Dana Spiotta - Innocents and Others

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.”