In the Spider's Web

by Jerome Gold

  All right. I won’t mess with you anymore.

  Stop!

  Okay.

  At Caitlin’s appeal I sat in a chair against the wall. Her attorney identified me to the judges as Caitlin’s case manager. Then she identified Jerry Jonas’ son and first wife, the son’s mother. They sat several chairs away, toward the exit, and did not look at me. Occasionally I glanced at them, but they sat stoically, their facial expressions unchanging.

  The attorney pointed out that the trial judge had said Caitlin could not be rehabilitated, but she had shown that she could be and, in fact, had been. The attorney quoted the psychologist who had interviewed Caitlin in detention as saying that she was emotionally immature at the time of the crime, and that she was strongly bonded to her mother, having been abandoned by her father and stepfather.

  The judge nearest the attorney interrupted to ask if her argument was that the trial judge had acted outside the boundaries of his discretion. The attorney said it was. The judge shook her head; it was an admonishment.

  The attorney from the prosecutor’s office said the violence of the killing was not addressed by the argument that Caitlin was unusually bonded to her mother. The implication was that there was something very dark in Caitlin’s personality that could not be accounted for. I wondered if the prosecutor was deeply religious. Other people I knew who believed in profound evil tended not to believe in the possibility of redemption.*

  In the corridor after the hearing, Caitlin’s attorney said that a due process argument requires a very high level of evidence, and this was why she had not used it. She thought there would be a decision in two or three months. She said Sonia’s appeal had been heard six months ago and there was no decision yet. I did not know Sonia’s appeal had been heard.

  Sonia did not remember having received a letter that her appeal had been heard. Yet there it was, in the shoebox with her other letters.

  Sonia was snubbing her, Caitlin said, and making a show of her, Sonia’s, friendship with Tessa. This was painful. She and Sonia had been friends since they were eight years old, and Tessa had been here only a few weeks.

  Last week Sonia and Tessa made a bet as to when Caitlin would ask Layton to talk with her. They knew she liked to be around Layton and me. Tessa began to pressure her to approach Layton, but she did not want to. Then she had a flashback of the murder. She thought it was because she was being pressured to do something she did not want to do.

  Her flashbacks were not always visual, but she would get body sensations similar to those she felt that night. Sometimes, too, she would hear voices: “Do it!” “Do it!” “Get it done!” These were the voices of the other kids who were there.

  She had a dream in which she was back at the house. Even her clothes were there. Everything was the same, but no people were there; everyone had gone.

  A team from the women’s prison at Purdy came to talk with the girls about their progress. They came every quarter. Caitlin asked them to send her to a prison out of state when it was time for her to transfer. She did not want to be near her mother. But, also, she told me after the meeting, she wanted to be away from Sonia.

  Caitlin lost her level for having taken some sodas belonging to one of the teachers out of the refrigerator in the school and giving them to two other girls as well as keeping one for herself. She did it for the thrill, she said. She said she had been bored lately. I noted that the girls she gave the sodas to were Sonia and Tessa.

  “So?” Caitlin said.

  She was having more flashbacks. They usually began with her hearing the voices of the other kids arguing about how to kill Jerry Jonas, about what each of them would do. Then she would start to relive the killing. She was learning to stop the flashbacks during the period of arguing. If she didn’t stop them then, she would relive the entire murder.

  She was afraid of Sonia’s anger. She believed that if Sonia got angry, she would ostracize her as she did last time and as she had done before. I thought this pattern reflected something of Caitlin’s relationship with her mother.

  One evening, walking Caitlin and Sonia into their zone to lock them in for the night, I heard Caitlin say at the door to her room, “Good night, Mom.”

  “Good night, Daughter,” Sonia said.

  Caitlin saw her sister for the first time in two and a half years. When Jewell left, Caitlin grew depressed; she didn’t respond to Maggie’s attempts to joke with her.

  She had a dream in which a boy she knew from school began to choke her. There had been no warning: they were talking and then he started choking her. She overpowered him, then choked him to death. She had nothing against him until he tried to kill her, and in her waking life she had nothing against him.

  She had another dream in which two men threatened her with a rifle. She was on a playground again. The man holding the rifle shot her in the side but she found an automatic rifle on the ground and shot and killed him with it. Then she was fighting with her other assailant on a rock ledge and she threw him off it. She did not know either of the men.

  On Saturday night she suddenly started crying. She didn’t know why, but she cried for half an hour. She stopped when Maggie started tickling her.

  I told her I wanted her to watch her language. She swore too much when Jewell was here visiting. She was hurt; she said she wasn’t going to stop.

  Three days later she lost her level again, having given up too many points over the last three weeks. The last point she lost was for swearing. Maggie took it from her.

  Peter Kasser’s psychiatrist said he was suffering from symptoms of PTSD, but not full-blown PTSD. He told her that as soon as he woke up in the morning, he was alert to all the sounds in the cottage. At home he slept with a knife under his pillow.

  In the cottage, he hung out with gang kids, although he wasn’t a member of a gang, I said. He identified with Crips.

  The psychiatrist said she wasn’t surprised; he would want to feel protected. He told her that staff regarded him as the scariest kid in the cottage. She said he was very vulnerable and would like to get away from violence.

  “And yet,” I said, “he hangs out with gang kids.”

  “Because he’s afraid.”

  “And that fear leads him to the company of those who do what he most fears.”

  I heard myself thinking: “I don’t know what I’m going to do when Caitlin is transferred to Purdy.” I thought I sounded frightened.

  Caitlin asked me if I was dating anybody. She said that eventually I would meet someone I would want to spend my life with. “I’m just someone who will pass in and out of your life.”

  “I don’t think so.” I made myself tell her: “You’ve come to mean a lot more than that to me.”

  I watched the anxiety pass from her face.

  Caitlin’s attorney called. Caitlin had lost her appeal. I asked for a few minutes to talk with Caitlin; the attorney said she’d call back. Caitlin and Sonia were in the craft room with two women who had come in to teach them how to do beadwork. I told Caitlin her lawyer would be calling and why. She said, “Well, I didn’t think I would win anyway.”

  But then the attorney called and after Caitlin talked with her, her eyes were red and she pulled the hood of her sweatshirt over her head. Sonia asked if she could hug her and I said yes. Caitlin wrapped her arms around her as if Sonia were her life.

  When I talked with Caitlin’s attorney she said she would tell Caitlin in a few days what she intended to do. She could ask the appellate court to reconsider or she could file a Petition for Review with the state Supreme Court. She had a month to get the petition in.

  After two weeks neither Caitlin nor I had heard from her. I called the firm for which she worked, but she had not been in for several days. I asked the receptionist if anyone there knew whether or not the attorney intended to file. The receptionist said they weren’t sure, but that the attorney probably would file. She told me to call back in a day or two.

  But Jan had gotten the name of another attorne
y from a firm that did pro bono work and I called him. He was sympathetic, but the firm was handling Sonia’s appeal to the Supreme Court, so could not do Caitlin’s. He recommended another lawyer from another firm.

  This lawyer refused to take on another pro bono case. He was doing ten now. There were only half a dozen lawyers in the state with the expertise to handle appeals for serious crimes, and all were overwhelmed with work, he said. He said, too, that with only two weeks left in which to file, no lawyer would be able to get himself up to speed on the case enough to do it. It would have to be done by the current attorney. But the attorney would not have to do it if she did not want to. She was not being paid to get Caitlin’s case before the Supreme Court; her responsibilities for Caitlin ended with the appellate court hearing.

  I was so angry I could hardly bear it.

  I got hold of Caitlin’s attorney two days later. She said, as she had said three weeks earlier, that she would either ask the appellate court to reconsider their decision or she would file a Petition for Review with the Supreme Court. In light of a recent Florida decision, she thought she might be able to argue that because of Caitlin’s age at the time she had to decide how to plead, she could not make an intelligent decision and, therefore, she should not have been tried as an adult.

  “Washington is not Florida,” I said. “Washington’s laws on juveniles are pretty draconian.”

  “I know, but we can try.”

  Caitlin wished now that she had not pled guilty to first-degree murder. Her lawyer, a different lawyer from the one she had now, had tried to talk her out of it. He wanted to go to trial. But the prosecutor told her that if she didn’t plead guilty, he would seek the death penalty. She was so afraid of dying that she did what he wanted, she said. Her lawyer had not been present when the prosecutor persuaded her to plead guilty. No one had been; it had been only her and the prosecutor. Sonia said the same. The prosecutor had told her, If you don’t plead guilty, you’ll die. She had been so scared, she couldn’t think, she told me.*, †

  B.s.-ing with Caitlin and Sonia, one of them said somebody’s name, which I misunderstood. Startled, I said, “Julius!”

  It was not his name Sonia had said, but that sparked Caitlin to ask, “Is Julius going to work here again?”

  “I can’t imagine that,” I said. “Anything is possible, but I can’t imagine that happening.”

  “I hope not. I don’t want him beating me up.”

  She received a letter from her attorney informing her that she had submitted a brief to the appellate court, asking it to reconsider its decision.

  I asked if she thought much about her mother.

  She said she didn’t like to think about her mother, then described an occasion when her mother had hit her. Then, without transition, she said she could have kept the murder from happening.

  There had been a sixth kid at the house, another cousin of Lucas York, who told the others that if they didn’t go through with the killing, he would come back and kill them. He pulled a gun out of his pocket to show them he meant what he said, and then he left. This was a little before Jonas came home. When this kid pulled out his gun, Caitlin knew they were going to kill Jonas.

  After the boy left, Caitlin ran downstairs. She had a cell phone and could have called the police from the basement. She could even have called from the phone upstairs before she went down to the basement, but she didn’t. Then Jonas came home and she heard him yell, “What the fuck’s going on? Who are you?” and she knew it was too late.

  Afterward, there were several days during which she was constantly looking over her shoulder, thinking someone was coming up behind her. In school, she kept waiting to be arrested. Then, finally, she was.

  After all that happened, she and Sonia were closer than they ever were before. Even though Sonia was cruel to her sometimes, she preferred to wait for these episodes to pass rather than confront Sonia or break off their relationship. She treasured their closeness. She knew Sonia was angry with her because it was Sonia’s loyalty to her that had gotten her involved in the murder. They had never talked about it. The murder.

  I asked her if she remembered what my question was.

  “I know what you’re doing, Jerry. I’m not stupid.” She sounded cynical, a tone I hadn’t heard her use before.

  “I asked you if you thought about your mother.”

  “You did?” She was genuinely surprised.

  “And you answered a different question, one I hadn’t asked.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You needn’t be sorry.”

  “I thought you asked me about something else.”

  “I know.”

  Peter remembered riding with his father in his car when he was small and listening to KZOK on the radio and how close he felt to his father then. As he talked, his eyes filled.

  I said I thought he would always love his father because small children love their parents, and that he would hate him also because his father had beaten him. I said he would love him and hate him and confuse himself, torn between guilt and rage, telling himself, “He’s my father and I shouldn’t hate him,” and also “He beat me. How can I not hate him?”

  The appellate court refused to reconsider Caitlin’s appeal. Her attorney said she would file a Petition for Review with the Supreme Court. Layton was worried about Caitlin. She had become withdrawn and he thought it had to do with her request for reconsideration being turned down.

  I asked her. She said she was not thinking much about her appeal. She didn’t have a lot of hope, but knew she had to jump through the hoops on the off chance that something favorable would come of it.

  She said she was avoiding Layton because she was angry with him for going on vacation. She felt he was leaving her. She knew she had no right to feel this way, but she couldn’t help herself.

  I said she had every right to feel that way, although, as she knew, he wasn’t really abandoning her. She still felt what she felt, she said.

  She talked then about going to Purdy, about which day of the week it was likely to happen. She thought she had figured out Purdy’s transportation schedule. I reminded her that she was still a long time away from that.

  She had several dreams in which she was killed. In the last one she was shot.

  I asked if the person who shot her in this dream was the same one who shot her in the others. Yes, she said, it was “that dude.”

  “Who is ‘that dude’?”

  “The man who died. The man we killed. In detention I used to see him when I was asleep. He would threaten to kill me. Sometimes he did kill me. He finally went away and I didn’t see him anymore. Now he’s back.”

  She began taking Prazosin which blunted the dreams’ intensity so that she could tolerate them. She had hoped that the Prazosin would stop them entirely, but it did not.

  The nightmares continued, and more frequently. She was almost always killed in them. She became fearful of going to sleep and resisted sleeping, even though she took a sleeping tablet every night. She lost her taste for food, except for sweets, and lost weight. I told her she could have sweets only after eating a meal.

  She had a dream in which she was shot. This time she didn’t see her killer.

  She had two more dreams of being killed, one where “the guy we killed” shot her, another where she was stabbed by someone she didn’t recognize.

  A week later she had another dream in which she was killed. This time she was both shot and stabbed by several men who came up behind her while she was on a playground. She could not see who they were.

  A few days later she dreamed again of being killed.

  Her psychiatrist increased her Prazosin dosage from one milligram to two, and also increased her Trazadone. He started her on Celexa.

  After a day on Celexa and the increased dosages of her other meds, her appetite improved and her mood became cheerful. But then she passed out one morning before school and had to be carried to her room. She was taken off Celexa and the Praz
osin was reduced from two milligrams to one. Her anxiety appeared to be more under control than it was a few weeks earlier, but she continued to experience it in regard to the Petition for Review. At the same time, she tried to prepare herself for the worst.

  She asked me if I thought I would ever become gay.

  I didn’t know what to say and it was a while before I said anything.

  She said she didn’t mean anything by it.

  I said I didn’t think I would, but I had a cousin who was gay and he told me he’d had a couple of relationships with older men who had either suppressed their desire for men until they were middle-aged, or who did become gay then. So maybe it was possible to become gay when you weren’t before.

  Caitlin said she was not going to do anything to jeopardize her relationship with Sonia, not even for a boyfriend. She would rather do without a boyfriend.

  I mentioned a friend, a woman, who had told me that a man was good to have fun with, but if you wanted a deeper relationship, it had to be with a woman.

  Caitlin agreed. She said that when she went to Purdy she might or might not have a relationship with a guard. “Some of them are bomb.” She had spent a month there before coming to us, as had Sonia. It was procedure for girls sentenced as adults to spend a month in Purdy’s maximum security unit before transferring to Ash Meadow.

  I said it was illegal for a corrections officer to have sex with an inmate.

  “It still happens,” she said.

  “Do you have children?”

  “Yes.”

  “I didn’t know you were married. Or maybe you weren’t.”

  “A long time ago.”

  “Do you see them?”

  “Not very often. They’re grown now.”

  After a while, she said, “You have us.”

  “Yes, I have you.”

  At our staff meeting, Jan said Clara was working on getting Caitlin transferred to Serpent Cottage. We were stunned. Dick said it would be hard on Sonia if she stayed in Wolf and Caitlin didn’t. Cami had transferred to a job in adult parole; Dick was Sonia’s case manager now.

  “What about Caitlin?” I said. “Think about her being without Sonia, Layton and me. We’re her entire support system.”