Redemption (28 page)

Tanya

our weeks passed, then months, and no one from medical did anything to treat my cancer. Every day, I lived with this knowledge. I knew cancer cells were inside, and I imagined them eating my cervix alive. It was a terrible, worrisome time, and I couldn’t do anything about it. I complained to my caseworker that I needed the doctors to give me those treatments. She told me she’d see what she could do.

It was my mom who finally freaked out about it. She called the prison and persisted until she got through to a manager. She cried on the phone, saying, “My daughter has been through rape, PID, a murder trial, prison, and now you’re letting her sit there with cancer? You’re not doing anything about her cancer?”

The next day, I got a call from medical to schedule the appointment. My mother surprised me. She wasn’t one to rock the boat, but she did, and she made something happen. I thought,
More power to her
.

For my cryotherapy treatment, I had to wear a thin paper robe while they inserted a probe in me. The doctors used low temperatures to freeze off the cancerous part of my cervix. I went only one time. They warned me that pieces of my cervix would slowly fall out onto pads. It did. It was scary and gross. But afterward, my Pap smear came back clear. After Mom got me cryotherapy, I was cancer free.

That left me more time to focus on my clemency package.

Tanya helped me. We settled into a relationship that was really close and tight. I needed her companionship. We had a special bond and love for each other—her nickname for me was Little Girl. When the officers weren’t looking, I could hug her in a place where physical contact was strictly prohibited. I could lay my head on her shoulder while we watched TV. I hadn’t been able to touch another person in years. I loved Tanya with all my heart. I didn’t care if inmates thought we were together. If anything, I encouraged it because Tanya was respected, and being with her offered me protection. She and I knew the truth: I wasn’t gay. But we had a relationship outside what traditional friendships might be. We were closer and more trusting. She helped me keep my humanity intact.

I had to put my life on paper, and it was hard. I didn’t want to write the details of the first time my father played Touch Tongues in the basement with me. I didn’t want to write about the time he pinned me down next to our wood-burning stove. I didn’t want to write about my eighteenth birthday. I had gone out of my way not to think about such awful things, even though the scenes still haunted me nearly every day. And there I was with an assignment: tell your story—the whole story—and give it to your lawyer for the whole world to read.

Tanya reminded me that I needed to get it out. “Writing will be good for you.”

She held me when I cried. I cried a lot during those months. She’d say that I was a good person, that what happened to me wasn’t my fault. She kissed me, and I let her. I had this longing for connection and touch. It was something so genuine and so needed. She held me again and again as I continued to break down. She loved me, and I loved her.

When I’d have a hard time with my mom—and we still fought sometimes—Tanya would tell me to let go of my anger. I would ask her how. She would tell me she didn’t know, but I had to try.

She snuggled with me. She listened.

She’s the only person who knew I still heard his voice almost every night.

———

I loved my job as cosmo clerk, but Tanya thought I needed to push myself a little harder.

“I know you’re comfortable there, but if life were about comfort, nothing would ever get done,” Tanya told me. “Take care of yourself and make sure you’re okay; then everything else is a perk.”

She got me a job working at Shiloh Lure making fishing lures. I was on the paint line, dipping lures in paint, putting them on a tray, and flipping them back over. At least I wasn’t just sitting there dotting the eyes on the fish. I was up moving around. I worked ten hours a day, four days a week at $5 an hour. That was $100 a month even after taxes and Social Security were taken out. For the first time, I could afford extra things like clothes and college classes. I liked having money. Tanya had been right.

I did the job for a year when something strange started happening. I woke up one morning and felt a twitch around my right eye. I didn’t pay much attention to it. It twitched all day. That night, it became hard to smile. My face felt tight. I thought it was from dust or some strange thing. The next morning, I was unable to smile or close my right eye. The right side of my face was paralyzed.

I went to the doctor immediately, and he thought I was on drugs. I finally convinced him that I hadn’t taken anything in years. Then he thought I had experienced a stroke. But tests revealed that wasn’t the case. He said I had Bell’s palsy, a condition that paralyzes the face due to inner nerve swelling. No one knows the cause or cure. He paraded me around to all of the nurses to show them my unique condition. I felt like a freak. I took medications and steroids, and my blood pressure was constantly monitored. When I wasn’t working, I went to the library to read about this weird condition.

The other offenders teased me. Everyone wanted to have a look at Stacey. I had to tape my eye closed when I slept, and I couldn’t close my mouth to swallow. I was embarrassed about something I couldn’t control. I felt trapped not only in prison, but inside my body.

The only thing I could do to help myself was exercise my face—something another inmate showed me to avoid getting strange wrinkles. At first, I couldn’t make the slightest movement with my facial muscles. But after weeks of stimulating them, the muscles began to loosen. My eye began to flutter—it wouldn’t yet close—but any movement overjoyed me.

My friends encouraged me to keep exercising my face. It was weird, but it worked. About six months later, my face returned to normal. I was lucky.

Mostly. About the same time, Tanya got to go home. I was so excited for her to get her freedom back; she had been talking about it for months. She had served her sentence and behaved impeccably, and now her time was up. I was truly happy for her. I was just sad for me.

A Caged Bird

fter that, my mom was convinced that the paint fumes from Shiloh had caused Bell’s palsy. She told me she’d send me money if I quit that job. Tanya also started sending me money. Mom and Tanya kept in touch regularly on the outside. With their help, I quit the fishing lure factory and took Tanya’s old job as the IAC. But there wasn’t as much donated stuff anymore. I didn’t have a lot to do.

By this time Jennifer Fair had been out of the hole for quite a while, and she’d even made her way up to the honor dorm with Tanya’s help. She became my new roommate, but I still missed Tanya every day. Plus, Jennifer’s close friend Lisa Harris, her codefendant on her case, had been captured (she was the young girl who had escaped Renz right before I arrived) and was in our room all the time. Lisa and Jennifer were best friends, and sometimes there wasn’t much room left for me. I was starting to feel more and more lonely.

To stay busy, I was elected president of the Missouri Women’s Association—we did everything from taking pictures to making sure inmates had gifts to give to their children when they visited. Moreover, the new prison superintendent wanted Chilli to open up a new pizza parlor. My new job was to manage it. We got our own space—not even near the kitchen—and I ran the place. I ate a lot of pizza.

I was still working on my clemency package, and I started taking a
Courage to Heal
class offered by a volunteer. With no one to turn to, this was one of the hardest things I’d tried to do. Even though I was familiar with
CTH
, I had a hard time facing the realities of what it proposed. Healing was just as painful as living through the abuse. It hurt so deeply sometimes that it was just easier to try to forget about it or act like it never happened. But I’d hear Tanya’s voice in my head telling me to keep on going. So I did.

Through all the reflection and written exercises, I found it much easier to forgive my father than it was to forgive myself. I stopped trying to figure out why he did it. I didn’t know why. Sure, my grandfather might’ve been an influence, but he didn’t make my father turn on me like he did. My father turned on his own. And the truth was, I had absolutely no idea why. I struggled with letting either one of us off the hook. Not only was I a sexual abuse victim, I was also a murderer. I told myself I could overcome these labels. But it was going to take awhile.

I read
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
by Maya Angelou for the first time.

When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,
When he beats his bars and would be free;

Just the title of the book changed my life. Then the words inside opened my eyes. I was a caged bird, and I still had a voice. It dawned on me that my soul, my life, and my spirit could be beautiful despite the bars and fences. This book helped me go easier on myself. I wrote to Tanya about it. We wrote letters and spoke a few times a week at first. But sometimes our contact only made me miss her more. She was living her life, and I was truly happy for her. But her new life was nothing like her old one, and we were slowly, naturally drifting apart. I exercised more; it helped me work out all the pain and anxiety.

Then a phone call came on November 17, 1997. I knew something was wrong because I got called out to the desk and the assistant superintendent handed me the phone. This wasn’t protocol for receiving phone calls.

The super said, “Make sure your mother knows this isn’t allowed.”

My mom was crying hysterically, and of course, my heart skipped several beats.

“Tanya’s dead, honey,” Mom said, barely audible.

She’d been free for only one year, and she died from an aneurysm. It happened just like that while she had been going about her day.

I was heartbroken. I literally cried for weeks. Jennifer and Sabrina tried to console me, but I couldn’t bring myself to smile. I couldn’t pretend that their attempts were successful. I stayed by myself so I could sit with my sadness.

I was totally alone.

My mom sent me Tanya’s funeral program. There was a picture of her as a beautiful and innocent little girl with two long blond pony-tails. A poem was enclosed called “Safely Home.”

Roberta

became withdrawn and closed off. What was the point of making friends if they were just going to leave—or worse, die? Jennifer was off with Lisa all the time, and Sabrina was starting to do her own things. If I did open up, I decided, it would only be to a lifer from them on. Even so, I preferred to stay by myself, to completely withdraw. People started to think I was a snob. But I just couldn’t communicate.

I had a teddy bear I’d received early on. We weren’t supposed to have them anymore, but mine hadn’t been confiscated. It was kind of grandfathered in by the officers. I was a grown woman, twenty-five, and I’d just hug that bear and pray to God.

I smuggled in a live bunny once and a frog I found outside. I just wanted to take care of something; I was so lonely I wanted something to love. I missed the dogs from my childhood—Max, Prince, and Caitlin. Like every other dream and hope in my life, those animals had been taken away from me. Even Caitlin, after being rescued that night, was hit by a car shortly after I went to jail.

One person broke through my barrier. My friend Roberta Gunn was a godsend. I met her after a bad haircut from the cosmetology department. I’d gotten my hair frosted and permed, but the girl who did it completely fried my hair. I had to cut it all off like GI Jane after that. It grew out a little, and the next cosmetology student cut it lopsided. Someone in another housing unit told me about a woman on the other side of the wing who actually knew how to cut hair. I found Roberta, a woman with long red hair, and asked if she could fix it. She did. That was back when we were allowed to have our own scissors. She had a good pair.

I had not been smoking for about a year at the time, and I was living in a nonsmoking room with a woman named Debbie. For no clear reason, I started up again, and I was always going to Roberta’s to smoke with her. We started becoming friends. She missed her baby back at home, and she was still heavy from baby weight. We talked a lot about exercise and our families. Like me, she had a lot of unresolved issues with her family. We’d give each other advice and just listen. In prison, it’s hard to find someone you can trust and depend on. At the time, all the talk was about the new prison, called Vandalia, that was opening up soon. It was closer to her family, so she was transferring. So I didn’t know how long we’d stay friends. I wasn’t sure about Vandalia yet, though it did offer computer courses we didn’t have at Chillicothe. Vandalia was closer to my sister and mother, too.

But Chillicothe wasn’t the day-care center it had been when I arrived. It was changing. A new warden had arrived and was starting to take away our privileges—for instance, we couldn’t have many street clothes anymore. We had to wear our grays all the time. We could no longer have scissors. Everywhere we turned, something was being taken away.

It felt like a real prison.

I did a lot of volunteering, and I was the canteen rep as well as the dorm rep. I didn’t like these changes one bit, and I decided to try to do something about them. The warden said he was going to keep making changes until we proved we could stand together. He didn’t like all the backstabbing and tattling that went on. He came from a men’s prison that had a different set of rules: if men have problems, they take care of them—they don’t tell.

So on the down low, a few of us organized a peaceful prison protest. One day, to prove we offenders could stand together, we didn’t go to lunch. Only 32 out of 650 people showed up. We did a great job, and we proved our point, that we had some power. We could disrupt the status quo in a calm and civilized way.

The warden was pissed, and so were the other prison officials. He told us he was going to keep making changes, and this time they would be hard changes. The staff must’ve been pretty freaked out by our protest.

To keep us from rising up against them again, they shipped half of us en masse to Vandalia. I volunteered to go.