Step On A Crack

Everything I had ever felt happy about, every laugh, every sunset, every hope, every good thing there was or ever would be shook loose and tottered and plummeted out of my heart.

I looked up suddenly when I heard the singing.

The pageant tape had come on again somehow, and on the TV screen above, Chrissy was making her way across the Holy Name gym stage in her silver angel costume as the whole school sang “Silent Night.”

I shut it off, along with the light, and lay down beside my wife. Snow was falling lightly in the dark outside the window.

How can I still be alive? I thought, feeling my heart beat on and on selfishly in my chest.

When I found Maeve’s hand, I felt the cold of her wedding ring. I remembered the happy tears in her eyes, in the small church we were married in, as I slid it on her finger. The rice that mixed with spits of snow as we came hand in hand outside and down the old wooden steps.

As I closed my eyes, I could no longer hear anything. The sounds of the hospital faded in the dark, and so did the sounds of the world outside. All that was left in the universe was my wife’s cold hand in mine and a nothingness that hummed through me like high voltage.

Chapter 102

THE HEAD NURSE, SALLY HITCHENS, came in at 4:30 a.m. She smiled as she helped me to stand up. She’d take care of my Maeve now, she promised as I stood disoriented and crazy-eyed over my wife. She’d protect her and keep her for as long as it took.

I walked the thirty blocks home from the hospital, the cold burning my skin in the predawn dark. A bartender, slamming closed the steel shutters of a bar on Amsterdam Avenue, crossed himself as I passed.

All the kids were up in the living room as I stumbled in.

I was instantly surrounded by them as I sat down. I thought I had purged away some of the pain from hours before, but I was deluding myself. My heart got heavier and heavier as my eyes slowly passed over each of my kids’ faces. My sorrow was as dense as a black hole as I looked upon the tears in my little Chrissy’s eyes.

Death notices are perhaps the hardest of realities for homicide detectives. Now, here I was having to deliver one in my own living room, to my own kids.

“Mom’s gone to heaven,” I finally said, gathering them in my arms.

“Mom’s in heaven now, guys. Say a prayer.”

After rising from their sobbing ranks, I stumbled into the kitchen and broke the news to Seamus and Mary Catherine.

Then I went into my room, quietly closed the door, and sat on the edge of my bed.

When Seamus came in, maybe ten hours later, I was still sitting there in the same clothes and hadn’t slept.

That’s when he sat down next to me.

“When I lost your grandmother,” he spoke very quietly, “I was ready to murder. The doctors who’d told me she was gone. All the people who came to her wake. Even the priest at her funeral made me unbelievably angry. Because of how lucky they were. They didn’t have to go home to an empty apartment. They didn’t have to listen to the roar of silence as they took down her abandoned things. I even seriously thought about picking up the bottle Eileen had pulled me out of. But I didn’t. Do you know why?”

I shook my head. I had no idea.

“Because of how insulting it would have been. Not to Eileen’s memory, I realized, but to Eileen herself. That’s when I realized she hadn’t really left for good. She’d just gone on ahead a little.

“One thing Eileen had taught me by her example was that you get up and put your clothes on and do what you can do until the day you don’t get up. I guess what I’m trying to say is that Maeve isn’t really gone. She’s just ahead, waiting for you, Mike. That’s why you can’t shut down. We Irish don’t always succeed, but we’re pretty decent at grinding it out.”

“Grind it out until you’re dead,” I said blankly after a moment. “Gentle words of inspiration from Seamus Be

“Ah, sweet, undiluted sarcasm,” Seamus said, punching my knee softly as he rose. “That’s the lad. Maeve’d be proud of ya. Music to her Irish ears.”

So after I took a shower, we made arrangements. Or, I should say, Seamus and Mary Catherine did. They called the church and then the funeral home, and I just nodded or shook my drooping head. Grind it out until you’re dead.

Chapter 103

IT WAS STONE WALL to stone wall with friends and relatives inside Holy Name Church two days later for Maeve’s funeral. At the wake the night before, and now here at the church, my wife had managed to draw a crowd that rivaled the one at St. Patrick’s for the First Lady, despite the fact that there wasn’t a news van or celebrity in sight.

In the sea of sad faces, I made out her former coworkers, past patients, even most of our snooty neighbors. Not only did most of my Homicide squad show, but most of the NYPD, it seemed, was there, giving their support for a brother in blue.

At the wake, so many people had shared touching vignettes I’d never heard before about Maeve. Story after story about how she had comforted their kid or wife or parent as they were wheeled into surgery or giving birth or dying. The compassion she showed at the hardest of moments. The strength she’d provided when people were most alone.

There are times when New York can be the loneliest place on earth, but as I watched Seamus in his robes come down from the altar and encircle Maeve’s casket with incense and heard the sincere weeping of the people behind me, I could feel a sense of community that I would put up against the smallest of small towns.

After the Gospel, Seamus did the eulogy.

“One of my favorite memories of Maeve comes from, of all places, Ground Zero,” he said from the pulpit.

“We were both volunteering on the Spirit of New York, moored off Battery Park City, helping to give out hot meals to the rescue people. It was during the fourth game of the 2001 World Series, and I was on the open top deck of the boat, comforting a distraught battalion chief who had lost one of his men, when we heard this earsplitting howl from below deck. We thought someone had been shot or fallen overboard, but when we arrived below in the dining room, all we could see was Maeve, wearing headphones, jumping up and down so hard she was nearly rocking the boat.

“ ‘Tino Martinez tied it up,’ she was screaming. ‘He tied it up!’

“Someone got a TV and set it up on the buffet table. Now, I’ve listened to people say that they’ve never heard Yankee Stadium louder than when Derek Jeter hit that walk-off home run in the tenth to win it, but they weren’t any louder than the group of us crowded around that beat-up set. When I think of Maeve, I will always see her in the middle of those tired men with her fist pumped in the air. Her energy and hope and life transforming that black place and time into something unique, something I think on the verge of holy.”

Seamus’s cheeks clenched then. He, along with the rest of the church, was losing it.

“I won’t lie to you. I can’t say why God would take her now. But if the fact that she was sent here among us doesn’t point toward a loving God, then I can’t help you. If we bring away anything from today, it should be the lesson that Maeve herself showed with every full, spent day of her life. Hold back nothing. Leave nothing in the tank.”

All through the church everyone, including myself, was crying shamelessly. Chrissy, beside me, brushed my overcoat out of the way and wiped her tears on my knee.

The sun came out for the burial at Gates of Heaven Cemetery up in Westchester. The kids filed past Maeve’s casket with roses. I almost lost it again behind my sunglasses when Shawna kissed her flower before she put it down with the rest. And again when the high, bittersweet skirls of an NYPD piper’s “Da