James Patterson: Step On A Crack

“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.”