by Jodi Picoult
But she was serious, and I was just as serious when I refused. The last thing in the world I wanted to do was sit down with that monster to make him feel better about himself so that he could die at peace.
Kurt didn't. Elizabeth didn't. Why should he?
I thought that was that, until one morning when there was a knock on the door. Claire was lying on the couch with Dudley curled over her feet, watching the Game Show Network. Our days were spent waiting for a heart with the shades drawn, both of us pretending there was nowhere we wanted to go, when in reality, neither of us could stand seeing how even the smallest trips exhausted Claire. "I'll get it," she called out, although we both knew she couldn't and wouldn't. I put down the knife I was using to chop celery in the kitchen and wiped my hands on my jeans.
"I bet it's that creepy guy who was selling magazines," Claire said as I passed her.
"I bet it's not." He'd been a corn-fed Utah boy, pitching subscriptions to benefit the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. I'd been upstairs in the shower; Claire had been talking to him through the screen door--for which I'd read her the riot act. It was that word Saints that had intrigued her; she didn't know it was a fancy word for Mormon. I had suggested that he try a town where there hadn't been a double murder committed by a young man who'd come around door to door looking for work, and after he left, I'd called the police.
No, I was sure it wasn't the same guy.
To my surprise, though, a priest was standing on my porch. His motorcycle was parked in my driveway. I opened the door and tried to smile politely. "I think you have the wrong house."
"I'm sure I don't, Ms. Nealon," I replied. "I'm Father Michael, from St. Catherine's. I was hoping I could speak to you for a few minutes."
"I'm sorry ... do I know you?"
He hesitated. "No," he said. "But I was hoping to change that."
My natural inclination was to slam the door. (Was that a mortal sin? Did it matter, if you didn't even believe in mortal sins?) I could tell you the exact moment I had given up on religion. Kurt and I had been raised Catholic. We'd had Elizabeth baptized, and a priest presided over their burials. After that, I had promised myself I would never set foot in a church again, that there was nothing God could do for me that would make up for what I'd lost. However, this priest was a stranger. For all I knew, though, this was not about saving my soul but about saving Claire's life. What if this priest knew of a heart that UNOS didn't?
"The house is a mess," I said, but I opened the door so that he could walk inside. He stopped as we passed the living room, where Claire was still watching television. She turned, her thin, pale face rising like a moon over the back of the sofa. "This is my daughter," I said as I turned to him, and faltered--he was looking at Claire as if she were already a ghost.
I was just about to throw him out when Claire said hello and propped her elbows on the back of the sofa. "Do you know anything about saints?"
"Claire!"
She rolled her eyes. "I'm just asking, Mom."
"I do," the priest said. "I've always sort of liked St. Ulric. He's the patron saint who keeps moles away."
"Get out."
"Have you ever had a mole in here?"
"No."
"Then I guess he's doing his job," he said, and grinned.
Because he'd made Claire smile, I decided to let him in and give him the benefit of the doubt. He followed me into the kitchen, where I knew we could talk without Claire overhearing. "Sorry about the third degree," I said. "Claire reads a lot. Saints are her latest obsession. Six months ago, it was blacksmithing." I gestured to the table, offering him a seat.
"About Claire," he said. "I know she's sick. That's why I'm here."
Although I'd hoped for this, my own heart still leapfrogged. "Can you help her?"
"Possibly," the priest said. "But I need you to agree to something first."
I would have become a nun; I would have walked over burning coals. "Anything," I vowed.
"I know the prosecutor's office already asked you about restorative justice--"
"Get out of my house," I said abruptly, but Father Michael didn't move.
My face flamed--with anger, and with shame that I had not connected the dots: Shay Bourne wanted to donate his organs; I was actively searching for a heart for Claire. In spite of all the news coverage from the prison, I had never linked them. I wondered whether I had been naive, or whether, even subconsciously, I'd been trying to protect my daughter.
It took all my strength to lift my gaze to the priest's. "What makes you think I would want a part of that man still walking around on this earth, much less inside my child?"
"June--please, just listen to me. I'm Shay's spiritual advisor. I talk to him. And I think you should talk to him, too."
"Why? Because it rubs your conscience the wrong way to give sympathy to a murderer? Because you can't sleep at night?"
"Because I think a good person can do bad things. Because God forgives, and I can't do any less."
Do you know how, when you are on the verge of a breakdown, the world pounds in your ears--a rush of blood, of consequence? Do you know how it feels when the truth cuts your tongue to ribbons, and still you have to speak it? "Nothing he says to me could make any difference."
"You're absolutely right," Father Michael said. "But what you say to him might."
There was one variable that the priest had left out of this equation: I owed Shay Bourne nothing. It already felt like a second, searing death to watch the broadcasts each night, to hear the voices of supporters camping out near the prison, who brought their sick children and their dying partners along to be healed. You fools, I wanted to shout to them. Don't you know he's conned you, just like he conned me? Don't you know that he killed my love, my little girl? "Name one person John Wayne Gacy killed," I demanded.
"I ... I don't know," Father Michael said.
"Jeffrey Dahmer?"
He shook his head.
"But you remember their names, don't you?"
He got out of his chair and walked toward me slowly. "June, people can change."
My mouth twisted. "Yeah. Like a mild-mannered, homeless carpenter who becomes a psychopath?"
Or a silver-haired fairy of a girl whose chest, in a heartbeat, blooms with a peony of blood. Or a mother who turns into a woman she never imagined being: bitter, empty, broken.
I knew why this priest wanted me to meet with Shay Bourne. I knew what Jesus had said: Don't pay back in kind, pay back in kindness. If someone does wrong to you, do right by them.
I'll tell you this: Jesus never buried his own child.
I turned away, because I didn't want to give him the satisfaction of seeing me cry, but he put his arm around me and led me to a chair. He handed me a tissue. And then his voice, a murmur, clotted into individual words.
"Dear St. Felicity, patron saint of those who've suffered the death of a child, I ask for your intercession that the Lord will help this woman find peace ..."
With more strength than I knew I had, I shoved him away. "Don't you dare," I said, my voice trembling. "Don't you pray for me. Because if God's listening now, he's about eleven years too late." I walked toward the refrigerator, where the only decoration was a picture of Kurt and Elizabeth, held up by a magnet Claire had made in kindergarten. I had fingered the photo so often that the edges had rounded; the color had bled onto my hands. "When it happened, everyone said that Kurt and Elizabeth were at peace. That they'd gone someplace better. But you know what? They didn't go anywhere. They were taken. I was robbed."
"Don't blame God for that, June," Father Michael said. "He didn't take your husband and your daughter."
"No," I said flatly. "That was Shay Bourne." I stared up at him coldly. "I'd like you to leave now."
I walked him to the door, because I didn't want him saying another word to Claire--who twisted around on the couch to see what was going on but must have picked up enough nonverbal cues from my stiff spine to know better than to make a peep.
At the threshold, Father Michael paused. "It may not be when we want, or how we want, but eventually God evens the score," he said. "You don't have to be the one to seek revenge."
I stared at him. "It's not revenge," I said. "It's justice."
After the priest left, I was so cold that I could not stop shivering. I put on a sweater and then another, and wrapped a blanket around myself, but there's no way of warming up a body whose insides have turned to stone.
Shay Bourne wanted to donate his heart to Claire so that she'd live.
What kind of mother would I be if I let that happen?
And what kind of mother would I be if I turned him down?
Father Michael said Shay Bourne wanted to balance the scales: give me one daughter's life because he had taken another's. But Claire wouldn't replace Elizabeth; I should have had them both. And yet, this was the simplest of equations: You can have one, or you can have neither. What do you choose?
I was the one who hated Bourne--Claire had never met him. If I did not take the heart, was I making that choice because of what I thought was best for Claire ... or what I could withstand myself?
I imagined Dr. Wu removing Bourne's heart from an Igloo cooler. There it was, a withered nut, a crystal black as coal. Put one drop of poison into the purest water, and what happens to the rest?
If I didn't take Bourne's heart, Claire would most likely die.
If I did, it would be like saying I could somehow be compensated for the death of my husband and daughter. And I couldn't--not ever.
I believe a good person can do bad things, Father Michael had said. Like make the wrong decision for the right reasons. Sign your daughter's life away, because she can't have a murderer's heart.
Forgive me, Claire, I thought, and suddenly I wasn't cold anymore. I was burning, seared by the tears on my cheeks.
I couldn't trust Shay Bourne's sudden altruistic turnaround; and maybe that meant he had won: I had gone just as bitter and rotten as he was. But that only made me more certain that I had the stamina to tell him, face-to-face, what balancing the scales really meant. It wasn't giving me a heart for Claire; it wasn't offering a future that might ease the weight of the past. It was knowing that Shay Bourne badly wanted something, and that this time, I'd be the one to take his dream away.
Maggie
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Stunned, I hung up the phone and stared at the receiver again. I was tempted to *69 the call, just to make sure it hadn't been some kind of prank.
Well, maybe miracles did happen.
But before I could mull over this change of events, I heard footsteps heading toward my desk. Father Michael turned the corner, looking like he'd just been through Dante's Inferno. "June Nealon wants nothing to do with Shay."
"That's interesting," I said, "since June Nealon just got off the phone with me, agreeing to a restorative justice meeting."
Father Michael blanched. "You've got to call her back. This isn't a good idea."
"You're the one who came up with it."
"That was before I spoke to her. If she goes to that meeting, it's not because she wants to hear what Shay has to say. It's because she wants to run him through before the state finishes him off."
"Did you really think that whatever Shay has to say to her is going to be any less painful than what she says to him?"
"I don't know ... I thought that maybe if they saw each other ..." He sank down into a chair in front of my desk. "I don't know what I'm doing. I guess there are just some things you can't make amends for."
I sighed. "You're trying. That's the best any of us can do. Look, it's not like I fight death penalty cases all the time--but my boss used to. He worked down in Virginia before he came up north. They're emotional minefields--you get to know the inmate, and you excuse some heinous crime with a lousy childhood or alcoholism or an emotional upheaval or drugs, until you see the victim's family and a whole different level of suffering. And suddenly you start to feel a little ashamed of being in the defendant's camp."
I walked to a small cooler next to a file cabinet and took out a bottle of water for the priest. "Shay's guilty, Father. A court already told us that. June knows it. I know it. Everyone knows that it's wrong to execute an innocent man. The real question is whether it's still wrong to execute someone who's guilty."
"But you're trying to get him hanged," Father Michael said.
"I'm not trying to get him hanged," I corrected. "I want to champion his civil liberties, and at the same time, bring front and center what's wrong with the death penalty in this country. The only way to do both is to find a way for him to die the way he wants to. That's the difference between you and me. You're trying to find a way for him to die the way you want him to."
"You're the one who said Shay's heart might not be a viable match. And even if it is, June Nealon will never agree to taking it," the priest said.
That was, of course, entirely possible. What Father Michael had conveniently put out of his mind when he dreamed up a meeting between June and Shay was that in order to forgive, you have to remember how you were hurt in the first place. And that in order to forget, you had to accept your role in what had happened.
"If we don't want Shay to lose hope," I said, "then we'd better not lose it either."
MICHAEL
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Every day when I wasn't running the noon Mass, I went to visit Shay. Sometimes we talked about television shows we'd seen--we were both pretty upset with Meredith on Grey's Anatomy, and thought the girls on The Bachelor were hot but dumb as bricks. Sometimes we talked about carpentry, how a piece of wood would tell him what it needed to be, how I could say the same of a parishioner in need. Sometimes we talked about his case--the appeals he'd lost, the lawyers he'd had over the years. And sometimes, he was less lucid. He'd run around his cell like a caged animal; he'd rock back and forth; he'd swing from topic to topic as if it was the only way to cross the jungle of his thoughts.
One day, Shay asked me what was being said about him outside.
"You know," I told him. "You watch the news."
"They think I can save them," Shay said.
"Well. Yeah."
"That's pretty fucking selfish, isn't it? Or is it selfish of me if I don't try?"
"I can't answer that for you, Shay," I said.
He sighed. "I'm tired of waiting to die," he said. "Eleven years is a long time."
I pressed my stool up close to the cell door; it was more private that way. It had taken me a week, but I had managed to separate out the way I felt about Shay's case from the way that he felt. I had been stunned to learn that Shay believed he was innocent--although Warden Coyne told me that everyone in prison believed they were innocent, regardless of the conviction. I wondered if his memory of the events, over time, had blurred--me, I could still remember that awful evidence as if it had been presented to me yesterday. When I pushed a bit--encouraged him to tell me more about his wrongful conviction, suggested that Maggie might be able to use the information in court, asked him why he was willing to go along with an execution so passively if he wasn't guilty--he shut down. He'd say, over and over, that what had happened then didn't matter now. I began to understand that proclaiming his innocence had a lot less to do with the reality of his case and more to do with the fragile connection between us. I was becoming his confidant--and he wanted me to think the best of him.
"What do you think is easier?" Shay asked. "Knowing you're going to die on a certain date and time, or knowing it might happen any moment when you least expect it?"
A thought swam through my mind like a minnow: Did you ask Elizabeth that? "I'd rather not know," I said. "Live every day like it's your last, and all that. But I think if you do know you're going to die, Christ showed the way to do it with grace."
Shay smirked. "Just think. It took you a whole forty-two minutes to bring up good ol' Jesus today."
"Sorry. Professional hazard," I said. "When He says, in Gethsemane, 'O my Fath
er, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me ...' He's wrestling with destiny ... but ultimately, He accepts God's will."
"Sucks for him," Shay said.
"Well, sure. I bet His legs felt like Jell-O when He was carrying the Cross. He was human, after all. You can be brave, but that doesn't keep your stomach from doing somersaults."
I finished speaking to find Shay staring at me. "Did you ever wonder if you're dead wrong?"
"About what?"
"All of it. What Jesus said. What Jesus meant. I mean, he didn't even write the Bible, did he? In fact, the people who did write the Bible weren't even alive when Jesus was." I must have looked absolutely stricken, because Shay hurried to continue. "Not that Jesus wasn't a really cool guy--great teacher, excellent speaker, yadda yadda yadda. But ... Son of God? Where's the proof?"
"That's what faith is," I said. "Believing without seeing."
"Okay," Shay argued. "But what about the folks who think Allah's the one to put your money on? Or that the right path is the eightfold one? I mean, how can a guy who walked on water even get baptized?"
"We know Jesus was baptized because--"
"Because it's in the Bible?" Shay laughed. "Someone wrote the Bible, and it wasn't God. Just like someone wrote the Quran, and the Talmud. And he must have made decisions about what went in and what didn't. It's like when you write a letter, and you put in all the stuff you did during vacation but you leave out the part where your wallet got stolen and you got food poisoning."
"Do you really need to know if Jesus got food poisoning?" I asked.
"You're missing the point. You can't take Matthew 26:39 or Luke 500:43 or whatever and read it as fact."
"See, Shay, that's where you're wrong. I can take Matthew 26:39 and know it's the word of God. Or Luke 500:43, if it went up that high."
By now, other inmates on the pod were eavesdropping. Some of them--like Joey Kunz, who was Greek Orthodox, and Pogie, who was Southern Baptist--liked to listen when I visited Shay and read scripture; a few of them had even asked if I'd stop by and pray with them when I came in to see Shay. "Shut your piehole, Bourne," Pogie yelled out. "You're going to hell as soon as they push that needle in your arm."