Change of Heart

by Jodi Picoult

‘The word Messiah isn’t in the Old Testament . . . just the Hebrew word for anointed. He’s not a savior; he’s a king or a priest with a special purpose. But the Midrash – well, it mentions the moshiach a lot, and he looks different every time. Sometimes he’s a soldier, sometimes he’s a politician, sometimes he’s got supernatural powers. And sometimes he’s dressed like a vagrant. The reason I gave that bum a quarter,’ he said, ‘is because you never know.’

I walked through the metal detector, holding my breath, as if I had something to hide. And I suppose I did, but my secrets wouldn’t set off those alarms.

When the doors released in unison, like all the strings tuning up in an orchestra and magically hitting the right note the first time the bow was raised, I didn’t run out of the cell like the others. I stopped for a beat, paralyzed by freedom.

I used to find him outside at the crack of dawn, rooting around in the dirt between our daylilies and sedums. The weeds shall inherit the earth, he had said. Meek, I’d corrected. The meek shall inherit it. No way, Adam had said, and laughed. The weeds will blow right by them. He used to say that if you picked a dandelion, two would grow back in its place. I guess they are the botanical equivalent of the men in this prison. Take one of us off the street, and more will sprout up in his wake.

I drew in my breath. No one in prison talked about another person’s crime, even if you secretly believed they were guilty.

‘It’s okay to not know something,’ Shay said. ‘That’s what makes us human.’

They say God won’t give you any more than you can handle, but that begs a more important question: why would God let you suffer in the first place?

There are people who say that the death penalty isn’t just because it takes so long to execute a man. That it’s inhumane to have to wait eleven years or more for punishment. That at least for Elizabeth and Kurt, death came quickly. Let me tell you what’s wrong with that line of reasoning: it assumes that Elizabeth and Kurt were the only victims. It leaves out me; it leaves out Claire. And I can promise you that every day for the last eleven years I’ve thought of what I lost at the hands of Shay Bourne. I’ve been anticipating his death just as long as he has.

My mind kept tripping over a verse from Matthew where Jesus spoke to his disciples: I was a stranger, and you took me in; naked, and you clothed me; I was sick, and you visited me; I was in prison, and you came unto me. The disciples – who were, to be brutally honest, a thick bunch – were confused. They couldn’t remember Jesus being lost or naked or sick or imprisoned. And Jesus told them: Inasmuch as you have done it unto one of the least of my brethren, you have done it unto me.

Following his conversation was like watching a SuperBall bounce.

We were making the same mistake, Shay and I. We both believed that you could right a former wrong by doing a good deed later on.

‘I couldn’t stop it,’ Shay said. ‘But this time, I can fix it.’ ‘Leave that to God,’ I suggested. ‘Tell Him you’re sorry for what you did, and He’ll forgive you.’ ‘No matter what?’ ‘No matter what.’ ‘Then why do you have to say you’re sorry first?’ I hesitated, trying to find a better way to explain sin and salvation to Shay. It was a bargain: you made an admission, you got redemption in return. In Shay’s economy of salvation, you gave away a piece of yourself – and somehow found yourself whole again. Were the two ideas really so different?

‘Christ can’t give Claire Nealon a heart.’ Suddenly Shay’s gaze was piercing and lucid. ‘I don’t need to find God. I don’t want catechism,’ he said. ‘All I want to know is whether, after I’m killed, I can save a little girl.’

There is so much pain in this world, I thought, how do any of us manage to get up in the morning?

I found myself considering what it would be like to be locked in here forever. What if my dress clothes and day clothes and pajamas were all the same orange scrubs? What if I was told when to shower, when to eat, when to go to bed? Given that my career was about maintaining personal freedoms, it was hard to imagine a world where they’d all been stripped away.

Anesthesiologists say that if a person were conscious at the time potassium chloride is administered, it would feel like boiling oil in the veins. An inmate might feel as if he were being burned alive from the inside, but be unable to move or speak because of the muscle paralysis and minimal sedation caused by the other two drugs.

Religion gave hope to people who knew the end wasn’t going to be pretty. It was why inmates started praying in prison and why patients started praying when the doctors said terminal.

‘If he was Jesus . . . if this was the Second Coming . . . well, there’d be rapture and destruction and resurrections and we wouldn’t be sitting here having a normal conversation.’ Then again, there was nothing in the Bible that said before the Second Coming, Jesus wouldn’t pop in to see how things were going here on earth.

I knew why this priest wanted me to meet with Shay Bourne. I knew what Jesus had said: Don’t pay back in kind, pay back in kindness. If someone does wrong to you, do right by them. I’ll tell you this: Jesus never buried his own child.

‘When it happened, everyone said that Kurt and Elizabeth were at peace. That they’d gone someplace better. But you know what? They didn’t go anywhere. They were taken. I was robbed.’

Shay Bourne wanted to donate his heart to Claire so that she’d live. What kind of mother would I be if I let that happen? And what kind of mother would I be if I turned him down?

It was knowing that Shay Bourne badly wanted something, and that this time, I’d be the one to take his dream away.

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.’

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.

‘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?’

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

My mother was wearing a cream-colored skirt so tiny it might as well have come from the American Girl doll store,

‘That’s the eternal question, isn’t it? Are we born who we are, or do we make ourselves that way?’

‘Most people just want to believe what someone else tells them,’ Shay said.

‘If you can get June to forgive you at this meeting, Shay, maybe you don’t have to give up your heart. Maybe you’ll feel good about connecting with her again, and then we can get her to talk to the governor on your behalf to commute your sentence to life in prison—’ ‘If you do that,’ Shay interrupted, ‘I will kill myself.’ My jaw dropped. ‘Why?’ ‘Because,’ he said, ‘I have to get out of here.’ At first I thought that he was talking about the prison, but then I saw he was clutching his own arms, as if the penitentiary he was referring to was his own body. And that, of course, made me think of my father and teshuvah. Could I truly be helping him by letting him die on his own terms?

I went to touch his shoulder to let him know I was leaving. As soon as I stretched out my arm, though, I found myself flat on the floor. Shay stood over me, just as shocked by the blow he’d dealt me as I was.

‘I didn’t mean to do it. I didn’t see you coming. I thought you were – would—’ He broke off, choking on the words. ‘I’m sorry.’ I was the one who’d made the mistake. A man who had been locked up alone for a decade, whose only human contact was having his handcuffs chained and removed, would be completely unprepared for a small act of kindness. He would have instinctively seen it as a threat to his personal space, which was how I’d wound up sprawled on the floor.

I watched them move Shay down the tier. Speak from your heart, I thought, watching him go. So that she knows it’s worth taking.

They say you get over your grief, but you don’t really, not ever. It’s been eleven years, and it hurts just as much as it did that first day.

If they had to die, I would have loved to have known in advance, so that I could take each second spent with them and know to hold on to it, instead of assuming there would be a million more. If they had to die, I would have loved to have been there, to be the last face they saw, instead of his. I would like to tell Shay Bourne to go to hell, because wherever he winds up after he dies, it had better not be anywhere close to my daughter and my husband.

Then, suddenly, her brake lights came on. She sped backward, stopping beside me with only inches to spare. She unrolled the window on the driver’s side. ‘I’ll take his heart,’ June said, her voice thick. ‘I’ll take it, and I’ll watch that son of a bitch die, and we still won’t be even.’ Too stunned to find any words, I nodded. I watched June drive off, her taillights winking as red as the eyes of any devil.

Still, he was a better speaker than Reverend Justus, who kept rising out of his seat as if he were filled with helium.

‘Not true; an atheist’s got more in common with a Christian, since he believes you can know whether or not God exists – but where a Christian says absolutely, the atheist says absolutely not. For me, and any other agnostic – the jury’s still out. Religion is intriguing, but in a historical sense. A man should live his life a certain way not because of some divine authority, but because of a personal moral obligation to himself and others.’

‘As far as I understand,’ Fletcher said, ‘Bourne’s not claiming to be the Messiah or Mary Poppins or Captain America – it’s the people supporting him who have christened him, no pun intended. Ironically, that’s very similar to what we see in the Bible – Jesus doesn’t go around claiming to be God.’

‘Do you truly believe that if the Lord chose to grace us with his earthly presence again – and that is a big if, in my humble opinion – he would willingly choose to inhabit a convicted murderer, two times over?’ My hot water started to boil, and I disconnected the stinger. Then I turned off the television without hearing Fletcher’s answer. Why would God choose to inhabit any of us? What if it was the other way around . . . if we were the ones who inhabited God?

‘So here’s the thing,’ Maggie said, distracting me from my thoughts as we pulled into the driveway. ‘My parents are going to be a little excited when they see you in my car.’ I glanced around at the quiet, wooded retreat. ‘Don’t get much company here?’ ‘Don’t get many dates is more like it.’ ‘I don’t want to burst your bubble, but I’m not exactly boyfriend material.’ Maggie laughed. ‘Yeah, thanks, but I’d like to think even I’m not that desperate. It’s just that my mother’s got radar or something – she can sniff out a Y chromosome from miles away.’

She squinted, glimpsing me through the windshield. ‘Maggie!’ she cried. ‘You didn’t tell us you were bringing a friend for dinner.’ Just the way she said the word friend made me feel a rush of sympathy for Maggie. ‘Joel!’ she called into the house behind her. ‘Maggie’s brought a guest!’ I stepped out of the car and adjusted my collar. ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘I’m Father Michael.’ Maggie’s mother’s hand went to her throat. ‘Oh, God.’ ‘Close,’ I replied, ‘but no cigar.’

‘So is he or isn’t he?’ ‘Donating his heart? That’s going to be up to your daughter, I think.’ The rabbi shook his head. ‘No, no. Maggie, she could move a mountain if she wanted to, one molecule at a time. I meant is he or isn’t he Jesus?’

‘I never understood people – Jewish or Christian – who read the Bible as if it were hard evidence. Gospel means good news. It’s a way to update the story, to fit the audience you’re telling it to.’

‘I’m sure you already know that heresy comes from the Greek word for choice.’ He shrugged. ‘Makes you wonder. What if the ideas that have always been considered sacrilegious aren’t sacrilegious at all – just ideas we haven’t come across before? Or ideas we haven’t been allowed to come across?’

But as I drew closer, I saw the detour signs set up at the end of my block, the police car sprawled sideways across the street. I felt that small tumble in my heart, the way you do when you see a fire engine racing toward the general vicinity of your home.

I struggled against Irv – scratching, kicking, pleading. I thought maybe if I put up a fight, it would keep me from hearing what he was about to say.

As Irv led me to the steps of another ambulance, he spoke, words that at the time felt as solid and square as bricks, layered sentence upon sentence to build a wall between life as I’d known it and the one I would now be forced to lead.

Elizabeth, I used to say, when she was following me around the tiny kitchen as I cooked dinner, I’m tripping over you. Elizabeth, your father and I are trying to have a conversation. Elizabeth, not now. Never.

On the interminable ride to the hospital, I looked down at my shirt. It was stained with blood, a Rorschach of loss.