Change of Heart Read Free Page A

stories, like Elizabeth Nealon’s parents had?”
    The attorney walked toward us. “You’ve heard that Shay Bourne has bipolar disorder, which was going untreated. You heard that he suffers from learning disabilities, so tasks that are simple for us become unbelievably frustrating for him. You’ve heard how hard it is for him to communicate his thoughts. These all contributed to Shay making poor choices—which you agreed with, beyond a reasonable doubt.” He looked at each of us in turn. “Shay Bourne made poor choices,” the attorney said. “But don’t compound that by making one of your own.”

June
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    It was up to the jury. Again.
    It’s a strange thing, putting justice in the hands of twelve strangers. I had spent most of the sentencing phase of the trial watching their faces. There were a few mothers; I would catch their eye and smile at them when I could. A few men who looked like maybe they’d been in the military. And the boy, the one who barely looked old enough to shave, much less make the right decision.
    I wanted to sit down with each and every one of them. I wanted to show them the note Kurt had written me after our first official date. I wanted them to touch the soft cotton cap that Elizabeth had worn home from the hospital as a newborn. I wanted to play them the answering machine message that still had their voices on it, the one I couldn’t bear to erase, even though it felt like I was being cut to ribbons every time I heard it. I wanted to take them on a field trip to see Elizabeth’s bedroom, with its Tinker Bell night-light and dress-up clothes; I wanted them to bury their faces in Kurt’s pillow, breathe him in. I wanted them to live my life, because that was the only way they’d really know what had been lost.
    That night after the closing arguments, I nursed Claire in the middle of the night and then fell asleep with her inmy arms. But I dreamed that she was upstairs, distant, and crying. I climbed the stairs to the nursery, the one that still smelled of virgin wood and drying paint, and opened the door. “I’m coming,” I said, and I crossed the threshold only to realize that the room had never been built, that I had no baby, that I was falling through the air.

M ICHAEL
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    Only certain people wind up on a jury for a trial like this. Mothers who have kids to take care of, the accountants with deadlines, doctors attending conferences—they all get excused. What’s left are retired folks, housewives, disabled folks, and students like me, because none of us have to be any particular place at any particular time.
    Ted, our foreman, was an older man who reminded me of my grandfather. Not in the way he looked or even the way he spoke, but because of the gift he had of making us measure up to a task. My grandfather had been like that, too—you wanted to be your best around him, not because he demanded it, but because there was nothing like that grin when you knew you’d impressed him.
    My grandfather was the reason I’d been picked for this jury. Even though I had no personal experience with murder, I knew what it was like to lose someone you loved. You didn’t get past something like that, you got
through
it—and for that simple reason alone, I understood more about June Nealon than she ever would have guessed. This past winter, four years after my grandfather’s death, someone had broken into my dorm and stolen my computer, my bike, and the only picture I had of my grandfather and me together. The thief left behind the sterling silver frame, but when I’dreported the theft to the cops, it was the loss of that photograph that hurt the most.
    Ted waited for Maureen to reapply her lipstick, for Jack to go to the bathroom, for everyone to take a moment for themselves before we settled down to the task of acting as a unified body. “Well,” he said, flattening his hands on the conference table. “I suppose we should just get down to