Jodi Picoult - Change of heart

I do not know what it was that led to Crash's change of plan-if it was knowing that the officers would storm the tier and punish him; if it was

Shay's well-timed sneeze; if it was a prayer- God bless- on the lips of a sinner like Crash. But by the time the SWAT team entered seconds later, all seven of us were sitting in our cells even though the doors were still wide open, as if we were angels, as if we had nothing to hide.

There's a flower I can see from the exercise yard. Well, I can't realiy see it-

I have to sort of hook my fingers on the ledge of the only window and spider-walk up the cement wall, but I can glimpse it then before I fall back down. It's a dandelion, which you might think is a weed, but it can be put into salads or soups. The root can be ground up and used as a coffee substitute.

The juices can get rid of warts or be used as an insect repellent. I learned all this from a Mother Earth News magazine piece that I keep wrapped around my treasures-my shank, my Q-tips, the tiny Visine bottles where I keep the ink I manufacture. I read the article every time I take my supplies out for inventory, which is daily. I keep my cache behind a loosened cinder block beneath my cot, refilling the mortar with Metamucil and toothpaste, mixed, so that the officers don't get suspicious when they toss the cell.

I never gave it much thought before I came in here, but I wish I knew more about horticulture. I wish I'd taken the time to learn what makes things grow. Hell, if I had, maybe I could have started a water melon plant from a seedling. Maybe I'd have vines hanging all over the place by now.

Adam had the green thumb in our household. I used to find him outside at the crack of dawn, rooting around in the dirt between our daylilies and sedums. The weeds shall inherit the earth, he had said.

Meek, I'd corrected. The meek shall inherit it.

No way, Adam had said, and laughed. The weeds will blow right by them.

He used to say that if you picked a dandelion, two would grow back in its place. I guess they are the botanical equivalent of the men in this prison. Take one of us off the street, and more will sprout up in his wake.

With Crash back in solitary, and Joey in the infirmary, I-tier was oddly quiet. In the wake of Joey's beating, our privileges had been suspended, so all showers and exercise yard visits were canceled for the day. Shay was pacing. Earlier, he'd been complaining that his teeth were vibrating with the air-conditioning unit; sometimes sounds got to be too much for him- usually when he was agitated. "Lucius," he said. "Did you see that priest today?"

"Yeah."

"Do you think he came for me?"

I didn't want to give him false hope. "I don't know, Shay. Maybe someone was dying on another tier and needed last rites."

"The dead aren't alive, and the living don't die."

I laughed. "Thanks for that, Yoda."

"Who's Yoda?"

He was talking crazy, the way Crash had a year ago when he'd started to peel the lead paint from the cinder blocks and eat it, hoping it would serve as a hallucinogen. "Well, if there is a heaven, I bet it's full of dandelions."

(Actually, I think heaven's full of guys who look like Wentworth Miller from Prison Break, but for right now, I was only talking landscaping.)

"Heaven's not a place."

"I didn't say it had map coordinates..."

"If it was in the sky, then birds would get there before you. If it was under the sea, fish would be first."

"Then where is it?" I asked.

"It's inside you," Shay said, "and outside, too."

If he wasn't eating the lead paint, then he'd been making hooch I didn't know about. "If this is heaven, I'll take a rain check."

"You can't wait for it, because it's already here."

"Well, you're the only one of us who got rose-colored glasses when he was booked, I guess."

Shay was silent for a while. "Lucius," he asked finally. "Why did Crash go after Joey instead of me?"

I didn't know. Crash was a convicted murderer; I had no doubt he could and would kill again if given the opportunity. Technically, both Joey and

Shay had sinned equally in Crash's code of justice; they had harmed children.

Maybe Crash figured Joey would be easier to kill. Maybe Shay had gained a modicum of respect through his miracles. Maybe he'd just gotten lucky.

Maybe even Crash thought there was something special about Shay.

"He's not any different than Joey..." Shay said.

"Teensy suggestion? Don't let Crash hear you say that."

"... and we're not any different than Crash," he finished. "You don't know what would make you do what Crash did, just like you didn't know what would make you kill Adam, until it happened."

I drew in my breath. No one in prison talked about another person's crime, even if you secretly believed they were guilty. But I had killed Adam.

It was my hand holding the gun; it was his blood on my clothes. It wasn't what had been done that was at issue for me in court; it was why.

"It's okay to not know something," Shay said. "That's what makes us human."

No matter what Mr. Philosopher Next Door thought, there were things I knew for sure: That I had been loved, once, and had loved back.

That a person could find hope in the way a weed grew. That the sum of a man's life was not where he wound up but in the details that brought him there.

That we made mistakes.

I closed my eyes, sick of the riddles, and to my surprise all I could see were dandelions-as if they had been painted on the fields of my imagination, a hundred thousand suns. And I remembered something else that makes us human: faith, the only weapon in our arsenal to battle doubt.

June

They say God won't give you any more than you can handle, but that begs a more important question: why would God let you surfer in the first place?

"No comment," I said into the phone, and I slammed down the receiver loud enough that Claire-on the couch with her iPod on-sat up and took notice. I reached beneath the table and yanked out the cord completely so that I would not have to hear the phone ring.

They had been calling all morning; they had set up camp outside my home. How does it feel to know that there are protesters outside the prison, hoping to free the man who murdered your child and your husband?

Do you think Shay Bourne's request to be an organ donor is a way to make up for what he's done?

What I thought was that nothing Shay Bourne could do or say would ever make up for the lives of Elizabeth and Kurt. I knew firsthand how well he could lie and what might come of it-this was nothing more than some publicity stunt to make everyone feel badly for him, because after a decade, who even remembered feeling badly for that police officer, that little girl?

Idid.

There are people who say that the death penalty isn't just because it takes so long to execute a man. That it's inhumane to have to wait eleven years or more for punishment. That at least for Elizabeth and Kurt, death came quickly.

Let me tell you what's wrong with that line of reasoning: it assumes that Elizabeth and Kurt were the only victims. It leaves out me; it leaves out Claire. And I can promise you that every day for the last eleven years I've thought of what I lost at the hands of

Shay Bourne. I've been anticipating his death just as long as he has.

I heard voices coming from the living room and realized that

Claire had turned on the television. A grainy photograph of Shay

Bourne filled the screen. It was the same photo that had been used in the newspapers, although Claire would not have seen those, since I'd thrown them out immediately. Bourne's hair was cut short now, and there were parenthetical lines around his mouth and fanning from the corners of his eyes, but he otherwise did not look any different.