Change of Heart (30 page)

“Shay—”

“Get the fuck away from me!”
He flailed against his handcuffs, yanking at the bonds so that his skin rubbed raw. The sound he made was wordless, primordial, the noise that had surely filled the world before there was order and light.

A nurse came running in, along with the two officers who were standing outside. “What happened?” the nurse cried, as Shay continued to thrash, his head whipping from side to side on the pillow. The gauze in his nose bloomed with fresh blood.

The nurse pushed a call button on the panel behind Shay’s head, and suddenly the room was filled with people. A doctor yelled at the officers to unlock his damn hands, but as soon as they did, Shay began swatting at everything he could reach. An aide plunged a hypodermic into his arm. “Get him out of here,” someone said, and an orderly pulled me out of the room; the last thing I saw was Shay going boneless, sliding away from the people who were desperately trying to save him.

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Claire was standing in front of a full-length mirror, naked. Her chest was crisscrossed with black ribbon, like the lacing on a football. As I watched, she untied the bow, unraveled the ribbons, and peeled back both halves of her chest. She unhooked a tiny brass hinge on her rib cage and it sprang open.

Inside, the heart was beating sure and strong, a clear sign that it wasn’t hers. Claire lifted a serving spoon and began to carve at the organ, trying to sever it from the veins and arteries. Her cheeks went pale; her eyes were the color of agony—but she managed to pull it free: a bloody, misshapen mass that she placed in my outstretched hand. “Take it back,” she said.

I woke up from the nightmare, sweat-soaked, pulse racing. After speaking with Dr. Wu about organ compatibility, I’d realized he was right—what was at issue here was not where this heart came from, but whether it came at all.

But I still hadn’t told Claire a donor heart had become available. We had yet to go through the legal proceedings, anyway—and although I told myself I didn’t want to get her hopes up until the judge ruled, another part of me realized that I just didn’t want to have to tell her the truth.

After all, it was
her
chest that would be hosting this man’s heart.

Even a long shower couldn’t get the nightmare of Claire out of my mind, and I realized that we had to have the conversation I had been so studiously avoiding. I dressed and hurried downstairs to find her eating a bowl of cereal on the couch and watching television. “The dog needs to go out,” she said absently.

“Claire,” I said, “I have to talk to you.”

“Let me just see the end of this show.”

I glanced at the screen—it was
Full House
, and Claire had watched this episode so often that even
I
could have told you Jesse came home from Japan realizing being a rock star was not what it was cracked up to be.

“You’ve seen it before,” I said, turning off the television.

Her eyes flashed, and she used the remote to turn the show back on.

Maybe it was a lack of sleep; maybe it was just the weight of the imminent future on my shoulders—for whatever reason, I snapped. I whirled around and yanked the cable feed out of the wall.

“What is
wrong
with you?” Claire cried. “Why are you being such a bitch!”

Both of us fell silent, stunned by Claire’s language. She’d never called me that before; she’d never really even argued with me.
Take it back
, I thought, and I remembered that image of Claire, holding out her heart.

“Claire,” I said, backpedaling. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

I broke off as Claire’s eyes rolled back in her head.

I’d seen this before—too often. The AICD in her chest was firing: when Claire’s heart skipped a beat, or several, it automatically defibrillated her. I caught her as she collapsed, settling her on the couch, waiting for her heart to restart, for Claire to come to.

Except this time, she didn’t.

On the ambulance ride to the hospital, I counted all the reasons I hated myself: For picking a fight with Claire. For accepting Shay Bourne’s offer to donate his heart, without asking her first. For turning off
Full House
before the happy ending.

Just stay with me,
I begged silently,
and you can watch TV twenty-four hours a day. I will watch it with you. Don’t give up, we’ve come so close.

Although the EMTs had gotten Claire’s heart beating again by the time we reached the hospital, Dr. Wu had admitted her, with the unspoken agreement that this was her new home until a new heart arrived—or hers gave out. I watched him check Claire, who was fast asleep in the oceanic blue light of the darkened room. “June,” he said, “let’s talk outside.”

He closed the door behind us. “There’s no good news here.”

I nodded, biting my lip.

“Obviously, the AICD isn’t functioning correctly. But in addition, the tests we’ve done show her urine output decreasing and her creatinine levels rising. We’re talking about renal failure, June. It’s not just her heart that’s giving out—her whole body is shutting down.”

I looked away, but I couldn’t stop a tear from rolling down my cheek.

“I don’t know how long it’s going to take to get a court to agree to that heart donation,” the doctor said, “but Claire can’t wait around for the docket to clear.”

“I’ll call the lawyer,” I said softly. “Is there anything else I can do?”

Dr. Wu touched my arm. “You should think about saying good-bye.”

I held myself together long enough for Dr. Wu to disappear into an elevator. Then, I rushed down the hallway and blindly plunged into a doorway that stood ajar. I fell to my knees and let the grief bleed out of me—one great, low keening note.

Suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder. I blinked through my tears to find the priest who was Shay Bourne’s ally staring at me. “June? Is everything all right?”

“No,” I said. “No, everything is most definitely
not
all right.”

I could see then what I hadn’t noticed when I first came into the room—the gold cross on the long dais in the front of the room, one flag with the star of David, another with a Muslim crescent moon: this was the hospital chapel, a place to ask for what you wanted the most.

Was it wrong to wish for someone’s death so that Claire could have his heart sooner?

“Is it your daughter?” the priest asked.

I nodded, but I couldn’t look him in the eye.

“Would it be all right—I mean, would you mind if I prayed for her?”

Although I did not want his assistance—had not
asked
for his assistance—this one time, I was willing to put aside how I felt about God, because Claire could use all the help she could get. Almost imperceptibly, I nodded.

Beside me, Father Michael’s voice began to move over the hills and valleys of the simplest of prayers:
“Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

Before I realized what I was doing, my own mouth had started to form the words, a muscle memory. And to my surprise, instead of it feeling false or forced, it made me relieved, as if I had just passed the baton to someone else.

“Give us this day our daily bread and lead us not into temptation. Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive others who trespass against us; and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”

It felt like putting on flannel pajamas on a snowy night; like turning on your blinker for the exit that you know will take you home.

I looked at Father Michael, and together we said “Amen.”

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Ian Fletcher, former tele-atheist and current academic, lived in New Canaan, New Hampshire, in a farmhouse on a dirt road where the mailboxes were not numbered. I drove up and down the street four times before turning down one driveway and knocking on the door. When I did, no one answered, although I could hear strains of Mozart through the open windows.

I had left June in the hospital, still shaken by my encounter with Shay. Talk about irony: just when I allowed myself to think that I
might
be in God’s company, after all—He flatly rejected me. The whole world felt off-kilter; it is an odd thing to start questioning the framework that’s ordered your life, your career, your expectations—and so I had placed a phone call to someone who’d been through it before.

I knocked again, and this time the door swung open beneath my fist. “Hello? Anyone home?”

“In here,” a woman called out.

I stepped into the foyer, taking note of the colonial furniture, the photo on the wall that showed a young girl shaking hands with Bill Clinton and another of the girl smiling beside the Dalai Lama. I followed the music to a room off the kitchen, where the most intricate dollhouse I’d ever seen was sitting on a table, surrounded by bits of wood and chisels and glue gun
sticks. The house was made of bricks no bigger than my thumbnail, the windows had miniature shutters that could be louvered to let in light; there was a porch with Corinthian columns. “Amazing,” I murmured, and a woman stood up from behind the dollhouse, where she’d been hidden.

“Oh,” she said. “Thanks.” Seeing me, she did a double take, and I realized her eyes were focused on my clerical collar.

“Bad parochial school flashback?”

“No … it’s just been a while since I’ve had a priest in here.” She stood up, wiping her hands on a white butcher’s apron. “I’m Mariah Fletcher,” she said.

“Michael Wright.”

“
Father
Michael Wright.”

I grinned. “Busted.” Then I gestured to her handiwork. “Did you make this?”

“Well. Yeah.”

“I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Good,” Mariah said. “That’s what the client’s counting on.”

I bent down, scrutinizing a tiny door knocker with the head of a lion. “You’re quite an artist.”

“Not really. I’m just better at detail than I am at the big picture.” She turned off the CD player that was trilling
The Magic Flute
. “Ian said I was supposed to keep an eye out for you. And—Oh, shoot.” Her eyes flew to the corner of the room, where a stack of blocks had been abandoned. “You didn’t come across two hellions on your way in?”

“No …”

“That’s not a good sign.” 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.

“You told us we could finger-paint,” one of the boys said.

“Not on the floor; and not with food!” She glanced at me. “I’d escort you, but—”

“You have to take care of a sticky situation?”

She smiled. “Ian’s in the barn; you can just head down there.” She lifted each boy and pointed him toward the sink. “And you two,” she said, “are going to clean up, and then go torture Daddy.”

I left her washing the twins’ hands and walked down the path toward the barn. Having children was not in the cards for me—I knew that. A priest’s love for God was so allencompassing that it should erase the human craving for a family—my parents, brothers, sisters, and children were
all
Jesus. If the Gospel of Thomas was right, however, and we were more
like
God than
unlike
Him, then having children should have been mandatory for everyone. After all, God had a son and had given Him up. Any parent whose child had gone to college or gotten married or moved away would understand this part of God more than me.

As I approached the barn, I heard the most unholy sounds—like cats being dismembered, calves being slaughtered. Panicked—was Fletcher hurt?—I threw open the door to find him watching a teenage girl play the violin.

Really badly.

She took the violin from her chin and settled it into the slight curve of her hip. “I don’t understand why I have to practice in the barn.”

Fletcher removed a pair of foam earplugs. “What was that?”

She rolled her eyes. “Did you even hear my piece at
all
?”

Fletcher paused. “You know I love you, right?” The girl nodded. “Well, let’s just say if God was hanging around here today, that last bit probably sent Her running for the hills.”

“Tryouts for band are tomorrow,” she said. “What am I going to
do
?”

“Switch to the flute?” Fletcher suggested, but he put his arm around the girl and hugged her as he spoke. As he turned, he noticed me. “Ah. You must be Michael Wright.” He shook my hand and introduced the girl. “This is my daughter, Faith.”

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. “I think it’s your turn to watch the demon twins from hell.”

“No, I remember very clearly that it’s
your
turn. I was doing it all morning while Mom worked.”

“Ten bucks,” Ian said.

“Twenty,” Faith countered.

“Done.” She put her violin back in its case. “Nice to meet you,” she said to me, and she slipped out of the barn, heading toward the house.

“You have a beautiful family,” I said to Fletcher.

He laughed. “Appearances can be deceiving. Spending an afternoon with Cain and Abel is a whole new form of birth control.”

“Their names are—”

“Not really,” Fletcher said, smiling. “But that’s what I call them when Mariah’s not listening. Come on back to my office.”

He walked me past a generator and a snowblower, two abandoned horse stalls, and through a pine door. Inside, to my surprise, was a finished room with paneled walls and two stories of bookshelves. “I have to admit,” Fletcher said, “I don’t get very many calls from the Catholic clergy. They aren’t quite the prevalent audience for my book.”

I sat down on a leather wing chair. “I can imagine.”

“So what’s a nice priest like you doing in the office of a rabble-rouser like me? Can I expect a blistering commentary in the
Catholic Advocate
with your byline on it?”