Jodi Picoult - Change of heart

I held up my hand, stopping him. "Do you support it?" I asked. "The death penalty?"

The priest hesitated before he spoke. "I used to."

I would have to tell Greenleaf. Even if Father Michael's testimony was stricken from the record, though, you couldn't make the judge forget hearing it; the damage had been done. Right now, however, I had more important things to do. "I have to go."

In the holding cell, I found Shay still distraught, his eyes squinched shut. "Shay?" I said. "It's Maggie. Look at me."

"I can't," he cried. "Turn the volume down."

The room was quiet; there was no radio playing, no sound at all. I glanced at the marshal, who shrugged. "Shay," I commanded, coming up to the bars of the cell. "Open your goddamn eyes."

One eye squinted open a crack, then the other.

"Tell me how you did it."

"Did what?"

"Your little magic act in there."

He shook his head. "I didn't do anything."

"You managed to get out of handcuffs," I said. "What did you do, make a key and hide it in a seam?"

"I don't have a key. I didn't unlock them."

Well, technically, this was true. What I'd seen were the still-fastened cuffs, clattering to the floor, while Shay's hands were somehow free of them. He certainly could have unfastened the locks and snapped them shut again-but it would have been noisy, something we all would have heard.

And we hadn't.

"I didn't do anything," Shay repeated.

I'd read somewhere of magicians who learned to dislocate their shoulders to get out of straitjackets; maybe this had been Shay's secret.

Maybe he could double-joint his thumbs or resettle the bones of his fingers and slide out of the metal fittings without anyone being the wiser.

"Okay. Whatever." I exhaled heavily. "Here's the thing, Shay. I don't know if you're a magician, or a messiah. I don't know very much about salvation, or miracles, or any of those things that Father Michael and Ian

Fletcher talked about. I don't even know if I believe in God. But what I do know is the law. And right now, everyone in that courtroom thinks you're a raving lunatic. You have to pull it together." I glanced at Shay and saw him looking at me with utter focus, his eyes clear and shrewd. "You have one chance," I said slowly. "One chance to speak to the man who will decide how you die, and whether Claire Nealon gets to live. So what are you going to tell him?"

Once, when I was in sixth grade, I let the most popular girl in the school cheat off my paper during a math test. "You know what," she said after ward, "you're not totally uncool." She let me sit with her at the lunch table and for one glorious Saturday, I was invited to the mall with her

Gordian knot of friends, who spritzed perfume onto their wrists at department stores and tried on expensive skinny jeans that didn't even come in my size. (I told them I had my period, and I didn't ever shop for jeans when I was bloated-a total lie, and yet one of the girls offered to show me how to make myself throw up in the bathroom to take off that extra five.) It was when I was getting a makeover at the Clinique counter, with no intent of buying any of the makeup, that I looked in a mirror and realized I did not like the girl staring back. To be the person they wanted me to be, I'd lost myself.

Watching Shay take the witness stand again, I thought about that sixthgrade thrill I'd gotten when, for a moment, I'd been part of the in-crowd;

I'd been popular. The gallery, hushed, waited for another outburst-but

Shay was mild-mannered and calm, quiet to a fault. He was triple-chained, and had to hobble to the stand, where he didn't look at anyone and simply waited for me to address him with the question we had practiced. I wondered whether remaking him in the image of a viable plaintiff said more about who he was willing to be, or whom I had become.

"Shay," I said. "What do you want to tell this court?"

He looked up at the ceiling, as if he were waiting for the words to drift down like snow. "The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news," he murmured.

"Amen," said a woman in the gallery.

I'll be honest, this was not quite what I had had in mind when I had told Shay he could make one final attempt to sway this court. To me, religious scripture sounded just as wacky and zealous as the diatribe Shay had given on the nature of organized religion. But maybe Shay was smarter than I was, because his quote made the judge purse his lips. "Is that from the Bible, Mr. Bourne?"

"I don't know," Shay replied. "I don't remember where it comes from."

A tiny paper airplane torpedoed over my shoulder to land in my lap.

I opened it up, read Father Michael's hastily scrawled note. "Yes, Judge," I said quickly. "It is."

"Marshal," Judge Haig said, "bring me the Bible." He began to thumb through the onionskin pages. "Do you happen to know where, Ms.

Bloom?"

I didn't know when or if Shay Bourne had been reading scripture.

This quote could have come from the priest; it could have come from

God; it could have been the only line he knew in the whole Old Testament.

But somehow, he'd piqued the interest of Judge Haig, who was no longer dismissing my client outright, but instead tracing the pages of the

Bible as if it were written in Braille.

I stood, armed with Father Michael's citation. "It's in Isaiah, Your

Honor," I said.

During the lunch recess, I drove to my office. Not because I had such an inviolable work ethic (although technically I had sixteen other cases going at the same time as Shay's, my boss had given me his blessing to put them on the back burner of the largest metaphorical stove ever), but because I just needed to get away from the trial completely. The secretary at the ACLU office blinked when I walked through the door. "Aren't you supposed to be-"

"Yes," I snapped, and I walked through the maze of filing cabinets to my desk.

I didn't know how Shay's outburst would affect the judge. I didn't know if I'd already lost this case, before the defense had even presented its witnesses. I did know that I hadn't slept well in three weeks and was flat out of rabbit food for Oliver, and I was having a really bad hair day. I rubbed my hands down my face, and then realized I'd probably smeared my mascara.

With a sigh, I glanced at the mountain of paperwork on my desk that had been steadily growing without me there to act as clearinghouse.

There was an appeal that had been filed in the Supreme Court by the attorneys of a skinhead who'd written the word towelhead in white paint on the driveway of his employer, a Pakistani convenience store owner who'd fired him for being drunk on the job; some research about why the words under God had been added to the Pledge of Allegiance in i954 during the

McCarthy era; and a stack of mail equally balanced between desperate souls who wanted me to fight on their behalf and right-wing conservatives who berated the ACLU for making it criminal to be a white churchgoing

Christian.

One letter sifted through my hands and dropped onto my lap-a plain envelope printed with the address of the New Hampshire State

Prison, the Office of the Warden. I opened it and found inside a pressed white sheet of paper, still bearing its watermark.

It was an invitation to attend the execution of Isaiah Bourne. The guest list included the attorney general, the governor, the lawyer who originally prosecuted Shay's case, me, Father Michael, and several other names I didn't recognize. By law, there had to be a certain number of people present for an execution from both the inmate's and the victim's sides. In this, it was a bit like organizing a wedding. And just like a wedding, there was a number to call to RSVP