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 yourself 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.