The Jodi Picoult Collection #4 Read online

  “Because I like the bird,” Shay murmured.

  I was the first one to laugh, then Texas snickered. Joey, too—but only because Crash wasn’t present to shut him up.

  “Bourne,” Calloway said, the first words any of us had heard from him since the bird had hopped back to his cell. “Thanks.”

  There was a beat of silence. “It deserved another chance,” Shay said.

  The pod door buzzed open, and this time CO Smythe walked in with the nurse, doing her evening rounds. Alma came to my cell first, holding out my card of pills. “Smells like someone had a barbecue in here and forgot to invite me,” she said. She waited for me to put the pills in my mouth, take a swallow of water. “You sleep well, Lucius.”

  As she left, I walked to the front of the cell. Rivulets of water ran down the cement catwalk. But instead of leaving the tier, Alma stopped in front of Calloway’s cell. “Inmate Reece, are you going to let me take a look at that arm?”

  Calloway hunched over, protecting the bird he held in his hand. We all knew he was holding Batman; we all held our collective breath. What if Alma saw the bird? Would she rat him out?

  I should have known Calloway would never let that happen—he’d be offensive enough to scare her off before she got too close. But before he could speak, we heard a fluted chirp—not from Calloway’s cell but from Shay’s. There was an answering call—the robin looking for its own kind. “What the hell’s that?” CO Smythe asked, looking around. “Where’s it coming from?”

  Suddenly, a twitter rose from Joey’s cell, and then a higher cheep from Pogie’s. To my surprise, I even heard a tweet come from the vicinity of my own bunk. I wheeled around, tracing it to the louvers of the vent. Was there a whole colony of robins in here? Or was it Shay, a ventriloquist in addition to a magician, this time throwing his voice?

  Smythe moved down the tier, hands covering his ears as he peered at the skylight and into the shower cell to find the source of the noise. “Smythe?” an officer said over the control booth intercom. “What the hell’s going on?”

  A place like this wears down everything, and tolerance is no exception. In here, coexistence passes for forgiveness. You do not learn to like something you abhor; you come to live with it. It’s why we submit when we are told to strip; it’s why we deign to play chess with a child molester; it’s why we quit crying ourselves to sleep. You live and let live, and eventually that becomes enough.

  Which maybe explains why Calloway’s muscled arm snaked through the open trap of his door, his “Anita Bryant” patch shadowing his biceps. Alma blinked, surprised.

  “I won’t hurt you,” she murmured, peering at the new skin growing where it had been grafted, still pink and evolving. She took a pair of latex gloves out of her pocket and snapped them on, making her hands just as lily-white as Calloway’s. And wouldn’t you know it—the moment Alma touched him, all of that crazy noise fell dead silent.

  MICHAEL

  A priest has to say Mass every day, even if no one shows up, although this was rarely the case. In a city as large as Concord there were usually at least a handful of parishioners, already praying the rosary by the time I came out in my vestments.

  I was just at the part of the Mass where miracles occurred. “For this is my body, which will be given up for you,” I said aloud, then genuflected and lifted the host.

  Next to “How the heck is one God also a Holy Trinity?” the most common question I got asked as a priest by non-Catholics was about transubstantiation: the belief that at consecration, the elements of bread and wine truly became the Body and Blood of Christ. I could see why people were baffled—if this was true, wasn’t Holy Communion cannibalistic? And if a change really occurred, why couldn’t you see it?

  When I went to church as a kid, long before I came back to it, I received Holy Communion like everyone else, but I didn’t really give much thought to what I received. It looked, to me, like a cracker and a cup of wine . . . before and after the priest consecrated it. I can tell you now that it still looks like a cracker and a cup of wine. The miracle part comes down to philosophy. It isn’t the accidents of an object that make it what it is . . . it’s the essential parts. We’d still be human even if we didn’t have limbs or teeth or hair; but if we suddenly stopped being mammals, that wouldn’t be the case. When I consecrated the host and the wine at Mass, the very substance of the elements changed; it was the other properties—the shape, the taste, the size—that remained the same. Just like John the Baptist saw a man and knew, right away, that he was looking at God; just like the wise men came upon a baby and knew He was our Savior . . . every day I held what looked like crackers and wine but actually was Jesus.

  For this very reason, from this point on in the Mass, my fingers and thumb would be kept pinched together until washed after the Sacrament of the Eucharist. Not even the tiniest particle of the consecrated host could be lost; we went to great pains to make sure of this when disposing of the leftovers from Holy Communion. But just as I was thinking this, the wafer slipped out of my hand.

  I felt the way I had when, in third grade, during the Little League play-offs, I’d watched a pop fly come into my corner of left field too fast and too high—knotted with the need to catch it, sick with the knowledge that I wouldn’t. Frozen, I watched the host tumble, safely, into the belly of the chalice of wine.

  “Five-second rule,” I murmured, and I reached into the chalice and snagged it.

  The wine had already begun to soak into the wafer. I watched, amazed, as a jaw took shape, an ear, an eyebrow.

  Father Walter had visions. He said that the reason he became a priest in the first place was because, as an altar boy, a statue of Jesus had reached for his robe and tugged, telling him to stay the course. More recently, Mary had appeared to him in the rectory kitchen when he was frying trout, and suddenly they began leaping in the pan. Don’t let a single one fall to the floor, she’d warned, and then disappeared.

  There were hundreds of priests who excelled at their calling but never received this sort of divine intercession—and yet, I didn’t want to fall among their ranks. Like the teens I worked with, I understood the need for miracles—they kept reality from paralyzing you. So I stared at the wafer, hoping the wine-sketched features would solidify into a portrait of Jesus . . . and instead I found myself looking at something else entirely. The shaggy dark hair that looked more like a grunge-band drummer than a priest, the nose broken while wrestling in junior high, the razor stubble. Engraved onto the surface of the host, with a printmaker’s delicacy, was a picture of me.

  What is my head doing on the body of Christ? I thought as I placed the host on the paten, plum-stained and dissolving already. I lifted the chalice. “This is my blood,” I said.

  June

  When Shay Bourne was working at our house as a carpenter, he gave Elizabeth a birthday present. Made of scrap wood and crafted after hours wherever he went when he left our house, it was a small, hinged chest. He had carved it intricately, so that each face portrayed a different fairy, dressed in the trappings of the seasons. Summer had bright peony wings, and a crown made of the sun. Spring was covered in climbing vines, and a bridal train of flowers swept beneath her. Autumn wore the jewel tones of sugar maples and aspen trees, the cap of an acorn balanced on her head. And Winter skated across a frozen lake, leaving a trail of silver frost in her wake. The cover was a painted picture of the moon, rising through a field of stars with its arms outstretched toward a sun that was just out of reach.

  Elizabeth loved that box. The night that Shay gave it to her, she lined it with blankets and slept inside. When Kurt and I told her she couldn’t do that again—what if the top fell on her while she was sleeping?—she turned it into a cradle for her dolls, then a toy chest. She named the fairies. Sometimes I heard her talking to them.

  After Elizabeth died, I took the box out to the yard, planning to destroy it. There I was, eight months pregnant and grieving, swinging Kurt’s axe, and at the last minute, I could not d