shouting at the cop in my exasperated voice, “My wife is having a baby!” we’d get a police escort the rest of the way there. I’d pace the halls of the hospital with Liz’s father, my father, and my stepfather, waiting for the doctor to come out and announce that we had a healthy baby girl. “Ten toes and ten fingers!” the doctor would say, and we’d all shake hands, slap backs, and smoke cigars. And then? Happily ever after, of course.

  Early on a Monday morning before I’d left the hospital for work, an alarm went off in the nurses’ station, just outside of room #7. Liz’s room. Her lucky #7. A nurse came in and told us the news: our baby’s heart rate had once again experienced a significant drop, which meant that today was the day we’d finally meet our child. Many factors went into the decision, but the doctors simply believed it was time. With Liz’s amniotic fluid level still low and our growing baby taking up more and more space in her womb, the possibility of damage to our daughter became a serious concern. In addition, as she got bigger, the umbilical cord got tighter around her neck, so if her heart rate showed a sustained drop it indicated a possible lack of oxygen getting to her brain and other parts of her body. They determined that our daughter would be better off out in the world than in Liz’s womb. We experienced a mix of excitement and fear; we were definitely ready to hold our baby, but she was still seven weeks early, and we were terrified that she might be too young to survive.

  While one of the nurses was talking to Liz, I called our parents and told them to get on the next flight to Los Angeles because their granddaughter would be making her first appearance sometime before noon. Liz’s parents and my mom all said they’d be in Los Angeles before the day was over. My stepfather was unable to make it due to a work conflict, and my dad and stepmother were in Florida on vacation, but they promised to come out in a couple of weeks for the trip they’d already booked to coincide with our baby’s scheduled due date. I called Anya, Liz’s best friend, and told her to ditch work and come to the hospital because Liz wanted her in the recovery room after the C-section.

  I posted something on the blog for the rest of our friends and family. It was a simple photo of the whiteboard in Liz’s hospital room. Preprinted on the board were the words, “Today is…” Underneath, I wrote, “March 24, 2008—and Madeline will be here in about 1 hour.” It was the first time I had ever written out my daughter’s name. Seeing it there on that board, in my handwriting, and knowing that today was the day we would finally meet her, made my heart feel like it was going to burst.

  As soon as we had learned that Liz was pregnant, we began our search for the perfect name. She kept a book of baby names on her bedside table, and we started at the beginning, taking turns thumbing through a new letter each night, calling out names to the one not holding the book. We had pretty simple criteria for choosing our child’s name: it couldn’t rhyme with anything terrible, it couldn’t be the name of any girl/woman from our past who was in any way insufferable, and it couldn’t be the name of any of my ex-girlfriends. I suggested names of women in my favorite songs and books, and Liz suggested names of strong females throughout history. Each of us rejected the other’s idea for one of the reasons mentioned above.

  It was on the thirteenth night that Liz called out a name that neither one of us objected to. “What do you think of Madeline?” she asked.

  “I love it.”

  And that was the last time we opened the book.

  Choosing a middle name was a bit more difficult. We hadn’t even considered one until Liz’s very first delivery scare. One of the nurses asked us to fill out some paperwork, and when she got to the spot for middle name, she paused.

  “We need to come up with a middle name for Madeline.”

  It hadn’t occurred to either of us.

  A few days later, we still didn’t have any ideas. I was walking through the halls of the maternity ward and I stopped at the window of the nursery. I looked from baby to baby, hoping that when ours was born, she would be as big and as healthy as they all appeared, when it came to me: Madeline’s middle name should be Elizabeth.

  I ran back to the room, excited to share the news with Liz.

  “No way,” she said. “It’s way too narcissistic.”

  “What? I think it’s cute. Think about it: Maddy is similar to my name, and with your name as her middle name, she’d sort of be named after both of us.”

  She digested my point of view for a few seconds, and then her contemplative look gave in to that huge smile that meant she was thrilled.

  “I don’t hate it,” she said playfully.

  As the nurses came in and prepared Liz for her delivery, I made a mental note of all the things I needed for the big moment. Still camera: check. Video camera: check. I had no intention of photographing or recording any parts of the birthing process, mainly because the thought of watching it
had me hyperventilating; I simply planned on taking some abstract shots of the delivery room and possibly a shot of our daughter, but only after the doctors and nurses removed all the nasty birthing goo from her. I brought the video camera to record Liz’s trip to and from the delivery room, capturing our moments together just before and just after our child was born. That was it. No breathing exercises to remember, no overnight bag to forget at home—just some electronic equipment.

  We heard a knock and then saw Anya’s head peek through a crack in the doorway. Liz’s face lit up immediately and the tears began to flow. She had this sadly beautiful way of crying when she felt an overwhelming sense of relief: her lower lip would quiver, her eyes would open wide, and her head would tilt slightly to the left. Despite the uncertainty of the situation she was about to face, she instantly felt better when her best friend arrived. Anya and Liz went to college together at Scripps and had been almost inseparable since they had met, becoming even closer after the rest of their group of friends moved away from Southern California. They were always there for one another, but more important, Anya was always there for me, indulging Liz’s shopping fantasies when I didn’t feel like watching her try on twenty-five different outfits or listening to her drone on and on about some idea she had for redecorating the house. I never heard Liz laugh as loud or as hard as she did when she was with her best friend. Liz was always at her happiest in Anya’s company, and I was a very, very close second. Aside from the big reason that Anya was at the hospital, this day was no different than any other time they got together. They were laughing hysterically and I was rolling my eyes at their inside jokes.

  A few minutes later, we heard another knock on the door. This time it was Dr. Nelson. She entered the room with a huge smile, bringing Liz even more tears of relief. Dr. Nelson shared with us information about the delivery, answered some last-minute questions, and reassured us that things were going to go great. Liz asked again if our baby would be okay if she came out today.