Innocents and Others (22 page)

Meadow said she did want to do the film about Sarah, who had been in jail for twenty years—since she was eighteen. “Good,” Carrie said. Meadow told her Sarah was in jail for the arson deaths of two people, her boyfriend and her daughter. But the evidence—that accelerant was found at the scene—was falsified by a corrupt DA. Sarah had confessed and pled guilty to something she didn't do. Maybe she could even help Sarah, who knows? Make the case for her innocence. Meadow wanted it to make some difference in Sarah's life. Not just use her, but help her. Carrie agreed to help produce the film.

After she got off the phone, Carrie wanted to make herself a grilled cheese sandwich. Will was out at band practice and she couldn't sleep. Carrie buttered the bread on the inside and out, layered in the cheese slices and fried it in a pan. She ate the sandwich with a bowl of thick-cut potato chips. When she was done, she ate a piece of carrot cake. The more she ate, the more she wanted to eat. She knew she would feel gross afterward, her flesh already pressing against her pants, her growing stomach and thighs. But it calmed her and she needed to sleep. Later as she lay in the king-sized bed, she felt more alone than usual.

* * *

Meadow began work on the Sarah Mills film, and almost immediately it fell apart. No one else knew about the Sarah Mills film because the Sarah Mills film was aborted.

Meadow brought Kyle, who was now her friendly ex-boyfriend, as her crew, and they planned to film Sarah at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. It would be their first conversation in person, and Meadow wanted Sarah to tell her story so Meadow could get an idea of what to film next. Although she was doing postproduction on her own movie, Carrie thought she would come for the first day of filming. She wanted to meet Sarah and give Meadow some support.

Carrie rode in the car with Meadow and Kyle up to the Bedford Hills prison. It was oddly situated, tucked next to wealthy Westchester towns, which made Carrie wonder how that ever happened, but maybe a women's prison wasn't as disturbing to the locals as a male prison. It also surprised her that so much of it was outdoors. They went through the initial security, which was elaborate even though they had prior approval to bring their equipment in. Carrie had a twinge of anxiety as they ran the hand-wand metal detector around and under her pregnant belly. She knew, and repeated to herself, that low-frequency electromagnetic fields were safe for pregnant women. After the meticulous searches they were stamped with an infrared number and then escorted through open-air passages lined by chain-link fences. At the top were gleaming spirals of razor wire. Then they ran their hands under a light to show their numbers, went through another security check, and were finally led to an open room that looked more like an elementary school classroom than the prison visiting rooms she had seen in the movies. One wall of the room was all windows. It was a sunny day, and the bright light warmed the room. At the back was a play area for the children of the inmates. A colorful mural of various animals was painted above the toys piled in boxes. The center of the room had brown laminate tables and purple plastic molded chairs. No bulletproof glass or bars between inmates and visitors. On the
near wall, next to the guard's high desk, was a long row of vending machines.

“It's not what I expected,” Carrie whispered to Meadow.

“It looks low-security, but that is for the comfort of the visitors. Every one of these women gets strip-searched after each visit. Can you imagine how humiliating that is? Even the elderly, honor-block inmates.”

Sarah was already sitting at their appointed table when they arrived. She had a dog with her. Sarah ran an in-prison program in which inmates train dogs to aid the blind and also to work as therapy animals for people with PTSD. The unleashed dog sat obediently at her feet, and Sarah sometimes put her hand on his head or whispered to him. Meadow had told Carrie that Sarah earned her BA and a master's in animal science while she was in prison.

Over several phone conversations, Meadow had given Carrie the background on Sarah's case, and why Meadow found it so intriguing.

“I briefly dated this lawyer who works with the Justice Campaign, which is—”

“I know what it is. They use DNA evidence to vacate false convictions,” Carrie said.

“Right, but also they reexamine evidence with current technology. In this case, fire engineering experts. Also they look at cases where the only evidence is a convenient confession, that sort of thing.”

“She was very young,” Carrie said.

“Yes, barely eighteen. She confessed to the arson charge and pled guilty. She is serving a seventy-five-years-to-life sentence, which means she can't even be considered for parole until 2054. Her public defender was incompetent, the DA was possibly corrupt.” Carrie noticed that the DA was described as corrupt the first time, but now Meadow had qualified it with that “possibly.”

“But the real reason she was, uh,
discarded
was because she was a big drug user, and she had a sordid and documented sex life, so she obviously was guilty.”

“Why would she confess if she didn't do it?”

“Ha! Do you know how many people have confessed to murdering Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia killing? Sixty. No joke.”

“Really?”

“It isn't hard to get people to confess to anything, believe me. We are highly suggestible creatures.”

Sarah was exactly what Carrie expected: she was a small, pretty woman. Despite her green smock and baggy green pants, you could see she still had a shapely body. In the photos from the paper twenty years earlier, she looked young and sexy despite the fact that she was being led to court. Everyone noticed her beauty, and it seemed to work against her.

Meadow sat across from her at the table. She wanted Kyle to film them in a two-shot, in profile. She said that people have what is called a camera-perspective bias when only the suspect is shown in videotapes of interrogations. They are perceived as guilty, while if the interrogator and his questioning are also shown, the bias disappears. So Meadow wanted herself in the frame. She wanted Sarah to look at her and not into the camera. Carrie sat behind Meadow but out of the camera's frame. She could see Sarah directly as she spoke, the same as Meadow saw her.

“Do you think you can begin by telling us what happened that night twenty years ago?” Meadow asked.

“Yes. I haven't spoken to anyone about it in a long time. But I have made my peace and I am ready.”

Sarah smiled placidly at Meadow, and then looked down at her hands on the table. She spoke slowly and deliberately.

“I was eighteen. Living with my daughter, Crystalynn, who was two, and Jason, my boyfriend. It was a snowy December night, two weeks before Christmas. I had put Crystalynn to bed after dinner, and by midnight, Jason and I were really gone. We had done a lot of pills and we'd been drinking. I had to get that way to make the videos you heard about, the sex ones.”

She stopped and looked up at Meadow.

“I heard about those. You filmed some homemade sex videos to make money, right? Can you tell me about that?”

Carrie could not help but think that when Meadow constructed her film, she would make much of intercutting clips of badly lit, wavy-lined vintage porn video.

“The videos were not just sex. Other stuff. I'd be blindfolded, and he'd do things to me. At first I didn't want to make the videos, but it was good money and we always needed the money. It started out, the blindfold, because I was shy about being videotaped, and I had this stupid idea that if I was blindfolded, no one could see me. I knew that wasn't true, but it felt okay then. If he blindfolded me, and especially if he tied my hands, then I didn't mind being filmed. But the truth was that I started to really like it, the blindfold, I was into that, you know, feeling like it was out of my control. When you can't see or move, everything feels different, more intense. I tried not to think about who would watch the videos. But I did like the sex. The police called it rough sex. ‘Rough sex videos.' Which wasn't true. Jason didn't hurt me at all in the videos. It was play. But when we weren't having sex, he did hurt me sometimes when he was angry—shoved me and pushed me, never punching but still hurting. That was what the police said was my motivation. He shoved me down the stairs that night, and my leg was badly bruised.”

Sarah stopped, and her eyes looked to the side and back. She
leaned over and rubbed the head of the dog next to her, then she looked back to Meadow. Her tone was emotionless, matter-of-fact.

“After we stopped shooting, we started to argue and then he pushed me. I don't remember what the fight was about. But usually it was Jason saying I cheated on him or wanted to cheat. Jason was like that—a lot of men are that way. They want you to be wild in bed, to get really crazy, but then they get freaked out like they blame you. I remember he slapped me and pushed me down the stairs and I ran outside. I was very drunk and high, so even though it was snowing and cold, I ran outside to the back of the house in my t-shirt and panties. Bare feet. This is when Mrs. Jamison saw me. I was screaming about Jason. Saying I would kill him. Crystalynn woke up. I could hear her shrieking, but I was too angry to stop. The garage door was open. I threw some stuff at Jason's car parked in the garage. I wanted to get him out there, but he was ignoring me. I never said anything about burning the house—that was Mrs. Jamison's mind. I was standing in the open garage, shivering, thinking if it weren't for Crystalynn, I would drive away from all this and start over. And then I calmed down, started to shake with cold. She stopped crying. I went back in the house. Jason was passed out on the couch. I went up to my bed, which is across the hall from Crystalynn's room. I fell into a wasted sleep. And sometime after that I woke up, maybe because I smelled something burning.”

“So you never set anything on fire, not even by accident. You didn't leave anything burning?”

“No.”

“Why did you tell the police that you set the house on fire?”

“I could've set the house on fire. I was a smoker, Jason was a smoker. We were so far gone, I could've passed out with a cigarette. I also burned food when I was like that. So it could've been.”

“But not that night?”

“No. I was questioned by the police for hours and hours. I was young and scared. And they told me that the rough sex videos would be used in the trial and in the papers. And that Mrs. Jamison saw me. I was confused. I felt like it was all my fault. So after many hours of this, I said I set the house on fire to get back at Jason.”

“There is evidence, suppressed at the time, that the fire was started by an electrical short in an overloaded outlet. In any case, arson requires intention, not carelessness.”

“Yes,” Sarah said, nodding. “I heard about that.”

“But let's get back to the night of the fire.”

“Crystalynn died,” Sarah said, looking down.

“Can you tell us what happened?”

“Okay, I will tell you.” Sarah looked up at Meadow and took a deep breath. As she spoke, her voice sounded flat, but she spoke very slowly. “I woke up. I was still high, the room—the world—was real hazy. I remember how I just wanted to go back to sleep. For many years I wished I had just gone back to sleep. The smoke and the smell came at me, I could feel my chest tighten. My throat was burning—the house was so hot, I couldn't breathe. I pulled myself out of bed. Jason was not in bed. He was still on the couch, and probably already dead at this point. I crawled to the hall. I could see the smoke coming up from downstairs and smoke over my head. I looked up at the door to Crystalynn's room.”

Carrie had a premonition, an odd feeling, from Sarah's flat tone. She felt a wave of nausea.

“I never told this part before. They were too busy on how the fire was set, and so I never really got to talking about it much. I crawled to the door of her room and pushed it open. I stood up in Crystalynn's room, and there she was sleeping in her crib.”

Carrie wanted to leave the room. But she didn't. Meadow looked frozen, listening intently. Carrie took a gulp of air and waited for what was to come.

Sarah's eyes looked up and back as if she could see the baby. Then she looked directly at Meadow. “I saw she was sleeping. I looked down at her, and I knew that she would die if I didn't pick her up and take her with me. It was a few seconds that I stood there. My eyes and nose were running, the smoke was getting worse and worse.” Sarah nodded. Then she stopped nodding. “But I didn't pick her up and take her with me,” Sarah said. “I didn't. Instead, I—”

“Cut!” Meadow said, her voice hard. Then, “Stop talking. Please don't say anything more.” Her voice lowered to a whisper. “Jesus.” She looked at Carrie. Carrie was clutching her stomach and crying.

“I thought you wanted to hear what happened,” Sarah said.

“No, I don't want to hear any more. I'm sorry.”

They packed up in silence. When they got into the car, Kyle drove as Meadow smoked and said nothing. After a few minutes, Meadow took the videotape out of the camera and held it in both hands. She put pressure on the plastic shell until it buckled and snapped. Carrie said nothing. Meadow turned to her left to face both Carrie in the backseat and Kyle in the driver's seat.

“As far as I am concerned, we never heard any of that. This movie is not happening. I am done with it,” she said. “I don't want to hear about gently placed pillows, or the caress that snapped the tiny neck, or whatever the fuck.”

“Should we talk to the lawyer?” Carrie said.

“No. As far as we know, she is a mentally ill woman making things up. And we are going to leave her alone.”

“I agree,” said Kyle. “We need to forget all about Sarah Mills. If she gets out for not committing arson, that's fine.”

“She won't. She doesn't even want to get out, according to the lawyer,” Meadow said wearily. “I was hoping—” Meadow sighed. “I don't know what.”