by Jerome Gold
I observed Caitlin’s and her father’s interaction and was gratified to see again how affectionate they were with each other. They kissed when he arrived and when he left, and held hands throughout his stay.
At the door, he said Linda’s trial would begin soon, and again expressed his fear that Caitlin would try to kill herself. I assured him again that we would not allow her to kill herself.
I asked Caitlin if she was ready to talk about her mother. She said she was and we began, but after a few minutes, she said she did not want to continue. She had been telling me about Linda’s hitting her when she did not perform well in athletics—volleyball, basketball, softball. Linda had been beaten by her own mother, Caitlin said. She was afraid that when she had children, she would beat them in turn.
She asked me if she and her father could do family counseling. She wanted to get closer to him. She said she didn’t know whether to trust him or not.
It was possible to do family counseling, I said, if her father agreed, but that, as her case manager, I would be the one to do the counseling. She said she knew this.
Caitlin’s father called Jan to say he was concerned that Caitlin was going to have sex with somebody. She had told him that she intended to, that someone had approached her, one of the staff.
I brought her into Jan’s office and had her sit down. Jan sat off to the side while I asked the questions.
It was true, Caitlin said, that she had told her father a staff had gotten sexual with her, but she had not said she was going to have sex with him. “I wouldn’t do that—have sex with a staff. I wouldn’t have sex with anybody while I’m here.”
“This was a staff here in Wolf? Not in detention?”
“Here.”
“Would you tell us who it was? You won’t get in trouble.”
“It was you.”
My breath caught. “Me?”
“Don’t you remember? It was when I first came here. We went in the office—we were going to do a MAYSI—and you asked me if I was afraid because I didn’t want to sit next to you.”
“When I asked you if you wanted to move your chair so you could see the computer monitor?”
“Yes.”
“I see. Do you still think I was coming on to you then?”
“No.”
“Why do you think I wanted you to move your chair?”
“So I could see better.”
“Were you afraid of me then?”
“Yes. I didn’t know you.”
“What about now? Are you still afraid of me?”
“No. I know you now. I know you wouldn’t do anything to hurt me.”
“You’re right,” I said.
Jan said, “Caitlin, why did you tell your father that Jerry came on to you if you knew he hadn’t?”
“I was mad at him. I wanted to make him angry. But I didn’t say it was Jerry. I didn’t say who it was.”
“Why were you mad at him?”
“Because he hasn’t visited me in a long time. It’s just like it was when I was in detention.”
Jan looked at me. I nodded.
“Okay, Caitlin. You can go now.”
“I didn’t get you in trouble, Jerry, did I? I didn’t know he was going to call here.”
“I’m not in trouble. But it’s probably not a good idea to be making up stories about staff. Either me or other staff.”
“Am I in trouble?”
“No,” Jan said. “But I need to talk with Jerry about something else for a minute.”
“Okay.” Caitlin went back out into the living room.
I let my breath out. “Jesus.”
Jan shook her head. “I can take her off your caseload, give her to a female staff.”
“No. She’s invested in me now. I’ll just have to be careful always to keep the door open when I’m talking with her.”
“All right. Jesus.” She shook her head. “You have a daughter, don’t you? Do you ever see her?”
“Not a lot. She lives in Germany. And she didn’t grow up with me.”
“I ask because it’s pretty obvious that while Caitlin has invested in you, you’ve invested in her.”
“I get that way. You know that.”
“I know. All right, leave me alone now. Layton’s not going to be in for a few days and I’ve got to do payroll. Jesus.”
Birdie Forrest and Kyla Nelson told Maggie and me stories about Frank.
Once Kyla asked for permission to go outside. Frank, sitting at the staff desk, said, “Go! Just go!” He was annoyed about something; he always was. She objected, knowing that a staff had to accompany her because no one else was outside. “Just go!” Frank said. She went out and sat on the porch, afraid to go down into the rec yard. Ten minutes later, Frank came out. Seeing her, he jumped back, startled. “Whoa! What are you doing here?” he said.
Another time, Kyla came out of the head and Frank told her to go to her room.
“But, Frank, everybody’s out.”
“No, everybody’s in their rooms.”
“Frank, look. Everybody’s out.”
“No, they’re not. Head down!”
But all around him kids were watching TV, playing dominoes, playing cards, talking on the phone.
After he locked her in her room, he returned, let her out and apologized.
One evening, after two boys had had a fight and been locked down, Frank let them out for a head call at the same time. Birdie saw this and told him, “Frank, they shouldn’t be out together.” Frank, realizing what he’d done, shouted at her, blaming her for his mistake.
“I didn’t let them out!” Birdie shouted back. To Maggie and me, she said, “I know I’m slow, but he’s stupid.”
Caitlin, in conversation, talked in loops. She would talk about one thing, then something else would occur to her and she would talk about that, then there would be another thing, and then she would return to the first thing. If there was time, she would wrap up her thoughts on everything she had brought up. If there was not, I might never hear of it again. She worried that she was unable to carry a thought through to its end without getting distracted by other thoughts.
I told her it might be a symptom of post-traumatic stress, or that it could be simply a style of thinking. It was my style also, I said. “It’s kind of embarrassing when somebody is saying something and I zone out on something else that occurs to me and miss whatever it was the person said and now he expects an answer.”
“Oh, that happens to me! It happened in school yesterday in third period!”
“Huh? What does?”
“Oh, you!” She raised her hand to slap my arm, but changed her mind.
I had her rated for attention deficit disorder. She did not score significantly.
She anticipated that her father would not show up, though he had said he would. She called him. Sure enough, he said he was not coming. He said he was hungover and also that he had to take down the Christmas tree lights. She was angry. She tried to talk with him anyway, but then hung up.
She said she had confronted him on the phone, reminding him how he had beaten her mother and her and her brother when he was living with them, reminding him also of his drinking when he was living with them. He denied all of this but Caitlin said she had seen the hospital records—her mother had shown them to her.
She wanted him to admit that he had beaten her, but he would not give her this. She was jealous, too, of the family he had now and wanted to know why he and her mother split up. That’s what she really wanted—to know why they broke up.
I had been listening to a boy who, I was sure, was about to confess to something that would get him a lot more time. He had gone on until he got to a certain point and then he stopped. Just like that, he stopped talking. He wouldn’t look at me.
“Why don’t we let it go for now. Until you want to continue.”
“All right,” he said. He stood up and walked out of the office, still without looking at me.
I hung my keys and ala
rm up in the key box and placed my handcuffs on the bottom shelf. I was late getting off shift.
Ed Horgan was conducting a Grief-and-Loss group with a dozen kids in the living room. Bernie and Layton were huddled over some paperwork on the desk at the far side of the room. Frank was seated behind the desk, uninvolved with either the group or with Bernie and Layton. I went over and asked him to let me out. He started to get up, then let himself down into his chair again.
“Layton will be leaving soon. You can go out with him.”
Layton was absorbed in something in the log. Bernie was looking over his shoulder. I asked Frank again to unlock the door for me.
“Layton will be leaving in a few minutes.”
“I want to leave now. Get off your ass.”
“No.” He didn’t move.
I waited silently. After a while Layton went to the door and I followed him. On my way, I told Frank, “I owe you.”
“That’s fine.”
I talked with Caitlin about her mother’s trial. It would be on the news. Did she want to watch it? She did. She didn’t care whether or not other residents watched. Her main concern was to get news of her mother. “I wonder what she looks like now.”
She talked a little about her own hearing and how much she had disliked the reporters’ trying to goad her into answering their questions. Then she said she was really angry at her mother for having ruined her and her brother’s and sister’s lives. Whenever she thought about her mother, she got angry.
I suggested she write a letter to her mother—not to be mailed, but to express what she felt—telling her anything she wanted to tell her.
She balked, saying she did not want to feel angry, and she would if she wrote it.
The anger is always there, I said, whether or not you’re aware of it, but she said it wasn’t there unless she thought about her mother. She hoped her mother was sentenced to death because she deserved the death penalty for what she did to her, her brother and her sister.
Her father visited her. I brought up his promising Caitlin that he would see her, then canceling at the last minute, or not canceling but not showing up either. He agreed not to make a promise that he wasn’t sure he could keep.
But a week later he again did not appear and did not call. I called his house several times but nobody picked up. When I allowed Caitlin to leave a message on his answering machine, she was courteous. She explained that she was upset and asked him to return her call. Her tone was matter-of-fact rather than accusatory.
Caitlin asked if she could see the photos I had mentioned in Alternatives to Violence. These were of men, soldiers mostly, who were badly wounded in World War I. Most of the wounds shown were facial.* I showed them to her, not knowing how she would react.
Norah had told me that she had not expected there to be so much blood when she did what she did; she thought about it all the time, the blood. I assumed, without Caitlin having said anything, that it was the same for her. But, looking at the photos, all she said was, “Those poor men.”
She said she was trying to understand her father better. He had been in the Gulf War. She knew I had been in Viet Nam and asked me about my experience of war. I dissembled.
Caitlin suddenly became angry and started demeaning another girl. Warned by Maggie to stop, she started swearing and picked some papers up from the desk and threw them on the floor. I took her into the office and asked her what had happened to set her off. She said she didn’t know. She was calm now and apologetic. I asked what she had been thinking about just prior to getting angry. She said she had been thinking about her mother.
In a letter she wrote the week before, she told her friend that she was sometimes depressed about her mother’s situation. She was angry with her mother for having destroyed her family, but she also found it hard to accept that she might never see her again.*
There was a fight during supper.
Jaime had been baiting Derek for a couple of weeks. Derek had told Layton, who did nothing. Other kids told Frank, who also did nothing. Finally both boys were at the kitchen counter when Jaime called Derek a crab—a pejorative for Crip—and threw a punch. Derek started swinging.
I was sitting at a table in the dining room with Caitlin and Sonia when they suddenly stood up and started running toward their zone. I turned and saw the two boys and Maggie trying to get hold of Derek. Somebody hit a body alarm. I grabbed Jaime and put him on the floor and handcuffed him. Maggie was about to cuff Derek when Julius pulled him away from her and did it himself. It was then that Security arrived. They took Jaime to Swan’s quiet room and we put Derek in ours.
Later, after Alternatives to Violence, Caitlin asked if she could stay back to help me clean up the classroom. As she rearranged the chairs and I cleaned the white board, she said the fight made her flash on her offense. Loud voices, people yelling, did that to her, she said.
After stabbing Jerry Jonas, when the other kids had gone downstairs to get rags to clean up the blood, she put the point of the knife to her stomach, but then didn’t go through with it. She felt that she didn’t deserve to live, but she couldn’t kill herself.
We were sitting on the back porch. Caitlin was enjoying the sun on the skin of her arms and face. I asked how her mom looked to her. I was alluding to a photo of her that was in the newspaper.
“Excuse me, but she’s got three chins. I almost didn’t recognize her, she’s gained so much weight.”
In the accompanying article, the reporter wrote that one of the kids who did the murder said Linda had told him she intended to pin the killing on Caitlin if they were caught. A couple of the morning staff had told me that Caitlin had been upset after reading this. I asked her now what her thoughts were about what her mother said.
She didn’t know what to think. Maybe her mother said that and maybe she didn’t. She accepted that she could not know what, if anything, her mother had said.
We had been watching a lone carpenter ant walking along the concrete floor of the porch. Near one of the roof supports it walked into a spider’s web. It was unable to break away. In seconds, a small black spider a tenth the size of the ant came scurrying down the web.
“Should I tear it loose?” Caitlin asked.
As I tried to decide what to say, thinking of the spider’s hunger and the ant’s desire to live, the ant became hopelessly enwrapped in the silk and the spider began hauling it up the web. Caitlin had become so enthralled that her nose was almost touching the silk.
Michael Reichert asked to talk with me. He said that Saturday the kids had watched a movie in which there was a scene portraying a child being killed. Michael could not tear himself away from the movie even though he was flashing—the most intensely yet—on the killing of his brother. He was at the kitchen counter with Sonia, watching the movie, squeezing two saltshakers in his fists, until Sonia said he was scaring her and moved away from him.
He sat by himself for a while and cried without anybody noticing. He went through the entire killing again in his mind. He went through it again with me now. When he said he put his brother’s body in his bed, I asked him why he did that. He didn’t know what to do with him, he said; he didn’t want to leave him on the floor. He thought about killing himself, but he didn’t have the courage to do it. Instead, he dressed in his best clothes and lay down on the floor, arms and legs outspread, and asked God to prove He existed by turning time backward. But God didn’t turn time backward. Michael said he had been hearing voices since he was twelve, when he and his mother and his brother moved into a house that was graffiti-ed with Nazi and Satanic symbols. Finally a voice, that of a gruff man, told him to kill himself. He didn’t have a gun so he got a knife from the kitchen drawer and, instead of killing himself, killed his brother, stabbing him again and again. At one point, his brother looked into his eyes and said, “Call mom.” Their mother was at work. Michael had never had a problem with the police before; he said he had been a model child until then.
Had it been difficult, being
a model child?
Yes, very. He had gotten straight A’s in school, but that was easy. The difficult part was having to do everything perfectly, being home on time, just getting everything right. Not just right, but exactly right.
Who had he been trying to please by getting everything right?
“My mother.”
“But none of the voices you heard were your mother’s.”
“No. They were all men’s voices. Different men.” He believed all of them were the voices of Satan. Satan had punished him for resisting when he told Michael to kill himself; the punishment had been the murder of his brother.
He fought to keep from crying, but he cried anyway. When he told me his brother’s last words—“Call mom”—I thought he would break in half.
“I didn’t get to apologize to him. I wanted to, but I couldn’t get the words out.” He broke.
When he had got himself together again, I asked: “What do you do to help yourself, Michael?”
“My mother said I should talk to him. That’s what her therapist has her do. She tells him how she feels. How much she misses him.” He broke. Brought himself together. “So I’ve started doing that.”
“Is it working?”
“I don’t know. I’ve just started. But I apologized.”
“Did he accept your apology?”
“Yes.”
“That’s good,” I said.
“Thank you for talking with me,” he said.
Ed Horgan finished his Grief-and-Loss group early and he and I left the cottage together. I said I knew a kid who claimed to have heard the voice of Satan.
Ed nodded. “I hear Satan’s voice. And I hear God’s. Sometimes it’s hard to tell one from the other, but I can usually tell.”
“And when you can’t?”
He pretended he hadn’t heard me.
Caitlin allowed a boy in the cottage to touch her ass. Both she and the boy lost their levels. They had to spend twenty-four hours in their rooms and a week on Tables. When I checked on Caitlin in her room, she said she was bored.
That’s the hard part of being off-program, I said. What had she learned?