Change of heart

E L E V E N Y E A R S L A T E R

Lucius

I have no idea where they were keeping Shay Bourne before they brought him to us. I knew he was an inmate here at the state prison in Concord-I can still remember watching the news the day his sentence was handed down and scrutinizing an outside world that was starting to fade in my mind: the rough stone of the prison exterior; the golden dome of the statehouse; even just the general shape of a door that wasn't made of metal and wire mesh. His conviction was the subject of great discussion on the pod all those years ago-where do you keep an inmate who's been sentenced to death when your state hasn't had a death row prisoner for ages?

Rumor had it that in fact, the prison did have a pair of death row cells-not too far from my own humble abode in the Secure Housing Unit on I-tier. Crash Vitale-who had something to say about everything, although no one usually bothered to listen-told us that the old death row cells were stacked with the thin, plastic slabs that pass for mattresses here.

I wondered for a while what had happened to all those extra mattresses after Shay arrived. One thing's for sure, no one offered to give them to us.

Moving cells is routine in prison. They don't like you to become too attached to anything. In the fifteen years I've been here, I have been moved eight different times. The cells, of course, all look alike-what's different is who's next to you, which is why Shay's arrival on I-tier was of great interest to all of us.

This, in itself, was a rarity. The six inmates in I-tier were radically dif24 ferent from one another; for one man to spark curiosity in all of us was nothing short of a miracle. Cell 1 housed Joey Kunz, a pedophile who was at the bottom of the pecking order. In Cell 2 was Calloway Reece, a cardcarrying member of the Aryan Brotherhood. Cell 3 was me, Lucius Du-

Fresne. Four and five were empty, so we knew the new inmate would be put in one of them-the only question was whether he'd be closer to me, or to the guys in the last three cells: Texas Wridell, Pogie Simmons, and Crash, the self-appointed leader of I-tier.

As Shay Bourne was escorted in by a phalanx of six correctional officers wearing helmets and flak jackets and face shields, we all came forward in our cells. The COs passed by the shower stall, shuffled by Joey and

Calloway, and then paused right in front of me, so I could get a good look.

Bourne was small and slight, with close-cropped brown hair and eyes like the Caribbean Sea. I knew about the Caribbean, because it was the last vacation

I'd taken with Adam. I was glad I didn't have eyes like that. I wouldn't want to look in the mirror every day and be reminded of a place

I'd never see again.

Then Shay Bourne turned to me.

Maybe now would be a good time to tell you what I look like. My face was the reason the COs didn't look me in the eye; it was why I sometimes preferred to be hidden inside this cell. The sores were scarlet and purple and scaly. They spread from my forehead to my chin.

Most people winced. Even the polite ones, like the eighty-year-old missionary who brought us pamphlets once a month, always did a double take, as if I looked even worse than he remembered. But Shay just met my gaze and nodded at me, as if I were no different than anyone else.

I heard the door of the cell beside mine slide shut, the clink of chains as Shay stuck his hands through the trap to have his cuffs removed. The

COs left the pod, and almost immediately Crash started in. "Hey, Death

Row," he yelled.

There was no response from Shay Bourne's cell.

"Hey, when Crash talks, you answer."

"Leave him alone, Crash," I sighed. "Give the poor guy five minutes to figure out what a moron you are."

"Ooh, Death Row, better watch it," Calloway said. "Lucius is kissing up to you, and his last boyfriend's six feet under."

There was the sound of a television being turned on, and then Shay must have plugged in the headphones that we were all required to have, so we didn't have a volume war with one another. I was a little surprised that a death row prisoner would have been able to purchase a television from the canteen, same as us. It would have been a thirteen-inch one, specially made for us wards of the state by Zenith, with a clear plastic shell around its guts and cathodes, so that the COs would be able to tell if you were extracting parts to make weapons.

While Calloway and Crash united (as they often did) to humiliate me, I pulled out my own set of headphones and turned on my television. It was five o'clock, and I didn't like to miss Oprah. But when I tried to change the channel, nothing happened. The screen flickered, as if it were resetting to channel 22, but channel 22 looked just like channel 3 and channel 5 and

CNN and the Food Network.

"Hey." Crash started to pound on his door. "Yo, CO, the cable's down.

We got rights, you know..."

Sometimes headphones don't work well enough.

I turned up the volume and watched a local news network's coverage of a fund-raiser for a nearby children's hospital up near Dartmouth Co llege.

There were clowns and balloons and even two Red Sox players signing autographs.

The camera zeroed in on a girl with fairy-tale blond hair and blue half-moons beneath her eyes, just the kind of child they'd televise to get you to open up your wallet. "Claire Nealon," the reporter's voice-over said,

"is waiting for a heart."

Boo-hoo, I thought. Everyone's got problems. I took off my headphones.

If I couldn't listen to Oprah, I didn't want to listen at all.

Which is why I was able to hear Shay Bourne's very first word on I-tier.

"Yes," he said, and just like that, the cable came back on.

You have probably noticed by now that I am a cut above most of the cretins on I-tier, and that's because I don't really belong here. It was a crime of passion-the only discrepancy is that I focused on the passion part and the courts focused on the crime. But I ask you, what would you have done, if the love of your life found a new love of his life-someone younger, thinner, better-looking?

The irony, of course, is that no sentence imposed by a court for homicide could trump the one that's ravaged me in prison. My last CD4+ was taken six months ago, and I was down to seventy-five cells per cubic millimeter of blood. Someone without HIV would have a normal T cell count of a thousand cells or more, but the virus becomes part of these white blood cells. When the white blood cells reproduce to fight infection, the virus reproduces, too. As the immune system gets weak, the more likely I am to get sick, or to develop an opportunistic infection like PCP, toxoplasmosis, or CMV. The doctors say I won't die from AIDS-I'll die from pneumonia or

TB or a bacterial infection in the brain; but if you ask me, that's just semantics.

Dead is dead.

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 Et 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.

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 frantic parents would rush her to the ER for intubation, where the vicious cycle would start all over again. I offered up a quick prayer to God to lead the doctors to cure Hannah. I was just finishing up with the sign of the cross when a small, silver-haired lady approached my desk.

"Father Michael?"

"Mary Lou," I said. "How are you doing?"

"Could I maybe talk to you for a few minutes?"

Mary Lou Huckens could talk not only for a few minutes; she was likely to go on for nearly an hour. Father Walter and I had an unwritten policy to rescue each other from her effusive praise after Mass. "What can I do for you?"

"Actually, I feel a little silly about this," she admitted. "I just wanted to know if you'd bless my bust."

I smiled at her. Parishioners often asked us to offer a prayer over a devotional item. "Sure. Have you got it with you?"

She gave me an odd look. "Well, of course I do."

"Great. Let's see it."

She crossed her hands over her chest. "I hardly think thafs necessary!"

I felt heat flood my cheeks as I realized what she actually wanted me to bless. "I-I'm sorry..." I stammered. "I didn't mean..."

Her eyes filled with tears. "They're doing a lumpectomy tomorrow.

Father, and I'm terrified."

I stood up and put my arm around her, walked her a few yards to the closest pew, offered her Kleenex. I'm sorry," she said. "I don't know who else to talk to. If I tell my husband I'm scared, he'll get scared, too."

"You know who to talk to," I said gently. "And you know He's always listening." I touched the crown of her head. "Omnipotent and eternal God, the everlasting Salvation of those who believe, hear us on behalf of Thy servant Mary Lou, for whom we beg the aid of Thy pitying mercy, that with her bodily health restored, she may give thanks to

Thee in Thy church. Through Christ our Lord, amen."

"Amen," Mary Lou whispered.

That's the other thing I love about the Church: you never know what to expect.

Lucius

When Shay Bourne returned to I-tier after three days in the hospital infirmary, he was a man with a mission. Every morning, when the officers came to poll us to see who wanted a shower or time in the yard, Shay would ask to speak to Warden Coyne. "Fill out a request," he was told, over and over, but it just didn't seem to sink in. When it was his turn in the little caged kennel that was our exercise yard, he'd stand in the far corner, looking toward the opposite side of the prison, where the administrative offices were housed, and he'd yell his request at the top of his lungs. When he was brought his dinner, he'd ask if the warden had agreed to talk to him.

"You know why he was moved to I-tier?" Calloway said one day when

Shay was bellowing in the shower for an audience with the warden. "Because he made everyone else on his last tier go deaf."

"He's a retard," Crash answered. "Can't help how he acts. Kinda like our own diaper sniper. Right, Joey?"

"He's not mentally challenged," I said. "He's probably got double the IQ that you do, Crash."

"Shut the fuck up, fruiter," Calloway said. "Shut up, all of you!" The urgency in his voice silenced us. Calloway knelt at the door of his cell, fishing with a braided string pulled out of his blanket and tied at one end to a rolled magazine. He cast into the center of the catwalk-risky behavior, since the COs would be back any minute. At first we couldn't figure out what he was doing-when we fished, it was with one another, tangling our lines to pass along anything from a paperback book to a Hershey's bar-but then we noticed the small, bright oval on the floor. God only knew why a bird would make a nest in a hellhole like this, but one had a few months back, after flying in through the exercise yard. One egg had fallen out and cracked; the baby robin lay on its side, unfinished, its thin, wrinkled chest working like a piston.

Calloway reeled the egg in, inch by inch. "It ain't gonna live," Crash said. "Its mama won't want it now."

"Well, I do," Calloway said.

"Put it somewhere warm," I suggested. "Wrap it up in a towel or something."

"Use your T-shirt," Joey added.

"I don't take advice from a cho-mo," Calloway said, but then, a moment later: "You think a T-shirt will work?"

While Shay yelled for the warden, we all listened to Calloway's playby- play: The robin was wrapped in a shirt. The robin was tucked inside his left tennis shoe. The robin was pinking up. The robin had opened its left eye for a half second.

We all had forgotten what it was like to care about something so much that you might not be able to stand losing it. The first year I was in here, I used to pretend that the full moon was my pet, that it came once a month just to me. And this past summer, Crash had taken to spreading jam on the louvers of his vent to cultivate a colony of bees, but that was less about husbandry than his misguided belief that he could train them to swarm Joey in his sleep.

"Cowboys comin' to lock 'em up," Crash said, fair warning that the COs were getting ready to enter the pod again. A moment later the doors buzzed open; they stood in front of the shower cell waiting for Shay to stick his hands through the trap to be cuffed for the twenty-foot journey back to his own cell.

"They don't know what it could be," CO Smythe said. "They've ruled out pulmonary problems and asthma. They're saying maybe an allergy-but there's nothing in her room anymore, Rick, it's bare as a cell."

Sometimes the COs talked to one another in front of us. They never spoke to inmates directly about their lives, and that actually was fine. We didn't want to know that the guy strip-searching us had a son who scored the winning goal in his soccer game last Thursday. Better to take the humanity out of it.

"They said," Smythe continued, "that her heart can't keep taking this kind of stress. And neither can I. You know what it's like to see your baby with all these bags and wires coming out of her?"

The second CO, Whitaker, was a Catholic who liked to include, on my dinner tray, handwritten scripture verses that denounced homosexuality.

"Father Walter led a prayer for Hannah on Sunday. He said he'd be happy to visit you at the hospital."

"There's nothing a priest can say that I want to hear," Smythe muttered.

"What kind of God would do this to a baby?"

Shay's hands slipped through the trap of the shower cell to be cuffed, and then the door was opened. "Did the warden say he'd meet with me?"

"Yeah," Smythe said, leading Shay toward his cell. "He wants you to come for high friggin' tea."

"I just need five minutes with him-"

"You're not the only one with problems," Smythe snapped. "Fill out a request."

"I can't," Shay replied.

I cleared my throat. "Officer? Could I have a request form, too, please?"

He finished locking Shay up, then took one out of his pocket and stuffed it into the trap of my cell.

Just as the officers exited the tier, there was a small, feeble chirp.

"Shay?" I asked. "Why not just fill out the request slip?"

"I can't get my words to come out right."

"I'm sure the warden doesn't care about grammar."

"No, it's when I write. When I start, the letters all get tangled."

"Then tell me, and I'll write the note."

There was a silence. "You'd do that for me?"

"Will you two cut the soap opera?" Crash said. "You're making me sick."

"Tell the warden," Shay dictated, "that I want to donate my heart, after he kills me. I want to give it to a girl who needs it more than I do."

I leaned the ticket up against the wall of the cell and wrote in pencil, signed Shay's name. I tied the note to the end of my own fishing line and swung it beneath the narrow opening of his cell door. "Give this to the officer who makes rounds tomorrow morning."

"You know, Bourne," Crash mused, "I don't know what to make of you.

I mean, on the one hand, you're a child-killing piece of shit. You might as well be fungus growing on Joey, for what you done to that little girl. But on the other hand, you took down a cop, and I for one am truly grateful there's one less pig in the world. So how am I supposed to feel? Do I hate you, or do I give you my respect?"

"Neither," Shay said. "Both."

"You know what I think? Baby killing beats anything good you might have done." Crash stood up at the front of his cell and began to bang a metal coffee mug against the Plexiglas. "Throw him out. Throw him out.

Throw him out!"

Joey-unused to being even one notch above low-man-on-the-totempole- was the first to join in the singing. Then Texas and Pogie started in, because they did whatever Crash told them to do.

Throw him out.

Throw him out.

Whitaker's voice bled through the loudspeaker. "You got a problem,

Vitale?"

"I don't got a problem. This punk-ass child killer here's the one with the problem. I tell you what, Officer. You let me out for five minutes, and

I'll save the good taxpayers of New Hampshire the trouble of getting rid of him-"

"Crash," Shay said softly. "Cool off."

I was distracted by a whistling noise coming from my tiny sink. I had no sooner stood up to investigate than the water burst out of the spigot.

This was remarkable on two counts-normally, the water pressure was no greater than a trickle, even in the showers. And the water that was splashing over the sides of the metal bowl was a deep, rich red.

"Fuck!" Crash yelled. "I just got soaked!"

"Man, that looks like blood," Pogie said, horrified. "I'm not washing up in that."

"It's in the toilets, too," Texas added.

We all knew our pipes were connected. The bad news about this was that you literally could not get away from the shit brought down by the others around you. On the bright side, you could actually flush a note down the length of the pod; it would briefly appear in the next cell's bowl before heading through the sewage system. I turned and looked into my toilet.

The water was as dark as rubies.

"Holy crap," Crash said. "It ain't blood. It's wine." He started to crow like a madman. "Taste it, ladies. Drinks are on the house."

I waited. I did not drink the tap water in here. As it was, I had a feeling that my AIDS medications, which came on a punch card, might be some government experiment done on expendable inmates... I wasn't about to imbibe from a water treatment system run by the same administration. But then I heard Joey start laughing, and Calloway slurping from the faucet, and Texas and Pogie singing drinking songs. In fact, the entire mood of the tier changed so radically that CO Whitaker's voice boomed over the intercom, confused by the visions on the monitors. "What's going on in there?" he asked. "Is there a water main leak?"

"You could say that," Crash replied. "Or you could say we got us a powerful thirst."

"Come on in, CO," Pogie added. "We'll buy the next round."

Everyone seemed to find this hilarious, but then, they'd all downed nearly a half gallon of whatever this fluid was by now. I dipped my finger into the dark stream that was still running strong from my sink. It could have been iron or manganese, but it was true-this water smelled like sugar, and dried sticky. I bent my head to the tap and drank tentatively from the flow.

Adam and I had been closet sommeliers, taking trips to the California vineyards. To that end, for my birthday that last year, Adam had gotten me a

2001 Dominus Estate cabernet sauvignon. We were going to drink it on New

Year's Eve. Weeks later, when I came in and found them, twisted together like jungle vines, that bottle was there, too-tipped off the nightstand and staining the bedroom carpet, like blood that had already been spilled.

If you've been in prison as long as I have, you've experienced a good many innovative highs. I've drunk hooch distilled from fruit juice and bread and Jolly Rancher candies; I've huffed spray deodorant; I've smoked dried banana peels rolled up in a page of the Bible. But this was like none of those. This was honest-to-God wine.

I laughed. But before long I began to sob, tears running down my face for what I had lost, for what was now literally coursing through my fingers.

You can only miss something you remember having, and it had been so long since creature comforts had been part of my ordinary life. I filled a plastic mug with wine and drank it down; I did this over and over again until it became easier to forget the fact that all extraordinary things must come to an end-a lesson I could have lectured on, given my history.

By now, the COs realized that there had been some snafu with the plumbing. Two of them came onto the tier, fuming, and paused in front of my cell. "You," Whitaker commanded. "Cuffs."

I went through the rigmarole of having my wrists bound through the open trap so that when Whitaker had my door buzzed open I could be secured by Smythe while he investigated. I watched over my shoulder as

Whitaker touched a pinky to the stream of wine and held it up to his tongue. "Lucius," he said, "what is this?"

"At first I thought it was a cabernet, Officer," I said. "But now I'm leaning toward a cheap merlot."

"The water comes from the town reservoir," Smythe said. "Inmates can't mess with that."

"Maybe it's a miracle," Crash sang. "You know all about miracles, don't you, Officer Bible-thumper?"

My cell door was closed and my hands freed. Whitaker stood on the catwalk in front of our cells. "Who did this?" he asked, but nobody was listening.

"Who's responsible?"

"Who cares?" Crash replied.

"So help me, if one of you doesn't fess up, I'll have maintenance turn off your water for the next week," Whitaker threatened.

Crash laughed. "The ACLU needs a poster child, Whit."

As the COs stormed off the tier, we were all laughing. Things that weren't humorous became funny; I didn't even mind listening to Crash. At some point, the wine trickled and dried up, but by then, Pogie had already passed out cold, Texas and Joey were singing "Danny Boy" in harmony, and

I was fading fast. In fact, the last thing I remember is Shay asking Calloway what he was going to name his bird, and Calloway's answer: Batman the

Robin. And Calloway challenging Shay to a chugging contest, but Shay saying he would sit that one out. That actually, he didn't drink.

For two days after the water on I-tier had turned into wine, a steady stream of plumbers, scientists, and prison administrators visited our cells.

Apparently, we were the only unit within the prison where this had happened, and the only reason anyone in power even believed it was because when our cells were tossed, the COs confiscated the shampoo bottles and milk containers and even plastic bags that we had all innovatively used to store some extra wine before it had run dry; and because swabs taken in the pipes revealed a matching substance. Although nobody would officially give us the results of the lab testing, rumor had it that the liquid in question was definitely not tap water.

Our exercise and shower privileges were revoked for a week, as if this had been our fault in the first place, and forty-three hours passed before I was allowed a visit from the prison nurse, Alma, who smelled of lemons and linen; and who had a massive coiled tower of braided hair that, I imagined, required architectural intervention in order for her to sleep. Normally, she came twice a day to bring me a card full of pills as bright and big as dragonflies. She also spread cream on inmates' fungal foot infections, checked teeth that had been rotted out by crystal meth, and did anything else that didn't require a visit to the infirmary. I admit to faking illness several times so that Alma would take my temperature or blood pressure.

Sometimes, she was the only person who touched me for weeks.

"So," she said, as she was let into my cell by CO Smythe. "I hear things have been pretty exciting on I-tier. You gonna tell me what happened?"

"Would if I could," I said, and then glanced at the officer accompanying her. "Or maybe I wouldn't."

"I can only think of one person who ever turned water into wine," she said, "and my pastor will tell you it didn't happen in the state prison this

Monday."

"Maybe your pastor can suggest that next time, Jesus try a nice fullbodied

Syrah."

Alma laughed and stuck a thermometer into my mouth. Over her back,

I stared at CO Smythe. His eyes were red, and instead of watching me to make sure I didn't do anything stupid, like take Alma hostage, he was staring at the wall behind my head, lost in thought.

The thermometer beeped. "You're still running a fever."

"Tell me something I don't know," I replied. I felt blood pool under my tongue, courtesy of the sores that were part and parcel of this horrific disease.

"You taking those meds?"

I shrugged. "You see me put them in my mouth every day, don't you?"

Alma knew there were as many different ways for a prisoner to kill himself as there were prisoners. "Don't you check out on me, Jupiter," she said, rubbing something viscous on the red spot on my forehead that had led to this nickname. "Who else would tell me what I miss on General Hospital?"

"That's a pretty paltry reason to stick around."

"I've heard worse." Alma turned to CO Smythe. "I'm all set here."

She left, and the control booth slid the door home again, the sound of metallic teeth gnashing shut. "Shay," I called out. "You awake?"

"I am now."

"Might want to cover your ears," I offered.

Before Shay could ask me why, Calloway let out the same explosive run of curses he always did when Alma tried to get within five feet of him.

"Get the fuck out, nigger," he yelled. "Swear to God, I'll fuck you up if you put your hand on me-"

CO Smythe pinned him against the side of his cell. "For Christ's sake,

Reece," he said. "Do we have to go through this every single day for a goddamn

Band-Aid?"

"We do if that black bitch is the one putting it on."

Calloway had been convicted of burning a synagogue to the ground seven years ago. He sustained head injuries and needed massive skin grafts on his arms, but he considered the mission a success because the terrified rabbi had fled town. The grafts still needed checking; he'd had three surgeries alone in the past year.

"You know what," Alma said, "I don't really care if his arms rot off."

She didn't, that much was true. But she did care about being called a nigger. Every time Calloway hurled that word at her, she'd stiffen. And after she visited Calloway, she moved a little more slowly down the pod.

I knew exactly how she felt. When you're different, sometimes you don't see the millions of people who accept you for what you are. All you notice is the one person who doesn't.

"I got hep C because of you," Calloway said, although he'd probably gotten it from the blade of the barber's razor, like the other inmates who'd contracted it in prison. "You and your filthy nigger hands."

Calloway was being particularly awful today, even for Calloway. At first

I thought he was cranky like the rest of us, because our meager privileges had been taken away. But then it hit me-Calloway couldn't let Alma into his house, because she might find the bird. And if she found the bird, CO

Smythe would confiscate it.

"What do you want to do?" Smythe asked Alma.

She sighed. "I'm not going to fight him."

"That's right," Calloway crowed. "You know who's boss. Rahowal"

At his call, short for Racial Holy War, inmates from all over the Secure

Housing Unit began to holler. In a state as white as New Hampshire, the

Aryan Brotherhood ran the prison population. They controlled drug deals done behind bars; they tattooed one another with shamrocks and lightning bolts and swastikas. To be jumped into the gang, you had to kill someone sanctioned by the Brotherhood-a black man, a Jew, a homosexual, or anyone else whose existence was considered an affront to your own.

The sound became deafening. Alma walked past my cell, Smythe following.

As they passed Shay, he called out to the officer, "Look inside."

"I know what's inside Reece," Smythe said. "Two hundred and twenty pounds of crap."

As Alma and the CO left, Calloway was still yelling his head off. "For

God's sake," I hissed at Shay. "If they find Calloway's stupid bird they'll toss all our cells again! You want to lose the shower for two weeks?"

"That's not what I meant," Shay said.

I didn't answer. Instead I lay down on my bunk and stuffed more wadded-up toilet paper into my ears. And still, I could hear Calloway singing his white-pride anthems. Still, I could hear Shay when he told me a second time that he hadn't been talking about the bird.

That night when I woke up with the sweats, my heart drilling through the spongy base of my throat, Shay was talking to himself again. "They pull up the sheet," he said.

"Shay?"

I took a piece of metal I'd sawed off from the lip of the counter in the cell-it had taken months, carved with a string of elastic from my underwear and a dab of toothpaste with baking soda, my own diamond band saw. Ingeniously, the triangular result doubled as both a mirror and a shank. I slipped my hand beneath my door, angling the mirror so I could see into Shay's cell.

He was lying on his bunk with his eyes closed and his arms crossed over his heart. His breathing had gone so shallow that his chest barely rose and fell. I could have sworn I smelled the worms in freshly turned soil. I heard the ping of stones as they struck a grave digger's shovel.

Shay was practicing.

I had done that myself. Maybe not quite in the same way, but I'd pictured my funeral. Who would come. Who would be well dressed, and who would be wearing something outrageously hideous. Who would cry. Who wouldn't.

God bless those COs; they'd moved Shay Bourne right next door to someone else serving a death sentence.

Two weeks after Shay arrived on I-tier, six officers came to his cell early one morning and told him to strip. "Bend over," I heard Whitaker say.

"Spread 'em. Lift 'em. Cough."

"Where are we going?"

"Infirmary. Routine checkup."

I knew the drill: they would shake out his clothes to make sure there was no contraband hidden, then tell him to get dressed again. They'd march him out of I-tier and into the great beyond of the Secure Housing

Unit.

An hour later, I woke up to the sound of Shay's cell door being opened again as he returned to his cell. "I'll pray for your soul," CO Whitaker said soberly before leaving the tier.

"So," I said, my voice too light and false to fool even myself. "Are you the picture of health?"

"They didn't take me to the infirmary. We went to the warden's office."

I sat on my bunk, looking up at the vent through which Shay's voice carried. "He finally agreed to meet with-"

"You know why they lie?" Shay interrupted. "Because they're afraid you'll go ballistic if they tell you the truth."

"About what?"

"It's all mind control. And we have no choice but to be obedient because what if this is the one time that really-"

"Shay," I said, "did you talk to the warden or not?"

"He talked to me. He told me my last appeal was denied by the Supreme

Court," Shay said. "My execution date is May twenty-third."

I knew that before he was moved to this tier, Shay had been on death row for eleven years; it wasn't like he hadn't seen this coming. And yet, that date was only two and a half months away.

"I guess they don't want to come in and say hey, we're taking you to get your death warrant read out loud. I mean, it's easier to just pretend you're going to the infirmary, so that I wouldn't freak out. I bet they talked about how they'd come and get me. I bet they had a meeting."

I wondered what I would prefer, if it were my death that was being announced like a future train departing from a platform. Would I want the truth from an officer? Or would I consider it a kindness to be spared knowing the inevitable, even for those four minutes of transit?

I knew what the answer was for me.

I wondered why, considering that I'd only known Shay Bourne for two weeks, there was a lump in my throat at the thought of his execution. "I'm really sorry."

"Yeah," he said. "Yeah."

"Po-lice," Joey called out, and a moment later, CO Smythe walked in, followed by CO Whitaker. He helped Whitaker transport Crash to the shower cell-the investigation into our bacchanal tap water had yielded nothing conclusive, apparently, except some mold in the pipes, and we were now allowed personal hygiene hours again. But afterward, instead of leaving I-tier, Smythe doubled back down the catwalk to stand in front of

Shay's cell.

"Listen," Smythe said. "Last week, you said something to me."

"Did I?"

"You told me to look inside." He hesitated. "My daughter's been sick.

Really sick. Yesterday, the doctors told my wife and me to say good-bye. It made me want to explode. So I grabbed this stuffed bear in her crib, one we'd brought from home to make going to the hospital easier for her-and

I ripped it wide open. It was filled with peanut shells, and we never thought to look there." Smythe shook his head. "My baby's not dying; she was never even sick. She's just allergic," he said. "How did you know?"

"I didn't-"

"It doesn't matter." Smythe dug in his pocket for a small square of tinfoil, unwrapping it to reveal a thick brownie. "I brought this in from home.

My wife, she makes them. She wanted you to have it."

"John, you can't give him contraband," Whitakersaid, glancing over his shoulder at the control booth.

"It's not contraband. It's just me... sharing a little bit of my lunch."

My mouth started to water. Brownies were not on our canteen forms.

The closest we came was chocolate cake, offered once a year as part of a

Christmas package that also included a stocking full of candy and two oranges.

Smythe passed the brownie through the trap in the cell door. He met

Shay's gaze and nodded, then left the tier with CO Whitaker.

"Hey, Death Row," Calloway said, "I'll give you three cigarettes for half of that."

"I'll trade you a whole pack of coffee," Joey countered.

"He ain't going to waste it on you," Calloway said. "I'll give you coffee and four cigarettes."

Texas and Pogie joined in. They would trade Shay a CD player. A Playboy magazine. A roll of tape.

"A teener," Calloway announced. "Final offer."

The Brotherhood made a killing on running the methamphetamine trade at the New Hampshire state prison; for Calloway to solicit his own personal stash, he must have truly wanted that chocolate.

As far as I knew, Shay hadn't even had a cup of coffee since coming to

I-tier. I had no idea if he smoked or got high. "No," Shay said. "No to all of you."

A few minutes passed.

"For God's sake, I can still smell it," Calloway said.

Let me tell you, I am not exaggerating when I say that we were forced to inhale that scent-that glorious scent-for hours. At three in the morning, when I woke up as per my usual insomnia, the scent of chocolate was so strong that the brownie might as well have been sitting in my cell instead of Shay's. "Why don't you just eat the damn thing," I murmured.

"Because," Shay replied, as wide awake as I, "then there wouldn't be anything to look forward to."

Maggie

There were many reasons I loved Oliver, but first and foremost was that my mother couldn't stand him. He's a mess, she said every time she came to visit. He's destructive. Maggie, she said, if you got rid ojhim, you could find

Someone.

Someone was a doctor, like the anesthesiologist from Dartmouth-

Hitchcock they'd set me up with once, who asked me if I thought laws against downloading child porn were an infringement on civil rights. Or the son of the cantor, who actually had been in a monogamous gay relationship for five years but hadn't told his parents yet. Someone was the younger partner in the accounting firm that did my father's taxes, who asked me on our first and only date if I'd always been a big girl.

On the other hand, Oliver knew just what I needed, and when I needed it. Which is why, the minute I stepped on the scale that morning, he hopped out from underneath the bed, where he was diligently severing the cord of my alarm clock with his teeth, and settled himself squarely on top of my feet so that I couldn't see the digital readout.

"Nicely done," I said, stepping off, trying not to notice the numbers that flashed red before they disappeared. Surely the reason there was a seven in there was because Oliver had been on the scale, too. Besides, if I were going to be writing a formal complaint about any of this, I'd have said that (a) size fourteen isn't really all that big, (b) a size fourteen here was a size sixteen in London, so in a way I was thinner than I'd be if I had been born British, and (c) weight didn't really matter, as long as you were healthy.

All right, so maybe I didn't exercise all that much either. But I would, one day, or so I told my mother the fitness queen, as soon as all the people on whose behalf I worked tirelessly were absolutely, unequivocally rescued. I told her (and anyone else who'd listen) that the whole reason the ACLU existed was to help people take a stand. Unfortunately, the only stands my mother recognized were pigeon pose, warrior two, and all the other staples of yoga.

I pulled on my jeans, the ones that I admittedly didn't wash very often because the dryer shrank them just enough that I had to suffer half a day before the denim stretched to the point of comfort again. I picked a sweater that didn't show my bra roll and then turned to Oliver. "What do you think?"

He lowered his left ear, which translated to, "Why do you even care, since you're taking it all off to put on a spa robe?"

As usual, he was right. It's a little hard to hide your flaws when you're wearing, well, nothing.

He followed me into the kitchen, where I poured us both bowls of rabbit food (his literal, mine Special K). Then he hopped off to the litter box beside his cage, where he'd spend the day sleeping.

I'd named my rabbit after Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the famous Supreme

Court Justice known as the Great Dissenter. He once said, "Even a dog knows the difference between being kicked and being tripped over."

So did rabbits. And my clients, for that matter.

"Don't do anything I wouldn't do," I warned Oliver. "That includes chewing the legs of the kitchen stools."

I grabbed my keys and headed out to my Prius. I had used nearly all my savings last year on the hybrid-to be honest, I didn't understand why car manufacturers charged a premium if you were a buyer with a modicum of social conscience. It didn't have all-wheel drive, which was a real pain in the neck during a New Hampshire winter, but I figured that saving the ozone layer was worth sliding off the road occasionally.

My parents had moved to Lynley-a town twenty-six miles east of

Concord -seven years ago when my father took over as rabbi at Temple

Beth Or. The catch was that there was no Temple Beth Or: his reform congregation held Friday night services in the cafeteria of the middle school, because the original temple had burned to the ground. The expectation had been to raise funds for a new temple, but my father had overestimated the size of his rural New Hampshire congregation, and although he assured me that they were closing in on buying land somewhere,

I didn't see it happening anytime soon. By now, anyway, his congregation had grown used to readings from the Torah that were routinely punctuated by the cheers of the crowd at the basketball game in the gymnasium down the hall.

The biggest single annual contributor to my father's temple fund was the ChutZpah, a wellness retreat for the mind, body, and soul in the heart of Lynley that was run by my mother. Although her clientele was nondenominational, she'd garnered a word-of-mouth reputation among temple sisterhoods, and patrons came from as far away as New York and Connecticut and even Maryland to relax and rejuvenate. My mother used salt from the Dead Sea for her scrubs. Her spa cuisine was kosher. She'd been written up in Boston magazine, the New York Times, and Luxury SpaFinder.

The first Saturday of every month, I drove to the spa for a free massage or facial or pedicure. The catch was that afterward, I had to suffer through lunch with my mother. We had it down to a routine. By the time we were served our passion fruit iced tea, we'd already covered "Why

Don't You Call." The salad course was "I'm Going to Be Dead Before You

Make Me a Grandmother." The entree-fittingly-involved my weight.

Needless to say, we never got around to dessert.

The ChutZpah was white. Not just white, but scary, I'm-afraid-tobreathe white: white carpets, white tiles, white robes, white slippers. I have no idea how my mother kept the place so clean, given that when I was growing up, the house was always comfortably cluttered.

My father says there's a God, although for me the jury is still out on that one. Which isn't to say that I didn't appreciate a miracle as much as the next person-such as when I went up to the front desk and the re 50 ceptionist told me my mother was going to have to miss our lunch because of a last-minute meeting with a wholesale orchid salesman. "But she said you should still have your treatment," the receptionist said.

"DeeDee's going to be your aesthetician, and you've got locker number two twenty."

I took the robe and slippers she handed me. Locker 220 was in a bank with fifty others, and several toned middle-aged women were stripping out of their yoga clothes. I breezed into another section of lockers, one that was blissfully empty, and changed into my robe. If someone complained because

I was using locker 664 instead, I didn't think my mother would disown me. I punched in my key code-2358, for ACLU-took a bracing breath, and tried not to glance in the mirror as I walked by.

There wasn't very much that I liked about the outside of me. I had curves, but to me, they were in all the wrong places. My hair was an explosion of dark curls, which could have been sexy if I didn't have to work so hard to keep them frizz-free. I'd read that stylists on the Oprah show would straighten the hair of guests with hair like mine, because curls added ten pounds to the camera-which meant that even my hair made objects like me look bigger than they appeared. My eyes were okay- they were mud-colored on an average day and green if I felt like embellishing-but most of all, they showed the part of me I was proud of: my intelligence. I might never be a cover girl, but I was a girl who could cover it all.

The problem was, you never heard anyone say, "Wow, check out the brain on that babe."

My father had always made me feel special, but I couldn't even look at my mother without wondering why I hadn't inherited her tiny waist and sleek hair. As a kid I had only wanted to be just like her; as an adult,

I'd stopped trying.

Sighing, I entered the whirlpool area: a white oasis surrounded by white wicker benches where primarily white women waited for their white-coated therapists to call their name.

DeeDee appeared in her immaculate jacket, smiling. "You must be

Maggie," she said. "You look just like your mother described you."

I wasn't about to take that bait. "Nice to meet you." I never quite figured out the protocol for this part of the experience-you said hello and then disrobed immediately so that a total stranger could lay their hands on you... and you paid for this privilege. Was it just me, or was there a great deal that spa treatments had in common with prostitution?

"You looking forward to your Song of Solomon Wrap?"

"I'd rather be getting a root canal."

DeeDee grinned. "Your mom told me you'd say something like that, too."

If you haven't had a body wrap, it's a singular experience. You're lying on a cushy table covered by a giant piece of Saran Wrap and you're naked. Totally, completely naked. Sure, the aesthetician tosses a washcloth the size of a gauze square over your privates when she's scrubbing you down, and she's got a poker face that never belies whether she's calculating your body mass index under her palms-but still, you're painfully aware of your physique, if only because someone's experiencing it firsthand with you.

I forced myself to close my eyes and remember that being washed beneath a Vichy shower by someone else was supposed to make me feel like a queen and not a hospitalized invalid.

"So, DeeDee," I said. "How long have you been doing this?"

She unrolled a towel and held it like a screen as I rolled onto my back. "I've been working at spas for six years, but I just got hired on here."

"You must be good," I said. "My mother doesn't sweat amateurs."

She shrugged. "I like meeting new people."

I like meeting new people, too, but when they're fully clothed.

"What do you do for work?" DeeDee asked.

"My mother didn't tell you?"

"No... she just said-" Suddenly she broke off, silent.

"She said what."

"She, um, told me to treat you to an extra helping of seaweed scrub."

"You mean she told you I'd need twice as much."

"She didn't-"

"Did she use the word zaftig?" I asked. When DeeDee didn't answer- wisely-I blinked up at the hazy light in the ceiling, listened to Yanni's canned piano for a few beats, and then sighed. "I'm an ACLU lawyer."

"For real?" DeeDee's hands stilled on my feet. "Do you ever take on cases, like, for free?"

"That's all I do."

"Then you must know about the guy on death row... Shay Bourne?

I've been writing to him for ten years, ever since I was in eighth grade and I started as part of an assignment for my social studies class. His last appeal just got rejected by the Supreme Court."

"I know," I said. "I've filed briefs on his behalf."

DeeDee's eyes widened. "So you're his lawyer?"

"Well... no." I hadn't even been living in New Hampshire when

Bourne was convicted, but it was the job of the ACLU to file amicus briefs for death row prisoners. Amicus was Latin for friend of the court; when you had a position on a particular case but weren't directly a party involved in it, the court would let you legally spell out your feelings if it might be beneficial to the decision-making process. My amicus briefs illustrated how hideous the death penalty was; defined it as cruel and unusual punishment, as unconstitutional. I'm quite sure the judge looked at my hard work and promptly tossed it aside.

"Can't you do something else to help him?" DeeDee asked.

The truth was, if Bourne's last appeal had been rejected by the Supreme

Court, there wasn't much any lawyer could do to save him now.

"Tell you what," I promised. "I'll look into it."

DeeDee smiled and covered me with heated blankets until I was trussed tight as a burrito. Then she sat down behind me and wove her fingers into my hair. As she massaged my scalp, my eyes drifted shut.

"They say it's painless," DeeDee murmured. "Lethal injection."

They: the establishment, the lawmakers, the ones assuaging their guilt over their own actions with rhetoric. "That's because no one ever comes back to tell them otherwise," I said. I thought of Shay Bourne being given the news of his own impending death. I thought of lying on a table like this one, being put to sleep.

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

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.

Mother fucker."

"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

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 is that it's raining, and the scissors got rusty, and so you slip the paper underneath them and carry them away."

I laughed. Claire shifted slightly, careful not to dislodge all the tubes and the wires. "Who'll feed Dudley?" she asked.

Dudley was our dog-a thirteen-year-old springer spaniel who, along with me, was one of the only pieces of continuity between

Claire and her late sister. Claire may never have met Elizabeth, but they had both grown up draping faux pearls around

Dudley's neck, dressing him up like the sibling they never had.

"Don't worry about Dudley," I said. "I'll call Mrs. Morrissey if I have to."

Claire nodded and glanced at the clock. "I thought they'd be back already."

"I know, baby."

"What do you think's taking so long?"

There were a hundred answers to that, but the one that floated to the top of my mind was that in some other hospital, two counties away, another mother had to say good-bye to her child so that

I would have a chance to keep mine.

The technical name for Claire's illness was pediatric dilated cardiomyopathy. It affected twelve million kids a year, and it meant that her heart cavity was enlarged and stretched, that her heart couldn't pump blood out efficiently. You couldn't fix it or reverse it; if you were lucky you could live with it. If you weren't, you died of congestive heart failure. In kids, 79 percent of the cases came from an unknown origin. There was a camp that attributed its onset to myocarditis and other viral infections during infancy; and another that claimed it was inherited through a parent who was a carrier of the defective gene. I had always assumed the latter was the case with Claire. After all, surely a child who grew out of grief would be born with a heavy heart.

At first, I didn't know she had it. She got tired more easily than other infants, but I was still moving in slow motion myself and did not notice. It wasn't until she was five, hospitalized with a flu she could not shake, that she was diagnosed. Dr. Wu said that

Claire had a slight arrhythmia that might improve and might not; he put her on Captopril, Lasix, Lanoxin. He said that we'd have to wait and see.

On the first day of fifth grade, Claire told me it felt like she had swallowed a hummingbird. I assumed it was nerves about starting classes, but hours later-when she stood up to solve a math problem at the chalkboard-she passed out cold. Progressive arrhythmias made the heart beat like a bag of worms-it wouldn't eject any blood. Those basketball players who seemed so healthy and then dropped dead on the court? That was ventricular fibrillation, and it was happening to Claire. She had surgery to implant an AICD-an automatic implantable cardioverter-defibrillator, or, in simpler terms, a tiny, internal ER resting right on her heart, which would fix future arrhythmias by administering an electric shock. She was put on the list for a transplant.

The transplant game was a tricky one-once you received a heart, the clock started ticking, and it wasn't the happy ending everyone thought it was. You didn't want to wait so long for a transplant that the rest of the bodily systems began to shut down. But even a transplant wasn't a miracle: most recipients could only tolerate a heart for ten or fifteen years before complications ensued, or there was outright rejection. Still, as Dr. Wu said, fifteen years from now, we might be able to buy a heart off a shelf and have it installed at Best B u y... the idea was to keep Claire alive long enough to let medical innovation catch up to her.

This morning, the beeper we carried at all times had gone off.

We have a heart, Dr. Wu had said when I called. I'll meet you at the hospital.

For the past six hours, Claire had been poked, pricked, scrubbed, and prepped so that the minute the miracle organ arrived in its little Igloo cooler, she could go straight into surgery.

This was the moment I'd waited for, and dreaded, her whole life.

What if... I could not even let myself say the words.

Instead, I reached for Claire's hand and threaded our fingers together. Paper and scissors, I thought. We are between a rock and a hard place. I looked at the fan of her angel hair on the pillow, the faint blue cast of her skin, the fairy-light bones of a girl whose body was still too much for her to handle. Sometimes, when I looked at her, I didn't see her at all; instead, I pretended that she was-

"What do you think she's like?"

I blinked, startled. "Who?"

"The girl. The one who died."

"Claire," I said. "Let's not talk about this."

"Why not? Don't you think we should know all about her if she's going to be a part of me?"

I touched my hand to her head. "We don't even know it's a girl."

"Of course it's a girl," Claire said. "It would be totally gross to have a boy's heart."

"I don't think that's a qualification for a match."

She shuddered. "It should be." Claire struggled to push herself upright so that she was sitting higher in the hospital bed. "Do you think I'll be different?"

I leaned down and kissed her. "You," I pronounced, "will wake up and still be the same kid who cannot be bothered to clean her room or walk Dudley or turn out the lights when she goes downstairs."

That's what I said to Claire, anyway. But all I heard were the first four words: You will wake up.

A nurse came into the room. "We just got word that the harvest's begun," she said. "We should have more information shortly; Dr. Wu's on the phone with the team that's on-site."

After she left, Claire and I sat in silence. Suddenly, this was real-the surgeons were going to open up Claire's chest, stop her heart, and sew in a new one. We had both heard numerous doctors explain the risks and the rewards; we knew how infrequently pediatric donors came about. Claire shrank down in the bed, her covers sliding up to her nose. "If I die," Claire said, "do you think

I'll get to be a saint?"

"You won't die."

"Yeah, I will. And so will you. I just might do it a little sooner."

I couldn't help it; I felt tears welling up in my eyes. I wiped them on the edge of the hospital sheets. Claire fisted her hand in my hair, the way she used to when she was little. "I bet I'd like it,"

Claire said. "Being a saint."

Claire had her nose in a book constantly, and recently, her Joan of Arc fascination had bloomed into all things martyred.

"You aren't going to be a saint."

"You don't know that for sure," Claire said.

"You're not Catholic, for one thing. And besides, they all died horrible deaths."

"That's not always true. You can be killed while you're being good, and that counts. St. Maria Goretti was my age when she fought off a guy who was raping her and was killed and she got to be one."

"That's atrocious," I said.

"St. Barbara had her eyeballs cut out. And did you know there's a patron saint of heart patients? John of God?"

"The question is, why do you know there's a patron saint of heart patients?"

"Duh," Claire said. "I read about it. It's all you let me do." She settled back against the pillows. "I bet a saint can play softball."

"So can a girl with a heart transplant."

But Claire wasn't listening; she knew that hope was just smoke and mirrors; she'd learned by watching me. She looked up at the clock. "I think I'll be a saint," she said, as if it were entirely up to her. "That way no one forgets you when you're gone."

The funeral of a police officer is a breathtaking thing. Officers and firemen and public officials will come from every town in the state and some even farther away. There is a procession of police cruisers that precedes the hearse; they blanket the highway like snow.

It took me a long time to remember Kurt's funeral, because I was working so hard at the time to pretend it wasn't happening.

The police chief, Irv, rode with me to the graveside service. There were townspeople lining the streets of Lynley, with handmade signs that read PROTECT AND SERVE, and THE ULTIMATE SACRIFICE.

It was summertime, and the asphalt sank beneath the heels of my shoes where I stood. I was surrounded by other policemen who'd worked with Kurt, and hundreds who didn't, a sea of dress blue.

My back hurt, and my feet were swollen. I found myself concentrating on a lilac tree that shuddered in the breeze, petals falling like rain.

The police chief had arranged for a twenty-one-gun salute, and as it finished, five fighter jets rose over the distant violet mountains. They sliced the sky in parallel lines, and then, just as they flew overhead, the plane on the far right broke off like a splinter, soaring east.

When the priest stopped speaking-I didn't listen to a word of it; what could he tell me about Kurt that I didn't already know?-

Robbie and Vic stepped forward. They were Kurt's closest friends in the department. Like the rest of the Lynley force, they had covered their badges with black fabric. They reached for the flag that draped Kurt's coffin and began to fold it. Their gloved hands moved so fast-I thought of Mickey Mouse, of Donald Duck, with their oversized white fists. Robbie was the one who put the triangle into my arms, something to hold on to, something to take

Kurt's place.

Through the radios of the other policemen came the voice of the dispatcher: All units stand by for a broadcast.

Final call for Officer Kurt Nealon, number 144.

144, report to 360 West Main for one last assignment.

It was the address of the cemetery.

You will be in the best of hands. You will be deeply missed.

244, 20-7. The radio code for end of shift.

I have been told that afterward, I walked up to Kurt's coffin. It was so highly polished I could see my own reflection, pinched and unfamiliar. It had been specially made, wider than normal, to accommodate

Elizabeth, too.

She was, at seven, still afraid of the dark. Kurt would lie down beside her, an elephant perched among pink pillows and satin blankets, until she fell asleep; then he'd creep out of the room and turn off the light. Sometimes, she woke up at midnight shrieking.

You turned it off, she'd sob into my shoulder, as if I had broken her heart.

The funeral director had let me see them. Kurt's arms were wrapped tight around my daughter; Elizabeth rested her head on his chest. They looked the way they looked on nights when Kurt fell asleep waiting for Elizabeth to do that very thing. They looked the way I wished I could: smooth and clear and peaceful, a pond with a stone unthrown. It was supposed to be comforting that they would be together. It was supposed to make up for the fact that I couldn't go with them.

"Take care of her," I whispered to Kurt, my breath blowing a kiss against the gleaming wood. "Take care of my baby."

As if I'd summoned her, Claire moved inside me then: a slow tumble of butterfly limbs, a memory of why I had to stay behind.

There was a time when I prayed to saints. What I liked about them were their humble beginnings: they were human, once, and so you knew that they just got it in a way Jesus never would. They understood what it meant to have your hopes dashed or your promises broken or your feelings hurt. St.

Therese was my favorite-the one who believed you could be perfectly ordinary, but that great love could somehow transport you. However, this was all a long time ago. Life has a way of pointing out, with great sweeping signs, that you are looking at the wrong things, doesn't it? It was when I started to admit to myself that I'd rather be dead that I was given a child who had to fight to stay alive.

In the past month, Claire's arrhythmias had worsened. Her

AICD was going off six times a day. I'd been told that when it fired, it felt like an electric current running through the body. It restarted your heart, but it hurt like hell. Once a month would be devastating; once a day would be debilitating. And then there was

Claire's frequency.

There were support groups for adults who had to live with

AICDs; there were stories of those who preferred the risk of dying from an arrhythmia to the sure knowledge that they would be shocked by the device sooner or later. Last week, I had found

Claire in her room reading the Guinness Book of World Records.

"Roy Sullivan was struck by lightning seven times over thirty-six years," she'd said. "Finally, he killed himself." She lifted her shirt, staring down at the scar on her chest. "Mom," she begged, "please make them turn it off."

I did not know how long I would be able to convince Claire to stay with me, if this was the way she had to do it.

Claire and I both turned immediately when the hospital door opened. We were expecting the nurse, but it was Dr. Wu. He sat down on the edge of the bed and spoke directly to Claire, as if she were my age instead of eleven. "The heart we had in mind for you had something wrong with it. The team didn't know until they got inside... but the right ventricle is dilated. If it isn't functioning now, chances are it will only get worse by the time the heart's transplanted."

"So... I can't have it?" Claire asked.

"No. When I give you a new heart, I want it to be the healthiest heart possible," the doctor explained.

My body felt stiff. "I don't-I don't understand."

Dr. Wu turned. "I'm sorry, June. Today's not going to be the day."

"But it could take years to find another donor," I said. I didn't add the rest of my sentence, because I knew Wu could hear it anyway: Claire can't last that long.

"We'll just hope for the best," he said.

After he left, we sat in stunned silence for a few moments. Had

I done this? Had the fear I'd tried to quash-the one that Claire wouldn't survive this operation-somehow bled into reality?

Claire began to pull the cardiac monitors off her chest. "Well," she said, but I could hear the hitch in her voice as she struggled not to cry. "What a total waste of a Saturday."

"You know," I said, forcing the words to unroll evenly, "you were named for a saint."

"For real?"

I nodded. "She founded a group of nuns called the Poor

Clares."

She glanced at me. "Why did you pick her?"

Because, on the day you were born, the nurse who handed you to me shook her head and said, "Now there's a sight for sore eyes." And you were. And she is the patron saint of that very thing. And I wanted you protected, from the very first moment I spoke your name.

"I liked the way it sounded," I lied, and I held up Claire's shirt so that she could shimmy into it.

We would leave this hospital, maybe go get chocolate Fribbles at Friendly's and rent a movie with a happy ending. We'd take

Dudley for a walk and feed him. We'd act like this was an ordinary day. And after she went to sleep, I would bury my face in my pillow and let myself feel everything I wasn't letting myself feel right now: shame over knowing that I've had five more years in

Claire's company than I did with Elizabeth, guilt over being re C lieved this transplant did not happen, since it might just as easily kill Claire as save her.

Claire stuffed her feet into her pink Converse high-tops.

"Maybe I'll join the Poor Clares."

"You still can't be a saint," I said. And added silently, Because I will not let you die.

Lucius

Shortly after Shay brought Batman the Robin back to life, Crash Vitale lit himself on fire.

He'd created a makeshift match the way we all do-by pulling the fluorescent bulb out of its cradle and holding the metal tines just far enough away from the socket to have the electricity arc to meet it. Stick a piece of paper in the gap, and it becomes a torch. Crash had crumpled up pages of a magazine and set them around himself in a circle. By the time Texas started screaming for help, smoke was filling the pod. The COs held the fire hose at full spray as they opened his cell door; we could hear Crash being knocked against the far wall by the stream. Dripping wet, he was strapped onto a gurney to be transported, his hair a matted mess, his eyes wild. "Hey, Green Mile," he yelled as he was wheeled off the tier, "how come you didn't save me?"

"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.