Jodi Picoult - Change of heart

Fake-Shay off the pod as part of their training, the real Shay was entering

I-tier again. For a moment, they hesitated at the door, gazing at one another.

Shay stared at his faux counterpart, until Officer Whitaker had to drag him through the door of I-tier, and even then, he craned his neck, trying to see where his future was heading.

In the middle of the night, the officers came for Shay. He was banging his head against the walls of his cell, speaking in a river of gibberish. Usually, I would have heard all of this-I was often the first to know that Shay was upset-but I had slept through it. I woke up when the officers arrived in their goggles and shields, swarming over him like a clot of black cockroaches.

"Where are you taking him?" I yelled, but the words sliced my throat to ribbons. I thought of the run-through and wondered if it was time for the real thing.

One of the officers turned to me-a nice one, but in that instant I could not grasp his name, although I had seen him every week for the past six years. "It's okay, Lucius," he said. "We're just taking him to an observation cell, so he doesn't hurt himself."

When they left, I lay down on my bunk and pressed my palm against my forehead. Fever: it was a school of fish swimming through my veins.

Once before, Adam had cheated on me. I found a note in his pocket when I went to take his shirts to the dry cleaner. Gary, and a phone number.

When I asked him about it, he said it had only been one night, after a show at the gallery where he worked. Gary was one of the artists, a man who created miniature cities out of plaster of Paris. New York was currently on display. He told me about the art-deco detail on the top of the Chrysler

Building; the individual leaves that were hand-fastened to the trees on

Park Avenue. I imagined Adam standing with Gary, their feet planted in

Central Park, their arms around each other, monstrous as Godzilla.

It was a mistake, Adam had said. It was just so exciting, for a minute, to know someone else was interested.

I could not imagine how people would not be interested in Adam, with his pale green eyes, his mocha skin. I saw heads turn all the time, gay and straight, when we walked down the street.

It felt all wrong, he said, because it wasn't you.

I had been naive enough to believe then that you could take something toxic and poisonous, and contain it so that you'd never be burned by it again. You'd think, after all that happened later with Adam, I had learned my lesson. But things like jealousy, rage, and infidelity-they don't disappear.

They lie in wait, like a cobra, to strike you again when you least expect it.

I looked down at my hands, at the dark blotches of Kaposi's sarcoma that had already begun to blend into one another, turning my skin as dark as Adam's, as if my punishment were to reinvent myself in his image.

"Please don't do this," I whispered. But I was begging to stop something that had already started. I was praying, although I couldn't remember to whom.

Maggie

After court had adjourned for the weekend, I took a trip to the ladies' room. I was sitting in a stall when suddenly a microphone snaked underneath the metal wall from the cubicle beside mine. "I'm Ella Wyndhammer from FOX News," a woman said. "I wonder if you have a comment about the fact that the White House has given a formal statement about the Bourne trial and the separation of church and state?"

I hadn't been aware that the White House had given a formal statement; there was a part of me that shivered with a thrill to know that we'd attracted that much attention. Then I considered what the statement most likely had been, and how it probably wouldn't help my case at all. And then I remembered that I was in the bathroom.

"Yeah, I've got a comment," I said, and flushed.

Because I didn't want to be ambushed by Ella Wyndhammer or any of the other hundred reporters crawling over the steps of the courthouse like lichen, I retreated into a foxhole-okay, an attorney-client conference room-and locked the door. I took out a legal pad and began to write my closing for Monday, hoping that by the time I finished, the reporters would have moved onto a fresher kill.

It was dark when I slipped on my heels again and packed away my notes. The lights had been turned off in the courthouse; distantly, I could hear a custodian buffing the floors. I walked through the lobby, past the dormant metal detectors, took a deep breath, and opened the door.

The majority of the media had packed up for the night. In the dis tance, though, I could see one tenacious reporter holding his microphone.

He called out my name.

I forged past him. "No comment," I muttered, and then I realized he wasn't a reporter, and he wasn't holding a microphone.

"It's about time," Christian said, and he handed me the rose.

"You're his spiritual advisor," Warden Coyne said when he phoned me at three in the morning. "Go give him some advice."

I had tried to explain to the warden that Shay and I weren't quite on speaking terms, but he hung up before I got the chance. Instead, with a sigh, I dragged myself out of bed and rode to the prison. Instead of taking me to I-tier, however, the CO led me elsewhere. "He's been moved," the officer explained.

"Why? Did someone hurt him again?"

"Nah, he was doing a good job of that on his own," he said, and as we stopped in front of Shay's cell, I understood.

Bruises mottled most of his face. His knuckles were scraped raw. A trickle of blood ran down his left temple. He was chained at the wrists and ankles and belly, even though he was inside the cell. "Why haven't you called a doctor?" I demanded.

"He's been here three times," the CO said. "Our boy, here, keeps ripping off the bandages. That's why we had to cuff him."

"If I promise you that he'll stop doing whatever he's doing-"

"Slamming his head into the wall?"

"Right. If I give you my word, will you take off the handcuffs?" I turned to Shay, who was studiously avoiding me. "Shay?" I said. "How does that sound?"

He didn't react one way or another, and I had no idea how I was going to convince Shay to stop harming himself, but the CO motioned him toward the cell door and removed the cuffs from his wrists and ankles. The belly chain, however, stayed on. Uust in case," he said, and left.

"Shay," I said. "Why are you doing this?"

"Get the fuck away from me."

"I know you're scared. And I know you're angry," I said. "I don't blame you."

"Then I guess something's changed. Because you sure did, once.

You, and eleven other people." Shay took a step forward. "What was it like, in that room? Did you sit around talking about what kind of monster would do those horrible things? Did you ever think that you hadn't gotten the whole story?"

"Then why didn't you tell it?" I burst out. "You gave us nothing,

Shay. We had the prosecution's explanation of what had happened; we heard from June. But you didn't even stand up and ask us for a lenient sentence."

"Who would believe what I had to say, over the word of a dead cop?" he said. "My own lawyer didn't. He kept talking about how we ought to use my troubled childhood to get me off-not my story of what happened. He said I didn't look like someone the jury would trust. He didn't care about me; he just wanted to get his five seconds on the news at night. He had a strategy. Well, you know what his strategy was? First he told the jury I didn't do it. Then it comes time for sentencing and he says: 'Okay, he did it, but here's why you shouldn't kill him for it.' You might as well admit that pleading not guilty in the first place was a lie."

I stared at him; stunned. It had never occurred to me during the capital murder trial that all this might be whirling around in Shay's head; that the reason he did not get up and beg for clemency during sentencing was because in order to do that, it felt like he'd also be admitting to the crime. Now that I looked back on it, it had felt like the defense had changed their tune between the penalty phase and the sentencing phase of the trial. It had made it harder to believe anything they said.