Change of Heart (45 page)

The light faded from his face. “Lucius?”

“I’m sorry.”

“He was … getting better.”

“I guess he wasn’t, really. It only looked that way,” I said. “I know you thought you helped him. I know you
wanted
to help him. But Shay, you couldn’t have. He was dying from the moment you met him.”

“Like me,” Shay said.

He bent over, as if the hand of grief were pushing hard on him, and started to cry—and that, I realized, was going to be my undoing. Because when you got right down to it, what was different between Shay and everyone else in this world was not nearly as profound as what we had in common. Maybe my hair was brushed, and I could string words together to make a sentence. Maybe I hadn’t been convicted of murder. But if someone told me that the only friend I really had in this world had left it, I’d sink to my knees, sobbing, too.

“Shay,” I said, at a loss, approaching him. How come there were no words for this kind of comfort?

“Don’t touch me,” Shay growled, his eyes feral. I ducked at the last moment as he swung at me, and his fist punched through the double pane of glass that separated us from the officer standing watch. “He wasn’t supposed to die,” Shay cried, as his hand bled down the front of his prison scrubs like a trail of regret. A small army of officers rushed in to save me and secure him, and then haul him off to the infirmary for
stitches, proof—as if either of us needed it—that Shay was not invincible.

One year in junior high, during a sex-ed unit, our teacher discussed the painfully obvious fact that some of us would not mature as quickly as our classmates. This was not a lesson you had to teach someone like me, whose waistline was larger than her bra size; or Cheryl Otenski, who had gotten her period in full view of every other sixth grader during an assembly where she happened to be wearing white pants. “Late bloomers,” the teacher called it—that was close enough to my last name for me to be the butt of every joke for the remaining week.

I had told my mother I had the bubonic plague and refused to get out of bed for three days, spending most of it under the covers and wishing I could just miraculously skip ahead ten or fifteen years to when my life surely would be more pleasant.

After seeing Shay, I was sorely tempted to pull the same act. If I stayed in bed when the verdict was read, did that mean the plaintiff lost by default?

Instead of driving to my house, however, I found myself pointing in the opposite direction and turned into the emergency entrance of the hospital. I felt as if I’d been poleaxed, which surely qualified me for medical attention—but I didn’t think that even the most gifted physician could cure a skeptic who’d come to see the light: I could not remain as emotionally unattached from my client as I’d believed. This wasn’t, as I’d told myself, about the death penalty in America. It wasn’t about my career as a litigator. It was about a man I’d been sitting next to—a man whose scent I could recognize (Head & Shoulders shampoo and pungent industrial soap); whose voice was familiar (rough as sandpaper, with words dropped like stepping-stones)
—who would, very shortly, be dead. I did not know Shay Bourne well, but that didn’t mean he would not leave a hole in my life when he exited his own.

“I need to see Dr. Gallagher,” I announced to the triage nurse. “I’m a personal …”

What?

Friend?

Girl
friend?

Stalker?

Before the nurse could rebuff me, however, I saw Christian coming down the hall with another doctor. He noticed me and—before I could even make a decision to go to him—he came to me. “What’s wrong, sweetheart?”

No one except my father had ever called me that. For this reason, and a dozen others, I burst into tears.

Christian folded me into his arms. “Follow me,” he said, and led me by the hand into an empty family waiting room.

“The governor denied Shay’s stay of execution,” I said. “And Shay’s best friend died, and I was the one who had to tell him. And
he’s
going to die, Christian, because he won’t let me try to find new evidence to exonerate him.” I drew away from him, wiping my eyes on my sleeve. “How do you do it? How do you let go?”

“The first patient who died on my table,” Christian said, “was a seventy-six-year-old woman who came in complaining of abdominal pain after a meal at a posh London restaurant. A half hour into the surgery, she coded, and we couldn’t bring her back.” He looked up at me. “When I went into the family waiting area to speak with her husband, the man just kept staring at me. Finally, I asked him if he had any questions, and he said he’d taken his wife to dinner to celebrate their fiftieth wedding
anniversary.” Christian shook his head. “That night, I sat with her body in the morgue. Silly, I know, but I thought that on one’s fiftieth anniversary, one didn’t deserve to spend the night alone.”

If I hadn’t been swayed before by Christian’s charm, good looks, or the way he called the trunk of his car a boot and the hood a bonnet, I was now completely smitten.

“Here’s the thing,” Christian added. “It doesn’t get any easier, no matter how many times you go through it. And if it does—well, I suspect that means you’ve lost some part of yourself that’s critically important.” He reached for my hand. “Let me be the attending physician at the execution.”

“You can’t,” I said automatically. Killing a man was a violation of the Hippocratic oath; doctors were contacted privately by the Department of Corrections, and the whole event was kept secret. In fact, in the other executions I’d studied before Shay’s trial, the doctor’s name was never mentioned—not even on the death certificate.

“Let me worry about that,” Christian said.

I felt a fresh wave of tears rising. “You would do that for Shay?”

He leaned forward and kissed me lightly. “I would do that for you,” he said.

If this had been a trial, here were the facts I’d present to the jury:

1. Christian had suggested that he swing by my house after his shift, just to make sure I wasn’t falling apart at the seams.

2. He was the one who brought the bottle of Penfolds.

3. It would have been downright rude to refuse to have a glass. Or three.

4. I truly could not establish the causal line between how we went from kissing on the couch to lying on the carpet with his hands underneath my shirt, and me worrying about whether or not I was wearing underwear that was a step above granny panties.

5. Other women—those who have sex with men more often than once during a senatorial term, for example—probably have a whole set of underwear just for moments like these, like my mother has a set of Sabbath china.

6. I was truly hammered if I had just thought of
sex
and
my mother
in the same sentence.

Maybe the details here weren’t nearly as important as the outcome—I had a man in my bed, right now, waiting for me. He was even more beautiful without clothes on than he was in them. And where was I?

Locked in the bathroom, so paralyzed by the thought of my disgusting, white, fish-bellied body being seen by him that I couldn’t open the door.

I had been discreet about it—lowering my lashes and murmuring something about changing. I’m sure Christian assumed I meant slipping into lingerie. Me, I was thinking more along the lines of morphing into Heidi Klum.

Bravely, I unbuttoned my blouse and stepped out of my jeans. There I was in the mirror, in my bra and panties, just like a bikini—except I wouldn’t be caught dead in a bikini.
Christian sees a hundred bodies a day,
I told myself.
Yours can’t be any worse than those.

But. Here was the ripple of cottage cheese cellulite that I usually avoided by dressing in the dark. Here was the inch (or
two) that I could pinch with my fingers, which vanished beneath a waistband. Here was my butt, large enough to colonize, which could so craftily be camouflaged by black trousers. Christian would take one look at the acoustic version of me and run screaming for the hills.

His voice came, muffled, through the bathroom door. “Maggie?” Christian said. “Are you all right in there?”

“I’m fine!”
I’m fat
.

“Are you coming out?”

I didn’t answer that. I was looking inside the waistband of my pants. They were a twelve, but that didn’t count, because this label had resized downward so that fourteens like me could feel better about themselves for being able to squeeze into the brand at all. But hadn’t Marilyn Monroe been a size fourteen? Or was that back when a size fourteen was really an eight—which meant that comparatively, I was a behemoth compared to your average 1940s starlet?

Well, hell. I was a behemoth compared to your average 2008 starlet, too.

Suddenly I heard scratching outside the door. It couldn’t have been Oliver—I’d put him in his cage when he kept sniffing around our heads as we’d rolled across the living room carpet having our
From Here to Eternity
moment. To my horror, the locked doorknob popped open and began to twist.

I grabbed my ratty red bathrobe from the back of the door and wrapped it around myself just in time to see the door swing open. Christian stood there, holding a wire hanger with its neck straightened.

“You can pick locks, too?” I said.

Christian grinned. “I do laparoscopic surgery through belly buttons,” he explained. “This isn’t dramatically different.”

He folded his arms around me and met my gaze in the mirror. “I can’t say come back to bed, because you haven’t been in it yet.” His chin notched over my shoulder. “Maggie,” he murmured, and at that moment he realized that I was wearing a robe.

Christian’s eyes lit up and his hands slipped down to the belt. Immediately, I started to tug him away. “Please. Don’t.”

His hands fell to his sides, and he took a step back. The room must have cooled twenty degrees. “I’m sorry,” Christian said, all business. “I must have misread—”

“No!” I cried, facing him. “You didn’t misread anything. I want this. I want
you
. I’m just afraid that … that … you won’t want
me
.”

“Are you
joking
? I’ve wanted you since the moment I didn’t get to examine you for appendicitis.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re smart. And fierce. And funny. And so beautiful.”

I smiled wryly. “I almost believed you, until that last part.”

Christian’s eyes flashed. “You truly think you’re not?” In one smooth motion, before I could stop him, he yanked the wide shawl collar of the robe down to my elbows, and my blouse along with it. My arms were trapped; I stood before him in my underwear. “Look at you, Maggie,” he said with quiet awe. “My God.”

I could not look at myself in the mirror, so instead, I looked at Christian. He wasn’t scrutinizing breasts that sagged or a waist that was too thick or thighs that rubbed together when the temperature climbed above eighty degrees. He was just staring at me, and as he did, his hands began to shake where they touched me.

“Let me show you what I see when I look at you,” Christian said quietly. His fingers were warm as they played over me, as
they coaxed me into the bedroom and under the covers, as they traced the curves of my body like a roller coaster, a thrill ride, a wonder. And somewhere in the middle of it all, I stopped worrying about sucking in my stomach, or if he could see me in the half-light of the moon, and instead noticed how seamlessly we fit together; how when I let go of me, there was only room for us.

Wow.

I woke up with the sun slicing the bed like a scalpel, and every muscle in my body feeling like I’d started training for a triathlon. Last night could effectively be classified as a workout, and to be honest, it was the first exercise routine I could see myself really looking forward to on a daily basis.

I smoothed my hand over the side of the bed where Christian had slept. In the bathroom, I heard the shower being turned off. The door opened, and Christian’s head popped out. He was wearing a towel. “Hi,” he said. “I hope I didn’t knock you up.”

“Well. I, uh, hope so, too …” Christian frowned, confused, and I realized that we were not speaking the same language. “Let me guess,” I said. “Where you come from, that doesn’t mean getting a girl pregnant?”

“Good God, no! It’s, you know, rousing someone from their sleep.”

I rolled onto my back and started laughing, and he sank down beside me, the towel slipping dangerously low. “But since I’ve knocked you up,” he said, leaning down to kiss me, “maybe I could try my hand at knocking you up …”

I had morning breath and hair that felt like a rat had taken nest in it, not to mention a courtroom verdict to attend, but I wrapped my arms around Christian’s neck and kissed him back.
Which was about the same moment that a phone began to ring.

“Bloody hell,” Christian muttered, and he swung over the far side of the bed to where he’d folded his clothes in a neat pile, his cell phone and pager resting on top. “It’s not mine,” he said, but by then I’d wrapped his discarded towel around me and hiked to my purse in the living room to dig out my own.

“Ms. Bloom?” a woman’s voice said. “This is June Nealon.”

“June,” I said, immediately sobering. “Is everything all right?”

“Yes,” she said, and then, “No. Oh, God. I can’t answer that question.” There was a beat of silence. “I can’t take it,” June whispered.

“I can’t imagine how difficult all this waiting has been for you,” I said, and I meant it. “But we should know definitively what’s going to happen by lunchtime.”

“I can’t take it,” June repeated. “Give it to someone else.”

And she hung up the phone, leaving me with Shay’s heart.

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

There were only seven people attending Monday morning Mass, and I was one of them. I wasn’t officiating—it was my day off, so Father Walter was presiding, along with a deacon named Paul O’Hurley. I participated in the Lord’s Prayer and the sign of peace, and I realized these were the moments Shay had missed: when people came
together
to celebrate God. You might be able to find Him on your own spiritual journey, but it was a lonelier trip. Coming to church felt like validation, like a family where everyone knew your flaws, and in spite of that was still willing to invite you back.