Change of Heart

by Jodi Picoult

Sometimes the COs talked to one another in front of us. They never spoke to inmates directly about their lives, and that actually was fine. We didn’t want to know that the guy strip-searching us had a son who scored the winning goal in his soccer game last Thursday. Better to take the humanity out of it.

God wanted me to help Shay, or so I told myself, because it kept me from admitting that I wanted to help Shay, too, after failing him the first time.

‘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?’

‘Jesus was a Jewish man, after all. Just look at the evidence: he lived at home, went into his dad’s business, thought his mother was a virgin, and his mother thought he was God.’ Rabbi Bloom grinned, and I started to smile.

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. It’s far easier to tell yourself your daughter is still a little girl than to see her in a bikini and realize she has the curves of a young woman; it’s safer to say you are a good parent who has all the right conversations about drugs and sex than to acknowledge there are a thousand things she would never tell you.

My mother says that emotion doesn’t get transplanted along with the heart, that I have to stop referring to it as his and start calling it mine. But that’s pretty hard to do, especially when you add up all the stuff I have to take just to keep my cells from recognizing this intruder in my chest, like that old horror movie with the woman who has an alien inside her.