Jodi Picoult - Change of heart

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 teamsome 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.

I stared at him. "I don't believe in God. But I do believe in Shay."

"Thank you for your time, Lucius," the priest said softly, and he walked down the tier.

He may have been a priest, but he was looking for his miracles in the wrong place. That day with the gum, for example. I had seen the coverage on the news-it was reported that Shay had somehow taken one tiny rectangle of Bazooka gum and multiplied it. But ask someone who'd been there-like me, or Crash, or Texas-and you'd know there weren't suddenly seven pieces of bubble gum. It was more like this: when the piece was fished underneath our cell doors, instead of taking as much as we could, we made do with less instead.

The gum was magically replicated. But we-the blatantly greedybalanced the needs of the other seven guys and in that instant found them just as worthy as our own.

Which, if you asked me, was an even greater miracle.

The Holy Father has an entire office at the Vatican devoted to analyzing alleged miracles and passing judgment on their authenticity. They scrutinize statues and busts, scrape Crisco out of the corners of supposedly bleeding eyes, track scented oil on walls that emit the smell of roses. I was nowhere as experienced as those priests, but then again, there was a crowd of nearly five hundred people outside the state prison calling Shay Bourne a savior-and I wasn't going to let people give up on Jesus that easily.

To that end, I was now ensconced in a lab on the Dartmouth campus, with a graduate student named Ahmed who was trying to explain to me the results of the test he'd run on the soil sample taken from the vicinity of the pipes that ran into I-tier. "The reason the prison couldn't get a conclusive explanation is because they were looking in the pipes, not outside them," Ahmed said. "So the water tested positive for something that looked like alcohol, but only in certain pipes. And you'll never guess what's growing near those pipes: rye."

"Rye? Like the grain?"

"Yeah," Ahmed said. "Which accounts for the concentration of ergot into the water. It's a fungal disease of rye. I'm not sure what brings it on-I'm not a botanist-but I bet it had something to do with the amount of rain we've had, and there was a hairline crack in the piping they found when they first investigated, which accounts for the transmission in the first place. Ergot was the first kind of chemical warfare. The Assyrians used it in the seventh century B.C. to poison water supplies." He smiled. "I double-majored in chemistry and ancient history."

"It's deadly?"

Ahmed shrugged. "In repeated doses. But at first, it's a hallucinogen that's related to LSD."

"So, the prisoners on I-tier might not have been drunk..." I said carefully.

"Right," Ahmed replied. "Just tripping."

I turned over the vial with the soil sample. "You think the water got contaminated?"

"That would be my bet."

But Shay Bourne, in prison, would not have been able to know that there was a fungus growing near the pipes that led into I-tier, would he?

I suddenly remembered something else: the following morning, those same inmates on I-tier had ingested the same water and had not acted out of the ordinary. "So how did it get uncontaminated?"

"Now that," Ahmed said, "I haven't quite figured out."

"There are a number of reasons that an advanced AIDS patient with a particularly low CD4 count and high viral load might suddenly appear to get better," Dr. Perego said. An autoimmune disease specialist at