by Jodi Picoult
“Because I like the bird,” Shay murmured.
I was the first one to laugh, then Texas snickered. Joey, too—but only because Crash wasn’t present to shut him up.
“Bourne,” Calloway said, the first words any of us had heard from him since the bird had hopped back to his cell. “Thanks.”
There was a beat of silence. “It deserved another chance,” Shay said.
The pod door buzzed open, and this time CO Smythe walked in with the nurse, doing her evening rounds. Alma came to my cell first, holding out my card of pills. “Smells like someone had a barbecue in here and forgot to invite me,” she said. She waited for me to put the pills in my mouth, take a swallow of water. “You sleep well, Lucius.”
As she left, I walked to the front of the cell. Rivulets of water ran down the cement catwalk. But instead of leaving the tier, Alma stopped in front of Calloway’s cell. “Inmate Reece, are you going to let me take a look at that arm?”
Calloway hunched over, protecting the bird he held in his hand. We all knew he was holding Batman; we all held our collective breath. What if Alma saw the bird? Would she rat him out?
I should have known Calloway would never let that happen—he’d be offensive enough to scare her off before she got too close. But before he could speak, we heard a fluted chirp—not from Calloway’s cell but from Shay’s. There was an answering call—the robin looking for its own kind. “What the hell’s that?” CO Smythe asked, looking around. “Where’s it coming from?”
Suddenly, a twitter rose from Joey’s cell, and then a higher cheep from Pogie’s. To my surprise, I even heard a tweet come from the vicinity of my own bunk. I wheeled around, tracing it to the louvers of the vent. Was there a whole colony of robins in here? Or was it Shay, a ventriloquist in addition to a magician, this time throwing his voice?
Smythe moved down the tier, hands covering his ears as he peered at the skylight and into the shower cell to find the source of the noise. “Smythe?” an officer said over the control booth intercom. “What the hell’s going on?”
A place like this wears down everything, and tolerance is no exception. In here, coexistence passes for forgiveness. You do not learn to like something you abhor; you come to live with it. It’s why we submit when we are told to strip; it’s why we deign to play chess with a child molester; it’s why we quit crying ourselves to sleep. You live and let live, and eventually that becomes enough.
Which maybe explains why Calloway’s muscled arm snaked through the open trap of his door, his “Anita Bryant” patch shadowing his biceps. Alma blinked, surprised.
“I won’t hurt you,” she murmured, peering at the new skin growing where it had been grafted, still pink and evolving. She took a pair of latex gloves out of her pocket and snapped them on, making her hands just as lily-white as Calloway’s. And wouldn’t you know it—the moment Alma touched him, all of that crazy noise fell dead silent.
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, then 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 Holy 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 received Holy 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 comes down to philosophy. It isn’t the accidents of an object that make it what it is . . . it’s 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 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 the Sacrament of the Eucharist. 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 Holy 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 play-offs, 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’d warned, and then disappeared.
There were hundreds of priests who excelled at their calling but never received this sort of divine intercession—and yet, I didn’t want to fall among their ranks. Like the teens I worked with, I understood the need for miracles—they kept reality from paralyzing you. So 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 shaggy dark hair that looked more like a grunge-band drummer than a priest, 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 as I placed the host on the paten, plum-stained and dissolving already. I lifted the chalice. “This is my blood,” I said.
June
When Shay Bourne was working at our house as a carpenter, he gave Elizabeth a birthday present. Made of scrap wood and crafted after hours wherever he went when he left our house, it was a small, hinged chest. He had carved it intricately, so that each face portrayed a different fairy, dressed in the trappings of the seasons. Summer had bright peony wings, and a crown made of the sun. Spring was covered in climbing vines, and a bridal train of flowers swept beneath her. Autumn wore the jewel tones of sugar maples and aspen trees, the cap of an acorn balanced on her head. And Winter skated across a frozen lake, leaving a trail of silver frost in her wake. The cover was a painted picture of the moon, rising through a field of stars with its arms outstretched toward a sun that was just out of reach.
Elizabeth loved that box. The night that Shay gave it to her, she lined it with blankets and slept inside. When Kurt and I told her she couldn’t do that again—what if the top fell on her while she was sleeping?—she turned it into a cradle for her dolls, then a toy chest. She named the fairies. Sometimes I heard her talking to them.
After Elizabeth died, I took the box out to the yard, planning to destroy it. There I was, eight months pregnant and grieving, swinging Kurt’s axe, and at the last minute, I could not d
o it. It was what Elizabeth had treasured; how could I stand to lose that, too? I put the box in the attic, where it remained for years.
I could tell you I forgot about the box, but I would be lying. I knew it was there, buried behind our luggage and old toddler clothes and paintings with broken frames. When Claire was about ten, I found her trying to lug the box downstairs. “It’s so pretty,” she said, winded with the effort. “And no one’s using it.” I snapped at her and told her to go lie down and rest.
But Claire kept asking about it, and eventually I brought the box to her room, where it sat at the end of her bed, just like it had for Elizabeth. I never told her who’d carved it. And yet sometimes, when Claire was at school, I found myself peeking inside. I wondered if Pandora, too, wished she had scrutinized the contents first—heartache, cleverly disguised as a gift.
Lucius
It had been said, among those on I-tier, that I had achieved Bassmaster status when it came to fishing. My equipment was a sturdy line made from yarn I’d stored up over the years, tempered by weight—a comb, or a deck of cards, depending on what I was angling for. I was known for my ability to fish from my cell into Crash’s, at the far end of the tier; and then down to the shower cell at the other end. I suppose this was why, when Shay cast out his own line, I found myself watching out of curiosity.
It was after One Life to Live but before Oprah, the time of day when most of the guys napped. I myself was not feeling so 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’s sarcoma, had swollen to the point where I could barely see. Then suddenly, Shay’s fishing line whizzed into the narrow space beneath my cell door. “Want some?” he 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—and, even more astounding, why he wouldn’t just hoard it.
I swallowed, and my throat nearly split along a fault line. “No thanks,” I rasped.
I sat up on my bunk and peeled the sheet off the plastic mattress. One of the seams had been carefully doctored by me. The thread, laced like a football, could be loosened enough for me to rummage around inside the foam padding. I jammed my forefinger inside, scooping out my stash.
There were the 3TC pills—Epivir—and the Sustiva. Retrovir. Lomotil for my diarrhea. All the medications that, for weeks, Alma had watched me place on my tongue and apparently swallow—when in fact they were tucked up high in the purse of my cheek.
I had not yet made up my mind whether I would use these to kill myself . . . or if I’d just continue to save them instead of ingest them: a slower but still sure suicide.
It’s funny how when you are dying, you still fight for the upper hand. You want to pick the terms; you want to choose the date. You’ll tell yourself anything you have to, to pretend that you’re still the one in control.
“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.
“Me, 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.”
“Fuck,” 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.”
I could hear paper being unwrapped, the fullness of Pogie speaking around the bounty softening 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 packet on the end of the line. 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 then I 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 were 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 for 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’s 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 in vain for the blisters and cankers that had kept me from eating.
“Lucius,” I heard, a 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 Alma himself. I was taken into the attorney-client cell so that she could draw my blood, and an hour later, she came back to my own cell to tell me what I already knew.
“Your CD4+ is 1250,” Alma 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.” She shook her head. “Looks to me like your drug regimen’s kicked in in a big way—”
“Alma,” I said, and I glanced behind her at Officer Whitaker before peeling the sheet off my mattress and ripping open my hiding place for pills. I brought them to her, spilled several dozen into her hand. “I haven’t been taking my meds for months.”
Color rose in her cheeks. “Then this isn’t possible.”
“It’s not probable,” I corrected. “Anythin
g’s possible.”
She stuffed the pills into her pocket. “I’m sure there’s a medical explanation—”
“It’s Shay.”
“Inmate Bourne?”
“He did this,” I said, well aware of how insane it sounded, and yet desperate to make her understand. “I saw him bring a dead bird back to life. And take one piece of gum and turn it into 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—”
“I’m not crazy, Alma; I’m—well, I’m healed.” I reached for her hand. “Haven’t you ever seen something with your own eyes that you never imagined possible?”
She darted a glance at Calloway Reece, who had submitted to her ministrations now for seven days straight. “He did that, too,” I whispered. “I know it.”
Alma walked out of my cell and stood in front of Shay’s. He was listening to his television, wearing headphones. “Bourne,” Whitaker barked. “Cuffs.”
After his wrists were secured, the door to his cell was opened. Alma stood in the gap with her arms crossed. “What do you know about Inmate DuFresne’s condition?”
Shay didn’t respond.
“Inmate Bourne?”
“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,” Alma said. “And for some reason, Inmate DuFresne thinks you had something to do with it.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
Alma turned to the CO. “Did you see any of this?”
“Traces of alcohol were found in the plumbing on I-tier,” Whitaker admitted. “And believe me, it was combed for a leak, but nothing conclusive was found. And yeah, I saw them all chewing gum. But Bourne’s cell’s been tossed religiously—and we’ve never found any contraband.”