Change Of Heart Part 12

Everything I knew about the death penalty I had learned at the ACLU. Prior to working there, I hadn't given the death penalty much thought, beyond when someone was executed and the media made a huge story out of it. Now I knew the names of those who were killed. I heard about their last-minute appeals. I knew that, after death, some inmates were found to be innocent.

Lethal injection was supposed to be like putting a dog to sleep-a drowsiness overcame you, and then you just never woke up. No pain, no stress. It was a c.o.c.ktail of three drugs: Sodium Pentothal, a sedative to put the inmate to sleep; Pavulon, to paralyze the muscular system and stop breathing; and pota.s.sium chloride, to stop the heart. The Sodium Pentothal was ultra-short-acting-which meant that you could recover quickly from its effects. It also meant that a subject might have feeling in his nerves, yet be just sedated enough to be unable to communicate or move.

The British medical journal the Lancet Lancet published a 2005 study of the toxicology reports of forty-nine executed inmates in four U.S. states; forty-three of the inmates had a level of anesthesia lower than required for surgery, and twenty-one had levels that would indicate awareness. Anesthesiologists say that if a person were conscious at the time pota.s.sium chloride is administered, it would feel like boiling oil in the veins. An inmate might feel as if he were being burned alive from the inside, but be unable to move or speak because of the muscle paralysis and minimal sedation caused by the other two drugs. The Supreme Court had even had its doubts: although they still ruled that capital punishment was const.i.tutional, they'd halted executions of two inmates on a narrower issue: whether the excessive pain caused by lethal injection was a civil rights infraction that could be argued in a lower court. published a 2005 study of the toxicology reports of forty-nine executed inmates in four U.S. states; forty-three of the inmates had a level of anesthesia lower than required for surgery, and twenty-one had levels that would indicate awareness. Anesthesiologists say that if a person were conscious at the time pota.s.sium chloride is administered, it would feel like boiling oil in the veins. An inmate might feel as if he were being burned alive from the inside, but be unable to move or speak because of the muscle paralysis and minimal sedation caused by the other two drugs. The Supreme Court had even had its doubts: although they still ruled that capital punishment was const.i.tutional, they'd halted executions of two inmates on a narrower issue: whether the excessive pain caused by lethal injection was a civil rights infraction that could be argued in a lower court.

Or-to put it simply-lethal injection might not be as humane as everyone wanted to believe.

630:5 (XIV). The commissioner of corrections or his designee shall determine the substance or substances to be used and the procedures to be used in any execution, provided, however, that if for any reason the commissioner finds it to be impractical to carry out the punishment of death by administration of the required lethal substance or substances, the sentence of death may be carried out by hanging under the provisions of law for the death penalty by hanging in effect on December 31, 1986.

Oliver settled on my lap as I read the words again.

Shay didn't have to be executed by lethal injection, if I could make the commissioner-or a court-find it impractical. If you coupled that with the RLUIPA-the law that said a prisoner's religious freedoms had to be protected in prison-and if I could prove that part of Shay's belief system for redemption included organ donation, then lethal injection was was impractical. impractical.

In which case, Shay would be hanged.

And-here was the real real miracle-according to Dr. Gallagher, that meant Shay Bourne miracle-according to Dr. Gallagher, that meant Shay Bourne could could donate his heart. donate his heart.

Lucius

The day the priest returned, I was working on pigments. My favorite substance was tea-it made a stain you could vary in intensity from an almost white to a yellowish brown. M&M's were vibrant, but they were the hardest to work with-you had to moisten a Q-tip and rub it over the surface of the M&M, you couldn't just soak off the pigment like I was doing this morning with Skittles.

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 b.u.t.ton 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 gra.s.s 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 G.o.d 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 team-some 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 G.o.d?"

"No," I joked. "That would be Crash."

"Lucius," the priest asked, "do you you believe Shay is G.o.d?" believe Shay is G.o.d?"

"You need to back up, Father, because I don't believe in G.o.d. 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 Pa.s.sion. 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 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 what you believed became more important than the fact you believed became more important than the fact that that you believed. you believed.

I stared at him. "I don't believe in G.o.d. 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 greedy-balanced 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.

MICHAEL.

The Holy Father has an entire office at the Vatican devoted to a.n.a.lyzing alleged miracles and pa.s.sing judgment on their authenticity. They scrutinize statues and busts, sc.r.a.pe 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 in the pipes, not the pipes, not outside 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." 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 a.s.syrians 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 Dartmouth-Hitchc.o.c.k Medical Center, he also served as the doctor for HIV/AIDS patients at the state prison and knew all about Lucius and his recovery. He didn't have time for a formal talk, but was perfectly willing to chat if I wanted to walk with him from his office to a meeting at the other end of the hospital-as long as I realized that he couldn't violate doctor-patient confidentiality. "If a patient is h.o.a.rding meds, for example, and suddenly decides to start taking them, sores will disappear and health will improve. Although we draw blood every three months from AIDS patients, sometimes we'll get a guy who refuses to have his blood drawn-and again, what looks like sudden improvement is actually a slow turn for the better."

"Alma, the nurse at the prison, told me Lucius hasn't had his blood drawn in over six months," I said.

"Which means we can't be quite sure what his recent viral count was." We had reached the conference room. Doctors in white coats milled into the room, taking their seats. "I'm not sure what you wanted to hear," Dr. Perego said, smiling ruefully. "That he's special ... or that he's not."

"I'm not sure either," I admitted, and I shook his hand. "Thanks for your time."

The doctor slipped into the meeting, and I started back down the hall toward the parking garage. I was waiting at the elevator, grinning down at a baby in a stroller with a patch over her right eye, when I felt a hand on my shoulder. Dr. Perego was standing there. "I'm glad I caught you," he said. "Have you got a moment?"

I watched the baby's mother push the stroller onto the yawning elevator. "Sure."

"This is what I didn't tell you," Dr. Perego said. "And you didn't hear it from me."

I nodded, understanding.

"HIV causes cognitive impairment-a permanent loss of memory and concentration. We can literally see this on an MRI, and DuFresne's brain scan showed irreparable damage when he first entered the state prison. However, another MRI brain scan was done on him yesterday-and it shows a reversal of that atrophy." He looked at me, waiting for this to sink in. "There's no physical evidence of dementia anymore."

"What could cause that?"

Dr. Perego shook his head. "Absolutely nothing," he admitted.

The second time I went to meet with Shay Bourne, he was lying on his bunk, asleep. Not wanting to disturb him, I started to back away, but he spoke to me without opening his eyes. "I'm awake," he said. "Are you?"

"Last time I checked," I answered.

He sat up, swinging his legs over the side of his bunk. "Wow. I dreamed that I was struck by lightning, and all of a sudden I had the power to locate anyone in the world, anytime. So the government cut a deal with me-find bin Laden, and you're free."

"I used to dream that I had a watch, and turning the hands could take you backward in time," I said. "I always wanted to be a pirate, or a Viking."

"Sounds pretty bloodthirsty for a priest."

"Well, I wasn't born with a collar on."

He looked me in the eye. "If I could turn back time, I'd go out fly-fishing with my grandfather."

I glanced up. "I used to do that with my grandfather, too."

I wondered how two boys-like Shay and me-could begin our lives at the same point and somehow take turns that would lead us to be such different men. "My grandfather's been gone a long time, and I still miss him," I admitted.

"I never met mine," Shay said. "But I must have had one, right?"

I looked at him quizzically. What kind of life had he suffered, to have to craft memories from his imagination? "Where did you grow up, Shay?" I asked.

"The light," Shay replied, ignoring my question. "How does a fish know where it is? I mean, things shift around on the floor of the ocean, right? So if you come back and everything's changed, how can it really be the place you were before?"

The door to the tier buzzed, and one of the officers came down the catwalk, carrying a metal stool. "Here you go, Father," he said, settling it in front of Shay's cell door. "Just in case you want to stay awhile."

I recognized him as the man who had sought me out the last time I'd been here, talking to Lucius. His baby daughter had been critically ill; he credited Shay with her recovery. I thanked him, but waited until he'd left to talk to Shay again.

"Did you ever feel like that fish?"

Shay looked at me as if I were the one who couldn't follow a linear conversation. "What fish?" he said. fish?" he said.

"Like you can't find your way back home?"

I knew where I was heading with this topic-straight to true salvation-but Shay took us off course. "I had a bunch of houses, but only one home."

He'd been in the foster care system; I remembered that much from the trial. "Which place was that?"

"The one where my sister was with me. I haven't seen her since I was sixteen. Since I got sent to prison."

I remembered he'd been sent to a juvenile detention center for arson, but I hadn't remembered anything about a sister.

"Why didn't she come to your trial?" I asked, and realized too late that I had made a grave mistake-that there was no reason for me to know that, unless I had been there.

But Shay didn't notice. "I told her to stay away. I didn't want her to tell anyone what I'd done." He hesitated. "I want to talk to her."

"Your sister?"

"No. She won't listen. The other one. She'll hear me, after I die. Every time her daughter speaks." Shay looked up at me. "You know how you said you'd ask her if she wants the heart? What if I asked her myself?"

Getting June Nealon to come visit Shay in prison would be like moving Mt. Everest to Columbus, Ohio. "I don't know if it will work ..."

But then again, maybe seeing June face-to-face would make Shay see the difference between personal forgiveness and divine forgiveness. Maybe putting the heart of a killer into the chest of a child would show-literally-how good might blossom from bad. And the beat of Claire's pulse would bring June more peace than any prayer I could offer.

Maybe Shay did did know more about redemption than I. know more about redemption than I.

He was standing in front of the cinder-block wall now, trailing his fingertips over the cement, as if he could read the history of the men who'd lived there before him.

"I'll try," I said.

There was a part of me that knew I should tell Maggie Bloom that I had been on the jury that convicted Shay Bourne. It was one thing to keep the truth from Shay; it was another to compromise whatever legal case Maggie was weaving together. On the other hand, it was up to me to make sure that Shay found peace with G.o.d before his death. The minute I told Maggie about my past involvement with Shay, I knew she'd tell me to get lost, and would find him another spiritual advisor the judge couldn't find fault with. I had prayed long and hard about this, and for now, I was keeping my secret. G.o.d wanted me to help Shay, or so I told myself, because it kept me from admitting that I I wanted to help Shay, too, after failing him the first time. wanted to help Shay, too, after failing him the first time.

The ACLU office was above a printing shop and smelled like fresh ink and toner. It was filled with plants in various stages of dying, and filing cabinets took up most of the floor s.p.a.ce. A paralegal sat at a reception desk, typing so furiously that I almost expected her computer screen to detonate. "How can I help," she said, not bothering to look up.

"I'm here to see Maggie Bloom."

The paralegal lifted her right hand, still typing with her left, and hooked a thumb overhead and to the left. I wound down the hallway, stepping over boxes of files and stacks of newspapers, and found Maggie sitting at her desk, scribbling on a legal pad. When she saw me, she smiled. "Listen," she said, as if we were old friends. "I have some fantastic news. I think Shay can be hanged." Then she blanched. "I didn't mean fantastic news, really. I meant ... well, you know what I meant."