Change of Heart (10 page)

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 do 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.

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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 fore-finger 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. “
Anything’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.”

“I didn’t do anything,” Shay repeated. “It was them.” Suddenly, he stepped toward Alma, animated. “Are you here for my heart?”

“What?”

“My heart. I want to donate it, after I die.” I heard him rummaging around in his box of possessions. “Here,” he said, giving Alma a piece of paper. “This is the girl who needs it. Lucius wrote her name down for me.”

“I don’t know anything about that …”

Alma hesitated, and then her voice went soft, the flannel-bound way she used to speak to me when the pain was so great that I could not see past it. “I can talk,” she said.

It is an odd thing to be watching television and know that in reality, it is happening right outside your door. Crowds had flooded the parking lot of the prison. Camping out on the stairs of the parole office entrance were folks in wheelchairs, elderly women with walkers, mothers clutching sick infants to their chests. There were gay couples, mostly one man supporting another frail, ill partner; and crackpots holding up signs with scriptural references about the end of the world. Lining the street that led past the cemetery and downtown were the news vans—local affiliates, and even a crew from FOX in Boston.

Right now, a reporter from ABC 22 was interviewing a young mother whose son had been born with severe neurological damage. She stood beside the boy, in his motorized wheelchair, one hand resting on his forehead. “What would I like?” she said, repeating the reporter’s question. “I’d like to know that he knows me.” She smiled faintly. “That’s not too greedy, is it?”

The reporter faced the camera. “Bob, so far there’s been no confirmation or denial from the administration that any miraculous behavior has in fact taken place within the Concord state prison. We have been told, however, by an unnamed source, that these occurrences stemmed from the desire of New Hampshire’s sole death row inmate, Shay Bourne, to donate his organs post-execution.”

I yanked my headphones down to my neck. “Shay,” I called out. “Are you listening to this?”

“We got us our own celebrity,” Crash said.

The brouhaha began to upset Shay. “I’m who I’ve always been,” he said, his voice escalating. “I’m who I’ll always be.”

Just then two officers arrived, escorting someone we rarely saw: Warden Coyne. A burly man with a flattop on which you could have served dinner, he stood beside the cell while Officer Whitaker told Shay to strip. His scrubs were shaken out, and then he was allowed to dress again before he was shackled to the wall across from our cells.

The officers started to toss Shay’s house—upending the meal he hadn’t finished, yanking his headphones out of the television, overturning his small box of property. They ripped his mattress, balled up his sheets. They ran their hands along the edges of his sink, his toilet, his bunk.

“You got any idea, Bourne, what’s going on outside?” the warden said, but Shay just stood with his head tucked into his shoulder, like Calloway’s robin did when he slept. “You care to tell me what you’re trying to prove?”

At Shay’s pronounced silence, the warden began to walk the length of our tier. “What about you?” he called out to the rest of us. “And I will inform you that those who cooperate with me will not be punished. I can’t promise anything for the rest of you.”

Nobody spoke.

Warden Coyne turned to Shay. “Where did you get the gum?”

“There was only one piece,” Joey Kunz blurted, the snitch. “But it was enough for all of us.”

“You some kind of magician, son?” the warden said, his face inches away from Shay’s. “Or did you hypnotize them into believing they were getting something they weren’t? I know about mind control, Bourne.”

“I didn’t do anything,” Shay murmured.

Officer Whitaker stepped closer. “Warden Coyne, there’s
nothing in his cell. Not even in his mattress. His blanket’s intact—if he’s been fishing with it, then he managed to weave the strings back together when he was done.”