“Does it have to do with that chart on the icebox in the kitchen?” my grandfather asked.

“Yes,” I said. “It does indeed.”

“Whose idea was that? You or Maeve?” my grandfather said suspiciously.

“Maeve,” I said. “She thought it would be good to give them something positive to do. Get their minds off everything else. Besides, they’re actually helping out. It’s amazing what twenty pairs of hands, even little ones, can get done.”

“It’s not a good idea,” my grandfather finally said brightly. “It’s a great one. No wonder Maeve came up with it.”

“You done now?” I said, half laughing. He loved Maeve as much as any of us.

“Any last insults before I hang up?” I said, conceding him the last word to get the call over with.

“A few,” Seamus said. “But I’ll be seeing you later. I might as well save them up.”

THIS WAS THE KIND of outlandish nightmare scene during which you were continually thinking, This can’t possibly be happening. I’ll wake up soon and it’ll be over.

The “danger zone” was occupied by police only and was off-limits to the press. The next outer ring belonged to the media and was dominated by TV trucks with giant antennae extended. The scene in the “staging area” was all crisscrossing cables, reporters at their computers, dozens of TV monitors. Periodically, we would convene a press conference and feed the newsies.

The portable generators for the lights were still roaring in the cold when I started walking back toward the bus. I found Commander Will Matthews inside. All the hostage advocates had been contacted, he informed me, and the situation was now officially in a holding pattern.

“Now for the excruciating part,” Will Matthews said. “It’s time to sit and wait this thing out.”

“Hey, Mike,” Martelli said as he stood. Though he’d been at this siege situation from the beginning, he didn’t look it.

“Nothing personal, but you seem beat. Why don’t you get out of here for a little while? These jokers say they won’t call back for hours, and when they do, we-and more important, those hostages inside-are going to need you calm and collected.”

“He’s right. Grab a bite. We need you on ice,” said Commander Will Matthews. “That’s an order, Mike.”

All the talk, and the thoughts of Maeve on my stroll, made me want to see her. The New York Hospital Cancer Center was only twenty blocks uptown, I thought. It wouldn’t take very long to swing by there.

I’m going to head to a cancer center to blow off steam, I realized.

I left my cell number with Martelli and stowed my badge before I stepped out from the checkpoints. Countless reporters, producers, correspondents, and technicians were camped out around both sides of blocked-off Fifth Avenue with the giddy camaraderie of Deadheads with tickets to Jerry Garcia’s back-from-the-grave concert.

I had to wake up a burly cameraman who was sleeping in a folding chair in front of my blue Imp. I jumped inside the car and hit the road.

I made two stops actually. The first was at a great, crazy place called Burger Joint in the lobby of the Le Méridien hotel on 57th. Minutes later, I left there with a greasy brown paper bag under my arm. The second stop was at Amy’s Bread on Ninth, where I left with another bag.

I put on my light and siren as I made a left onto Park Avenue. Poinsettias and white lights fringed the center median as far as the eye could see to the north. Massive wreaths were hung above the revolving doors of the gleaming glass office towers, as well as from the polished brass doors of the luxury apartment houses I passed farther uptown.

As I drove, I couldn’t help staring at the high, stately old buildings lit up through the billowing silver of the avenue steam stacks, the gleaming wood-paneled walls beneath the opulent awnings.

As I waited on the light at 61st, a top-hatted doorman escorted a pale, devastatingly beautiful brunette in an ankle-length white mink and a little girl in red plaid into the plush rear leather of a waiting Mercedes.

The holiday beauty I saw everywhere I looked made my chest literally ache with guilt. I’d been so shot to pieces lately, I hadn’t even gotten a tree.

No wonder so many people went and killed themselves around the holidays, I thought as I screeched around the CL55 and the corner. Christmas was geared to make you explode with contentment, to burn with the passing year’s tremendous love and good fortune.

To be anything short of excited seemed, well, impolite.

To be depressed at this time of year, I thought, gunning my car east down a cold, black side street, to be actually sick with sadness, felt like an unforgivable sin.

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.