The Jodi Picoult Collection #4 Read online

  She blinked. “You think what?”

  The words began to spill out of me, the way I always imagined it felt to be speaking in tongues: truths that tumbled before you even realized they’d left your mouth. “It makes perfect sense. The age, the profession. The fact that he’s on death row. The miracles. And the heart donation—he’s literally giving himself away for our sins, again. He’s giving the part that matters the least—the body—in order to become whole in spirit.”

  “This is way worse than having cold feet,” Maggie murmured. “You’re crazy.”

  “Maggie, he’s been quoting a gospel that was written two hundred years after Christ’s death—a gospel that most people don’t even know exists. Word for word.”

  “I’ve listened to his words, and frankly, they’re unintelligible. Do you know what he was doing yesterday when I briefed him on his testimony? Playing tic-tac-toe. With himself.”

  “You have to read between the lines.”

  “Yeah, right. And I bet when you listen to Britney Spears records backward, you hear ‘Sleep with me, I’m not too young.’ For God’s sake—no pun intended—you’re a Catholic priest. Whatever happened to the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost? I don’t remember Shay being part of the Trinity.”

  “What about everyone camped outside the prison? Are they all crazy, too?”

  “They want Shay to cure their kid’s autism or reverse their husband’s Alzheimer’s. They’re in it for themselves,” Maggie said. “The only people who think Shay Bourne is the Messiah are so desperate that they’d be able to find salvation beneath the lid of a two-liter bottle of Pepsi.”

  “Or through a heart transplant?” I countered. “You’ve worked up a whole legal theory based on individual religious beliefs. So how can you tell me, categorically, that I’m wrong?”

  “Because it’s not a matter of right or wrong. It’s life or death—namely, Shay’s. I’d say whatever I had to to win this case for him; it’s my job. And it was supposed to be yours, too. This isn’t about some revelation; it’s not about who Shay might have been or might be in the future. It’s about who he is right now: a convicted murderer who’s going to be executed unless I can do something about it. It doesn’t matter to me if he’s a vagrant or Queen Elizabeth or Jesus Christ—it just matters that we win this case for him, so that he can die on his own terms. That means that you will get on that damn stand and swear on that Bible—which, for all I know, might not even be relevant to you now that you’ve found Jesus on I-tier. And if you screw this up for Shay by sounding like a nut job when I question you, I will make your life miserable.” By the time Maggie finished, she was red in the face and breathless. “This old gospel,” she said. “Word for word?”

  I nodded.

  “How did you find out about it?”

  “From your father,” I said.

  Maggie’s brows rose. “I’m not putting a priest and a rabbi on the stand. The judge will be waiting for a punch line.”

  I looked up at her. “I have an idea.”

  Maggie

  In the client-attorney conference room outside I-tier, Shay climbed on the chair and started talking to flies. “Go left,” he urged as he craned his neck toward the air vent. “Come on. You can do it.”

  I looked up from my notes for a moment. “Are they pets?”

  “No,” Shay said, stepping down from the chair. His hair was matted, but only on the left side, which made him look absentminded at best and mentally ill at worst. I wondered what I could say to convince him to let me brush it before we went out in front of the judge tomorrow.

  The flies were circling. “I have a pet rabbit,” I said.

  “Last week, before I was moved to I-tier, I had pets,” Shay said, then shook his head. “It wasn’t last week. It was yesterday. I can’t remember.”

  “It doesn’t matter—”

  “What’s its name?”

  “Sorry?”

  “The rabbit.”

  “Oliver,” I said, and took out of my pocket what I’d been holding for Shay. “I brought you a gift.”

  He smiled at me, his eyes piercing and suddenly focused. “I hope it’s a key.”

  “Not quite.” I passed him a Snack Pack butterscotch pudding. “I figured you don’t get the good stuff in prison.”

  He opened the foil top, licked it, and then carefully folded it into his breast pocket. “Is there butter in it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What about Scotch?”

  I smiled. “I truly doubt it.”

  “Too bad.”

  I watched him take the first bite. “Tomorrow’s going to be a big day,” I said.

  In the wake of Michael’s crisis of faith, I had contacted the witness he recommended—an academic named Ian Fletcher whom I vaguely remembered from a television show he used to host, where he’d go around debunking the claims of people who saw the Virgin Mary in their toast burn pattern and things like that. At first, putting him on the stand seemed to be a sure way to lose a case—but the guy had a PhD from the Princeton Theological Seminary, and there had to be some merit in putting a former atheist on the stand. If Fletcher could be convinced there was a God—be it Jesus, Allah, Yahweh, Shay, or none of the above—then surely any of us could.

  Shay finished his pudding and handed the empty cup back to me. “I need the foil, too,” I said. The last thing I wanted was to find out a few days from now that Shay had fashioned a shank out of the aluminum and hurt himself or someone else. He took it out of his pocket meekly and handed it back to me. “You do know what’s happening tomorrow, right?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “Well. About the trial,” I began, “all you have to do is sit patiently and listen. A lot of what you’ll hear probably won’t make sense to you.”

  He looked up. “Are you nervous?”

  I was nervous, all right—and not just because this was a high-profile death penalty case that might or might not have found a constitutional loophole. I lived in a country where 85 percent of the residents called themselves Christians and about half went regularly to some form of church—religion was not about the individual to the average American; it was about the community of believers, and my whole case was about to turn that on its ear. “Shay,” I said. “You understand that we might lose.”

  Shay nodded, dismissive. “Where is she?”

  “Who?”

  “The girl. The one who needs the heart.”

  “She’s in the hospital.”

  “Then we have to hurry,” he said.

  I exhaled slowly. “Right. I’d better go get my game face on.”

  I stood up, summoning the CO to let me out of the conference room, but Shay’s voice called me back. “Don’t forget to say you’re sorry,” he said.

  “To whom?”

  By then, though, Shay was standing on the chair again, his attention focused on something else. And as I watched, seven flies landed in quick succession on the palm of his outstretched hand.

  * * *

  When I was five, all I wanted was a Christmas tree. My friends had them, and the menorah we lit at night paled in comparison. My father pointed out that we got eight presents, but my friends got even more than that, if you added up what was sitting underneath their tree. One cold December afternoon, my mother told my father we were heading to the movies, and instead, she drove me to the mall. We waited in line with little girls who had ribbons in their hair and fancy lace dresses, so that I could sit on Santa’s lap and tell him I wanted My Pretty Pony. Then, with a candy cane fisted in my hand, we walked to the decoration display where there were fifteen Christmas trees set up—white ones with glass balls, fake balsam ones strung with red beads and bows, one that had Tinker Bell at the top and all the Disney characters dotted as ornaments. “Like this,” my mother said, and right in the middle of the department store we lay down at a crossroads of the trees and gazed up at the blinking light displays. I thought it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. “I won’