Change of heart

M I C HAEL

The crazy woman who'd barged in on our little pastoral counseling session was now promising Shay Bourne happy endings she could not deliver. "I need to do a little research," she explained. I'm going to come back to see you in a few days."

Shay, for what it was worth, was staring at her as if she had just handed him the moon. "But you think... you think I'll be able to donate my heart to her?"

"Yes," she said. "Maybe."

Yes. Maybe. Mixed signals, that's what she was giving him. As opposed to my message: God. Jesus. One true course.

She knocked on the window, in just as big a hurry to get out of the conference room as she'd been to enter it. As an officer buzzed open the door, I grasped her upper arm. "Don't get his hopes up," I whispered.

She raised a brow. "Don't cut them down."

The door closed behind Maggie Bloom, and I watched her walk away through the oblong window in the conference room. In the faint reflection, I could see Shay watching, too. "I like her," he announced.

"Well," I sighed. "Good."

"Did you ever notice how sometimes it's a mirror, and sometimes it's glass?"

It took me a moment to realize that he was talking about the reflection.

"It's the way the light hits," I explained.

"There's light inside a man of light," Shay murmured. "It can light up the whole world." He met my gaze. "So, what were you saying is impossible?"

My grandmother had been so fervently Catholic that she was on the committee of women who would come to scrub down the church, sometimes taking me along. I'd sit in the back, setting up a traffic jam of

Matchbox cars on the kneeler. I'd watch her rub Murphy Oil Soap into the scarred wooden pews and sweep down the aisle with a broom; and on Sunday when we went to Mass she'd look around-from the entryway to the arched ceilings to the flickering candles-and nod with satisfaction. On the other hand, my grandfather never went to church.

Instead, on Sundays, he fished. In the summer, he went out fly-fishing for bass; in the winter, he cut a hole in the ice and waited, drinking from his thermos of coffee, with steam wreathing his head like a halo.

It wasn't until I was twelve that I was allowed to skip a Sunday

Mass to tag along with my grandfather. My grandmother sent me off with a bag lunch and an old baseball hat to keep the sun off my face.

"Maybe you can talk some sense into him," she said. I had heard enough sermons to understand what happened to those who didn't truly believe, so I climbed into his little aluminum boat and waited until we had stopped underneath the reaching arm of a willow tree along the shoreline. He took out a fly rod and handed it to me, and then started casting with his own ancient bamboo rod.

One two three, one two three. There was a rhythm to fly-fishing, like a ballroom dance. I waited until we had both unspooled the long tongue of line over the lake, until the flies that my grandfather laboriously tied in his basement had lightly come to rest on the surface.

"Grandpa," I asked, "you don't want to go to hell, do you?"

"Aw, Christ," he had answered. "Did your grandmother put you up to this?"

"No," I lied. "I just don't understand why you never go to Mass with us."

"I have my own Mass," he had said. "I don't need some guy in a collar and a dress telling me what I should and shouldn't believe."

Maybe if I'd been older, or smarter, I would have left it alone at that. Instead, I squinted into the sun, up at my grandfather. "But you got married by a priest."

He sighed. "Yeah, and I even went to parochial school, like you."

"What made you stop?"

Before he could answer, I felt that tug on my line that always felt like Christmas, the moment before you opened the biggest box under the tree. I reeled in, fighting the whistle and snap of the fish on the other end, certain that I'd never caught anything quite like this before.

Finally, it burst out of the water, as if it were being born again.

"A salmon!" my grandfather crowed. "Ten pounds, easy... imagine all the ladders it had to climb to make its way back here from the ocean to spawn." He held the fish aloft, grinning. "I haven't seen one in this lake since the sixties!"

I looked down at the fish, still on my line, thrashing in splendor. It was silver and gold and crimson all at once.

My grandfather held the salmon, stilling it enough to unhook the fly, and set the fish back into the lake. We watched the flag of its tail, the ruddy back as it swam away. "Who says that if you want to find

God on a Sunday morning, you ought to be looking in church?" my grandfather murmured.

For a long time after that, I believed my grandfather had it right:

God was in the details. But that was before I learned that the requirements of a true believer included Mass every Sunday and holy day of obligation, receiving the Eucharist, reconciliation once a year, giving money to the poor, observing Lent. Or in other words-just because you say you're Catholic, if you don't walk the walk, you're not.

Back when I was at seminary, I imagined I heard my grandfather's voice: I thought God was supposed to love you unconditionally Those sure sound like a lot of conditions to me.

The truth is, I stopped listening.

By the time I left the prison, the crowd outside had doubled in size.

There were the ill, the feeble, the old and the hungry, but there was also a small cadre of nuns from a convent up in Maine, and a choir singing "Holy Holy Holy." I was surprised at how hearsay about a socalled miracle could produce so many converts, so quickly.

"You see?" I heard a woman say, pointing to me. "Even Father Michael's here."

She was a parishioner, and her son had cystic fibrosis. He was here, too, in a wheelchair being pushed by his father.

"Is it true, then?" the man asked. "Can this guy really work miracles?" aGod can," I said, heading that question off at the pass. I put my hand on the boy's forehead. "Dear St. John of God, patron saint of those who are ill, I ask for your intercession that the Lord will have mercy on this child and return him to health. I ask this in Jesus's name."

Not Shay Bourne's, I thought.

"Amen," the parents murmured.

"If you'll excuse me," I said, turning away.

The chances of Shay Bourne being Jesus were about as likely as me being God. These people, these falsely faithful, didn't know Shay

Bourne-they'd never met Shay Bourne. They were imposing the face of our Savior on a man with a tendency to talk to himself; a man whose hands had been covered with the blood of two innocent people. They were confusing showmanship and inexplicable events with divinity. A miracle was a miracle only until it could be proved otherwise.

I started pushing through the mob, moving in the opposite direction, away from the prison gates, a man on a mission. Maggie Bloom wasn't the only one who could do research.

Maggie

In retrospect, it would have been much simpler to place a phone call to a medical professional who might lecture me on the ins and outs of organ donation.

But it could take a week for a busy doctor to call me back, and my route home from the prison skirted the grounds of the Concord hospital, and I was still buzzing with righteous legal fervor. These are the only grounds I can offer for why I decided to stop in the emergency room. The faster I could speak to an expert, the faster I could start building Shay's case.

However, the triage nurse-a large graying woman who looked like a battleship-compressed her mouth into a flat line when I asked to talk to a doctor. "What's the problem?" she asked.

"I've got a few questions-"

"So does everyone else in that waiting room, but you'll still have to explain the nature of the illness to me."

"Oh, I'm not sick..."

She glanced around me. "Then where's the patient?"

"At the state prison."

The nurse shook her head. "The patient has to be present for registration."

I found that hard to believe. Surely someone knocked unconscious in a car accident wasn't left waiting in the hall until he came to and could recite his Blue Cross group number.

"We're busy," the nurse said. "When the patient arrives, sign in again."

"But I'm a lawyer-"

"Then sue me," the nurse replied.

I walked back to the waiting room and sat down next to a college-age boy with a bloody washcloth wrapped around his hand. "I did that once,"

I said. "Cutting a bagel."

He turned to me. "I put my hand through a plate-glass window because my girlfriend was screwing my roommate."

A nurse appeared. "Whit Romano?" she said, and the boy stood up.

"Good luck with that," I called after him, and I speared my fingers through my hair, thinking hard. Leaving a message with the nurse didn't guarantee a doctor would see it anytime in the next millennium-I had to find another way in.

Five minutes later I was standing in front of the battleship again.

"The patients arrived?" she asked.

"Well. Yes. It's me."

She put down her pen. "You're sick now. You weren't sick before."

I shrugged. "I'm thinking appendicitis..."

The nurse pursed her lips. "You know you'll be charged a hundred and fifty dollars for an emergency room visit, even a fabricated one."

"You mean insurance doesn't-"

"Nope."

I thought of Shay, of the sound the steel doors made when they scraped shut in prison. "It's my abdomen. Sharp pains."

"Which side?"

"My left...?" The nurse narrowed her eyes. "I meant my other left."

"Take a seat," she said.

I settled in the waiting room again and read two issues of People nearly as old as I was before being called into an exam room. A nurse- younger, wearing pink scrubs-took my blood pressure and temperature.

She wrote down my health history, while I mentally reviewed whether you could be brought up on criminal charges for falsifying your own medical records.

I was lying on the exam table, staring at a Where's Waldo? poster on the ceiling, when the doctor came in.

"Ms. Bloom?" he said.

Okay, I'm just going to come out and say it-he was stunning. He had black hair and eyes the color of the blueberries that grew in my parents' garden-almost purple in a certain light, and translucent the next moment.

He could have sliced me wide open with his smile. He was wearing a white coat and a denim collared shirt with a tie that had Barbie dolls all over it.

He probably had a real live one of those at home, too-a 38-22-36 fiancee who had double-majored in law and medicine, or astrophysics and political science.

Our whole relationship was over, and I hadn't even said a word to him.

"You are Ms. Bloom?"

How had I not noticed that British accent? "Yes," I said, wishing I was anyone but.

"I'm Dr. Gallagher," he said, sitting down on a stool. "Why don't you tell me what's been going on?"

"Well," I began. "Actually, I'm fine."

"For the record, appendicitis rates as pretty ill."

III. I loved that. I bet he said things like flat and loo and lift, too.

"Let's just check you out," he said. He stood and hooked his stethoscope into his ears, then settled it under my shirt. I couldn't remember the last time a guy had slipped his hand under my shirt. "Just breathe," he said.

Yeah, right.

"Really," I said. "I'm not sick."

"If you could just lie back...?"

That was enough to bring me crashing down to reality. Not only would he realize, the moment he palpated my stomach, that I didn't have appendicitis... he'd also probably be able to tell that I had the twodonut combo at Dunkin' Donuts for breakfast, when everyone knows they take three days- each -to digest.

"I don't have appendicitis," I blurted out. "I just told the nurse I did because I wanted to talk to a doctor for a few minutes-"

"All right," he said gently. "I'm just going to call in Dr. Tawasaka. I'm sure she'll talk to you all you like... " He stuck his head out the door.

"Sue? Page psych..."

Oh, excellent, now he thought I had a mental health problem. "I don't need a psychiatrist," I said. "I'm an attorney and I need a medical consultation about a client."

I hesitated, expecting him to call in security, but instead he sat down and folded his arms. "Go on."

"Do you know anything about heart transplants?"

"A bit. But I can tell you right now that if your client requires one, he'll have to register with UNOS and get in line like everyone else..."

"He doesn't need a heart. He wants to donate one."

I watched his face transform as he realized that my client had to be the death row inmate. There just weren't a lot of prisoners in New Hampshire clamoring to be organ donors these days. "He's going to be executed,"

Dr. Gallagher said.

"Yes. By lethal injection."

"Then he won't be able to donate his heart. A heart donor has to be brain-dead; lethal injection causes cardiac death. In other words, once your client's heart stops beating during that execution, it's not going to work in someone else."

I knew this; Father Michael had told me this, but I hadn't wanted to believe it.

"You know what's interesting?" the doctor said. "I believe it's potassium that's used in lethal injection-the chemical that stops the heart. That's the same chemical we use in cardioplegia solution, which is perfused into the donor heart just prior to sewing it into the patient. It keeps the heart arrested while it's not receiving a normal blood flow, until all the suturing's finished." He looked up at me. "I don't suppose the prison would agree to a surgical cardiectomy-a heart removal-as a method of execution?"

I shook my head. "The execution has to happen within the walls of the prison."

He shrugged. "I cannot believe I'm saying this, but it's too bad that they don't use a firing squad anymore. A well-placed shot could leave an inmate a perfect organ donor. Even hanging would work, if one could hook up a respirator after brain death was confirmed." He shuddered.

"Pardon me. I'm used to saving patients, not theoretically killing them."

"I understand."

"Then again, even if he could donate his heart, chances are it would be too large for a child's body. Has anyone addressed that yet?"

I shook my head, feeling even worse about Shay's odds.

The doctor glanced up. "The bad news, I'm afraid, is that your client is out of luck."

"Is there any good news?"

"Of course." Dr. Gallagher grinned. "You don't have appendicitis, Ms.

Bloom."

"Here's the thing," I said to Oliver when I had gotten us enough Chinese takeout to feed a family of four (you could keep the leftovers, and Oliver really did like vegetable moo shu, even if my mother said that rabbits didn't eat real food). "It's been sixty-nine years since anyone's been executed in the state of New Hampshire. We're assuming that lethal injection is the only method, but that doesn't mean we're right."

I picked up the carton of lo mein and spooled the noodles into my mouth. "I know it's here somewhere," I muttered as the rabbit hopped across another stack of legal texts scattered on the floor of the living room. I was not in the habit of reading the New Hampshire Criminal

Code; going through the sections and subsections was like navigating through molasses. I'd turn back a page, and the spot I'd been reading a moment before would disappear in the run of text.

Death.

Death penalty.

Capital murder.

Injection, lethal.

630:5 (XXlll). When the penalty of death is imposed, the sentence shall be that the defendant is imprisoned in the state prison at Concord until the day appointed for his execution, which shall not be within one year from the day sentence is passed.

Or in Shays case, eleven years.

The punishment of death shall be inflicted by continuous, intravenous administration of a lethal quantity of an ultra-short-acting barbiturate in combination with a chemical paralytic agent until death is pronounced by a licensed physician according to accepted standards of medical practice.

Everything I knew about the death penalty I had learned at the

ACLU. Prior to working there, I hadn't given the death penalty much thought, beyond when someone was executed and the media made a huge story out of it. Now I knew the names of those who were killed. I heard about their last-minute appeals. I knew that, after death, some inmates were found to be innocent.

Lethal injection was supposed to be like putting a dog to sleep-a drowsiness overcame you, and then you just never woke up. No pain, no stress. It was a cocktail of three drugs: Sodium Pentothal, a sedative to put the inmate to sleep; Pavulon, to paralyze the muscular system and stop breathing; and potassium chloride, to stop the heart. The Sodium Pentothal was ultra-short-acting-which meant that you could recover quickly from its effects. It also meant that a subject might have feeling in his nerves, yet be just sedated enough to be unable to communicate or move.

The British medical journal the Lancet published a 2005 study of the toxicology reports of forty-nine executed inmates in four U.S. states; forty-three of the inmates had a level of anesthesia lower than required

Anesthesiologists say that if a person were conscious at the time potassium chloride is administered, it would feel like boiling oil in the veins.

An inmate might feel as if he were being burned alive from the inside, but be unable to move or speak because of the muscle paralysis and minimal sedation caused by the other two drugs. The Supreme Court had even had its doubts: although they still ruled that capital punishment was constitutional, they'd halted executions of two inmates on a narrower issue: whether the excessive pain caused by lethal injection was a civil rights infraction that could be argued in a lower court.

Or-to put it simply-lethal injection might not be as humane as everyone wanted to believe.

630:5 (XIV). The commissioner of corrections or his designee shall determine the substance or substances to be used and the procedures to be used in any execution, provided, however, that if for any reason the commissioner finds it to be impractical to carry out the punishment of death by administration of the required lethal substance or substances, the sentence of death may be carried out by hanging under the provisions of law for the death penalty by hanging in effect on December 31,1986.

Oliver settled on my lap as I read the words again.

Shay didn't have to be executed by lethal injection, if I could make the commissioner-or a court-find it impractical. If you coupled that with the RLUIPA-the law that said a prisoner's religious freedoms had to be protected in prison-and if I could prove that part of Shay's belief system for redemption included organ donation, then lethal injection was impractical.

In which case, Shay would be hanged.

And-here was the real miracle-according to Dr. Gallagher, that meant Shay Bourne could donate his heart.

Lucius

The day the priest returned, I was working on pigments. My favorite substance was tea-it made a stain you could vary in intensity from an almost white to a yellowish brown. MEtM's were vibrant, but they were the hardest to work with-you had to moisten a Q-tip and rub it over the surface of the MftM, you couldn't just soak off the pigment like I was doing this morning with Skittles.

I set my jar lid on the table and added about fifteen drops of warm water. The green Skittle went in next, and I rolled it around with my finger, watching the food dye coating come off. The trick here was to pull the candy out just as I started to see the white sugar beneath the coating-if the sugar melted into the paint, it wouldn't work as well.

I popped the bleached button of candy into my mouth-I could do that these days, now that the thrush was gone. As I sucked on it, I poured the contents of the lid (green, like the grass I had not walked on with my bare feet in years; like the color of a jungle; like Adam's eyes) into an aspirin bottle for safekeeping. Later, I could vary the pigment with a dab of white toothpaste, diluted with water to make the right hue.

It was a laborious process, but then again... I had time.

I was just about to repeat the endeavor with a yellow jawbreaker-the yield of paint was four times as much as a Skittle-when Shay's priest walked up to my cell door in his flak jacket. I had, of course, seen the priest briefly the day he first visited Shay, but only at a distance. Now, with him directly in front of my cell door, I could see that he was younger than I would have expected, with hair that seemed decidedly un-priestlike and eyes as soft as gray flannel. "Shay's getting his hair cut," I said, because it was barber day, and that's where he had been taken about ten minutes before.

"I know, Lucius," the priest said. "That's why I was hoping to talk to you."

Let me tell you, the last thing I wanted to do was chat with a priest. I hadn't asked for one, certainly, and in my previous experience, the clergy only wanted to give a lecture on how being gay was a choice, and how God loved me (but not my pesky habit of falling in love with other men). Just because Shay had come back to his cell convinced that his new teamsome lawyer girl and this priest-were going to move mountains for him didn't mean that I shared his enthusiasm. In spite of the fact that he'd been incarcerated for eleven years, Shay was still the most naive inmate I'd ever met. Just last night, for example, he'd had a fight with the correctional officers because it was laundry day and they'd brought new sheets, which Shay refused to put on the bed. He said he could feel the bleach, and instead insisted on sleeping on the floor of the cell.

"I appreciate you seeing me, Lucius," the priest said. "I'm happy to hear you're feeling better these days."

I stared at him, wary.

"How long have you known Shay?"

I shrugged. "Since he was put in the cell next to me a few weeks ago."

"Was he talking about organ donation then?"

"Not at first," I said. "Then he had a seizure and got transferred to the infirmary. When he came back, donating his heart was all he could talk about."

"He had a seizure?" the priest repeated, and I could tell this was news to him. "Has he had any more since then?"

"Why don't you just ask Shay these questions?"

"I wanted to hear what you had to say."

"What you want," I corrected, "is for me to tell you whether or not he's really performing miracles."

The priest nodded slowly. "I guess that's true."

Some had already been leaked to the press; I imagined the rest would be brought to light sooner or later. I told him what I'd seen with my own eyes, and by the time I was finished, Father Michael was frowning slightly.

"Does he go around saying he's God?"

"No," I joked. "That would be Crash."

"Lucius," the priest asked, "do you believe Shay is God?"

"You need to back up, Father, because I don't believe in God. I quit around the same time one of your esteemed colleagues told me that AIDS was my punishment for sinning." To be honest, I had split religion along the seam of secular and nonsecular; choosing to concentrate on the beauty of a Caravaggio without noticing the Madonna and child; or finding the best lamb recipe for a lavish Easter dinner, without thinking about the Passion.

Religion gave hope to people who knew the end wasn't going to be pretty. It was why inmates started praying in prison and why patients started praying when the doctors said terminal. Religion was supposed to be a blanket drawn up to your chin to keep you warm, a promise that when it came to the end, you wouldn't die alone-but it could just as easily leave you shivering out in the cold, if what you believed became more important than the fact that you believed.

I stared at him. "I don't believe in God. But I do believe in Shay."

"Thank you for your time, Lucius," the priest said softly, and he walked down the tier.

He may have been a priest, but he was looking for his miracles in the wrong place. That day with the gum, for example. I had seen the coverage on the news-it was reported that Shay had somehow taken one tiny rectangle of Bazooka gum and multiplied it. But ask someone who'd been there-like me, or Crash, or Texas-and you'd know there weren't suddenly seven pieces of bubble gum. It was more like this: when the piece was fished underneath our cell doors, instead of taking as much as we could, we made do with less instead.

The gum was magically replicated. But we-the blatantly greedybalanced the needs of the other seven guys and in that instant found them just as worthy as our own.

Which, if you asked me, was an even greater miracle.

The Holy Father has an entire office at the Vatican devoted to analyzing alleged miracles and passing judgment on their authenticity. They scrutinize statues and busts, scrape Crisco out of the corners of supposedly bleeding eyes, track scented oil on walls that emit the smell of roses. I was nowhere as experienced as those priests, but then again, there was a crowd of nearly five hundred people outside the state prison calling Shay Bourne a savior-and I wasn't going to let people give up on Jesus that easily.

To that end, I was now ensconced in a lab on the Dartmouth campus, with a graduate student named Ahmed who was trying to explain to me the results of the test he'd run on the soil sample taken from the vicinity of the pipes that ran into I-tier. "The reason the prison couldn't get a conclusive explanation is because they were looking in the pipes, not outside them," Ahmed said. "So the water tested positive for something that looked like alcohol, but only in certain pipes. And you'll never guess what's growing near those pipes: rye."

"Rye? Like the grain?"

"Yeah," Ahmed said. "Which accounts for the concentration of ergot into the water. It's a fungal disease of rye. I'm not sure what brings it on-I'm not a botanist-but I bet it had something to do with the amount of rain we've had, and there was a hairline crack in the piping they found when they first investigated, which accounts for the transmission in the first place. Ergot was the first kind of chemical warfare. The Assyrians used it in the seventh century B.C. to poison water supplies." He smiled. "I double-majored in chemistry and ancient history."

"It's deadly?"

Ahmed shrugged. "In repeated doses. But at first, it's a hallucinogen that's related to LSD."

"So, the prisoners on I-tier might not have been drunk..." I said carefully.

"Right," Ahmed replied. "Just tripping."

I turned over the vial with the soil sample. "You think the water got contaminated?"

"That would be my bet."

But Shay Bourne, in prison, would not have been able to know that there was a fungus growing near the pipes that led into I-tier, would he?

I suddenly remembered something else: the following morning, those same inmates on I-tier had ingested the same water and had not acted out of the ordinary. "So how did it get uncontaminated?"

"Now that," Ahmed said, "I haven't quite figured out."

"There are a number of reasons that an advanced AIDS patient with a particularly low CD4 count and high viral load might suddenly appear to get better," Dr. Perego said. An autoimmune disease specialist at

Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, he also served as the doctor for

HIV/AIDS patients at the state prison and knew all about Lucius and his recovery. He didn't have time for a formal talk, but was perfectly willing to chat if I wanted to walk with him from his office to a meeting at the other end of the hospital-as long as I realized that he couldn't violate doctor-patient confidentiality. "If a patient is hoarding meds, for example, and suddenly decides to start taking them, sores will disappear and health will improve. Although we draw blood every three months from

AIDS patients, sometimes we'll get a guy who refuses to have his blood drawn-and again, what looks like sudden improvement is actually a slow turn for the better."

"Alma, the nurse at the prison, told me Lucius hasn't had his blood drawn in over six months," I said.

"Which means we can't be quite sure what his recent viral count was." We had reached the conference room. Doctors in white coats milled into the room, taking their seats. I'm not sure what you wanted to hear," Dr. Perego said, smiling ruefully. "That he's special... or that he's not."

I'm not sure either," I admitted, and I shook his hand. "Thanks for your time."

The doctor slipped into the meeting, and I started back down the hall toward the parking garage. I was waiting at the elevator, grinning down at a baby in a stroller with a patch over her right eye, when I felt a hand on my shoulder. Dr. Perego was standing there. I'm glad I caught you," he said. "Have you got a moment?"

I watched the baby's mother push the stroller onto the yawning elevator.

"Sure."

"This is what I didn't tell you," Dr. Perego said. "And you didn't hear it from me."

I nodded, understanding.

"HIV causes cognitive impairment-a permanent loss of memory and concentration. We can literally see this on an MRI, and Du-

Fresne's brain scan showed irreparable damage when he first entered the state prison. However, another MRI brain scan was done on him yesterday-and it shows a reversal of that atrophy." He looked at me, waiting for this to sink in. "There's no physical evidence of dementia anymore."

"What could cause that?"

Dr. Perego shook his head. "Absolutely nothing," he admitted.

The second time I went to meet with Shay Bourne, he was lying on his bunk, asleep. Not wanting to disturb him, I started to back away, but he spoke to me without opening his eyes. I'm awake," he said. "Are you?"

"Last time I checked," I answered.

C He sat up, swinging his legs over the side of his bunk. "Wow. I dreamed that I was struck by lightning, and all of a sudden I had the power to locate anyone in the world, anytime. So the government cut a deal with me-find bin Laden, and you're free."

"I used to dream that I had a watch, and turning the hands could take you backward in time," I said. "I always wanted to be a pirate, or a

Viking."

"Sounds pretty bloodthirsty for a priest."

"Well, I wasn't born with a collar on."

He looked me in the eye. "If I could turn back time, I'd go out flyfishing with my grandfather."

I glanced up. "I used to do that with my grandfather, too."

I wondered how two boys-like Shay and me-could begin our lives at the same point and somehow take turns that would lead us to be such different men. "My grandfather's been gone a long time, and I still miss him," I admitted.

"I never met mine," Shay said. "But I must have had one, right?"

I looked at him quizzically. What kind of life had he suffered, to have to craft memories from his imagination? "Where did you grow up.

Shay?" I asked.

"The light," Shay replied, ignoring my question. "How does a fish know where it is? I mean, things shift around on the floor of the ocean, right? So if you come back and everything's changed, how can it really be the place you were before?"

The door to the tier buzzed, and one of the officers came down the catwalk, carrying a metal stool. "Here you go. Father," he said, settling it in front of Shay's cell door. "Just in case you want to stay awhile."

I recognized him as the man who had sought me out the last time

I'd been here, talking to Lucius. His baby daughter had been critically ill; he credited Shay with her recovery. I thanked him, but waited until he'd left to talk to Shay again.

"Did you ever feel like that fish?"

Shay looked at me as if I were the one who couldn't follow a linear conversation. "What fish?" he said.

"Like you can't find your way back home?"

I knew where I was heading with this topic-straight to true salvation-but Shay took us off course. "I had a bunch of houses, but only one home."

He'd been in the foster care system; I remembered that much from the trial. "Which place was that?"

"The one where my sister was with me. I haven't seen her since I was sixteen. Since I got sent to prison."

I remembered he'd been sent to a juvenile detention center for arson, but I hadn't remembered anything about a sister.

"Why didn't she come to your trial?" I asked, and realized too late that I had made a grave mistake-that there was no reason for me to know that, unless I had been there.

But Shay didn't notice. "I told her to stay away. I didn't want her to tell anyone what I'd done." He hesitated. "I want to talk to her."

"Your sister?"

"No. She won't listen. The other one. She'll hear me, after I die.

Every time her daughter speaks." Shay looked up at me. "You know how you said you'd ask her if she wants the heart? What if I asked her myself?"

Getting June Nealon to come visit Shay in prison would be like moving Mt. Everest to Columbus, Ohio. "I don't know if it will work..."

But then again, maybe seeing June face-to-face would make Shay see the difference between personal forgiveness and divine forgiveness.

Maybe putting the heart of a killer into the chest of a child would showliterally- how good might blossom from bad. And the beat of Claire's pulse would bring June more peace than any prayer I could offer.

Maybe Shay did know more about redemption than I.

He was standing in front of the cinder-block wall now, trailing his fingertips over the cement, as if he could read the history of the men who'd lived there before him.

Til try," I said.

There was a part of me that knew I should tell Maggie Bloom that I had been on the jury that convicted Shay Bourne. It was one thing to keep the truth from Shay; it was another to compromise whatever legal case

Maggie was weaving together. On the other hand, it was up to me to make sure that Shay found peace with God before his death. The minute I told Maggie about my past involvement with Shay, I knew she'd tell me to get lost, and would find him another spiritual advisor the judge couldn't find fault with. I had prayed long and hard about this, and for now, I was keeping my secret. God wanted me to help

Shay, or so I told myself, because it kept me from admitting that I wanted to help Shay, too, after failing him the first time.

The ACLU office was above a printing shop and smelled like fresh ink and toner. It was filled with plants in various stages of dying, and filing cabinets took up most of the floor space. A paralegal sat at a reception desk, typing so furiously that I almost expected her computer screen to detonate. "How can I help," she said, not bothering to look up.

I'm here to see Maggie Bloom."

The paralegal lifted her right hand, still typing with her left, and hooked a thumb overhead and to the left. I wound down the hallway, stepping over boxes of files and stacks of newspapers, and found Maggie sitting at her desk, scribbling on a legal pad. When she saw me, she smiled. "Listen," she said, as if we were old friends. "I have some fantastic news. I think Shay can be hanged." Then she blanched. "I didn't mean fantastic news, really. I meant... well, you know what I meant."

"Why would he want to do that?"

"Because then he can donate his heart." Maggie frowned. "But first we need to get the prison to agree to send him for tests, to make sure

I drew in my breath. "Look. We need to talk."

"It's not often I get a priest who wants to confess."

She didn't know the half of it. This is not about you, I reminded myself, and firmly settled Shay in the front of my mind. "Shay wants to be the one to ask June Nealon if she'll take his heart. Unfortunately, visiting him is not on her top-ten list of things to do. I want to know if there's some kind of court-ordered mediation we can ask for."

Maggie raised a brow. "Do you really think he's the best person to relay this information to her? I don't see how that will help our case..."

"Look, I know you're doing your job," I said, "but I'm doing mine, too. And saving Shay's soul may not be important to you, but it's critical to me. Right now. Shay thinks that donating his heart is the only way to save himself-but there's a big difference between mercy and salvation."

Maggie folded her hands on her desk. "Which is?"

"Well, June can forgive Shay. But only God can redeem him-and it has nothing to do with giving up his heart. Yes, organ donation would be a beautiful, selfless final act on earth-but it's not going to cancel out his debt with the victim's family, and it's not necessary to get him special brownie points with God. Salvation's not a personal responsibility.

You don't have to get salvation. You're given it, by Jesus."

"So," she said. "I guess you don't think he's the Messiah."

"No, I think that's a pretty rash judgment."

"You're preaching to the choir. I was raised Jewish."

My cheeks flamed. "I didn't mean to suggest-"

"But now I'm an atheist."

I opened my mouth, snapped it shut.

"Believe me," Maggie said, "I'm the last person in the world to buy into the belief that Shay Bourne is Jesus incarnate-"

"Well, of course not-"

"-but not because a messiah wouldn't inhabit a criminal," she qualified. "I can tell you right now that there are plenty of innocent people on death row in this country."

I wasn't about to tell her that I knew Shay Bourne was guilty. I had studied the evidence; I had heard the testimony; I had convicted him.

"It's not that."

"Then how can you be so sure he's not who everyone thinks he is?" Maggie asked.

"Because," I replied, "God only had one son to give us."

"Right. And-correct me if I'm wrong-he was a thirty-three-year-old carpenter with a death sentence on his head, who was performing miracles left and right. Nah, you're right. That's nothing like Shay Bourne."

I thought of what I'd heard from Ahmed and Dr. Perego and the correctional officers. Shay Bourne's so-called miracles were nothing like

Jesus's... or were they? Water into wine. Feeding many with virtually nothing. Healing the sick. Making the blind-or in Calloway's case, the prejudiced-see.

Like Shay, Jesus didn't take credit for his miracles. Like Shay, Jesus had known he was going to die. And the Bible even said Jesus was supposed to be returning. But although the New Testament is very clear about this coming to pass, it is a bit muddier on the details: the when, the why, the how.

"He's not Jesus."

"Okey-dokey."

"He's not." I pressed.

Maggie held up her hands. "Got it."

"If he was Jesus... if this was the Second Coming... well, there'd be rapture and destruction and resurrections and we wouldn't be sitting here having a normal conversation."

Then again, there was nothing in the Bible that said before the

Second Coming, Jesus wouldn't pop in to see how things were going here on earth.

I suppose in that case, it would make sense to be incognito-to pose as the least likely person anyone would ever assume to be the Messiah.

For the love of God, what was I thinking? I shook my head, clearing it. "Let him meet with June Nealon once before you petition for organ donation, that's all I'm asking. I want the same things you do-Shay's voice to be heard, a little girl to be saved, and capital punishment to be put in the hot seat. I just also want to make sure that if and when Shay does donate his heart, he does it for all the right reasons. And that means untangling Shay's spiritual health from the whole legal component of this mess."

"I can't do that," Maggie said. "It's the crux of my case. Look, it doesn't matter to me whether you think Shay is Jesus or Shay thinks

Shay is Jesus or if he's just plain off his rocker. What does matter is that

Shay's rights don't get shuffled aside in the grand mechanism of capital punishment-and if I have to use the fact that other people seem to think he's God to do it, I will."

I raised a brow. "You're using Shay to spotlight an issue you find reprehensible, in the hopes that you can change it."

"Well," Maggie said, coloring, "I guess that's true."

"Then how can you criticize me for having an agenda because of what I believe in?"

Maggie raised her gaze and sighed. "There's something called restorative justice," she said. "I don't know if the prison will even allow it, much less Shay or the Nealons. But it would let Shay sit down in a room with the family of his victims and ask for forgiveness."

I exhaled the breath I had not even realized I was holding. "Thank you," I said.

Maggie picked up her pen and began to write on the legal pad again.

"Don't thank me. Thank June Nealon-if you get her to agree to it."

Motivated, I started out of the ACLU office, then paused. "It's the right thing to do."

Maggie didn't look up. "If June won't meet with him," she said, "I'm still filing the suit."

June

At first, when the victim's assistance advocate asked me if I'd attend a restorative justice meeting with Shay Bourne, I started to laugh. "Yeah," I said. "And maybe after that, I could get dunked in boiling oil or drawn and quartered."

But she was serious, and I was just as serious when I refused.

The last thing in the world I wanted to do was sit down with that monster to make him feel better about himself so that he could die at peace.

Kurt didn't. Elizabeth didn't. Why should he?

I thought that was that, until one morning when there was a knock on the door. Claire was lying on the couch with Dudley curled over her feet, watching the Game Show Network. Our days were spent waiting for a heart with the shades drawn, both of us pretending there was nowhere we wanted to go, when in reality, neither of us could stand seeing how even the smallest trips exhausted

Claire. "I'll get it," she called out, although we both knew she couldn't and wouldn't. I put down the knife I was using to chop celery in the kitchen and wiped my hands on my jeans.

"I bet it's that creepy guy who was selling magazines," Claire said as I passed her.

"I bet it's not." He'd been a corn-fed Utah boy, pitching subscriptions to benefit the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day

Saints. I'd been upstairs in the shower; Claire had been talking to him through the screen door-for which I'd read her the riot act. It was that word Saints that had intrigued her; she didn't know it was a fancy word for Mormon. I had suggested that he try a town where there hadn't been a double murder committed by a young man who'd come around door to door looking for work, and after he left, I'd called the police.

No, I was sure it wasn't the same guy.

To my surprise, though, a priest was standing on my porch.

His motorcycle was parked in my driveway. I opened the door and tried to smile politely. "I think you have the wrong house."

"I'm sure I don't, Ms. Nealon," I replied. "I'm Father Michael, from St. Catherine's. I was hoping I could speak to you for a few minutes."

"I'm sorry... do I know you?"

He hesitated. "No," he said. "But I was hoping to change that."

My natural inclination was to slam the door. (Was that a mortal sin? Did it matter, if you didn't even believe in mortal sins?) I could tell you the exact moment I had given up on religion.

Kurt and I had been raised Catholic. We'd had Elizabeth baptized, and a priest presided over their burials. After that, I had promised myself I would never set foot in a church again, that there was nothing God could do for me that would make up for what I'd lost. However, this priest was a stranger. For all I knew, though, this was not about saving my soul but about saving Claire's life. What if this priest knew of a heart that UNOS didn't?

"The house is a mess," I said, but I opened the door so that he could walk inside. He stopped as we passed the living room, where Claire was still watching television. She turned, her thin, pale face rising like a moon over the back of the sofa. "This is my daughter," I said as I turned to him, and faltered-he was looking at Claire as if she were already a ghost.

I was just about to throw him out when Claire said hello and propped her elbows on the back of the sofa. "Do you know anything about saints?"

"Claire!"

She rolled her eyes. "I'm just asking, Mom."

"I do," the priest said. "I've always sort of liked St. Ulric. He's the patron saint who keeps moles away."

"Get out."

"Have you ever had a mole in here?"

"No."

"Then I guess he's doing his job," he said, and grinned.

Because he'd made Claire smile, I decided to let him in and give him the benefit of the doubt. He followed me into the kitchen, where I knew we could talk without Claire overhearing. "Sorry about the third degree," I said. "Claire reads a lot. Saints are her latest obsession. Six months ago, it was blacksmithing." I gestured to the table, offering him a seat.

"About Claire," he said. "I know she's sick. That's why I'm here."

Although I'd hoped for this, my own heart still leapfrogged.

"Can you help her?"

"Possibly," the priest said. "But I need you to agree to something first."

I would have become a nun; I would have walked over burning coals. "Anything," I vowed.

"I know the prosecutor's office already asked you about restorative justice-"

"Get out of my house," I said abruptly, but Father Michael didn't move.

My face flamed-with anger, and with shame that I had not connected the dots: Shay Bourne wanted to donate his organs; I was actively searching for a heart for Claire. In spite of all the news coverage from the prison, I had never linked them. I wondered whether I had been naive, or whether, even subconsciously, I'd been trying to protect my daughter.

It took all my strength to lift my gaze to the priest's. "What makes you think I would want a part of that man still walking around on this earth, much less inside my child?"

"June-please, just listen to me. I'm Shay's spiritual advisor. I talk to him. And I think you should talk to him, too."

"Why? Because it rubs your conscience the wrong way to give sympathy to a murderer? Because you can't sleep at night?"

"Because I think a good person can do bad things. Because

God forgives, and I can't do any less."

Do you know how, when you are on the verge of a breakdown, the world pounds in your ears-a rush of blood, of consequence?

Do you know how it feels when the truth cuts your tongue to ribbons, and still you have to speak it? "Nothing he says to me could make any difference."

"You're absolutely right," Father Michael said. "But what you say to him might."

There was one variable that the priest had left out of this equation:

I owed Shay Bourne nothing. It already felt like a second, searing death to watch the broadcasts each night, to hear the voices of supporters camping out near the prison, who brought their sick children and their dying partners along to be healed. You fools, I wanted to shout to them. Don't you know he's conned you, just like he conned me? Don't you know that he killed my love, my little girl?

"Name one person John Wayne Gacy killed," I demanded.

" I... I don't know," Father Michael said.

"Jeffrey Dahmer?"

He shook his head.

"But you remember their names, don't you?"

He got out of his chair and walked toward me slowly. "June, people can change."

My mouth twisted. "Yeah. Like a mild-mannered, homeless carpenter who becomes a psychopath?"

Or a silver-haired fairy of a girl whose chest, in a heartbeat, blooms with a peony of blood. Or a mother who turns into a woman she never imagined being: bitter, empty, broken.

I knew why this priest wanted me to meet with Shay Bourne. I knew what Jesus had said: Don't pay back in kind, pay back in kindness.

If someone does wrong to you, do right by them.

I'll tell you this: Jesus never buried his own child.

I turned away, because I didn't want to give him the satisfaction of seeing me cry, but he put his arm around me and led me to a chair. He handed me a tissue. And then his voice, a murmur, clotted into individual words.

"Dear St. Felicity, patron saint of those who've suffered the death of a child, I ask for your intercession that the Lord will help this woman find peace..."

With more strength than I knew I had, I shoved him away.

"Don't you dare," I said, my voice trembling. "Don't you pray for me. Because if God's listening now, he's about eleven years too late." I walked toward the refrigerator, where the only decoration was a picture of Kurt and Elizabeth, held up by a magnet Claire had made in kindergarten. I had fingered the photo so often that the edges had rounded; the color had bled onto my hands. "When it happened, everyone said that Kurt and Elizabeth were at peace.

That they'd gone someplace better. But you know what? They didn't go anywhere. They were taken. I was robbed."

"Don't blame God for that, June," Father Michael said. "He didn't take your husband and your daughter."

"No," I said flatly. "That was Shay Bourne." I stared up at him coldly. "I'd like you to leave now."

I walked him to the door, because I didn't want him saying another word to Claire-who twisted around on the couch to see what was going on but must have picked up enough nonverbal cues from my stiff spine to know better than to make a peep. At the threshold, Father Michael paused. "It may not be when we want, or how we want, but eventually God evens the score," he said. "You don't have to be the one to seek revenge."

I stared at him. "It's not revenge," I said. "It's justice."

After the priest left, I was so cold that I could not stop shivering. I put on a sweater and then another, and wrapped a blanket around myself, but there's no way of warming up a body whose insides have turned to stone.

Shay Bourne wanted to donate his heart to Claire so that she'd live.

What kind of mother would I be if I let that happen?

And what kind of mother would I be if I turned him down?

Father Michael said Shay Bourne wanted to balance the scales: give me one daughter's life because he had taken another's. But

Claire wouldn't replace Elizabeth; I should have had them both.

And yet, this was the simplest of equations: You can have one, or you can have neither. What do you choose?

I was the one who hated Bourne-Claire had never met him. If

I did not take the heart, was I making that choice because of what

I thought was best for Claire... or what I could withstand myself?

I imagined Dr. Wu removing Bourne's heart from an Igloo cooler. There it was, a withered nut, a crystal black as coal. Put one drop of poison into the purest water, and what happens to the rest?

If I didn't take Bourne's heart, Claire would most likely die.

If I did, it would be like saying I could somehow be compensated for the death of my husband and daughter. And I couldn't- not ever.

I believe a good person can do bad things, Father Michael had said.

Like make the wrong decision for the right reasons. Sign your daughter's life away, because she can't have a murderer's heart.

Forgive me, Claire, I thought, and suddenly I wasn't cold anymore.

I was burning, seared by the tears on my cheeks.

I couldn't trust Shay Bourne's sudden altruistic turnaround; and maybe that meant he had won: I had gone just as bitter and rotten as he was. But that only made me more certain that I had the stamina to tell him, face-to-face, what balancing the scales really meant. It wasn't giving me a heart for Claire; it wasn't offering a future that might ease the weight of the past. It was knowing that Shay Bourne badly wanted something, and that this time, I'd be the one to take his dream away.

Maggie

Stunned, I hung up the phone and stared at the receiver again. I was tempted to*69 the call, just to make sure it hadn't been some kind of prank.

Well, maybe miracles did happen.

But before I could mull over this change of events, I heard footsteps heading toward my desk. Father Michael turned the corner, looking like he'd just been through Dante's Inferno. "June Nealon wants nothing to do with Shay."

"That's interesting," I said, "since June Nealon just got off the phone with me, agreeing to a restorative justice meeting."

Father Michael blanched. "You've got to call her back. This isn't a good idea."

"You're the one who came up with it."

"That was before I spoke to her. If she goes to that meeting, it's not because she wants to hear what Shay has to say. It's because she wants to run him through before the state finishes him off."

"Did you really think that whatever Shay has to say to her is going to be any less painful than what she says to him?"

"I don't know... I thought that maybe if they saw each other..."

He sank down into a chair in front of my desk. "I don't know what I'm doing. I guess there are just some things you can't make amends for."

I sighed. "You're trying. That's the best any of us can do. Look, it's not like I fight death penalty cases all the time-but my boss used to. He worked down in Virginia before he came up north. They're emotional minefields-you get to know the inmate, and you excuse some heinous crime with a lousy childhood or alcoholism or an emotional upheaval or drugs, until you see the victims family and a whole different level of suffering.

And suddenly you start to feel a little ashamed of being in the defendant's camp."

I walked to a small cooler next to a file cabinet and took out a bottle of water for the priest. "Shay's guilty, Father. A court already told us that.

June knows it. I know it. Everyone knows that it's wrong to execute an innocent man. The real question is whether it's still wrong to execute someone who's guilty."

"But you're trying to get him hanged," Father Michael said.

"I'm not trying to get him hanged," I corrected. "I want to champion his civil liberties, and at the same time, bring front and center what's wrong with the death penalty in this country The only way to do both is to find a way for him to die the way he wants to. That's the difference between you and me. You're trying to find a way for him to die the way you want him to."

"You're the one who said Shay's heart might not be a viable match.

And even if it is, June Nealon will never agree to taking it," the priest said.

That was, of course, entirely possible. What Father Michael had conveniently put out of his mind when he dreamed up a meeting between

June and Shay was that in order to forgive, you have to remember how you were hurt in the first place. And that in order to forget, you had to accept your role in what had happened.

"If we don't want Shay to lose hope," I said, "then we'd better not lose it either."