That Night (11 page)

For the next three years, nothing changed. If I wasn’t in the hole for fighting, I’d work in the kitchen, then run the track every night or work out in my cell. And if I wasn’t working or exercising, I slept. Once I stopped writing back, my dad’s letters drifted off. He came over my first Christmas in the pen, but I’d gotten thrown in the hole the day before. Now he just sent money into my account every few months and new CDs, sometimes a card with a brief note. I wondered if those would also stop one day. My grandmother was the only family member who kept writing each month, the only one I answered sometimes.

Pinky was still my roommate and we existed fine with each other, never friends but never enemies. Other inmates who were also serving long sentences tried to talk to me sometimes, telling me I needed to chill out, I was making things harder on myself, but I ignored everyone. I had lots of sessions with my institutional parole officer and the prison psychiatrist. I did my best to piss them all off, and I succeeded every time. No one liked me.

Ryan still wrote, at first every week, then every month, and then months would go by and I’d think he’d finally given up, but he’d send another letter. I didn’t read them, didn’t even open them, though sometimes the urge was so strong I’d be physically sick, retching over our small metal toilet, Pinky watching and shaking her head. Sometimes I’d wake up from a dead sleep, Ryan’s name on my lips, and know that he was thinking of me, calling for me. After every letter I’d retreat back into my cell to stare at the wall. I’d stop eating. They’d put me in a paper suit and back into solitary. I got thinner—and angrier. Some days I didn’t even know myself anymore.

After I’d been at Rockland for five years, I was sitting in the hole one day, after spitting on a guard, when they sent the prison shrink to talk to me. He was a younger guy with an earnest face and big glasses. I got the feeling that he really cared about his job and wanted to help, but I’d spent most of our previous meetings trying to convince him that I was a waste of time—and doing a good job of it, I thought.

This time he said, “Toni, you’ve served a third of your sentence. You can get out of here and have a life, but you just keep making it harder on yourself. It’s like you don’t
want
to get out. Like you’re scared of everything out there.”

After he left I thought a lot about what he’d said. When I’d first come in, my sentence had seemed so long, but there was a light at the end of the tunnel now. The idea
was
terrifying and exhilarating. Did I even have a life to go back to? If I kept going the way I was, fighting the system every step of the way, I’d be nothing but a deadbeat or a druggie when I got out. I’d probably be back in a week—I’d seen it happen time and time again. I thought about what Janet had told me, about doing easy time and hard time. I’d assumed cutting my family and Ryan off would make things easier, but I’d never really accepted being in prison, never tried to fit in or make any kind of life on the inside. I’d seen other inmates laugh, love, learn, achieve things, but I’d closed myself off from any chance of any happiness.

It was like I’d thought finding some pleasure in prison would be giving in, or would be unfair to Nicole, but I hadn’t proved anything to anybody except that maybe they were right about me all along—I was a bad kid. I was twenty-five and I’d done nothing to improve myself, nothing to give myself a fighting chance of succeeding in society when I did make it out. If anything, I’d made it harder to even get parole when I was eligible. And what if by some small miracle Ryan and I were proved innocent? What kind of future could we have if I kept screwing up? He’d finally stopped writing that year, but I couldn’t help wondering if he still felt the same way about me. If maybe I’d been wrong and one day, somehow, we’d find our way back to each other.

I met with the shrink a lot after that and started listening to him, started answering his questions, even if I thought some of them were stupid. I told him I was innocent. I don’t know if he believed me, but he said that it wasn’t about my guilt or innocence, it was about my accepting that I was in prison and that I could try to make the most of it. I also started going to programs. At first I had a chip on my shoulder, the other inmates’ problems weren’t my problems. I didn’t shoot drugs, I wasn’t an addict, but when I listened closer I heard the stories underneath the words. How they hadn’t belonged anywhere, how they didn’t get along with their family, how they’d used drugs to get attention or forget their pain. I thought about all the times Ryan and I had gotten high just to deal with our family shit, how we thought there was nothing wrong with that. But if I hadn’t been stoned out of my mind that night I might have been able to protect Nicole, might have heard her scream. I never wanted to do drugs or drink again. I even quit smoking.

I went to more programs, I followed the steps, and I read some self-help books. Then I started reading other books, novels I remembered Nicole talking about, some memoirs and biographies, anything written about survivors, people who had overcome adversity. Eventually I branched out into the classics, books I’d avoided in school:
Moby-Dick
,
Jane Eyre
,
Great Expectations, Of Mice and Men
. After years of being stagnant, my mind wanted to work, wanted to learn. There weren’t many classes available unless I got moved down to minimum—I’d been placed in maximum because of my fighting—but I was trying to stay out of trouble. I told my institutional parole officer whatever he wanted to hear, about my remorse, that I wanted to make amends to all the people I’d hurt over the years, my family, the guards, others. I was more polite inside, respectful, and after another year I was moved back down to medium.

It wasn’t a straight line. I still had the odd tussle with another inmate, but I was learning to walk away from fights more. In time, I finally opened up to the shrink about my guilt surrounding Nicole’s murder, how even though I didn’t kill her, I was the reason she was dead. And how sometimes I felt angry at her for not confiding in me about what was happening to her that last year, which might have had something to do with her death. He talked a lot about forgiveness, of myself and others, and said, “Punishing yourself isn’t helping anyone, Toni.”

But I wasn’t ready to forgive myself, or Shauna and her crew for the things they’d said at our trial. I couldn’t stop thinking they were involved somehow, that they knew what had really happened that night. And they were all still walking around free. The years had only intensified my hatred. I didn’t tell my shrink that part, wanting him to report only good things to my parole officer.

Two years later, when I was twenty-eight, I was finally moved to minimum. I hadn’t seen my dad or my mom in years, but they sent money on my birthday and Christmas. My dad would also still send cards once in a while. I would stare at the cards, wondering why they didn’t even hurt anymore. They felt like part of another life, one that I would never belong to again.

One letter hit hard, though. Dad wrote to tell me that my grandma had died. I’ll never forget her funny letters in her shaky handwriting where she’d bitch about her doctor, her friends, or her new boyfriend. They were some of the few bright spots in years of gray. I wasn’t allowed to go to her funeral and I regretted not having written her more often, but I’d been too ashamed, feeling like I’d let her down so badly, ashamed of putting that return address on mail to her.

Now I didn’t get letters from anyone, except once in a while a law student or a reporter wrote saying they wanted to work on my case. I never answered.

I couldn’t really remember the outside as much, the scents and sounds of that world fading in my mind, and I didn’t think about it as often. Or at least I didn’t let myself go there in my mind. Sometimes the other girls and I would talk about what we’d eat when we got out of the joint, imagining burgers and fries and thick milkshakes, big steaks and baked potatoes, or maybe a strawberry cheesecake. But I always ended the game first. It hurt too much.

I had made some good friends, like Amber, Brenda, and Margaret. We didn’t talk about our crimes. It wasn’t something you ever asked about, but usually you’d hear something through the grapevine and you’d know what they were doing a “bid” for. Amber was in for manslaughter, and Brenda and Margaret were also in for murder. Margaret had been there the longest. She’d killed her husband and his friend after they raped her when they were all drunk one night—the jury decided the sex had been consensual and she’d shot them in a drunken rage.

I’d stopped telling anybody I was innocent, didn’t talk about Nicole or my family. Most of the girls didn’t have any family either and we became each other’s support. Amber, a tiny blonde who could talk your ear off if you gave her half a chance, was obsessed with all things country and western. Only nineteen, she was our little sister. Brenda, a tough ex-druggie who dressed butch and had a shaved head, was our brother. She fell in love with a different woman every week, and provided us with lots of drama and excitement as we watched her try to juggle a couple of relationships at a time. Margaret was our mother.

Margaret was in her late fifties, with wild curly blond hair that stood out around her head like a halo. She was forever trying to calm it down, buying different potions, but within hours it would frizz up again. She ran the kitchen, and I worked as her prep cook. At first I thought she was a tough bitch, real cranky, and wasn’t sure why everyone liked her, then I realized she had a lot of respect inside because she didn’t take crap from anyone but she never had to raise her voice. She was like a bossy mama. She had this stare that made you want to apologize right away, and she treated everyone as if they were her kids—slapping them on the hand with a spatula if they stole a cookie, but adding a little extra to someone’s plate if she knew that woman was having a bad day. She’d also get everyone to decorate their cells at Christmas or other holidays, and we’d hold contests—it was pretty amazing what a bunch of female inmates could come up with, just using colored paper and stuff. We’d also make each other homemade cards, and birthday cakes out of things we could get at the canteen. Christmas, we always exchanged presents, maybe an extra can of Coke or a few packages of noodles and chips. First time I made a Mother’s Day card for Margaret, she cried and cried. Later she told me she had a few kids on the outside but she’d been into drugs when she was young and they didn’t want anything to do with her anymore.

I told her about my family then, and what had happened that night. Margaret was cool, said I needed to forgive myself, but I told her I couldn’t, not yet. I also told her about Shauna and her gang, and how my mom hated me. She said that after she went to prison her youngest son had been killed when he was a teen. He was drunk, in a car with a bunch of other kids who were also drunk, and they wrapped the car around a telephone pole. Her son was thrown out of the car and broke his neck. She blamed herself for a long time—if she’d been a better mother, her kid wouldn’t have been out that night—and she blamed the driver of the car.

But then she said, “One day, I just saw all this hate I was carrying around with me, how it wasn’t doing no good to nobody. People make mistakes, and the more they hurt inside, the more they hurt on the outside.” She also said, “And your mom? Losing a child, it’s the worst thing that can ever happen to a woman. It makes you crazy inside. She just can’t let go of that grief yet. She’s stuck.”

I thought about that for a moment, remembering how the year after Nicole’s murder my mom would make me go over everything that had happened that night again and again, every torturous detail, no matter how painful.

Margaret reached out and grabbed my hand. “She doesn’t hate you, baby. It’s just easier for her to be mad at you than herself. But you got to stop blaming
your
self for what went down.”

After that, Margaret started giving me some books to read, stuff on living in the now by some dude named Eckhart Tolle and some other books on meditation, spiritual stuff like that. I was also taking some university correspondence classes and she’d ask me to read out sections to her, then we’d discuss different parts. When I got a good grade she’d prance around, telling everyone on our range how her “daughter” was so damn smart.

Margaret was really into yoga, which was pretty funny because she was a woman with an odd shape, big on top with broad shoulders and big breasts but skinny chicken legs. Still, she could bend herself into all kinds of positions and she got most of us to join her for sessions in the activity room. Amber and Brenda would grumble all the way through, but it was some of the most fun I had in there, watching those girls try to do warrior poses and downward dogs. I was the only one who stuck with Margaret and did a class with her every day. She had bad arthritis, with gnarled hands and feet, and she said yoga and meditation were pretty much the only things that helped with the pain.

One winter day she was rubbing her hands, in a foul mood. She’d even made Amber cry when we were all watching TV: “I can’t stand all your chatter. Shut up or go back to your cell.” Amber left, and a couple of minutes later Margaret said, “Shit. Now I’m going to have to give her some of my cookies.”

I smiled at her. “Amber will get over it. But I can give you a foot rub if you want?” We weren’t supposed to have any physical contact, but they were a little more relaxed in minimum and we had a guard, Theresa, who liked us, so she’d turn a blind eye.

After that, I’d come to Margaret’s cell when she was having a bad day and give her a hand or foot rub. I even gave her a pedicure sometimes, then all the girls wanted them, so I got a reputation for being the beauty consultant, which I thought was pretty funny. I liked making them feel pretty. Margaret especially, the way she’d lean back in bliss, giving little sighs as I rubbed and molded her feet. She’d say, “Toni, you have hands of a miracle worker.”

It was during the pedicures that we shared the most about our past lives. I talked about Ryan, told her all the things that I’d never shared with my mom. She’d get me to describe how he looked and say, “Oh, he sounds so cuuuute.” I told her some of the fun stuff we used to do, and how we were always sneaking out to see each other. One day I told her about the time he’d climbed up the tree to my roof, just to say he was sorry for being jealous. It was nice, remembering, but then I saw his face so clearly, his smile, and I had to break off, the emotions still too raw.