Change of Heart Read online

  "Really?" Dr. Gallagher said. "How strange. At Oxford it meant your roommate was inside having sex."

  "Maybe we should go," I said quickly, hoping he didn't notice that I was blushing fiercely, or that I lived alone with a rabbit, or that my hips were so big that they probably wouldn't fit into the seat of the little sports car he'd parked in my driveway.

  He opened the car door for me and didn't turn the ignition until my seat belt was fastened. As he sped off, he cleared his throat. "There's something I'd like to get out of the way before we go any further," he said. "I'm Christian."

  I stared at him. Was he some kind of fundamentalist who limited his extracurricular conversations to people of the same faith? Did he think that I harbored some secret desire to elope, and was he giving me the lay of the land? (All right. So maybe that last one wasn't far off the mark.)

  Well, whatever. I'd been eating, sleeping, breathing religion with Shay's case; I was even more sensitive now about religious tolerance than I'd been before I took up this mantle. And if religion was so vitally important to Gallagher that he had to bring it up as the first point of conversation, I could give as good as I got. "I'm an atheist," I said, "but you might as well know right now that my father's a rabbi, and if you have a problem with that I'm sure I can find another physician to talk to me, and I'd really appreciate it if you didn't make a joke right now about Jewish doctors."

  I exhaled.

  "Well," he said, and glanced at me. "Perhaps you'd rather call me Chris?"

  I was pretty sure Emily Post wouldn't have covered this topic, but it seemed more discreet to wait until after we were served our main course to start talking about how to kill a man.

  The restaurant was inside an old colonial home in Orford, with floorboards that rolled like the seas beneath my feet and a bustling kitchen off to one side. The hostess had a husky, mellifluous voice and greeted the doctor by name.

  Christian.

  The room we were sitting in had only six tables, covered with mismatched linen and dishes and glasses; candles burned in recycled wine bottles. On the wall were mirrors in every shape and size--my own personal version of the ninth circle of hell--but I hardly even noticed them. Instead, I drank water and wine and pretended that I did not want to spoil my appetite by eating the freshly baked bread they'd served us along with dipping oil--or by talking about Shay's execution.

  Christian smiled at me. "I've always imagined one day I'd be forced to consider how one went about losing one's heart, but I must admit, I didn't think it would be quite so literal."

  The waiter arrived with our plates. The menu had been full of the most delectable cuisine: Vietnamese bouillabaisse, escargot tortellini, chorizo dumplings. Even the descriptions of the entrees made me salivate: Handmade to order, fresh Italian parsley pasta filled with fresh artichoke hearts, roasted eggplant, a medley of cheeses, and sweet roasted red and yellow pepper, tossed with a sun-dried tomato cream sauce. Slices of boneless chicken lined with thin slices of prosciutto filled with fresh spinach, Asiago cheese, and sweet onion rolled and served with fresh fettuccine and a tomato marsala wine reduction. Boneless breast of duck roasted, thinly sliced, served with a sun-dried cherry sauce and a wild rice pancake.

  In the wild hope that I might fool Christian into thinking my waist size was not what it seemed to be, I'd swallowed hard and ordered an appetizer. I'd fervently wished that Christian would order the braised leg of lamb or the steak frites so that I could beg a taste, but when I explained I wasn't all that hungry (a colossal lie), he said an appetizer was all he really wanted, too.

  "From what I imagine," Christian said, "the inmate would be hanged in such a way that the spine would be fractured at C2/C3, which would arrest all spontaneous respiration."

  I was trying very hard to follow along. "You mean he'd break his neck and stop breathing?"

  "Right."

  "So then he's brain-dead?"

  A couple at the next table glanced at me, and I realized I'd been talking too loudly. That some people didn't like to mix death with dinner.

  "Well, not quite. It takes some time for anoxic changes to the brain to result in a loss of reflexes ... which is how you test for brain-stem function. The problem is that you can't leave your man hanging for a great period of time, or his heart will stop, and that disqualifies him as a donor."

  "So what has to happen?"

  "The state needs to agree that the fact that respiration's ceased is enough to justify taking the body down from the noose on likely suspicion of death, then intubate him so that the heart is protected, and then test for brain death."

  "Intubating him isn't the same as resuscitating him, then?"

  "No. It's the equivalent of someone brain-dead being on a ventilator. It preserves the organs, but there won't be any brain function once that spinal cord is severed and hypoxia sets in, no matter how much oxygen you pump into his system."

  I nodded. "So how do you determine brain death?"

  "There are multiple ways. You can do a physical exam first--check to make sure there are no corneal reflexes, no spontaneous respirations, no gag reflex--and then repeat it twelve hours later. But since time is of the essence, I'd recommend a transcranial Doppler test, which uses ultrasound to measure blood flow through the carotid arteries at the base of the brain. If there's no blood flow for ten minutes, you can legally declare brain death."

  I imagined Shay Bourne--who could barely string together a coherent sentence, who bit his fingernails to the quick--being led to a gallows. I pictured the noose being drawn tight around his neck and felt the hair stand up on the back of my own.

  "It's brutal," I said softly, and put down my fork.

  Christian was quiet for a moment. "I was a resident in Philadelphia the first time I had to tell a mother her child had died. He was the victim of a gang shooting--eight years old. He'd gone to the corner store to get a quart of milk, and was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I will never forget the look in her eyes when I told her we weren't able to save her son. When a child is killed, two people die, I think. The only difference is that his mother still had to suffer a heartbeat." He looked up at me. "It will be brutal for Mr. Bourne. But it was brutal for June Nealon first."

  I sat back in my chair. This, then, was the catch. You meet a well-educated, intensely gorgeous, charming Oxford-educated man, and he turns out to be so right-wing he's nearly pointed backward. "Then you're in favor of capital punishment?" I asked, trying to keep my voice level.

  "I think it's easy to take the moral high road when it's all theory," Christian said. "As a physician, do I think it's right to kill someone? No. But then again, I don't have children yet. And I'd be lying if I said that when I do, this issue will still seem crystal clear to me."

  I didn't have children yet, either; at the rate I was going, I might never have them. And the only time I'd seen June Nealon, face-to-face, we'd been at the restorative justice meeting and she had been so filled with righteous anger that I found it hard to look at her. I didn't know what it felt like to carry a child underneath my heart for nine months, to feel my body give way to make room for hers. I didn't know what it felt like to hold an infant and rock her to sleep, to find a lullaby in her breathing. But I knew what it was like to be the daughter.

  My mother and I hadn't always argued. I could still remember wishing that I was as glamorous as she was--trying on her high-heeled shoes, pulling her sheer satin slips up to my armpits as if they were strapless dresses, diving into the wondrous mystery of her makeup bag. She had, at one point, been the person I wanted to grow up to be.

  It was so damn hard to find love in this world, to locate someone who could make you feel that there was a reason you'd been put on this earth. A child, I imagined, was the purest form of that. A child was the love you didn't have to look for, didn't have to prove anything to, didn't have to worry about losing.

  Which is why, when it happened, it hurt so badly.

  Suddenly, I wanted to call my mother. I wanted t