In her eleventh year of incarceration, when she was twenty-four, Caitlin fell in love with another inmate. It was not her first infatuation. During her third year in Purdy, she had been drawn to a woman who found her appealing, but they had little in common other than mutual attraction and they drifted apart. Then Caitlin fell for someone else, but this woman was transferred to a halfway house and they lost contact with each other. Later Caitlin shared a room with a woman with whom she believed she was in love, but that relationship soured and when at last Caitlin was able to move to another room, she was long past any good feeling she had had for her former friend. What she felt for Christy, her current friend, was emotion of a depth she had not experienced before.
Like her mother the last time Caitlin saw her, Christy was in her mid-thirties, a little overweight, and had blond-brown hair. Like Linda Weber, Christy alternated being loving with pushing Caitlin away, between affection and its denial. Sometimes she was endearing, expressing her own need, and other times she called Caitlin names and accused her of infidelity. Christy both loved her and was afraid of getting close to her, Caitlin said. Caitlin denied being unfaithful or flirtatious—“I haven’t done anything wrong,” she would say—and when Christy insisted that by gesture and expression Caitlin was inviting other women to come on to her, Caitlin apologized for hanging out with her other friends. She hated it when Christy was angry with her; it made her feel like she was nothing, like she wasn’t even human.
Once, on impulse, Christy kissed her in view of a corrections officer. Both women were placed in Segregation, “the hole.” When they got out of the hole, a different corrections officer told Caitlin that if the officers don’t see anything that indicates an intimate relationship between inmates, and don’t hear anything about it from other inmates, then they can ignore it. But when someone flaunts it, she has to expect consequences. Caitlin’s and Christy’s friendship endured, but their hope of living together in the same room ended.
For several years Caitlin had talked about appealing to the governor for clemency. She had delayed because she was afraid of being turned down. She remembered how devastated she had been when her appeal for resentencing was rejected. Still, she had not given up on the idea of clemency and had even researched attorneys who specialized in clemency appeals.
Now, however, she decided not to pursue it. She would serve the rest of her time, much as she hated being in prison. “You have no idea what it’s like,” she said. If she behaved well, she could be paroled in eight years. Christy would get out in nine. In the year between their release dates, Caitlin planned to get a job and an apartment and establish herself so that when Christy got out, Caitlin could help her with her transition to life on the outside.