Change of Heart (7 page)

All right, so maybe I didn’t exercise all that much either. But I would, one day, or so I told my mother the fitness queen, as soon as all the people on whose behalf I worked tirelessly were absolutely, unequivocally rescued. I told her (and anyone else who’d listen) that the whole reason the ACLU existed was to help people take a stand. Unfortunately, the only stands my mother recognized were pigeon pose, warrior two, and all the other staples of yoga.

I pulled on my jeans, the ones that I admittedly didn’t wash very often because the dryer shrank them just enough that I had to suffer half a day before the denim stretched to the point of comfort again. I picked a sweater that didn’t show my bra roll and then turned to Oliver. “What do you think?”

He lowered his left ear, which translated to, “Why do you even care, since you’re taking it all off to put on a spa robe?”

As usual, he was right. It’s a little hard to hide your flaws when you’re wearing, well, nothing.

He followed me into the kitchen, where I poured us both bowls of rabbit food (his literal, mine Special K). Then he hopped off to the litter box beside his cage, where he’d spend the day sleeping.

I’d named my rabbit after Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the famous Supreme Court Justice known as the Great Dissenter. He once said, “Even a dog knows the difference between being kicked and being tripped over.” So did rabbits. And my clients, for that matter.

“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” I warned Oliver. “That includes chewing the legs of the kitchen stools.”

I grabbed my keys and headed out to my Prius. I had used nearly all my savings last year on the hybrid—to be honest, I didn’t understand why car manufacturers charged a premium if you were a buyer with a modicum of social conscience. It didn’t have all-wheel drive, which was a real pain in the neck during a New Hampshire winter, but I figured that saving the ozone layer was worth sliding off the road occasionally.

My parents had moved to Lynley—a town twenty-six miles east of Concord—seven years ago when my father took over as rabbi at Temple Beth Or. The catch was that there
was
no Temple Beth Or: his reform congregation held Friday night services in the cafeteria of the middle school, because the original temple had burned to the ground. The expectation had been to raise funds for a new temple, but my father had overestimated the size of his rural New Hampshire congregation, and although he assured me that they were closing in on buying land somewhere, I didn’t see it happening anytime soon. By now, anyway, his congregation had grown used to readings from the Torah that were routinely punctuated by the cheers of the crowd at the basketball game in the gymnasium down the hall.

The biggest single annual contributor to my father’s temple fund was the ChutZpah, a wellness retreat for the mind, body, and soul in the heart of Lynley that was run by my mother. Although her clientele was nondenominational, she’d garnered a word-of-mouth reputation among temple sisterhoods, and patrons came from as far away as New York and Connecticut and even Maryland to relax and rejuvenate. My mother used salt from the Dead Sea for her scrubs. Her spa cuisine was kosher. She’d been written up in
Boston
magazine, the
New York Times,
and
Luxury SpaFinder
.

The first Saturday of every month, I drove to the spa for a free massage or facial or pedicure. The catch was that afterward,
I had to suffer through lunch with my mother. We had it down to a routine. By the time we were served our passion fruit iced tea, we’d already covered “Why Don’t You Call.” The salad course was “I’m Going to Be Dead Before You Make Me a Grandmother.” The entrée—fittingly—involved my weight. Needless to say, we never got around to dessert.

The ChutZpah was white. Not just white, but scary, I’m-afraid-to-breathe white: white carpets, white tiles, white robes, white slippers. I have no idea how my mother kept the place so clean, given that when I was growing up, the house was always comfortably cluttered.

My father says there’s a God, although for me the jury is still out on that one. Which isn’t to say that I didn’t appreciate a miracle as much as the next person—such as when I went up to the front desk and the receptionist told me my mother was going to have to miss our lunch because of a last-minute meeting with a wholesale orchid salesman. “But she said you should still have your treatment,” the receptionist said. “DeeDee’s going to be your aesthetician, and you’ve got locker number two twenty.”

I took the robe and slippers she handed me. Locker 220 was in a bank with fifty others, and several toned middle-aged women were stripping out of their yoga clothes. I breezed into another section of lockers, one that was blissfully empty, and changed into my robe. If someone complained because I was using locker 664 instead, I didn’t think my mother would disown me. I punched in my key code—2358, for ACLU—took a bracing breath, and tried not to glance in the mirror as I walked by.

There wasn’t very much that I liked about the outside of me. I had curves, but to me, they were in all the wrong places. My hair was an explosion of dark curls, which could have been sexy if I didn’t have to work so hard to keep them frizz-free. I’d read
that stylists on the
Oprah
show would straighten the hair of guests with hair like mine, because curls added ten pounds to the camera—which meant that even my
hair
made objects like me look bigger than they appeared. My eyes were okay—they were mud-colored on an average day and green if I felt like embellishing—but most of all, they showed the part of me I
was
proud of: my intelligence. I might never be a cover girl, but I was a girl who could cover it all.

The problem was, you never heard anyone say, “Wow, check out the brain on that babe.”

My father had always made me feel special, but I couldn’t even look at my mother without wondering why I hadn’t inherited her tiny waist and sleek hair. As a kid I had only wanted to be just like her; as an adult, I’d stopped trying.

Sighing, I entered the whirlpool area: a white oasis surrounded by white wicker benches where primarily white women waited for their white-coated therapists to call their name.

DeeDee appeared in her immaculate jacket, smiling. “You must be Maggie,” she said. “You look just like your mother described you.”

I wasn’t about to take
that
bait. “Nice to meet you.” I never quite figured out the protocol for this part of the experience—you said hello and then disrobed immediately so that a total stranger could lay their hands on you … and you
paid
for this privilege. Was it just me, or was there a great deal that spa treatments had in common with prostitution?

“You looking forward to your Song of Solomon Wrap?”

“I’d rather be getting a root canal.”

DeeDee grinned. “Your mom told me you’d say something like that, too.”

If you haven’t had a body wrap, it’s a singular experience. You’re lying on a cushy table covered by a giant piece of Saran Wrap and you’re naked. Totally, completely naked. Sure, the aesthetician tosses a washcloth the size of a gauze square over your privates when she’s scrubbing you down, and she’s got a poker face that never belies whether she’s calculating your body mass index under her palms—but still, you’re painfully aware of your physique, if only because someone’s experiencing it first-hand with you.

I forced myself to close my eyes and remember that being washed beneath a Vichy shower by someone else was supposed to make me feel like a queen and not a hospitalized invalid.

“So, DeeDee,” I said. “How long have you been doing this?”

She unrolled a towel and held it like a screen as I rolled onto my back. “I’ve been working at spas for six years, but I just got hired on here.”

“You must be good,” I said. “My mother doesn’t sweat amateurs.”

She shrugged. “I like meeting new people.”

I like meeting new people, too, but when they’re fully clothed.

“What do you do for work?” DeeDee asked.

“My mother didn’t tell you?”

“No … she just said—” Suddenly she broke off, silent.

“She said
what
.”

“She, um, told me to treat you to an extra helping of seaweed scrub.”

“You mean she told you I’d need twice as much.”

“She didn’t—”

“Did she use the word
zaftig
?” I asked. When DeeDee didn’t answer—wisely—I blinked up at the hazy light in the ceiling, listened to Yanni’s canned piano for a few beats, and then sighed.
“I’m an ACLU lawyer.”

“For real?” DeeDee’s hands stilled on my feet. “Do you ever take on cases, like, for free?”

“That’s
all
I do.”

“Then you must know about the guy on death row … Shay Bourne? I’ve been writing to him for ten years, ever since I was in eighth grade and I started as part of an assignment for my social studies class. His last appeal just got rejected by the Supreme Court.”

“I know,” I said. “I’ve filed briefs on his behalf.”

DeeDee’s eyes widened. “So you’re his lawyer?”

“Well … no.” I hadn’t even been living in New Hampshire when Bourne was convicted, but it was the job of the ACLU to file amicus briefs for death row prisoners.
Amicus
was Latin for
friend of the court
; when you had a position on a particular case but weren’t directly a party involved in it, the court would let you legally spell out your feelings if it might be beneficial to the decision-making process. My amicus briefs illustrated how hideous the death penalty was; defined it as cruel and unusual punishment, as unconstitutional. I’m quite sure the judge looked at my hard work and promptly tossed it aside.

“Can’t you do something else to help him?” DeeDee asked.

The truth was, if Bourne’s last appeal had been rejected by the Supreme Court, there wasn’t much
any
lawyer could do to save him now.

“Tell you what,” I promised. “I’ll look into it.”

DeeDee smiled and covered me with heated blankets until I was trussed tight as a burrito. Then she sat down behind me and wove her fingers into my hair. As she massaged my scalp, my eyes drifted shut.

“They say it’s painless,” DeeDee murmured. “Lethal injection.”

They
: the establishment, the lawmakers, the ones assuaging their guilt over their own actions with rhetoric. “That’s because no one ever comes back to tell them otherwise,” I said. I thought of Shay Bourne being given the news of his own impending death. I thought of lying on a table like this one, being put to sleep.

Suddenly I couldn’t breathe. The blankets were too hot, the cream on my skin too thick. I wanted out of the layers and began to fight my way free.

“Whoa,” DeeDee said. “Hang on, let me help you.” She pulled and peeled and handed me a towel. “Your mother didn’t tell me you were claustrophobic.”

I sat up, drawing great gasps of air into my lungs.
Of course she didn’t,
I thought.
Because she’s the one who’s suffocating me
.

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

It was late afternoon, almost time for the shift change, and I-tier was relatively quiet. Me, I’d been sick all day, hazing in and out of sleep brought on by fever. Calloway, who usually played chess with me, was playing with Shay instead. “Bishop takes a6,” Calloway called out. He was a racist bigot, but Calloway was also the best chess player I’d ever met.

During the day, Batman the Robin resided in his breast pocket, a small lump no bigger than a pack of Starburst candies. Sometimes it crawled onto his shoulder and pecked at the scars on his scalp. At other times, he kept Batman in a paperback copy of
The Stand
that had been doctored as a hiding place—starting on chapter six, a square had been cut out of the pages of the thick book with a pilfered razor blade, creating a little hollow that Calloway lined with tissues to make a bed. The robin ate mashed potatoes; Calloway traded precious masking tape and twine and even a homemade handcuff key for extra portions.

“Hey,” Calloway said. “We haven’t made a wager on this game.”

Crash laughed. “Even Bourne ain’t dumb enough to bet you when he’s losing.”

“What have you got that I want?” Calloway mused.

“Intelligence?” I suggested. “Common sense?”

“Keep out of this, homo.” Calloway thought for a moment. “The brownie. I want the damn brownie.”

By now, the brownie was two days old. I doubted that Calloway would even be able to swallow it. What he’d enjoy, mostly, was the act of taking it away from Shay.

“Okay,” Shay said. “Knight to g6.”

I sat up on my bunk. “Okay? Shay, he’s beating the pants off you.”

“How come you’re too sick to play, DuFresne, but you don’t mind sticking your two cents into every conversation?” Calloway said. “This is between me and Bourne.”

“What if
I
win?” Shay asked. “What do I get?”

Calloway laughed. “It won’t happen.”

“The bird.”

“I’m not giving you Batman—”

“Then I’m not giving you the brownie.” There was a beat of silence.

“Fine,” Calloway said. “You win, you get the bird. But you’re not going to win, because my bishop takes d3. Consider yourself officially screwed.”

“Queen to h7,” Shay replied. “Checkmate.”

“What?” Calloway cried. I scrutinized the mental chessboard I’d been tracking—Shay’s queen had come out of nowhere, screened by his knight. There was nowhere left for Calloway to go.

At that moment the door to I-tier opened, admitting a pair of officers in flak jackets and helmets. They marched to Calloway’s cell and brought him onto the catwalk, securing his handcuffs to a metal railing along the far wall.

There was nothing worse than having your cell searched. In here, all we had were our belongings, and having them pored over was a gross invasion of privacy. Not to mention the fact that when it happened, you had an excellent chance of losing your best stash, be that drugs or hooch or chocolate or art
supplies or the stinger rigged from paper clips to heat up your instant coffee.

They came in with flashlights and long-handled mirrors and worked systematically. They’d check the seams of the walls, the vents, the plumbing. They’d roll deodorant sticks all the way out to make sure nothing was hidden underneath. They’d shake containers of powder to hear what might be inside. They’d sniff shampoo bottles, open envelopes, and take out the letters inside. They’d rip off your bedsheets and run their hands over the mattresses, looking for tears or ripped seams.