by Jodi Picoult
I got up and began to walk around the little room. “The book you loaned me—it got me thinking.”
“And that’s a bad thing?”
“Shay Bourne has said things, verbatim, that I read last night in the Gospel of Thomas.”
“Bourne? He’s read Thomas? I thought Maggie said he—”
“—has no religious training to speak of, and a minimal education.”
“It’s not like the Gideons leave the Gospel of Thomas in hotel rooms,” Rabbi Bloom said. “Where would he have—”
“Exactly.”
He steepled his fingers. “Huh.”
I placed the book he’d loaned me on his desk. “What would you do if you began to second-guess everything you believed?”
Rabbi Bloom leaned forward and riffled through his Rolodex. “I would ask more questions,” he said. He scribbled down something on a Post-it and handed it to me.
Ian Fletcher, I read. 603-555-1367.
Lucius
The night Shay had his second seizure, I was awake, gathering ink that I planned to use to give myself another tattoo. If I do say so myself, I’m rather proud of my homemade tattoos. I had five—my rationale being that my body, up until three weeks ago, wasn’t worth much more than being a canvas for my art; plus the threat of getting AIDS from a dirty needle was obviously a moot point. On my left ankle was a clock, with the hands marking the moment of Adam’s death. On my left shoulder was an angel, and below it an African tribal design. On my right leg was a bull, because I was a Taurus; and swimming beside it was a fish, for Adam, who was a Pisces. I had grand plans for this sixth one, which I planned to put right on my chest: the word BELIEVE, in Gothic letters. I’d practiced the art in reverse multiple times in pencil and pen, until I felt sure that I could replicate it with my tattoo gun as I worked in the mirror.
My first gun had been confiscated by the COs, like Crash’s hype kit. It had taken me six months to amass the parts for the new one. Making ink was hard to do, and harder to get away with—which was why I had chosen to work on this during the deadest hours of the night. I had lit a plastic spoon on fire, keeping the flame small so I could catch the smoke in a plastic bag. It stank horribly, and just as I was getting certain the COs would literally get wind of it and shut down my operation, Shay Bourne collapsed next door.
This time, his seizure had been different. He’d screamed—so loud that he woke up the whole pod, so loud that the finest dust of plaster drifted down from the ceilings of our cells. To be honest, Shay was such a mess when he was wheeled off I-tier that none of us were sure whether or not he’d be returning—which is why I was stunned to see him being led back to his cell the very next day.
“Po-lice,” Joey Kunz yelled, just in time for me to hide the pieces of my tattoo gun underneath the mattress. The officers locked Shay into his cell, and as soon as the door to I-tier shut behind them, I asked Shay how he was feeling.
“My head hurts,” he said. “I have to go to sleep.”
With Crash still off the tier after the hype kit transgression, things were quieter. Calloway slept most days and stayed up nights with his bird; Texas and Pogie played virtual poker; Joey was listening to his soaps. I waited an extra few minutes to make sure the officers were otherwise occupied out in the control booth and then I reached underneath my mattress again.
I had unraveled a guitar string to its central core, a makeshift needle. This was inserted into a pen whose ink cartridge had been removed—and a small piece of its tip sawed off and attached to the other end of the needle, which was attached to the motor shaft of a cassette player. The pen was taped to a toothbrush bent into an L shape, which let you hold the contraption more easily. You could adjust the needle length by sliding the pen casing back and forth; all that was left was plugging in the AC adapter of the cassette player, and I had a functional tattoo gun again.
The soot I’d captured the previous night had been mixed with a few drops of shampoo to liquefy it. I stood in front of the stainless steel panel that served as a mirror, and scrutinized my chest. Then, gritting my teeth against the pain, I turned on the gun. The needle moved back and forth in an elliptical orbit, piercing me hundreds of times per minute.
There it was, the letter B.
“Lucius?” Shay’s voice drifted into my house.
“I’m sort of busy, Shay.”
“What’s that noise?”
“None of your business.” I lifted it to my skin again, felt the needle working against me, a thousand arrows striking.
“Lucius? I can still hear that noise.”
I sighed. “It’s a tattoo gun, Shay, all right? I’m giving myself a tattoo.”
There was a hesitation. “Will you give me one?”
I had done this for multiple inmates when I was housed on different tiers—ones that had a bit more freedom than I-tier, which offered twenty-three rollicking hours of lockdown. “I can’t. I can’t reach you.”
“That’s okay,” Shay said. “I can reach you.”
“Yeah, whatever,” I said. I squinted back into the mirror and set the tattoo gun against my skin. Holding my breath, I carefully formed the curves and flourishes around the letters E and L.
I thought I heard Shay whimpering when I started on the letter I, and surely he cried out when I tattooed the V. My gun must not have been helping his headache any. Shrugging off his moans, I stepped closer to the mirror and surveyed my handiwork.
God, it was gorgeous. The letters moved with every breath I took; even the angry red swelling of my skin couldn’t take away from the clean lines of the letters.
“B-believe,” Shay stammered.
I turned around, as if I could see him through the wall between our cells. “What did you say?”
“It’s what you said,” Shay corrected. “I read it right, didn’t I?”
I had not told anyone of my plans for my sixth tattoo. I hadn’t shared the prototype artwork. I knew for a fact that Shay, from where he stood, could not have seen into my cell as I worked.
Fumbling behind the brick that served as my safe, I took out the shank that I used as a portable mirror. I stepped up to the front of my cell and angled it so that I could see Shay’s beaming face in the reflection. “How did you know what I was writing?”
Shay smiled wider, and then raised his fist. He unfolded his fingers, one at a time.
His palm was red and inflamed, and printed across it, in Gothic script, was the same exact tattoo I’d just given myself.
MICHAEL
Shay paced his cell in figure eights. “Did you see him?” he asked, wild-eyed.
I sank down on the stool I’d dragged in from the control booth. I was sluggish today—not only was my head buzzing with questions about what I’d read, but I was also—for the first time in a year—not officiating at this evening’s midnight Mass. “See who?” I replied, distracted.
“Sully. The new guy. Next door.”
I glanced into the other cell. Lucius DuFresne was still on Shay’s left; on his right, the formerly empty cell now had someone occupying it. Sully, however, wasn’t there. He was in the rec yard, repeatedly running full tilt across the little square yard and leaping up against the far wall, hands splayed, as if hitting it hard enough meant he’d go right through the metal.
“They’re going to kill me,” Shay said.
“Maggie’s working on writing a motion at this very—”
“Not the state,” Shay said. “One of them.”
I did not know anything about prison politics, but there was a fine line between Shay’s paranoia and what might pass for the truth. Shay was receiving more attention than any other inmate at the prison, as a result of his lawsuit and the media frenzy. There was every chance he might be targeted by the general prison population.
Behind me, CO Smythe passed in his flak jacket, carrying a broom and some cleaning supplies. Once a week, the inmates were required to clean their own cells. It was one-at-a-time, supervised cleaning: after an inmate came i
n from rec, the supplies would be waiting for him in his cell, and a CO would stand guard at the doorway until the work was finished—close by, because even Windex could become a weapon in here. I watched the empty cell door open, so that Smythe could leave the spray bottles and the toweling and the broom; then he walked to the far end of the tier to get the new inmate from the rec yard. “I’ll talk to the warden. I’ll make sure you’re protected,” I told Shay, which seemed to mollify him. “So,” I said, changing the subject, “what do you like to read?”
“What, you’re Oprah now? We’re having a book club?”
“No.”
“Good, because I’m not reading the Bible.”
“I know that,” I said, seizing this inroad. “Why not?”
“It’s lies.” Shay waved a hand, a dismissal.
“What do you read that isn’t a lie?”
“I don’t,” he replied. “The words get all knotted up. I have to stare at a page for a year before I can make sense of it.”
“‘There’s light inside a person of light,’” I quoted, “‘and it shines on the whole world.’”
Shay hesitated. “Can you see it, too?” He held his hands up in front of his face, scrutinizing his fingertips. “The light from the television—the stuff that went into me—it’s still there. It glows, at night.”
I sighed. “It’s from the Gospel of Thomas.”
“No, I’m pretty sure it came from the television . . .”
“The words, Shay. The ones I just said. They came from a gospel I was reading last night. And so does a lot of stuff you’ve been saying to me.”
His eyes met mine. “What do you know,” he said softly, and I couldn’t tell if it was a statement or a question.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “That’s why I’m here.”
“That’s why we’re all here,” Shay said.
If you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you. It was one of Jesus’s sayings in the Gospel of Thomas; it was one of the first things Shay Bourne had ever told me, when he was explaining why he needed to donate his heart. Could it really be this simple? Could salvation be not a passive acceptance, like I’d been led to believe, but an active pursuit?
Maybe it was saying the rosary, for me, and receiving Holy Communion, and serving God. Maybe for Maggie’s father, it was meeting with a bunch of die-hard congregants who wouldn’t let the lack of a physical temple dissuade them from prayer. Maybe for Maggie, it was mending whatever kept her focused on her faults instead of her strengths.
Maybe for Shay, maybe it was offering his heart—literally and figuratively—to the mother who’d lost hers years ago because of him.
Then again, Shay Bourne was a killer; his sentences curled like a puppy chasing its tail; he thought he had something phosphorescent coursing through his veins because a television had zapped him in the middle of the night. He did not sound messianic—just delusional.
Shay looked at me. “You should go,” he said, but then his attention was distracted by the sound of the rec yard door being opened. Officer Smythe led the new inmate back onto I-tier.
He was an enormous tower of muscle with a swastika tattooed on his scalp. His hair, sprouting out from a buzz cut, grew over it like moss.
The inmate’s cell door was closed, and his handcuffs removed. “You know the drill, Sully,” the officer said. He stood in the doorway as Sully slowly picked up the spray bottle and washed down his sink. I heard the squeak of paper toweling on metal.
“Hey, Father—you watch the game last night?” CO Smythe said, and then he rolled his eyes. “Sully, what are you doing? You don’t need to sweep the—”
Suddenly the broom in Sully’s hands was no longer a broom but a broken spear that he jutted into the officer’s throat. Smythe grabbed his neck, gurgling. His eyes rolled back in his head; he stumbled toward Shay’s cell. As he fell beside me, I clasped my hands over the wound and screamed for help.
The tier came to life. The inmates were all clamoring to see what had happened; CO Whitaker was suddenly there and hauling me to my feet, taking my place as another officer started CPR. Four more officers ran past me with pepper spray and shot it into Sully’s face. He was dragged out of the tier shrieking as the closest physician arrived—a psychiatrist I’d seen around the prison. But by now, Smythe had stopped moving.
No one seemed to notice that I was there; there was far too much happening, too much at stake. The psychiatrist tried to find a pulse in Smythe’s neck, but his hand came away slick with blood. He lifted the CO’s wrist and, after a moment, shook his head. “He’s gone.”
The tier had gone absolutely silent; the inmates were all staring in shock at the body in front of them. Blood had stopped flowing from Smythe’s neck; he was perfectly still. To my right, I could see an argument going on in the control booth—the EMTs who’d arrived too late and were trying to gain admission to the tier. They were buzzed in, still shrugging into their flak jackets, and knelt beside Smythe’s body, repeating the same ineffective tests that the psychiatrist had.
Behind me, I heard weeping.
I turned around to find Shay crouched on the floor of his cell. His face was streaked with tears and blood; his hand slipped beneath his cell door so that his fingers brushed Smythe’s.
“You here for last rites?” one of the medics asked, and for the first time, everyone seemed to realize I was still present.
“I, uh—”
“What’s he doing here?” CO Whitaker barked.
“Who the hell is he?” another officer said. “I don’t even work this tier.”
“I can go,” I said. “I’ll . . . just go.” I glanced once more at Shay, who was curled into a ball, whispering. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought he was praying.
As the two EMTs got ready to move the body onto a stretcher, I prayed over Smythe. “In the Name of God the Father Almighty who created you . . . in the Name of Jesus Christ who redeemed you; in the Name of the Holy Spirit who sanctifies you. May your rest be this day in peace, and your dwelling place in the Paradise of God. Amen.”
I made the sign of the cross and started to get to my feet.
“On three,” the first EMT said.
The second one nodded, his hands on the slain officer’s ankles. “One, two . . . holy shit,” he cried as the dead man began to struggle against him.
“One of the proofs of the immortality of the soul is that myriads have believed it. They also believed the world was flat.”
—MARK TWAIN, NOTEBOOK
June
Claire would be cut in half, her sternum buzzed open with a saw and held open with a metal spreader so that she could be made, literally, heartless—and this was not what terrified me the most.
No, what scared me to death was the idea of cellular memory.
Dr. Wu had said that there was no scientific evidence that the personality traits of heart donors transferred to their recipients. But science could only go so far, I figured. I’d read the books and done the research, and I didn’t see why it was such a stretch to think that living tissue might have the ability to remember. After all, how many of us had tried to forget something traumatic . . . only to find it printed on the back of our eyelids, tattooed on our tongues?
There were dozens of cases. The baby with a clubfoot who drowned and gave his heart to another infant, who began to drag her left leg. The rapper who started playing classical music, and then learned his donor had died clutching a violin case. The cattle rancher who received the heart of a sixteen-year-old vegetarian, and could not eat meat again without getting violently ill.
Then there was the twenty-year-old organ donor who wrote music in his spare time. A year after he died, his parents found a CD of a love song he’d recorded, about losing his heart to a girl named Andi. His recipient, a twenty-year-old girl, was named Andrea. When the boy’s parents played the song for her, she could complete the chorus, without ever having heard it.
Most of these s
tories were benign—a strange coincidence, an intriguing twist. Except for one: a little boy received the heart of another boy who’d been murdered. He began to have nightmares about the man who killed his donor—with details about the clothing the man wore, how he’d abducted the boy, where the murder weapon had been stashed. Using this evidence, the police caught the killer.
If Claire received Shay Bourne’s heart, it would be bad enough if she were to harbor thoughts of murder. But what would absolutely wreck me was if, with that heart in her, she had to feel her own father and sister being killed.
In that case, better to have no heart at all.
Maggie
Today, I decided, I was going to do everything right. It was Sunday, and I didn’t have to go to work. Instead, I got up and unearthed my One Minute Workout video (which was not nearly as slacker as it sounds—you could add minutes to your own liking, and no one was here to notice if I chose the four-minute option over the more grueling eight-minute one). I picked Focus on Abs, instead of the easier Upper Arm. I sorted my recyclables and flossed and shaved my legs in the shower. Downstairs, I cleaned Oliver’s cage and let him have the run of the living room while I made myself scrambled egg whites for breakfast.
With wheat germ.
Well. I lasted forty-seven minutes, anyway, before I had to break out the Oreos that I hid in the box with my skinny jeans, a last-ditch attempt at utter guilt before I ripped open the package and indulged.
I gave Oliver an Oreo, too, and was starting my third cookie when the doorbell rang.
As soon as I saw the bright pink T-shirt of the man standing on the porch, with the words JOYOUS FOR JESUS printed boldly across it, I knew this was my punishment for falling off the wagon into the snack foods.
