I held Maddy in my arms as we approached, smoothing a bit of sunscreen that hadn’t absorbed into her tiny white shoulders. Usually on these journeys, Liz would be looking out for me, making sure that I had remembered the SPF 15. Now I had to make sure I wouldn’t burn, and I was responsible for keeping Maddy as covered up as possible, too. I was using SPF 65, just to be safe.
On the path to the water, I felt dulled without Liz’s excitement, her bubbling laughter as she skipped ahead. More changes were all around me, unexpected changes, like the tacky sculptures placed at odd intervals among the plants, making it look more like a mall with a jungle theme than a place of natural beauty.
Candee found a spot for us to drop our bags and held out her arms for Maddy. I handed my daughter over and then stood there in the sunlight and silence, thinking about the difficulty of being there without Liz. What Tom must be thinking. What Candee must be thinking as our baby squirmed and chattered in her arms. What Deb must be thinking as we prepared to enter the water. How could we be here without her? How could any of this exist without her? Why are we not all crying every second of the day?
I knew how fucking useless these questions were, because I knew what the answers were. Taking trips together, eating at the restaurants we loved, swimming in the lagoon, giggling with Maddy, finding ways to smile when all we wanted to do was break down and wail. I knew already that these were not coping mechanisms; they were survival techniques. Without them, I might not have made it to this point. I would have just stayed in my house, like many of the widows I knew, losing weight until I was more skeleton than human, moping around until I was just an outline of the person I had been before Liz died.
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 it was the worst thing that had ever happened to me, like Maddy did now when she was tired or wet or hungry.
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 to see the pyramids or to Moscow to see Red Square. A.J. was on spring break from his job as a technology coordinator at a school in Minneapolis; Sonja could take time off from her gig as a pediatrician; I had made some money from putting ads on my blog; and Maddy and Emilia were just babies without any prior engagements. Nothing was keeping us from trekking through the Himalayas or sampling the local fare in Cambodia or any of the other numerous and pleasurable things that one can do when one has time, friends whose company is a joy, and available cash.
But after a year spent retracing Liz’s steps through Minneapolis, through Los Angeles, and, recently, along the coast of Mexico, I had discovered that it was in the place where we vacationed with her family every year that I felt her spirit the most keenly, the most purely. So back to Mexico we went. Maddy wasn’t quite a year old, not yet, but this was her second trip abroad in just a few months. In her short life so far, she had already accumulated almost ten thousand frequent-flier miles, which meant that she would be better traveled by her first birthday than I had been at age twenty.
It was hot and humid the day we arrived, and we stood there for a moment, blinking in the sun outside the airport, a ragtag group consisting of two boys masquerading as grown men, two actual babies, and one beautiful woman. That poor woman, passersby must have thought, imagining that she would have to spend her vacation taking care of all of us.
But I wasn’t going to be coddled and catered to like I had been on every single trip to Mexico with Liz’s family. When you travel with a group like theirs, things just happen magically—well, because someone else manages all of the arrangements and shoulders the hassles. On this trip, I didn’t just want to go along for the ride. I appointed myself the driver, the travel agent, the financier, and even sometimes the babysitter.
“Who needs water?” I asked, making myself useful from the moment we arrived. I put Maddy’s passport and mine in the safest place in my backpack, and settled my friends in the shade.
“I’m going to get the car,” I announced. There was no way I was going to make them suffer in the shuttle to the place where our rental was parked. I hoisted Maddy up, holding her securely with my right arm. I could just bring her car seat, I had decided while the plane taxied, and drive back with her to pick up the rest of the group.
“Leave her with us,” said Sonja in her best let’s-be-reasonable voice. “Why should she have to take the shuttle?”
“She’s going to go nuts when I leave. And you guys have your own kid to worry about,” I said, even though I knew Sonja was right. This was not how my SuperDad routine was supposed to progress. If I could have pulled it off without looking like a crazy car seat juggler, I would have insisted that Emilia come with me, too, sending Sonja and A.J. to have a margarita and meet us at the condo later.
But Sonja’s plan prevailed, and the four of them waited for me at the airport while I argued with the rental officials at a location that felt a thousand miles from the airport. It took two hours to get the car, an hour and a half to drive to our condo in Akumal, and another hour to settle the kids down, change out of our sweaty travel garb, and unpack our suitcases.
I had remembered almost everything we needed for Madeline to have a great birthday: the sunscreen, her cute little bathing suits, bathing suit cover-ups, and even her hat with the extra-broad, extra-floppy brim. But I had forgotten to bring a box of cake mix so I could bake her a birthday cake in Akumal, an omission that clashed sorely with my desire to be the perfect father to my baby as she turned one. Disappointed that I’d forgotten this integral detail, I gave up on unpacking.
We got settled in as quickly as possible and made our way to the white lounge chairs on the beach to stare out at the ocean, at least half a day of sun still ahead of us. That night, as our babies fell asleep in our arms and the sun started to set, I looked around at my friends, and I felt…good. I felt like an adult. Like I was taking care of things. By recognizing when I needed help, and by being able to ask for it. By inviting others to go away with me instead of always accepting invitations to go away with others. By remembering on my own to pack the SPF 65. Now I really felt like I was following Liz’s lead by not following anyone’s lead at all.
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 with Emilia, and the scent of eggs and onions was in the air.
The five of us sat on the patio enjoying the breakfast they had made. It felt weird to think of us as an odd-numbered group. I couldn’t get it out of my mind that there should have been six of us at the table as I filled another tortilla with the egg concoction. We said nothing, letting the clanging of silverware against the plates and the crashing of the waves on the beach do all of the talking. Everyone seemed to be waiting for someone else to speak first. I hadn’t thought much about what we should do on this day, but sitting there bouncing Madeline on my knee, I knew we had to go to the lagoon.
Two Kisses for Maddy Page 22