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.