by Jerome Gold
Sonia was the next to arrive. Like Walter, she was small. But where he was wiry, she was bony, maybe even undernourished. She was assigned to Cami, but Cami was on her weekend.
On Sonia’s first day with us, she sat in the living room alone. Other kids looked at her, but didn’t speak to her. Nor did she speak to them. It was only when she went outside to play basketball that I could see anything aside from numbness on her face. When she came back inside, her face went blank again.
After watching her for a couple of hours, I suggested to Jan that we not wait for Cami to come back, that I go ahead and do Sonia’s MAYSI. Jan agreed. She had been watching her too. The MAYSI was a set of questions, the answers to which, if given truthfully, provided us a snapshot of the kid’s emotions. Our practice was to give each new kid a MAYSI as soon as possible after he arrived. Although the institution required us to administer it within the first month, we tried to do it the first week: the days immediately following a kid’s arrival carried with them the greatest possibility of suicide.
After supper, I asked Sonia to come into the staff office with me. I had her sit where she could see the computer monitor. I left the door open so she wouldn’t feel trapped or frightened that I might do something to her.
I called the questionnaire up on the monitor and explained what we would be doing. She only had to answer yes or no to each question. There were fifty-two questions and she could watch me enter her answer to each one on the monitor. After we were done, we could look at a summary of her answers in the form of a bar graph indicating where she might be having emotional or psychological problems. Did she know what a bar graph was? She did. Okay. We give this questionnaire to every kid who comes here, I said, and every time the kid moves to another cottage the new unit gives it to her again.
“They told me I would be staying here until I go to Purdy.” Purdy was the adult women’s prison.
“That’s what they told us too. I’m just trying to explain how the MAYSI works and why we give it.”
“Oh.”
“But also, Sonia, things change. I’m sure you already know that.”
She nodded. The numbness again. Now I could see the sadness behind it.
“For now, and for as far as we can see, you’ll be with us. But you can never tell—there might be a change in policy and you may benefit from the change.”
She looked past me. I didn’t think she was looking at anything, actually. She just wasn’t looking at me.
“Okay. Let’s get started. These first questions apply only to the last three or four months. Later there will be some that pertain to your whole life, but I’ll tell you when we get to them. These pertain only to the last three or four months.”
Halfway through, she began to tremble. She saw that I had noticed and she said she was cold. I asked if the questions were upsetting her and she said they were. She hadn’t been able to tell anyone how she felt while she was in detention, she said.
“I haven’t really talked to anybody since I got locked up. My lawyer said I shouldn’t talk to anyone about it, because of the trial.” She was alluding to her offense, although I hadn’t asked her about it. I gave her time to calm herself.
“Would you like to do this at another time? We have to do it eventually, but it doesn’t have to be this minute. The questions toward the end may be harder than these have been.”
“No, I can finish.”
When we were done, I sat with her without speaking. She was an intelligent girl, but emotionally… She had red-flagged on Trauma and Depression, but not on Suicide. PTSD, I thought.
I asked her if Caitlin was as smart as she was.
“She’s smart,” she said. I couldn’t find any emotion in her voice.
“Is she as good an athlete as you? I was watching you shoot hoops earlier.” One of the photos in one of the newspapers showed Caitlin in a basketball uniform, a ball under her arm, smiling at us, we who were behind the camera, behind the photographer, an eternity’s remove from her posing for the shot. In one of the stories, she said she hoped to be out of prison when she was still young enough to play women’s basketball in college. Like Sonia, she got twenty-two years.
Sonia smiled. “I don’t know. She’s a good athlete.”
“You’re a very good ball player.”
“Thank you.”
“It’s all right to talk here. The trial’s over. This is a good place. You’re safe here.”
Water came to the rims of her eyes, then spilled over.
“Can I go to my room now?”
“Sure.”
Safe from what? I’d said it, I often said it to kids—“You’re safe here”—but usually they were gang kids, kids whose lives were at risk of extinction. But, as far as I knew, no one intended to kill Sonia. At this point in her life, she was as hurt as she was going to be. I thought for a moment about what had prompted me to assure her that she was safe and then I went out on the floor and thought about other things and other kids.
In August we were told we would be getting Caitlin soon and I asked Jan to put her on my caseload. I missed Norah; I wanted to raise another child and try to make her well. I assumed Caitlin, like Sonia, was damaged. You don’t do this kind of crime when you’re thirteen and come out of it whole. For that matter, you don’t do it when you’re twenty and come through it as though you hadn’t.
Jan had intended to give her to Julius, but I argued that he had his hands full with Elaine, a sex offender not liked by someone in Administration. She should have been moved out of maximum security and into a unit that had staff who specialized in girls who had committed sex offenses, but the administration was a punitive god who did not like kids who had done bad things to smaller kids, and so they kept her in max. I said Julius could take Gary, who was on my caseload, and I would take Caitlin. Gary was low-maintenance, plus Julius liked Gary.
I had another boy on my caseload, Aaron, who was personable and with whom I liked to joke. When Jan suggested he go to Julius instead of Gary, I countered that Julius had already had a problem with Aaron, and anyway, he had been on my caseload for four months now, while I’d had Gary less than a month.
“Also, Gary’s white. Julius will treat him better than he would Aaron.”
“You never give up, do you? All right. I’ll go for it if Julius agrees.”
She called him into the office. It was quiet time and most of the kids were locked down. Maggie could monitor the three or four who were in the living room watching a video.
Jan explained what I wanted, couching it as an idea that was worth thinking about. Which told me she was in favor of it. Which meant she did not have the confidence in Julius that she pretended to have. I didn’t think he had done a good job with Elaine. While she had come to depend on him, as kids will rely on adults, he seemed only to be counting the days until she was paroled.
Julius agreed immediately. I had expected him to suspect that whatever I wanted would be at his expense, but I did not see suspicion on his face. His eyebrows went up, a small smile appeared, then went away, and he said it was all right with him if it was all right with me. I assured him it was, and said I thought he would be better with Gary than I was. He said he didn’t think he would be better, but he would try to be as good. This was how we negotiated with each other now, each giving the other room to maneuver, each wanting to walk away satisfied that the other was also satisfied.
And so I got Caitlin.
SIX
When Caitlin came to us, she was skinny and tense and her brown hair was growing out from under a yellow crop. She had been in detention almost a year and a half. She had made a life for herself there.
She arrived a couple of hours before I came in to begin my shift. We had a long staff meeting that day and I saw her for only a few minutes. I introduced myself as her case manager, shook her hand and told her I would be gone for the next two days because it was my weekend, but we would talk when I came back. I asked if she needed anything—shampoo, toothpaste, a hairbr
ush—but she said Dick had given her all of that, and that was the extent of our first conversation.
What I noticed mainly were her eyes. She listened to you with her eyes. She looked directly at you and did not blink while you talked. She took in everything. Like Sonia, she showed no affect.
Like all the other kids who came to Wolf, she would spend her first week on Tables. We told them that this was not punishment, that we wanted some time to observe them before we started awarding privileges, but of course it was punishment. They did something to get sent to max. But we did want to see how well they could follow instructions and how they dealt with frustration and, for those with ADHD, how long they could sit without speaking or simply standing up.
I wondered sometimes what the cottage must look like to the kids coming from detention. It was drab compared to most of the cottages on campus, but they didn’t know that. When they came to us from the outside, they had not seen the interior of any of the other units yet, and from the outside all the cottages looked the same.
Andromeda, the girls’ mental health unit, was especially colorful once you were inside. At Andromeda, among other wall decorations, were broadsides of poetry the girls had written spackled with pastel drawings of flowers and birds. In Swan, a boys’ unit I worked in before going to Wolf, pennants emblematic of professional football teams had been stapled to the cornices of the walls enclosing the living room and dining room. They were the collection of one of the staff who brought them in to lighten the monotony of the unicolor walls.
In Wolf, the flags of twenty-plus countries hung on the cornices. I didn’t know who had put them up; neither did anybody I worked with. They were there when Jan and the first members of the current staff were brought in to run the cottage five years ago. Most of us recognized most of the flags, but none of us knew them all. Eventually Dick realized that the French flag had been hung upside down and we began to suspect that others had also. But their purpose in the unit was to provide color, relief from sameness, and to a degree, they did.
Even so, there was a starkness in Wolf that you did not find in other cottages. Part of it was due, I thought, to what the kids wore. In other units, kids wore their own clothes; in Wolf, they wore orange jumpsuits. Because the color was bright enough to attract the eye, it was the color you saw first, not the kid. And, from kid to kid, the color was uniform. But the drabness, the lack of visual vitality in the cottage, owed mostly to the lack of human movement. Kids could not go from one place to another, from one chair to another, from their chair in the living room to a table in the dining room, from inside the cottage to outside, without staff’s permission, and they spent a lot of time in their rooms, sometimes hours at a stretch.
Years ago, when the previous staff ran Wolf, it was worse. Kids spent twenty-three hours a day locked down. Maximum Security was modeled on the adult system then, and it had some of the problems the adult system had. Violence between kids and between kids and staff was chronic. That staff team was moved out and dispersed to other units after one of them beat up a kid, then threatened to do the same to any staff who informed on him. Finally somebody did, and the beater disappeared from campus. Wolf could be violent now, it could be very bad indeed, but the violence was nothing compared to what it had been.
And it was nothing like county detention. There the kids had not been locked up long enough to have adapted to jailhouse routine, and many were still coming down from their last ingestion of whatever drugs they were doing or, unable to get more, were kicking their habit. The kids didn’t know each other or knew each other too well from the outside, and fought to establish dominance. The boys did, anyway. The girls, with the exception of some of the mental health cases, were not as violent.
Coming to us after a few days or a few weeks in detention, the most obvious effects of the drugs having worn off (though not all; you did not really know a kid until you had seen him daily for six months. After four months without drugs, his true, or truer, personality only began to reveal itself), most kids were surprised to find that, if they were in their rooms longer than they wanted, it did not compare with the lengthy lockdowns in detention, and if they had a problem with another kid, the consequences of a fight were more far-reaching than those in detention. In detention, you were locked down for a few days; in prison, getting into a fight could affect the length of your sentence.
Wolf was not a place to warehouse kids, it was not a system of cells and corridors and barren classrooms. It was a living unit, with carpeting, upholstered chairs, television, DVD and VCR players, small book and video libraries, the requirement to get along with other people, punishment if you didn’t and rewards if you did. It was an elongated A-frame with open twenty-foot ceilings supported by massive wood beams. Like the other cottages, it had its own kitchen and a common dining area and a mudroom for doing laundry. It looked like a cottage you would want your children to live in at summer camp, but it was always locked and only staff had the keys.
We spent most of the meeting talking about another new kid. Jan read us the police report of the crime the boy had committed. It was one of the worst stories I’d ever heard. As she read the report, I was in agony, as were other staff, judging from the moans I heard, the winces I saw. I didn’t know what I would do with it, how I would be able to dump it. There was nobody on the outside I could talk to, nobody willing to listen to something like this. But I knew too, knew already, that the story had struck so deep that I would not want to talk about it, that I would be angry with anyone who would listen, that I would regard him or her as a voyeur. I wanted to tell Jan to stop reading. I kept asking myself, Why is she doing this? She had never read a police report to us before. But we had never had a case like this before. I thought, and Bernie said, “How will he be able to live with himself?”
When Jan was finished, she put the file on her desk and said, “I have something to say. Regardless of how we feel about what this boy did, we have to get past our personal revulsion and focus on him as a human being. We come from different backgrounds and we probably have different notions about what to do about this boy, but we have to get past our ideas of evil and deal with the boy as he is. It’s going to be hard for me and I know it’s going to be hard for some of you, too. But we need to be professional and put our instincts and prejudices aside.”
Everyone was silent, and then Dick said, “Thank you, Jan. I mean it.”
“You’re welcome,” Jan said. Everybody laughed, though it was unclear why.
“She’s just a moral motherfucker,” I said, to which everybody laughed again.
I asked if the boy was suicidal. Jan said there was nothing in the file that indicated suicide, then asked Charlie to do a MAYSI on him as soon as he could. Charlie said he’d already done it and nothing had popped up except Trauma and Depression. Like Sonia, I thought.
“Everybody go home and love your kids,” Bernie said. He had young children. The boy’s victim was his younger brother.
In the evening I watched Caitlin shoot baskets and talk a little with some of the other girls. Sonia sat on the asphalt at the edge of the court when Caitlin was playing. When Caitlin was with the other girls, Sonia shot baskets. Neither looked at the other, but each knew exactly what the other was doing.
Leaving the cottage with Bernie after our shift was over, I said, “How lucky we are to have been born into the right family, the right class, the right whatever. Any one of us could have been this boy.” I was talking, really, not only about him, nor even about Caitlin, but about nearly all, perhaps all, of the kids we worked with.
“I know. I think about that all the time,” Bernie said.
We joked about the color and thickness of the French dressing we’d had on our salad at supper, how it looked like something you didn’t want to think about, and the flood of ketchup Frank had put on his macaroni, but it wasn’t any good. We’d been knocked for a loop.
SEVEN
I gave Caitlin the MAYSI. Almost all of her answers were “No.” She
didn’t hear voices, she didn’t see things that weren’t there, she didn’t think other people could control her thoughts or that she could control theirs, she didn’t have nightmares such that she was afraid to go to sleep, she didn’t enjoy fighting, she hadn’t given up on her life. On the other hand, she thought and dreamed about a bad event that had happened to her and she had seen someone killed. She red-flagged in Trauma but not Depression.
She wanted to leave the past behind. She wanted to concentrate on her future. She knew she had a long sentence, she knew she would be thirty-five years old when she was released, she knew she had lost the youthful part of her life, but she wanted to make of her life what she could. She said all of this as if by rote. She stared at the wall behind me as she spoke.
Peer pressure was what brought her down, she said. She followed the lead of her boyfriend, doing what he did. She really didn’t think they were going to kill Jerry, she thought it was just a kind of fantasy. Until it began. Until they began to hit him with the bats. She didn’t know why she stabbed him; he was already dead by then.
She was twelve when she began hanging out with the wrong people. She didn’t know why. She didn’t like my asking these questions and she didn’t like thinking about what she had done. She just didn’t want to go into it again. Her grandmother was dying. Caitlin thought that what they all did, and the uncertainty about what was going to happen to her mother, brought on her grandmother’s stroke or heart attack—she wasn’t sure which it was. But she was not responsible for it; she had given in to peer pressure.
She was strung so taut that if you strummed one of her strings she would vibrate until she shook apart. I said this to her, said it was my impression of her, but she only stared at me. She was profoundly sad, as sad as Sonia was, if sadness in one person can be compared to it in another. Regardless of what the MAYSI said, the depression was there; she just didn’t want to admit it.