never linked them. I wondered whether I had been naive, or whether, even subconsciously, I'd been trying to protect my daughter.
It took all my strength to lift my gaze to the priest's. 'What makes you think I would want a part of that man still walking around on this earth, much less inside my child?'
'June-please, just listen to me. I'm Shay's spiritual advisor. I talk to him. And I think you should talk to him, too.'
'Why? Because it rubs your conscience the wrong way to give sympathy to a murderer? Because you can't sleep at night?'
'Because I think a good person can do bad things. Because
God forgives, and I can't do any less.'
Do you know how, when you are on the verge of a breakdown, the world pounds in your ears-a rush of blood, of consequence?
Do you know how it feels when the truth cuts your tongue to ribbons, and still you have to speak it? 'Nothing he says to me could make any difference.'
'You're absolutely right,' Father Michael said. 'But what you say to him might.'
There was one variable that the priest had left out of this equation:
I owed Shay Bourne nothing. It already felt like a second, searing death to watch the broadcasts each night, to hear the voices of supporters camping out near the prison, who brought their sick children and their dying partners along to be healed. You fools, I wanted to shout to them. Don't you know he's conned you, just like he conned me? Don't you know that he killed my love, my little girl?
'Name one person John Wayne Gacy killed,' I demanded.
' I... I don't know,' Father Michael said.
'Jeffrey Dahmer?'
He shook his head.
'But you remember their names, don't you?'
He got out of his chair and walked toward me slowly. 'June, people can change.'
My mouth twisted. 'Yeah. Like a mild-mannered, homeless carpenter who becomes a psychopath?'
Or a silver-haired fairy of a girl whose chest, in a heartbeat, blooms with a peony of blood. Or a mother who turns into a woman she never imagined being: bitter, empty, broken.
I knew why this priest wanted me to meet with Shay Bourne. I knew what Jesus had said: Don't pay back in kind, pay back in kindness.
If someone does wrong to you, do right by them.
I'll tell you this: Jesus never buried his own child.
I turned away, because I didn't want to give him the satisfaction of seeing me cry, but he put his arm around me and led me to a chair. He handed me a tissue. And then his voice, a murmur, clotted into individual words.
'Dear St. Felicity, patron saint of those who've suffered the death of a child, I ask for your intercession that the Lord will help this woman find peace...'
With more strength than I knew I had, I shoved him away.
'Don't you dare,' I said, my voice trembling. 'Don't you pray for me. Because if God's listening now, he's about eleven years too late.' I walked toward the refrigerator, where the only decoration was a picture of Kurt and Elizabeth, held up by a magnet Claire had made in kindergarten. I had fingered the photo so often that the edges had rounded; the color had bled onto my hands. 'When it happened, everyone said that Kurt and Elizabeth were at peace.
That they'd gone someplace better. But you know what? They didn't go anywhere. They were taken. I was robbed.'
'Don't blame God for that, June,' Father Michael said. 'He didn't take your husband and your daughter.'
'No,' I said flatly. 'That was Shay Bourne.' I stared up at him coldly. 'I'd like you to leave now.'
I walked him to the door, because I didn't want him saying another word to Claire-who twisted around on the couch to see what was going on but must have picked up enough nonverbal cues from my stiff spine to know better than to make a peep. At the threshold, Father Michael paused. 'It may not be when we want, or how we want, but eventually God evens the score,' he said. 'You don't have to be the one to seek revenge.'
I stared at him. 'It's not revenge,' I said. 'It's justice.'
After the priest left, I was so cold that I could not stop shivering. I put on a sweater and then another, and wrapped a blanket around myself, but there's no way of warming up a body whose insides have turned to stone.
Shay Bourne wanted to donate his heart to Claire so that she'd live.
What kind of mother would I be if I let that happen?
And what kind of mother would I be if I turned him down?
Father Michael said Shay Bourne wanted to balance the scales: give me one daughter's life because he had taken another's. But
Claire wouldn't replace Elizabeth; I should have had them both.
And yet, this was the simplest of equations: You can have one, or you can have neither. What do you choose?
I was the one who hated Bourne-Claire had never met him. If
I did not take the heart, was I making that choice because of what
I thought was best for Claire... or what I could withstand myself?
I imagined Dr. Wu removing Bourne's heart from an Igloo cooler. There it was, a withered nut, a crystal black as coal. Put one drop of poison into the purest water, and what happens to the rest?
If I didn't take Bourne's heart, Claire would most likely die.
If I did, it would be like saying I could somehow be compensated for the death of my husband and daughter. And I couldn't- not ever.
I believe a good person can do bad things, Father Michael had said.
Like make the wrong decision for the right reasons. Sign your daughter's life away, because she can't have a murderer's heart.
Forgive me, Claire, I thought, and suddenly I wasn't cold anymore.
I was burning, seared by the tears on my cheeks.
I couldn't trust Shay Bourne's sudden altruistic turnaround; and maybe that meant he had won: I had gone just as bitter and rotten as he was. But that only made me more certain that I had the stamina to tell him, face-to-face, what balancing the scales really meant. It wasn't giving me a heart for Claire; it wasn't offering a future that might ease the weight of the past. It was knowing that Shay Bourne badly wanted something, and that this time, I'd be the one to take his dream away.
Maggie
Stunned, I hung up the phone and stared at the receiver again. I was tempted to*69 the call, just to make sure it hadn't been some kind of prank.
Well, maybe miracles did happen.
But before I could mull over this change of events, I heard footsteps heading toward my desk. Father Michael turned the corner, looking like he'd just been through Dante's Inferno. 'June Nealon wants nothing to do with Shay.'
'That's interesting,' I said, 'since June Nealon just got off the phone with me, agreeing to a restorative justice meeting.'
Father Michael blanched. 'You've got to call her back. This isn't a good idea.'
'You're the one who came up with it.'
'That was before I spoke to her. If she goes to that meeting, it's not because she wants to hear what Shay has to say. It's because she wants to run him through before the state finishes him off.'
'Did you really think that whatever Shay has to say to her is going to be any less painful than what she says to him?'
'I don't know... I thought that maybe if they saw each other...'
He sank down into a chair in front of my desk. 'I don't know what I'm doing. I guess there are just some things
