The Jodi Picoult Collection #4 Read online

  I had a few more questions, but to be honest, I was terrified of what Shay might say. He already was talking in riddles. “Thank you,” I replied, and sat down.

  “I have a question, Mr. Bourne,” Judge Haig said. “There’s a lot of talk about odd things that have occurred at the prison. Do you believe you can perform miracles?”

  Shay looked at him. “Do you?”

  “I’m sorry, but that’s not how a courtroom works. I’m not allowed to answer your question, but you still need to answer mine. So,” the judge said, “do you believe you can perform miracles?”

  “I just did what I was supposed to. You can call that whatever you want.”

  The judge shook his head. “Mr. Greenleaf, your witness.”

  Suddenly, a man in the gallery stood up. He unzipped his jacket, revealing a T-shirt that had been emblazoned with the numbers 3:16. He started yelling, his voice hoarse. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son—” By then, two U.S. marshals had descended, hauling him out of his seat and dragging him up the alley, as the news cameras swiveled to follow the action. “His only son!” the man yelled. “Only! You are going to hell once they pump your veins full of—” The doors of the courtroom banged shut behind him, and then it was utterly silent.

  It was impressive that this man had gotten into the court in the first place—there were checkpoints with metal detectors and marshals in place before you entered. But his weapon had been the fundamental fury of his righteousness, and at that moment, I would have been hard-pressed to decide whether he or Shay had come off looking worse.

  “Yes,” Gordon Greenleaf said, getting to his feet. “Well.” He walked toward Shay, who rested his chained hands on the witness stand rail again. “You’re the only person who subscribes to your religion?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “I don’t belong to a religion. Religion’s the reason the world’s falling apart—did you see that guy get carted out of here? That’s what religion does. It points a finger. It causes wars. It breaks apart countries. It’s a petri dish for stereotypes to grow in. Religion’s not about being holy,” Shay said. “Just holier-than-thou.”

  At the plaintiff’s table, I closed my eyes—at the very least, Shay had surely just lost the case for himself; at the most, I was going to wind up with a cross being burned on my lawn. “Objection,” I said feebly. “It’s not responsive.”

  “Overruled,” the judge replied. “He’s not your witness now, Ms. Bloom.”

  Shay continued muttering, more quietly now. “You know what religion does? It draws a big fat line in the sand. It says, ‘If you don’t do it my way, you’re out.’”

  He wasn’t yelling, he wasn’t out of control. But he wasn’t in control, either. He brought his hands up to his neck, started scratching at it as the chains jangled down his chest. “These words,” he said, “they’re cutting my throat.”

  “Judge,” I said immediately, alert to a rapidly approaching meltdown. “Can we take a recess?”

  Shay started rocking back and forth.

  “Fifteen minutes,” Judge Haig said, and the U.S. marshals approached to remand Shay into custody. Panicking, Shay cowered and raised his arms in defense. And we all watched as the chains he was wearing—the ones that had secured him at the wrists and the ankles and the waist, the ones that had jangled throughout his testimony—fell to the floor with a clatter, as if they’d been no more substantial than smoke.

  “Religion often gets in the way of God.”

  —BONO, AT THE NATIONAL PRAYER BREAKFAST, FEBRUARY 2, 2006

  Maggie

  Shay stood, his arms akimbo, looking just as surprised to be unshackled as we were to see him that way. There was a collective moment of disbelief, and then chaos exploded in the courtroom. Screams rang out from the gallery. One marshal dragged the judge off the bench and into his chambers while the other drew his weapon, yelling for Shay to put his hands up. Shay froze, only to have the marshal tackle and handcuff him. “Stop!” Father Michael cried behind me. “He doesn’t know what’s happening!” As the marshal pushed Shay’s head against the wooden floor, he looked up at us, terrified.

  I whipped around to face the priest. “What the hell’s going on? He’s gone from being Jesus to being Houdini?”

  “This is the kind of thing he does,” Father Michael said. Was it me, or did I hear a note of satisfaction in his voice? “I tried to tell you.”

  “Let me tell you,” I shot back. “Our friend Shay just earned himself a one-way ticket to the lethal injection gurney, unless one of us can convince him to say something to Judge Haig to explain what just happened.”

  “You’re his lawyer,” Michael said.

  “You’re his advisor.”

  “Remember how I told you Shay won’t talk to me?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Could we just pretend we’re not in seventh grade anymore, and do our jobs?”

  He let his gaze slide away, and immediately I knew that whatever else this conversation had to hold, it wasn’t going to be pleasant.

  By now, the courtroom had emptied. I had to get to Shay and put a solitary, cohesive thought in his head, one that I hoped he could retain long enough to take to the witness stand. I didn’t have time for Father Michael’s confessions right now.

  “I was on the jury that convicted Shay,” the priest said.

  My mother had a trick she’d employed since I was a teenager—if I said something that made her want to (a) scream, (b) whack me, or (c) both, she would count to ten, her lips moving silently, before she responded. I could feel my mouth rounding out the syllables of the numbers, and with some dismay I realized that finally, I had become my mother. “Is that all?” I asked.

  “Isn’t that enough?”

  “Just making sure.” My mind raced. I could get into a lot of trouble for not telling Greenleaf that fact in advance. Then again, I hadn’t known in advance. “Is there a reason you waited so long to mention this?”

  “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” he said, parroting my own words. “At first I thought I’d just help Shay understand redemption, and then I’d tell you the truth. But Shay wound up teaching me about redemption, and you said my testimony was critical, and I thought maybe it was better you didn’t know. I thought it wouldn’t screw up the trial quite as much . . .”

  I held up my hand, stopping him. “Do you support it?” I asked. “The death penalty?”

  The priest hesitated before he spoke. “I used to.”

  I would have to tell Greenleaf. Even if Father Michael’s testimony was stricken from the record, though, you couldn’t make the judge forget hearing it; the damage had been done. Right now, however, I had more important things to do. “I have to go.”

  In the holding cell, I found Shay still distraught, his eyes squinched shut. “Shay?” I said. “It’s Maggie. Look at me.”

  “I can’t,” he cried. “Turn the volume down.”

  The room was quiet; there was no radio playing, no sound at all. I glanced at the marshal, who shrugged. “Shay,” I commanded, coming up to the bars of the cell. “Open your goddamn eyes.”

  One eye squinted open a crack, then the other.

  “Tell me how you did it.”

  “Did what?”

  “Your little magic act in there.”

  He shook his head. “I didn’t do anything.”

  “You managed to get out of handcuffs,” I said. “What did you do, make a key and hide it in a seam?”

  “I don’t have a key. I didn’t unlock them.”

  Well, technically, this was true. What I’d seen were the still-fastened cuffs, clattering to the floor, while Shay’s hands were somehow free of them. He certainly could have unfastened the locks and snapped them shut again—but it would have been noisy, something we all would have heard.

  And we hadn’t.

  “I didn’t do anything,” Shay repeated.

  I’d read somewhere of magicians who learned to dislocate their shoulders to g