Step On A Crack

Chapter 6

I PULLED the final door closed and stood for a moment in the hall outside the boys’ room. On a normal night, in about a half hour, when I’d come home from my precinct, the living room would be flashing blue light from Maeve watching television, or a warm, steady yellow light from her sitting on our sectional reading a book, waiting for me to arrive.

As I stared from that corridor at the blackened doorway of my living room, I realized I was experiencing for the first time what darkness truly was.

I went into the living room and flicked on the lamp beside the couch. Then I sat in the silence, passing my eyes slowly across all the memories.

The wallpaper we’d painstakingly put up. All the family photographs Maeve had shot and framed. Christmas trips to the Bronx Botanical Garden. And pumpkin picking upstate. She’d made shadow boxes of vacations we’d taken, with seashells and sand from our two-years-ago trip down to Myrtle Beach, pinecones and leaves from the week we spent in the Poconos the August before.

How could she have had the energy for that? I wondered. How could she have had the time?

Because my wife was something special was the answer to that one.

And I wasn’t the only one who thought so. In fact, I didn’t know anyone who didn’t adore Maeve.

After we’d adopted Julia, Maeve quit the hospital in order to spend more time with her, and she took a job taking care of an elderly man on West End Avenue. Mr. Kessler was ninety-five, from an old-money railroad family, and he was bitter and angry at the modern world and everything in it. But week after week, Maeve wore him down with small kindnesses and compassion. She would regularly wheel him out to sit in the sun at Riverside Park, make him remember he was alive, even if he didn’t want to.

By the end, he had become a different person, let go of his bitterness, even made amends with his estranged daughter.

After he died, we found out that the old man had bequeathed to Maeve his apartment, the one our family lives in now.

And instead of the antiques and Persian rugs a lot of our neighbors seem to be into, Maeve filled our house with children. Four months after we got the apartment, we adopted Brian. Six months after that came Jane. And on… and on…

Saint was a pretty trite term, I knew, but as I sat there alone, gazing at all my wife’s accomplishments, that was the word that kept popping into my mind.

The life of a saint, I thought bitterly.

All the way down to the martyrdom.

My heart literally skipped when the doorbell rang.

The outside world could go scratch, I thought as it rang again.

I figured that it was an errant guest of the Underhills, our frequent-cocktail-party-throwing neighbors across the hall-when it rang a third time.

I finally stood, annoyed.

Big mistake, dude, I thought as I yanked back the doorknob. You just woke up the Grinch.