Step On A Crack

Chapter 101

I STAYED BEHIND after Seamus took Mary Catherine and the kids back home. For some reason, I felt strong all of a sudden, calm, completely alert, not even tired. I closed the door to the room and sat behind Maeve in the cold bed, hugging her. After a while, I held her hand, staring at where our wedding rings touched.

When I closed my eyes, I pictured Maeve from my first days of courting her in the hospital emergency room. She had always been holding someone’s hand then, too, I remembered. Black, white, yellow, brown, young, old, mad, maimed, broken, bloody. I thought about all the human hearts she’d lifted in her life. Mine most of all. And our ten children.

As I stood up to stretch around midnight, Maeve opened her eyes wide and crushed my hand in hers.

“I love you, Mike,” she said urgently.

Oh God! I thought. Not now. Please, not now!

My hand went for the nurse’s button, but Maeve batted it away. A tear rolled down her taut face as she shook her head.

Then she smiled.

Stop!

She looked into my eyes. It was as if she could see some distant place within them. Some new land she was about to travel to.

“Be happy,” she said.

Then she let go of my hand.

As her fingertips left the surface of my palm, I felt as though somewhere deep inside me something shattered and a hole opened.

I caught Maeve as she tipped back. She was so light. Her chest was already still. My hand lowered the back of her head toward the pillow as gently as it did on our honeymoon night.

This is it, I kept thinking. This is really it.

The room spun as I stood there gasping. It felt as if the wind had been knocked out of me, all of my air, my spirit gone.

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.