Bri
I Love You to Pieces!
Member since 5/05 9919 total posts
Name:
Brianne
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Jodi Picoult Fans- what to look forward to . . .
Wonder Woman is coming out in November, which she is a co-author of . . . .
And coming out in the spring . . .
Change of Heart
Synopsis:
Shay Bourne - New Hampshire’s first death row prisoner in 69 years – has only one last request: to donate his heart post-execution to the sister of his victim, who is looking for a transplant. Bourne says it’s the only way he can redeem himself…but with lethal injection as his form of execution, this is medically impossible. Enter Father Michael Wright, a young local priest. Called in as Shay’s spiritual advisor, he knows redemption has nothing to do with organ donation – and plans to convince Bourne. But then Bourne begins to perform miracles at the prison that are witnessed by officers, fellow inmates, and even Father Michael – and the media begins to call him a messiah. Could an unkempt, bipolar, convicted murderer be a savior? It seems highly unlikely, to the priest. Until he realizes that the things Shay says may not come from the Bible…but are, verbatim, from a gospel that the early Christian church rejected two thousand years ago…and that is still considered heresy.
Change Of Heart looks at the nature of organized religion and belief, and takes the reader behind the closely drawn curtains of America’s death penalty. Featuring the return of Ian Fletcher from Keeping Faith, it also asks whether religion and politics truly are separate in this country, or inextricably tangled. Does religion make us more tolerant, or less? Do we believe what we do because it’s right? Or because it’s too frightening to admit that we may not have the answers?
An excerpt from Change of Heart:
Lucius
I have no idea where they were keeping Shay Bourne, before
they brought him to us. I knew he was an inmate here at the
state prison in Concord – I can still remember
watching the news the day his sentence was handed down so I
could scrutinize an outside world that was starting to fade
in my mind: the rough stone of the prison exterior; the
golden dome of the State house; even just the general shape
of door that wasn’t made of metal and wire mesh. His
conviction was the subject of great discussion on the pod
all those years ago – where do you keep an inmate
who’s been sentenced to death, when your state
hasn’t had a death row for ages?
Rumor had it that in fact, the prison did have a pair of
death row cells – not too far from my own humble abode
in the Secure Housing Unit on I-tier. Crash Vitale –
who had something to say about everything, although no one
bothered to listen – told us that the old death row
cells were stacked with the thin, plastic slabs that pass
for mattresses here. I wondered for a while what happened
to all those extra mattresses after Shay arrived. One
thing’s for sure, no one offered to give them to us.
Moving cells is routine, in prison. They don’t
like you to become too attached to anything. In the fifteen
years I’ve been here, I have been moved eight
different times. The cells, of course, all look alike
– what’s different is who’s next to you.
Which is why Shay’s arrival on I-tier was of great
interest to all of us. As he was escorted in by a phalanx
of six correctional officers wearing helmets and flak
jackets and face shields, we came forward to the front of
our cells, pressed up against the Plexiglas in our doors to
better see.
There were eight cells in I-tier, each holding such
distinct personalities that to me it sometimes seemed a
miracle the steel bars could contain them. Cell 1 housed
Joey Kunz, a pedophile who was the bottom of the pecking
order. In Cell 2 was Calloway Reece, a card-carrying member
of the Aryan Brotherhood. Cell 3 was me, Lucius DuFresne.
Four and five were empty, so we knew the new inmate would be
put in one of them – the only question was whether
he’d be closer to me, or to the guys in the last three
cells: Texas Wridell, Pogie Simmons, and – of course
– Crash, the unofficial self-appointed leader of
I-tier.
The COs passed by the shower stall, shuffled by Joey and
Calloway, and then paused right in front of my cell, so I
could get a good look. Shay Bourne was small and slight,
with close-cropped brown hair and eyes like the sea in the
Caribbean. I knew about the Caribbean, because it was the
last vacation I’d taken with Adam.. I was glad I
didn’t have eyes like that. I wouldn’t want to
look in the mirror every day and be reminded of a place I
would never have the opportunity to see again.
Then Shay Bourne turned to me.
Maybe now would be a good time to tell you what I look
like. My face is the reason the COs don’t look me in
the eye; it’s why I sometimes actually prefer to be
hidden inside this cell. The sores are scarlet and purple
and scaly. They spread from my forehead to my chin.
Most people wince. Even the polite ones like the eighty
year old missionary who comes to bring us pamphlets once a
month always does a double-take, as if I look even worse
than he remembers. But Shay Bourne just met my gaze and
nodded at me, as if I were no different than anyone else.
I heard the door of the cell beside mine slide shut; the
clink of chains as Shay stuck his hands through the trap to
have his cuffs removed. The COs left the pod, and almost
immediately Crash started in. “Hey Death Row,”
he yelled.
There was no response from Shay Bourne’s cell.
“Hey, I’m talkin’ to you, and when
Crash talks, you answer.”
“Leave him alone, Crash,” I sighed.
“Give the poor guy five minutes to figure out what an
******* you are.”
“Ooh, Death Row, better watch it,” Calloway
said. “Lucius is kissing up to you, and his last
boyfriend’s six feet under.”
There was the sound of a television being turned on, and
then Shay must have plugged in the headphones that we were
all required to have, so we didn’t have a volume war
with each other. I was a little surprised that a death row
prisoner would have been able to purchase a television from
the canteen, same as us. It would have been a thirteen inch
one, specially made for us wards of the state by Zenith,
with a clear plastic shell around its guts and cathodes, so
that the COs would be able to tell if you were extracting
parts to make weapons.
As Calloway and Crash united (as they often did) to
humiliate me, I pulled out my own set of headphones and
turned on my television. It was five o’clock, and I
didn’t like to miss Oprah. But when I tried to change
the channel, nothing happened. The screen flickered, as if
it was resetting to channel 22, but channel 22 looked just
like channel 3 and channel 5 and CNN and the Food Network.
“Hey,” Crash started to pound on his door.
“Yo, CO, the cable’s down. We got rights, you
know…”
Sometimes headphones don’t even work well enough.
I turned up the volume and watched a local news
network’s coverage of a fundraiser for a local
children’s hospital up near Dartmouth College. There
were clowns and balloons and even professional hockey
players. The camera zeroed in on a girl with fairytale
blond hair and blue half-moons beneath her eyes, just the
kind of child they’d televise to get you to open up
your wallet. “Claire Nealon,” the
reporter’s voiceover said, “is waiting for a
heart.”
Boo hoo, I thought. Everyone’s got problems. I
took off my headphones. If I couldn’t listen to
Oprah, I didn’t want to listen at all.
Which is why I was able to hear Shay Bourne’s very
first word on I-tier. “Yes,” he said, and just
like that, the cable came back on.
· · · · · ·
You have probably noticed by now that I am a cut above
most of the cretins on I-tier; and that’s because I
don’t really belong here. It was a crime of passion
– the only issue is that I focused on the passion part
and the courts focused on the crime. But I ask you, what
would you have done, if the love of your life found a new
love of his life – someone younger, thinner, better
looking?
The irony, of course, is that no sentence imposed by a
court for homicide could trump the one that’s ravaged
me while I’ve been in prison. My last CD4+ was taken
three months ago, and I was down to 75 cells per cubic
millimeter of blood. Someone without HIV would have a
normal T-cell count of a thousand cells or more, but the
virus becomes part of these white blood cells. When the
white blood cells reproduce to fight infection, the virus
reproduces too. As the immune system gets weak, the more
likely I am to get sick, or to develop an opportunistic
infection, like PCP, toxoplasmosis, CMV. The doctors say I
won’t die from AIDS – I’ll die from
pneumonia or TB or a bacterial infection in the brain; but
if you ask me, that’s just semantics. Dead is dead.
I was an artist by vocation, and now, by avocation
– although it was considerably more challenging to get
my supplies in a place like this. Where I had once favored
Windsor-Newton oils and red sable brushes, linen canvases I
stretched myself and coated with gesso; I now used whatever
I could get my hands on. I had my nephews draw me pictures
on card stock in pencil that I erased, so that I could use
the paper over again. I hoarded the foods that produced
pigment. Tonight I had been working on a portrait of Adam,
drawn of course from memory, because that was all I had
left. I had mixed some red ink gleaned from a Skittle with
a dab of toothpaste in the lid of a juice bottle, and coffee
with a bit of water in a second lid, and then I’d
combined them to get just the right shade of his skin
– a burnished, deep molasses.
I had already outlined his features in black – the
broad brow, the strong chin, the hawk’s nose.
I’d used a shank to shave a picture of a coal mine in
a National Geographic, and added a dab of shampoo to make
the chalky paint. With the broken tip of a pencil, I had
transferred the color to my makeshift canvas.
God, he was beautiful.
I enjoyed working at night because it was quieter. To
be honest, I don’t sleep much. Even if I do, I find
myself getting up in the middle of the night to go to the
bathroom – as little as I eat these days, food passes
through me at lightning speed. I get sick to my stomach; I
get headaches. The thrush in my mouth and throat makes it
hard to swallow. Instead, I use my insomnia to fuel my
artwork.
That night, I’d had the sweats. I was soaked
through by the time I woke up, and after I stripped off my
sheets and my scrubs, I didn’t want to lie down on the
mattress again. Instead, I had pulled out my painting and
started recreating Adam. But I got sidetracked, sometimes,
by the other portraits I’d finished of him. Adam
standing in the same pose he’d first struck when he
was modeling for the college art class I taught;
Adam’s face, when he first opened his eyes. Adam,
from behind, the way I’d seen him before I shot him.
“I need to do it,” Shay Bourne said.
“It’s the only way.”
Distracted, I walked to the front of my cell, to see who
he was having a conversation with at this hour of night.
But the pod was silent, empty. Maybe he was having a
nightmare. “Bourne?” I whispered. “Are
you okay?”
“Who’s there?”
“Lucius. Lucius DuFresne.” I paused.
“You talking to someone?”
He hesitated. “I think I’m talking to
you.”
“Can’t sleep?”
“I can sleep,” Shay said. “I just
don’t want to.”
“You’re luckier than I am, then,” I
replied.
“There’s no such thing as luck.”
“Oh,” I said. “Then I’m
supposed to feel so sick in the middle of the night that I
can’t lie down?”
“I only meant you’re no luckier than me, and
I’m no unluckier than you.”
Well, in a way, he was right. I may not have been
handed down the same sentence as Shay Bourne, but like him,
I would die within the walls of this prison – sooner,
rather than later.
“Lucius,” he said. “What are you
doing?”
“I’m painting.”
There was a beat of silence. “Your cell?”
“No. A portrait.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m an artist.”
“Once, when I was in school, my art teacher said I
had classic lips,” Shay said.
“I still don’t know what that means.”
“It’s a reference to the ancient Greeks and
Romans,” I explained. “And the art that we see
represented on—“
“Lucius? Did you see that whatchamacallit on TV
today?”
In a way, I was relieved to talk about TV instead of art
history. Although I used to be a PBS snob, I now found
myself watching the shows the rest of the philistines in
here enjoyed. We were addicted to the Red Sox and the
Patriots; we kept meticulous score of their league standings
depending on the time of year, and we debated the fairness
of umpire and ref calls as if they were law and we were
Supreme Court judges. Sometimes, like us, our teams had
their hopes dashed; other times we got to share their Super
Bowl. But there hadn’t been any televised games
today, and with the cable on the blitz, there’d barely
been anything worth watching.
“That thing for the doctors,” Shay said,
struggling to find the right words. “There was a
little girl –“
“The fundraiser? The one up at the
hospital?”
“That little girl,” Shay said.
“I’m going to give her my heart.”
Before I could respond, there was a loud crash and the
thud of flesh smacking against the concrete floor.
“Shay?” I called. “Shay?!”
I pressed my face up against the Plexiglas lining the
cell door. I couldn’t see Shay at all, but I heard
something rhythmic smacking his cell door.
“Hey!” I yelled at the top of my lungs.
“Hey, we need a CO down here!”
The others started to wake up, cursing me out for
disturbing their rest, and then falling silent with
fascination. Two officers stormed into I-tier, still
velcroing their flak jackets. One of them, CO Kappaletti,
was the kind of man who’d taken this job so that
he’d always have someone to put down. The other, CO
Smythe, had never been anything but professional toward me.
Kappaletti stopped in front of my cell. “DuFresne, if
you’re crying wolf –“
But Smythe was already kneeling in front of Shay’s
cell. “I think Bourne’s having a
seizure.” He reached for his radio and the electronic
door slid open so that they could enter. Is he breathing?
On the count of three…
The EMTs arrived and wheeled Shay past my cell on a
gurney – a stretcher with restraints across the
shoulders, belly, and legs that was used to transport
inmates like Crash, who were too much trouble even cuffed at
the waist and ankles; or inmates who were too sick to walk
to the infirmary. I always assumed I’d leave I-tier
on one of those gurneys. But now, I realized that it looked
a lot like the table Shay would one day be strapped onto,
for his lethal injection.
The EMTs had pushed an oxygen mask over Shay’s
mouth that frosted with each breath he took. His eyes had
rolled up in their sockets, white and blind. “Do
whatever it takes to bring him back,” CO Smythe
instructed; and that was how I learned that the state will
save a dying man, just so that they can kill him later.
· · · · · ·
When Shay Bourne returned to I-tier after three days in
the hospital infirmary, he was a man with a mission. Every
morning, when the officers came to poll us to see who wanted
a shower or time in the yard, Shay would ask if he could
speak to Warden Coyne. “Fill out a request,” he
was told, over and over, but it just didn’t seem to
sink in. When it was his turn in the little caged kennel
that was our exercise yard, he’d stand in the far
corner, looking toward the opposite side of the prison where
the administrative offices were housed, and he’d yell
at the top of his lungs to talk to the warden. When he was
brought his dinner, he’d ask if the warden had agreed
to talk to him.
“You know why he was moved to I-tier?”
Calloway said one day when Shay was bellowing in the shower
for an audience with the warden. “Because he made
everyone else on his last tier go deaf.” He knelt at
the door of his cell, fishing with a braided string pulled
out of his blanket and tied, at one end, to a rolled
magazine. He cast into the center of the catwalk –
risky behavior, since the COs would be back any minute. At
first we couldn’t figure out what he was doing –
when we fished, it was with each other, tangling our lines
to pass along anything from a paperback book to a
Hershey’s bar – but then we noticed the small,
bright oval on the floor. God only knew why a bird would
make a nest in a hellhole like this, but one had a few
months back, after flying in through the exercise yard. One
egg had fallen out and cracked; the baby robin lay on its
side, unfinished; its thin, wrinkled chest working like a
piston.
Calloway reeled the egg in, inch by inch. “It
ain’t gonna live,” Crash said. “It’s
mama won’t want it now.”
“Well, I do,” Calloway said.
“Put it somewhere warm,” I suggested.
“Wrap it up in a towel or something.”
We all had forgotten what it was like to care about
something so much that you might not be able to stand losing
it. The first year I was in here, I used to pretend that
the full moon was my pet; that it came once a month just to
me. And this past summer, Crash had taken to spreading jam
on the louvers of his vent to cultivate a colony of bees,
but that was less about husbandry than his misguided belief
that he could train them to swarm Joey in his sleep.
“Cowboy’s comin’ to lock ‘em
up,” Crash said, fair warning that the COs were
getting ready to enter the pod again. A moment later the
doors buzzed open; they stood in front of the shower cell
waiting for Shay to stick his hands through the trap to be
cuffed for the twenty foot journey back to his own cell.
Shay’s hands slipped through the trap of the
shower cell to be cuffed, and then the door was opened.
“Did the warden say he’d meet with me?”
“Yeah,” the CO said. “He wants you to
come for high friggin’ tea.”
“I just need five minutes with the warden--”
“Fill out a request.”
“I can’t,” Shay replied.
I cleared my throat. “Officer? Could I have a
request form, too, when you get a chance?”
He finished locking Shay up again, then took one out of
his pocket and stuffed it into the trap of my cell.
Just as the officers exited the tier, there was a small,
feeble chirp.
“Shay?” I asked. “Why not just fill
out the request slip?”
“I can’t write. Not the right way, anyhow.
When I start the letters all get tangled.”
“Then tell me, and I’ll write the
note.”
“You’d do that for me?” There was a
silence. “Tell the warden,” Shay dictated,
“that I want to donate my heart, after he kills me. I
want to give it to a girl who needs it more than me.”
I leaned the ticket up against the wall of the cell and
wrote in pencil, signed Shay’s name. I tied the note
to the end of my own fishing line and swung it beneath the
narrow opening of his cell door. “Give this to the
officer who makes rounds tomorrow morning.”
“Thanks…”
“Will you two cut the soap opera?” Crash
said. “You’re making me sick.”
“You need to cool off, Crash,” Shay said
softly.
For whatever reason, Crash actually listened. He went
to the sink and turned the faucet, I could hear splashing.
The last time he’d been acting like this, he’d
set fire to his mattress right in his cell; maybe this time,
he was aiming to flood it.
“What the hell…?” Crash said, and
then he started to laugh. “Man. Oh man oh man oh
man.”
We all knew our pipes were connected. The bad news
about this was that you literally could not get away from
the **** brought down by the others around you. On the
bright side, you could actually flush a note down the length
of the pod; it would briefly appear in the next cell’s
bowl before heading through the sewage system. I stood up
and turned the faucet in the sink. The water that spilled
out was dark as rubies.
It could have been iron or manganese, but this water
smelled like sugar, and dried sticky. I did not drink the
tap water in here – none of us did. As it was, I had
a feeling that my AIDS medications, which came on a punch
card, might be some government experiment done on expendable
inmates…I wasn’t about to imbibe from a water
treatment system run by the same administration. But I bent
my head to the tap, all the same, and drank straight from
the flow.
If you’ve been in prison as long as I have,
you’ve experienced a good many innovative highs.
I’ve drunk hooch distilled from fruit juice and bread
and Jolly Rancher candies; I have huffed spray deodorant;
I’ve smoked dried banana peels rolled up in a page of
the Bible. But this was like none of those. In fact, if I
didn’t know better, I would have assumed this was
truly wine.
By now, everyone else on the pod realized that there had
been some snafu with the plumbing. They were all drinking,
hooting, shrieking. “Cool off,” Crash crowed.
“Yeah, dude, I’ll cool off.”
I wish I could tell you more about what happened, but
the sad fact is that I’m as fallible as the next man,
and free alcohol is free alcohol. The last thing I remember
is Shay asking Calloway what he was going to name his bird,
and Calloway’s answer: Batman the Robin. And
Calloway challenging Shay to a chugging contest, but Shay
saying he would sit that one out. That actually, he
didn’t drink.
· · · · · ·
That night when I woke up with the sweats, my heart
drilling through the spongy base of my throat, Shay was
talking to himself again. They pull up the sheet, he said.
“Shay?”
I took a piece of metal I’d sawed off from the lip
of the counter in the cell – it had taken months,
carved with a string of elastic from my underwear and a dab
of toothpaste with baking soda, my own diamond band saw.
Ingeniously, the triangular result doubled as both a mirror
and a shank. I slipped my hand beneath my door, angling the
mirror so I could see into Shay’s house.
He was lying on his bunk with his eyes closed and his
arms crossed over his heart. His breathing had gone so
shallow that his chest barely rose and fell. I could have
sworn I smelled the worms in freshly turned soil. I heard
the ping of stones as they struck a gravedigger’s
shovel.
Shay was practicing.
I had done that myself. Maybe not quite in the same
way, but I’d pictured my funeral. Who would come.
Who’d be well-dressed, and who would be wearing
something outrageously hideous. Who would cry. Who
wouldn’t.
God bless those COs; they’d moved Bourne right
next door to someone else serving a death sentence.
Maggie
There were many reasons I loved Oliver, but first and
foremost was that my mother couldn’t stand him.
He’s a mess, she said, every time she came to visit.
He’s destructive. Maggie, she said, if you got rid of
him, you could find Someone.
Someone was a doctor, like the anesthesiologist from
Dartmouth Hitchcock they’d set me up with once, who
asked me if I thought laws against downloading child porn
were an infringement on civil rights. Or the son of the
cantor, who actually had been in a monogamous gay
relationship for five years but hadn’t told his
parents yet. Someone was the younger partner in the
accounting firm that did my father’s taxes, who asked
me on our first and only date if I’d always been a big
girl.
On the other hand, Oliver knew just what I needed, and
when I needed it. Which is why, the minute I stepped on the
scale that morning, he hopped out from underneath the bed
where he was diligently severing the cord of my alarm clock
with his teeth, and settled himself squarely on top of my
feet so that I couldn’t see the digital readout.
“Nicely done,” I said, stepping off, trying
not to notice the numbers that flashed red before they
disappeared. Surely the reason there was a seven in there
was because Oliver had been on the scale too. Besides, if I
were going to be writing a formal complaint about any of
this, I’d have said that a) size fourteen isn’t
really all that big, b) a size fourteen here was a size
sixteen or eighteen in London, so in a way I was thinner
than I’d be if I had been born British and c) weight
didn’t really matter, as long as you were healthy.
All right, so maybe I didn’t exercise all that
much either. But I would, one day, or so I told my mother
the fitness queen, as soon as all the people on whose behalf
I worked tirelessly were absolutely, unequivocally rescued.
I told her (and anyone else who’d listen) that the
whole reason the ACLU existed was to help people take a
stand. To which my mother had replied, Try Warrior Two,
then. You could kill two birds with one stone.
I pulled on my jeans, the ones that I admittedly
didn’t wash very often because the dryer shrank them
just enough that I had to suffer half a day before the denim
stretched to the point of comfort again. I picked a sweater
that didn’t show my bra roll and then turned to
Oliver. “What do you think?”
He lowered his left ear, which translated to, “Why
do you even care, since you’re taking it all off to
put on a spa robe?”
As usual, he was right. It’s a little hard to
hide your flaws when you’re wearing, well, nothing.
He followed me into the kitchen, where I poured us both
bowls of rabbit food (his literal, mine Special K). Then he
hopped off to the litter box beside his cage, where
he’d spend the day sleeping.
I’d named my rabbit after Oliver Wendell Holmes,
Jr., the famous Supreme Court Justice known as “the
Great Dissenter.” He said, once, “Even a dog
knows the difference between being kicked and being tripped
over.” So did rabbits. And my clients, for that
matter.
“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t
do,” I warned Oliver. “That includes chewing
the legs of the kitchen stools.”
I grabbed my keys and headed out to my Prius. I had
used nearly all my savings last year to buy the hybrid -- to
be honest, I didn’t understand why car manufacturers
charged a premium if you were a buyer with a modicum of
social conscience. It didn’t have all-wheel drive,
which was a real pain in the neck during a New Hampshire
winter, but I figured that sliding off the road occasionally
was worth saving the ozone layer.
My parents had moved to Lynley – a town twenty-six
miles east of Concord, NH – seven years ago when my
father took over as rabbi at Temple Beth Or. The catch was
that there was no Temple Beth Or: his reform congregation
held Friday night services in the cafeteria of the middle
school, because the original temple had burned to the
ground. The expectation had been to raise funds for a new
temple, but my father had underestimated the size of his
rural New Hampshire congregation, and although he assured me
that they were closing in on buying land somewhere, I
didn’t see it happening anytime soon. By now, anyway,
his congregation had grown used to readings from the Torah
that were routinely punctuated by the cheers of the audience
at the basketball game in the gymnasium down the hall.
The biggest single annual contributor to my
father’s temple fund was the ChutZpah, a wellness
retreat for the mind, body and soul in the heart of Lynley
that was run by my mother. Although her clientele was
non-denominational, she’d garnered a word-of-mouth
reputation among temple sisterhoods, and patrons came from
as far away as New York and Connecticut and even Maryland to
relax and rejuvenate. My mother used salt from the Dead
Sea for her scrubs. Her spa cuisine was kosher.
She’d been written up in Boston Magazine, the New York
Times, and Spa Finder.
The first Saturday of every month, I drove to the spa
for a free massage or facial or pedicure. The catch was
that afterward, I had to suffer through lunch with my
mother. We had it down to a routine. By the time we were
served our passion fruit iced tea, we’d already
covered Why Don’t You Call. The salad course was
I’m Going To Be Dead Before You Make Me A Grandmother.
The entrée – fittingly – involved my
weight. Needless to say, we never got around to dessert.
The ChutZpah was white. Not just white, but scary,
I’m-afraid-to-breathe white: white carpets, white
tiles, white robes, white slippers. I have no idea how my
mother kept the place so clean, given that when I was
growing up, the house was always comfortably cluttered.
My father says there’s a God, although for me the
jury is still out on that one. Which wasn’t to say
that I didn’t appreciate a miracle as much as the next
person – such as when I went up to the front desk and
the receptionist told me my mother was in a meeting with a
wholesale orchid salesman. “But DeeDee’s going
to be your aesthetician,” she said. “Locker
number 220.”
I took the robe and slippers she handed me. Locker 220
was in a bank with fifty others, and several toned
middle-age women were stripping out of their yoga clothes.
I breezed into another section of lockers, one that was
blissfully empty, and changed into my robe. If someone
complained because I was using Locker 664 instead, I
didn’t think my mother would disown me. I punched in
my key code – 2358, for ACLU – took a bracing
breath, and walked out into the whirlpool area: a white
oasis surrounded with white wicker benches where primarily
white women waited for their white-coated therapists to call
their name.
DeeDee appeared in her immaculate jacket, smiling.
“You must be Maggie,” she said. “You look
just like your mother described you.”
I wasn’t about to take that bait. “Nice to
meet you,” I said. I never quite figured out the
protocol for this part of the experience – you said
hello and then disrobed immediately so that a total stranger
could lay hands on you...and you paid for this privilege.
Was it just me, or was there a great deal that spa
treatments had in common with prostitution?
“You looking forward to your Song of Solomon
Wrap?”
“I’d rather be getting a root canal.”
DeeDee grinned. “Your mom told me you’d say
something like that, too.” If you haven’t
had a body wrap, it’s a singular experience.
You’re lying on a cushy table covered by a giant piece
of Saran wrap and you’re naked. Totally, completely
naked. Sure, the therapist tosses a washcloth the size of a
gauze square over your privates when she’s scrubbing
you down, and she’s got a poker face that never belies
whether she’s calculating your body mass index under
her palms – but still, you’re painfully aware of
your physique, if only because someone’s experiencing
it firsthand with you.
I forced myself to close my eyes and remember that being
washed beneath a Vichy shower by someone else was supposed
to make me feel like a queen, instead of a hospitalized
invalid.
“So, DeeDee,” I said. “How long have
you been doing this?”
She unrolled a towel and held it like a screen as I
rolled onto my back. “I’ve been working at
spas for six years, but I just got hired on here.”
“You must be good,” I said. “My
mother doesn’t sweat amateurs.”
She shrugged. “I like meeting new people.”
I like meeting new people too, but when they’re
fully clothed.
“What do you do for work?” DeeDee asked.
“My mother didn’t tell you?”
“No…she just said –“ Suddenly,
she broke off, silent.
“She said what.”
“She, um, told me to treat you to an extra helping
of seaweed scrub.”
“You mean she told you I’d need twice as
much.”
“She didn’t –“
“Did she use the word zaftig?” I asked.
When Debbie didn’t answer – wisely - I blinked
up at the hazy light in the ceiling, listened to
Yanni’s canned piano for a few beats, and then sighed.
“I’m an ACLU lawyer.”
“For real?” DeeDee’s hands stilled on
my feet. “Do you ever take on cases, like, for
free?”
“That’s all I do.”
“Then you must know about the guy on Death Row.
I’ve been writing to him for ten years, ever since I
was in eighth grade and I started as part of an assignment
for my social studies class. His last appeal just got
rejected by the Supreme Court.”
I frowned. I could recall seeing something to that
effect buried in the local paper, but I didn’t
remember anything about the case. Then again, I had only
lived in New Hampshire for seven years; and unlike DeeDee, I
hadn’t taken up the civil liberties banner until after
I graduated from college.
“Isn’t there anything you can do for
him?”
“If his last appeal was rejected by the Supreme
Court, probably not.”
She pressed her lips together and wrapped the plastic
around me a little too tightly. “Tell you
what,” I promised. “I’ll look into
it.”
DeeDee smiled and covered me with heated blankets, until
I was trussed tight as a burrito. Then she sat down behind
me and wove her fingers into my hair. As she massaged my
scalp, my eyes drifted shut.
“They say it’s painless,” DeeDee
murmured. “Lethal injection.”
They: the establishment, the lawmakers, the ones
assuaging their guilt over their own actions with rhetoric.
“That’s because no one ever comes back to tell
them otherwise,” I said. I thought of Shay Bourne,
being given the news of his own impending death. I thought
of lying on a table like this one, being put to sleep.
Suddenly I couldn’t breathe. The blankets were
too hot; the cream on my skin too thick. I wanted out of
the layers, and began to fight my way free.
“Whoa,” Debbie said. “Hang on, let me
help you.” She pulled and peeled and handed me a
towel. “Your mother didn’t tell me you were
claustrophobic.”
I sat up, drawing great gasps of air into my lungs. Of
course she didn’t, I thought. Because she’s the
one who’s killing me.
Lucius
It was late afternoon, almost time for the shift change,
and I-tier was relatively quiet. Me, I’d been sick
all day, hazing in and out of sleep brought on by fever.
Calloway, who usually played chess with me about this time
of day, was playing with Shay instead. “Bishop takes
a6,” Calloway called out. For all that he was a
racist bigot, Calloway was also the best chess player
I’d ever met.
During the day, Batman the Robin resided in his breast
pocket, a small lump no bigger than a pack of Starburst
candies. Sometimes it crawled onto his shoulder and pecked
at the scars on his scalp. At other times, he kept Batman in
a paperback copy of The Stand that had been doctored as a
hiding place – starting on chapter six, a square had
been cut out of the pages of the thick book with a pilfered
razor blade, creating a little hollow that Calloway lined
with tissues to make a bed for the bird. The bird ate
mashed potatoes; Calloway traded precious masking tape and
twine and even a homemade handcuff key for our own portions.
“It occurs to me,” Calloway said,
“that we haven’t made a wager on this
game.”
Crash laughed. “Even Bourne ain’t stupid
enough to bet you when he’s losing.”
“What have you got that I want?” Calloway
mused.
“Intelligence?” I suggested. “Common
sense?”
“Keep out of this, homo.” Calloway thought
for a moment. “The brownie. I want that brownie
you’ve been hoarding.”
By now, the brownie was two days old. I doubted that
Calloway would even be able to swallow it. What he’d
enjoy, mostly, was the act of taking it away from Shay.
“Okay,” Shay said. “Knight to
g6.”
I sat up on my bunk. “Okay? Shay, he’s
beating the pants off you.”
“How come you’re too sick to play, DuFresne,
but you don’t mind sticking your two cents into every
conversation?” Calloway said. “This is between
me and Bourne.”
“What if I win?” Shay asked. “What do
I get?”
Calloway laughed. “Whatever you want, since it
ain’t gonna happen.”
“The bird. That’s what I want.”
“I’m not giving you Batman –“
“Then I’m not giving you the brownie.”
There was a beat of silence.
“Fine,” Calloway said. “You win, you
get the bird. But you’re not going to win, because my
bishop takes d3. Consider yourself officially
screwed.”
There was one pawn between Shay’s king and
Calloway’s bishop. I’d probably be the one to
fish the brownie from Shay to Calloway. I wondered if
either of them would notice if I happened to steal a crumb
or two for myself.
“Queen to h7,” Shay said finally.
“Checkmate.”
“What?” Calloway cried. I scrutinized the
mental chessboard I’d been tracking –
Shay’s queen had come out of nowhere, screened by his
knight. There was nowhere left for Calloway to go.
At that moment the door to I-tier opened, admitting a
pair of officers in flak jackets and helmets. They marched
to Calloway’s cell and cuffed him, then brought him
onto the catwalk and secured the handcuffs to a metal
railing along the far wall.
There was nothing worse than having your cell searched.
In here, all we had were our belongings, and having them
pored over and inspected was a gross invasion of privacy.
Not to mention the fact that when it happened, you had an
excellent chance of losing your best stash, be that drugs or
hooch or chocolate or my art supplies or the stinger I
rigged from paper clips to heat up my instant coffee.
They came in with flashlights and long handled mirrors,
and worked systematically. They’d check the seams of
the walls, the vents, the plumbing. They’d roll
deodorant sticks all the way out, to make sure nothing was
hidden underneath. They’d shake containers of powder,
to hear what might be inside. They’d sniff inside
shampoo bottles, open our letters and take out the letters
inside. They’d rip off our bedsheets and run their
hands over the mattresses, looking for tears or ripped
seams.
Meanwhile, we were forced to watch.
I could not see what was going on in Calloway’s
cell, but I had a pretty good idea based on his reactions.
He rolled his eyes as his blanket was checked for unraveled
threads; his jaw tensed when a postage stamp was peeled off
an envelope, revealing the black tar heroin underneath. But
when his bookshelf was reached – we were allowed five
paperbacks at one time – Calloway flinched. I looked
for the small bulge in his breast pocket that would have
been the bird, and realized that Batman the Robin was
somewhere inside that cell.
The pages were rifled, the spine snapped, the book
tossed against the cell wall. “What’s in
here?” an officer asked, focusing not on the bird that
had been whipped across the cell, but on the baby-blue
tissues that fluttered down over his boots.
“Nothing,” Calloway said, but the officer
wasn’t about to take his word for it. He picked
through the tissues, and when he didn’t find anything
he confiscated the book with its carved hidey-hole.
Whitaker said something about a write-up, but Calloway
wasn’t listening. I could not remember ever seeing
him quite so unraveled. As soon as he was released back
into his cell, he ran to the rear corner where the bird had
been flung.
The sound that Calloway Reece made was primordial,
bloodcurdling; but then maybe that was always the case when
a grown man with no heart started to cry. He sank down to
the floor of his cell, cradling the dead bird.
“Reece,” Shay interrupted, “I want my
prize.”
My head snapped around. Surely Shay wasn’t stupid
enough to antagonize Calloway?
“What,” Calloway breathed. “What did
you say?”
“My prize. I won the chess game.”
“Not now,” I hissed.
“Yes, now,” Shay said. “A
deal’s a deal.”
In here, you were only as good as your word, and
Calloway – a card carrying member of the Aryan
Brotherhood – would have known that better than anyone
else. “You better make sure you’re always
behind those bars,” Calloway vowed, “because the
next time I get the chance, I’m going to mess you up
so bad your own mama wouldn’t know you.” But
even as he threatened Shay, Calloway gently wrapped the dead
bird in a tissue and attached the small, slight bundle to
the end of his fishing line.
When the robin reached me, I drew it beneath the door of
my cell. It was still featherless and half-cooked, its
closed eye translucent blue; veins thinly veiled beneath its
onion-skin like a road map of life. One wing was bent at a
severe backward angle; its neck lolled sideways, so that I
could stroke its fragile throat. So this is what death
looked like, when you held it in your hand: ugly and undone
and real.
Shay sent out his own line of string, with a weight made
of a regulation comb on one end, and reel in the bundle I
fished out to him. I saw his hands gently slide the robin,
wrapped in tissue, under the door of his cell. Then the
lights in our cells and out on the catwalk flickered.
I’ve often imagined what happened next. With an
artist’s eye, I like to picture Shay sitting on his
bunk, cupping his palms around the tiny bird. I imagine the
touch of someone who loves you so much, he cannot bear to
watch you sleep; and so you wake up with his hand on your
heart. In the long run though, it hardly matters how Shay
did it. What matters is the result: that we all heard the
piccolo trill of that robin; that Shay pushed the bird
beneath his cell door onto the catwalk where it hopped, like
broken punctuation, toward Calloway’s outstretched
hand.
· · · · · ·
June
If you’re a mother, you can look into the face of
your grown child and see, instead, the one that peeked up at
you from the folds of a baby blanket. You can watch your
twelve year old daughter painting her nails with glitter
polish and remember how she used to reach for you when she
wanted to cross the street. You can hear the doctor say
that the real danger is adolescence, because you don’t
know how the heart will respond to growth spurts – and
you can pretend that’s ages away.
“Best two out of three,” Claire said, and
from the folds of her hospital Johnny she raised her fist
again.
I lifted my hand, too. Rock, paper, scissors, shoot.
“Paper,” Claire grinned. “I
win.”
“You totally do not,” I said. “Hello?
Scissors?”
“What I forgot to tell you is that it’s
raining, and the scissors got rusty, and so you slip the
paper underneath them and carry them away.”
I laughed. Claire shifted slightly, careful not to
dislodge all the tubes and the wires. “Who’ll
feed Dudley?” she asked.
Dudley was our dog – a thirteen year old Springer
spaniel who – along with me – was one of the
only pieces of continuity between Claire and her late
sister. Claire may never have met Elizabeth, but they had
both grown up draping faux pearls around Dudley’s
neck; dressing him up like the sibling they never had.
“Don’t worry about Dudley,” I said.
“I’ll call Mrs. Morrissey if I have to.”
Claire nodded and glanced at the clock. “I
thought they’d be back already.”
“I know, baby.”
“What do you think’s taking so long?”
There were a hundred answers to that, but the one that
floated to the top of my mind was that in some other
hospital, two counties away, another mother had to say
goodbye to her child so that I would have a chance to keep
mine.
The technical name for Claire’s illness was
pediatric dilated cardiomyopathy. It affected twelve
million kids a year, and meant that her heart cavity was
enlarged and stretched; that her heart couldn’t pump
blood out efficiently. You couldn’t fix it or reverse
it; if you were lucky you could live with it. If you
weren’t, you died of congestive heart failure. In
kids, 79% of the cases came from an unknown origin. There
was a camp that attributed its onset to myocarditis and
other viral infections during infancy; and another that
claimed it was inherited through a parent who was a carrier
of the defective gene. I had always assumed the latter was
the case, with Claire. After all, surely a child who grew
out of grief would be born with a heavy heart.
At first, I didn’t know she had it. She got tired
more easily than other infants, but I was still moving in
slow motion myself, and did not notice. It wasn’t
until she was five, hospitalized with a flu she could not
shake, that she was diagnosed. Dr. Wu said that Claire had
a slight arrhythmia which might improve and might not; he
put her on Captopril, Lasix, Digoxin. He said that
we’d have to wait and see.
On the first day of fifth grade, Claire told me it felt
like she had swallowed a hummingbird. I assumed it was
nerves about starting classes, but hours later -- when she
stood up to solve a math problem at the chalkboard -- she
passed out cold. Progressive arrhythmias made the heart
beat like a bag of worms – it wouldn’t eject any
blood. Those basketball players who seemed so healthy, and
then dropped dead on the court? That was ventricular
fibrillation, and it was happening to Claire. She had
surgery to implant an AICD – a tiny, internal ER
resting right on her heart, which would fix future
arrhythmias by administering an electric shock. She was put
on the list for a transplant.
The transplant game was a tricky one – once you
received a heart, the clock started ticking, and it
wasn’t the happy ending everyone thought it was. You
didn’t want to wait so long for a transplant that the
rest of the bodily systems began to shut down. But even a
transplant wasn’t a miracle: most recipients could
only tolerate a heart for ten or fifteen years before
complications ensued, or there was outright rejection.
Still, as Dr. Wu said, fifteen years from now, we might be
able to buy a heart off a shelf and have it installed at
Best Buy…the idea was to keep Claire alive long
enough to let medical innovation catch up to her.
This morning, the beeper we carried at all times had
gone off. We have a heart, Dr. Wu said, when I called.
I’ll meet you at the hospital.
For the past six hours, Claire had been poked, pricked,
scrubbed, and prepped so that the minute the miracle organ
arrived in its little Igloo cooler, she could go straight
into surgery. This was the moment I’d waited for, and
dreaded, her whole life.
What if (I could not even let myself say the words.)
Instead, I reached for Claire’s hand, and threaded
our fingers together. Paper and scissors, I thought. We
are between a rock and a hard place. I looked at the fan of
her angel hair on the pillow, the faint blue cast of her
skin, the fairy-light bones of a girl whose body was still
too much for her to handle. Sometimes, when I looked at
her, I didn’t see her at all; instead, I pretended
that she was ---
“What do you think she’s like?”
I blinked, startled. “Who?”
“The girl. The one who died.”
“Claire,” I said. “Let’s not
talk about this.”
“Are you kidding me? It’s exactly what we
should talk about.” Her cheeks bloomed with fire, the
way they sometimes did when Claire got impassioned - the
same fervor that also made her short of breath, sometimes.
“Easy,” I soothed, laying a hand on her
head. “We don’t even know it’s a
girl.”
“Of course it’s a girl,” Claire said.
“It would be totally gross to have a boy’s heart
in me.”
“I don’t think that’s a qualification
for a match.”
She shuddered. “It should be.” Claire
struggled to push herself upright, so that she was sitting
higher in the hospital bed. “Do you think I’ll
be different?”
I leaned down and kissed her forehead.
“You,” I pronounced, “will wake up and
still be the same kid who cannot be bothered to clean her
room or walk Dudley or turn out the lights when she goes
downstairs.”
That’s what I said to Claire, anyway. But all I
heard were the first four words: You will wake up.
A nurse came into the room. “We just got word
that the harvest’s begun,” she said. “We
should have more information shortly; Dr. Wu’s on the
phone with the team that’s on site.”
After she left, Claire and I sat in silence. Suddenly,
this was real – the surgeons were going to open up
Claire’s chest, stop her heart, and sew in a new one.
We had both heard numerous doctors explain the risks and the
rewards; we knew how infrequently pediatric donors came
about. Claire shrank down in the bed, her covers sliding up
to her nose. “If I die,” Claire said, “do
you think I’ll get to be a saint?”
I sat down beside her, gathered her into my arms.
“You won’t die.”
“Yeah, I will. And so will you. I just might do
it a little sooner.”
I couldn’t help it; I felt tears welling up in my
eyes.
“I bet I’d like it,” Claire said.
“Being a saint.”
“You aren’t going to be a saint,
honey.”
“You don’t know that for sure,” Claire
said.
“You’re not Catholic, for one thing. And
besides, they all died horrible deaths.”
“That’s not always true. You can be killed
while you’re being good, and that counts. Saint Maria
Goretti was my age when she fought off a guy who was raping
her and was killed and she got to be one.”
“That’s atrocious,” I said.
“St. Barbara had her eyeballs cut out.”
“Claire –“
“Did you know there’s a patron saint of
heart patients? John of God?”
“The question is, why do you know there’s a
patron saint of heart patients?”
“Duh,” Claire said. “I read.
It’s all you let me do.” She settled back
against the pillows. “I bet a saint can play
softball.”
“So can a girl with a heart transplant.”
But Claire wasn’t listening; she’d learned
long ago that hope was just smoke and mirrors; I’d
been the one to show her. She looked up at the clock.
“I think I’ll be a saint,” she said, as if
it were entirely up to her. “That way no one forgets
you, when you’re gone.”
· · · · · ·
The funeral of a police officer is a breathtaking thing.
Officers and firemen and public officials will come from
every town in the state and some even further away. There
is a procession of police cruisers that precedes the hearse;
they blanket the highway like snow.
It took me a long time to remember Kurt’s funeral,
because I was working so hard at the time to pretend it
wasn’t happening. The police chief, Irv, rode with me
to the graveside service. There were townspeople lining the
streets of Lynley, with handmade signs that read PROTECT AND
SERVE, and THE ULTIMATE SACRIFICE. It was summertime, and
the ground sank beneath the heels of my shoes where I stood.
I was surrounded by other policemen who’d worked with
Kurt, and hundreds who didn’t, a sea of dress blue.
My back hurt, and my feet were swollen. I found myself
concentrating on a lilac tree that shuddered in the breeze,
petals falling like rain.
The police chief had arranged for a twenty-one gun
salute, and as it finished, five fighter jets rose over the
distant violet mountains. They sliced the sky in parallel
lines, and then, just as they flew overhead, the plane on
the far right broke off like a splinter, soaring east.
When the priest stopped speaking – I didn’t
listen to a word of it; what could he tell me about Kurt
that I did not already know? -- Robbie and Vic stepped
forward. They were Kurt’s closest friends in the
department. Like the rest of the Lynley force, they had
covered their badges with black fabric. With their gloved
hands, they reached for the flag that draped Kurt’s
coffin, and began to fold the flag. Their hands moved so
fast – I thought of Mickey Mouse, of Donald Duck, with
their oversized white fists. Robbie was the one who put the
triangle into my arms, something to hold onto, something to
take Kurt’s place.
Through the radios of the other policemen, we heard the
final call: All units stand by for a broadcast, the voice
said.
Final call for Officer Kurt Nealon, number 144.
144, report to 360 West Main for one last assignment.
It was the address of the cemetery.
You will be in the best of hands. You will be deeply
missed.
144, 10-7. The radio code, for end of shift.
I have been told that after that, I walked up to
Kurt’s coffin. It was so highly polished I could see
my own reflection, pinched and unfamiliar. It had been
specially made, wider than normal, to accommodate Elizabeth
too.
She was, at seven, still afraid of the dark. Kurt would
lie down beside her, an elephant perched among pink pillows
and satin blankets, until she fell asleep; then he’d
creep out of the room and turn off the light. Sometimes,
she woke up at midnight shrieking. You turned it off,
she’d sob into my shoulder, as if I had broken her
heart.
The funeral director had let me see them. Kurt’s
arms were wrapped tight around my daughter, Elizabeth rested
her head on his chest. They looked the way they looked on
nights when Kurt fell asleep waiting for Elizabeth to do the
very same thing. They looked the way I wished I could:
smooth and clear and peaceful, a pond with a stone unthrown.
It was supposed to be comforting that they would be
together. It was supposed to make up for the fact that I
couldn’t go with them.
“Take care of her,” I whispered to Kurt, my
breath blowing a kiss against the gleaming wood.
“Take care of my baby.”
As if I’d summoned her, Claire moved inside me
then: a slow tumble of butterfly limbs, a memory of why I
had to stay behind.
· · · · · ·
There was a time when I prayed to saints. What I liked
about them were their humble beginnings: they were human,
once, and so you knew that they just got it in a way Jesus
never would. They understood what it meant to have your
hopes dashed or your promises broken or your feelings hurt.
St. Therese was my favorite – the one who believed you
could be perfectly ordinary, but that great love could
somehow transport you. However, this was all a long time
ago. Life has a way of pointing out, with great sweeping
signs, that you are looking at the wrong things,
doesn’t it? It was when I started to admit to myself
that I’d rather be dead that I was given a child who
had to fight to stay alive.
In the past month, Claire’s arrhythmias had
worsened. Her AICD was going off six times a day.
I’d been told that when it fired, it felt like an
electric current running through the body. It restarted
your heart, but it hurt like hell. Once a month would be
devastating; once a day would be debilitating. And then
there was Claire.
There were support groups for adults who had to live
with AICDs; there were stories of those who preferred the
risk of dying from an arrhythmia to the sure knowledge that
they would be shocked by the device sooner or later. Last
week, I had found Claire in her room reading the Guinness
Book of World records. “Roy Sullivan was struck by
lightning seven times over thirty-six years,”
she’d said. “Finally, he killed himself.”
She lifted her shirt, staring down at the scar on her chest.
“Mom,” she begged, “please make them turn
it off.”
I did not know how long I would be able to convince
Claire to stay with me, if this was the condition in which
she had to do it.
Claire and I both turned immediately when the hospital
door opened. We were expecting the nurse, but it was Dr.
Wu. He sat down on the edge of the bed and spoke directly
to Claire, as if she were my age instead of twelve.
“The heart we had in mind for you had something wrong
with it. The team didn’t know until they got
inside…but the right ventricle is dilated. If it
isn’t functioning now, chances are it will only get
worse by the time the heart’s transplanted.”
“So…I can’t have it?” Claire
asked.
“No. When I give you a new heart, I want it to be
the healthiest heart possible,” the doctor explained.
My body felt stiff. “I don’t – I
don’t understand.”
Dr. Wu turned. “I’m sorry, June.
Today’s not going to be the day.”
“But it could take years to find another
donor,” I said. I didn’t add the rest of my
sentence, because I knew Wu could hear it anyway: Claire
can’t last that long.
“We’ll just hope for the best,” he
said.
After he left, we sat in stunned silence for a few
moments. Had I done this? Had the fear I’d tried to
quash – the one that Claire wouldn’t survive
this operation – somehow bled into reality?
Claire began to pull the cardiac monitors off her chest.
“Well,” she said, but I could hear the hitch in
her voice as she struggled not to cry. “What a total
waste of a Saturday.”
“You know,” I said, forcing the words to
unroll evenly, “you were named for a saint.”
“For real?”
I nodded. “She founded a group of nuns called the
Poor Clares.”
She glanced at me. “Why did you pick her?”
Because, on the day you were born, the nurse who handed
you to me shook her head and said, Now there’s a sight
for sore eyes. And you were. And she is the patron saint
of that very thing. And I wanted you protected, from the
very first moment I spoke your name.
“I liked the way it sounded,” I lied, and I
held up Claire’s shirt, so that she could shimmy into
it.
We would leave this hospital and maybe go to get
chocolate Fribbles at Friendly’s and rent a movie with
a happy ending. We’d take Dudley for a walk and feed
him. We’d act like this was an ordinary day. And
after she went to sleep, I would bury my face in my pillow
and let myself feel everything I wasn’t letting myself
feel right now: shame over knowing that I have had five
years longer in Claire’s company than I did with her
sister Elizabeth; guilt over being relieved this transplant
did not happen, since it might just as easily kill Claire as
save her.
Claire stuffed her feet into her pink Converse
high-tops. “Maybe I’ll join the Poor
Clares.”
“You still can’t be a saint,” I said.
And added silently, Because I will not let you die.
Michael
A priest has to say Mass every day, even if no one shows
up, although this was rarely the case. In a city as large
as Concord there were usually at least a handful of
parishioners, already praying the rosary by the time I came
out in my vestments.
I was just at the part of the Mass where miracles
occurred. “For this is my body, which will be given up
for you,” I said aloud, genuflected, and lifted the
Host.
Next to How the heck is one God also a Holy Trinity, the
most common question I got asked as a priest by
non-Catholics was about transubstantiation: the belief that
at consecration, the elements of bread and wine truly became
the Body and Blood of Christ. I could see why people were
baffled – if this was true, wasn’t communion
cannibalistic? And if a change really occurred, why
couldn’t you see it?
When I went to church as a kid, long before I came back
to it, I took communion like everyone else, but I
didn’t really give much thought to what I received.
It looked, to me, like a cracker and a cup of
wine…before and after the priest consecrated it. I
can tell you, now, that it still looks like a cracker and a
cup of wine. The miracle part came down to philosophy. It
wasn’t the accidents of an object that make it what it
is…it was the essential parts. We’d still be
human even if we didn’t have limbs or teeth or hair;
but if we suddenly stopped being mammals, that
wouldn’t be the case. When I consecrated the Host and
the wine at Mass, the very substance of the elements
changed; it was the other properties – the shape, the
taste, the size – that remained the same. Just like
John the Baptist saw a man and knew, right away, that he was
looking at God; just like the wise men came upon a baby and
knew He was Our Savior…every day I held what looked
like crackers and wine, but which actually was Jesus.
For this very reason, from this point on in the Mass, my
fingers and thumb would be kept pinched together until
washed after Communion. Not even the tiniest particle of
the consecrated Host could be lost; we went to great pains
to make sure of this when disposing of the leftovers from
communion. But just as I was thinking this, the wafer
slipped out of my hand.
I felt the way I had when, in third grade, during the
Little League playoffs, I’d watched a pop fly come
into my corner of left field too fast and too high –
knotted with the need to catch it; sick with the knowledge
that I wouldn’t. Frozen, I watched the Host tumble,
safely, into the belly of the chalice of wine.
“Five second rule,” I murmured, and I
reached into the chalice and snagged it.
The wine had already begun to soak into the wafer. I
watched, amazed, as a jaw took shape, an ear, an eyebrow.
Father Walter had visions. He said that the reason he
became a priest in the first place was because, as an altar
boy, a statue of Jesus had reached for his robe and tugged,
telling him to stay the course. More recently, Mary had
appeared to him in the rectory kitchen when he was frying
trout, and suddenly they began leaping in the pan.
Don’t let a single one fall to the floor, she warned,
and then she disappeared.
There were hundreds of priests who excelled at their
calling, yet never received this sort of divine intercession
– and yet, I didn’t want to fall among their
ranks. I stared at the wafer, hoping the wine-sketched
features would solidify into a portrait of Jesus…and
instead I found myself looking at something else entirely.
The dark brows, the nose broken while wrestling in junior
high, the razor stubble. Engraved onto the surface of the
Host, with a printmaker’s delicacy, was a picture of
me.
What is my head doing on the body of Christ? I thought,
shaking off the very thought. I placed the Host on the
paten, plum-stained and pinkened, a mirror image. I lifted
the chalice. “This is my blood,” I said.
Lucius
It was after One Life to Live but before Oprah; the time
of day when most of the guys napped. I myself was not
feelingso well. The sores in my mouth made it difficult to
speak;I had to keep using the toilet. The skin around my
eyes,stained by Kaposi sarcoma, had swollen to the point
where Icould barely see. I sometimes lay on my back and
picturedwhat an opportunistic infection looked like,
breaching thebarriers of my immune system: a jewel thief on
a stealthmission, except in my case, it didn’t even
have topick a lock. The door was left wide open.
Suddenly, I saw a fishing line whiz into the narrow
space beneath my cell door. “Want some?” Shay
asked.
When we fish, it’s to get something. We trade
magazines; we barter food; we pay for drugs. But Shay
didn’t want anything; except to give. Wired to the
end of his line was a piece of Bazooka bubble gum.
It’s contraband. Gum can be used as putty to
build all sorts of things, and to tamper with locks. God
only knew where Shay had come across this bounty - or even
more astounding – why he wouldn’t just hoard it.
I swallowed, and felt my throat nearly split along a
fault line. “No thanks,” I rasped.
“Joey,” Shay said. “Want some?”
He cast again, his line arcing over the
catwalk. “For real?” Joey asked. Most of us
just pretended Joey wasn’t around; it was safer for
him. No one went out of their way to acknowledge him, much
less offer him something as precious as a piece of gum.
“I want some,” Calloway demanded. He must
have seen the bounty going by, since his cell was between
Shay’s and Joey’s. “Bourne’s got
gum,” he announced.
“No ****. I want some too,” Crash said.
Shay waited for Joey to take the gum, and then pulled
his line gently closer, until it was within reach of
Calloway.
“There’s plenty.”
“How many pieces you got?” Crash asked.
“Just the one.”
Now, you’ve seen a piece of Bazooka gum. Maybe
you can split it with a friend. But to divvy up one single
piece among seven greedy men?
Shay’s fishing line whipped to the left, past my
cell en route to Crash’s. “Take some, and pass
it on,” Shay said.
“Maybe I want the whole thing.”
“Maybe you do.”
“****,” Crash said. “I’m taking
it all.”
“If that’s what you need,” Shay
replied.
I stood up, unsteady, and crouched down as Shay’s
fishing line reached Pogie’s cell. “Have
some,” Shay offered.
“But Crash took the whole piece—“
“Have some.”
“Holy…” I could hear paper being
unwrapped, the fullness of Pogie speaking around the
rectangle that hadn’t yet softened in his mouth.
“I ain’t had chewing gum since 2001.”
By now, I could smell it. The pinkness, the sugar. I
began to salivate.
“Oh, man,” Texas breathed, and then everyone
chewed in silence, except for me.
Shay’s fishing line swung between my own feet.
“Try it,” he urged.
I reached for the small wrapped packet on the end of the
lines. Since six other men had already done the same, I
expected to see only a fragment remaining, a smidgen of gum,
if anything at all – yet, to my surprise, the piece of
Bazooka was intact. I ripped the gum in half and put a piece
into my mouth. The rest I wrapped up, and tugged on
Shay’s line. I watched it zip away, back to his own
cell.
At first I could barely stand it – the sweetness
against the sores in my mouth; the sharp edges of the gum
before it softened. It brought tears to my eyes to so badly
want something that I knew would cause great pain. I held
up my hand, ready to spit the gum out, when the most
remarkable thing happened: my mouth, my throat, they
stopped aching, as if there was an anesthetic in the gum; as
if I were no longer an AIDS patient but an ordinary man,
who’d picked up this treat at the gas station counter
after filling his tank in preparation of driving far, far
away. My jaw moved, rhythmic. I sat down on the floor of my
cell, crying as I chewed – not because it hurt, but
because it didn’t.
We were silent for so long that CO Whitaker came in to
see what we were up to; and what he found, of course, was
not what he had expected. Seven men, imagining childhoods
that we all wished we’d had. Seven men, blowing
bubbles as bright as the moon.
· · · · · ·
For the first time in nearly six months, I slept through
the night. I woke up rested and relaxed, without any of the
stomach-knotting that usually consumed me for the first two
hours of every day. I walked to the basin, squeezed
toothpaste onto the stubby brush they gave us, and glanced
up at the wavy sheet of metal that passed for a mirror.
Something was different.
The sores, the Kaposi sarcoma that had spotted my cheeks
and inflamed my eyelids for a year now, were gone. My skin
was clear as a river.
I leaned forward for a better look. I opened up my
mouth, tugged my lower lip, searching for the blisters and
cankers that had kept me from eating.
“Lucius,” I heard, a ragged voice spilling
from the vent over my head. “Good morning.”
I glanced up. “It is, Shay. God, yes, it
is.”
· · · · · ·
In the end, I didn’t have to call for a medical
consult. Officer Whitaker was shocked enough at my improved
appearance to call the nurse himself. I was taken into the
attorney-client cell so that she could draw my blood, and an
hour later, she came back to tell me what I already knew.
“Your CD4+ is 1250,” the nurse said.
“And your viral load’s undetectable.”
“That’s good, right?”
“It’s normal. It’s what someone who
doesn’t have AIDS would look like, if we drew his
blood.”
“It’s Shay.”
“Inmate Bourne?”
“He did this,” I said, well aware of how
insane it sounded; and yet desperate to make her understand.
“He made a dead bird come back to life. He took
one piece of gum, and made it enough for all of us. He made
wine come out of our faucets the first night he was here…”
“Okey-dokey. Officer Whitaker, let me see if we
can get a psych consult for –“
“Haven’t you ever seen something with your
own eyes that you never imagined possible?”
The nurse walked out of my cell and stood in front of
Shay’s. “What do you know about Inmate
DuFresne’s condition?”
“He can’t sleep much,” Shay said
quietly. “It hurts him to eat.”
“He’s got AIDS. But suddenly, this morning,
that’s all changed,” the nurse said. “And
for some reason, Inmate DuFresne thinks you had something to
do with it.”
“I didn’t do anything.” Suddenly, he
stepped forward, animated. “Are you here for my
heart?”
“What?”
“My heart. I want to donate it, after I
die.” I heard him rummaging around in his box of
possessions. “Here,” he said, giving her a piece
of paper. “This is the girl who needs it. Lucius
wrote her name down for me.”
“I don’t know anything about
that…”
“But you can find out, right? You can talk to
the right people?”
The nurse hesitated, and then her voice went soft, the
flannel-bound way she used to speak to me, when the pain was
so great that I could not see past it. “I can
talk,” she said.
· · · · · ·
It is an odd thing to be watching television and know
that in reality, it is happening right outside your door.
Crowds had flooded the parking lot of the prison. Camping
out on the stairs of the parole office entrance were folks
in wheelchairs, elderly women with walkers, mothers
clutching sick infants to their chests. There were gay
couples, mostly one man supporting another frail, ill
partner; and crackpots holding up signs with scriptural
references about the end of the world. Lining the street
that led past the cemetery and downtown, were the news vans
– local affiliates, and even a crew from Fox in
Boston.
Right now, a reporter from ABC 22 was interviewing a
young mother whose son had been born with severe
neurological damage. She stood beside the boy, in his
motorized wheelchair, one hand resting on his forehead.
“What would I like?” she said, repeating the
reporter’s question. “I’d like to know
that he knows me.” She smiled faintly.
“That’s not too greedy, is it?”
The reporter faced the camera. “Bob, so far
there’s been no confirmation or denial from the
administration that any miraculous behavior has in fact
taken place within the Concord State Prison. We have been
told, however, by an unnamed source, that these occurrences
stemmed from the desire of New Hampshire’s sole death
row inmate, Shay Bourne, to donate his organs
post-execution.”
I yanked my headphones down to my neck.
“Shay,” I called out. “Are you listening
to this?”
“We got us our own celebrity,” Crash said.
Suddenly two officers arrived, escorting someone we
rarely saw: Warden Coyne. A burly man with a flat-top on
which you could have served dinner, he stood beside the cell
while Officer Whitaker told Shay to strip. His scrubs were
shaken out, and then he was allowed to dress again before he
was shackled to the wall across from our cells.
The officers started to toss Shay’s house –
upending the meal he hadn’t finished; yanking his
headphones out of the television, overturning his small box
of property. They ripped his mattress, balled up his
sheets. They ran their hands along the edges of his sink,
his toilet, his bunk.
“You got any idea, Bourne, what’s going on
outside?” the warden said, but Shay just stood with
his head tucked into his shoulder, like Calloway’s
robin did when he slept. “What about you?” the
warden called out to the rest of us. “Those who
cooperate with me will not be punished. I can’t
promise anything for the rest of you.”
Nobody spoke.
Warden Coyne turned to Shay. “Where did you get
the gum?”
“There was only one piece,” Joey Kunz
blurted, the snitch. “But it was enough for all of
us.”
“You some kind of magician, son?” the Warden
said, his face inches away from Shay’s. “Or did
you hypnotize them into believing they were getting
something they weren’t? I know about mind control,
Bourne.”
“I didn’t do anything,” Shay murmured.
Officer Whitaker stepped closer. “Warden Coyne,
there’s nothing in his cell. Not even in his
mattress. His blanket’s intact – if he’s
been fishing with it, then he managed to weave the strings
back together when he was done.”
I stared at Shay. Of course he’d fished with his
blanket; I’d seen the line he’d made with my own
eyes. I’d untied the bubble gum from the braided blue
strand.
“I’m watching you, Bourne,” the Warden
hissed. “I know what you’re up to. You know
damn well your heart isn’t going to be worth anything
once it’s pumped full of potassium chloride in a death
chamber. You’re doing this because you’ve got
no appeals left, and even if you get Barbara freaking
Walters to do an interview with you, the sympathy
vote’s not going to change your execution date.”
I realized then that even though Shay was a prisoner, he
had a certain power over Warden Coyne. He had a certain
power over all of us. Shay Bourne had done what no brute
force or power play or gang threat had been able to do all
the years I’d been on I-tier: he’d brought us
together.
Next door, Shay was slowly putting his cell to rights.
The news program was wrapping up with another bird’s
eye view of the state prison. From the helicopter footage,
you could see how many people had gathered; how many more
were heading this way.
I sat down on my bunk. It wasn’t possible, was
it?
I pulled my art supplies out of my hiding spot in the
mattress, rifling through my sketches for the one I’d
done of Shay being wheeled off the tier after his seizure.
I’d drawn him on the gurney, arms spread and tied
down, legs banded together, eyes raised to the ceiling. This
time, though, I turned the paper ninety degrees, so that
Shay was no longer lying down, but upright.
People were always finding Jesus in jail. What if He
was already here?
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