Step On A Crack

Chapter 45

MY SWEET MAEVE had her eyes closed as I stepped through her open hospital room door.

But her nose was definitely still in working order because she smiled when I put the smuggled packages on her drab-colored tray.

“No,” she said in her cracked voice. “You didn’t?” I lifted her plastic water cup and made her drink some. Her eyes teared with pain as she sat up. So did mine.

“I smell cheeseburgers,” she said with a dead seriousness. “If this is a dream and you wake me up, I won’t be responsible, Mike.”

“You’re not dreaming, angel,” I said into her ear as I climbed in carefully beside her. “Do you want the double onion or the double onion?”

Though Maeve ate only half of the burger and only about a quarter of the blondie, her cheeks flushed with healthy color as she pushed back the waxed paper.

“Remember our midnight junk-a-thons?” she said.

I smiled. When we started going out, we both worked four-to-twelves. At first, we used to hit a bar, but that tired quickly, and soon we found ourselves visiting the local video store and an all-night supermarket, heading straight for the frozen-food aisle. Chicken wings, pizza, mozzarella sticks-health food. The rule was anything you wanted, as long as you could cook it in a microwave and eat it in front of an old movie.

God, they were great times, though. Sometimes we’d stay up after we ate, just talking, not wanting it to end, until birds started tweeting outside the bedroom window.

“Remember all the work I used to bring you?” I said.

Maeve had been in the trauma ward at Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx just around the corner from the Four-Nine, my rookie precinct.

The whole time during my tour, I would practically kidnap people off the streets and bring them into the emergency room just to get a chance to see her.

“Remember when that huge, homeless, toothless man you brought in hugged you?” Maeve said with a hard laugh. “What did he say? ‘You ain’t like those other jive turkeys, man. You care.’ ”

“No,” I said, laughing with her now. “He said, ‘Man, you’re the nicest damn honky I ever met.’ ”

Her eyes closed, and then she stopped laughing. Just like that. She must have taken something before I came in, and now she was fading fast into sleep.

I squeezed Maeve’s hand gently. Then I rose from the bed as quietly as I could. I cleaned up our mess and tucked her sheet around her shoulders, and then I knelt beside her.

For more than ten minutes, I watched my wife’s chest rise and fall. It was strange because for the first time I didn’t feel angry at the world or at God. I just loved her and always would. I wiped my tears on my sleeves before I leaned in beside her.

“Remember when you changed me forever,” I whispered in Maeve’s ear.