Step On A Crack

Chapter 8

DOWNSTAIRS, I couldn’t sleep a wink after I slid in between the cold sheets of my bed. I remembered that tomorrow was Caroline Hopkins’s funeral, and that was yet another sad fact to consider tonight.

I lay in the dark, listening to the winter wind howl around the corner of my building. Somewhere, on Broadway probably, a distant car alarm started up, went all the way through its excruciating phases of electronic agony only to start up again.

For about an hour, I steadfastly refused to feel sorry for myself. I wasn’t the one whose body had mutinied. I wasn’t the one who had devoted my life to helping others for thirty-eight years-and for that trouble wouldn’t be seeing thirty-nine.

Then I started to cry. It came on slowly, achingly, like the first cracks of ice on a pond you’ve wandered too far onto. After a minute, my steely composure was shattered into a thousand pieces, and I was lost.

Originally, I had just gone along with my wife’s idea to adopt. After we found out we couldn’t have kids, I would have done whatever Maeve wanted. I loved her so much and just wanted to make her happy in any way I could.

But after we got Jane, I was a little reluctant to go on. Three kids in New York? Even owning an apartment was expensive, and it wasn’t like I was Mr. Moneybags.

Maeve showed me that we had room in our home, and in our hearts, for one more. After Fiona and Bridget, I’d roll my eyes whenever Maeve would mention another foster case or needy child she’d heard about and say, “What’s another pound on an elephant?”

But how can an elephant live without a heart? I thought as I lay there with tears streaming down my cheeks.

There was no way I was going to be able to do this. The older kids were becoming teenagers, and the younger ones… Jesus Christ, how could I be in charge of their lives and their happiness and their future all by myself?

Then I heard my door crack open.

“Peep-peep,” someone small said.

It was Chrissy. Every morning, she’d come into our room with her empty cereal bowl pretending to be a different baby animal in need of feeding. A kitten, a puppy, a baby penguin, a baby armadillo one time.

She padded up to the edge of the bed.

“Peep-peep can’t sleep,” she said.

I wiped my tears on the pillow.

“Big Peep can’t either,” I said.

She hadn’t slept in our bed since she was two, and I was about to get up to tuck her back in her own bed, but then I pulled open the covers.

“Get in the nest, Peep, quick!”

As Chrissy dove in beside me, I realized how I’d gotten it dead wrong as usual. My kids weren’t a burden. They were the only thing holding me together.

Chrissy was asleep in about two minutes. After she dug the tiny icicles of her feet snugly into my kidneys, I realized sleepily that maybe you couldn’t call this happy. But it was the first time in weeks I’d seen the ballpark.