by Jodi Picoult
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 so-called 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?”
“God 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 patient’s 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 fiancée 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.”
Ill. 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 two-donut 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 (XXIII). 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 Shay’s 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 for surgery, and twenty-one had levels that would indicate awareness. 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. M&M’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 M&M, 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 team—some 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.
