Change of Heart Read online

  "A salmon!" my grandfather crowed. "Ten pounds, easy ... imagine all the ladders it had to climb to make its way back here from the ocean to spawn." He held the fish aloft, grinning. "I haven't seen one in this lake since the sixties!"

  I looked down at the fish, still on my line, thrashing in splendor. It was silver and gold and crimson all at once.

  My grandfather held the salmon, stilling it enough to unhook the fly, and set the fish back into the lake. We watched the flag of its tail, the ruddy back as it swam away. "Who says that if you want to find God on a Sunday morning, you ought to be looking in church?" my grandfather murmured.

  For a long time after that, I believed my grandfather had it right: God was in the details. But that was before I learned that the requirements of a true believer included Mass every Sunday and holy day of obligation, receiving the Eucharist, reconciliation once a year, giving money to the poor, observing Lent. Or in other words--just because you say you're Catholic, if you don't walk the walk, you're not.

  Back when I was at seminary, I imagined I heard my grandfather's voice: I thought God was supposed to love you unconditionally. Those sure sound like a lot of conditions to me.

  The truth is, I stopped listening.

  By the time I left the prison, the crowd outside had doubled in size. There were the ill, the feeble, the old and the hungry, but there was also a small cadre of nuns from a convent up in Maine, and a choir singing "Holy Holy Holy." I was surprised at how hearsay about a so-called miracle could produce so many converts, so quickly.

  "You see?" I heard a woman say, pointing to me. "Even Father Michael's here."

  She was a parishioner, and her son had cystic fibrosis. He was here, too, in a wheelchair being pushed by his father.

  "Is it true, then?" the man asked. "Can this guy really work miracles?"

  "God can," I said, heading that question off at the pass. I put my hand on the boy's forehead. "Dear St. John of God, patron saint of those who are ill, I ask for your intercession that the Lord will have mercy on this child and return him to health. I ask this in Jesus's name."

  Not Shay Bourne's, I thought.

  "Amen," the parents murmured.

  "If you'll excuse me," I said, turning away.

  The chances of Shay Bourne being Jesus were about as likely as me being God. These people, these falsely faithful, didn't know Shay Bourne--they'd never met Shay Bourne. They were imposing the face of our Savior on a man with a tendency to talk to himself; a man whose hands had been covered with the blood of two innocent people. They were confusing show-manship and inexplicable events with divinity. A miracle was a miracle only until it could be proved otherwise.

  I started pushing through the mob, moving in the opposite direction, away from the prison gates, a man on a mission. Maggie Bloom wasn't the only one who could do research.

  Maggie

  |||||||||||||||||||||||||

  In retrospect, it would have been much simpler to place a phone call to a medical professional who might lecture me on the ins and outs of organ donation. But it could take a week for a busy doctor to call me back, and my route home from the prison skirted the grounds of the Concord hospital, and I was still buzzing with righteous legal fervor. These are the only grounds I can offer for why I decided to stop in the emergency room. The faster I could speak to an expert, the faster I could start building Shay's case.

  However, the triage nurse--a large graying woman who looked like a battleship--compressed her mouth into a flat line when I asked to talk to a doctor. "What's the problem?" she asked.

  "I've got a few questions--"

  "So does everyone else in that waiting room, but you'll still have to explain the nature of the illness to me."

  "Oh, I'm not sick ..."

  She glanced around me. "Then where's the patient?"

  "At the state prison."

  The nurse shook her head. "The patient has to be present for registration."

  I found that hard to believe. Surely someone knocked unconscious in a car accident wasn't left waiting in the hall until he came to and could recite his Blue Cross group number.

  "We're busy," the nurse said. "When the patient arrives, sign in again."

  "But I'm a lawyer--"

  "Then sue me," the nurse replied.

  I walked back to the waiting room and sat down next to a college-age boy with a bloody washcloth wrapped around his hand. "I did that once," I said. "Cutting a bagel."

  He turned to me. "I put my hand through a plate-glass window because my girlfriend was screwing my roommate."

  A nurse appeared. "Whit Romano?" she said, and the boy stood up.

  "Good luck with that," I called after him, and I speared my fingers through my hair, thinking hard. Leaving a message with the nurse didn't guarantee a doctor would see it anytime in the next millennium--I had to find another way in.

  Five minutes later I was standing in front of the battleship again. "The patient's arrived?" she asked.

  "Well. Yes. It's me."

  She put down her pen. "You're sick now. You weren't sick before."

  I shrugged. "I'm thinking appendicitis ..."

  The nurse pursed her lips. "You know you'll be charged a hundred and fifty dollars for an emergency room visit, even a fabricated one."

  "You mean insurance doesn't--"

  "Nope."

  I thought of Shay, of the sound the steel doors made when they scraped shut in prison. "It's my abdomen. Sharp pains."

  "Which side?"

  "My left ... ?" The nurse narrowed her eyes. "I meant my other left."

  "Take a seat," she said.

  I settled in the waiting room again and read two issues of People nearly as old as I was before being called into an exam room. A nurse--younger, wearing pink scrubs--took my blood pressure and temperature. She wrote down my health history, while I mentally reviewed whether you could be brought up on criminal charges for falsifying your own medical records.

  I was lying on the exam table, staring at a Where's Waldo? poster on the ceiling, when the doctor came in.

  "Ms. Bloom?" he said.

  Okay, I'm just going to come out and say it--he was stunning. He had black hair and eyes the color of the blueberries that grew in my parents' garden--almost purple in a certain light, and translucent the next moment. He could have sliced me wide open with his smile. He was wearing a white coat and a denim collared shirt with a tie that had Barbie dolls all over it.

  He probably had a real live one of those at home, too--a 38-22-36 fiancee who had double-majored in law and medicine, or astrophysics and political science.

  Our whole relationship was over, and I hadn't even said a word to him.

  "You are Ms. Bloom?"

  How had I not noticed that British accent? "Yes," I said, wishing I was anyone but.

  "I'm Dr. Gallagher," he said, sitting down on a stool. "Why don't you tell me what's been going on?"

  "Well," I began. "Actually, I'm fine."

  "For the record, appendicitis rates as pretty ill."

  Ill. I loved that. I bet he said things like flat and loo and lift, too.

  "Let's just check you out," he said. He stood and hooked his stethoscope into his ears, then settled it under my shirt. I couldn't remember the last time a guy had slipped his hand under my shirt. "Just breathe," he said.

  Yeah, right.

  "Really," I said. "I'm not sick."

  "If you could just lie back ... ?"

  That was enough to bring me crashing down to reality. Not only would he realize, the moment he palpated my stomach, that I didn't have appendicitis ... he'd also probably be able to tell that I had the two-donut combo at Dunkin' Donuts for breakfast, when everyone knows they take three days--each--to digest.

  "I don't have appendicitis," I blurted out. "I just told the nurse I did because I wanted to talk to a doctor for a few minutes--"

  "All right," he said gently. "I'm just going to call in Dr. Tawasaka. I'm sure she'll talk to you all you like ..