Change of Heart Read online

  Suddenly I couldn't breathe. The blankets were too hot, the cream on my skin too thick. I wanted out of the layers and began to fight my way free.

  "Whoa," DeeDee said. "Hang on, let me help you." She pulled and peeled and handed me a towel. "Your mother didn't tell me you were claustrophobic."

  I sat up, drawing great gasps of air into my lungs. Of course she didn't, I thought. Because she's the one who's suffocating me.

  Lucius

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  It was late afternoon, almost time for the shift change, and I-tier was relatively quiet. Me, I'd been sick all day, hazing in and out of sleep brought on by fever. Calloway, who usually played chess with me, was playing with Shay instead. "Bishop takes a6," Calloway called out. He was a racist bigot, but Calloway was also the best chess player I'd ever met.

  During the day, Batman the Robin resided in his breast pocket, a small lump no bigger than a pack of Starburst candies. Sometimes it crawled onto his shoulder and pecked at the scars on his scalp. At other times, he kept Batman in a paperback copy of The Stand that had been doctored as a hiding place--starting on chapter six, a square had been cut out of the pages of the thick book with a pilfered razor blade, creating a little hollow that Calloway lined with tissues to make a bed. The robin ate mashed potatoes; Calloway traded precious masking tape and twine and even a homemade handcuff key for extra portions.

  "Hey," Calloway said. "We haven't made a wager on this game."

  Crash laughed. "Even Bourne ain't dumb enough to bet you when he's losing."

  "What have you got that I want?" Calloway mused.

  "Intelligence?" I suggested. "Common sense?"

  "Keep out of this, homo." Calloway thought for a moment. "The brownie. I want the damn brownie."

  By now, the brownie was two days old. I doubted that Calloway would even be able to swallow it. What he'd enjoy, mostly, was the act of taking it away from Shay.

  "Okay," Shay said. "Knight to g6."

  I sat up on my bunk. "Okay? Shay, he's beating the pants off you."

  "How come you're too sick to play, DuFresne, but you don't mind sticking your two cents into every conversation?" Calloway said. "This is between me and Bourne."

  "What if I win?" Shay asked. "What do I get?"

  Calloway laughed. "It won't happen."

  "The bird."

  "I'm not giving you Batman--"

  "Then I'm not giving you the brownie." There was a beat of silence.

  "Fine," Calloway said. "You win, you get the bird. But you're not going to win, because my bishop takes d3. Consider yourself officially screwed."

  "Queen to h7," Shay replied. "Checkmate."

  "What?" Calloway cried. I scrutinized the mental chessboard I'd been tracking--Shay's queen had come out of nowhere, screened by his knight. There was nowhere left for Calloway to go.

  At that moment the door to I-tier opened, admitting a pair of officers in flak jackets and helmets. They marched to Calloway's cell and brought him onto the catwalk, securing his handcuffs to a metal railing along the far wall.

  There was nothing worse than having your cell searched. In here, all we had were our belongings, and having them pored over was a gross invasion of privacy. Not to mention the fact that when it happened, you had an excellent chance of losing your best stash, be that drugs or hooch or chocolate or art supplies or the stinger rigged from paper clips to heat up your instant coffee.

  They came in with flashlights and long-handled mirrors and worked systematically. They'd check the seams of the walls, the vents, the plumbing. They'd roll deodorant sticks all the way out to make sure nothing was hidden underneath. They'd shake containers of powder to hear what might be inside. They'd sniff shampoo bottles, open envelopes, and take out the letters inside. They'd rip off your bedsheets and run their hands over the mattresses, looking for tears or ripped seams.

  Meanwhile, you were forced to watch.

  I could not see what was going on in Calloway's cell, but I had a pretty good idea based on his reactions. He rolled his eyes as his blanket was checked for unraveled threads; his jaw tensed when a postage stamp was peeled off an envelope, revealing the black tar heroin underneath. But when his bookshelf was inspected, Calloway flinched. I looked for the small bulge in his breast pocket that would have been the bird and realized that Batman the Robin was somewhere inside that cell.

  One of the officers held up the copy of The Stand. The pages were riffled, the spine snapped, the book tossed against the cell wall. "What's this?" an officer asked, focusing not on the bird that had been whipped across the cell but on the baby-blue tissues that fluttered down over his boots.

  "Nothing," Calloway said, but the officer wasn't about to take his word for it. He picked through the tissues, and when he didn't find anything, he confiscated the book with its carved hidey-hole.

  Whitaker said something about a write-up, but Calloway wasn't listening. I could not remember ever seeing him quite so unraveled. As soon as he was released back into his cell, he ran to the rear corner where the bird had been flung.

  The sound that Calloway Reece made was primordial; but then maybe that was always the case when a grown man with no heart started to cry.

  There was a crash, and a sickening crunch. A whirlwind of destruction as Calloway fought back against what couldn't be fixed. Finally spent, Calloway sank down to the floor of his cell, cradling the dead bird. "Motherfucker. Motherfucker."

  "Reece," Shay interrupted, "I want my prize."

  My head snapped around. Surely Shay wasn't stupid enough to antagonize Calloway.

  "What?" Calloway breathed. "What did you say?"

  "My prize. I won the chess game."

  "Not now," I hissed.

  "Yes, now," Shay said. "A deal's a deal."

  In here, you were only as good as your word, and Calloway--with his Aryan Brotherhood sensibilities--would have known that better than anyone else. "You better make sure you're always behind those bars," Calloway vowed, "because the next time I get the chance, I'm going to mess you up so bad your own mama wouldn't know you." But even as he threatened Shay, Calloway gently wrapped the dead bird in a tissue and attached the small, slight bundle to the end of his fishing line.

  When the robin reached me, I drew it under the three-inch gap beneath the door of my cell. It still looked half cooked, its closed eye translucent blue. One wing was bent at a severe backward angle; its neck lolled sideways.

  Shay sent out his own line of string, with a weight made of a regulation comb on one end. I saw his hands gently slide the robin, wrapped in tissue, into his cell. The lights on the catwalk flickered.

  I've often imagined what happened next. With an artist's eye, I like to picture Shay sitting on his bunk, cupping his palms around the tiny bird. I imagine the touch of someone who loves you so much, he cannot bear to watch you sleep; and so you wake up with his hand on your heart. In the long run, though, it hardly matters how Shay did it. What matters is the result: that we all heard the piccolo trill of that robin; that Shay pushed the risen bird beneath his cell door onto the catwalk, where it hopped, like broken punctuation, toward Calloway's outstretched hand.

  June

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  If you're a mother, you can look into the face of your grown child and see, instead, the one that peeked up at you from the folds of a baby blanket. You can watch your eleven-year-old daughter painting her nails with glitter polish and remember how she used to reach for you when she wanted to cross the street. You can hear the doctor say that the real danger is adolescence, because you don't know how the heart will respond to growth spurts--and you can pretend that's ages away.

  "Best two out of three," Claire said, and from the folds of her hospital johnny she raised her fist again.

  I lifted my hand, too. Rock, paper, scissors, shoot.

  "Paper." Claire grinned. "I win."

  "You totally do not," I said. "Hello? Scissors?"

  "What I forgot to tell you i