Change of Heart (39 page)

There was a fire,
Shay had said.
I don’t want to talk about it.

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, you said that already. The bathroom’s down the hall.”

I put a hand on her arm. There were patches of skin there, too, that were scarred. “Grace. That message—it’s from your brother.”

She took a step away from me, stunned. “You know Shay?”

“He needs to see you, Grace. He’s going to die soon.”

“What did he say about me?”

“Not a lot,” I admitted. “But you’re the only family he has.”

“Do you know about the fire?” Grace asked.

“Yes. It was why he went to juvenile prison.”

“Did he tell you that our foster father died in it?”

This time, it was my turn to be surprised. A juvenile record would be sealed, which is why I hadn’t known during the capital murder trial what Shay had been convicted of. I’d assumed, when fire had been mentioned, that it was arson. I hadn’t realized that the charges might have included negligent homicide, or even manslaughter. And I understood exactly why, now, Renata Ledoux might viscerally hate Shay.

Grace was staring at me intently. “Did he ask to see me?”

“He doesn’t actually know I’m here.”

She turned away, but not before I saw that she had started to cry. “He didn’t want me at his trial.”

“He probably didn’t want you to have to witness that.”

“You don’t know anything.” She buried her face in her hands.

“Grace,” I said, “come back with me. Come see him.”

“I can’t,” she sobbed. “I can’t. You don’t understand.”

But I was beginning to: Shay had set the fire that had disfigured her. “That’s all the more reason to meet with him. Forgive him, before it’s too late.”

“Forgive him? Forgive
him
?” Grace parroted. “No matter what I say, it won’t change what happened. You don’t get to do your life over.” She glanced away. “I think … I just … you should go.”

It was my dismissal. I nodded, accepting.

“The bathroom’s the second door on the right.”

Right—my ruse to get inside. I walked down the hall to a restroom that was floral, overpowering in a scent of air freshener and rose potpourri. There were little crocheted toilet paper holders, a crocheted bra for the toilet tank, and a crocheted cover for the Kleenex box. There were roses on the shower curtain, and art on the walls—framed prints of flowers, except for one of a child’s drawing—a dragon, or maybe a lizard. The room felt like the kind of abode for an elderly lady who’d lost count of her cats. It was stifling; slowly, Grace Bourne was suffocating herself to death.

If Shay knew that his sister forgave him for the fire, then maybe—even if he wasn’t allowed to donate his heart—it would be enough to let him die in peace. Grace was in no condition
to be convinced right now, but I could work on her. I’d get her phone number and call her, until I’d worn down her resistance.

I opened the sliding mirrored medicine cabinet, looking for a prescription with Grace’s phone number so that I could copy it down. There were lotions and creams and exfoliants, toothpaste and floss and deodorant. There was also a medicine bottle of Ambien, with Grace’s phone number across the top of the label. I wrote it on the inside of my palm with a pen and set the pills back on the shelf, beside a small pewter frame. Two tiny children sat at a table: Grace in a high chair with a glass of milk in front of her, and Shay hunched over a picture he was drawing. A dragon, or maybe a lizard.

He was smiling, so wide it looked like it might hurt.

Every inmate is someone’s child. And so is every victim.

I walked out of the bathroom. Handing Grace a card with my name and number on it, I thanked her. “Just in case you change your mind.”

“Mine was never the one that needed changing,” Grace said, and closed the door behind me. Immediately I heard the bolt slide shut, the curtain in the front window rustle. I kept envisioning the dragon picture, which was carefully matted and framed in the bathroom. TO GRACIE, it had said in the upper left-hand corner.

I was all the way to Crawford Notch before I realized what had been niggling in my mind about that photo of Shay as a child. In it, he’d been holding a pen in his right hand. But in prison—when he ate, when he wrote—he was a lefty.

Could someone change so radically over a lifetime? Or could all of these changes in Shay—from his dominant hand to his miracles to his ability to quote the Gospel of Thomas—have come from some … possession? It sounded like some bad
science fiction movie, but that wasn’t to say it couldn’t happen. If prophets could be overtaken by the Holy Spirit, why not a murderer?

Or, maybe it was simpler than that. Maybe who we were in the past informed who we chose to be in the future. Maybe Shay had intentionally shifted his writing hand. Maybe he cultivated miracles, to make up for a sin as horrible as setting a fire that took the lives of two people—one literal, one metaphorical. It struck me that even in the Bible, there was no record of Jesus’s life between the ages of eight and thirty-three. What if he’d done something awful; what if his later years were a response to that?

You could do a horrible thing, and then spend your whole natural life trying to atone.

I knew that better than anyone.

|||||||||||||||||||||||||

The last conversation I had with Shay Bourne, before putting him on the stand as a witness, had not gone well. In the holding cell, I’d reminded him what was going to happen in court. Shay didn’t deal well with curves being thrown at him; he could just as likely become belligerent as curl up in a ball beneath the wooden stand. Either way, the judge would think he was crazy—and that couldn’t happen.

“So after the marshal helps you into the seat,” I had explained, “they’re going to bring you a Bible.”

“I don’t need one.”

“Right. But they need you to swear on it.”

“I want to swear on a comic book,” Shay had replied. “Or a
Playboy
magazine.”

“You have to swear on a Bible,” I’d said, “because we have to play by their rules before we’re allowed to change the game.”

Just then, a U.S. marshal had come to tell me that court was about to convene. “Remember,” I had said to Shay, “focus only on me. Nothing else in that courtroom’s important. It’s just us, having a chat.”

He had nodded, but I could see that he was jittery. And now, as I watched him being brought into the courtroom, everyone else could see it, too. He was bound at the ankles and the wrists, with a belly chain to link the others; the links rattled as he shuddered into his seat beside me. His head was ducked, and he was
murmuring words no one but I could hear. He was actually cursing out one of the U.S. marshals who’d led him into the courtroom, but with any luck, people who watched his mouth moving silently would think he was praying.

As soon as I put him on the witness stand, a quiet pall fell over the people in the gallery.
You are not like us,
their silence seemed to say.
You never will be.
And there, without me asking a single question, was my answer: no amount of piousness could erase the stain on the hands of a murderer.

I walked in front of Shay and waited until he caught my eye.
Focus,
I mouthed, and he nodded. He gripped the front of the witness box railing, and his chains clinked.

Dammit. I’d forgotten to tell him to keep his hands in his lap. It would be less of a reminder to the judge and the gallery that he was a convicted felon.

“Shay,” I asked, “why do you want to donate your heart?”

He stared right at me. Good boy. “I have to save her.”

“Who?”

“Claire Nealon.”

“Well,” I said, “you’re not the only person in the world who can save Claire. There are other suitable heart donors.”

“I’m the one who took the most away from her,” Shay said, just like we had practiced. “I have the most to give back to her.”

“Is this about clearing your conscience?” I asked.

Shay shook his head. “It’s about clearing the slate.”

So far
, I thought,
so good.
He sounded rational, and clear, and calm.

“Maggie?” Shay said just then. “Can I stop now?”

I smiled tightly. “Not quite yet, Shay. We’ve got a few more questions.”

“The questions are bullshit.”

There was a gasp in the rear of the gallery—probably one of the blue-haired ladies I’d seen filing in with their Bibles wrapped in protective quilted cozies, who hadn’t stumbled across a cuss word since before menopause. “Shay,” I said, “we don’t use that language in court. Remember?”

“Why is it called court?” he asked. “It’s not like a tennis court or a basketball court, where you’re playing a game. Or maybe you are, and that’s why there’s a winner and a loser, except it has nothing to do with how well you make a three-point shot or how fast your serve is.” He looked at Judge Haig. “I bet you play golf.”

“Ms. Bloom,” the judge said. “Control your witness.”

If Shay didn’t shut up, I was going to personally cover his mouth with my hand. “Shay, tell me about your religious upbringing as a child,” I said firmly.

“Religion’s a cult. You don’t get to choose your own religion. You’re what your parents tell you you are; it’s not upbringing at all, just a brainwashing. When a baby’s getting water poured over his head at a christening he can’t say, ‘Hey, man, I’d rather be a Hindu,’ can he?”

“Shay, I know this is hard for you, and I know that being here is very distracting,” I said. “But I need you to listen to the question I’m asking, and answer it. Did you go to church when you were a kid?”

“Part of the time. And part of the time I didn’t go anywhere at all, except hide in the closet so I wouldn’t get beat up by another kid or the foster dad, who’d try to keep everyone in line with a metal hairbrush. It kept us in line, all right, all the way down our backs. The whole foster care system in this country is a joke; it ought to be called foster
don’t
care, don’t give a shit except for the stipend you’re getting from the—”

“Shay!” I warned him with a flash of my eyes. “Do you believe in God?”

This question, somehow, seemed to calm him down. “I
know
God,” Shay said.

“Tell me how.”

“Everyone’s got a little God in them … and a little murder in them, too. It’s how your life turns out that makes you lean to one side or the other.”

“What’s God like?”

“Math,” Shay said. “An equation. Except when you take everything away, you get infinity, instead of zero.”

“And where does God live, Shay?”

He leaned forward, lifted his chained hands so that the metal chinked. He pointed to his heart. “Here.”

“You said you used to go to church when you were a kid. Is the God you believe in today the same God you were taught about at church?”

Shay shrugged. “Whatever road you take, the view is going to be the same.”

I was nearly a hundred percent certain I’d heard that phrase before, at the one and only Bikram yoga class I’d attended, before I decided that my body wasn’t meant to bend in certain ways. I couldn’t believe Greenleaf wasn’t objecting, on the grounds that channeling the Dalai Lama wasn’t the same as answering a question. Then again, I
could
believe Greenleaf wasn’t objecting. The more Shay said, the crazier he appeared. It was hard to take someone’s claims about religion seriously when he sounded delusional; Shay was digging a grave big enough for both of us.

“If the judge orders you to die by lethal injection, Shay, and you can’t donate your heart—will that upset God?” I asked.

“It’ll upset me. So yeah, it’ll upset God.”

“Well, then,” I said, “what is it about giving your heart to Claire Nealon that will
please
God?”

He smiled at me then—the sort of smile you see on the faces of saints in frescoes, and that makes you wish you knew their secret. “My end,” Shay said, “is her beginning.”

I had a few more questions, but to be honest, I was terrified of what Shay might say. He already was talking in riddles. “Thank you,” I replied, and sat down.

“I have a question, Mr. Bourne,” Judge Haig said. “There’s a lot of talk about odd things that have occurred at the prison. Do you believe you can perform miracles?”

Shay looked at him. “Do
you
?”

“I’m sorry, but that’s not how a courtroom works. I’m not allowed to answer your question, but you still need to answer mine. So,” the judge said, “do you believe you can perform miracles?”

“I just did what I was supposed to. You can call that whatever you want.”

The judge shook his head. “Mr. Greenleaf, your witness.”

Suddenly, a man in the gallery stood up. He unzipped his jacket, revealing a T-shirt that had been emblazoned with the numbers 3:16. He started yelling, his voice hoarse. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son—” By then, two U.S. marshals had descended, hauling him out of his seat and dragging him up the alley, as the news cameras swiveled to follow the action. “His only son!” the man yelled. “
Only
! You are going to hell once they pump your veins full of—” The doors of the courtroom banged shut behind him, and then it was utterly silent.

It was impressive that this man had gotten into the court in the first place—there were checkpoints with metal detectors and
marshals in place before you entered. But his weapon had been the fundamental fury of his righteousness, and at that moment, I would have been hard-pressed to decide whether he or Shay had come off looking worse.

“Yes,” Gordon Greenleaf said, getting to his feet. “Well.” He walked toward Shay, who rested his chained hands on the witness stand rail again. “You’re the only person who subscribes to your religion?”

“No.”

“No?”

“I don’t belong to a religion. Religion’s the reason the world’s falling apart—did you see that guy get carted out of here?
That’s
what religion does. It points a finger. It causes wars. It breaks apart countries. It’s a petri dish for stereotypes to grow in. Religion’s not about being holy,” Shay said. “Just holier-than-thou.”

At the plaintiff’s table, I closed my eyes—at the very least, Shay had surely just lost the case for himself; at the most, I was going to wind up with a cross being burned on my lawn. “Objection,” I said feebly. “It’s not responsive.”