Change of Heart (28 page)

He was an enormous tower of muscle with a swastika tattooed on his scalp. His hair, sprouting out from a buzz cut, grew over it like moss.

The inmate’s cell door was closed, and his handcuffs removed. “You know the drill, Sully,” the officer said. He stood in the doorway as Sully slowly picked up the spray bottle and washed down his sink. I heard the squeak of paper toweling on metal.

“Hey, Father—you watch the game last night?” CO Smythe said, and then he rolled his eyes. “Sully, what are you doing? You don’t need to sweep the—”

Suddenly the broom in Sully’s hands was no longer a broom but a broken spear that he jutted into the officer’s throat. Smythe grabbed his neck, gurgling. His eyes rolled back in his head; he stumbled toward Shay’s cell. As he fell beside me, I clasped my hands over the wound and screamed for help.

The tier came to life. The inmates were all clamoring to see what had happened; CO Whitaker was suddenly there and hauling me to my feet, taking my place as another officer started CPR. Four more officers ran past me with pepper spray and shot it into Sully’s face. He was dragged out of the tier shrieking as the closest physician arrived—a psychiatrist I’d seen around the prison. But by now, Smythe had stopped moving.

No one seemed to notice that I was there; there was far too much happening, too much at stake. The psychiatrist tried to find a pulse in Smythe’s neck, but his hand came away slick with blood. He lifted the CO’s wrist and, after a moment, shook his head. “He’s gone.”

The tier had gone absolutely silent; the inmates were all staring in shock at the body in front of them. Blood had stopped flowing from Smythe’s neck; he was perfectly still. To my right,
I could see an argument going on in the control booth—the EMTs who’d arrived too late and were trying to gain admission to the tier. They were buzzed in, still shrugging into their flak jackets, and knelt beside Smythe’s body, repeating the same ineffective tests that the psychiatrist had.

Behind me, I heard weeping.

I turned around to find Shay crouched on the floor of his cell. His face was streaked with tears and blood; his hand slipped beneath his cell door so that his fingers brushed Smythe’s.

“You here for last rites?” one of the medics asked, and for the first time, everyone seemed to realize I was still present.

“I, uh—”

“What’s he doing here?” CO Whitaker barked.

“Who the hell
is
he?” another officer said. “I don’t even work this tier.”

“I can go,” I said. “I’ll … just go.” I glanced once more at Shay, who was curled into a ball, whispering. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought he was praying.

As the two EMTs got ready to move the body onto a stretcher, I prayed over Smythe. “In the Name of God the Father Almighty who created you … in the Name of Jesus Christ who redeemed you; in the Name of the Holy Spirit who sanctifies you. May your rest be this day in peace, and your dwelling place in the Paradise of God. Amen.”

I made the sign of the cross and started to get to my feet.

“On three,” the first EMT said.

The second one nodded, his hands on the slain officer’s ankles. “One, two … holy
shit,
” he cried as the dead man began to struggle against him.

“One of the proofs of the immortality
of the soul is that myriads have believed it.
They also believed the world was flat.”

—MARK TWAIN,
NOTEBOOK

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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.

Most of these stories were benign—a strange coincidence, an intriguing twist. Except for one: a little boy received the heart of another boy who’d been murdered. He began to have nightmares about the man who killed his donor—with details about the clothing the man wore, how he’d abducted the boy, where the murder weapon had been stashed. Using this evidence, the police caught the killer.

If Claire received Shay Bourne’s heart, it would be bad enough if she were to harbor thoughts of murder. But what would absolutely wreck me was if, with that heart in her, she had to
feel
her own father and sister being killed.

In that case, better to have no heart at all.

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Today, I decided, I was going to do everything right. It was Sunday, and I didn’t have to go to work. Instead, I got up and unearthed my
One Minute Workout
video (which was not nearly as slacker as it sounds—you could add minutes to your own liking, and no one was here to notice if I chose the four-minute option over the more grueling eight-minute one). I picked Focus on Abs, instead of the easier Upper Arm. I sorted my recyclables and flossed and shaved my legs in the shower. Downstairs, I cleaned Oliver’s cage and let him have the run of the living room while I made myself scrambled egg whites for breakfast.

With
wheat germ
.

Well. I lasted forty-seven minutes, anyway, before I had to break out the Oreos that I hid in the box with my skinny jeans, a last-ditch attempt at utter guilt before I ripped open the package and indulged.

I gave Oliver an Oreo, too, and was starting my third cookie when the doorbell rang.

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.

“If you’re not gone in the next ten seconds, I’m calling 911,” I said.

He grinned at me, a big platinum orthodontically enhanced grin. “I’m not a stranger,” he said. “I’m a friend you haven’t met yet.”

I rolled my eyes. “Why don’t we just cut to the chase—you give me the pamphlets, I politely refuse to talk to you, and then I close the door and throw them in the trash.”

He held out his hand. “I’m Tom.”

“You’re
leaving,
” I corrected.

“I used to be bitter, too. I’d go to work in the mornings and come home to an empty house and eat half a can of soup and wonder why I had even been put on this earth. I thought I had no one, but myself—”

“And then you offered Jesus the rest of your soup,” I finished. “Look, I’m an atheist.”

“It’s not too late to find your faith.”

“What you really mean is that it’s not too late for me to find
your
faith,” I answered, scooping up Oliver as he made a mad dash for the open door. “You know what I believe? That religion served its historical purpose—it was a set of laws to live by, before we had a justice system. But even when it starts out with the best of intentions, things get screwed up, don’t they? A group bands together because they believe the same things, and then somehow that gets perverted so that anyone who doesn’t believe those things is wrong. Honestly, even if there was a religion founded on the principle of doing good for other people, or helping them with their personal rights, like I do every day, I wouldn’t join … because it would still be a
religion
.”

I had rendered Tom speechless. This was probably the most heated debate he’d had in months; mostly, he’d have doors closed in his face. Inside my house, the phone began to ring.

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.” I slipped the pamphlet onto the liner of newspaper beneath Oliver’s cage as I hurried to the phone, which was on the verge of rolling over to the answering machine. “Hello?”

The voice was unfamiliar, halting. “Is Maggie Bloom there?”

“Speaking.” I geared up for a zinger to put a telemarketer in her place for disturbing me on a Sunday morning.

As it turned out, she wasn’t a telemarketer. She was a nurse at Concord Hospital, and she was calling because I had been listed as Shay Bourne’s emergency contact, and an emergency had occurred.

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

The remaining officers had to give statements to the warden about the stabbing. We were kept in lockdown, and the next day a team of officers who did not normally work on I-tier were brought in on duty. They started our one-hour rotations on the exercise yard and the shower, and Pogie was the first to go.

I hadn’t showered since the stabbing, although the COs had given both Shay and me a fresh set of scrubs. We had gotten Smythe’s blood on us, and a quick wash in our cell basins didn’t go very far to making me feel clean. While we were waiting for our turns in the shower, Alma showed up to give us both blood tests. They tested anyone who came in contact with an inmate’s blood, and since that included CO Smythe,
his
blood apparently was only one step removed from questionable. Shay was moved in handcuffs, ankle cuffs, and a belly chain to a holding room outside the tier, where Alma was waiting.

In the middle of all this, Pogie slipped in the shower. He lay there, moaning about his back. Two more COs dragged in the backboard and handcuffed Pogie to it, then carried him to a gurney so he could be transported all the way to Medical. But because they were not used to I-tier, and because COs are supposed to follow us, not lead, they did not realize that Shay was
already being brought back to the tier at the same time Pogie was going out.

Tragedies happen in a split second in prison; that’s all it took for Pogie to use the handcuff key he’d hidden to free himself, jump off the backboard, grab it, and slam it into Shay’s skull, so that he flew face-first into the brick wall.

“
Weiss macht!
” Pogie yelled—
White pride
!—which was how I realized Crash—from where he was still being kept in solitary—had used his connections to order a hit on Shay in retaliation for ratting him out and giving his hype kit to the COs. Sully’s attack on CO Smythe had just been collateral damage, meant to shake up the staffing on our tier so that part two of the plan could be carried out. And Pogie—a probate—had jumped at the chance to earn his bones by carrying out a murder sanctioned by the Aryan Brotherhood.

Six hours after this fiasco, Alma returned to finish drawing my blood. I was taken to the holding cell and found her still shaken by what had happened, although she would not tell me anything—except that Shay had been taken to the hospital.

When I saw something silver winking at me, I waited until Alma drew the needle from my arm. Then I put my head down between my knees.

“You all right, sugar?” Alma asked.

“Just feeling a little dizzy.” I let my fingers trail along the floor.

If magicians are the best at sleight of hand, then inmates have to be a close second. As soon as I was back in my cell, I pulled my booty out of the seam in my scrubs where I’d hidden it. Pogie’s handcuff key was tiny, shiny, formed from the fastener of a manila envelope.

I crawled beneath my bunk and wriggled the loose brick that concealed my prized possessions. In a small cardboard box were my bottles of paint and my Q-tip brushes. There were packets of
candy, too, that I planned to extract pigment from in the future—a half-empty pack of M&M’s, a roll of LifeSavers, a few loose Starbursts. I unwrapped one of the Starbursts, the orange one that tasted like St. Joseph children’s aspirin, and kneaded the square with my thumbs until the taffy became pliable. I pressed the handcuff key into the center, then reshaped a careful square and folded it into its original wrapping.

I did not like the thought of profiting in some way from an incident that had hurt Shay so badly, but I was also a realist. When Shay ran out of his nine lives and I was left alone, I would need all the help I could get.

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Even if I hadn’t been listed as Shay Bourne’s emergency contact, I would have found him quickly enough at the hospital: he was the only patient with armed guards standing outside his door. I glanced at the officers, then turned my attention to the nurse at the desk. “Is he all right? What happened?”

Father Michael had called me after the attack on CO Smythe and told me Shay hadn’t been hurt. Somewhere between now and then, however, something must have gone drastically wrong. I had tried calling the priest now, but he wasn’t answering his cell—I assumed he was on his way, that he’d been called, too.

If Shay hadn’t been treated at the prison hospital, whatever had happened must’ve been pretty awful. Inmates weren’t moved off-site unless absolutely necessary, because of cost and security. With the hoopla Shay had generated outside the prison walls, it must have been a matter of life or death.