Jodi Picoult - Change of heart
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- Название:Change of heart
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Change of heart: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация
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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 shir," 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 stories 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 Olivers 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.
"If you're not gone in the next ten seconds, I'm calling 911," I said.
He grinned at me, a big platinum orthodontically enhanced grin.
"I'm not a stranger," he said. "I'm a friend you haven't met yet."
I rolled my eyes. "Why don't we just cut to the chase-you give me the pamphlets, I politely refuse to talk to you, and then I close the door and throw them in the trash."
He held out his hand. "I'm Tom."
"You're leaving," I corrected.
"I used to be bitter, too. I'd go to work in the mornings and come home to an empty house and eat half a can of soup and wonder why I had even been put on this earth. I thought I had no one, but myself-"
"And then you offered Jesus the rest of your soup," I finished. "Look,
I'm an atheist."
"It's not too late to find your faith."
"What you really mean is that it's not too late for me to find your faith,"
I answered, scooping up Oliver as he made a mad dash for the open door.
"You know what I believe? That religion served its historical purpose-it was a set of laws to live by, before we had a justice system. But even when it starts out with the best of intentions, things get screwed up, don't they? A group bands together because they believe the same things, and then somehow that gets perverted so that anyone who doesn't believe those things is wrong. Honestly, even if there was a religion founded on the principle of doing good for other people, or helping them with their personal rights, like I do every day, I wouldn't join... because it would still be a religion"
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