Authors: Jodi Picoult
As I watched the inmate mop beneath a bank of seats, I wondered what would be the hardest luxury to leave behind. There were the trivial things: losing chocolate practically qualified as cruel and unusual punishment; I couldn’t sacrifice my contact lenses; I’d sooner die than relinquish the Ouidad Climate Control gel that kept my hair from becoming a frizzy rat’s nest. But what about the rest—missing the dizzying choice of all the cereals in the grocery store aisle, for example? Not being able to receive a phone call? Granted, it had been so long since I was intimate with a man that I had spiderwebs between my legs, but what would it be like to give up being touched casually, even a handshake?
I bet I’d even miss fighting with my mother.
Suddenly a pair of boots appeared on the floor before me. “You’re out of luck. He’s got his spiritual advisor with him,” the officer said. “Bourne’s pretty popular today.”
“That’s fine,” I bluffed. “The spiritual advisor can join us during our meeting.” I saw the slightest flicker of uncertainty on the face of the officer. Not allowing an inmate to see his attorney was a big no-no, and I was planning to capitalize on that.
The officer shrugged and led me down a hallway. He nodded to a man in a control booth, and a door scraped open. We stepped into a small metal midroom, and I sucked in my breath as the steel door slid home. “I’m a little claustrophobic,” I said.
The officer smiled. “Too bad.”
The inner door buzzed, and we entered the prison. “It’s quiet in here,” I remarked.
“That’s because it’s a good day.” He handed me a flak jacket and goggles and waited for me to put them on. For one brief moment, I panicked—what if a man’s jacket like this didn’t zip shut on me? How embarrassing would
that
be? But there were
Velcro straps and it wasn’t an issue, and as soon as I was outfitted, the door to a long tier opened. “Have fun,” the officer said, and that was when I realized I was supposed to go in alone.
Well. I wasn’t going to convince Shay Bourne I was brave enough to save his life if I couldn’t muster the courage to walk through that door.
There were whoops and catcalls. Leave it to me to find my only appreciative audience in the maximum-security tier of the state prison. “Baby, you here for me?” one guy said, and another pulled down his scrubs so that I could see his boxer shorts, as if I’d been waiting for that kind of peep show all my life. I kept my eyes focused on the priest who was standing outside one of the cells.
I should have introduced myself. I should have explained why I had lied my way into this prison. But I was so flustered that nothing came out the way it should have. “Shay Bourne?” I said. “I know a way that you can donate your organs.”
The priest frowned at me. “Who are you?”
“His lawyer.”
He turned to Shay. “I thought you said you didn’t have a lawyer.”
Shay tilted his head. He looked at me as if he were sifting through the grains of my thoughts, separating the wheat from the chaff. “Let her talk,” he said.
My streak of bravery widened after that: leaving the priest with Shay, I went back to the officers and demanded a private attorney– client conference room. I explained that legally, they had to provide one and that due to the nature of our conversation, the priest should be allowed into the meeting. Then the priest and I were taken into a small cubicle from one side, while Shay was
escorted through a different entrance by two officers. When the door was closed, he backed up to it, slipping his hands through the trap to have his handcuffs removed.
“All right,” the priest said. “What’s going on?”
I ignored him and faced Shay. “My name is Maggie Bloom. I’m an attorney for the ACLU, and I think I know a way to save you from being executed.”
“Thanks,” he said, “but that’s not what I’m looking for.”
I stared at him. “What?”
“I don’t need you to save all of me. Only my heart.”
“I … I don’t understand,” I said slowly.
“What Shay means,” the priest said, “is that he’s resigned to his execution. He just wants to be an organ donor, afterward.”
“Who are you, exactly?” I asked.
“Father Michael Wright.”
“And you’re his spiritual advisor?”
“Yes.”
“Since when?”
“Since ten minutes before you became his lawyer,” the priest said.
I turned back to Shay. “Tell me what you want.”
“To give my heart to Claire Nealon.”
Who the hell was Claire Nealon? “Does she
want
your heart?”
I looked at Shay, and then I looked at Michael, and I realized that I had just asked the one question no one had considered up till this point.
“I don’t know if she wants it,” Shay said, “but she needs it.”
“Well, has anyone talked to her?” I turned to Father Michael. “Isn’t that
your
job?”
“Look,” the priest said, “the state has to execute him by lethal injection. And if that happens, organ donation isn’t viable.”
“Not necessarily,” I said slowly.
A lawyer can’t care more about the case than the client does. If I couldn’t convince Shay to enter a courtroom hoping for his life to be spared, then it would be foolish for me to take this on. However, if his mission to donate his heart dovetailed with mine—to strike down the death penalty—then why not use the same loophole law to get what we both wanted? I could fight for him to die on his own terms—donate his organs—and in the process, raise enough awareness about the death penalty to make more people take a stand against it.
I glanced up at my new client and smiled.
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The crazy woman who’d barged in on our little pastoral counseling session was now promising Shay Bourne happy endings she could not deliver. “I need to do a little research,” she explained. “I’m going to come back to see you in a few days.”
Shay, for what it was worth, was staring at her as if she had just handed him the moon. “But you think … you think I’ll be able to donate my heart to her?”
“Yes,” she said. “Maybe.”
Yes. Maybe. Mixed signals, that’s what she was giving him. As opposed to my message:
God. Jesus. One true course
.
She knocked on the window, in just as big a hurry to get out of the conference room as she’d been to enter it. As an officer buzzed open the door, I grasped her upper arm. “Don’t get his hopes up,” I whispered.
She raised a brow. “Don’t cut them down.”
The door closed behind Maggie Bloom, and I watched her walk away through the oblong window in the conference room. In the faint reflection, I could see Shay watching, too. “I like her,” he announced.
“Well,” I sighed. “Good.”
“Did you ever notice how sometimes it’s a mirror, and sometimes it’s glass?”
It took me a moment to realize that he was talking about the reflection. “It’s the way the light hits,” I explained.
“There’s light inside a man of light,” Shay murmured. “It can light up the whole world.” He met my gaze. “So, what were you saying is impossible?”
My grandmother had been so fervently Catholic that she was on the committee of women who would come to scrub down the church, sometimes taking me along. I’d sit in the back, setting up a traffic jam of Matchbox cars on the kneeler. I’d watch her rub Murphy Oil Soap into the scarred wooden pews and sweep down the aisle with a broom; and on Sunday when we went to Mass she’d look around—from the entryway to the arched ceilings to the flickering candles—and nod with satisfaction. On the other hand, my grandfather never went to church. Instead, on Sundays, he fished. In the summer, he went out fly-fishing for bass; in the winter, he cut a hole in the ice and waited, drinking from his thermos of coffee, with steam wreathing his head like a halo.
It wasn’t until I was twelve that I was allowed to skip a Sunday Mass to tag along with my grandfather. My grandmother sent me off with a bag lunch and an old baseball hat to keep the sun off my face. “Maybe you can talk some sense into him,” she said. I had heard enough sermons to understand what happened to those who didn’t truly believe, so I climbed into his little aluminum boat and waited until we had stopped underneath the reaching arm of a willow tree along the shoreline. He took out a fly rod and handed it to me, and then started casting with his own ancient bamboo rod.
One two three, one two three
. There was a rhythm to fly-fishing, like a ballroom dance. I waited until we had both
unspooled the long tongue of line over the lake, until the flies that my grandfather laboriously tied in his basement had lightly come to rest on the surface. “Grandpa,” I asked, “you don’t want to go to hell, do you?”
“Aw, Christ,” he had answered. “Did your grandmother put you up to this?”
“No,” I lied. “I just don’t understand why you never go to Mass with us.”
“I have my own Mass,” he had said. “I don’t need some guy in a collar and a dress telling me what I should and shouldn’t believe.”
Maybe if I’d been older, or smarter, I would have left it alone at that. Instead, I squinted into the sun, up at my grandfather. “But you got married by a priest.”
He sighed. “Yeah, and I even went to parochial school, like you.”
“What made you stop?”
Before he could answer, I felt that tug on my line that always felt like Christmas, the moment before you opened the biggest box under the tree. I reeled in, fighting the whistle and snap of the fish on the other end, certain that I’d never caught anything quite like this before. Finally, it burst out of the water, as if it were being born again.
“A salmon!” my grandfather crowed. “Ten pounds, easy … imagine all the ladders it had to climb to make its way back here from the ocean to spawn.” He held the fish aloft, grinning. “I haven’t seen one in this lake since the sixties!”
I looked down at the fish, still on my line, thrashing in splendor. It was silver and gold and crimson all at once.
My grandfather held the salmon, stilling it enough to unhook the fly, and set the fish back into the lake. We watched
the flag of its tail, the ruddy back as it swam away. “Who says that if you want to find God on a Sunday morning, you ought to be looking in church?” my grandfather murmured.
For a long time after that, I believed my grandfather had it right: God was in the details. But that was before I learned that the requirements of a true believer included Mass every Sunday and holy day of obligation, receiving the Eucharist, reconciliation once a year, giving money to the poor, observing Lent. Or in other words—just because you say you’re Catholic, if you don’t walk the walk, you’re not.
Back when I was at seminary, I imagined I heard my grandfather’s voice:
I thought God was supposed to love you unconditionally. Those sure sound like a lot of conditions to me.
The truth is, I stopped listening.
By the time I left the prison, the crowd outside had doubled in size. There were the ill, the feeble, the old and the hungry, but there was also a small cadre of nuns from a convent up in Maine, and a choir singing “Holy Holy Holy.” I was surprised at how hearsay about a so-called miracle could produce so many converts, so quickly.
“You see?” I heard a woman say, pointing to me. “Even Father Michael’s here.”
She was a parishioner, and her son had cystic fibrosis. He was here, too, in a wheelchair being pushed by his father.
“Is it true, then?” the man asked. “Can this guy really work miracles?”
“
God
can,” I said, heading that question off at the pass. I put my hand on the boy’s forehead. “Dear St. John of God, patron saint of those who are ill, I ask for your intercession that
the Lord will have mercy on this child and return him to health. I ask this in Jesus’s name.”
Not
Shay Bourne’s, I thought.
“Amen,” the parents murmured.
“If you’ll excuse me,” I said, turning away.
The chances of Shay Bourne being Jesus were about as likely as me being God. These people, these falsely faithful, didn’t know Shay Bourne—they’d never
met
Shay Bourne. They were imposing the face of our Savior on a man with a tendency to talk to himself; a man whose hands had been covered with the blood of two innocent people. They were confusing show-manship and inexplicable events with divinity. A miracle was a miracle only until it could be proved otherwise.
I started pushing through the mob, moving in the opposite direction, away from the prison gates, a man on a mission. Maggie Bloom wasn’t the only one who could do research.
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In retrospect, it would have been much simpler to place a phone call to a medical professional who might lecture me on the ins and outs of organ donation. But it could take a week for a busy doctor to call me back, and my route home from the prison skirted the grounds of the Concord hospital, and I was still buzzing with righteous legal fervor. These are the only grounds I can offer for why I decided to stop in the emergency room. The faster I could speak to an expert, the faster I could start building Shay’s case.
However, the triage nurse—a large graying woman who looked like a battleship—compressed her mouth into a flat line when I asked to talk to a doctor. “What’s the problem?” she asked.
“I’ve got a few questions—”
“So does everyone else in that waiting room, but you’ll still have to explain the nature of the illness to me.”
“Oh, I’m not sick …”
She glanced around me. “Then where’s the patient?”
“At the state prison.”
The nurse shook her head. “The patient has to be present for registration.”
I found that hard to believe. Surely someone knocked unconscious in a car accident wasn’t left waiting in the hall until he came to and could recite his Blue Cross group number.
“We’re busy,” the nurse said. “When the patient arrives, sign in again.”
“But I’m a lawyer—”
“Then sue me,” the nurse replied.
I walked back to the waiting room and sat down next to a college-age boy with a bloody washcloth wrapped around his hand. “I did that once,” I said. “Cutting a bagel.”