Change of Heart Read Online Free PDF Page B

my lungs. “Hey, we need help down here!”
    The others started to wake up, cursing me out for disturbing their rest, and then falling silent with fascination. Two officers stormed into I-tier, still Velcroing their flak jackets. One of them, CO Kappaletti, was the kind of man who’d taken this job so that he’d always have someone to put down. The other, CO Smythe, had never been anything but professional toward me. Kappaletti stopped in front of my cell. “DuFresne, if you’re crying wolf—”
    But Smythe was already kneeling in front of Shay’s cell. “I think Bourne’s having a seizure.” He reached for his radio and the electronic door slid open so that other officers could enter.
    “Is he breathing?” one said.
    “Turn him over, on the count of three …”
    The EMTs arrived and wheeled Shay past my cell on a gurney—a stretcher with restraints across the shoulders, belly, and legs that was used to transport inmates like Crash who were too much trouble even cuffed at the waist and ankles; or inmates who were too sick to walk to the infirmary. I always assumed I’d leave I-tier on one of those gurneys. But now I realized that it looked a lot like the table Shay would one day be strapped onto for his lethal injection.
    The EMTs had pushed an oxygen mask over Shay’s mouth that frosted with each breath he took. His eyes had rolled up in their sockets, white and blind. “Do whatever it takes to bring him back,” CO Smythe instructed; and that was how I learned that the state will save a dying man just so that they can kill him later.

M ICHAEL
    |||||||||||||||||||||||||
    There was a great deal that I loved about the Church.
    Like the feeling I got when two hundred voices rose to the rafters during Sunday Mass in prayer. Or the way my hand still shook when I offered the host to a parishioner. I loved the double take on the face of a troubled teenager when he drooled over the 1969 Triumph Trophy motorcycle I’d restored—and then found out I was a priest; that being cool and being Catholic were not mutually exclusive.
    Even though I was clearly the junior priest at St. Catherine’s, we were one of only four parishes to serve all of Concord, New Hampshire. There never seemed to be enough hours in the day. Father Walter and I would alternate officiating at Mass or hearing confession; sometimes we’d be asked to drop in and teach a class at the parochial school one town over. There were always parishioners to visit who were ill or troubled or lonely; there were always rosaries to be said. But I looked forward to even the humblest act—sweeping the vestibule, or rinsing the vessels from the Eucharist in the sacrarium so that no drop of Precious Blood wound up in the Concord sewers.
    I didn’t have an office at St. Catherine’s. Father Walter did, but then he’d been at the parish so long that he seemed as much a part of it as the rosewood pews and the velveteen drapes at the altar. Although he kept telling me he’d getaround to clearing out a spot for me in one of the old storage rooms, he tended to nap after lunch, and who was I to wake up a man in his seventies and tell him to get a move on? After a while, I gave up asking and instead set a small desk up inside a broom closet. Today, I was supposed to be writing a homily—if I could get it down to seven minutes, I knew the older members of the congregation wouldn’t fall asleep—but instead, my mind kept straying to one of our youngest members. Hannah Smythe was the first baby I baptized at St. Catherine’s. Now, just one year later, the infant had been hospitalized repeatedly. Without warning, her throat would simply close, and her frantic parents would rush her to the ER for intubation, where the vicious cycle would start all over again. I offered up a quick prayer to God to lead the doctors to cure Hannah. I was just finishing up with the sign of the cross when a small, silver-haired lady approached my desk. “Father Michael?”
    “Mary