Change of Heart Read online

  "What?"

  He shook his head, but stopped short of calling me a heretic. "You've read Tertullian," he said.

  We all had, in seminary. He was a famous orthodox Christian historian whose text The Prescription Against Heretics was a forerunner of the Nicene Creed. Tertullian had coined the idea of a deposit of faith--that we take what Christ taught and believe it as is, without adding to or taking away from it.

  "You want to know why Catholicism's been around for two thousand years?" Father Walter said. "Because of people like Tertullian, who understood that you can't mess around with truth. People were upset with the changes of Vatican II. The Pope's even reinstated the Latin Mass."

  I took a deep breath. "I thought being a spiritual advisor meant doing what Shay Bourne needs to face his death with peace--not what we need him to do, as a good Catholic."

  "Good Lord," Father Walter said. "He's conned you."

  I frowned. "He hasn't conned me."

  "He's got you eating out of the palm of his hand! Look at you--you practically acted like his press secretary today on the news--"

  "Do you think Jesus died for a reason?" I interrupted.

  "Of course."

  "Then why shouldn't Shay Bourne be allowed to do the same?"

  "Because," Father Walter said, "Shay Bourne is not dying for anyone's sins, except his own."

  I flinched. Well, didn't I know that better than anyone else?

  Father Walter sighed. "I don't agree with the death penalty, but I understand this sentence. He murdered two people. A police officer, and a little girl." He shook his head. "Save his soul, Michael. Don't try to save his life."

  I glanced up. "What do you think would have happened if just one of the apostles had stayed awake in the garden with Jesus? If they'd kept Him from being arrested? If they'd tried to save His life?"

  Father Walter's mouth dropped open. "You don't really think Shay Bourne is Jesus, do you?"

  I didn't.

  Did I?

  Father Walter sank down onto the pew and took off his glasses. He rubbed his eyes. "Mikey," he said, "take a couple weeks off. Go somewhere and pray. Think about what you're doing--what you're saying." He looked up at me. "And in the meantime, I don't want you going to the prison on behalf of St. Catherine's."

  I looked around this church, which I had grown to love--with its polished pews and the spatter of light from the stained glass, the whispering silk of the chalice veil, the dancing flames on the candles lit in offering. Where your treasure is, there your heart will be.

  "I won't go to the prison on behalf of St. Catherine's," I said, "but I will go on behalf of Shay."

  I walked down the aisle, past the holy water, past the bulletin board with the information about the young boy from Zimbabwe the congregation supported with their donations. When I stepped outside the double doors of the church, the world was so bright that for a moment, I couldn't see where I was headed.

  Maggie

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  There were four ways to hang someone. The short drop involved a prisoner falling just a few inches; their body weight and physical struggling tightened the noose and caused death by strangulation. Suspension hanging required the prisoner to be raised upward and strangled. Standard drop hanging--popular in America in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries--meant the prisoner fell four to six feet, which might or might not break his neck. Long drop hanging was a more personal execution: the distance the prisoner fell was determined by weight and body type. The body was still accelerating due to gravity at the end of the drop, but the head was restricted by the noose--which broke the neck and ruptured the spinal cord, rendering instant unconsciousness, and a quick death.

  I'd learned that next to shooting, hanging was the world's most popular form of execution. It was introduced in Persia twenty-five hundred years ago for male criminals (females were strangled at the stake, because it was less indecent)--a nice alternative to the blood and guts of a typical beheading, with all the same punch as any public spectacle.

  It was not, however, foolproof. In 1885, a British murderer named Robert Goodale was hanged, but the force of the drop decapitated him. Most recently, Saddam Hussein's half brother had suffered the same grisly fate in Iraq. This was a legal conundrum: if the sentence of death was to be carried out by hanging, then the prisoner could not be decapitated, or the sentence wasn't fulfilled.

  I had to do my homework--which explained why I was reading the Official Table of Drops and estimating Shay Bourne's weight when Father Michael came into my office. "Oh, good," I said, motioning to the seat across from my desk. "If the noose is positioned right--there's something about a brass eyelet--the fall causes an instant fracture of the C2 vertebra. It says here brain death occurs in six minutes, and whole-body death within ten to fifteen minutes. That means we've got a four-minute window to get him back on a respirator before the heart stops beating and oh, I almost forgot--I heard back from the AG's office. They denied our request to have Shay hanged instead of executed with lethal injection. They even included the original sentence, as if I haven't read it a bazillion times, and told me if I wanted to challenge it, I had to file the appropriate motions. Which," I said, "I did five hours ago."

  Father Michael didn't even seem to hear me. "Listen," I said gently, "it's easier if you think about this hanging business as science ... and stop connecting it personally to Shay."

  "I'm sorry," the priest said, shaking his head. "It's just--it's been a pretty bad day."

  "You mean the showdown you had with the televangelist?"

  "You saw that?"

  "You're the talk of the town, Father."

  He closed his eyes. "Great."

  "I'm sure Shay saw it, too, if that's any consolation."

  Father Michael looked up at me. "Thanks to Shay, my supervising priest thinks I'm a heretic."

  I thought about what my father would say if a member of his congregation came to him to ease his soul. "Do you think you're a heretic?"

  "Does any heretic?" he said. "Honestly, I'm the last person who ought to be helping you win Shay's case, Maggie."

  "Hey," I said, trying to boost his spirits. "I was just about to go to my parents' house for dinner. It's a standing engagement on Friday nights. Why don't you come with me?"

  "I couldn't impose--"

  "Believe me, there's always enough food to feed a third world country."

  "Well, then," the priest said, "that would be great."

  I switched off my desk lamp. "We can take my car," I said.

  "Can I leave my motorcycle parked in the lot here?"

  "You're allowed to ride a motorcycle, but you can't eat meat on Friday?"

  He still looked as if the world had been pulled out from beneath him. "I guess the Church forefathers found it easier to abstain from beef than Harleys."

  I led him through the maze of file cabinets in the ACLU office and headed outside. "Guess what I found out today," I said. "The trapdoor from the old gallows at the state prison is in the chaplain's office."

  When I glanced at Father Michael, I was pretty sure I saw the ghost of a smile.

  June

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  One of the things I liked about Dr. Wu's office was the wall of pictures. An enormous corkboard held photographs of patients who had beaten the odds after having Dr. Wu operate on their failing hearts. There were babies propped up on pillows, Christmas card portraits, and boys wielding Little League bats. It was a mural of success.

  When I'd first come to tell Dr. Wu about Shay Bourne's offer, he listened carefully and then said that in his twenty-three years of practice, he had yet to see a grown man's heart that would be a good match for a child. Hearts grew to fit the needs of their host body--which was why every other potential organ that had been offered to Claire for transplant had come from another child. "I'll examine him," Dr. Wu promised, "but I don't want you to get your hopes up."

  Now I watched Dr. Wu take a seat and flatten