Step on a Crack (3 page)

THE KIDS WERE a blur of activity once we got back home that evening. From every room of our apartment, instead of television and electronic gunfire, came the satisfying sound of busy Bennetts.

Water splashed as Julia prepped Shawna and Chrissy’s bath. Brian sat at the dining room table with a deck of cards, patiently teaching Trent and Eddie how to play twenty-one.

“
Bam
,” I could hear Ricky, like an Emeril Mini-Me, say from the kitchen as he squeezed jelly onto each slice of Wonder bread. “
Bam
…
bam
.”

Jane had the flash cards out on the floor of her room and was preparing Fiona and Bridget for the 2014 SAT.

I didn’t hear a complaint, a whine, or even a silly question out of anyone.

Add
brilliant
to the list of my wife’s attributes. She must have known how much the kids were hurting, how disoriented and useless they felt, so she had given them something to do to fill that void, to feel useful.

I only wished I could come up with something to make myself feel the same way.

As most parents will tell you, bedtime is the roughest time of day. Everyone, not excluding parents, is tired and cranky, and restlessness can degrade quickly to frustration, yelling, threats, and punishments. I didn’t know how Maeve did it every night-some magical, innate sense of measure and calm, I had assumed. It was one of the things that I was most worried about having to take on.

But by eight o’clock that night, from the sound coming out of the apartment, you would have thought we had all left on a Christmas vacation.

I almost expected to see the window open and bedsheets tied together when I went into the little girls’ room-but all I saw were Chrissy, Shawna, Fiona, and Bridget with their sheets tucked to their chins, and Julia closing an Olivia book.

“Good night, Chrissy,” I said, kissing her on her forehead. “Much love from your dad.”

I was heartened by my clutch Dad performance as I went on my rounds.

The boys were all in bed as well. “Good night, Trent,” I said, giving him a kiss on his brow. “You did one great job today. How about coming to work with me tomorrow?”

Trent ’s tiny forehead crinkled as he thought about it.

“Is it anybody’s birthday at work?” he said after a little while. “Any of the other detectives?”

“No,” I said.

“I’ll just go to school then,” Trent said, closing his eyes. “It’s Lucy Shapiro’s birthday tomorrow, and birthdays mean chocolate cupcakes.”

“Good night, guys,” I said as I stepped toward the door. “I couldn’t do this without you.”

“We know, Dad,” Brian called from the top bunk. “Don’t worry about it. We got your back.”

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.

JUDGING FROM the wrinkled jeans and dusty navy peacoat of the young blond woman on the other side of my door, I decided she probably wasn’t headed to a Manhattan-style cocktail party.

But with a dirty knapsack that bulged over her back and a duffel bag clutched in her gloveless hands, she definitely seemed to be heading somewhere.

“Mr. Bennett?” she said, dropping her bag and extending a small, well-formed hand. “Mr. Michael Bennett?”

Her Irish accent was as warm as her hand was cold.

“It’s me, Mary Catherine,” she said. “I made it.”

From her accent, I
suspected
she must be some relative of my wife’s. I tried to place Mary Catherine’s face from the small contingent of Maeve’s side who had attended our wedding. But all I could remember was an elderly granduncle, some distant cousins, and a trio of middle-aged bachelors. What the heck was this about?

“Made it?” I repeated warily.

“I’m the au pair,” Mary Catherine said. “Nona said she spoke with you.”

Au pair? Nona?
I thought. Then I remembered that Nona was Maeve’s mother’s name. My wife had always been insistently vague about her past, growing up in Donegal. I had a feeling her people were a little eccentric.

“I’m sorry, um, Mary, is it?” I said. “Ah, I don’t think I know exactly what you’re talking about.”

Mary Catherine’s mouth opened as if she was about to say something. Then it closed. Her porcelain features blushed crimson as she picked up her bag.

“Sorry I wasted your time, sir,” she said quickly and a tad sadly. “There must have been some mistake on my part. I’m sorry.”

Her duffel bag slipped out of her hand as she approached the elevator. I stepped out of the doorway to give her a hand, then noticed my mail on the floor. It had been piling up a little, and my helpful neighbors, the Underhills, had dumped it beneath the alcove’s table we share in order to make way for their antique wooden nutcracker collection.

I noticed a small, odd-looking letter sticking out from the pile’s center.

“Wait,” I said. “Hold up a second, Mary Catherine. Just a sec.”

I tore open the letter. It was handwritten in a tiny, all but illegible script, but I was able to make out the
Dear Michael
, a couple of
Mary Catherine
’s, and the
God Bless You In Your Time of Need, Love Nona
closing.

I still didn’t know what the hell it all meant, though.

I wasn’t even 100 percent aware my mother-in-law was still alive until that moment. One thing I was sure of, though, was that it was too late and I was too tired to try to figure it all out right now.

“Oh,” I said to the girl as the elevator door rumbled open. “You’re Mary Catherine, the au pair.”

Naked hope twinkled in her bright blue eyes. But where the heck was I going to put her? Our inn was filled to capacity. Then I remembered the maid’s room on the top floor; it had come with the apartment and was currently being used for storage.

“C’mon,” I said, grabbing her bag and walking her into the elevator. “I’ll show you where you’re staying.”

It took me a good twenty minutes to get the crib, baby toys, some old car seats, and Chrissy’s Barbie and Shawna’s Three Princesses bikes out of the small room.

By the time I went down to the apartment and came back with some sheets, Mary Catherine had the mattress unrolled on the steel-frame twin bed and was putting her stuff neatly into the drawers of the dresser we’d used for a changing table.

I studied her for a moment. She was in her late twenties. Though she wasn’t very tall, there seemed to be an energetic heartiness to her. Spunky, I thought, which was good, considering the job she was applying for.

“Nona didn’t happen to mention how big my family is, did she?”

“A brood, she said. ‘Quite a brood,’ I believe was the phrase she used.”

“How many is ‘quite a brood’? Where you come from?” I asked.

Mary Catherine’s eyebrows raised.

“Five?”

I shook my head, put out my thumb, and jerked it upward.

“Seven?”

I watched a ripple of panic cross Mary Catherine’s face when I motioned for her to shoot higher.

“Not ten?” she said.

I nodded.

“They’re all toilet trained, thank God. And they’re great kids. But if you want to walk away now or tomorrow or next week, I won’t blame you.”

“Ten?” Mary Catherine said again.

“A one and a zero,” I said with a smile. “Oh, and if you’re going to work for us, you have to call me Mike. Or idiot, if you want. But please don’t call me Mr. Bennett.”

“Okay, Mike,” Mary Catherine said.

As I left, I noticed that the panic seemed to have stuck in her face.

“Ten,” I repeated under my breath.

The perfect ten.

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.

WHAT AN INTERESTING DAY this was going to be. Eventful, historic as a son of a bitch.

The silver chimes of St. Patrick’s morning bells were still hanging in the chilled air over Fifth Avenue when the Neat Man arrived outside the cathedral’s massive entrance doors. He sipped his venti drip and shook his head at the crowd of loonies who already lined the sidewalk four-deep behind the police barricades.

Caroline Hopkins’s funeral wouldn’t start for another forty minutes, and already the turnout was as thick as the mounds of donated flowers that buried the base of the block-long church. She’d be getting a bigger holiday crowd than the Rock Center tree and Radio City Music Hall ’s Christmas Spectacular combined if this morning’s 1010 WINS report was right. Caroline had been a popular First Lady to be sure, but more important to many of these imbeciles, she’d been born and raised in New York City. She was one of their own. Yeah, right. Like the mayor of New York was one of the people.

The Neat Man took another shot of caffeine and continued to check out the scene. Up on the front steps of St. Paddy’s, he watched a red-faced FDNY bagpiper struggling to hold down a plaid skirt over his tighty whities in the frigid wind.

In the vestibule, just inside the open three-story bronze doors, a marine drill sergeant inspected the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine honor guard. He snapped the bottom of the marine’s dress-blue jacket and slapped the blade of his hand across the sailor’s immaculate shoulder, knocking away an imaginary speck of dirt.

Then the limousines started arriving.

Mayor Andrew Thurman got there first, which made sense, the Neat Man thought. The mayor claimed to be a close friend of the Hopkinses.

Politically active movie-star couple Marilyn and Kenneth Rubenstein arrived next. The proenvironmentalist actors had done touchy-feely commercials with Caroline to put a stop to Alaskan wilderness oil drilling, or some such horseshit. In the meantime, both of their teenage kids were having major trouble with drugs and alcohol up in Westchester.

When someone in the crowd across Fifth whistled, two-time Oscar winner Kenneth Rubenstein turned with his million-dollar smile and waved with both hands as if he were about to receive a third award. The Neat Man grinned as he watched Rubenstein’s raven-haired wife, Marilyn, elbow him hard in the ribs.
Cinema verité
, he thought.

On the movie stars’ heels came real estate mogul Xavier Brown and his wife, a Chanel-clad fashion diva named Celeste. The power couple was also
close
friends of the First Lady. Hell, who wasn’t?

The next to de-limo was New York Giants quarterback Todd Snow. His Super Bowl ring glittered as he put his arm around his attractive model wife. The athlete had done charity work with Caroline Hopkins as well.

The Neat Man gazed with satisfaction at the tinted-window freight train of limousines forming to the north up Fifth Avenue.
Hail, hail, the gang’s all here. Well, almost
.

Finally, he looked up at the gigantic rose window and majestic three-hundred-foot stone towers at the front of the cathedral. With the ego-per-square-inch ratio this thing was developing, he thought, stamping his shoes onto the flagstone to warm his feet, it would be surprising if there’d still be room for the casket.