Change of Heart

by Jodi Picoult

Even after four weeks, coming into this courtroom felt like landing in a foreign country without a guidebook . . . and yet, I couldn’t plead ignorant just because I was a tourist. I was expected to speak the language fluently.

Once again, Shay Bourne never took the stand to beg us for mercy.

In most trials, when it was time for closing arguments, the prosecution spoke last . . . so that whatever they said was still buzzing in your head when you went back to the jury room to deliberate. In a capital punishment sentencing phase, though, the prosecution went first, and then the defense got that final chance to change your mind. Because, after all, it really was a matter of life or death.

I wanted them to live my life, because that was the only way they’d really know what had been lost.

Ted, our foreman, was an older man who reminded me of my grandfather. Not in the way he looked or even the way he spoke, but because of the gift he had of making us measure up to a task. My grandfather had been like that, too – you wanted to be your best around him, not because he demanded it, but because there was nothing like that grin when you knew you’d impressed him.

‘Speaking of which . . . where’s lunch?’ Jack asked. ‘Don’t they usually bring it by now?’ Did he really want to eat? What did you order off a deli menu when you were in the process of deciding whether to end a man’s life?

You couldn’t bring them back, and there was no sob story in the world big enough to erase that truth.

One of them, CO Kappaletti, was the kind of man who’d taken this job so that he’d always have someone to put down.

‘Do whatever it takes to bring him back,’ CO Smythe instructed; and that was how I learned that the state will save a dying man just so that they can kill him later.

While Shay yelled for the warden, we all listened to Calloway’s play-by-play: The robin was wrapped in a shirt. The robin was tucked inside his left tennis shoe. The robin was pinking up. The robin had opened its left eye for a half second. We all had forgotten what it was like to care about something so much that you might not be able to stand losing it.

‘There’s nothing a priest can say that I want to hear,’ Smythe muttered. ‘What kind of God would do this to a baby?’

I laughed. But before long I began to sob, tears running down my face for what I had lost, for what was now literally coursing through my fingers. You can only miss something you remember having, and it had been so long since creature comforts had been part of my ordinary life.

Alma, who smelled of lemons and linen; and who had a massive coiled tower of braided hair that, I imagined, required architectural intervention in order for her to sleep.

I knew exactly how she felt. When you’re different, sometimes you don’t see the millions of people who accept you for what you are. All you notice is the one person who doesn’t.

To be jumped into the gang, you had to kill someone sanctioned by the Brotherhood – a black man, a Jew, a homosexual, or anyone else whose existence was considered an affront to your own.

‘You know why they lie?’ Shay interrupted. ‘Because they’re afraid you’ll go ballistic if they tell you the truth.’

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.’

There wasn’t very much that I liked about the outside of me.

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.’

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.

‘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.

Calloway wasn’t listening. I could not remember ever seeing him quite so unraveled. As soon as he was released back into his cell, he ran to the rear corner where the bird had been flung. The sound that Calloway Reece made was primordial; but then maybe that was always the case when a grown man with no heart started to cry. There was a crash, and a sickening crunch. A whirlwind of destruction as Calloway fought back against what couldn’t be fixed. Finally spent, Calloway sank down to the floor of his cell, cradling the dead bird.

I’ve often imagined what happened next. With an artist’s eye, I like to picture Shay sitting on his bunk, cupping his palms around the tiny bird. I imagine the touch of someone who loves you so much, he cannot bear to watch you sleep; and so you wake up with his hand on your heart. In the long run, though, it hardly matters how Shay did it. What matters is the result: that we all heard the piccolo trill of that robin; that Shay pushed the risen bird beneath his cell door onto the catwalk, where it hopped, like broken punctuation, toward Calloway’s outstretched hand.

If you’re a mother, you can look into the face of your grown child and see, instead, the one that peeked up at you from the folds of a baby blanket.

In kids, 79 percent of the cases came from an unknown origin. There was a camp that attributed its onset to myocarditis and other viral infections during infancy; and another that claimed it was inherited through a parent who was a carrier of the defective gene. I had always assumed the latter was the case with Claire. After all, surely a child who grew out of grief would be born with a heavy heart.

But even a transplant wasn’t a miracle: most recipients could only tolerate a heart for ten or fifteen years before complications ensued, or there was outright rejection. Still, as Dr Wu said, fifteen years from now, we might be able to buy a heart off a shelf and have it installed at Best Buy . . . the idea was to keep Claire alive long enough to let medical innovation catch up to her.

I leaned down and kissed her. ‘You,’ I pronounced, ‘will wake up and still be the same kid who cannot be bothered to clean her room or walk Dudley or turn out the lights when she goes downstairs.’ That’s what I said to Claire, anyway. But all I heard were the first four words: You will wake up.

But Claire wasn’t listening; she knew that hope was just smoke and mirrors; she’d learned by watching me. She looked up at the clock. ‘I think I’ll be a saint,’ she said, as if it were entirely up to her. ‘That way no one forgets you when you’re gone.’

Through the radios of the other policemen came the voice of the dispatcher: All units stand by for a broadcast. Final call for Officer Kurt Nealon, number 144. 144, report to 360 West Main for one last assignment. It was the address of the cemetery. You will be in the best of hands. You will be deeply missed. 144, 10-7. The radio code for end of shift.

I have been told that afterward, I walked up to Kurt’s coffin. It was so highly polished I could see my own reflection, pinched and unfamiliar. It had been specially made, wider than normal, to accommodate Elizabeth, too. She was, at seven, still afraid of the dark. Kurt would lie down beside her, an elephant perched among pink pillows and satin blankets, until she fell asleep; then he’d creep out of the room and turn off the light. Sometimes, she woke up at midnight shrieking. You turned it off, she’d sob into my shoulder, as if I had broken her heart.

It was supposed to be comforting that they would be together. It was supposed to make up for the fact that I couldn’t go with them. ‘Take care of her,’ I whispered to Kurt, my breath blowing a kiss against the gleaming wood. ‘Take care of my baby.’

There was a time when I prayed to saints. What I liked about them were their humble beginnings: they were human, once, and so you knew that they just got it in a way Jesus never would. They understood what it meant to have your hopes dashed or your promises broken or your feelings hurt.

It was when I started to admit to myself that I’d rather be dead that I was given a child who had to fight to stay alive.

Claire’s arrhythmias had worsened. Her AICD was going off six times a day. I’d been told that when it fired, it felt like an electric current running through the body. It restarted your heart, but it hurt like hell. Once a month would be devastating; once a day would be debilitating. And then there was Claire’s frequency. There were support groups for adults who had to live with AICDs; there were stories of those who preferred the risk of dying from an arrhythmia to the sure knowledge that they would be shocked by the device sooner or later. Last week, I had found Claire in her room reading the Guinness Book of World Records. ‘Roy Sullivan was struck by lightning seven times over thirty-six years,’ she’d said. ‘Finally, he killed himself.’ She lifted her shirt, staring down at the scar on her chest. ‘Mom,’ she begged, ‘please make them turn it off.’ I did not know how long I would be able to convince Claire to stay with me, if this was the way she had to do it.

‘You know,’ I said, forcing the words to unroll evenly, ‘you were named for a saint.’ ‘For real?’ I nodded. ‘She founded a group of nuns called the Poor Clares.’ She glanced at me. ‘Why did you pick her?’ Because, on the day you were born, the nurse who handed you to me shook her head and said, ‘Now there’s a sight for sore eyes.’ And you were. And she is the patron saint of that very thing. And I wanted you protected, from the very first moment I spoke your name. ‘I liked the way it sounded,’ I lied,

‘You still can’t be a saint,’ I said. And added silently, Because I will not let you die.

Like the teens I worked with, I understood the need for miracles – they kept reality from paralyzing you.

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.

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.

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.’

I pulled my art supplies out of my hiding spot in the mattress, riffling through my sketches for the one I’d done of Shay being wheeled off the tier after his seizure. I’d drawn him on the gurney, arms spread and tied down, legs banded together, eyes raised to the ceiling. I turned the paper ninety degrees. This way, it didn’t look like Shay was lying down. It looked like he was being crucified. People were always ‘finding’ Jesus in jail. What if he was already here?

There were many things I was grateful for, including the fact that I was no longer in high school.

Topher Renfrew, the boy who was sitting beside me in the lobby of the high school, was dressed in black jeans and a frayed T-shirt with an anarchy symbol, a guitar pick strung around his neck on a leather lanyard. Cut him, and he’d bleed antiestablishment.

My mother would invite me on Monday, and I’d tell her I’d have to wait and see whether anything came up – like a date, or Armageddon, both of which had the same likelihood of occurring in my life.

‘There’s a difference between a Jewish messiah, Dad, and . . . well . . . the other one.’

The more I learned about Jewish law the more I felt that, as a girl, I was bound to be considered unclean or limited or lacking.

I’d seen too much injustice in the world to buy into the belief that a merciful, all-powerful deity would continue to allow such atrocities to exist; and I downright detested the party line that there was some divine grand plan for humanity’s bumbling existence. It was a little like a parent watching her children playing with fire and thinking, Well, let them burn. That’ll teach ’em.

when I was in high school, I asked my father about religions that were, with the passage of time, considered to be false. The Greeks and Romans, with all their gods, thought they were making sacrifices and praying at temples in order to receive favor from their deities; but today, pious people would scoff. How do you know, I’d asked my father, that five hundred years from now, some alien master race won’t be picking over the artifacts of your Torah and their crucifix and wondering how you could be so naive? My father, who was the first to take a controversial situation and say ‘Let’s think about that,’ had been speechless. Because, he’d said finally, a religion doesn’t last two thousand years if it’s based on a lie.

Here’s my take on it: I don’t think religions are based on lies, but I don’t think they’re based on truths, either. I think they come about because of what people need at the time that they need them. Like the World Series player who won’t take off his lucky socks, or the mother of the sick child who believes that her baby can sleep on...

‘Come to the spa next week. We’ll have a nice afternoon, just the two of us.’ A dozen comments sprang to the back of my tongue: Some of us have to work for a living. It won’t be a nice afternoon if it’s just the two of us. I may be a glutton, but not for punishment. Instead, I nodded, even though we both knew I had no intention of showing up.