Change of Heart

by Jodi Picoult

‘So instead of trying, you’re just going to die for a crime you didn’t commit? You’re okay with that?’ He stared at me and slowly nodded. ‘I told you that the first day I met you. I didn’t want you to save me. I wanted you to save my heart.’ I was stunned. ‘Why?’ He struggled to get the words out. ‘It was still my fault. I tried to rescue her, and I couldn’t. I wasn’t there in time. I never liked Kurt Nealon – I used to try to not be in the same room as him when I was working, so I wouldn’t feel him looking at me. But June, she was so nice. She smelled like apples and she’d make me tuna fish for lunch and let me sit at the kitchen table like I belonged there with her and the girl. After Elizabeth . . . afterward . . . it was bad enough that June wouldn’t have them anymore. I didn’t want her to lose the past, too. Family’s not a thing, it’s a place,’ Shay said softly. ‘It’s where all the memories get kept.’ So he took the blame for Kurt Nealon’s crimes, in order to allow the grieving widow to remember him with pride, instead of hate. How much worse would it have been for June if DNA testing had existed back then – if the alleged rape of Elizabeth had proved Kurt as the perpetrator?

‘You go looking for evidence now, Maggie, and you’ll rip her wide open again. This way – well, this is the end, and then it’s over.’ I could feel my throat closing, a fist of tears. ‘And what if one day June finds out the truth? And realizes that you were executed, even though you were innocent?’ ‘Then,’ Shay said, a smile breaking over him like daylight, ‘she’ll remember me.’

I had gone into this case knowing that Shay and I wanted different outcomes; I had expected to be able to convince him that an overturned conviction was a cause for celebration, even if living meant organ donation would have to be put on hold for a while. But Shay was ready to die; Shay wanted to die. He wasn’t just giving Claire Nealon a future; he was giving one to her mother, too. He wasn’t trying to save the world, like me. Just one life at a time – which is why he had a fighting chance of succeeding. He touched my hand, where it rested on the bars. ‘It’s okay, Maggie. I’ve never done anything important. I didn’t cure cancer or stop global warming or win a Nobel Prize. I didn’t do anything with my life, except hurt people I loved. But dyin...

He bent over, as if the hand of grief were pushing hard on him, and started to cry – and that, I realized, was going to be my undoing. Because when you got right down to it, what was different between Shay and everyone else in this world was not nearly as profound as what we had in common. Maybe my hair was brushed, and I could string words together to make a sentence. Maybe I hadn’t been convicted of murder. But if someone told me that the only friend I really had in this world had left it, I’d sink to my knees, sobbing, too.

Before the nurse could rebuff me, however, I saw Christian coming down the hall with another doctor. He noticed me and – before I could even make a decision to go to him – he came to me. ‘What’s wrong, sweetheart?’ No one except my father had ever called me that. For this reason, and a dozen others, I burst into tears. Christian folded me into his arms. ‘Follow me,’ he said, and led me by the hand into an empty family waiting room.

‘Here’s the thing,’ Christian added. ‘It doesn’t get any easier, no matter how many times you go through it. And if it does – well, I suspect that means you’ve lost some part of yourself that’s critically important.’

I grabbed my ratty red bathrobe from the back of the door and wrapped it around myself just in time to see the door swing open. Christian stood there, holding a wire hanger with its neck straightened. ‘You can pick locks, too?’ I said. Christian grinned. ‘I do laparoscopic surgery through belly buttons,’ he explained. ‘This isn’t dramatically different.’

And somewhere in the middle of it all, I stopped worrying about sucking in my stomach, or if he could see me in the half-light of the moon, and instead noticed how seamlessly we fit together; how when I let go of me, there was only room for us.

Father Walter hesitated. ‘You know, Mikey, you haven’t been fooling anyone.’ I felt the hair stand up on the back of my neck. ‘No?’ ‘You don’t have to be embarrassed about having a crisis of faith,’ Father Walter said. ‘That’s what makes us human.’ I nodded, not trusting myself to respond. I wasn’t having a crisis of faith; I just didn’t particularly think Father Walter was any more right in his faith than Shay was.

Father Walter started to walk back down the church aisle, and I fell into step beside him. ‘You got time for lunch in the next few weeks?’ he asked. ‘Can’t,’ I said, grinning. ‘I’ll be doing a funeral.’ It was a joke between priests – you couldn’t schedule anything when your plans were likely to be changed by the lives and deaths of your parishioners. Except this time, as I said it, I realized it wasn’t a joke. In days, I’d be presiding over Shay’s funeral.

A miracle was only a miracle if someone witnessed it, and if the story was passed along to someone else.

‘I am not a religious man. I have not attended a service for many years. But I do believe in God. My own practice of religion, you could say, is a nonpractice. I personally feel that it’s just as worthy on a weekend to rake the lawn of an elderly neighbor or to climb a mountain and marvel at the beauty of this land we live in as it is to sing hosannas or go to Mass. In other words, I think every man finds his own church – and not all of them have four walls.

‘The judge . . . he’s made it possible for you to donate your organs . . . afterward. And even if Claire Nealon doesn’t want them, there are thousands of people in this country who do.’ Shay sank onto the bunk. ‘Just give it all away,’ he murmured. ‘It doesn’t matter anymore.’

Now that I had agreed to Claire’s wishes and given up the heart – now that she was dying by degrees – I kept a vigil, 24/7. I didn’t sleep, I didn’t eat, because years from now, I knew I would miss those minutes.

We pretend that we know our children, because it’s easier than admitting the truth – from the minute that cord is cut, they are strangers.

‘I don’t want to be alive because of him.’ ‘Then stay alive because of me.’ I drew in my breath and pulled my deepest secret free. ‘See, I’m not as strong as you are, Claire. I don’t think I can stand to be left behind again.’ She closed her eyes, and I thought she had drifted back into sleep, until she squeezed my hand. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘But I hope you realize I may hate you for the rest of my life.’ The rest of my life. Was there any other phrase with so much music in it? ‘Oh, Claire,’ I said tightly. ‘That’s going to be a long, long time.’

They kept saying ‘the inmate’ as if they did not know who they were executing in twenty-four hours. I knew, though, that the reason they would not say Shay’s name was that none of them were brave enough. That would make them accountable for murder – the very same crime for which they were hanging a man.

Try not to think about the fact that it is subzero in this tiny cell. Try not to think about the fact that it backs up to a gallows from which you will swing tomorrow. Try not to think about the sea of faces you will see when you stand up there, about what you will say when you are asked to, about your heart pounding so fast with fear that you cannot hear the words you speak. Try not to think about that same heart being cut from your chest, minutes later, when you are gone. Earlier, Alma the nurse had come to offer Shay Valium. He’d declined – but now I wished I’d taken her up on his behalf.

I had tried to get him a spot in the St Catherine’s cemetery, but the committee in charge had vetoed it – they did not want the grave of a murderer resting beside their loved ones. Private plots and burials were thousands of dollars – thousands that neither Grace nor Maggie nor I had to spend. An inmate whose family did not make alternate plans would be buried in a tiny graveyard behind the prison, a headstone carved only with his correctional facility number, not his name.

Sometime during the night, the frost had broken; and with it, the cement that had been poured for the base of the holding cell. Weeds from the courtyard sprouted in tufts and bunches; vines climbed up the metal wall of the cell door. Shay took off his shoes and socks and walked across the new grass barefoot, a big smile on his face. I had moved back to my outside stool, so that the officer watching over Shay would not get into trouble, but the sergeant who arrived with the food was immediately wary. ‘Who brought in the plants?’ ‘No one,’ the officer said. ‘They just sort of showed up overnight.’ The sergeant frowned. ‘I’m going to tell the warden.’ ‘Yeah,’ the officer said. ‘Go on. I’m sure he’s got nothing else to think about right now.’ At his sarcasm, Shay and I looked at each other and grinned.

‘I worked on a farm for a while,’ Shay said absently. ‘I was putting up a timber-frame barn. One day, I watched the guy who ran it empty the whole sack of grain out into the middle of the pasture for his steers, instead of just a scoop. I thought that was so cool – like Christmas, for them! – until I saw the butcher’s truck drive up. He was giving them all they could eat, because by then, it didn’t matter.’

I thought about Christian’s hands checking the knot against Shay’s neck. I knew the mercy of his touch; I was grateful that Shay’s last physical contact with a human would be gentle.

Somewhere, a door slammed, and suddenly the trap was open and the body plummeted, one quick firecracker snap as the weight caught at the end of the rope. Shay slowly turned counterclockwise with the unlikely grace of a ballerina, an October leaf, a snowflake falling.

‘You know why I think we still execute people? Because, even if we don’t want to say it out loud – for the really heinous crimes, we want to know that there’s a really heinous punishment. Simple as that. We want to bring society closer together – huddle and circle our wagons – and that means getting rid of people we think are incapable of learning a moral lesson. I guess the question is: Who gets to identify those people? Who decides what crime is so awful that the only answer is death? And what if, God forbid, they get it wrong?’