Change of Heart Read online

  Except this time, she didn't.

  On the ambulance ride to the hospital, I counted all the reasons I hated myself: For picking a fight with Claire. For accepting Shay Bourne's offer to donate his heart, without asking her first. For turning off Full House before the happy ending.

  Just stay with me, I begged silently, and you can watch TV twenty-four hours a day. I will watch it with you. Don't give up, we've come so close.

  Although the EMTs had gotten Claire's heart beating again by the time we reached the hospital, Dr. Wu had admitted her, with the unspoken agreement that this was her new home until a new heart arrived--or hers gave out. I watched him check Claire, who was fast asleep in the oceanic blue light of the darkened room. "June," he said, "let's talk outside."

  He closed the door behind us. "There's no good news here."

  I nodded, biting my lip.

  "Obviously, the AICD isn't functioning correctly. But in addition, the tests we've done show her urine output decreasing and her creatinine levels rising. We're talking about renal failure, June. It's not just her heart that's giving out--her whole body is shutting down."

  I looked away, but I couldn't stop a tear from rolling down my cheek.

  "I don't know how long it's going to take to get a court to agree to that heart donation," the doctor said, "but Claire can't wait around for the docket to clear."

  "I'll call the lawyer," I said softly. "Is there anything else I can do?"

  Dr. Wu touched my arm. "You should think about saying good-bye."

  I held myself together long enough for Dr. Wu to disappear into an elevator. Then, I rushed down the hallway and blindly plunged into a doorway that stood ajar. I fell to my knees and let the grief bleed out of me--one great, low keening note.

  Suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder. I blinked through my tears to find the priest who was Shay Bourne's ally staring at me. "June? Is everything all right?"

  "No," I said. "No, everything is most definitely not all right."

  I could see then what I hadn't noticed when I first came into the room--the gold cross on the long dais in the front of the room, one flag with the star of David, another with a Muslim crescent moon: this was the hospital chapel, a place to ask for what you wanted the most.

  Was it wrong to wish for someone's death so that Claire could have his heart sooner?

  "Is it your daughter?" the priest asked.

  I nodded, but I couldn't look him in the eye.

  "Would it be all right--I mean, would you mind if I prayed for her?"

  Although I did not want his assistance--had not asked for his assistance--this one time, I was willing to put aside how I felt about God, because Claire could use all the help she could get. Almost imperceptibly, I nodded.

  Beside me, Father Michael's voice began to move over the hills and valleys of the simplest of prayers: "Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven."

  Before I realized what I was doing, my own mouth had started to form the words, a muscle memory. And to my surprise, instead of it feeling false or forced, it made me relieved, as if I had just passed the baton to someone else.

  "Give us this day our daily bread and lead us not into temptation. Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive others who trespass against us; and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil."

  It felt like putting on flannel pajamas on a snowy night; like turning on your blinker for the exit that you know will take you home.

  I looked at Father Michael, and together we said "Amen."

  MICHAEL

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  Ian Fletcher, former tele-atheist and current academic, lived in New Canaan, New Hampshire, in a farmhouse on a dirt road where the mailboxes were not numbered. I drove up and down the street four times before turning down one driveway and knocking on the door. When I did, no one answered, although I could hear strains of Mozart through the open windows.

  I had left June in the hospital, still shaken by my encounter with Shay. Talk about irony: just when I allowed myself to think that I might be in God's company, after all--He flatly rejected me. The whole world felt off-kilter; it is an odd thing to start questioning the framework that's ordered your life, your career, your expectations--and so I had placed a phone call to someone who'd been through it before.

  I knocked again, and this time the door swung open beneath my fist. "Hello? Anyone home?"

  "In here," a woman called out.

  I stepped into the foyer, taking note of the colonial furniture, the photo on the wall that showed a young girl shaking hands with Bill Clinton and another of the girl smiling beside the Dalai Lama. I followed the music to a room off the kitchen, where the most intricate dollhouse I'd ever seen was sitting on a table, surrounded by bits of wood and chisels and glue gun sticks. The house was made of bricks no bigger than my thumbnail, the windows had miniature shutters that could be louvered to let in light; there was a porch with Corinthian columns. "Amazing," I murmured, and a woman stood up from behind the dollhouse, where she'd been hidden.

  "Oh," she said. "Thanks." Seeing me, she did a double take, and I realized her eyes were focused on my clerical collar.

  "Bad parochial school flashback?"

  "No ... it's just been a while since I've had a priest in here." She stood up, wiping her hands on a white butcher's apron. "I'm Mariah Fletcher," she said.

  "Michael Wright."

  "Father Michael Wright."

  I grinned. "Busted." Then I gestured to her handiwork. "Did you make this?"

  "Well. Yeah."

  "I've never seen anything like it."

  "Good," Mariah said. "That's what the client's counting on."

  I bent down, scrutinizing a tiny door knocker with the head of a lion. "You're quite an artist."

  "Not really. I'm just better at detail than I am at the big picture." She turned off the CD player that was trilling The Magic Flute. "Ian said I was supposed to keep an eye out for you. And--Oh, shoot." Her eyes flew to the corner of the room, where a stack of blocks had been abandoned. "You didn't come across two hellions on your way in?"

  "No ..."

  "That's not a good sign." Pushing past me, she ran into the kitchen and threw open a pantry door. Twins--I figured them to be about four years old--were smearing the white linoleum with peanut butter and jelly.

  "Oh, God," Mariah sighed as their faces turned up to hers like sunflowers.

  "You told us we could finger-paint," one of the boys said.

  "Not on the floor; and not with food!" She glanced at me. "I'd escort you, but--"

  "You have to take care of a sticky situation?"

  She smiled. "Ian's in the barn; you can just head down there." She lifted each boy and pointed him toward the sink. "And you two," she said, "are going to clean up, and then go torture Daddy."

  I left her washing the twins' hands and walked down the path toward the barn. Having children was not in the cards for me--I knew that. A priest's love for God was so allencompassing that it should erase the human craving for a family--my parents, brothers, sisters, and children were all Jesus. If the Gospel of Thomas was right, however, and we were more like God than unlike Him, then having children should have been mandatory for everyone. After all, God had a son and had given Him up. Any parent whose child had gone to college or gotten married or moved away would understand this part of God more than me.

  As I approached the barn, I heard the most unholy sounds--like cats being dismembered, calves being slaughtered. Panicked--was Fletcher hurt?--I threw open the door to find him watching a teenage girl play the violin.

  Really badly.

  She took the violin from her chin and settled it into the slight curve of her hip. "I don't understand why I have to practice in the barn."

  Fletcher removed a pair of foam earplugs. "What was that?"

  She rolled her eyes. "Did you even hear my piece at all?"

  Fletcher paused. "Y