Jodi Picoult - Change of heart

The officer smiled. "Too bad."

The inner door buzzed, and we entered the prison. "It's quiet in here," I remarked.

"That's because it's a good day." He handed me a flak jacket and goggles and waited for me to put them on. For one brief moment, I panicked-what if a man's jacket like this didn't zip shut on me? How embarrassing would that be? But there were Velcro straps and it wasn't an issue, and as soon as I was outfitted, the door to a long tier opened.

"Have fun," the officer said, and that was when I realized I was supposed to go in alone.

Well. I wasn't going to convince Shay Bourne I was brave enough to save his life if I couldn't muster the courage to walk through that door.

There were whoops and catcalls. Leave it to me to find my only appreciative audience in the maximum-security tier of the state prison.

"Baby, you here for me?" one guy said, and another pulled down his scrubs so that I could see his boxer shorts, as if I'd been waiting for that kind of peep show all my life. I kept my eyes focused on the priest who was standing outside one of the cells.

I should have introduced myself. I should have explained why I had lied my way into this prison. But I was so flustered that nothing came out the way it should have. "Shay Bourne?" I said. "I know a way that you can donate your organs."

The priest frowned at me. "Who are you?"

"His lawyer."

He turned to Shay. "I thought you said you didn't have a lawyer."

Shay tilted his head. He looked at me as if he were sifting through the grains of my thoughts, separating the wheat from the chaff. "Let her talk," he said.

My streak of bravery widened after that: leaving the priest with Shay, I went back to the officers and demanded a private attorney-client conference room. I explained that legally, they had to provide one and that due to the nature of our conversation, the priest should be allowed into the meeting. Then the priest and I were taken into a small cubicle from one side, while Shay was escorted through a different entrance by two officers.

When the door was closed, he backed up to it, slipping his hands through the trap to have his handcuffs removed.

"All right," the priest said. "What's going on?"

I ignored him and faced Shay. "My name is Maggie Bloom. I'm an attorney for the ACLU, and I think I know a way to save you from being executed."

"Thanks," he said, "but that's not what I'm looking for."

I stared at him. "What?"

"I don't need you to save all of me. Only my heart."

" I... I don't understand," I said slowly.

"What Shay means," the priest said, "is that he's resigned to his execution.

He just wants to be an organ donor, afterward."

"Who are you, exactly?" I asked.

"Father Michael Wright."

"And you're his spiritual advisor?"

"Yes."

"Since when?"

"Since ten minutes before you became his lawyer," the priest said.

I turned back to Shay. "Tell me what you want."

"To give my heart to Claire Nealon."

Who the hell was Claire Nealon? "Does she want your heart?"

I looked at Shay, and then I looked at Michael, and I realized that I had just asked the one question no one had considered up till this point.

"I don't know if she wants it," Shay said, "but she needs it."

"Well, has anyone talked to her?" I turned to Father Michael. "Isn't that your job?"

"Look," the priest said, "the state has to execute him by lethal injection.

And if that happens, organ donation isn't viable."

"Not necessarily," I said slowly.

A lawyer can't care more about the case than the client does. If I couldn't convince Shay to enter a courtroom hoping for his life to be spared, then it would be foolish for me to take this on. However, if his mission to donate his heart dovetailed with mine-to strike down the death penalty-then why not use the same loophole law to get what we both wanted? I could fight for him to die on his own terms-donate his organs-and in the process, raise enough awareness about the death penalty to make more people take a stand against it.

I glanced up at my new client and smiled.

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."