The Jodi Picoult Collection #4 Read online

  I got up and began to walk around the little room. “The book you loaned me—it got me thinking.”

  “And that’s a bad thing?”

  “Shay Bourne has said things, verbatim, that I read last night in the Gospel of Thomas.”

  “Bourne? He’s read Thomas? I thought Maggie said he—”

  “—has no religious training to speak of, and a minimal education.”

  “It’s not like the Gideons leave the Gospel of Thomas in hotel rooms,” Rabbi Bloom said. “Where would he have—”

  “Exactly.”

  He steepled his fingers. “Huh.”

  I placed the book he’d loaned me on his desk. “What would you do if you began to second-guess everything you believed?”

  Rabbi Bloom leaned forward and riffled through his Rolodex. “I would ask more questions,” he said. He scribbled down something on a Post-it and handed it to me.

  Ian Fletcher, I read. 603-555-1367.

  Lucius

  The night Shay had his second seizure, I was awake, gathering ink that I planned to use to give myself another tattoo. If I do say so myself, I’m rather proud of my homemade tattoos. I had five—my rationale being that my body, up until three weeks ago, wasn’t worth much more than being a canvas for my art; plus the threat of getting AIDS from a dirty needle was obviously a moot point. On my left ankle was a clock, with the hands marking the moment of Adam’s death. On my left shoulder was an angel, and below it an African tribal design. On my right leg was a bull, because I was a Taurus; and swimming beside it was a fish, for Adam, who was a Pisces. I had grand plans for this sixth one, which I planned to put right on my chest: the word BELIEVE, in Gothic letters. I’d practiced the art in reverse multiple times in pencil and pen, until I felt sure that I could replicate it with my tattoo gun as I worked in the mirror.

  My first gun had been confiscated by the COs, like Crash’s hype kit. It had taken me six months to amass the parts for the new one. Making ink was hard to do, and harder to get away with—which was why I had chosen to work on this during the deadest hours of the night. I had lit a plastic spoon on fire, keeping the flame small so I could catch the smoke in a plastic bag. It stank horribly, and just as I was getting certain the COs would literally get wind of it and shut down my operation, Shay Bourne collapsed next door.

  This time, his seizure had been different. He’d screamed—so loud that he woke up the whole pod, so loud that the finest dust of plaster drifted down from the ceilings of our cells. To be honest, Shay was such a mess when he was wheeled off I-tier that none of us were sure whether or not he’d be returning—which is why I was stunned to see him being led back to his cell the very next day.

  “Po-lice,” Joey Kunz yelled, just in time for me to hide the pieces of my tattoo gun underneath the mattress. The officers locked Shay into his cell, and as soon as the door to I-tier shut behind them, I asked Shay how he was feeling.

  “My head hurts,” he said. “I have to go to sleep.”

  With Crash still off the tier after the hype kit transgression, things were quieter. Calloway slept most days and stayed up nights with his bird; Texas and Pogie played virtual poker; Joey was listening to his soaps. I waited an extra few minutes to make sure the officers were otherwise occupied out in the control booth and then I reached underneath my mattress again.

  I had unraveled a guitar string to its central core, a makeshift needle. This was inserted into a pen whose ink cartridge had been removed—and a small piece of its tip sawed off and attached to the other end of the needle, which was attached to the motor shaft of a cassette player. The pen was taped to a toothbrush bent into an L shape, which let you hold the contraption more easily. You could adjust the needle length by sliding the pen casing back and forth; all that was left was plugging in the AC adapter of the cassette player, and I had a functional tattoo gun again.

  The soot I’d captured the previous night had been mixed with a few drops of shampoo to liquefy it. I stood in front of the stainless steel panel that served as a mirror, and scrutinized my chest. Then, gritting my teeth against the pain, I turned on the gun. The needle moved back and forth in an elliptical orbit, piercing me hundreds of times per minute.

  There it was, the letter B.

  “Lucius?” Shay’s voice drifted into my house.

  “I’m sort of busy, Shay.”

  “What’s that noise?”

  “None of your business.” I lifted it to my skin again, felt the needle working against me, a thousand arrows striking.

  “Lucius? I can still hear that noise.”

  I sighed. “It’s a tattoo gun, Shay, all right? I’m giving myself a tattoo.”

  There was a hesitation. “Will you give me one?”

  I had done this for multiple inmates when I was housed on different tiers—ones that had a bit more freedom than I-tier, which offered twenty-three rollicking hours of lockdown. “I can’t. I can’t reach you.”

  “That’s okay,” Shay said. “I can reach you.”

  “Yeah, whatever,” I said. I squinted back into the mirror and set the tattoo gun against my skin. Holding my breath, I carefully formed the curves and flourishes around the letters E and L.

  I thought I heard Shay whimpering when I started on the letter I, and surely he cried out when I tattooed the V. My gun must not have been helping his headache any. Shrugging off his moans, I stepped closer to the mirror and surveyed my handiwork.

  God, it was gorgeous. The letters moved with every breath I took; even the angry red swelling of my skin couldn’t take away from the clean lines of the letters.

  “B-believe,” Shay stammered.

  I turned around, as if I could see him through the wall between our cells. “What did you say?”

  “It’s what you said,” Shay corrected. “I read it right, didn’t I?”

  I had not told anyone of my plans for my sixth tattoo. I hadn’t shared the prototype artwork. I knew for a fact that Shay, from where he stood, could not have seen into my cell as I worked.

  Fumbling behind the brick that served as my safe, I took out the shank that I used as a portable mirror. I stepped up to the front of my cell and angled it so that I could see Shay’s beaming face in the reflection. “How did you know what I was writing?”

  Shay smiled wider, and then raised his fist. He unfolded his fingers, one at a time.

  His palm was red and inflamed, and printed across it, in Gothic script, was the same exact tattoo I’d just given myself.

  MICHAEL

  Shay paced his cell in figure eights. “Did you see him?” he asked, wild-eyed.

  I sank down on the stool I’d dragged in from the control booth. I was sluggish today—not only was my head buzzing with questions about what I’d read, but I was also—for the first time in a year—not officiating at this evening’s midnight Mass. “See who?” I replied, distracted.

  “Sully. The new guy. Next door.”

  I glanced into the other cell. Lucius DuFresne was still on Shay’s left; on his right, the formerly empty cell now had someone occupying it. Sully, however, wasn’t there. He was in the rec yard, repeatedly running full tilt across the little square yard and leaping up against the far wall, hands splayed, as if hitting it hard enough meant he’d go right through the metal.

  “They’re going to kill me,” Shay said.

  “Maggie’s working on writing a motion at this very—”

  “Not the state,” Shay said. “One of them.”

  I did not know anything about prison politics, but there was a fine line between Shay’s paranoia and what might pass for the truth. Shay was receiving more attention than any other inmate at the prison, as a result of his lawsuit and the media frenzy. There was every chance he might be targeted by the general prison population.

  Behind me, CO Smythe passed in his flak jacket, carrying a broom and some cleaning supplies. Once a week, the inmates were required to clean their own cells. It was one-at-a-time, supervised cleaning: after an inmate came i