Change of Heart Read online

  "Take care of her," I whispered to Kurt, my breath blowing a kiss against the gleaming wood. "Take care of my baby."

  As if I'd summoned her, Claire moved inside me then: a slow tumble of butterfly limbs, a memory of why I had to stay behind.

  There was a time when I prayed to saints. What I liked about them were their humble beginnings: they were human, once, and so you knew that they just got it in a way Jesus never would. They understood what it meant to have your hopes dashed or your promises broken or your feelings hurt. St. Therese was my favorite--the one who believed you could be perfectly ordinary, but that great love could somehow transport you. However, this was all a long time ago. Life has a way of pointing out, with great sweeping signs, that you are looking at the wrong things, doesn't it? It was when I started to admit to myself that I'd rather be dead that I was given a child who had to fight to stay alive.

  In the past month, Claire's arrhythmias had worsened. Her AICD was going off six times a day. I'd been told that when it fired, it felt like an electric current running through the body. It restarted your heart, but it hurt like hell. Once a month would be devastating; once a day would be debilitating. And then there was Claire's frequency.

  There were support groups for adults who had to live with AICDs; there were stories of those who preferred the risk of dying from an arrhythmia to the sure knowledge that they would be shocked by the device sooner or later. Last week, I had found Claire in her room reading the Guinness Book of World Records. "Roy Sullivan was struck by lightning seven times over thirty-six years," she'd said. "Finally, he killed himself." She lifted her shirt, staring down at the scar on her chest. "Mom," she begged, "please make them turn it off."

  I did not know how long I would be able to convince Claire to stay with me, if this was the way she had to do it.

  Claire and I both turned immediately when the hos pital door opened. We were expecting the nurse, but it was Dr. Wu. He sat down on the edge of the bed and spoke directly to Claire, as if she were my age instead of eleven. "The heart we had in mind for you had something wrong with it. The team didn't know until they got inside ... but the right ventricle is dilated. If it isn't functioning now, chances are it will only get worse by the time the heart's transplanted."

  "So ... I can't have it?" Claire asked.

  "No. When I give you a new heart, I want it to be the healthiest heart possible," the doctor explained.

  My body felt stiff. "I don't--I don't understand."

  Dr. Wu turned. "I'm sorry, June. Today's not going to be the day."

  "But it could take years to find another donor," I said. I didn't add the rest of my sentence, because I knew Wu could hear it anyway: Claire can't last that long.

  "We'll just hope for the best," he said.

  After he left, we sat in stunned silence for a few moments. Had I done this? Had the fear I'd tried to quash--the one that Claire wouldn't survive this operation--somehow bled into reality?

  Claire began to pull the cardiac monitors off her chest. "Well," she said, but I could hear the hitch in her voice as she struggled not to cry. "What a total waste of a Saturday."

  "You know," I said, forcing the words to unroll evenly, "you were named for a saint."

  "For real?"

  I nodded. "She founded a group of nuns called the Poor Clares."

  She glanced at me. "Why did you pick her?"

  Because, on the day you were born, the nurse who handed you to me shook her head and said, "Now there's a sight for sore eyes." And you were. And she is the patron saint of that very thing. And I wanted you protected, from the very first moment I spoke your name.

  "I liked the way it sounded," I lied, and I held up Claire's shirt so that she could shimmy into it.

  We would leave this hospital, maybe go get chocolate Fribbles at Friendly's and rent a movie with a happy ending. We'd take Dudley for a walk and feed him. We'd act like this was an ordinary day. And after she went to sleep, I would bury my face in my pillow and let myself feel everything I wasn't letting myself feel right now: shame over knowing that I've had five more years in Claire's company than I did with Elizabeth, guilt over being relieved this transplant did not happen, since it might just as easily kill Claire as save her.

  Claire stuffed her feet into her pink Converse high-tops. "Maybe I'll join the Poor Clares."

  "You still can't be a saint," I said. And added silently, Because I will not let you die.

  Lucius

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  Shortly after Shay brought Batman the Robin back to life, Crash Vitale lit himself on fire.

  He'd created a makeshift match the way we all do--by pulling the fluorescent bulb out of its cradle and holding the metal tines just far enough away from the socket to have the electricity arc to meet it. Stick a piece of paper in the gap, and it becomes a torch. Crash had crumpled up pages of a magazine and set them around himself in a circle. By the time Texas started screaming for help, smoke was filling the pod. The COs held the fire hose at full spray as they opened his cell door; we could hear Crash being knocked against the far wall by the stream. Dripping wet, he was strapped onto a gurney to be transported, his hair a matted mess, his eyes wild. "Hey, Green Mile," he yelled as he was wheeled off the tier, "how come you didn't save me?"

  "Because I like the bird," Shay murmured.

  I was the first one to laugh, then Texas snickered. Joey, too--but only because Crash wasn't present to shut him up.

  "Bourne," Calloway said, the first words any of us had heard from him since the bird had hopped back to his cell. "Thanks."

  There was a beat of silence. "It deserved another chance," Shay said.

  The pod door buzzed open, and this time CO Smythe walked in with the nurse, doing her evening rounds. Alma came to my cell first, holding out my card of pills. "Smells like someone had a barbecue in here and forgot to invite me," she said. She waited for me to put the pills in my mouth, take a swallow of water. "You sleep well, Lucius."

  As she left, I walked to the front of the cell. Rivulets of water ran down the cement catwalk. But instead of leaving the tier, Alma stopped in front of Calloway's cell. "Inmate Reece, are you going to let me take a look at that arm?"

  Calloway hunched over, protecting the bird he held in his hand. We all knew he was holding Batman; we all held our collective breath. What if Alma saw the bird? Would she rat him out?

  I should have known Calloway would never let that happen--he'd be offensive enough to scare her off before she got too close. But before he could speak, we heard a fluted chirp--not from Calloway's cell but from Shay's. There was an answering call--the robin looking for its own kind. "What the hell's that?" CO Smythe asked, looking around. "Where's it coming from?"

  Suddenly, a twitter rose from Joey's cell, and then a higher cheep from Pogie's. To my surprise, I even heard a tweet come from the vicinity of my own bunk. I wheeled around, tracing it to the louvers of the vent. Was there a whole colony of robins in here? Or was it Shay, a ventriloquist in addition to a magician, this time throwing his voice?

  Smythe moved down the tier, hands covering his ears as he peered at the skylight and into the shower cell to find the source of the noise. "Smythe?" an officer said over the control booth intercom. "What the hell's going on?"

  A place like this wears down everything, and tolerance is no exception. In here, coexistence passes for forgiveness. You do not learn to like something you abhor; you come to live with it. It's why we submit when we are told to strip; it's why we deign to play chess with a child molester; it's why we quit crying ourselves to sleep. You live and let live, and eventually that becomes enough.

  Which maybe explains why Calloway's muscled arm snaked through the open trap of his door, his "Anita Bryant" patch shadowing his biceps. Alma blinked, surprised.

  "I won't hurt you," she murmured, peering at the new skin growing where it had been grafted, still pink and evolving. She took a pair of latex gloves out of her pocket and snapped them on, making her h
ands just as lily-white as Calloway's. And wouldn't you know it--the moment Alma touched him, all of that crazy noise fell dead silent.

  MICHAEL

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  A priest has to say Mass every day, even if no one shows up, although this was rarely the case. In a city as large as Concord there were usually at least a handful of parishioners, already praying the rosary by the time I came out in my vestments.

  I was just at the part of the Mass where miracles occurred. "For this is my body, which will be given up for you," I said aloud, then genuflected and lifted the host.

  Next to "How the heck is one God also a Holy Trinity?" the most common question I got asked as a priest by non-Catholics was about transubstantiation: the belief that at consecration, the elements of bread and wine truly became the Body and Blood of Christ. I could see why people were baffled--if this was true, wasn't Holy Communion cannibalistic? And if a change really occurred, why couldn't you see it?

  When I went to church as a kid, long before I came back to it, I received Holy Communion like everyone else, but I didn't really give much thought to what I received. It looked, to me, like a cracker and a cup of wine ... before and after the priest consecrated it. I can tell you now that it still looks like a cracker and a cup of wine. The miracle part comes down to philo sophy. It isn't the accidents of an object that make it what it is ... it's the essential parts. We'd still be human even if we didn't have limbs or teeth or hair; but if we suddenly stopped being mammals, that wouldn't be the case. When I consecrated the host and the wine at Mass, the very substance of the elements changed; it was the other properties--the shape, the taste, the size--that remained the same. Just like John the Baptist saw a man and knew, right away, that he was looking at God; just like the wise men came upon a baby and knew He was our Savior ... every day I held what looked like crackers and wine but actually was Jesus.

  For this very reason, from this point on in the Mass, my fingers and thumb would be kept pinched together until washed after the Sacrament of the Eucharist. Not even the tiniest particle of the consecrated host could be lost; we went to great pains to make sure of this when disposing of the leftovers from Holy Communion. But just as I was thinking this, the wafer slipped out of my hand.

  I felt the way I had when, in third grade, during the Little League play-offs, I'd watched a pop fly come into my corner of left field too fast and too high--knotted with the need to catch it, sick with the knowledge that I wouldn't. Frozen, I watched the host tumble, safely, into the belly of the chalice of wine.

  "Five-second rule," I murmured, and I reached into the chalice and snagged it.

  The wine had already begun to soak into the wafer. I watched, amazed, as a jaw took shape, an ear, an eyebrow.

  Father Walter had visions. He said that the reason he became a priest in the first place was because, as an altar boy, a statue of Jesus had reached for his robe and tugged, telling him to stay the course. More recently, Mary had appeared to him in the rectory kitchen when he was frying trout, and suddenly they began leaping in the pan. Don't let a single one fall to the floor, she'd warned, and then disappeared.

  There were hundreds of priests who excelled at their calling but never received this sort of divine intercession--and yet, I didn't want to fall among their ranks. Like the teens I worked with, I understood the need for miracles--they kept reality from paralyzing you. So I stared at the wafer, hoping the wine-sketched features would solidify into a portrait of Jesus ... and instead I found myself looking at something else entirely. The shaggy dark hair that looked more like a grunge-band drummer than a priest, the nose broken while wrestling in junior high, the razor stubble. Engraved onto the surface of the host, with a printmaker's delicacy, was a picture of me.

  What is my head doing on the body of Christ? I thought as I placed the host on the paten, plum-stained and dissolving already. I lifted the chalice. "This is my blood," I said.

  June

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  When Shay Bourne was working at our house as a carpenter, he gave Elizabeth a birthday present. Made of scrap wood and crafted after hours wherever he went when he left our house, it was a small, hinged chest. He had carved it intricately, so that each face portrayed a different fairy, dressed in the trappings of the seasons. Summer had bright peony wings, and a crown made of the sun. Spring was covered in climbing vines, and a bridal train of flowers swept beneath her. Autumn wore the jewel tones of sugar maples and aspen trees, the cap of an acorn balanced on her head. And Winter skated across a frozen lake, leaving a trail of silver frost in her wake. The cover was a painted picture of the moon, rising through a field of stars with its arms outstretched toward a sun that was just out of reach.

  Elizabeth loved that box. The night that Shay gave it to her, she lined it with blankets and slept inside. When Kurt and I told her she couldn't do that again--what if the top fell on her while she was sleeping?--she turned it into a cradle for her dolls, then a toy chest. She named the fairies. Sometimes I heard her talking to them.

  After Elizabeth died, I took the box out to the yard, planning to destroy it. There I was, eight months pregnant and grieving, swinging Kurt's axe, and at the last minute, I could not do it. It was what Elizabeth had treasured; how could I stand to lose that, too? I put the box in the attic, where it remained for years.

  I could tell you I forgot about the box, but I would be lying. I knew it was there, buried behind our luggage and old toddler clothes and paintings with broken frames. When Claire was about ten, I found her trying to lug the box downstairs. "It's so pretty," she said, winded with the effort. "And no one's using it." I snapped at her and told her to go lie down and rest.

  But Claire kept asking about it, and eventually I brought the box to her room, where it sat at the end of her bed, just like it had for Elizabeth. I never told her who'd carved it. And yet sometimes, when Claire was at school, I found myself peeking inside. I wondered if Pandora, too, wished she had scrutinized the contents first--heartache, cleverly disguised as a gift.

  Lucius

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  It had been said, among those on I-tier, that I had achieved Bassmaster status when it came to fishing. My equipment was a sturdy line made from yarn I'd stored up over the years, tempered by weight--a comb, or a deck of cards, depending on what I was angling for. I was known for my ability to fish from my cell into Crash's, at the far end of the tier; and then down to the shower cell at the other end. I suppose this was why, when Shay cast out his own line, I found myself watching out of curiosity.

  It was after One Life to Live but before Oprah, the time of day when most of the guys napped. I myself was not feeling so well. The sores in my mouth made it difficult to speak; I had to keep using the toilet. The skin around my eyes, stained by Kaposi's sarcoma, had swollen to the point where I could barely see. Then suddenly, Shay's fishing line whizzed into the narrow space beneath my cell door. "Want some?" he asked.

  When we fish, it's to get something. We trade magazines; we barter food; we pay for drugs. But Shay didn't want anything, except to give. Wired to the end of his line was a piece of Bazooka bubble gum.

  It's contraband. Gum can be used as putty to build all sorts of things, and to tamper with locks. God only knew where Shay had come across this bounty--and, even more astounding, why he wouldn't just hoard it.

  I swallowed, and my throat nearly split along a fault line. "No thanks," I rasped.

  I sat up on my bunk and peeled the sheet off the plastic mattress. One of the seams had been carefully doctored by me. The thread, laced like a football, could be loosened enough for me to rummage around inside the foam padding. I jammed my fore-finger inside, scooping out my stash.

  There were the 3TC pills--Epivir--and the Sustiva. Retrovir. Lomotil for my diarrhea. All the medications that, for weeks, Alma had watched me place on my tongue and apparently swallow--when in fact they were tucked up high in the purse of my cheek.

  I had not yet ma
de up my mind whether I would use these to kill myself ... or if I'd just continue to save them instead of ingest them: a slower but still sure suicide.

  It's funny how when you are dying, you still fight for the upper hand. You want to pick the terms; you want to choose the date. You'll tell yourself anything you have to, to pretend that you're still the one in control.

  "Joey," Shay said. "Want some?" He cast again, his line arcing over the catwalk.

  "For real?" Joey asked. Most of us just pretended Joey wasn't around; it was safer for him. No one went out of their way to acknowledge him, much less offer him something as precious as a piece of gum.

  "I want some," Calloway demanded. He must have seen the bounty going by, since his cell was between Shay's and Joey's.

  "Me, too," Crash said.

  Shay waited for Joey to take the gum, and then pulled his line gently closer, until it was within reach of Calloway. "There's plenty."

  "How many pieces you got?" Crash asked.

  "Just the one."

  Now, you've seen a piece of Bazooka gum. Maybe you can split it with a friend. But to divvy up one single piece among seven greedy men?

  Shay's fishing line whipped to the left, past my cell en route to Crash's. "Take some and pass it on," Shay said.

  "Maybe I want the whole thing."

  "Maybe you do."

  "Fuck," Crash said. "I'm taking it all."

  "If that's what you need," Shay replied.

  I stood up, unsteady, and crouched down as Shay's fishing line reached Pogie's cell. "Have some," Shay offered.

  "But Crash took the whole piece--"

  "Have some."

  I could hear paper being unwrapped, the fullness of Pogie speaking around the bounty softening in his mouth. "I ain't had chewing gum since 2001."

  By now, I could smell it. The pinkness, the sugar. I began to salivate.

  "Oh, man," Texas breathed, and then everyone chewed in silence, except for me.