He wasn't yelling, he wasn't out of control. But he wasn't in control, either. He brought his hands up to his neck, started scratching at it as the chains jangled down his chest. 'These words,' he said, 'they're cutting my throat.'
'Judge,' I said immediately, alert to a rapidly approaching meltdown.
'Can we take a recess?'
Shay started rocking back and forth.
'Fifteen minutes,' Judge Haig said, and the U.S. marshals approached to remand Shay into custody. Panicking, Shay cowered and raised his arms in defense. And we all watched as the chains he was wearing-the ones that had secured him at the wrists and the ankles and the waist, the ones that had jangled throughout his testimony-fell to the floor with a clatter, as if they'd been no more substantial than smoke.
'Religion often gets in the way of God.'
- BONO, AT THE NATIONAL PRAYER BREAKFAST, FEBRUARY 2, 2006
Maggie
Shay stood, his arms akimbo, looking just as surprised to be unshackled as we were to see him that way. There was a collective moment of disbelief, and then chaos exploded in the courtroom. Screams rang out from the gallery. One marshal dragged the judge off the bench and into his chambers while the other drew his weapon, yelling for Shay to put his hands up. Shay froze, only to have the marshal tackle and handcuff him.
'Stop!' Father Michael cried behind me. 'He doesn't know what's happening!'
As the marshal pushed Shay's head against the wooden floor, he looked up at us, terrified.
I whipped around to face the priest. 'What the hell's going on? He's gone from being Jesus to being Houdini?'
'This is the kind of thing he does,' Father Michael said. Was it me, or did I hear a note of satisfaction in his voice? 'I tried to tell you.'
'Let me tell you,' I shot back. 'Our friend Shay just earned himself a one-way ticket to the lethal injection gurney, unless one of us can convince him to say something to Judge Haig to explain what just happened.'
'You're his lawyer,' Michael said.
'You're his advisor.'
'Remember how I told you Shay won't talk to me?'
I rolled my eyes. 'Could we just pretend we're not in seventh grade anymore, and do our jobs?'
He let his gaze slide away, and immediately I knew that whatever else this conversation had to hold, it wasn't going to be pleasant.
By now, the courtroom had emptied. I had to get to Shay and put a solitary, cohesive thought in his head, one that I hoped he could retain long enough to take to the witness stand. I didn't have time for Father
Michael's confessions right now.
'I was on the jury that convicted Shay,' the priest said.
My mother had a trick she'd employed since I was a teenager-if I said something that made her want to (a) scream, (b) whack me, or (c) both, she would count to ten, her lips moving silently, before she responded.
I could feel my mouth rounding out the syllables of the numbers, and with some dismay I realized that finally, I had become my mother. 'Is that all?' I asked.
'Isn't that enough!'
'Just making sure.' My mind raced. I could get into a lot of trouble for not telling Greenleaf that fact in advance. Then again, I hadn't known in advance. 'Is there a reason you waited so long to mention this?'
'Don't ask, don't tell,' he said, parroting my own words. 'At first I thought I'd just help Shay understand redemption, and then I'd tell you the truth. But Shay wound up teaching me about redemption, and you said my testimony was critical, and I thought maybe it was better you didn't know. I thought it wouldn't screw up the trial quite as much...'
I held up my hand, stopping him. 'Do you support it?' I asked. 'The death penalty?'
The priest hesitated before he spoke. 'I used to.'
I would have to tell Greenleaf. Even if Father Michael's testimony was stricken from the record, though, you couldn't make the judge forget hearing it; the damage had been done. Right now, however, I had more important things to do. 'I have to go.'
In the holding cell, I found Shay still distraught, his eyes squinched shut. 'Shay?' I said. 'It's Maggie. Look at me.'
'I can't,' he cried. 'Turn the volume down.'
The room was quiet; there was no radio playing, no sound at all. I glanced at the marshal, who shrugged. 'Shay,' I commanded, coming up to the bars of the cell. 'Open your goddamn eyes.'
One eye squinted open a crack, then the other.
'Tell me how you did it.'
'Did what?'
'Your little magic act in there.'
He shook his head. 'I didn't do anything.'
'You managed to get out of handcuffs,' I said. 'What did you do, make a key and hide it in a seam?'
'I don't have a key. I didn't unlock them.'
Well, technically, this was true. What I'd seen were the still-fastened cuffs, clattering to the floor, while Shay's hands were somehow free of them. He certainly could have unfastened the locks and snapped them shut again-but it would have been noisy, something we all would have heard.
And we hadn't.
'I didn't do anything,' Shay repeated.
I'd read somewhere of magicians who learned to dislocate their shoulders to get out of straitjackets; maybe this had been Shay's secret.
Maybe he could double-joint his thumbs or resettle the bones of his fingers and slide out of the metal fittings without anyone being the wiser.
'Okay. Whatever.' I exhaled heavily. 'Here's the thing, Shay. I don't know if you're a magician, or a messiah. I don't know very much about salvation, or miracles, or any of those things that Father Michael and Ian
Fletcher talked about. I don't even know if I believe in God. But what I do know is the law. And right now, everyone in that courtroom thinks you're a raving lunatic. You have to pull it together.' I glanced at Shay and saw him looking at me with utter focus, his eyes clear and shrewd. 'You have one chance,' I said slowly. 'One chance to speak to the man who will decide how you die, and whether Claire Nealon gets to live. So what are you going to tell him?'
Once, when I was in sixth grade, I let the most popular girl in the school cheat off my paper during a math test. 'You know what,' she said after ward, 'you're not totally uncool.' She let me sit with her at the lunch table and for one glorious Saturday, I was invited to the mall with her
Gordian knot of friends, who spritzed perfume onto their wrists at department stores and tried on expensive skinny jeans that didn't even come in my size. (I told them I had my period, and I didn't ever shop for jeans when I was bloated-a total lie, and yet one of the girls offered to show me how to make myself throw up in the bathroom to take off that extra five.) It was when I was getting a makeover at the Clinique counter, with no intent of buying any of the makeup, that I looked in a mirror and realized I did not like the girl staring back. To be the person they wanted me to be, I'd lost myself.
Watching Shay take the witness stand again, I thought about that sixthgrade thrill I'd gotten when, for a moment, I'd been part of the in-crowd;
I'd been popular. The gallery, hushed, waited for another outburst-but
Shay was mild-mannered and calm, quiet to a fault. He was triple-chained, and had to hobble to the stand, where he didn't look at anyone and simply waited for me to address him with the question we had practiced. I wondered whether remaking him in the image of a viable plaintiff said more about who he was willing to be, or whom I had become.
'Shay,' I said. 'What do you want to tell this court?'
He looked up at the ceiling, as if he were waiting for the words to drift down like snow. 'The Spirit of the Lord
