by Jodi Picoult
“You can’t get salvation by donating your organs, Shay. The only way to find salvation is to admit your guilt and seek absolution through Jesus.”
“What happened then doesn’t matter now.”
“You don’t have to be afraid to take responsibility; God loves us, even when we screw up.”
“I couldn’t stop it,” Shay said. “But this time, I can fix it.”
“Leave that to God,” I suggested. “Tell Him you’re sorry for what you did, and He’ll forgive you.”
“No matter what?”
“No matter what.”
“Then why do you have to say you’re sorry first?”
I hesitated, trying to find a better way to explain sin and salvation to Shay. It was a bargain: you made an admission, you got redemption in return. In Shay’s economy of salvation, you gave away a piece of yourself—and somehow found yourself whole again.
Were the two ideas really so different?
I shook my head to clear it.
“Lucius is an atheist,” Shay said. “Right, Lucius?”
From next door, Lucius mumbled, “Mm-hmm.”
“And he didn’t die. He was sick, and he got better.”
The AIDS patient; I’d heard about him on the news. “Did you have something to do with it?”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“Lucius, do you believe that, too?”
I leaned back so that I could make eye contact with this other inmate, a slim man with a shock of white hair. “I think Shay had everything to do with it,” he said.
“Lucius should believe whatever he needs to,” Shay said.
“What about the miracles?” Lucius added.
“What miracles?” Shay said.
Two facts struck me: Shay Bourne was not claiming to be the Messiah, or Jesus, or anyone but himself. And through some misguided belief, he truly felt that he wouldn’t rest in peace unless he could donate his heart to Claire Nealon.
“Look,” Lucius said. “Are you or are you not going to help him?”
Maybe none of us could compensate for what we’d done wrong in the past, but that didn’t mean we couldn’t make our futures matter more. I closed my eyes and imagined being the last person Shay Bourne spoke with before he was executed by the State of New Hampshire. I imagined picking a section of the Bible that would resonate with him, a balm of prayer during those last few minutes. I could do this for him. I could be who he needed me to be now, because I hadn’t been who he needed me to be back then. “Shay,” I said, “knowing that your heart is beating in some other person isn’t salvation. It’s altruism. Salvation is coming home. It’s understanding that you don’t have to prove yourself to God.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Lucius snorted. “Don’t listen to him, Shay.”
I turned to him. “Do you mind?” Then I shifted position, so that I blocked Lucius from my sight, focusing on Shay. “God loves you—whether or not you give up your organs, whether or not you’ve made mistakes in the past. And the day of your execution, he’ll be waiting for you. Christ can save you, Shay.”
“Christ can’t give Claire Nealon a heart.” Suddenly Shay’s gaze was piercing and lucid. “I don’t need to find God. I don’t want catechism,” he said. “All I want to know is whether, after I’m killed, I can save a little girl.”
“No,” I said bluntly. “Not if you’re given a lethal injection. The drugs are meant specifically to stop your heart, and after that, it’s worthless for donation.”
The light in his eyes dimmed, and I drew in my breath. “I’m sorry, Shay. I know you were hoping to hear something different, and your intentions are good . . . but you need to channel those good intentions to make peace with God another way. And that is something I can make happen.”
Just then a young woman burst onto I-tier. She had a cascade of black curls tumbling down her back, and peeking out from her flak jacket was the ugliest striped suit I’d ever seen. “Shay Bourne?” she said. “I know a way you can donate your organs.”
Maggie
Some people may find it tough to break out of prison, but for me, it was equally as hard to get in. Okay, so I wasn’t officially Shay Bourne’s attorney—but the prison officials didn’t know that. I could argue the technicality with Bourne himself, if and when I reached him.
I hadn’t counted on how difficult it would be to get through the throng outside the prison. It’s one thing to shove your way past a group of college kids smoking pot in a tent, their MAKE PEACE NOT MIRACLES signs littering the muddy ground; it’s another thing entirely to explain to a mother and her smooth-scalped, cancer-stricken toddler why you deserved to cut their place in line. In the end, the only way I could edge forward was by explaining to those who’d been waiting (in some cases, for days) that I was Shay Bourne’s legal advisor and that I would pass along their pleas: from the elderly couple with knotted hands, whose twin diagnoses—breast cancer and lymphatic cancer—came within a week of each other; to the father who carried pictures of the eight children he couldn’t support since losing his job; to the daughter pushing her mother’s wheelchair, wishing for just one more lucid moment in the fog of Alzheimer’s so that she could say she was sorry for a transgression that had happened years earlier. There is so much pain in this world, I thought, how do any of us manage to get up in the morning?
When I reached the front gate, I announced that I had come to see Shay Bourne, and the officer laughed at me. “You and the rest of the free world.”
“I’m his lawyer.”
He looked at me for a long moment, and then spoke into his radio. A moment later, a second officer arrived and escorted me past the blockade. As I left, a cheer went up from the crowd.
Stunned, I turned around, waved hesitantly, and then hurried to catch up.
I had never been to the state prison. It was a large, old brick building; its courtyard stretched out behind the razor-wire fencing. I was told to sign in on a clipboard and to take off my jacket before I went through the metal detector.
“Wait here,” the officer said, and he left me sitting in a small anteroom. There was an inmate mopping the floor who did not make eye contact with me. He was wearing white tennis shoes that squelched every time he stepped forward. I watched his hands on the mop and wondered if they’d been part of a murder, a rape, a robbery.
There was a reason I didn’t become a criminal defense attorney: this setting freaked me out. I had been to the county jail to meet with clients, but those were small-potatoes crimes: picketing outside a rally for a political candidate, flag burning, civil disobedience. None of my clients had ever killed anyone before, much less a child and a police officer. I found myself considering what it would be like to be locked in here forever. What if my dress clothes and day clothes and pajamas were all the same orange scrubs? What if I was told when to shower, when to eat, when to go to bed? Given that my career was about maintaining personal freedoms, it was hard to imagine a world where they’d all been stripped away.
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 slighte
st 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.
MICHAEL
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.
* * *