Change of Heart

by Jodi Picoult

If you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you. If you don’t bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you.

What if the Church forefathers had gotten it wrong? What if the gospels that had been dismissed and debunked were the real ones, and the ones that had been picked for the New Testament were the embellished versions?

‘He’ll live,’ the nurse said, and then, realizing her mistake, blushed fiercely.

‘The nurse said it was a seizure. Do you remember anything else?’ ‘I remember what I was thinking,’ Shay said. ‘This was what it would feel like.’ ‘What?’ ‘Dying.’ I took a deep breath. ‘Remember when you were little, a kid – and you’d fall asleep in the car? And someone would carry you out and put you into bed, so that when you woke up in the morning, you knew automatically you were home again? That’s what I think it’s like to die.’ ‘That would be good,’ Shay said, his voice deeper, groggy. ‘It’ll be nice to know what home looks like.’

‘B-believe,’ Shay stammered. I turned around, as if I could see him through the wall between our cells. ‘What did you say?’ ‘It’s what you said,’ Shay corrected. ‘I read it right, didn’t I?’ I had not told anyone of my plans for my sixth tattoo. I hadn’t shared the prototype artwork. I knew for a fact that Shay, from where he stood, could not have seen into my cell as I worked. Fumbling behind the brick that served as my safe, I took out the shank that I used as a portable mirror. I stepped up to the front of my cell and angled it so that I could see Shay’s beaming face in the reflection. ‘How did you know what I was writing?’ Shay smiled wider, and then raised his fist. He unfolded his fingers, one at a time. His palm was red and inflamed, and printed across it, in Gothic script, was the same exact tattoo I’d just given myself.

Claire would be cut in half, her sternum buzzed open with a saw and held open with a metal spreader so that she could be made, literally, heartless – and this was not what terrified me the most. No, what scared me to death was the idea of cellular memory. Dr Wu had said that there was no scientific evidence that the personality traits of heart donors transferred to their recipients. But science could only go so far, I figured. I’d read the books and done the research, and I didn’t see why it was such a stretch to think that living tissue might have the ability to remember. After all, how many of us had tried to forget something traumatic . . . only to find it printed on the back of our eyelids, tattooed on our tongues?

There were dozens of cases. The baby with a clubfoot who drowned and gave his heart to another infant, who began to drag her left leg. The rapper who started playing classical music, and then learned his donor had died clutching a violin case. The cattle rancher who received the heart of a sixteen-year-old vegetarian, and could not eat meat again without getting violently ill. Then there was the twenty-year-old organ donor who wrote music in his spare time. A year after he died, his parents found a CD of a love song he’d recorded, about losing his heart to a girl named Andi. His recipient, a twenty-year-old girl, was named Andrea. When the boy’s parents played the song for her, she could complete the chorus, without ever having heard it.

As soon as I saw the bright pink T-shirt of the man standing on the porch, with the words JOYOUS FOR JESUS printed boldly across it, I knew this was my punishment for falling off the wagon into the snack foods.

Tom pushed a pamphlet into my hand and beat a hasty retreat off my porch. As I closed the door behind him I glanced down at the cover. GOD + YOU = ∞ ‘If there’s any math to religion,’ I muttered, ‘it’s division.’

You would not have believed it possible, but when CO Smythe came back to life, things actually got worse.

If magicians are the best at sleight of hand, then inmates have to be a close second.

‘There was a bit of a trauma during the operation. As soon as we saw the injuries we knew that the anesthesia would be intravenous, instead of inhalational. Needless to say, when Mr Bourne heard the anesthesiologist say that she’d begun Sodium Pentothal drip, he grew quite agitated.’ The doctor looked up at me. ‘He asked if this was a dry run for the real thing.’ I tried to imagine how it would feel to be Shay – hurt, aching, and confused – whisked away to an unfamiliar place for what seemed to be a prelude to his own execution. ‘I want to see him.’ ‘If you can tell him, Ms Bloom, that if I’d realized who he was – what his circumstances are, I mean – well, I would never have allowed the anesthesiologist to use that drug, much less an IV tube. I’m deeply sorry for putting him through that.’

‘Mr Smythe was extremely lucky,’ the doctor said. ‘A quarter inch to the left, and he wouldn’t have survived.’ ‘About that . . .’ I took a deep breath. ‘A doctor at the prison pronounced him dead.’ ‘Between you and me, Father, I wouldn’t trust a psychiatrist to find his own car in a parking lot, much less a hypotensive victim’s pulse. Reports of Mr Smythe’s death were, as they say, greatly exaggerated.’

I ran up the stairs, pushing past doctors and nurses and lab technicians and secretaries, as if my speed now could make up for the fact that I had not been available for Shay when he needed me. The armed officers at the door took one look at my collar – a free pass, especially on a Sunday afternoon – and let me inside.

I. M. Bourne Isaiah Matthew Bourne. We had been told this at his trial, but I had forgotten that Shay was not his Christian name. ‘I. M. Bourne,’ I said aloud. ‘Sounds like a guy Trump would hire.’ I am born. Was this a hint, another puzzle piece of evidence?

The officer hesitated – as well he should have: what clergyman isn’t accustomed to praying in front of others? Then he shrugged. ‘Guess a priest wouldn’t do anything funny,’ he said. ‘Your boss is tougher than mine.’

Pushing past me, she ran into the kitchen and threw open a pantry door. Twins – I figured them to be about four years old – were smearing the white linoleum with peanut butter and jelly. ‘Oh, God,’ Mariah sighed as their faces turned up to hers like sunflowers.

Faith shook my hand, too. ‘Did you hear me play? Am I as bad as he says I am?’ I hesitated, and Fletcher came to my rescue. ‘Honey, don’t put the priest in a position where he’s going to have to lie – he’ll waste his whole afternoon at confession.’ He grinned at Faith.

Fletcher looked at me. ‘Let me ask you a question, Father – in your opinion, what’s the purpose of religion?’ I laughed. ‘Wow, thank goodness you picked an easy one.’

‘The biggest heresies are the ones that scare the Church to death.’

Every priest knew that what we were taught in seminary had a Catholic spin put on it – yet there was an incontrovertible truth behind it. I had always believed that the Catholic Church was evidence of religious survival of the fittest: the truest, most powerful ideas were the ones that had prevailed over time. But Fletcher was saying that the most powerful ideas had been subjugated . . . because they jeopardized the existence of the Orthodox Church. That the reason they’d had to be crushed was because – at one point – they’d been as or more popular than Orthodox Christianity. Or in other words, the reason the Church had survived and flourished was not because its ideas were the most valid, but because it had been the world’s first bully.

America was founded on religious freedom, on the separation of church and state, and yet I will be the first to tell you that we’re not much better off than those Puritans were in the 1770s over in England. Religion and politics get into bed with each other all the time: the first thing we do in a courtroom is swear on a Bible; public school classes begin with the Pledge of Allegiance, which declares us one nation under God; even our currency is stamped with the words In God We Trust.

On the wall were mirrors in every shape and size – my own personal version of the ninth circle of hell

Christian was quiet for a moment. ‘I was a resident in Philadelphia the first time I had to tell a mother her child had died. He was the victim of a gang shooting – eight years old. He’d gone to the corner store to get a quart of milk, and was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I will never forget the look in her eyes when I told her we weren’t able to save her son. When a child is killed, two people die, I think. The only difference is that his mother still had to suffer a heartbeat.’

Something in Claire’s eyes dimmed. ‘Just forget it,’ she said, and that was how I realized she’d already begun to die, before I had a chance to save her.

After the murders, I would sleepwalk. I’d find myself the next morning in the gardening shed, holding a spade. In the garage, with my face pressed against the metal cheek of a shovel. In my subconscious, I was making plans to join them; it was only when I was awake and alert and felt Claire kicking me from within that I realized I had to stay.

My head snapped up. ‘I can’t tell the court that Shay will find Jesus,’ I said. ‘I think he might be Jesus.’ She blinked. ‘You think what?’ The words began to spill out of me, the way I always imagined it felt to be speaking in tongues: truths that tumbled before you even realized they’d left your mouth. ‘It makes perfect sense. The age, the profession. The fact that he’s on death row. The miracles. And the heart donation – he’s literally giving himself away for our sins, again. He’s giving the part that matters the least – the body – in order to become whole in spirit.’ ‘This is way worse than having cold feet,’ Maggie murmured. ‘You’re crazy.’

In that moment, I remembered us lying on the floor of the department store, gazing at the lit trees, as a security guard loomed over us. Just give her another few minutes, my mother had begged. June Nealon’s face flashed before me. Maybe this was the job of a mother: to buy time for her child, no matter what.

I thought of all the times I’d held a Bible for comfort, a religious man’s security blanket. I used to think it contained all the answers; now I wondered whether the right questions had even been asked.

‘Mr Greenleaf,’ I said, ‘there are all sorts of experiences that we can’t really put a name to.’ ‘I beg your pardon?’ ‘The birth of a child, for one. Or the death of a parent. Falling in love. Words are like nets – we hope they’ll cover what we mean, but we know they can’t possibly hold that much joy, or grief, or wonder. Finding God is like that, too. If it’s happened to you, you know what it feels like. But try to describe it to someone else – and language only takes you so far,’ I said.

I would tell Claire about the elephants when she woke up, I decided. About a country where mothers and daughters walked side by side for years with their aunts and sisters. About how elephants were either right-handed or left-handed. How they could find their way home years after they’d left. Here is what I wouldn’t tell Claire, ever: That elephants know when they’re close to dying, and they make their way to a riverbed for nature to take its course. That elephants bury their dead, and grieve. That naturalists have seen a mother elephant carry a dead calf for miles, cradled in her trunk, unwilling and unable to let it go.

It is not an easy thing to pick the clothes in which your child will be buried.

I hope you’re pleased, the funeral director had said. It didn’t look like Elizabeth, not one bit, because she was too perfect. My daughter would have been rumpled and untucked, her hands dirty from chasing frogs, her socks mismatched, her wrists ringed with bracelets she’d beaded herself.

Maybe who we were in the past informed who we chose to be in the future. Maybe Shay had intentionally shifted his writing hand. Maybe he cultivated miracles, to make up for a sin as horrible as setting a fire that took the lives of two people – one literal, one metaphorical. It struck me that even in the Bible, there was no record of Jesus’s life between the ages of eight and thirty-three. What if he’d done something awful; what if his later years were a response to that?

‘So after the marshal helps you into the seat,’ I had explained, ‘they’re going to bring you a Bible.’ ‘I don’t need one.’ ‘Right. But they need you to swear on it.’ ‘I want to swear on a comic book,’ Shay had replied. ‘Or a Playboy magazine.’

‘I’m the one who took the most away from her,’ Shay said, just like we had practiced. ‘I have the most to give back to her.’

‘Why is it called court?’ he asked. ‘It’s not like a tennis court or a basketball court, where you’re playing a game. Or maybe you are, and that’s why there’s a winner and a loser, except it has nothing to do with how well you make a three-point shot or how fast your serve is.’ He looked at Judge Haig. ‘I bet you play golf.’

‘Part of the time. And part of the time I didn’t go anywhere at all, except hide in the closet so I wouldn’t get beat up by another kid or the foster dad, who’d try to keep everyone in line with a metal hairbrush. It kept us in line, all right, all the way down our backs. The whole foster care system in this country is a joke; it ought to be called foster don’t care, don’t give a shit except for the stipend you’re getting from the—’

‘If the judge orders you to die by lethal injection, Shay, and you can’t donate your heart – will that upset God?’ I asked. ‘It’ll upset me. So yeah, it’ll upset God.’ ‘Well, then,’ I said, ‘what is it about giving your heart to Claire Nealon that will please God?’ He smiled at me then – the sort of smile you see on the faces of saints in frescoes, and that makes you wish you knew their secret. ‘My end,’ Shay said, ‘is her beginning.’ I had a few more questions, but to be honest, I was terrified of what Shay might say. He already was talking in riddles.

‘I don’t belong to a religion. Religion’s the reason the world’s falling apart – did you see that guy get carted out of here? That’s what religion does. It points a finger. It causes wars. It breaks apart countries. It’s a petri dish for stereotypes to grow in. Religion’s not about being holy,’ Shay said. ‘Just holier-than-thou.’

Shay continued muttering, more quietly now. ‘You know what religion does? It draws a big fat line in the sand. It says, “If you don’t do it my way, you’re out.”’

Lynch shrugged. ‘Nobody wants to execute a man. It’s my job to do it with as much dignity as possible.’

I looked down at my hands, at the dark blotches of Kaposi’s sarcoma that had already begun to blend into one another, turning my skin as dark as Adam’s, as if my punishment were to reinvent myself in his image. ‘Please don’t do this,’ I whispered. But I was begging to stop something that had already started. I was praying, although I couldn’t remember to whom.

Since I’d become his spiritual advisor, he’d told me that what had happened in the past didn’t matter now, and I’d taken that to mean that he wouldn’t accept responsibility for what he’d done. But it could also have meant that in spite of his innocence, he knew he was still going to die.

I tried to imagine what it would be like to be Shay – easily confused and unable to communicate well – and to suddenly have a pistol thrust in my face. I would have panicked, too.

What if he truly believed Elizabeth’s death was a blessing, after what she’d suffered at the hands of her stepfather? Something snagged in the back of my mind, a splinter of memory. ‘Her underpants,’ I said. ‘You had them in your pocket.’ Shay stared at me as if I were an idiot. ‘Well, that’s because she didn’t have a chance to put them back on yet, before everything else happened.’

The Shay I had grown to know was a man who could close an open wound with a brush of his hand, yet who also might have a breakdown if the mashed potatoes in his meal platter were more yellow than the day before. That Shay would not see anything suspicious about the police finding a little girl’s underwear in his possession; it would make perfect sense to him to grab them when he grabbed Elizabeth, for the sake of her modesty.

‘I never said I was guilty,’ he answered. The pundits who downplayed Shay’s miracles were always quick to point out that if God were to return to earth, He wouldn’t choose to be a murderer. But what if He hadn’t? What if the whole situation had been misunderstood; what if Shay had not willfully, intentionally killed Elizabeth Nealon and her stepfather – but in fact had been trying to save her from him? It would mean that Shay was about to die for someone else’s sins. Again.

By the time Father Michael rode into the parking lot, I’d decided that if Shay Bourne had cost me my first shot at a relationship since the Jews went to wander the desert, I would execute him myself.

‘The guys at the top of the totem pole never see what’s carved at the bottom. See you Monday, Father.’