Change of Heart Read online

  Before I realized what I was doing, I had stepped into the tiny circle of space that the media had afforded to Rufus. "Maggie," he whispered, covering the mikes, "I'm working this here."

  A reporter gave me my invitation. "Hey, weren't you his lawyer?"

  "Yes," I said. "Which I hope means I'm qualified to tell you what I'm going to. I work for the ACLU. I can spout out all the same statistics that Mr. Urqhart just did. But you know what that speech leaves out? That I am truly sorry for June Nealon's loss, after all this time. And that today, I lost someone I cared about. Someone who'd made some serious mistakes--someone who was a hard nut to crack--but someone I'd made a place for in my life."

  "Maggie," Rufus hissed, pulling at my sleeve. "Save the true confessional for your diary."

  I ignored him. "You know why I think we still execute people? Because, even if we don't want to say it out loud--for the really heinous crimes, we want to know that there's a really heinous punishment. Simple as that. We want to bring society closer together--huddle and circle our wagons--and that means getting rid of people we think are incapable of learning a moral lesson. I guess the question is: Who gets to identify those people? Who decides what crime is so awful that the only answer is death? And what if, God forbid, they get it wrong?"

  The crowd was murmuring; the cameras were rolling. "I don't have children. I can't say I'd feel the same way if one of them was killed. And I don't have the answers--believe me, if I did, I'd be a lot richer--but you know, I'm starting to think that's okay. Maybe instead of looking for answers, we ought to be asking some questions instead. Like: What's the lesson we're teaching here? What if it's different every time? What if justice isn't equal to due process? Because at the end of the day, this is what we're left with: a victim, who's become a file to be dealt with, instead of a little girl, or a husband. An inmate who doesn't want to know the name of a correctional officer's child because that makes the relationship too personal. A warden who carries out executions even if he doesn't think they should happen in principle. And an ACLU lawyer who's supposed to go to the office, close the case, and move on. What we're left with is death, with the humanity removed from it." I hesitated a moment. "So you tell me ... did this execution really make you feel safer? Did it bring us all closer together? Or did it drive us farther apart?"

  I pushed past the cameras, whose heavy heads swung like bulls to follow my path, and into the crowd, which carved a canyon for me to walk through. And I cried.

  God, I cried.

  I turned on my windshield wipers on the way home, even though it was not raining. But I was falling apart at the seams, and sobbing, and I couldn't see; somehow I thought this would help. I had upstaged my boss on what was arguably the most important legal outcome for the New Hampshire ACLU in the past fifty years; even worse--I didn't particularly care.

  I would have liked to talk to Christian, but he was at the hospital by now, supervising the harvest of Shay's heart and other organs. He'd said he'd come over as soon as he could, as soon as he had word that the transplant was going to be a success.

  Which meant that I was going home to a house with a rabbit in it, and not much else.

  I turned the corner to my street and immediately saw the car in my driveway. My mother was waiting for me at the front door. I wanted to ask her why she was here, instead of at work. I wanted to ask her how she'd known I'd need her.

  But when she wordlessly held out a blanket that I usually kept on the couch, one with fuzzy fleece inside, I stepped into it and forgot all my questions. Instead, I buried my face against her neck. "Oh, Mags," she soothed. "It's going to be all right."

  I shook my head. "It was awful. Every time I blink, I can see it, like it's still happening." I drew in a shuddering breath. "It's stupid, isn't it? Up till the last minute, I was expecting a miracle. Like in the courtroom. That he'd slip out of the noose, or--I don't know--fly away or something."

  "Here, sit down," my mother said, leading me into the kitchen. "Real life doesn't work that way. It's like you said, to the reporters--"

  "You saw me?" I glanced up.

  "On television. Every channel, Maggie. Even CNN." Her face glowed. "Four people already called me to say you were brilliant."

  I suddenly remembered sitting in my parents' kitchen when I was in college, unable to decide on a career. My mother had sat down, propped her elbows on the table. What do you love to do? she had asked.

  Read, I'd told her. And argue.

  She had smiled broadly. Maggie, my love, you were meant to become a lawyer.

  I buried my face in my hands. "I was an idiot. Rufus is going to fire me."

  "Why? Because you said what nobody has the guts to say? The hardest thing in the world is believing someone can change. It's always easier to go along with the way things are than to admit that you might have been wrong in the first place."

  She turned to me, holding out a steaming, fragrant bowl. I could smell rosemary, pepper, celery. "I made you soup. From scratch."

  "You made me soup from scratch?"

  My mother rolled her eyes. "Okay, I bought soup someone else made from scratch."

  When I smiled a little, she touched my cheek. "Maggie," she said, "eat."

  Later that afternoon, while my mother did the dishes and cleaned up in my kitchen, and with Oliver curled up at my side, I fell asleep on the living room couch. I dreamed that I was walking in the dark in my favorite Stuart Weitzman heels, but they were hurting me. I glanced down to discover I was not walking on grass, but on a ground that looked like tempered glass after it's been shattered, like the cracked, parched landscape of a desert. My heels kept getting stuck in the crevasses, and finally I had to stop to pull one free.

  When I did, a clod of earth overturned, and beneath it was light, the purest, most liquid lava form of it. I kicked at another piece of the ground with my heel, and more beams spilled outward and upward. I poked holes, and rays shined up. I danced, and the world became illuminated, so bright that I had to shade my eyes; so bright that I could not keep them from filling with tears.

  June

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  This, I had told Claire, the night before the surgery, is how they'll transplant the heart: You'll be brought into the operating room and given general anesthesia.

  Grape, she'd said. She liked it way better than bubble gum, although the root beer wasn't bad.

  You'll be prepped and draped, I told her. Your sternum will be opened with a saw.

  Won't that hurt?

  Of course not, I said. You'll be fast asleep.

  I knew the procedure as well as any cardiac resident; I'd studied it that carefully, and that long. What comes next? Claire had asked.

  Sutures--stitches--get sewn into the aorta, the superior vena cava, and the inferior vena cava. Catheters are placed. Then you're put on the heart-lung machine.

  What's that?

  It works so you don't have to. It drains blue blood from the two cava, and returns red blood through the cannula in the aorta.

  Cannula's a cool word. I like how it sounds on my tongue.

  I skipped over the part about how her heart would be removed: the inferior and superior vena cava divided, then the aorta.

  Keep going.

  His heart (no need to say whose) is flushed with cardioplegia solution.

  It sounds like something you use to wax a car.

  Well, you'd better hope not. It's chock-full of nutrients and oxygen, and keeps the heart from beating as it warms up.

  And after that?

  Then the new heart goes to its new home, I had said, and I'd tapped her chest. First, the left atriums get sewn together. Then the inferior vena cava, then the superior vena cava, then the pulmonary artery, and finally, the aorta. When all the connections are set, the cross clamp on your aorta is removed, warm blood starts flowing into the coronaries, and ...

  Wait, let me guess: the heart starts beating.

  Now, hours later, Claire beamed up at me from her