by Jerome Gold
Later, after we had finished the MAYSI and had talked, I watched her playing basketball with Carmen Young. Carmen faked her out on a move and Caitlin plopped down on her butt, laughing. It was nice to see her laugh.
A couple of days later she said she didn’t like my name because it was the name of the man who died.
“You can call me by another name, if you want,” I said.
She shook her head. She was nearing tears. “The healing process hasn’t begun,” she said.
During my time at Ash Meadow, I had come to despise such expressions as “healing process” and “reconciliation” and “forgiveness.” In my experience, people did not heal; rather, scar tissue built up over the surface of the wound so that air could not get to it, but the injury was always there, was always something to contend with. Neither did people reconcile. They learned to live with each other when they had no choice, or they learned to ignore each other. And if the cause of conflict or pain was too great to think about, they compressed it until they could hide it in a part of themselves that they did not visit, and this was called “forgiveness.” It had nothing to do with forgiving; it was the suppression of memory. I said nothing of this to Caitlin.
She said she was going to talk to Jan.
That was on a Tuesday. I waited until Thursday, then went into Jan’s office and asked her if Caitlin had spoken to her. She had. She’d asked for a different staff. What did I think?
“I don’t know. It’s still early. We really haven’t established a relationship yet and it’s clear that, at the least, I make her uncomfortable, so… If you’re going to do it, it would be better to do it now, before we get to know each other.
“On the other hand, I don’t like the idea of a kid getting to choose her own staff, or at least which staff she doesn’t get. But I wouldn’t be put out if you assigned her to someone else. I anticipate a difficult relationship with her.”
“You asked for her.”
“I know. I’m not complaining. I’m just telling you how I think about it.”
Layton was sitting at his desk and Jan turned and asked him what he thought about Caitlin. He made his thumb and forefinger into a V and put them to his chin and stroked it lightly. He did this when he wanted to signify that he was giving something serious consideration.
“Well, I kind of agree with Jerry on this. It might be best to change Caitlin’s staff now, if we’re going to do it. But I’m not comfortable with letting a resident tell us who her staff should be.”
“She froze up on me when I told her I was going to make her work. I told her I expected her to dig inside herself and find out why she did what she did. Up until that point she seemed to be all right with me.”
“Did she tell you she doesn’t like your name?”
“Yes. Because it’s the same as her victim’s. But I don’t buy it.”
“I don’t either. Layton and I talked about it after she came in here. We think Caitlin’s trying to avoid dealing with you because you ask questions. So the answer is no. I’m not going to give her a different staff. I’ll tell her later. That settled, what do you think of her?”
“My take is that she feels guilty. I don’t know if the prosecutor depicted her as showing no remorse, but it covers her like a coat—”
“‘Covers her like a coat.’ I like that.”
“And she does not want to regard herself as a murderer. She’d like to compartmentalize the killing in her mind so that she doesn’t have to think about it, but she can’t—it keeps leaking out. Remember that boy we had who accidentally killed his cousin when they were wrestling? I told her about him—I didn’t mention his name, of course. He was so good at tucking it away that when I did the MAYSI with him, where it asks ‘Have you ever seen someone severely injured or killed?’ he said no. I had to remind him that he had seen his cousin die, and then he said, ‘Oh, yeah,’ as if he’d completely forgotten about it. And I think he had. So I told Caitlin this story and her response was: ‘I envy him.’
“So here I am, dredging this stuff up that she would like to hide. And I have her victim’s name, and I’m only a few years younger than he was when they killed him. To her, I probably appear to be the same age. And he didn’t treat her well, or her mother either, swearing at them and all when he was drunk. So, having turned her guilt to anger, she decides she hates me. And that’s where we stand.”
“Well, you have your hands full. I don’t envy you.”
Caitlin’s grandmother died a few days later. Caitlin’s aunt called to tell her. As I was leaving work that night, Caitlin asked Maggie if she could talk to her about her grandmother, but Maggie refused. She told Caitlin that she knew she had waited until I was leaving because she did not want to talk to me. Caitlin told her to tell me that she wouldn’t ever talk to me.
On Sunday when I returned from my weekend, I asked her to come into the office. When I invited her to sit down, she said, “I don’t want to talk. I just want to get on with my life.”
I ignored her. I gave her the assignment to write about her attempt to kill herself six months earlier when she was in detention. I gave her two days to do it.
She said she would do it if she had time.
I rehearsed her for her committing-offense group. I was concerned about her emotional fragility and her ability to handle questions. She didn’t want to rehearse, but I told her that if she didn’t, I wouldn’t allow her to do the group and I’d put her back on Tables. I did not want her caught off guard by a question, and I tried to anticipate those the group would ask. I asked them during the rehearsal and I insisted she answer completely.
“I just want to get through this,” she said. She meant the rehearsal.
“I know you do, but it was a notorious crime and the kids and staff both are going to grill you if they think you’re not being honest with them, or if they think you’re trying to hide something.”
Among the things she said during rehearsal was that Jerry Jonas had abused her.
“What do you mean when you say ‘abuse’? Sexually?”
“No.”
“What, then?”
“He cursed at me and threw an ashtray at me.”
“Did he throw an ashtray at you more than once?”
“No.”
“Did he hit you or hurt you physically in any way?”
“No.”
“All right. When you do the group, don’t say he abused you. You can say what he did—he threw an ashtray at you and he swore at you—but if you use the word ‘abuse,’ people are going to think you mean something else, and when they find out what you really meant, they’ll think you intentionally misled them. Understand?”
“Yes.”
“Listen. If I see that the group is too hard for you, I’m going to stop it. You won’t have to go back on Tables. Or if you think you’re not going to be able to get through it, signal me and I’ll stop it. You’ll have another chance to do it when you’re stronger.”
“Is it this hard for everyone? Sonia said it was hard for her too.”
“It’s especially hard for those who have been traumatized by what they did. Not everyone has been. Do you know what I mean by ‘traumatized’?”
“Yes.”
“What do I mean?”
“It’s when somebody makes something big out of something that isn’t big, so they can get attention for themselves.”
I watched her while I thought about what she had said. Did she think I was belittling her? I could not read her expression.
“You’re thinking of ‘drama.’ What I said was ‘trauma.’” I spelled it. “Trauma is when a person is shocked, or made real fearful, by something she’s seen or done, or by something that was done to her. Then, afterward, she’s haunted by the thing that frightened her. Soldiers who have been in combat are often traumatized. Girls who have been raped—boys, too—are often traumatized by what happened to them. They keep thinking about it, in different ways, or they dream about it. They may have flashbacks. Cert
ain sounds may frighten them.”
As I talked, I watched her face. She didn’t try to avoid my gaze and she didn’t let anything show.
“I can do it,” she said.
It took me a moment to understand that she was talking about her group.
The group met in the living room the following afternoon. The kids’ chairs were configured as a U. Caitlin sat at the open end, facing everybody. Staff were at the desk beside the left arm of the U or standing opposite, outside the other arm.
It went well. Caitlin came across as honest and sincere. She did not try to evade any of the questions she was asked. After she described the killing and her role in it and what she did afterward, one of the kids asked her how she thought she could get away with it.
“I didn’t think about it,” she said.
It flashed on me then that she had trusted the older people, her mother and her boyfriend, to know what they were doing and to take care of her. I asked her if this were not true and she said yes, but she said it—that one word, yes—as if she had just now realized it, just this minute after I asked the question, as if it was a surprise to her to discover it.
Jan asked her why she hadn’t said anything about her mother. She had mentioned the four other kids, but she had said nothing about her mother.
“Five,” Caitlin said, then said, “No, four.”
For a moment I saw on Jan’s face the expression she got when she thought a kid was trying to con her, but then it was gone.
“What I’m asking, Caitlin, is why you haven’t mentioned your mother. Certainly she played a role in all of this.”
“It bothers me to say something bad about my mother,” Caitlin said.
Jan’s eyebrows went up.
One of the kids asked, “Do you hate your mother?”
“I still love my mother, but I also hate her for what she did. For destroying our family. I have a brother who is in a group home now and is getting into trouble, and a sister who is in foster care.”
“I’m the oldest,” she said in response to the next question.
She didn’t cry, although she came close when she talked about her mother, her eyelids swelling and the edges of the lower lids reddening. Her mother had not been tried yet. She was facing a death sentence.
After the questions were asked and answered, there was a pause. Then Sonia said, “I don’t know how we could have been so stupid.”
There was silence again and Durell filled it by saying, “Whoo! I got four years, and that’s a long time. But twenty-two years! I don’t know…”
I gave him time to say what he didn’t know, but he’d said what he meant to.
I told Caitlin: “I’m very impressed with you and the way you handled yourself in your group. You did remarkably well.”
At this, as though I’d given them permission to show that they felt for her, the kids applauded, all except Sonia. I’d never seen kids applaud a CO group before.
EIGHT
Sonia said she didn’t see herself as being locked up. Rather, “This is my life.”
She used to blame Caitlin for getting her involved in the murder. But now she felt she and Caitlin needed each other and she was trying to re-establish their friendship. Before the murder they were best friends.
I’d let Caitlin coast on writing about her attempted suicide, but now I brought it up again. She said she had tried to write about it, but couldn’t. I asked her what she had done. She’d cut on her wrist with a staple.
“Let me see your wrist.”
She held out her arm. There was a light scar.
“Why did you do it?”
“I didn’t think I had anything to live for. I didn’t think I’d get to see my family again. I didn’t want to live anymore. I didn’t deserve to live. I mean that’s what I thought. I didn’t like knowing that I killed someone.”
“Did you really intend to kill yourself?”
“No.” She laughed, perhaps at being found out, perhaps for a different reason. “I don’t know. Maybe. Yes. I don’t know. I got scared. I was afraid I was going to die. I don’t like blood.” She looked at me as though waiting for me to say something.
I said, “What stopped you from going through with it?”
“I told you. I got scared. I called staff and they took me to the nurse.”
“Did they put you on suicide watch?”
“No. I promised I wouldn’t do it again.”
“Have you?”
“No. And I won’t either.”
“All right. I won’t insist that you write about it. But I want you to understand something. If I ask you to do something and you don’t feel able to do it, I want you to tell me this, and to tell me why you don’t think you can do it.”
“Okay. Thank you.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t thank me yet. I’m going to put you in a class called Aggression Replacement Training. I teach it.”
“I don’t want it. I know I’m never going to hurt anybody again.”
“Do you know what it is?”
“I can tell from the name. I had it in detention.”
“No, you didn’t. They don’t teach it there. You probably had Anger Management. This is different. In any case, you don’t have a choice on this. You have to have the class.”
“Will Sonia be in it?”
“Sonia’s in the class that’s finishing up this week.”
“What if I refuse?”
“Every time the class meets, you’ll be locked in your room and you’ll lose a point for refusing treatment. It’s as simple as that.”
She was silent.
Julius criticized Caitlin about the way she cleaned the kitchen counter after supper. He was loud and he criticized her in front of half a dozen other kids, including Sonia. When he asked her afterward if she understood what he wanted her to do, she didn’t answer. After he asked her again and she didn’t answer again, he sent her to her room.
I wondered if there was not something involved in her lack of response aside from the humiliation. Perhaps she was afraid of men. Had somebody done something to her? Had Jonas’ abuse gone further than we knew? She’d told me that I reminded her of him, but perhaps I called up someone from farther back. She’d said she didn’t know why she stabbed him, as he was already dead when she went upstairs from the basement.
Another explanation, of course, was that she did it to please her mother and her boyfriend. This was my working hypothesis. But perhaps both were true, the fear of men and the wanting to please her mother. Perhaps things converge to make a murder, as they do to make the other things in life.
Carmen Young said in Aggression Replacement Training that she had done a lot of bad things, worse things than what she was locked up for. She felt she should be punished for them, although she didn’t intend to confess to anything.
Birdie Forrest, on the other hand, said her victims deserved what she gave them. They shouldn’t have been where she would run into them.
Caitlin said she deserved to have gotten more time for what she did.
In a role-play, Caitlin said that although her father often told her when she was in detention that he would visit her on a particular day, he usually did not show up. Nor would he call to tell her he would not be coming. He had told her he would see her this Saturday. She was worried that he would not show up then either.
He didn’t, and he didn’t call, but he came a week later on Sunday. I talked with him and Caitlin together for about twenty minutes. He had brought her candy, and while she ate it she rubbed her cheek against his shoulder. When he put his arm around her, she nestled against his chest. Her face had altered: her features had smoothed out and her cheeks and lips had grown plump. Her eyes were closed and she seemed in ecstasy as she chewed her red licorice. She looked four years old.
Her father said he had tried to get custody of Caitlin and her brother for several years, and had tried to exercise his visitation rights, but Caitlin’s mother had refused to allow it. “Nothing will keep m
e from her now,” he said.
Caitlin said she hadn’t known he had tried to see her.
When he was ready to leave, I walked with him to the door. I said Caitlin had put too much trust in her mother.
He said, “That wasn’t it. In Linda’s house there was no right or wrong. There was only Mother’s way. Maybe that’s the same thing you said.”
He knew Caitlin had tried to kill herself in detention and he was afraid that, with Linda’s trial coming up, she would try to do it again.
I told him Caitlin was under constant observation for anything resembling suicidal impulse or ideation. I guaranteed him that she would not kill herself while in Wolf Cottage.
That evening, after the kids were locked down, I reread the part of Caitlin’s file that talked about her relationship with her father. According to the file, he had tried to get custody of his children for three years after he and Linda divorced. That was eight years ago. It did not cite any attempt to see Caitlin in the last five years. It said, rather, that he disappeared from her life. (Yet she had spoken to him when she was in detention, and he visited her, if infrequently. The caseworker who wrote the report must have known that. Was the caseworker so angry with Caitlin’s father that she had expunged him from Caitlin’s life, at least on paper? Or did she simply take Caitlin’s word that her father was not in her life? Certainly Caitlin could have been angry enough with him to say that. Or could it have been something else entirely?)
NINE
On his second visit, Caitlin’s father said he knew something bad was going to happen three years before it did. He tried to get Caitlin and her brother away from their mother then, and to have her prosecuted for not allowing him to exercise his visitation rights, but the prosecutor told him the case was not one of his priorities. He was the same prosecutor who would represent the state against Caitlin and Sonia and Linda Weber and the boys who killed Jerry Jonas.