Change of Heart (44 page)

I stood up. “Shay Bourne is not asking for freedom. He’s not asking for his sentence to be overturned. He’s simply asking to die in accordance with his religious beliefs. And if America
stands for nothing else, it stands for the right to practice your own religion, even if you die in the custody of the state.”

I began to walk toward the gallery. “People still flock to this country because of its religious freedom. They know that in America, you won’t be told what God should look like or sound like. You won’t be told there is one right belief, and yours isn’t it. They want to speak freely about religion, and to ask questions. Those rights were the foundation of America four hundred years ago, and they’re still the foundation today. It’s why, in this country, Madonna can perform on a crucifix, and
The Da Vinci Code
was a bestseller. It’s why, even after 9/11, religious freedom flourishes in America.”

Facing the judge again, I pulled out all the stops. “Your Honor, we’re not asking you to remove the wall between church and state by ruling in favor of Shay Bourne. We just want the law upheld—the one that promises Shay Bourne the right to practice his religion even in the state penitentiary, unless there’s a compelling governmental interest to keep him from doing so. The only governmental interest that the state can point to here is one hundred and twenty dollars—and a matter of a few months.” I walked back to my seat, slipped into it. “How do you weigh lives and souls against two months, and a hundred and twenty bucks?”

Once the judge returned to chambers to reach his verdict, two marshals came to retrieve Shay. “Maggie?” he said, getting to his feet. “Thanks.”

“Guys,” I said to the marshals, “can you give me a minute with him in the holding cell?”

“Make it quick,” one of them said, and I nodded.

“What do you think?” Father Michael said, still seated in the gallery behind me. “Does he have a chance?”

I reached into my pocket, retrieved the note the bailiff had passed me just before I began my closing, and handed it to Michael. “You better hope so,” I said. “The governor denied his stay of execution.”

He was lying on the metal bunk, his arm thrown over his eyes, by the time I reached the holding cell. “Shay,” I said, standing in front of the bars. “Father Michael came to talk to me. About what happened the night of the murders.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It does matter,” I said urgently. “The governor denied your stay of execution, which means we’re up against a brick wall. DNA evidence is used routinely now to overturn capital punishment verdicts. There was some talk about sexual assault during the trial, wasn’t there, before that charge was dropped? If that semen sample still exists, we can have it tested and matched to Kurt … I just need you to give me the details about what happened, Shay, so that I can get the ball rolling.”

Shay stood up and walked toward me, resting his hands on the bars between us. “I can’t.”

“Why not?” I challenged. “Were you lying when you told Father Michael you were innocent?”

He glanced up at me, his eyes hot. “No.”

I cannot tell you why I believed him. Maybe I was naive, because I hadn’t been a criminal defense attorney; maybe I just felt that a dying man had very little left to lose. But when Shay met my gaze, I knew that he was telling me the truth—and that executing an innocent man was even more devastating, if possible, than executing a guilty one. “Well, then,” I said, my head already swimming with possibilities. “You told Father Michael your first lawyer wouldn’t listen to you—but I’m
listening to you now. Talk to me, Shay. Tell me something I can use to convince a judge you were wrongly convicted. Then I’ll write up the request for DNA testing, you just have to sign—”

“No.”

“I can’t do this alone,” I exploded. “Shay, we’re talking about overturning your conviction, do you understand that? About you walking out of here, free.”

“I know, Maggie.”

“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 dying—dying will be different.”

“How?”

“They’ll see their lives are worth living.”

I knew that I would be haunted by Shay Bourne for a very long time, whether or not his sentence was carried out. “Someone who thinks like that,” I said, “does not deserve to be executed. Please, Shay. Help me help you. You don’t have to play the hero.”

“Maggie,” he said. “Neither do you.”

|||||||||||||||||||||||||

Code blue
, the nurse had said.

A stream of doctors and nurses flooded Claire’s room. One began chest compressions.

I don’t feel a pulse.

We need an airway.

Start chest compressions.

Can we get an IV access …

What rhythm is she in?

We need to shock her … put on the patches …

Charge to two hundred joules.

All clear … fire!

Hold compressions …

No pulse.

Give epi. Lidocaine. Bicarb.

Check for a pulse …

Dr. Wu flew through the door. “Get the mother out of here,” he said, and a nurse grasped my shoulders.

“You need to come with me,” she said, and I nodded, but my feet would not move. Someone held the defibrillator to Claire’s chest again. Her body jackknifed off the bed just as I was dragged through the doorway.

I had been the one present when Claire flatlined; I was the one who’d run to the nurse’s desk. And I was the one
sitting with her now that she’d been stabilized, now that her heart, battered and ragged, was beating again. She was in a monitored bed, and I stared at the screens, at the mountainous terrain of her cardiac rhythm, sure that if I didn’t blink we’d be safe.

Claire whimpered, tossing her head from side to side. The monitors cast her skin an alien green.

“Baby,” I said, moving beside her. “Don’t try to talk. You’ve still got a tube in.”

Her eyes slitted open; she pleaded to me with her eyes and mimed holding a pen.

I gave her the white board Dr. Wu had given me; until Claire was extubated tomorrow morning she would have to use this to communicate. Her writing was shaky and spiked. WHAT HAPPENED?

“Your heart,” I said, blinking back tears. “It wasn’t doing so well.”

MOMMY, DO SOMETHING.

“Anything, honey.”

LET GO OF ME.

I glanced down; I was not touching her.

Claire circled the words again; and this time, I understood.

Suddenly I remembered something Kurt had told me once: you could only save someone who wanted to be saved; otherwise, you’d be dragged down for the count, too. I looked at Claire, but she was asleep again, the marker still curled in her hand.

Tears slipped down my cheeks, onto the hospital blanket. “Oh, Claire … I’m so sorry,” I whispered, and I was.

For what I had done.

For what I knew I had to do.

|||||||||||||||||||||||||

When I coughed it turned me inside out. I could feel the tendons tangle on the outside of my skin and the fever in my head steaming against the pillow. You put ice chips on my tongue and they vanished before I swallowed isn’t it funny how now things come back that I was so sure I’d forgotten like this moment of high school chemistry. Sublimation that’s the word the act of turning into something you never expected to become.

The room it was so white that it hurt the backs of my eyeballs. Your hands were like hummingbirds or butterflies
Stay with us Lucius
you said but it was harder and harder to hear you and I could only feel you instead your hummingfly hands your butterbird fingers.

They talk about white lights and tunnels and there was a part of me expecting to see oh I’ll just say it outright Shay but none of that was true. Instead it was Him and He was holding out His hand and reaching for me. He was just like I remembered coffee skin ebony eyes five o’clock shadow that dimple too deep for tears and I saw how foolish I had been. How could I not have known it would be Him how could I not have known that you see God every time you look at the face of the person you love.

There were so many things I expected Him to say to me now when it counted the most.
I love you. I missed you
. But instead He smiled
at me with those white teeth those white wolf’s teeth and He said
I forgive you Lucius I forgive you
.

Your hands pounded and pumped at me your electricity shot through my body but you could not reclaim my heart it already belonged to someone else. He spread the fingers of His hand a star a beacon and I went to him.
I am coming I am coming.

Wait for me.

|||||||||||||||||||||||||

“I wouldn’t have called you in here on a Sunday, normally,” Warden Coyne said to me, “but I thought you’d want to know …” He closed the door to his office for privacy. “Lucius DuFresne died last night.”

I sank down into one of the chairs across from the warden’s desk. “How?”

“AIDS-related pneumonia.”

“Does Shay know?”

The warden shook his head. “We thought that might not be the best course of action at this moment.”

What he meant, of course, was that Shay was already in an observation cell for slamming his own head into a wall—they didn’t need to give him even more reason to be upset. “He could hear about it from someone else.”

“That’s true,” Coyne said. “I can’t stop rumors.”

I remembered the reporters glorifying Lucius’s initial cure—how would this turn the tide of public opinion against Shay even more? If he wasn’t a messiah, then—by default—he was only a murderer. I glanced up at the warden. “So you asked
me
here so I could break the bad news to him.”

“That’s your call, Ms. Bloom. I asked you here to give you this.” He reached into his desk and removed an envelope. “It was with Lucius’s personal effects.”

The manila envelope was addressed to Father Michael and me in shaky, spiderweb handwriting. “What is it?”

“I didn’t open it,” the warden said.

I unhinged the clasp of the envelope and reached inside. At first I thought I was looking at a magazine advertisement of a painting—the detail was that precise. But a closer look showed that this was a piece of card stock; that the pigment wasn’t oil, but what seemed to be watercolor and pen.

It was a copy of Raphael’s
Transfiguration
, something I only knew because of an art history course I’d taken when I fancied myself in love with the TA who ran the class sessions—a tall, anemic guy with ski-slope cheekbones who wore black, smoked clove cigarettes, and wrote Nietzsche quotes on the back of his hand. Although I didn’t really care about sixteenth-century art, I’d gotten an A, trying to impress him—only to discover he had a live-in lover named Henry.

The
Transfiguration
was thought to be Raphael’s last painting. It was left unfinished and was completed by one of his students. The upper part of the painting shows Jesus floating above Mt. Tabor with Moses and Elijah. The bottom part of the painting shows the miracle of the possessed boy, waiting for Jesus to cure him, along with the Apostles and the other disciples.

Lucius’s version looked exactly like the painting I’d seen slides of in a darkened amphitheater—until you looked closely. Then you noticed that my face was superimposed where Moses’s should have been. Father Michael was standing in for Elijah. The possessed boy—there, Lucius had drawn his self-portrait. And Shay rose in white robes above Mt. Tabor, his face turned upward.

I slipped the painting back into the envelope carefully and looked at the warden. “I’d like to see my client,” I said.

* * *

Shay stepped into the conference room. “Did you get the verdict?”

“Not yet. It’s still the weekend.” I took a deep breath. “Shay, I have some bad news for you. Lucius died last night.”