Authors: Jodi Picoult
Then again, maybe
everything
was when it came to Shay. Here I was literally shaking over the news that he’d been seriously injured, when I had spent yesterday filing motions that would streamline his execution.
The nurse looked up at me. “He’s just come back from surgery.”
“
Surgery
?”
“Yes,” said a clipped British voice behind me. “And no, it wasn’t an appendectomy.”
When I turned around, Dr. Gallagher was standing there.
“Are you the
only
doctor who works here?”
“It certainly feels that way sometimes. I’m happy to answer your questions. Mr. Bourne is my patient.”
“He’s my client.”
Dr. Gallagher glanced at the nurse and at the armed officers. “Why don’t we go somewhere to talk?”
I followed him down the hall to a small family waiting lounge that was empty. When the doctor gestured for me to take a seat, my heart sank. Doctors only made you sit down when they delivered bad news.
“Mr. Bourne is going to be fine,” Dr. Gallagher said. “At least in terms of this injury.”
“
What
injury?”
“I’m sorry, I thought you knew—apparently, it was an inmate fight. Mr. Bourne sustained a severe blow to the maxillary sinus.”
I waited for him to translate.
“His maxilla’s broken,” Dr. Gallagher said, and he leaned forward, touching my face. His fingers brushed over the bone below my eye socket, tracing toward my mouth. “Here,” he said, and I absolutely, positively stopped breathing. “There was a bit of a trauma during the operation. As soon as we saw the injuries we knew that the anesthesia would be intravenous, instead of inhalational. Needless to say, when Mr. Bourne heard the anesthesiologist say that she’d begun Sodium Pentothal drip, he grew quite agitated.” The doctor looked up at me. “He asked if this was a dry run for the real thing.”
I tried to imagine how it would feel to be Shay—hurt, aching, and confused—whisked away to an unfamiliar place for what seemed to be a prelude to his own execution. “I want to see him.”
“If you can tell him, Ms. Bloom, that if I’d realized who he was—what his circumstances are, I mean—well, I would never have allowed the anesthesiologist to use that drug, much less an IV tube. I’m deeply sorry for putting him through that.”
I nodded and stood up.
“One more thing,” Dr. Gallagher said. “I really admire you. For doing this sort of thing.”
I was halfway to Shay’s room when I realized that Dr. Gallagher had remembered my name.
It took several cell phone calls to the prison before I was allowed in to see Shay, and even then, the warden insisted that the officer inside the room would have to stay. I walked inside, acknowledged the CO, and sat down on the edge of Shay’s bed. His eyes were blackened, his face bandaged. He was asleep, and it made him look younger.
Part of what I did for a living meant championing the causes of my clients. I was the strong arm, fighting on their behalf, the bullhorn broadcasting their voices. I could feel the angry discomfort of the Abenaki boy whose school team was called the Redskins; I could identify with the passion of the teacher who’d been fired for being Wiccan. Shay, though, had sent me reeling. Although this was arguably the most important case I would ever bring to court, and although—as my father pointed out—I hadn’t been this motivated in my career in ages, there was an inherent paradox. The more I got to know him, the better chance I had of winning his organ donation case. But the more I got to know him, the harder it would be for me to see him executed.
I dragged my cell phone out of my purse. The officer’s eyes flicked toward me. “You’re not supposed to use that in here—”
“Oh, piss off,” I snapped, and for the hundredth time I dialed Father Michael, and reached his voice mail. “I don’t know where you are,” I said, “but call me back
immediately
.”
I had left the emotional component of Shay Bourne’s welfare to Father Michael, figuring (a) my talents were better put to use in a courtroom, and (b) my interpersonal relationship skills had grown so rusty I needed WD-40 before employing them. But now, Father Michael was MIA, Shay was hospitalized, and I was here, for better or for worse.
I stared at Shay’s hands. They were cuffed at the wrist to the metal bars of the hospital gurney. The nails were clean and clipped, the tendons ropy. It was hard to imagine the fingers curled around a pistol, pulling a trigger twice. And yet, twelve jurors had been able to picture it.
Very slowly, I reached across the knobby cotton blanket. I threaded my fingers with Shay’s, surprised at how warm his skin was. But when I was about to pull away, his grip tightened. His eyes slitted open, another shade of blue amid the bruising. “Gracie,” he said, in a voice that sounded like cotton caught on thorns. “You came.”
I did not know who he thought I was. “Of
course
I came,” I said, squeezing his hand. I smiled at Shay Bourne and pretended that I was the person he needed me to be.
|||||||||||||||||||||||||
Dr. Vijay Choudhary’s office was filled with statues of Ganesha, the Hindu deity with a potbellied human body and an elephant’s head. I had to move one in order to sit down, in fact. “Mr. Smythe was extremely lucky,” the doctor said. “A quarter inch to the left, and he wouldn’t have survived.”
“About that …” I took a deep breath. “A doctor at the prison pronounced him dead.”
“Between you and me, Father, I wouldn’t trust a psy chiatrist to find his own car in a parking lot, much less a hypo tensive victim’s pulse. Reports of Mr. Smythe’s death were, as they say, greatly exaggerated.”
“There was a lot of blood—”
“Many structures in the neck can bleed a great deal. To a layman, a pool of blood may look like a huge quantity, even when it’s not.” He shrugged. “What I imagine happened was a vasovagal reaction. Mr. Smythe saw blood and passed out. The body compensates for shock due to blood loss. Blood pressure lowers, and vasoconstriction occurs, and both tend to stop the bleeding. They also lead to a loss of palpable pulses in the extremities—which is why the psychiatrist couldn’t find one in his wrist.”
“So,” I said, pinkening. “You don’t think it’s possible that Mr. Smythe was … well … resurrected?”
“No,” he chuckled. “Now, in medical school, I saw patients
who’d frozen to death, in the vernacular, come back to life when they were warmed up. I saw a heart stop beating, and then start up by itself again. But in neither of those cases—or in Mr. Smythe’s—did I consider the patient clinically dead before his or her recovery.”
My phone began to vibrate, as it had every ten minutes for the past two hours. I’d turned the ringer off when I came into the hospital, as per their policy. “Nothing miraculous, then,” I said.
“Perhaps not by your standards … but I think that Mr. Smythe’s family might disagree.”
I thanked him, set the statue of Ganesha back on my chair, and left Dr. Choudhary’s office. As soon as I exited the hospital building, I turned on my cell phone to see fifty-two messages.
Call me right back
, Maggie said on her message.
Something’s happened to Shay
. Beep.
Where are you??
Beep.
Okay, I know you probably don’t have your phone on but you have to call me back immediately.
Beep.
Where the fuck are you?
Beep.
I hung up and dialed her cell phone. “Maggie Bloom,” she whispered, answering.
“What happened to Shay?”
“He’s in the hospital.”
“What?!
Which
hospital?”
“Concord. Where are you?”
“Standing outside the ER.”
“Then for God’s sake, get up here. He’s in room 514.”
I ran up the stairs, pushing past doctors and nurses and lab technicians and secretaries, as if my speed now could make up for the fact that I had not been available for Shay
when he needed me. The armed officers at the door took one look at my collar—a free pass, especially on a Sunday afternoon—and let me inside. Maggie was curled up on the bed, her shoes off, her feet tucked underneath her. She was holding Shay’s hand, although I would have been hard-pressed to recognize the patient as the man I’d talked to just yesterday. His skin was the color of fine ash; his hair had been shaved in one patch to accommodate stitches to close a gash. His nose—broken, from the looks of it—was covered with gauze, and the nostrils were plugged with cotton.
“Dear God,” I breathed.
“From what I can understand, he came out on the short end of a prison hit,” Maggie said.
“That’s not possible. I was
there
during the prison hit—”
“Apparently, you left before Act Two.”
I glanced at the officer who stood like a sentry in the corner of the hospital room. The man looked at me and nodded in confirmation.
“I already called Warden Coyne at home to give him hell,” Maggie said. “He’s meeting me at the prison in a half hour to talk about additional security measures that can be put in place to protect Shay until his execution—when what he really means is ‘What can I do to keep you from suing?’ ” She turned to me. “Can you sit here with Shay?”
It was a Sunday, and I was utterly, absolutely lost. I was on an unofficial leave of absence from St. Catherine’s, and although I had always known I’d feel adrift without God, I had underestimated how aimless I would feel without my church. Usually at this time, I would be hanging my robes after celebrating Mass. I would go with Father Walter to have lunch with a parishioner. Then we’d head back to his place
and watch the preseason Sox game on TV, have a couple of beers. What religion did for me went beyond belief—it made me part of a community.
“I can stay,” I answered.
“Then I’m out of here,” Maggie said. “He hasn’t woken up, not really, anyway. And the nurse said he’ll probably have to pee when he does, and that we should use this torture device.” She pointed at a plastic jug with a long neck. “I don’t know about you, but I’m not getting paid enough for that.” She paused in the doorway. “I’ll call you later. Turn on your damn phone.”
When she left, I pulled a chair closer to Shay’s bed. I read the plastic placard about how to raise and lower the mattress, and the list of which television channels were available. I said an entire rosary, and still Shay didn’t stir.
At the edge of the bed, Shay’s medical chart hung on a metal clip. I skimmed through the language that I didn’t understand—the injury, the medications, his vital statistics. Then I glanced at the patient name at the top of the page:
I. M. Bourne
Isaiah Matthew Bourne. We had been told this at his trial, but I had forgotten that Shay was not his Christian name. “I. M. Bourne,” I said aloud. “Sounds like a guy Trump would hire.”
I am born.
Was this a hint, another puzzle piece of evidence?
There were two ways of looking at any situation. What one person sees as a prisoner’s babble, another might recognize as words from a long-lost gospel. What one person sees as a medically viable stroke of luck, another might see as a resurrection. I thought of Lucius being healed, of the water into wine, of the followers who had so easily believed in Shay.
I thought of a thirty-three-year-old man, a carpenter, facing execution. I thought of Rabbi Bloom’s idea—that every generation had a person in it capable of being the Messiah.
There is a point when you stand at the edge of the cliff of hard evidence, look across to what lies on the other side, and step forward. Otherwise, you wind up going nowhere. I stared at Shay, and maybe for the first time, I didn’t see who he was. I saw who he might be.
As if he could feel my gaze, he began to toss and turn. Only one of his eyes could slit open; the other was swollen shut. “Father,” he rasped in a voice still cushioned with medication. “Where am I?”
“You were hurt. You’re going to be all right, Shay.”
In the corner of the room, the officer was staring at us. “Do you think we could have a minute alone? I’d like to pray in private with him.”
The officer hesitated—as well he should have: what clergyman isn’t accustomed to praying in front of others? Then he shrugged. “Guess a priest wouldn’t do anything funny,” he said. “Your boss is tougher than mine.”
People anthropomorphized God all the time—as a boss, as a lifesaver, as a justice, as a father. No one ever pictured him as a convicted murderer. But if you put aside the physical trappings of the body—something that all the apostles had had to do after Jesus was resurrected—then maybe anything was possible.
As the officer backed out of the room, Shay winced. “My face …” He tried to lift up his hand to touch the bandages, but found that he was handcuffed to the bed. Struggling, he began to pull harder.
“Shay,” I said firmly, “don’t.”
“It hurts. I want drugs …”
“You’re already on drugs,” I told him. “We only have a few minutes till the officer comes back in, so we have to talk while we can.”
“I don’t want to talk.”
Ignoring him, I leaned closer. “Tell me,” I whispered. “Tell me who you are.”
A wary hope lit Shay’s eyes; he’d probably never expected to be recognized as the Lord. He went very still, never taking his eyes off mine. “Tell me who
you
are.”
In the Catholic Church, there were lies of commission and lies of omission. The first referred to telling an outright falsehood, the second to withholding the truth. Both were sins.
I had lied to Shay since before the moment we met. He’d counted on me to help him donate his heart, but he’d never realized how black mine was. How could I expect Him to reveal Himself when I hadn’t done the same?
“You’re right,” I said quietly. “There’s something I haven’t told you … about who I used to be, before I was a priest.”
“Let me guess … an altar boy.”
“I was a college student, majoring in math. I didn’t even go to church until after I served on the jury.”
“What jury?”
I hesitated. “The one that sentenced you to death, Shay.”
He stared at me for a long minute, and then he turned away. “Get out.”