Step On A Crack

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 “Danny Boy” blew off the headstones and frozen ground.

But I didn’t.

I asked myself what Maeve would do, and I swallowed my tears and hugged my kids and promised myself and my wife that I would somehow get us through.