Authors: Naomi Canale
In between each slurp, it felt like I was experiencing that whole good-cop, bad-cop mentality.
After I was booked, I don’t remember much beyond the filth that lined the floor between the entrance and the outside of my cell.
I guess I should consider myself lucky that I don’t have to bunk with the other criminals in this place—I’m special. That’s why they gave me a white paper outfit. I’m a homicide criminal who’s on suicide watch and waiting for a trial. Maybe I’m not so lucky after all. The other criminals outside of these confined rooms probably won’t have as heavy a sentence as I will.
The last glimmer of sun shines off a faded bolt on the thick door that keeps me locked in. A tray fastened across the door opens—a man knocks. “Meal’s up,” he says.
I don’t bother to look at it. The emotional turmoil plaguing me hurts more than my growling stomach—Daniel’s tricks have left me to slowly drown in my own tears. Dad would have something comforting to tell me right now or he would just offer me a warm hug. I shut my eyes and wish I had held onto him longer after that night we got home from seeing Lucky. “Daddy,” I murmur, “I’m sorry, I love you, Daddy.”
Could he really be gone? When I asked if I could have his Bible, they told me no. It’s being used to collect evidence for the trial they said. My lungs pound up and down as I start to sob. I lie down and pull a scratchy blanket over myself as I attempt to shut out life with eyes fastened shut.
It doesn’t work.
Whispers flow through the stale air in the room. I quickly look over my shoulder, no one’s there. I can hear the other cell mates that share the rooms connected to mine. But as I try to zoom in and get use to unfamiliar sounds and voices, I hear Daniel.
I want to scream, but resist. I don’t want them to write anything down in their logs they are required to keep. My behavior is being watched, closely—that’s what Detective Johnson said.
“Don’t you want to know why I chose you? Why you are special to me?” The soft voice, it is clearer this time.
I know I should ignore the whispers, but I want answers. Why did he choose me and kill the ones I loved—move into their dying bodies?
Warm air brushes against my ear and sends a shiver colliding across my skin. It’s deceitful and fills me with bitterness. I reach down, move a palm over my upper thigh, and listen as paper crinkles as I grip on. As I rub harder and teeter on the edge of agony, the paper rips. I can’t believe I allowed him to deceive me, to take everything from me—to touch me—take my innocence.
In a moment of weakness I think about him asking me to be his queen, but resentment quickly burns out the flame that used to burn bright within me for him. “Leave me alone,” I say.
There’s no answer.
A fever enters my brain, right down to my heart, and into my legs. My body quakes as I tuck my hands just under my chin. He’s still on stage performing his tricks and I’m foolish enough to recall memories of picking up the dice and playing this game with him. “Leave me alone,” I weep, “haven’t you done enough?”
Silence.
I try to fill my head with recollections—the good kind.
A time when I was little and scared of the dark, Dad told me everything was going to be okay, he knelt down in front of me and said, “Just sing, let God comfort you. He loves to hear you sing.”
I hold onto his words—the lies and the voices slowly switch off as I start to sing myself to sleep.
Chapter 26
Sentenced
~Ten Months Later~
My head rests in the shadow of my cupped hands and moves from elbows leaning on bouncing nervous knees. I’m waiting for keys to clink and echo down the hallway and for the light scuffle of rubber soles upon tile floors.
This is the day they will pick me up in the white van for the last time. And this time I won’t be headed to a fancy building where I get to change out of my jumpsuit and sit in a trial with nice clothes—I’m on my way to live amongst the murderers.
For the rest of my life, I’ll be compared to other criminals and sit in a stack of papers tucked into a file cabinet somewhere in the system. And maybe in a few years, I’ll be printed onto legal paper and go out into the world as a statistic. If I’m lucky, someone may see a black spot that will be me blended into the ink that makes up a graph on an article in the newspaper with the heading Prison Population.
They gave me an early gift—an orange jumpsuit with large black printed numbers on the front, zero sixty-two. The numbers are larger than the ones I’ve worn here. It’s as if they’re trying to remind me of the upgrade that’s about to take place, but in the worst kind of way. I’ll be known as Zero Sixty-Two for the rest of my life. I’ll blend in with the rest and only be differentiated by a numeral, a digit.
In a way I wish I could blackout the trial like when I was possessed. But unfortunately, I’m left to remember, to sit here forever and think, and the worst part is remembering those defining moments.
The slamming of the gavel and the lead juror rambling on about how they found me guilty of four murders in the first degree were nothing compared to finally having Mom raise her eyes and catch a glimpse into mine.
For months Mom kept her head hung low. The humiliation of raising a killer more than covered her face with shame—it kept her hidden from the world. I wasn’t sure why she wouldn’t look at me, but I assumed it was because she was afraid and wanted to finally wake up from the nightmare that had swallowed up our lives. It could have been the media too, she had always been a quiet woman, never did like having her picture taken. But when the district attorney went to the judge and asked him something secretly, and then walked over to Mom to ask the same question, tears welled up in her red eyes. She shook her head no, and that’s when she finally looked at me. Time zoomed in and the air around me was suddenly so heavy that it seemed to compress onto my skin changing my white skin to a blush of red.
After she left the court room, they laid out the crime scene visually. One-by-one photos were placed onto a table where everyone could see and all of a sudden, I understood why I might not ever see Mom again, and I haven’t.
When Dad’s picture came up, I tried to look away, but it was too late, I had already caught a glimpse of the horror. Mom and Dad were each other’s beloved. They had always joked about how they would be old and senile together. My heart will never heal at the thought that that won’t be happening as I sit and rot in my cell, for life.
For a split second, I thought it was a man resting his head on a table, and then I saw the blood—then Dad. His Bible sat vertically where the other chair had sat at our kitchen table—someone had been sitting next to him. I noticed the pages of Dad’s Bible crumbled up in wads and strewn about in puddles of his blood. The idea that Daniel was taunting Dad, or whatever it was he was doing with my body, puts a sour taste upon my taste buds. I click my tongue against the roof of my mouth and swallow. I know as the new Christian I am, I have to practice forgiveness, otherwise I might not survive a penitentiary.
I shut my eyes and press hard into the creases of my eyelids. I push firm enough to see black and silver stars before more tears fall across my cheeks.
I breathe in, wipe them clean, and pick up my Bible. I place it in my lap. But I’m tempted to put it back down as I listen to my attorney’s words echo through me as if it was yesterday.
“You’ve already been through a traumatic experience and I know after talking with you personally, what a smart young lady you are,” he said.
“Thank you,” I half smiled. Being complimented felt strange after being prosecuted like I had been, especially by myself, I seemed to be harder on me than anyone else sitting in that room.
“In school you were at the top of your class—”
The prosecutor quickly interrupted, “Excuse me, but what does this have to do with the trial?
”
“Well, I’m trying to make the point that Savanna is extremely intelligent. Her scores rank among the highest in the state, but she also comes from a religious background. And I believe she was fostered into the delusion she was possessed.”
The entire time he interviewed me, I thought he believed me, and then I felt stupid sitting up there on that stand. He had me suddenly believing I was more than insane, that I was a psychopath. I should have just taken the plea bargain I was first offered to avoid all the media and humiliation. But he had urged me not to. “I wouldn’t ever get an appeal again,” he told me.
Later, the psychologist that works with the state had me believing I fostered a manifestation and the moments I couldn’t remember as Daniel “used” my body was my brains way of collecting bits and pieces of an experience. She told me on several occasions that our brains can only attempt to fill in the gaps of our memories and sometimes they block out things we don’t want to remember. It’s common among homicide cases.
But I know what I saw, and now that I’ve read all one thousand seven hundred and one pages of the Bible, I know I didn’t foster an illusion, a manifestation. People used to think the earth was flat and the Bible has always said different.
The list of why I now have faith is long.
I have the faith Dad was always trying to show me, and I’ve become one of those Jesus freaks I was always afraid of.
The door unlocks.
It’s time for me to pay for my sins.
Chapter 27
Jesus Freak
As I step out of the van and onto soil that belongs to Sin City, I think how ironic it is that I’ll be paying for mine in the city most known for sin.
The chains connecting my wrists down to my ankles quickly begin to burn from the August heat. Desert sand bakes on top of asphalt and shifts under the soles of my canvas sneakers as guards guide me across an empty lot toward the entrance.
A crow startles me with a loud squawk as the sun sits just behind him. My eyes burn as I watch him fluff up his charcoal wings. He’s agitated and continues on with his shrieking as his glossy eyes look straight into mine.
A shiver moves down my spine—he has reminded me of my nightmares.
My psychologist told me traumatic experiences will leave an impression on a person for a long time and nightmares are a very normal thing when it comes to recovery. But the thing I didn’t tell her is that I’ve been having nightmares since before I could even remember. Maybe that’s why I’d always enjoyed a good thrill, my nightmares became normal and only seemed to make life dull after waking.
Gates lined with barbed wire slam shut before we step onto cement shadowed by the large building made of bricks covered with a sloppy off-white paint job. I’ve lost sight of the sun. The warmth of it on my skin, its guiding light, the rays of hope it carries—dreams, it’s all gone.
The crow bats his wings in my direction and I catch a glance of him over my shoulder. He lets out one last harsh call as he takes off. Wherever he’s headed, I’m envious. And in a way, he just mocked me because he’s free and I’m not.
Since my trial got a lot of media attention, the system is treating me special. It sucks in a way because I don’t get to blend in under the shadow of other inmates; I have to do everything alone with the guards.
They hand me off to two other guards and bring me into an open room with large windows. On the other side I can see the prisoners that I may spend the rest of my life with—if we’re all blessed enough to survive.
One of the newer guards I’m being handed off to removes my cuffs and doesn’t even look at me, like I don’t matter. “Please step into the fish tank and remove all your articles of clothing.”
Fish tank? What is this, some form of humiliation to break in new prisoners?
As I start to remove a jumpsuit that’s twice my size, I notice the other prisoners staring. One begins to laugh and point which causes another to split two fingers across her mouth and stick out her tongue. Another joins in on their “fun” and humps the air before I’m searched.
I already had this done before I got into the van for my nine hour drive over here, but I guess they want to make sure I didn’t find anything tucked away into the cushions inside the van. Another guard with short hair and heavy freckles searches through my Bible. She turns it upside down and shakes it. The many pieces of papers that it holds are almost a year worth of notes—they fall all over her desk, and I squint in pain. The visual of verses strewn all over make Dad’s homicide picture come to mind. I bite my lip and swallow trying to hold in tears, I don’t want the inmates watching to think I’m weak.
A loud buzzer sounds and two other women guards walk out. “C-2 segregation here?” says another large woman with the straightest posture I’ve ever seen. She carries the name Sandy in small lettering printed on her shirt.
“Yup,” says the other holding onto my Bible. She gives it back. “You can get dressed now.”
They chain me up all over again while the other two guards grab my elbows. “You ready?”
I nod quickly; I want out of the fish tank. Being the source of everyone’s “entertainment” isn’t fun and it feels dirty, unholy.
They’ve allowed me to have a Bible—that’s it. It’s tucked close into sweaty palms. I won’t even get the essential toiletries for a while unless family or friends send me some, but I don’t have any of those left except for Mom and I doubt she will. To her, I took the love of her life, the two souls God bound together to be one. In a way, I guess I did.
I’ll find strength in pain. I shut my eyes and try to listen to the outside world, but I can’t even hear the loud shriek of a crow, the soft chirping of the birds, or even the violent wind making dust devils out in the desert. I wonder how long it will be before they let me outside so I can hear them again.
The darker woman hanging on to my left elbow stiffens her grip. It’s like she read too many news clippings on my case and she’s scared. When I catch a glimpse of the cross that delicately hangs on a gold chain around her neck, I start to understand why she would be afraid of me.