The Jodi Picoult Collection #4 Read online

  My father looked at me carefully. “How about for you?”

  “You told me to ask Shay what he wanted,” I said. “He doesn’t want his life saved. He wants his death to mean something.”

  My father nodded. “A lot of Jews think you can’t donate organs, because it violates Jewish law—you’re not supposed to mutilate the body after death; you’re supposed to bury it as soon as possible. But pikkuah nefesh takes precedence over that. It says that the duty to save life trumps everything. Or in other words—a Jew is required to break the law, if it means saving a life.”

  “So it’s okay to commit murder in order to save someone else?” I asked.

  “Well, God’s not stupid; He sets parameters. But if there’s any karmic pikkuah nefesh in the world—”

  “To mix metaphors, no less religions . . .”

  “—then the fact that you can’t stop an execution is at least balanced by the fact that you’ll be saving a life.”

  “At what cost, Daddy? Is it okay to kill someone who’s a criminal, someone society really doesn’t want around anymore, so that a little girl can live? What if it wasn’t a little girl who needed that heart? What if it was some other criminal? Or what if it wasn’t Shay who had to die in order to donate his organs? What if it was me?”

  “God forbid,” my father said.

  “It’s semantics.”

  “It’s morality. You’re doing good.”

  “By doing bad.”

  My father shook his head. “There’s something else about pikkuah nefesh . . . it clears the slate of guilt. You can’t feel remorse about breaking the law, because ethically, you’re obligated to do it.”

  “See, that’s where you’re wrong. I can feel remorse. Because we’re not talking about not fasting on Yom Kippur since you happen to be sick . . . we’re talking about a man dying.”

  “And saving your life.”

  I looked up at him. “Claire’s life.”

  “Two birds with one stone,” my father said. “Maybe it’s not literal in your case, Maggie. But this lawsuit—it’s fired you up. It’s given you something to look forward to.” He looked around my home—the place setting for one, the bowl of popcorn on the table, the rabbit cage.

  I suppose there was a point in my life when I wanted the package deal—the chuppah, the husband, the kids, the carpools—but somewhere along the line, I’d just stopped hoping. I had gotten used to living alone, to saving the other half of the can of soup for the next night’s dinner, to only changing the pillowcases on my side of the bed. I had become overly comfortable with myself, so much so that anyone else would have felt like an intrusion.

  Pretending, it turned out, took much less effort than hoping.

  One of the reasons I loved my parents—and hated them—is that they still thought I had a chance at all that. They only wanted me to be happy; they didn’t see how on earth I could be happy by myself. Which, if you read between the lines, meant they found me just as lacking as I did.

  I could feel my eyes filling with tears. “I’m tired,” I said. “You should go now.”

  “Maggie—”

  When he reached for me, I ducked away. “Good night.”

  I punched buttons on the remote control until the television went black. Oliver crept out from behind my desk to investigate, and I scooped him up. Maybe this was why I chose to spend my free time with a rabbit: he didn’t offer unwanted advice. “You forgot one little detail,” I said. “Pikkuah nefesh doesn’t apply to an atheist.”

  My father paused in the act of taking his coat from the world’s ugliest coat rack. He slipped it over his arm and walked toward me. “I know it sounds strange for a rabbi,” he said, “but it’s never mattered to me what you believe in, Mags, as long as you believe in yourself as much as I do.” He settled his hand on top of Oliver’s back. Our fingers brushed, but I didn’t look up at him. “And that’s not semantics.”

  “Daddy—”

  He held up a hand to shush me and opened the door. “I’ll tell your mother to get you new pajamas for your birthday,” he said, pausing at the threshold. “Those have a hole in the butt.”

  MICHAEL

  In 1945, two brothers were digging beneath cliffs in Nag Hammadi, Egypt, trying to find fertilizer. One—Mohammed Ali—struck something hard as he dug. He unearthed a large earthenware jug, covered with a red dish. Afraid that a jinn would be inside it, Mohammed Ali didn’t want to open the jar. Finally, the curiosity of finding gold instead led him to break it open—only to find thirteen papyrus books inside, bound in gazelle leather.

  Some of the books were burned for firewood. The others made their way to religious scholars, who dated them to have been written around A.D. 140, about thirty years after the New Testament—and deciphered them to find the names of gospels not found in the Bible, full of sayings that were in the New Testament . . . and many that weren’t. In some, Jesus spoke in riddles; in others, the Virgin birth and bodily resurrection were dismissed. They came to be known as the Gnostic gospels, and even today, they are given short shrift by the Church.

  In seminary, we learned about the Gnostic gospels. Namely, we learned that they were heresy. And let me tell you, when a priest hands you a text and tells you this is what not to believe, it colors the way you read it. Maybe I skimmed the text, saving the careful close analysis for the Bible. Maybe I whiffed completely and told the priest who was teaching that course that I’d done my homework when in fact I didn’t. Whatever the excuse, that night when I cracked open Joel Bloom’s book, it was as if I’d never seen the words before, and although I planned to only read the foreword by the scholar who’d compiled the texts—a man named Ian Fletcher—I found myself devouring the pages as if it were the latest Stephen King novel and not a collection of ancient gospels.

  The book had been earmarked to the Gospel of Thomas. Any mentions of Thomas I knew from the Bible certainly weren’t flattering: He doesn’t believe Lazarus will rise from the dead. When Jesus tells His disciples to follow Him, Thomas points out that they don’t know where to go. And when Jesus rises after the crucifixion, Thomas isn’t even there—and won’t believe it until he can touch the wounds with his own hands. He’s the very definition of faithless—and the origin of the term doubting Thomas.

  Yet in Rabbi Bloom’s book, this page began:

  These are the secret words which the living Jesus spoke, and the twin, Didymos Judas Thomas, wrote them down.

  Twin? Since when did Jesus have a twin?

  The rest of the “gospel” was not a narrative of Jesus’s life, like Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, but a collection of quotes by Jesus, all beginning with the words Jesus said. Some were lines similar to those in the Bible. Others were completely unfamiliar and sounded more like logic puzzles than any scripture:

  If you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you. If you don’t bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you.

  I read the line over twice and rubbed my eyes. There was something about it that made me feel as if I’d heard it before.

  Then I realized where.

  Shay had said it to me the first time I’d met with him, when he’d explained why he wanted to donate his heart to Claire Nealon.

  I kept reading intently, hearing Shay’s voice over and over again:

  The dead aren’t alive, and the living won’t die.

  We come from the light.

  Split a piece of wood; I am there. Lift up the stone; you will find me there.

  The first time I had gone on a roller coaster, I felt like this—like the ground had been pulled out from beneath my feet, like I was going to be sick, like I needed something to grab hold of.

  If you asked a dozen people on the street if they’d ever heard of the Gnostic gospels, eleven would look at you as if you were crazy. In fact most people today couldn’t even recite the Ten Commandments. Shay Bourne’s religious training had been minimal and fragmented; the only thing I’d ever seen him “read�€