Shay, for what it was worth, was staring at her as if she had just handed him the moon. 'But you think... you think I'll be able to donate my heart to her?'
'Yes,' she said. 'Maybe.'
Yes. Maybe. Mixed signals, that's what she was giving him. As opposed to my message: God. Jesus. One true course.
She knocked on the window, in just as big a hurry to get out of the conference room as she'd been to enter it. As an officer buzzed open the door, I grasped her upper arm. 'Don't get his hopes up,' I whispered.
She raised a brow. 'Don't cut them down.'
The door closed behind Maggie Bloom, and I watched her walk away through the oblong window in the conference room. In the faint reflection, I could see Shay watching, too. 'I like her,' he announced.
'Well,' I sighed. 'Good.'
'Did you ever notice how sometimes it's a mirror, and sometimes it's glass?'
It took me a moment to realize that he was talking about the reflection.
'It's the way the light hits,' I explained.
'There's light inside a man of light,' Shay murmured. 'It can light up the whole world.' He met my gaze. 'So, what were you saying is impossible?'
My grandmother had been so fervently Catholic that she was on the committee of women who would come to scrub down the church, sometimes taking me along. I'd sit in the back, setting up a traffic jam of
Matchbox cars on the kneeler. I'd watch her rub Murphy Oil Soap into the scarred wooden pews and sweep down the aisle with a broom; and on Sunday when we went to Mass she'd look around-from the entryway to the arched ceilings to the flickering candles-and nod with satisfaction. On the other hand, my grandfather never went to church.
Instead, on Sundays, he fished. In the summer, he went out fly-fishing for bass; in the winter, he cut a hole in the ice and waited, drinking from his thermos of coffee, with steam wreathing his head like a halo.
It wasn't until I was twelve that I was allowed to skip a Sunday
Mass to tag along with my grandfather. My grandmother sent me off with a bag lunch and an old baseball hat to keep the sun off my face.
'Maybe you can talk some sense into him,' she said. I had heard enough sermons to understand what happened to those who didn't truly believe, so I climbed into his little aluminum boat and waited until we had stopped underneath the reaching arm of a willow tree along the shoreline. He took out a fly rod and handed it to me, and then started casting with his own ancient bamboo rod.
One two three, one two three. There was a rhythm to fly-fishing, like a ballroom dance. I waited until we had both unspooled the long tongue of line over the lake, until the flies that my grandfather laboriously tied in his basement had lightly come to rest on the surface.
'Grandpa,' I asked, 'you don't want to go to hell, do you?'
'Aw, Christ,' he had answered. 'Did your grandmother put you up to this?'
'No,' I lied. 'I just don't understand why you never go to Mass with us.'
'I have my own Mass,' he had said. 'I don't need some guy in a collar and a dress telling me what I should and shouldn't believe.'
Maybe if I'd been older, or smarter, I would have left it alone at that. Instead, I squinted into the sun, up at my grandfather. 'But you got married by a priest.'
He sighed. 'Yeah, and I even went to parochial school, like you.'
'What made you stop?'
Before he could answer, I felt that tug on my line that always felt like Christmas, the moment before you opened the biggest box under the tree. I reeled in, fighting the whistle and snap of the fish on the other end, certain that I'd never caught anything quite like this before.
Finally, it burst out of the water, as if it were being born again.
'A salmon!' my grandfather crowed. 'Ten pounds, easy... imagine all the ladders it had to climb to make its way back here from the ocean to spawn.' He held the fish aloft, grinning. 'I haven't seen one in this lake since the sixties!'
I looked down at the fish, still on my line, thrashing in splendor. It was silver and gold and crimson all at once.
My grandfather held the salmon, stilling it enough to unhook the fly, and set the fish back into the lake. We watched the flag of its tail, the ruddy back as it swam away. 'Who says that if you want to find
God on a Sunday morning, you ought to be looking in church?' my grandfather murmured.
For a long time after that, I believed my grandfather had it right:
God was in the details. But that was before I learned that the requirements of a true believer included Mass every Sunday and holy day of obligation, receiving the Eucharist, reconciliation once a year, giving money to the poor, observing Lent. Or in other words-just because you say you're Catholic, if you don't walk the walk, you're not.
Back when I was at seminary, I imagined I heard my grandfather's voice: I thought God was supposed to love you unconditionally Those sure sound like a lot of conditions to me.
The truth is, I stopped listening.
By the time I left the prison, the crowd outside had doubled in size.
There were the ill, the feeble, the old and the hungry, but there was also a small cadre of nuns from a convent up in Maine, and a choir singing 'Holy Holy Holy.' I was surprised at how hearsay about a socalled miracle could produce so many converts, so quickly.
'You see?' I heard a woman say, pointing to me. 'Even Father Michael's here.'
She was a parishioner, and her son had cystic fibrosis. He was here, too, in a wheelchair being pushed by his father.
'Is it true, then?' the man asked. 'Can this guy really work miracles?' aGod can,' I said, heading that question off at the pass. I put my hand on the boy's forehead. 'Dear St. John of God, patron saint of those who are ill, I ask for your intercession that the Lord will have mercy on this child and return him to health. I ask this in Jesus's name.'
Not Shay Bourne's, I thought.
'Amen,' the parents murmured.
'If you'll excuse me,' I said, turning away.
The chances of Shay Bourne being Jesus were about as likely as me being God. These people, these falsely faithful, didn't know Shay
Bourne-they'd never met Shay Bourne. They were imposing the face of our Savior on a man with a tendency to talk to himself; a man whose hands had been covered with the blood of two innocent people. They were confusing showmanship and inexplicable events with divinity. A miracle was a miracle only until it could be proved otherwise.
I started pushing through the mob, moving in the opposite direction, away from the prison gates, a man on a mission. Maggie Bloom wasn't the only one who could do research.
Maggie
In retrospect, it would have been much simpler to place a phone call to a medical professional who might lecture me on the ins and outs of organ donation.
