In the Spider's Web

by Jerome Gold

  It was the shock. I was stunned: what Julius was doing was inconceivable, yet he was doing it. I knew it had happened before, with a different staff and another kid, but I had not been there to see it. And Julius had such confidence that I would not say anything. He locked the other kids’ doors and handed me his glasses, certain that I would not say a word of truth about what he was going to do. How could he have been so sure, even if he was wrong?

  What did Julius tell himself about beating up James? Did he tell himself the boy deserved what he got? That he himself, Julius, was only an agent of justice? Of retribution? That he was an avenging angel? How did he live with himself?

  I didn’t know what I could have done. What I should have done was something. Was Maurice St. Pierre surprised that I shot him? I visualized the circle his mouth formed, signifying confusion, or awe, or the recognition that something he hadn’t expected was about to happen, just before I fired. But Maurice St. Pierre fired and I fired; Maurice St. Pierre didn’t have time to recognize anything. If he knew anything, he didn’t know why.*

  What it came down to was that I was a fraction of a second too late, half a step behind where I should have been. Layton would say I was being too hard on myself. And I was. I knew I was. But it didn’t matter. It wasn’t as though I could change myself. It wasn’t as though I could change anything.

  I was walking Caitlin back to her cottage after her visit when she heard something in the trees. “I’m going to scream,” she said. She cupped her hands over her mouth.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m keeping myself from screaming.”

  “Are you afraid of all animals?”

  “Only those I can’t see and who might jump out at me.”

  She was still recovering from Sonia’s leaving. Ian from the Rec Department had taken her to the gym a couple of times to lift weights and she was sore. He was going to take her again tomorrow. She liked her body’s being sore. It made her feel that she had done something.

  The superintendent came down to the cottage with Clara to discuss the implementation of Performance Based Standards, a program used, if not designed, to force cottage staff, at least at Ash Meadow, to teach DBT every week and cottage directors to document that they did.

  “This is the end of Aggression Replacement Training,” I said. “There won’t be time to do anything but DBT.”

  “I’m determined that that won’t be the case,” Jan said.

  “Your determination aside, there is only so much you can do. Think of all we’ve lost since DBT was adopted here. Victim Awareness, Drug-and-Alcohol Education, Anger Management, Grief-and-Loss Group, Male Survivors of Sexual Abuse, Female Survivors Group—all gone. And now Aggression Replacement Training will go too. And the worst thing is we all know—all of us know—that DBT is ineffective when it comes to reducing recidivism.”

  “What are you complaining about?” Dick said. “You’re leaving. What about the rest of us?”

  Nobody said anything.

  “Oops. Sorry, man.”

  Jan was staring at me.

  “I haven’t decided when. I’ll give you at least two weeks’ notice.”

  “Wow,” Frank said.

  The superintendent said that throughout his tenure at Ash Meadow he had met only success in bringing money into the institution. He had made decisions without assurances that the money would come—opening two new mental health units, introducing DBT first to these units, then to the rest of the institution, training staff in how to implement it—but the money had always come.

  I’d been told that the superintendent was religious, but I had not seen it on his sleeve before. This was the man of deep faith talking, telling us that God favored him, and the proof of it was that he got funding for the projects he wanted. I could see too that success, for him, was measured by what he gained, not by what he produced. Performance Based Standards evaluated staff’s use of time. It had nothing to do with reducing recidivism or any other measurement of improvement in kids’ lives. The Superintendent’s god was the god of the apparent.

  “I’m really angry with you, Jerry. Why was I the last to know?” Jan said.

  “I only told Bernie. I didn’t know he told anyone else.”

  “That’s not the point, and you know it.”

  “I wanted to wait until I decided on a date. I still haven’t decided.”

  “I know you’ve been unhappy here, but why, specifically, are you leaving?”

  I tried to think of an answer that would satisfy her, but every one that came to mind sounded both shallow and false. While I was thinking about what to tell her, she said, “Let me ask it another way. What would it take to keep you here?”

  “Shoot Clara.”

  “I can’t do that. I don’t have the authority. And Clara’s not so bad. She’s changing.”

  “No, she isn’t. But it doesn’t matter. I’d leave even if she told us tomorrow that she was taking a job in Timbuktu. The truth is, I don’t know why I’m leaving, but I know it’s time.” I stopped. I would tell her something else if I continued. I had thought of Norah, and how we, all of us, I too, had betrayed her. But that was an old story now, and things had gotten much worse since she left us. I said, “I promised Caitlin I would stay until she left. She’ll probably be going sometime in February. That’s part of it. I would have left earlier if it weren’t for her. And killing off the programs that I’ve been involved with, Alternatives to Violence, Aggression Replacement Training, Male Survivors Group—really, there’s not much left that interests me. There’s nothing left that interests me. There are probably other reasons too, but I’m suddenly too tired to want to try to think of them.”

  “Clara’s not one of them?”

  “No. She’s only a pinprick. She’s just a pimple on my ass. Although if I were going to stay, I’d probably feel differently. If I were going to stay, I’d probably blow the whistle on her for trying to force me to sign off on that phony transcript. You remember, she was trying to get me to say that you were incompetent. Why didn’t you ever report her? Didn’t she also forge somebody’s signature on one of your yearly evaluations?”

  “Yes. But who would replace her if she left? Celia Barney? God help us all. No, better the devil we know.” A sigh. “She wants me to do a supervisory on you. I’m not going to do it.”

  “Even now that she knows I’m leaving? I would have thought she’d let up now. What’s it about?”

  “Oh, who knows. She thinks you were rude to the superintendent when he was here.”

  “Because I let him know I’m contemptuous of DBT?”

  “Probably. She didn’t say.”

  “Tell her you did it, but I refused to sign it. Will she want to see it?

  “No. She just tells me to do something. She never asks if I did it.”

  I laughed. “The whole fucking administration is like that. That’s how the cottages have survived.”

  “I’m going to miss you. So will everybody else. Kids and staff anyway.”

  “I’m going to miss you all too. I’m sure I will.”

  “Well, you do what you have to do. Give me as much notice as you can. Oh! I didn’t tell you. I thought you’d want to know: Julius won’t be coming back. He agreed to a settlement, part of which is his agreement not to work with kids again.”

  “Settlement! What are you talking about? I’ve been waiting for CPS to interview me about what happened, and you’re saying they’re paying him off? I thought he’d go to jail without passing Go.”

  “CPS never interviewed you?”

  “No.”

  “Well, they probably won’t now. There’s no reason to.”

  “Did they interview Maggie?”

  “I don’t know. You’ll have to ask her.”

  I told Maggie that Julius wouldn’t be coming back.

  “Good thing. There’s no way I could work with him again.”

  “Did CPS ever interview you about him?”

  “No. I’ve been wai
ting. Actually, I’d stopped waiting. It’s been what? a year? Longer.”

  “They never interviewed me either.”

  I received a letter from Sonia. She had a job in the laundry at Purdy. She was trying to stay cheerful and would be starting bible study on Sunday evenings soon. Some of the women at Purdy were waiting for Caitlin to arrive so they could pass on messages from her mother.

  I told Caitlin about the letter and asked her how she thought it would feel to hear from her mother again.

  “How does it feel? To know they’re going to kick my ass?”

  “Why would you think that? The one letter your mother managed to get through to you was written to try to console you.” But I knew why she would think that.

  She was playing a game on Yahoo. She didn’t say anything.

  Caitlin said Jenny told her she needed to say her goodbyes by the end of the month: transportation had been scheduled. Caitlin was scared.

  I gave notice.

  At our staff meeting, Dick said that after I leave, the rest of the staff will have to watch out: Clara will be looking for another target.

  “She’s already targeting me,” Frank said.

  Dick opened his mouth as though to speak, then shut it.

  “You’ve been locked up a long time,” Bernie said.

  I smiled. Then I realized he could have meant it in a couple of ways. I said, “How do you mean that?”

  “Take it any way you want.”

  I went over to see Caitlin. She was leaving the next day. So was I.

  She talked about her future at Purdy: when she would be able to go to Medium Security, when she would be eligible for work release, how much time she would have to spend on parole.

  I told her I admired her because, as much as she had gone through, as often as she wanted to give up, something in her was determined to survive and she would begin again to plan for what lay ahead.

  “Thank you,” she said, and then she was silent. I watched for tears, but there were none. I asked her if she wanted me to leave.

  “In two or three minutes.” She said she had a lot to do, but I knew I was distracting her, that she needed to concentrate on holding herself together.

  I told her my home phone number. “Memorize it. Don’t write it down until you get to Purdy. I’m not supposed to do this.”

  “I know. Thank you.”

  She left in the morning. The weather was bad. There was rain and the beginning of snow. By the time I left in the afternoon, the clouds were breaking up and you could see the sun.

  FIFTEEN

  I wrote her. It was a tentative gesture; I wasn’t sure how she would respond, or if she would respond at all. When I went in the army I did not want to hear from anyone I knew on the outside. I had a new life, regardless of how unpleasant it might be, and I believed I needed to shed all the remnants of my old life.

  A few weeks later she called. She had received my letter and one from her aunt. She was in Close Custody where she would spend the next six months. She got to drink coffee now, which she was not allowed at Ash Meadow. She loved the smell of it the first thing in the morning. Sonia was in the same pod but on a different tier. Sonia refused to talk to her.

  She had had one message from her mother so far. Another inmate told her that if there was anything she needed, she would get it for her; she had promised Linda to help Caitlin out. Caitlin said she knew to be careful: any favor she accepted would require repayment.

  Two weeks later, Sonia was talking to her again. Also, several women had been nice to her because they liked her mother. The guards liked her mother, too, because she had not gotten any infractions during the time she was in Purdy. Before she was told she was going to be transferred to another prison, she asked one of the guards to allow her to see Caitlin for just two minutes when she arrived, so she could tell her how much she loved her. Caitlin said she could imagine her mother saying that, and hugging her for a minute, but then she saw her mother hitting her as she used to.

  She had a nightmare in which another inmate killed her. “That’s for what you did,” the woman in the dream said. It was the first nightmare she’d had in several months. The woman was someone she knew at Purdy. She thought the dream meant she should not trust this woman, even though they got along okay.

  The authorization to visit came and a week later I visited her for the first time. She looked good. Her acne had cleared up and she looked fit. She moved fluidly and had lost some of the awkwardness of adolescence. She was playing volleyball twice a week, some weeks three times. We sat outside and played rummy at a table in the sun. I noticed she couldn’t add even small numbers in her head and I made a mental note to insist that she try the next time we played.

  She said some of the women there were hard and unhappy enough to want to pick fights, but others were very nice. She had had to become more aggressive and it had been difficult for her.

  At the end of the year, Sonia transferred to Medium Security. Caitlin followed her six weeks later. She was there only a few days when the guards searched her room. They offered no explanation but seemed surprised that they didn’t find any contraband. The search reminded her that she was in prison. Sometimes she forgot. Sometimes it was just life.

  I was putting together a package to send to her and the woman who had been her guardian ad litem came by my apartment to drop off some clothes. She had visited Caitlin at Ash Meadow every month or so and she and I had become friends. Even though Caitlin was no longer entitled to a guardian, Larisse wanted to maintain a relationship with her. Over coffee, I said I could not imagine what the judge must have told himself to justify sending a thirteen-year-old girl to prison for twenty-two years. I could understand the prosecutor asking for a harsh sentence. He was ambitious and it was easy to score political points by being tough on criminals, even if the criminal was a kid; prosecutors do not advance their careers by garnering a reputation for being humane. But the judge knew he was not going to run for reelection. He retired after the hearing, and died shortly after that. What could have been in his mind?

  Larisse had been at the hearing. The judge had agonized over whether or not to sentence Caitlin as an adult, she said. One of the administrators from Ash Meadow was there, representing the institution. He told the judge that if Caitlin was sentenced as a juvenile and came to Ash Meadow, she would be eligible to go to a group home in as little as two years. He said, too, that rehabilitative treatment was offered to residents, but they were not required to participate. He portrayed Ash Meadow as a summer camp rather than a prison. In the end, the judge decided that Caitlin needed more than two years in prison, especially if she could refuse rehabilitation.

  I did not know what to think. Why had the administrator lied? But I knew him. My question properly should have been: what did he want that was worth his lying? I had no answer.

  Larisse was talking but I did not hear her. I was staring at a photograph hanging on the wall. Suddenly I did not know what it represented.

  EPILOGUE

  Bernie eventually left Ash Meadow for a job in the private sector.

  Maggie transferred to a different cottage at Ash Meadow.

  Layton retired.

  Frank eventually transferred to a different cottage.

  Dick remains at Wolf Cottage.

  Clara Beam took an early retirement.

  Jan Boats died of cancer. There was no mention of her passing in the Daily Bulletin, Ash Meadow’s information sheet. Four days after her death, the Superintendent came down to Wolf Cottage to speak to the staff. The staff refused to talk to him.

  I have no information on Julius beyond what is provided in this book.

  Jazz was transferred to Elk Grove, a sister institution, after assaulting a staff member at Ash Meadow. At Elk Grove he was diagnosed as schizophrenic. He was paroled but soon stopped meeting with his parole counselor. He is presumed to be homeless; he was homeless before he came to Ash Meadow.

  Jeremiah Court re-offended and was sentenced to two
years in Elk Grove. I have no other information on him.

  James Johnson was transferred to Elk Grove.

  Peter Kasser was paroled. He called me a few days before I left Ash Meadow and we agreed to meet for coffee, but he did not show up. I called him several times but no one answered his phone and no one responded to my messages.

  Daniel Bragg was paroled and served the term of his parole without incident. He became involved in high school athletics.

  Ahmed Williams was paroled and dropped out of sight. He never met with his parole officer.

  Jasmine Nunn was transferred to Andromeda Cottage where I lost track of her.

  Caitlin and Sonia are serving the remainder of their sentences at Washington Corrections Center for Women.

  I remarried. My wife and I visit Caitlin monthly and talk with her on the telephone once or twice a week.

  SECOND EPILOGUE

  In her eleventh year of incarceration, when she was twenty-four, Caitlin fell in love with another inmate. It was not her first infatuation. During her third year in Purdy, she had been drawn to a woman who found her appealing, but they had little in common other than mutual attraction and they drifted apart. Then Caitlin fell for someone else, but this woman was transferred to a halfway house and they lost contact with each other. Later Caitlin shared a room with a woman with whom she believed she was in love, but that relationship soured and when at last Caitlin was able to move to another room, she was long past any good feeling she had had for her former friend. What she felt for Christy, her current friend, was emotion of a depth she had not experienced before.

  Like her mother the last time Caitlin saw her, Christy was in her mid-thirties, a little overweight, and had blond-brown hair. Like Linda Weber, Christy alternated being loving with pushing Caitlin away, between affection and its denial. Sometimes she was endearing, expressing her own need, and other times she called Caitlin names and accused her of infidelity. Christy both loved her and was afraid of getting close to her, Caitlin said. Caitlin denied being unfaithful or flirtatious—“I haven’t done anything wrong,” she would say—and when Christy insisted that by gesture and expression Caitlin was inviting other women to come on to her, Caitlin apologized for hanging out with her other friends. She hated it when Christy was angry with her; it made her feel like she was nothing, like she wasn’t even human.