“Ohmigod, Chris, I missed you so much. I’m telling you, I was so good out there. Honest. Then I ran into some old friends and one thing led to another.” She slumped against the cold concrete wall. “I really tried this time.”

  “Yeah, well, I hope your ‘old friends’ take care of you while you’re here. When you came in, you were all about recovery and getting your life together. Then you left and totally forgot about the people who took care of you—before you were cool. You never even wrote to me when you left. I know you wrote your girl even though she’s been seeing somebody else for months. How do you think that makes me feel?”

  Zoë’s mouth started to form words, but no sound accompanied them. Her eyes fell to the floor. When I realized no explanation was forthcoming, I stomped off, my rage vented. She left prison again a short while later. I found out she was back the afternoon Marisol told me she’d died. We had never made amends.

  Zoë killed herself on the evening of June 21, 2006—a Wednesday, the longest day of the year. Life here hasn’t changed because of her violent death. I still do my dishes in the sink above my toilet. I still worry about the next shakedown. I wear the same clothes I wore when I met Zoë; they are the same clothes I wore the day she died. The compound is no different either. The day after Zoë’s death, a new girl was sleeping in her bed and wearing her uniform. There was a memorial service, but I couldn’t bring myself to go. From what I heard, my friend’s life was reduced to a three-sentence eulogy, squeezed in between announcements for an upcoming Bible study and a reminder to please pick up our candy wrappers from the chapel floor. It was standard DOC.

  Zoë’s girlfriend is long gone, as is most of the crew she hooked up with during her thug phase. There is no one left to speak for her or remember her. Like a vast, black ocean, the prison swallowed her up. Zoë is just another death. Two weeks later, the memory of her has vanished as well. Still, she is part of every woman here.

  I walk her path every single day. I stand in the same chow hall line, order the same commissary, look out on the same compound. I am herded like a sheep from one area to another, just as she was, just as every inmate is. I’ve owned her despair and her loneliness. There are days when I avoid the mirror just as she did. At night when I sit alone and face myself, it’s sometimes more than I can take. I know what her desperate thoughts were in the moments leading up to her death—I’ve been there too many times to count. I’ve choked back the same hopeless sobs at two in the morning. So what made her do it, and not me? What desperate thought pushed her hand that night? Will it one day push mine?

  V.

  I’ll Fly Away

  Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else. You are the one who gets burned.

  —THE BUDDHA

  When I stand before thee at the day’s end, thou shalt see my scars and know that I had my wounds and also my healing.

  —RABINDRANATH TAGORE

  Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.

  —ARUNDHATI ROY

  My Three Fates

  BY CHASITY C. WEST

  The sound of shuffling paper broke the silence that engulfed the room. The door leading from the hallway into the courtroom opened with a hollow, woody swoosh. In filed the jury, exhausted and solemn. Juror number eleven—white male, retired electrician—nervously polished his bifocals with the hem of his shirt. Alternate juror number two—musician—took a seat, raked hand through dark hair, and sighed. The foreman—midforties, dirty-blond hair, cable technician—had flushed cheeks and a furrowed brow, but his face was otherwise expressionless. He handed a folded sheet of paper to the sheriff. This single sheet of paper would reveal the results of two weeks’ worth of deliberations that would either emancipate or condemn me.

  Before the verdict was read aloud, the judge scanned the sheet of paper. Peering over his reading spectacles, his eyes cut across the courtroom and fell upon me. I could read little from his expression; I saw only his eyebrows rise, heard only his deep sigh. But I felt the news could not be good. Was I just being negative and pessimistic, somehow demonized by my own trial? Maybe the judge, a former prosecutor, was disappointed with a favorable return, displeased with the result of a case that he had practically handed to the state with his rulings? In another moment, I would know.

  The jury—had even one member looked at me when they walked in and took their seats? If they had, I hadn’t noticed. I couldn’t look up from the tabletop. I was too afraid. Instead, I saw a blue fountain pen, a stack of papers, a box of tissues, a white binder with the words State of Connecticut v. Chasity West printed in bold black letters.

  I forced myself to look up from the table and face my jurors—the twelve who had determined my fate. Look at me! Look at me! I thought as I stole swift, tortured glances. I looked only long enough to notice that some of my jurors were crying. Juror number five—student, black female, thirty-one years old—was holding wadded tissues to her face, her shoulders rising and falling. Jurors number seven, one, and three: all crying. What do tears mean? If the jury looks at the defendant, that’s good, right? If they don’t, it’s bad? But tears? No one had prepared me for tears.

  Bracing myself, I gripped Faith’s hand; my lawyer was now my closest friend. The foreman cleared his throat and read the verdict. The two prosecutors—a white woman of retirement age with bleached hair and a masculine woman with a permanent scowl—peered at me through eyeglasses that made their eyes seem as big as cartoon characters. Both wore the same victory smirk.

  “Guilty.” My knees buckled and I stumbled back. Faith, who’d sat beside me for weeks, arguing for my freedom, held and consoled me as I wept into her shoulder. “Guilty.” With a gentle, repetitive pat on the back, she reassured me that this was not over. “It’ll be okay, Chas,” Faith said, struggling to keep her voice intact. “This is only round one in a fifteen-round fight. Don’t give up.”

  Howie, her partner, stood beside us with a solemn expression on his face, his hands stuffed into his pockets. “We’ll appeal, kiddo,” he offered.

  “I know it’s hard, but try to control yourself,” Faith whispered. “You don’t want them throwing you into that room when you go back.” I tried to stifle the tears but, instead, cried harder than I’d ever cried in my life. I cried until my voice caught in my throat, until all that remained was a steady flow of tears and a body heaving for air. Despite Faith’s words, I knew it would not be okay.

  The room was packed with reporters, sheriffs, lawyers, family, friends, and foes. Behind me on the wooden bench, my parents cried bitter tears. As I watched them weep over their lost daughter, the disheartening truth was that, if this sentence stood, I would never be able to bring forth life into the world. I would never experience motherhood. I would never make my mother and father grandparents. Instead, I would sit back helplessly over the course of their weekly visits and watch them gradually gray and wrinkle, stoop and shrink. Perhaps over the years, they would begin to forget things until they could no longer make the trip down to Niantic prison or remember me at all. My sister, ten years old when I’d been taken away, would blossom, go off to college, marry, and have children of her own without having the opportunity to really know me or to reap the rewards a big sister could bestow. My older brother had lost his childhood playmate, my younger brother his childhood tormentor. All five had sat behind me, strong and lovingly, throughout my trial. Now they held on to each other, broken, their faces buried in their hands.

  The rush of emotions coming at me ranged from self-pity to a rage that swelled every capillary in my throbbing head. My thoughts, fleeting and fragmented, were a patternless patchwork of frayed fabric and loose stitches. But suddenly my mind seized on a thought that seemed more rational than any I’d had in the last six years of my life: suicide. I would decide whether to live or die, not this jury. The idea was so beautiful in its simplicity that I almost laughed out loud. Suicide. I repeated the word over and over in my head until an unfamiliar sense of serenity enveloped me. I now knew that I was going to die, but I would determine when that would be.

  My nose ran over my top lip, and I sniffled and buried my face in the safety of Faith’s shoulder. The suspense was over. The dam had finally broken. After the three-year wait in York Prison for Women, the painstaking four-month process of choosing a jury, the grueling eleven-week trial, and two weeks of waiting for the jury to return a verdict, everything up to and including that verdict began to seep out of my body and onto the lapel of Faith’s navy blue suit jacket. Whatever “everything” was or still is, I’m not quite sure, because if I truly knew, I do not think I would have ever found myself in prison. What I do know, however, is pain. And on that day, my heart bled, flowing from my body in the form of tears.

  Why had I chosen the men that I had—the men I’d settled for? Why had I always felt like I didn’t deserve better? Why had I bought and stolen love? How was it that I had found myself seated in the defendant’s chair? I was someone who had never had so much as a speeding ticket. I had given my parents minimal trouble growing up and had finished high school. I’d stayed away from drugs and alcohol. I’d gone to nursing school and tried to be a good citizen, a good daughter, a good sister, cousin, granddaughter, niece, and friend. Now I had nothing to show for that life but a murder conviction and one of two options: a life in prison without the possibility of parole, or a state of Connecticut–sanctioned death by lethal injection.

  The judge, whose posture seemed more slumped than usual, exhaled deeply again and continued to shuffle papers as he set a date for the penalty phase. Though my tears had stopped flowing, I continued to cry. My heart ached as it pounded against my chest. I could feel the burn of a buried anger whose roots were embedded deep in the anguish of having been misunderstood my entire life. My face was blank and my mind was oblivious to what was happening around me, but a powerful internal storm was gathering quickly and tearing through everything it touched.

  I had taken brief, painful glimpses of my former lover during his testimony. Although his daggerlike words had helped to seal my conviction, it was the hurt that did me in. Now I watched him being comforted by aunts, cousins, and grandparents, blood relatives who had offered me only their scornful judgment. I could no longer recognize them as the people I’d once known. Hadn’t I been in enough trouble without their rejection? Hadn’t I been troubled enough?

  The courtroom was bustling from the verdict. Guilty! Guilty! Guilty on all counts! Sniffling, I blew my nose into a flimsy piece of tissue that Gladys, a stout African American sheriff, had plucked from the tissue box on the table in front of me. “Here, honey,” she’d said, then plucked another tissue for herself.

  “I’m sorry, Faith,” I said

  “No, I’m sorry, Chasity. I’m sorry this happened to you. I know that you really wanted to go home. You’re a good girl.” She was crying now, too, wiping a tear from her cheek with the back of her finger.

  “No, no, Faith. I mean I’m sorry about that.” Her blue eyes followed my pointed finger to where I’d left a smear of tears and slobber on the lapel and down the sleeve of her suit jacket. “I’ll have my dad pay for your dry cleaning,” I said.

  Smiling, she tucked a wayward tuft of her straw-blond hair behind her ear. “Don’t worry about that,” she said. “Dry cleaning’s covered in my fee.”

  It was five o’clock, Friday the thirteenth. I had hoped to be running into my parents’ outstretched arms and heading home to Windsor. Instead I was heading back to prison. Seated in the back of the DOC van—chained, numb, out of my body—I knew that this final blow had left my heart and soul critically wounded. Passing Bushnell Park, I stared out the window at women in business suits and sneakers, power-walking in gossipy bunches. I saw a young woman around my age roller-blading. She had tied her sweatshirt around her waist and become lost somewhere between the music coming from her headphones and the radiant sunshine that beamed down on her. That could have been me, I thought. Instead, I was being returned to the place where I would die. This might be the last time that I’d ever ride in a vehicle anywhere—the last time I would ever leave Niantic Prison for Women alive. All cried out, I sat and listened to the hum of the engine. The police cruiser that had escorted the van with flashing lights had detoured miles earlier, leaving us to find our way back to the prison. The two guards riding up front, normally brimming with small talk and corny jokes, were somber and silent. The quiet settled deep into my belly.

  The chains I wore felt heavier than usual as I stepped out of the vehicle. I felt frail and spent—as if the trial had eaten away pieces of my body from the inside out, leaving me hollow and cored. If the wind had risen up at that very second, it might have blown me away like the spores of a dandelion, leaving nothing except a pile of chains. Closing my eyes against the lens of the video camera the guard in Admissions and Processing held, I imagined a huge gust coming to rescue me. If my savior had come at that moment, I would have willingly betrayed my body, separating from the shell that was to be stripped, outfitted in a paper gown, and locked in an isolated cell in the mental health unit for “observation.” I had been forced to endure such scrutiny too many times before. But this time, I would have flown away, only to return in the middle of the night and tap gently on the window. My body would awaken easily. Ever since I was a child, I’d been afraid of the dark, but now the arrival of my spirit would interrupt my praying, my questioning and cursing God. Maybe my arrival would save me from saying angry words I really didn’t mean—from sealing my own eternal damnation. I wouldn’t stay long, just long enough to make my presence known, to reassure that wretched and comely shell of incarcerated bones and skin that I was safe and not alone. I would sit by the window until daybreak. Come morning light, I would fly away again.

  Seated on the corner of the cot, I replayed testimony and relived the gory crime-scene photographs. I rewound statements collected by the Windsor police and the major crime squad. I reran the expert medical opinions, the autopsy report. I saw my former lover, sitting exempt in the comfort of family and forgiveness. Everything that had transpired played over and over and over in my head, haunting me. Excerpts from the trial. Excerpts from my life. I crossed my legs and adjusted the flimsy paper gown I wore. It had already ripped, so I slipped it off and pulled the stiff blanket over my body to shield me from the stream of cold air being forced out of the overhead vent. Though I’d been raised to be a lady, my nakedness meant nothing to me now. I resented being trapped in this body sitting cross-legged on the cot. Smiling politely each time a familiar face walked past and waved, I was unsure of what to feel. Having become conditioned to feel nothing at all, I now was forced to sit there with no one but myself and feel.

  I felt prickly with embarrassment every time a guard or a nurse walked by and peered into the cell. What I call “the process” had begun. The process started with a look. All who passed the cell and looked in wore that same awkward expression on their faces: the look of not knowing what to say or whether to say anything at all. The look of wishing they hadn’t looked in because now they were forced to make that decision. Yesterday I’d been sane. Today I was not. I would not regain the right to call myself sane until a doctor who’d met me only minutes earlier scribbled on a sheet of paper that I was. Maybe it would be Monday morning; maybe it wouldn’t. Whether Monday or Wednesday or the week after that, I would be released from this cold, locked room to return to another—to be, once again, among the “normal,” the “uncrazy.” But for now I must sit in this barren room listed as “certifiably crazy.” Sanity and insanity were separated by a steel door and a Plexiglass window and the signature of an anonymous doctor. I imagined I must have looked convincingly insane: naked, puffy-eyed, pacing in circles, hair awry, comforting myself by whispering songs my mother had once sung to me as a child. Each time someone peered into the cell, I wanted to scream, “This is all a big misunderstanding! I’m not crazy! I don’t belong here! I’m a good girl!” Instead, I straightened my posture, smoothed my hair with my hand, and turned away from the door. They’re trying to make me crazy, I thought. I saw a fleeting image of myself: body hanging limp from a makeshift ceiling noose. I wanted nothing more than to disappear, to fold into myself over and over again until I was nothing.

  I stared at the peeling gray walls, at a silhouette of someone who’d tried to trace herself by a shadow cast at midday. “Naynay loves Punkin’,” was scribbled in pencil. Below that, “Tiny gives dead-head!” and “Hard hittin’ New Britain,” scratched on the door jamb. On the adjacent wall, “This place sucks.” I concurred. Finally I saw it, etched in the paint in shaky script: “Jesus saves.” Does he? Well, where was Jesus now?

  As the evening progressed, the narrow beam of light that shone through the cell’s only window disappeared with the day. Outside my cell door, I heard a small commotion: jingling keys, squeaky stainless-steel dinner cars, overlapping voices. The trap on the door fell open. A hand and a Styrofoam tray came in through the peek space.

  “You get no utensils,” the disembodied voice said. “Tear off a corner of the tray and try to scoop up your food, or just eat with your hands.” When I didn’t respond, I heard the keys again. The door quickly opened and closed. On the floor was a tray and a carton of milk. For what seemed like hours, I sat in my corner of the floor, wrapped in my blanket, tormented by solitude.

  The next thing I’m about to tell you could have been a dream. For my own peace of mind, I’d like to believe it was. But whether I dreamt, imagined, or hallucinated the events that took place, I do not know for sure. I know only that the things I saw were and still are very real to me.