The Jodi Picoult Collection #4 Read online

  “You can’t get salvation by donating your organs, Shay. The only way to find salvation is to admit your guilt and seek absolution through Jesus.”

  “What happened then doesn’t matter now.”

  “You don’t have to be afraid to take responsibility; God loves us, even when we screw up.”

  “I couldn’t stop it,” Shay said. “But this time, I can fix it.”

  “Leave that to God,” I suggested. “Tell Him you’re sorry for what you did, and He’ll forgive you.”

  “No matter what?”

  “No matter what.”

  “Then why do you have to say you’re sorry first?”

  I hesitated, trying to find a better way to explain sin and salvation to Shay. It was a bargain: you made an admission, you got redemption in return. In Shay’s economy of salvation, you gave away a piece of yourself—and somehow found yourself whole again.

  Were the two ideas really so different?

  I shook my head to clear it.

  “Lucius is an atheist,” Shay said. “Right, Lucius?”

  From next door, Lucius mumbled, “Mm-hmm.”

  “And he didn’t die. He was sick, and he got better.”

  The AIDS patient; I’d heard about him on the news. “Did you have something to do with it?”

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  “Lucius, do you believe that, too?”

  I leaned back so that I could make eye contact with this other inmate, a slim man with a shock of white hair. “I think Shay had everything to do with it,” he said.

  “Lucius should believe whatever he needs to,” Shay said.

  “What about the miracles?” Lucius added.

  “What miracles?” Shay said.

  Two facts struck me: Shay Bourne was not claiming to be the Messiah, or Jesus, or anyone but himself. And through some misguided belief, he truly felt that he wouldn’t rest in peace unless he could donate his heart to Claire Nealon.

  “Look,” Lucius said. “Are you or are you not going to help him?”

  Maybe none of us could compensate for what we’d done wrong in the past, but that didn’t mean we couldn’t make our futures matter more. I closed my eyes and imagined being the last person Shay Bourne spoke with before he was executed by the State of New Hampshire. I imagined picking a section of the Bible that would resonate with him, a balm of prayer during those last few minutes. I could do this for him. I could be who he needed me to be now, because I hadn’t been who he needed me to be back then. “Shay,” I said, “knowing that your heart is beating in some other person isn’t salvation. It’s altruism. Salvation is coming home. It’s understanding that you don’t have to prove yourself to God.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Lucius snorted. “Don’t listen to him, Shay.”

  I turned to him. “Do you mind?” Then I shifted position, so that I blocked Lucius from my sight, focusing on Shay. “God loves you—whether or not you give up your organs, whether or not you’ve made mistakes in the past. And the day of your execution, he’ll be waiting for you. Christ can save you, Shay.”

  “Christ can’t give Claire Nealon a heart.” Suddenly Shay’s gaze was piercing and lucid. “I don’t need to find God. I don’t want catechism,” he said. “All I want to know is whether, after I’m killed, I can save a little girl.”

  “No,” I said bluntly. “Not if you’re given a lethal injection. The drugs are meant specifically to stop your heart, and after that, it’s worthless for donation.”

  The light in his eyes dimmed, and I drew in my breath. “I’m sorry, Shay. I know you were hoping to hear something different, and your intentions are good . . . but you need to channel those good intentions to make peace with God another way. And that is something I can make happen.”

  Just then a young woman burst onto I-tier. She had a cascade of black curls tumbling down her back, and peeking out from her flak jacket was the ugliest striped suit I’d ever seen. “Shay Bourne?” she said. “I know a way you can donate your organs.”

  Maggie

  Some people may find it tough to break out of prison, but for me, it was equally as hard to get in. Okay, so I wasn’t officially Shay Bourne’s attorney—but the prison officials didn’t know that. I could argue the technicality with Bourne himself, if and when I reached him.

  I hadn’t counted on how difficult it would be to get through the throng outside the prison. It’s one thing to shove your way past a group of college kids smoking pot in a tent, their MAKE PEACE NOT MIRACLES signs littering the muddy ground; it’s another thing entirely to explain to a mother and her smooth-scalped, cancer-stricken toddler why you deserved to cut their place in line. In the end, the only way I could edge forward was by explaining to those who’d been waiting (in some cases, for days) that I was Shay Bourne’s legal advisor and that I would pass along their pleas: from the elderly couple with knotted hands, whose twin diagnoses—breast cancer and lymphatic cancer—came within a week of each other; to the father who carried pictures of the eight children he couldn’t support since losing his job; to the daughter pushing her mother’s wheelchair, wishing for just one more lucid moment in the fog of Alzheimer’s so that she could say she was sorry for a transgression that had happened years earlier. There is so much pain in this world, I thought, how do any of us manage to get up in the morning?

  When I reached the front gate, I announced that I had come to see Shay Bourne, and the officer laughed at me. “You and the rest of the free world.”

  “I’m his lawyer.”

  He looked at me for a long moment, and then spoke into his radio. A moment later, a second officer arrived and escorted me past the blockade. As I left, a cheer went up from the crowd.

  Stunned, I turned around, waved hesitantly, and then hurried to catch up.

  I had never been to the state prison. It was a large, old brick building; its courtyard stretched out behind the razor-wire fencing. I was told to sign in on a clipboard and to take off my jacket before I went through the metal detector.

  “Wait here,” the officer said, and he left me sitting in a small anteroom. There was an inmate mopping the floor who did not make eye contact with me. He was wearing white tennis shoes that squelched every time he stepped forward. I watched his hands on the mop and wondered if they’d been part of a murder, a rape, a robbery.

  There was a reason I didn’t become a criminal defense attorney: this setting freaked me out. I had been to the county jail to meet with clients, but those were small-potatoes crimes: picketing outside a rally for a political candidate, flag burning, civil disobedience. None of my clients had ever killed anyone before, much less a child and a police officer. I found myself considering what it would be like to be locked in here forever. What if my dress clothes and day clothes and pajamas were all the same orange scrubs? What if I was told when to shower, when to eat, when to go to bed? Given that my career was about maintaining personal freedoms, it was hard to imagine a world where they’d all been stripped away.

  As I watched the inmate mop beneath a bank of seats, I wondered what would be the hardest luxury to leave behind. There were the trivial things: losing chocolate practically qualified as cruel and unusual punishment; I couldn’t sacrifice my contact lenses; I’d sooner die than relinquish the Ouidad Climate Control gel that kept my hair from becoming a frizzy rat’s nest. But what about the rest—missing the dizzying choice of all the cereals in the grocery store aisle, for example? Not being able to receive a phone call? Granted, it had been so long since I was intimate with a man that I had spiderwebs between my legs, but what would it be like to give up being touched casually, even a handshake?

  I bet I’d even miss fighting with my mother.

  Suddenly a pair of boots appeared on the floor before me. “You’re out of luck. He’s got his spiritual advisor with him,” the officer said. “Bourne’s pretty popular today.”

  “That’s fine,” I bluffed. “The spiritual advisor can join us during our meeting.” I saw the slighte