The Jodi Picoult Collection #4

by Jodi Picoult

  “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 Buy . . . 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 re
wards; 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.

  144, 10-7. 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 m
onitors 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 relieved 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?”