Change of Heart (4 page)

Moving cells is routine in prison. They don’t like you to become too attached to anything. In the fifteen years I’ve been
here, I have been moved eight different times. The cells, of course, all look alike—what’s different is who’s next to you, which is why Shay’s arrival on I-tier was of great interest to all of us.

This, in itself, was a rarity. The six inmates in I-tier were radically different from one another; for one man to spark curiosity in all of us was nothing short of a miracle. Cell 1 housed Joey Kunz, a pedophile who was at the bottom of the pecking order. In Cell 2 was Calloway Reece, a card-carrying member of the Aryan Brother hood. Cell 3 was me, Lucius DuFresne. Four and five were empty, so we knew the new inmate would be put in one of them—the only question was whether he’d be closer to me, or to the guys in the last three cells: Texas Wridell, Pogie Simmons, and Crash, the self-appointed leader of I-tier.

As Shay Bourne was escorted in by a phalanx of six correctional officers wearing helmets and flak jackets and face shields, we all came forward in our cells. The COs passed by the shower stall, shuffled by Joey and Calloway, and then paused right in front of me, so I could get a good look. Bourne was small and slight, with close-cropped brown hair and eyes like the Caribbean Sea. I knew about the Caribbean, because it was the last vacation I’d taken with Adam. I was glad I didn’t have eyes like that. I wouldn’t want to look in the mirror every day and be reminded of a place I’d never see again.

Then Shay Bourne turned to me.

Maybe now would be a good time to tell you what I look like. My face was the reason the COs didn’t look me in the eye; it was why I sometimes preferred to be hidden inside this cell. The sores were scarlet and purple and scaly. They spread from my forehead to my chin.

Most people winced. Even the polite ones, like the eighty-year-old missionary who brought us pamphlets once a month, always
did a double take, as if I looked even worse than he remembered. But Shay just met my gaze and nodded at me, as if I were no different than anyone else.

I heard the door of the cell beside mine slide shut, the clink of chains as Shay stuck his hands through the trap to have his cuffs removed. The COs left the pod, and almost immediately Crash started in. “Hey, Death Row,” he yelled.

There was no response from Shay Bourne’s cell.

“Hey, when Crash talks, you answer.”

“Leave him alone, Crash,” I sighed. “Give the poor guy five minutes to figure out what a moron you are.”

“Ooh, Death Row, better watch it,” Calloway said. “Lucius is kissing up to you, and his last boyfriend’s six feet under.”

There was the sound of a television being turned on, and then Shay must have plugged in the headphones that we were all required to have, so we didn’t have a volume war with one another. I was a little surprised that a death row prisoner would have been able to purchase a television from the canteen, same as us. It would have been a thirteen-inch one, specially made for us wards of the state by Zenith, with a clear plastic shell around its guts and cathodes, so that the COs would be able to tell if you were extracting parts to make weapons.

While Calloway and Crash united (as they often did) to humili ate me, I pulled out my own set of headphones and turned on my television. It was five o’clock, and I didn’t like to miss
Oprah
. But when I tried to change the channel, nothing happened. The screen flickered, as if it were resetting to channel 22, but channel 22 looked just like channel 3 and channel 5 and CNN and the Food Network.

“Hey.” Crash started to pound on his door. “Yo, CO, the cable’s down. We got rights, you know …”

Sometimes headphones don’t work well enough.

I turned up the volume and watched a local news network’s coverage of a fund-raiser for a nearby children’s hospital up near Dartmouth College. There were clowns and balloons and even two Red Sox players signing autographs. The camera zeroed in on a girl with fairy-tale blond hair and blue half-moons beneath her eyes, just the kind of child they’d televise to get you to open up your wallet. “Claire Nealon,” the reporter’s voice-over said, “is waiting for a heart.”

Boo-hoo
, I thought. Everyone’s got problems. I took off my headphones. If I couldn’t listen to
Oprah
, I didn’t want to listen at all.

Which is why I was able to hear Shay Bourne’s very first word on I-tier. “Yes,” he said, and just like that, the cable came back on.

You have probably noticed by now that I am a cut above most of the cretins on I-tier, and that’s because I don’t really belong here. It was a crime of passion—the only discrepancy is that I focused on the
passion
part and the courts focused on the
crime
. But I ask you, what would
you
have done, if the love of your life found a new love of
his
life—someone younger, thinner, better-looking?

The irony, of course, is that no sentence imposed by a court for homicide could trump the one that’s ravaged me in prison. My last CD4+ was taken six months ago, and I was down to seventy-five cells per cubic millimeter of blood. Someone without HIV would have a normal T cell count of a thousand cells or more, but the virus becomes part of these white blood cells. When the white blood cells reproduce to fight infection, the virus reproduces, too. As the immune system gets weak, the more likely I am to get sick, or to develop an opportunistic infection like PCP, toxoplasmosis,
or CMV. The doctors say I won’t die from AIDS—I’ll die from pneumonia or TB or a bacterial infection in the brain; but if you ask me, that’s just semantics. Dead is dead.

I was an artist by vocation, and now by avocation—although it’s been considerably more challenging to get my supplies in a place like this. Where I had once favored Winsor & Newton oils and red sable brushes, linen canvases I stretched myself and coated with gesso, I now used whatever I could get my hands on. I had my nephews draw me pictures on card stock in pencil that I erased so that I could use the paper over again. I hoarded the foods that produced pigment. Tonight I had been working on a portrait of Adam, drawn of course from memory, because that was all I had left. I had mixed some red ink gleaned from a Skittle with a dab of toothpaste in the lid of a juice bottle, and coffee with a bit of water in a second lid, and then I’d combined them to get just the right shade of his skin—a burnished, deep molasses.

I had already outlined his features in black—the broad brow, the strong chin, the hawk’s nose. I’d used a shank to shave ebony curls from a picture of a coal mine in a
National Geographic
and added a dab of shampoo to make a chalky paint. With the broken tip of a pencil, I had transferred the color to my makeshift canvas.

God, he was beautiful.

It was after three a.m., but to be honest, I don’t sleep much. When I do, I find myself getting up to go to the bathroom—as little as I eat these days, food passes through me at lightning speed. I get sick to my stomach; I get headaches. The thrush in my mouth and throat makes it hard to swallow. Instead, I use my insomnia to fuel my artwork.

Tonight, I’d had the sweats. I was soaked through by the time I woke up, and after I stripped off my sheets and my scrubs, I
didn’t want to lie down on the mattress again. Instead, I had pulled out my painting and started re-creating Adam. But I got sidetracked by the other portraits I’d finished of him, hanging on my cell wall: Adam standing in the same pose he’d first struck when he was modeling for the college art class I taught; Adam’s face when he opened his eyes in the morning. Adam, looking over his shoulder, the way he’d been when I shot him.

“I need to do it,” Shay Bourne said. “It’s the only way.”

He had been utterly silent since this afternoon’s arrival on I-tier; I wondered who he was having a conversation with at this hour of the night. But the pod was empty. Maybe he was having a nightmare. “Bourne?” I whispered. “Are you okay?”

“Who’s … there?”

The words were hard for him—not quite a stutter; more like each syllable was a stone he had to bring forth. “I’m Lucius. Lucius DuFresne,” I said. “You talking to someone?”

He hesitated. “I
think
I’m talking to you.”

“Can’t sleep?”

“I can sleep,” Shay said. “I just don’t want to.”

“You’re luckier than I am, then,” I replied.

It was a joke, but he didn’t take it that way. “You’re no luckier than me, and I’m no unluckier than you,” he said.

Well, in a way, he was right. I may not have been handed down the same sentence as Shay Bourne, but like him, I would die within the walls of this prison—sooner rather than later.

“Lucius,” he said. “What are
you
doing?”

“I’m painting.”

There was a beat of silence. “Your cell?”

“No. A portrait.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m an artist.”

“Once, in school, an art teacher said I had classic lips,” Shay said. “I still don’t know what that means.”

“It’s a reference to the ancient Greeks and Romans,” I explained. “And the art that we see represented on—”

“Lucius? Did you see on TV today … the Red Sox …”

Everyone on I-tier had a team they followed, myself included. We each kept meticulous score of their league standings, and we debated the fairness of umpire and ref calls as if they were law and we were Supreme Court judges. Sometimes, like us, our teams had their hopes dashed; other times we got to share their World Series. But it was still preseason; there hadn’t been any televised games today.

“Schilling was sitting at a table,” Shay added, still struggling to find the right words. “And there was a little girl—”

“You mean the fund-raiser? The one up at the hospital?”

“That little girl,” Shay said. “I’m going to give her my heart.”

Before I could respond, there was a loud crash and the thud of flesh smacking against the concrete floor. “Shay?” I called. “Shay?!”

I pressed my face up against the Plexiglas. I couldn’t see Shay at all, but I heard something rhythmic smacking his cell door. “Hey!” I yelled at the top of my lungs. “Hey, we need help down here!”

The others started to wake up, cursing me out for disturbing their rest, and then falling silent with fascination. Two officers stormed into I-tier, still Velcroing their flak jackets. 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. The other, CO Smythe, had never been anything but professional toward me. Kappaletti stopped in front of my cell. “DuFresne, if you’re crying wolf—”

But Smythe was already kneeling in front of Shay’s cell. “I think Bourne’s having a seizure.” He reached for his radio and the electronic door slid open so that other officers could enter.

“Is he breathing?” one said.

“Turn him over, on the count of three …”

The EMTs arrived and wheeled Shay past my cell on a gurney—a stretcher with restraints across the shoulders, belly, and legs that was used to transport inmates like Crash who were too much trouble even cuffed at the waist and ankles; or inmates who were too sick to walk to the infirmary. I always assumed I’d leave I-tier on one of those gurneys. But now I realized that it looked a lot like the table Shay would one day be strapped onto for his lethal injection.

The EMTs had pushed an oxygen mask over Shay’s mouth that frosted with each breath he took. His eyes had rolled up in their sockets, white and blind. “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.

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There was a great deal that I loved about the Church.

Like the feeling I got when two hundred voices rose to the rafters during Sunday Mass in prayer. Or the way my hand still shook when I offered the host to a parishioner. I loved the double take on the face of a troubled teenager when he drooled over the 1969 Triumph Trophy motorcycle I’d restored—and then found out I was a priest; that being cool and being Catholic were not mutually exclusive.

Even though I was clearly the junior priest at St. Catherine’s, we were one of only four parishes to serve all of Concord, New Hampshire. There never seemed to be enough hours in the day. Father Walter and I would alternate officiating at Mass or hearing confession; sometimes we’d be asked to drop in and teach a class at the parochial school one town over. There were always parishioners to visit who were ill or troubled or lonely; there were always rosaries to be said. But I looked forward to even the humblest act—sweeping the vestibule, or rinsing the vessels from the Eucharist in the sacrarium so that no drop of Precious Blood wound up in the Concord sewers.

I didn’t have an office at St. Catherine’s. Father Walter did, but then he’d been at the parish so long that he seemed as much a part of it as the rosewood pews and the velveteen drapes at the altar. Although he kept telling me he’d get
around to clearing out a spot for me in one of the old storage rooms, he tended to nap after lunch, and who was I to wake up a man in his seventies and tell him to get a move on? After a while, I gave up asking and instead set a small desk up inside a broom closet. Today, I was supposed to be writing a homily—if I could get it down to seven minutes, I knew the older members of the congregation wouldn’t fall asleep—but instead, my mind kept straying to one of our youngest members. Hannah Smythe was the first baby I baptized at St. Catherine’s. Now, just one year later, the infant had been hospitalized repeatedly. Without warning, her throat would simply close, and her frantic parents would rush her to the ER for intubation, where the vicious cycle would start all over again. I offered up a quick prayer to God to lead the doctors to cure Hannah. I was just finishing up with the sign of the cross when a small, silver-haired lady approached my desk. “Father Michael?”

“Mary Lou,” I said. “How are you doing?”

“Could I maybe talk to you for a few minutes?”

Mary Lou Huckens could talk not only for a few minutes; she was likely to go on for nearly an hour. Father Walter and I had an unwritten policy to rescue each other from her effusive praise after Mass. “What can I do for you?”