Read Online Change of Heart by Jodi Picoult - Free Book Online Page B

systematically. They’d check the seams of the walls, the vents, the plumbing. They’d roll deodorant sticks all the way out to make sure nothing was hidden underneath. They’d shake containers of powder to hear what might be inside. They’d sniff shampoo bottles, open envelopes, and take out the letters inside. They’d rip off your bedsheets and run their hands over the mattresses, looking for tears or ripped seams.
    Meanwhile, you were forced to watch.
    I could not see what was going on in Calloway’s cell, but I had a pretty good idea based on his reactions. He rolled his eyes as his blanket was checked for unraveled threads; his jaw tensed when a postage stamp was peeled off an envelope, revealing the black tar heroin underneath. But when his bookshelf was inspected, Calloway flinched. I looked for the small bulge in his breast pocket that would have been the bird and realized that Batman the Robin was somewhere inside that cell.
    One of the officers held up the copy of
The Stand
. The pages were riffled, the spine snapped, the book tossed against the cell wall. “What’s this?” an officer asked, focusing not on the bird that had been whipped across the cell but on the baby-blue tissues that fluttered down over his boots.
    “Nothing,” Calloway said, but the officer wasn’t about to take his word for it. He picked through the tissues, and when he didn’t find anything, he confiscated the book with its carved hidey-hole.
    Whitaker said something about a write-up, but Calloway wasn’t listening. I could not remember ever seeing him quite so unraveled. As soon as he was released back into his cell, he ran to the rear corner where the bird had been flung.
    The sound that Calloway Reece made was primordial; but then maybe that was always the case when a grown man with no heart started to cry.
    There was a crash, and a sickening crunch. A whirlwind of destruction as Calloway fought back against what couldn’t be fixed. Finally spent, Calloway sank down to the floor of his cell, cradling the dead bird. “Motherfucker. Mother
fucker
.”
    “Reece,” Shay interrupted, “I want my prize.”
    My head snapped around. Surely Shay wasn’t stupid enough to antagonize Calloway.
    “What?” Calloway breathed. “What did you say?”
    “My prize. I won the chess game.”
    “Not
now
,” I hissed.
    “Yes, now,” Shay said. “A deal’s a deal.”
    In here, you were only as good as your word, and Calloway—with his Aryan Brotherhood sensibilities—would have known that better than anyone else. “You better make sure you’re always behind those bars,” Calloway vowed, “because the next time I get the chance, I’m going to mess you up so bad your own mama wouldn’t know you.” But even as he threatened Shay, Calloway gently wrapped the dead bird in a tissue and attached the small, slight bundle to the end of his fishing line.
    When the robin reached me, I drew it under the three-inch gap beneath the door of my cell. It still looked half cooked, its closed eye translucent blue. One wing was bent at a severe backward angle; its neck lolled sideways.
    Shay sent out his own line of string, with a weight made of a regulation comb on one end. I saw his hands gently slide the robin, wrapped in tissue, into his cell. The lights on the catwalk flickered.
    I’ve often imagined what happened next. With an artist’s eye, I like to picture Shay sitting on his bunk, cupping his palms aroundthe tiny bird. I imagine the touch of someone who loves you so much, he cannot bear to watch you sleep; and so you wake up with his hand on your heart. In the long run, though, it hardly matters how Shay did it. What matters is the result: that we all heard the piccolo trill of that robin; that Shay pushed the risen bird beneath his cell door onto the catwalk, where it hopped, like broken punctuation, toward Calloway’s outstretched hand.

June
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    If you’re a mother, you can look into the face of your grown