Change of Heart (19 page)

If I didn’t take Bourne’s heart, Claire would most likely die.

If I did, it would be like saying I could somehow be compensated for the death of my husband and daughter. And I couldn’t—not ever.

I believe a good person can do bad things,
Father Michael had said. Like make the wrong decision for the right reasons. Sign your daughter’s life away, because she can’t have a murderer’s heart.

Forgive me, Claire
, I thought, and suddenly I wasn’t cold anymore. I was burning, seared by the tears on my cheeks.

I couldn’t trust Shay Bourne’s sudden altruistic turnaround; and maybe that meant he had won: I had gone just as bitter and rotten as he was. But that only made me more certain that I had the stamina to tell him, face-to-face, what balancing the scales really meant. It wasn’t giving me a heart for Claire; it wasn’t offering a future that might ease the weight of the past. It was knowing that Shay Bourne badly wanted something, and that this time, I’d be the one to take
his
dream away.

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Stunned, I hung up the phone and stared at the receiver again. I was tempted to *69 the call, just to make sure it hadn’t been some kind of prank.

Well, maybe miracles
did
happen.

But before I could mull over this change of events, I heard footsteps heading toward my desk. Father Michael turned the corner, looking like he’d just been through Dante’s Inferno. “June Nealon wants nothing to do with Shay.”

“That’s interesting,” I said, “since June Nealon just got off the phone with me, agreeing to a restorative justice meeting.”

Father Michael blanched. “You’ve got to call her back. This isn’t a good idea.”

“
You’re
the one who came up with it.”

“That was before I spoke to her. If she goes to that meeting, it’s not because she wants to hear what Shay has to say. It’s because she wants to run him through before the state finishes him off.”

“Did you really think that whatever Shay has to say to her is going to be any less painful than what she says to him?”

“I don’t know … I thought that maybe if they saw each other …” He sank down into a chair in front of my desk. “I don’t know what I’m doing. I guess there are just some things you can’t make amends for.”

I sighed. “You’re trying. That’s the best any of us can do. Look, it’s not like I fight death penalty cases all the time—but my boss used to. He worked down in Virginia before he came up north. They’re emotional minefields—you get to know the inmate, and you excuse some heinous crime with a lousy childhood or alcoholism or an emotional upheaval or drugs, until you see the victim’s family and a whole different level of suffering. And suddenly you start to feel a little ashamed of being in the defendant’s camp.”

I walked to a small cooler next to a file cabinet and took out a bottle of water for the priest. “Shay’s guilty, Father. A court already told us that. June knows it. I know it. Everyone knows that it’s wrong to execute an innocent man. The real question is whether it’s still wrong to execute someone who’s guilty.”

“But you’re trying to get him hanged,” Father Michael said.

“I’m not trying to get him hanged,” I corrected. “I want to champion his civil liberties, and at the same time, bring front and center what’s wrong with the death penalty in this country. The only way to do both is to find a way for him to die the way
he
wants to. That’s the difference between you and me. You’re trying to find a way for him to die the way
you
want him to.”

“You’re the one who said Shay’s heart might not be a viable match. And even if it is, June Nealon will never agree to taking it,” the priest said.

That was, of course, entirely possible. What Father Michael had conveniently put out of his mind when he dreamed up a meeting between June and Shay was that in order to forgive, you have to remember how you were hurt in the first place. And that in order to forget, you had to accept your role in what had happened.

“If we don’t want Shay to lose hope,” I said, “then we’d better not lose it either.”

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Every day when I wasn’t running the noon Mass, I went to visit Shay. Sometimes we talked about television shows we’d seen—we were both pretty upset with Meredith on
Grey’s Anatomy
, and thought the girls on
The Bachelor
were hot but dumb as bricks. Sometimes we talked about carpentry, how a piece of wood would tell him what it needed to be, how I could say the same of a parishioner in need. Sometimes we talked about his case—the appeals he’d lost, the lawyers he’d had over the years. And sometimes, he was less lucid. He’d run around his cell like a caged animal; he’d rock back and forth; he’d swing from topic to topic as if it was the only way to cross the jungle of his thoughts.

One day, Shay asked me what was being said about him outside.

“You know,” I told him. “You watch the news.”

“They think I can save them,” Shay said.

“Well. Yeah.”

“That’s pretty fucking selfish, isn’t it? Or is it selfish of me if I don’t try?”

“I can’t answer that for you, Shay,” I said.

He sighed. “I’m tired of waiting to die,” he said. “Eleven years is a long time.”

I pressed my stool up close to the cell door; it was more private that way. It had taken me a week, but I had managed to separate out the way I felt about Shay’s case from the way that he felt. I had been stunned to learn that Shay believed he was innocent—although Warden Coyne told me that everyone in prison believed they were innocent, regardless of the conviction. I wondered if his memory of the events, over time, had blurred—me, I could still remember that awful evidence as if it had been presented to me yesterday. When I pushed a bit—encouraged him to tell me more about his wrongful conviction, suggested that Maggie might be able to use the information in court, asked him why he was willing to go along with an execution so passively if he wasn’t guilty—he shut down. He’d say, over and over, that what had happened then didn’t matter now. I began to understand that proclaiming his innocence had a lot less to do with the reality of his case and more to do with the fragile connection between us. I was becoming his confidant—and he wanted me to think the best of him.

“What do you think is easier?” Shay asked. “Knowing you’re going to die on a certain date and time, or knowing it might happen any moment when you least expect it?”

A thought swam through my mind like a minnow:
Did you ask Elizabeth that?
“I’d rather not know,” I said. “Live every day like it’s your last, and all that. But I think if you
do
know you’re going to die, Christ showed the way to do it with grace.”

Shay smirked. “Just think. It took you a whole forty-two minutes to bring up good ol’ Jesus today.”

“Sorry. Professional hazard,” I said. “When He says, in Gethsemane, ‘
O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me …’
He’s wrestling with destiny … but ultimately, He accepts God’s will.”

“Sucks for him,” Shay said.

“Well, sure. I bet His legs felt like Jell-O when He was carrying the Cross. He was human, after all. You can be brave, but that doesn’t keep your stomach from doing somersaults.”

I finished speaking to find Shay staring at me. “Did you ever wonder if you’re dead wrong?”

“About what?”

“All of it. What Jesus said. What Jesus meant. I mean, he didn’t even write the Bible, did he? In fact, the people who
did
write the Bible weren’t even alive when Jesus was.” I must have looked absolutely stricken, because Shay hurried to continue. “Not that Jesus wasn’t a really cool guy—great teacher, excellent speaker, yadda yadda yadda. But … Son of God? Where’s the proof?”

“That’s what faith is,” I said. “Believing without seeing.”

“Okay,” Shay argued. “But what about the folks who think Allah’s the one to put your money on? Or that the right path is the eightfold one? I mean, how can a guy who walked on water even get
baptized
?”

“We know Jesus was baptized because—”

“Because it’s in the Bible?” Shay laughed. “Someone wrote the Bible, and it wasn’t God. Just like someone wrote the Quran, and the Talmud. And he must have made decisions about what went in and what didn’t. It’s like when you write a letter, and you put in all the stuff you did during vacation but you leave out the part where your wallet got stolen and you got food poisoning.”

“Do you really need to know if Jesus got food poisoning?” I asked.

“You’re missing the point. You can’t take Matthew 26:39 or Luke 500:43 or whatever and read it as fact.”

“See, Shay, that’s where you’re wrong. I
can
take Matthew 26:39 and know it’s the word of God. Or Luke 500:43, if it went up that high.”

By now, other inmates on the pod were eavesdropping. Some of them—like Joey Kunz, who was Greek Orthodox, and Pogie, who was Southern Baptist—liked to listen when I visited Shay and read scripture; a few of them had even asked if I’d stop by and pray with them when I came in to see Shay. “Shut your piehole, Bourne,” Pogie yelled out. “You’re going to hell as soon as they push that needle in your arm.”

“I’m not saying I’m right,” Shay said, his voice escalating. “I’m just saying that if
you’re
right, it still doesn’t mean
I’m
wrong.”

“Shay,” I said, “you have to stop shouting, or they’re going to ask me to leave.”

He walked toward me, flattening his hands on the other side of the steel mesh door. “What if it didn’t matter if you were a Christian or a Jew or a Buddhist or a Wiccan or a … a transcendentalist? What if all those roads led to the same place?”

“Religion brings people together,” I said.

“Yeah, right. You can track every polarizing issue in this country to religion. Stem cell research, the war in Iraq, the right to die, gay marriage, abortion, evolution, even the death penalty—what’s the fault line? That Bible of yours.” Shay shrugged. “You really think Jesus would be happy with the way the world’s turned out?”

I thought of suicide bombers, of the radicals who stormed into Planned Parenthood clinics. I thought of the news footage of the Middle East. “I think God would be horrified by some of the things that are done in His name,” I admitted. “I think there
are places His message has been distorted. Which is why I think it’s even more important to spread the one He meant to give.”

Shay pushed away from the cell door. “You look at a guy like Calloway—”

“Fuck you, Bourne,” Reece called out. “I don’t want to be part of your speech. I don’t even want your filthy-ass mouth speaking my name—”

“—an AB guy, who burned down a temple—”

“You’re dead, Bourne,” Reece said. “D-E-A-D.”

“—or the CO who walks you to the shower and knows he can’t look you in the eye, because if his life had gone just a little different, he might be the one wearing the cuffs. Or the politicians who think that they can take someone they don’t really want in society anymore and lock him away—”

At this, the other inmates began to cheer. Texas and Pogie picked up their dinner trays and began to bang them against the steel doors of their cells. On the intercom, an officer’s voice rang through. “What’s going on in there?”

Shay was standing at the front of his house now, preaching to his congregation, disconnected from linear thought and everything but his moment of grandstanding. “And the ones who are really monsters, the ones they don’t ever want walking around near their wives and children again—the ones like
me
—well, those they get to dispose of. Because it’s easier than admitting there isn’t much difference between them and me.”

There were catcalls; there were cheers. Shay backed up as if he were on a stage, bent at the waist, bowed. Then he came back for his encore.

“The joke’s on them. One little hypodermic won’t be enough. Split a piece of wood, and they’ll find me. Lift up a stone, and they’ll find me. Look in the mirror, and they’ll find me.” Shay gazed squarely at me. “If you really want to know what makes someone a killer,” he said, “ask yourself what would make
you
do it.”

My hands tightened on the Bible I always brought when I came to visit Shay. As it turned out, Shay wasn’t railing about nothing. He wasn’t disconnected from reality.

That would have been me.

Because, as Shay was suggesting, we weren’t as different as I would have liked to think. We were both murderers.

The only distinction was that the death I’d caused had yet to happen.

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That week, when I showed up at the ChutZpah for lunch with my mother, she was too busy to see me. “Maggie,” she said when I was standing at the threshold of her office door. “What are you doing here?”

It was the same day, the same time, we met for our habitual lunch—the same lunch I never wanted to go to. But today, I was actually looking forward to zoning out while my cuticles were being cut and shaped. Ever since Father Michael had barreled into my office talking about a meeting between Shay and June Nealon, I’d been doubting myself and my intentions. By trying to make it possible for Shay to donate his heart, was I carrying out what was in his best interests, or my own? Sure, it would be a media boon for the anti–death penalty movement if Shay’s last act on earth was as selfless as organ donation … but wasn’t it morally wrong to try to legally hasten a man’s execution, even if it was what he’d asked for? After three sleepless nights, all I wanted was to close my eyes, soak my hands in warm water, and think of anything
but
Shay Bourne.

My mother was wearing a cream-colored skirt so tiny it might as well have come from the American Girl doll store, and her hair was twisted up in a chignon. “I have an investor coming in,” she said. “Remember?”

What I remembered was her vague mention of adding another wing to the ChutZpah. And that there was some very
rich lady from Woodbury, New York, who wanted to talk about financing it.

“You never told me it was going to be today,” I said, and I sank down in one of the chairs opposite her desk.