The Jodi Picoult Collection #4 Read online

  “I didn’t do anything,” Shay repeated. “It was them.” Suddenly, he stepped toward Alma, animated. “Are you here for my heart?”

  “What?”

  “My heart. I want to donate it, after I die.” I heard him rummaging around in his box of possessions. “Here,” he said, giving Alma a piece of paper. “This is the girl who needs it. Lucius wrote her name down for me.”

  “I don’t know anything about that . . .”

  “But you can find out, right? You can talk to the right people?”

  Alma hesitated, and then her voice went soft, the flannel-bound way she used to speak to me when the pain was so great that I could not see past it. “I can talk,” she said.

  * * *

  It is an odd thing to be watching television and know that in reality, it is happening right outside your door. Crowds had flooded the parking lot of the prison. Camping out on the stairs of the parole office entrance were folks in wheelchairs, elderly women with walkers, mothers clutching sick infants to their chests. There were gay couples, mostly one man supporting another frail, ill partner; and crackpots holding up signs with scriptural references about the end of the world. Lining the street that led past the cemetery and downtown were the news vans—local affiliates, and even a crew from FOX in Boston.

  Right now, a reporter from ABC 22 was interviewing a young mother whose son had been born with severe neurological damage. She stood beside the boy, in his motorized wheelchair, one hand resting on his forehead. “What would I like?” she said, repeating the reporter’s question. “I’d like to know that he knows me.” She smiled faintly. “That’s not too greedy, is it?”

  The reporter faced the camera. “Bob, so far there’s been no confirmation or denial from the administration that any miraculous behavior has in fact taken place within the Concord state prison. We have been told, however, by an unnamed source, that these occurrences stemmed from the desire of New Hampshire’s sole death row inmate, Shay Bourne, to donate his organs post-execution.”

  I yanked my headphones down to my neck. “Shay,” I called out. “Are you listening to this?”

  “We got us our own celebrity,” Crash said.

  The brouhaha began to upset Shay. “I’m who I’ve always been,” he said, his voice escalating. “I’m who I’ll always be.”

  Just then two officers arrived, escorting someone we rarely saw: Warden Coyne. A burly man with a flattop on which you could have served dinner, he stood beside the cell while Officer Whitaker told Shay to strip. His scrubs were shaken out, and then he was allowed to dress again before he was shackled to the wall across from our cells.

  The officers started to toss Shay’s house—upending the meal he hadn’t finished, yanking his headphones out of the television, overturning his small box of property. They ripped his mattress, balled up his sheets. They ran their hands along the edges of his sink, his toilet, his bunk.

  “You got any idea, Bourne, what’s going on outside?” the warden said, but Shay just stood with his head tucked into his shoulder, like Calloway’s robin did when he slept. “You care to tell me what you’re trying to prove?”

  At Shay’s pronounced silence, the warden began to walk the length of our tier. “What about you?” he called out to the rest of us. “And I will inform you that those who cooperate with me will not be punished. I can’t promise anything for the rest of you.”

  Nobody spoke.

  Warden Coyne turned to Shay. “Where did you get the gum?”

  “There was only one piece,” Joey Kunz blurted, the snitch. “But it was enough for all of us.”

  “You some kind of magician, son?” the warden said, his face inches away from Shay’s. “Or did you hypnotize them into believing they were getting something they weren’t? I know about mind control, Bourne.”

  “I didn’t do anything,” Shay murmured.

  Officer Whitaker stepped closer. “Warden Coyne, there’s nothing in his cell. Not even in his mattress. His blanket’s intact—if he’s been fishing with it, then he managed to weave the strings back together when he was done.”

  I stared at Shay. Of course he’d fished with his blanket; I’d seen the line he’d made with my own eyes. I’d untied the bubble gum from the braided blue strand.

  “I’m watching you, Bourne,” the warden hissed. “I know what you’re up to. You know damn well your heart isn’t going to be worth anything once it’s pumped full of potassium chloride in a death chamber. You’re doing this because you’ve got no appeals left, but even if you get Barbara freaking Walters to do an interview with you, the sympathy vote’s not going to change your execution date.”

  The warden stalked off I-tier. Officer Whitaker released Shay’s handcuffs from the bar where he was tethered and led him back to his cell. “Listen, Bourne. I’m Catholic.”

  “Good for you,” Shay replied.

  “I thought Catholics were against the death penalty,” Crash said.

  “Yeah, don’t do him any favors,” Texas added.

  Whitaker glanced down the tier, where the warden stood outside the soundproof glass, talking to another officer. “The thing is . . . if you want . . . I could ask one of the priests from St. Catherine’s to visit.” He paused. “Maybe he can help with the whole heart thing.”

  Shay stared at him. “Why would you do that for me?”

  The officer fished inside the neck of his shirt, pulling out a length of chain and the crucifix that was attached to the end of it. He brought it to his lips, then let it fall beneath his uniform again. “He that believeth on me,” Whitaker murmured, “believeth not on me, but on him that sent me.”

  I did not know the New Testament, but I recognized a biblical passage when I heard one—and it didn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that he was suggesting Shay’s antics, or whatever you wanted to call them, were heaven-sent. I realized then that even though Shay was a prisoner, he had a certain power over Whitaker. He had a certain power over all of us. Shay Bourne had done what no brute force or power play or gang threat had been able to do all the years I’d been on I-tier: he’d brought us together.

  Next door, Shay was slowly putting his cell to rights. The news program was wrapping up with another bird’s-eye view of the state prison. From the helicopter footage, you could see how many people had gathered, how many more were heading this way.

  I sat down on my bunk. It wasn’t possible, was it?

  My own words to Alma came back to me: It’s not probable. Anything’s possible.

  I pulled my art supplies out of my hiding spot in the mattress, riffling through my sketches for the one I’d done of Shay being wheeled off the tier after his seizure. I’d drawn him on the gurney, arms spread and tied down, legs banded together, eyes raised to the ceiling. I turned the paper ninety degrees. This way, it didn’t look like Shay was lying down. It looked like he was being crucified.

  People were always “finding” Jesus in jail. What if he was already here?

  “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying.”

  —WOODY ALLEN, QUOTED IN WOODY ALLEN AND HIS COMEDY, BY ERIC LAX

  Maggie

  There were many things I was grateful for, including the fact that I was no longer in high school. Let’s just say it wasn’t a walk in the park for a girl who didn’t fit into the smorgasbord of clothing at the Gap, and who tried to become invisible so she wouldn’t be noticed for her size. Today, I was in a different school and it was ten years later, but I was still suffering from a flashback anxiety attack. It didn’t matter that I was wearing my Jones New York I’m-going-to-court suit; it didn’t matter that I was old enough to be mistaken for a teacher instead of a student—I still expected a football jock to turn the corner, at any moment, and make a fat joke.

  Topher Renfrew, the boy who was sitting beside me in the lobby of the high school, was dressed in black jeans and a frayed T-shirt with an anarchy symbol, a guitar pick strung around his neck on a leather