The Jodi Picoult Collection #4 Read online

  I was an artist by vocation, and now by avocation—although it’s been considerably more challenging to get my supplies in a place like this. Where I had once favored Winsor & Newton oils and red sable brushes, linen canvases I stretched myself and coated with gesso, I now used whatever I could get my hands on. I had my nephews draw me pictures on card stock in pencil that I erased so that I could use the paper over again. I hoarded the foods that produced pigment. Tonight I had been working on a portrait of Adam, drawn of course from memory, because that was all I had left. I had mixed some red ink gleaned from a Skittle with a dab of toothpaste in the lid of a juice bottle, and coffee with a bit of water in a second lid, and then I’d combined them to get just the right shade of his skin—a burnished, deep molasses.

  I had already outlined his features in black—the broad brow, the strong chin, the hawk’s nose. I’d used a shank to shave ebony curls from a picture of a coal mine in a National Geographic and added a dab of shampoo to make a chalky paint. With the broken tip of a pencil, I had transferred the color to my makeshift canvas.

  God, he was beautiful.

  It was after three a.m., but to be honest, I don’t sleep much. When I do, I find myself getting up to go to the bathroom—as little as I eat these days, food passes through me at lightning speed. I get sick to my stomach; I get headaches. The thrush in my mouth and throat makes it hard to swallow. Instead, I use my insomnia to fuel my artwork.

  Tonight, I’d had the sweats. I was soaked through by the time I woke up, and after I stripped off my sheets and my scrubs, I didn’t want to lie down on the mattress again. Instead, I had pulled out my painting and started re-creating Adam. But I got sidetracked by the other portraits I’d finished of him, hanging on my cell wall: Adam standing in the same pose he’d first struck when he was modeling for the college art class I taught; Adam’s face when he opened his eyes in the morning. Adam, looking over his shoulder, the way he’d been when I shot him.

  “I need to do it,” Shay Bourne said. “It’s the only way.”

  He had been utterly silent since this afternoon’s arrival on I-tier; I wondered who he was having a conversation with at this hour of the night. But the pod was empty. Maybe he was having a nightmare. “Bourne?” I whispered. “Are you okay?”

  “Who’s . . . there?”

  The words were hard for him—not quite a stutter; more like each syllable was a stone he had to bring forth. “I’m Lucius. Lucius DuFresne,” I said. “You talking to someone?”

  He hesitated. “I think I’m talking to you.”

  “Can’t sleep?”

  “I can sleep,” Shay said. “I just don’t want to.”

  “You’re luckier than I am, then,” I replied.

  It was a joke, but he didn’t take it that way. “You’re no luckier than me, and I’m no unluckier than you,” he said.

  Well, in a way, he was right. I may not have been handed down the same sentence as Shay Bourne, but like him, I would die within the walls of this prison—sooner rather than later.

  “Lucius,” he said. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m painting.”

  There was a beat of silence. “Your cell?”

  “No. A portrait.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m an artist.”

  “Once, in school, an art teacher said I had classic lips,” Shay said. “I still don’t know what that means.”

  “It’s a reference to the ancient Greeks and Romans,” I explained. “And the art that we see represented on—”

  “Lucius? Did you see on TV today . . . the Red Sox . . .”

  Everyone on I-tier had a team they followed, myself included. We each kept meticulous score of their league standings, and we debated the fairness of umpire and ref calls as if they were law and we were Supreme Court judges. Sometimes, like us, our teams had their hopes dashed; other times we got to share their World Series. But it was still preseason; there hadn’t been any televised games today.

  “Schilling was sitting at a table,” Shay added, still struggling to find the right words. “And there was a little girl—”

  “You mean the fund-raiser? The one up at the hospital?”

  “That little girl,” Shay said. “I’m going to give her my heart.”

  Before I could respond, there was a loud crash and the thud of flesh smacking against the concrete floor. “Shay?” I called. “Shay?!”

  I pressed my face up against the Plexiglas. I couldn’t see Shay at all, but I heard something rhythmic smacking his cell door. “Hey!” I yelled at the top of my lungs. “Hey, we need help down here!”

  The others started to wake up, cursing me out for disturbing their rest, and then falling silent with fascination. Two officers stormed into I-tier, still Velcroing their flak jackets. One of them, CO Kappaletti, was the kind of man who’d taken this job so that he’d always have someone to put down. The other, CO Smythe, had never been anything but professional toward me. Kappaletti stopped in front of my cell. “DuFresne, if you’re crying wolf—”

  But Smythe was already kneeling in front of Shay’s cell. “I think Bourne’s having a seizure.” He reached for his radio and the electronic door slid open so that other officers could enter.

  “Is he breathing?” one said.

  “Turn him over, on the count of three . . .”

  The EMTs arrived and wheeled Shay past my cell on a gurney—a stretcher with restraints across the shoulders, belly, and legs that was used to transport inmates like Crash who were too much trouble even cuffed at the waist and ankles; or inmates who were too sick to walk to the infirmary. I always assumed I’d leave I-tier on one of those gurneys. But now I realized that it looked a lot like the table Shay would one day be strapped onto for his lethal injection.

  The EMTs had pushed an oxygen mask over Shay’s mouth that frosted with each breath he took. His eyes had rolled up in their sockets, white and blind. “Do whatever it takes to bring him back,” CO Smythe instructed; and that was how I learned that the state will save a dying man just so that they can kill him later.

  MICHAEL

  There was a great deal that I loved about the Church.

  Like the feeling I got when two hundred voices rose to the rafters during Sunday Mass in prayer. Or the way my hand still shook when I offered the host to a parishioner. I loved the double take on the face of a troubled teenager when he drooled over the 1969 Triumph Trophy motorcycle I’d restored—and then found out I was a priest; that being cool and being Catholic were not mutually exclusive.

  Even though I was clearly the junior priest at St. Catherine’s, we were one of only four parishes to serve all of Concord, New Hampshire. There never seemed to be enough hours in the day. Father Walter and I would alternate officiating at Mass or hearing confession; sometimes we’d be asked to drop in and teach a class at the parochial school one town over. There were always parishioners to visit who were ill or troubled or lonely; there were always rosaries to be said. But I looked forward to even the humblest act—sweeping the vestibule, or rinsing the vessels from the Eucharist in the sacrarium so that no drop of Precious Blood wound up in the Concord sewers.

  I didn’t have an office at St. Catherine’s. Father Walter did, but then he’d been at the parish so long that he seemed as much a part of it as the rosewood pews and the velveteen drapes at the altar. Although he kept telling me he’d get around to clearing out a spot for me in one of the old storage rooms, he tended to nap after lunch, and who was I to wake up a man in his seventies and tell him to get a move on? After a while, I gave up asking and instead set a small desk up inside a broom closet. Today, I was supposed to be writing a homily—if I could get it down to seven minutes, I knew the older members of the congregation wouldn’t fall asleep—but instead, my mind kept straying to one of our youngest members. Hannah Smythe was the first baby I baptized at St. Catherine’s. Now, just one year later, the infant had been hospitalized repeatedly. Without warning, her throat would simply close, and her