Change of Heart Read online

  The temperature continued to drop. I put on my coat and zipped it tight. Shay's entire body was racked with tremors; his lips had started to turn blue. Frost swirled on the metal door of the cell, like a white feathered fern.

  "It's ten degrees warmer outside this building," the officer said. "I don't get it." He was blowing on his hands, a small exclamation of breath that hovered in the air. "I could call maintenance ..."

  "Let me into the cell," I ordered.

  The officer blinked at me. "I can't."

  "Why? I've been searched twice over. I'm not near any other inmates. And you're here. It's no different than a meeting in an attorney-client conference room, is it?"

  "I could get fired for this ..."

  "I'll tell the warden it was my idea, and I'll be on my best behavior," I said. "I'm a priest. Would I lie to you?"

  He shook his head and unlocked the cell with an enormous Folger Adam key. I heard the tumblers click into place as he secured me inside; as I entered Shay's six-by-six world. Shay glanced up at me, his teeth chattering.

  "Move over," I said, and sat down on the bunk beside him. I draped a blanket over us and waited until the heat from my body conducted through the slight space between us.

  "Why ... is it so ... cold?" Shay whispered.

  I shook my head. "Try not to think about it."

  Try not to think about the fact that it is subzero in this tiny cell. Try not to think about the fact that it backs up to a gallows from which you will swing tomorrow. Try not to think about the sea of faces you will see when you stand up there, about what you will say when you are asked to, about your heart pounding so fast with fear that you cannot hear the words you speak. Try not to think about that same heart being cut from your chest, minutes later, when you are gone.

  Earlier, Alma the nurse had come to offer Shay Valium. He'd declined--but now I wished I'd taken her up on his behalf.

  After a few minutes, Shay stopped shaking so violently--he was down to an occasional tremor. "I don't want to cry up there," he admitted. "I don't want to look weak."

  I turned to him. "You've been on death row for eleven years. You've fought--and won--the right to die on your own terms. Even if you had to crawl up there tomorrow, there's not a single person who'd think of you as weak."

  "Are they all still out there?"

  By they, he meant the crowds. And they were--and were still coming, blocking the exits off 93 to get into Concord. In the end, and this was the end, it did not matter whether or not Shay was truly messianic, or just a good showman. It mattered that all of those people had someone to believe in.

  Shay turned to me. "I want you to do me a favor."

  "Anything."

  "I want you to watch over Grace."

  I had already assumed he'd ask that; an execution bound people together much like any other massive emotional moment--a birth, an armed robbery, a marriage, a divorce. I would be linked to the parties involved forever. "I will."

  "And I want you to have all my things."

  I could not imagine what this entailed--his tools, maybe, from when he was a carpenter? "I'd like that." I pulled the blanket up a little higher. "Shay, about your funeral."

  "It really doesn't matter."

  I had tried to get him a spot in the St. Catherine's cemetery, but the committee in charge had vetoed it--they did not want the grave of a murderer resting beside their loved ones. Private plots and burials were thousands of dollars--thousands that neither Grace nor Maggie nor I had to spend. An inmate whose family did not make alternate plans would be buried in a tiny graveyard behind the prison, a headstone carved only with his correctional facility number, not his name.

  "Three days," Shay said, yawning.

  "Three days?"

  He smiled at me, and for the first time in hours, I actually felt warm to the core. "That's when I'm coming back."

  At nine o'clock on the morning of Shay's execution, a tray was brought up from the kitchen. Sometime during the night, the frost had broken; and with it, the cement that had been poured for the base of the holding cell. Weeds from the courtyard sprouted in tufts and bunches; vines climbed up the metal wall of the cell door. Shay took off his shoes and socks and walked across the new grass barefoot, a big smile on his face.

  I had moved back to my outside stool, so that the officer watching over Shay would not get into trouble, but the sergeant who arrived with the food was immediately wary. "Who brought in the plants?"

  "No one," the officer said. "They just sort of showed up overnight."

  The sergeant frowned. "I'm going to tell the warden."

  "Yeah," the officer said. "Go on. I'm sure he's got nothing else to think about right now."

  At his sarcasm, Shay and I looked at each other and grinned. The sergeant left, and the officer handed the tray through the trapdoor. Shay uncovered the items, one by one.

  Mallomars. Corn dogs. Chicken nuggets.

  Kettle corn and cotton candy, s'mores.

  Curly fries, ice cream crowned with a halo of maraschino cherries. Fry bread sprinkled with powdered sugar. A huge blue Slurpee.

  There was more than one man could ever eat. And it was all the sort of food you got at a country fair. The sort of food you remembered from your childhood.

  If, unlike Shay, you'd had one.

  "I worked on a farm for a while," Shay said absently. "I was putting up a timber-frame barn. One day, I watched the guy who ran it empty the whole sack of grain out into the middle of the pasture for his steers, instead of just a scoop. I thought that was so cool--like Christmas, for them!--until I saw the butcher's truck drive up. He was giving them all they could eat, because by then, it didn't matter."

  Shay rolled the French fry he'd been holding between his fingers, then set it back on the plate. "You want some?"

  I shook my head.

  "Yeah," he said softly. "I guess I'm not so hungry, either."

  Shay's execution was scheduled for ten a.m. Although death penalty sentences used to be carried out at midnight, it felt so cloak-and-dagger that now they were staggered at all times of the day. The family of the inmate was allowed to visit up to three hours prior to the execution, although this was not an issue, since Shay had told Grace not to come. The attorney of record and the spiritual advisor were allowed to stay up to forty-five minutes prior to the execution.

  After that, Shay would be alone, except for the officer guarding him.

  After the breakfast tray was removed, Shay got diarrhea. The officer and I turned our backs to give him privacy, then pretended it had not happened. Shortly afterward, Maggie arrived. Her eyes were red, and she kept wiping at them with a crumpled Kleenex. "I brought you something," she said, and then she saw the cell, overrun with vegetation. "What's this?"

  "Global warming?" I said.

  "Well. My gift's a little redundant." Maggie emptied her pockets, full of grass, Queen Anne's lace, lady's slippers, Indian paintbrushes, buttercups.

  She fed them to Shay through the metal mesh on the door. "Thank you, Maggie."

  "For God's sake, don't thank me," Maggie said. "I wish this wasn't the way it ended, Shay." She hesitated. "What if I--"

  "No." Shay shook his head. "It's almost over, and then you can go on to rescuing people who want to be rescued. I'm okay, really. I'm ready."

  Maggie opened her mouth to speak, but then pressed her lips together and shook her head. "I'll stand where you can see me."

  Shay swallowed. "Okay."

  "I can't stay. I need to make sure that Warden Coyne's talked to the hospital, so that everything happens like it's supposed to."

  Shay nodded. "Maggie," he said, "promise me something?"

  "Sure, Shay."

  He rested his head against the metal door. "Don't forget me."

  "Not a chance," Maggie said, and she pressed her lips against the metal door, as if she could kiss Shay good-bye.

  Suddenly, we were alone, with a half hour stretching between us.

  "How are you doing?" I