by Jodi Picoult
I was an artist by vocation, and now by avocation—although it’s been considerably more challenging to get my supplies in a place like this. Where I had once favored Winsor & 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 ebony curls from a picture of a coal mine in a National Geographic and added a dab of shampoo to make a chalky paint. With the broken tip of a pencil, I had transferred the color to my makeshift canvas.
God, he was beautiful.
It was after three a.m., but to be honest, I don’t sleep much. When I do, I find myself getting up 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.
Tonight, 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 re-creating Adam. But I got sidetracked by the other portraits I’d finished of him, hanging on my cell wall: 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 opened his eyes in the morning. Adam, looking over his shoulder, the way he’d been when I shot him.
“I need to do it,” Shay Bourne said. “It’s the only way.”
He had been utterly silent since this afternoon’s arrival on I-tier; I wondered who he was having a conversation with at this hour of the night. But the pod was empty. Maybe he was having a nightmare. “Bourne?” I whispered. “Are you okay?”
“Who’s . . . there?”
The words were hard for him—not quite a stutter; more like each syllable was a stone he had to bring forth. “I’m Lucius. Lucius DuFresne,” I said. “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.
It was a joke, but he didn’t take it that way. “You’re no luckier than me, and I’m no unluckier than you,” he said.
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, in school, an 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 on TV today . . . the Red Sox . . .”
Everyone on I-tier had a team they followed, myself included. We each kept meticulous score of their league standings, 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 World Series. But it was still preseason; there hadn’t been any televised games today.
“Schilling was sitting at a table,” Shay added, still struggling to find the right words. “And there was a little girl—”
“You mean the fund-raiser? 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. 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 help 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 other officers could enter.
“Is he breathing?” one said.
“Turn him over, 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.
MICHAEL
There was a great deal that I loved about the Church.
Like the feeling I got when two hundred voices rose to the rafters during Sunday Mass in prayer. Or the way my hand still shook when I offered the host to a parishioner. I loved the double take on the face of a troubled teenager when he drooled over the 1969 Triumph Trophy motorcycle I’d restored—and then found out I was a priest; that being cool and being Catholic were not mutually exclusive.
Even though I was clearly the junior priest at St. Catherine’s, we were one of only four parishes to serve all of Concord, New Hampshire. There never seemed to be enough hours in the day. Father Walter and I would alternate officiating at Mass or hearing confession; sometimes we’d be asked to drop in and teach a class at the parochial school one town over. There were always parishioners to visit who were ill or troubled or lonely; there were always rosaries to be said. But I looked forward to even the humblest act—sweeping the vestibule, or rinsing the vessels from the Eucharist in the sacrarium so that no drop of Precious Blood wound up in the Concord sewers.
I didn’t have an office at St. Catherine’s. Father Walter did, but then he’d been at the parish so long that he seemed as much a part of it as the rosewood pews and the velveteen drapes at the altar. Although he kept telling me he’d get around to clearing out a spot for me in one of the old storage rooms, he tended to nap after lunch, and who was I to wake up a man in his seventies and tell him to get a move on? After a while, I gave up asking and instead set a small desk up inside a broom closet. Today, I was supposed to be writing a homily—if I could get it down to seven minutes, I knew the older members of the congregation wouldn’t fall asleep—but instead, my mind kept straying to one of our youngest members. Hannah Smythe was the first baby I baptized at St. Catherine’s. Now, just one year later, the infant had been hospitalized repeatedly. Without warning, her throat would simply close, and her
frantic parents would rush her to the ER for intubation, where the vicious cycle would start all over again. I offered up a quick prayer to God to lead the doctors to cure Hannah. I was just finishing up with the sign of the cross when a small, silver-haired lady approached my desk. “Father Michael?”
“Mary Lou,” I said. “How are you doing?”
“Could I maybe talk to you for a few minutes?”
Mary Lou Huckens could talk not only for a few minutes; she was likely to go on for nearly an hour. Father Walter and I had an unwritten policy to rescue each other from her effusive praise after Mass. “What can I do for you?”
“Actually, I feel a little silly about this,” she admitted. “I just wanted to know if you’d bless my bust.”
I smiled at her. Parishioners often asked us to offer a prayer over a devotional item. “Sure. Have you got it with you?”
She gave me an odd look. “Well, of course I do.”
“Great. Let’s see it.”
She crossed her hands over her chest. “I hardly think that’s necessary!”
I felt heat flood my cheeks as I realized what she actually wanted me to bless. “I-I’m sorry . . .” I stammered. “I didn’t mean . . .”
Her eyes filled with tears. “They’re doing a lumpectomy tomorrow, Father, and I’m terrified.”
I stood up and put my arm around her, walked her a few yards to the closest pew, offered her Kleenex. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know who else to talk to. If I tell my husband I’m scared, he’ll get scared, too.”
“You know who to talk to,” I said gently. “And you know He’s always listening.” I touched the crown of her head. “Omnipotent and eternal God, the everlasting Salvation of those who believe, hear us on behalf of Thy servant Mary Lou, for whom we beg the aid of Thy pitying mercy, that with her bodily health restored, she may give thanks to Thee in Thy church. Through Christ our Lord, amen.”
“Amen,” Mary Lou whispered.
That’s the other thing I love about the Church: you never know what to expect.
Lucius
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 to 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 his request at the top of his lungs. 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’s a retard,” Crash answered. “Can’t help how he acts. Kinda like our own diaper sniper. Right, Joey?”
“He’s not mentally challenged,” I said. “He’s probably got double the IQ that you do, Crash.”
“Shut the fuck up, fruiter,” Calloway said. “Shut up, all of you!” The urgency in his voice silenced us. Calloway 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 one another, 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. “Its 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.”
“Use your T-shirt,” Joey added.
“I don’t take advice from a cho-mo,” Calloway said, but then, a moment later: “You think a T-shirt will work?”
While Shay yelled for the warden, we all listened to Calloway’s play-by-play: The robin was wrapped in a shirt. The robin was tucked inside his left tennis shoe. The robin was pinking up. The robin had opened its left eye for a half second.
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.
“Cowboys 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.
“They don’t know what it could be,” CO Smythe said. “They’ve ruled out pulmonary problems and asthma. They’re saying maybe an allergy—but there’s nothing in her room anymore, Rick, it’s bare as a cell.”
Sometimes the COs talked to one another in front of us. They never spoke to inmates directly about their lives, and that actually was fine. We didn’t want to know that the guy strip-searching us had a son who scored the winning goal in his soccer game last Thursday. Better to take the humanity out of it.
“They said,” Smythe continued, “that her heart can’t keep taking this kind of stress. And neither can I. You know what it’s like to see your baby with all these bags and wires coming out of her?”
The second CO, Whitaker, was a Catholic who liked to include, on my dinner tray, handwritten scripture verses that denounced homosexuality. “Father Walter led a prayer for Hannah on Sunday. He said he’d be happy to visit you at the hospital.”
“There’s nothing a priest can say that I want to hear,” Smythe muttered. “What kind of God would do this to a baby?”
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,” Smythe said, leading Shay toward his cell. “He wants you to come for high friggin’ tea.”
“I just need five minutes with him—”
“You’re not the only one with problems,” Smythe snapped. “Fill out a request.”
“I can’t,” Shay replied.
I cleared my throat. “Officer? Could I have a request form, too, please?”
He finished locking Shay up, 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 get my words to come out right.”
“I’m sure the warden doesn’t care about grammar.”
“No, it’s when I write. When I start, the letters all get tangled.”
“Then tell me, and I’ll write the note.”
There was a silence. “You’d do that for me?”
“Will you two cut the soap opera?” Crash said. “You’re making me sick.”
“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 I do.”
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.”
“You know, Bourne,” Crash mused, “I don’t know what to make of you. I mean, on the one hand, you’re a child-killing piece of shit. You might as well be fungus growing on Joey, for what you done to that little girl. But on the other hand, you took down a cop, and I for one am truly grateful there’s one less pig in the world. So how am I supposed to feel? Do I hate you, or do I give you my respect?”
“Neither,” Shay said. “Both.”
“You know what I think? Baby killing beats anything good you might have done.” Crash stood up at the front of his cell and began to bang a metal coffee mug against the Plexiglas. “Throw him out. Throw him out. Throw him out!”
Joey—unused to being even one notch above low-man-on-the-totem-pole—was the first to join in the singing. Then Texas and Pogie started in, because they did whatever Crash told them to do.
Throw him out.
Throw him out.
Whitaker’s voice bled through the loudspeaker. “You got a problem, Vitale?”
“I don’t got a problem. This punk-ass child killer here’s the one with the problem. I tell you what, Officer. You let me out for five minutes, and I’ll save the good taxpayers of New Hampshire the trouble of getting rid of him—”
“Crash,” Shay said softly. “Cool off.”
I was distracted by a whistling noise coming from my tiny sink. I had no sooner stood up to investigate than the water burst out of the spigot. This was remarkable on two counts—normally, the water pressure was no greater than a trickle, even in the showers. And the water that was splashing over the sides of the metal bowl was a deep, rich red.