This is the Life Saver trick: you take a few pieces of candy, dissolve them in a cup of water, dip a toothbrush in and spread the sugar on your hair. It's sort of like hairspray, although there's no spray involved. Spray cans aren't allowed here.
Helen knows the Life Saver trick now. And other tricks, too. You can grind up pencil lead in toothpaste and make mascara, although Helen herself has never bothered. You can make tattoos by poking yourself with a plastic deodorant can and a pencil.They don't allow mirrors. To see herself, Helen squints into a metal plate bolted to the wall above her sink. The person she sees is hazy and slightly distorted, a woman whose skin has gone all pasty in the perpetual fluorescence of this place.
In the Women's Section of the Salt Lake Metro Jail there is no way to escape the lights and the noise, the sitcoms and Oprah and the yelling and the vomiting of the women detoxing. There are no windows here, only the artificial rhythm of lights dimmed a little at bedtime, turned brighter at dawn.
Bedtime is Helen's brief salvation. In the middle of the night, in the darkness that is not quite darkness, she lies on her cot and tries to remember who she is. Sometimes in the quiet she can hear a woman in B Tier singing "Amazing Grace."
Grace is what Helen is after. And some way to understand how it all ended up this way.
The worst day of a person's life can begin innocently enough. There's no way of knowing in the morning how a road will look 12 hours later, how a temptation will prove too big, how many lives will be ruined.
The worst day of Helen's life started out in such an ordinary way that she can't even remember it now. The kids went off to school. Maybe she went to the grocery store. That evening, since her husband was on duty at the emergency room, she agreed to go with a friend to play bingo at St. Francis Xavier Church in Kearns.
The worst year of a person's life can begin with a resolution. Helen kept hers a secret because her track record for resolutions wasn't that good. I'll stop drinking on the first of next month, she would say. I'll stop on the 15th. She'd go along for a while not drinking and not drinking and then something would upset her and she would go to the refrigerator and pour herself a drink of wine in the middle of the day.
For the first five days of January 1995, Helen kept her resolution. But on the evening of Jan. 6, as she drove toward Kearns, she passed the liquor store on Fort Union. Maybe she'd just pick up a pint of rum.
She drank a little at bingo and on the way home she drank some more. She drank on I-215 and then on Creek Road, and then she turned up Willow Creek Drive toward home, past the country club and up the hill, and that's when she decided how nice it would be to get her children some doughnuts for breakfast tomorrow, a little surprise on a Saturday morning, but first she'd have to make a U-turn and go back down Willow Creek and then up ahead there was something moving, and now her car is facing the wrong way and there are people yelling at her and she knows she has to get the car out of the middle of the road but everything is so confused.
She has no memory, she says, of Jena Sandberg hitting the windshield of the Acura, no memory of Jena and Kim Bohn lying in the road, or their friend Taryn Johnson looking on in horror. No memory of Jena's body face down on the pavement, her flannel shirt pushed up over her ponytail.
Later, witnesses reported that Helen tried to drive away but hit a light pole in the grassy median strip, that she backed up and tried again, that someone yelled "Stop your car. Stop your driving. Stop!"
What she remembers is wanting desperately to get out of the car. She remembers reaching for her purse and finding the tranquilizer she kept there just in case she ever felt a panic attack coming on.
She doesn't remember much about the days and months that followed. Yet, while the details are lost, the substance of that time survives: a heavy, dull, suffocating thing.
She hated to go to sleep because that meant waking up and that meant remembering all over again what she had done. It would be a sensation at first -a shame as startling and insistent as magpies at dawn. And then the details: She had driven drunk. Blood alcohol content three times the legal limit. Two 14-year-old girls hit. Jena Sandberg in a coma.
She would wake up and know again that she had hurt two girls, that there was a criminal and a civil suit against her, that she had brought shame on her husband and her children, that she had made a mess of everything. How would she tell her in-laws? How would she face her friends at bridge club? What if the Sandberg girl died?
The accident was like a third limb now, an oddity that had become a part of her, that was beginning to define her.
She was on heavy doses of Klonopin. By spring she was put on a less addicting anti-anxiety medication, plus an anti-depressant. She thinks maybe that's when she started drinking again.
At first she tried to keep it a secret, but after a while she just didn't care anymore. She hoped, in fact, that somebody would finally say they had to do something to help her. By the fall of 1995, as the criminal case against her intensified, she was drinking all day long, even though she was in an out-patient alcohol rehabilitation program.
In November, feeling more and more helpless that the rehab wasn't working, Helen wrote her husband a letter and left it on his desk. She needed to go away, she said. She needed to check herself into a rehab program in California where she wouldn't be able to drink, where she would be forced to look at whatever it was that made her want a drink more than she wanted anything else.
She didn't think she would go to jail. She knew what she had done was unforgivable, but she was hoping that the judge would see her time in California at the alcohol treatment center as an honest effort to rehabilitate herself into a person who would never drink again. By the time of her sentencing hearing in April 1996, Helen had spent nearly six months in rehab.
Her husband was on vacation in Mexico when she flew back to Utah for the hearing. The only person she knew in the courtroom that day, besides her lawyer, was her priest.
Prosecution attorney Blake Nakamura spoke first. "The charges," he said, "don't even begin to capture the severity of this crime."
Nakamura laid it all out: how Jena, for a moment, undoubtedly saw Helen's car coming toward her, how she hit the windshield so hard her lipstick was imprinted on the glass, how Helen would have driven over Jena's body if she had actually been able to get her car going again.
Nakamura acknowledged that Helen is "a lady of conscience." And indeed the pre-sentence report included, among the sadder elements of Helen's life, a list of her accomplishments:
Helen had once been a nurse. In college she won awards for being first in her class in clinical nursing, second in theory. Later she worked on the critical care ward at Johns Hopkins University Hospital. Her resume includes volunteer stints at the St. Vincent de Paul soup kitchen, the Festival of Trees, St. Thomas More parish, Earthwatch, her children's schools. She was a room mother. She and her husband had financed a year of school for a child in Tanzania in 1991.
But we can't let our focus on Helen overshadow what happened to her victims, said Nakamura.
"She's the one who chose to drive drunk that night. The girls just chose to get together" - three 14-year-old girls taking a walk in a Sandy neighborhood during a slumber party.
He recited Jena's injuries and the residue of those injuries. "She will never heal. Her I.Q. has been reduced to 82. There's a hope she'll be able to live independently, but it's only a hope." With her impaired judgment, said Nakamura, "she'll be at risk for drug use, promiscuity."
Yes, this is Helen's first DUI, concluded Nakamura. But it's Jena and Kim and Teryn's first DUI, too.
The unspoken argument hung in the air: It's easy to see, isn't it, that the equation is lopsided. That Helen will never suffer as much as Jena Sandberg and her family. That she will never suffer enough.
The booking area of the jail is down a short flight of stairs off 300 East. By the time you're at the bottom you're already in the shadows. A plastic garbage can is chained to the railing.
Helen, having never checked in to such a place before, brought along a little nylon overnight bag with some underwear, toiletries, a few books on alcoholism and some novels. She didn't know the rules yet.
The sentence was six months. She was allowed the clothes she was wearing and her reading glasses; after she was fingerprinted she had to give up the clothes. A guard handed her a green jumpsuit, some underwear, a pair of tennis shoes, a tiny bar of soap, a cup, a plastic toothbrush.
She had once gone away to college, where she shared a dorm with women she didn't know. But nothing of course prepared her for this. Prostitutes. Felons. Women who looked at you like they wanted to kill you.
She felt trapped, but then she tends to get claustrophobia anyway. Once, on a small yacht with her husband and their two children in the Galapagos Islands, she lay awake on the bottom bunk, the one without a porthole, and the reality of where she was - in a small space without any way to get out - suddenly overwhelmed her. After the first night she went out on deck to sleep, but pretty soon she could see that she was no less trapped in the open air. Finally she had to ask to get off the boat early.
In jail she felt both trapped and frightened. She was too agitated to sit down; for the first week she ate standing up. And she never would get used to the food: the drab glueyness of it, everything cut in little pieces and then held together by something gelatinous. Nothing that would require a fork, much less a knife. Nothing with bones.
You can buy supplies at the jail commissary: shampoo, paper, pencils, candy. No pens, though. Nothing metal or sharp.
She can have three visitors a week. Sometimes a neighbor visits or a friend from her bookclub. Her daughter, who is the same age as Jena Sandberg, comes once a week.
Like everything in jail, the visit is only vaguely like real life. You visit through glass, on a telephone, looking straight into the eyes of the person on the other end of the line, close and far away at the same time.
Helen writes letters, in pencil, on the yellow pads she buys at the commissary.
"It's amazing," she writes on one of her better days, "how every little thing is used here. I found a rough spot on my bed frame that I can use as a nail file. It's sort of like camping out. At night I wrap up my shoes in my towel and jumpsuit to use as a pillow."
"May 12," she writes to her family. "Mother's Day. Tough day. Depressed and crying on and off. Wonder what you did today." At the end of May, in jail, she turns 49.
"I'm very labile," she tells a visitor through the glass, apologizing for crying again. It's a medical term, emotions up and down. Sometimes she calls collect, her quiet voice tiny in the receiver.
"We had some excitement here last night," she says one morning on the phone. Some of the women in another cell were caught digging their way out. They'd apparently been at it for months, first dismantling part of a bed, then scraping away at the cinderblock, then hiding the dust on their lunch trays.
The women here can't wait to get out, and then, it seems, can't wait to be back. Helen hears them talking about the drugs they'll do, and the prostitution, once they get back on the street.
Helen has been in C tier for a couple of months now. It's the trustees tier, for the women who seem to be trustworthy enough and who want to work while they're in jail. It's all relative, though. Helen's trustee partner confides that she can't wait to get some crack once she's out.
Helen passes out meals and does the laundry. She washes and dries the underwear, socks and jumpsuits. The jumpsuits are green, stenciled on the back with the words "Salt Lake Metro Jail," as if someone might want to walk off with one.
For some reason she doesn't understand, the darker green suits are more prestigious than the lighter green ones. She's noticed that the other trustees will hand them out to the women who are in for the harsher crimes, a token of respect she guesses.
She is afraid of all the women at first. She's heard what jail can be like. After a few weeks though she's only afraid of a few of them. Still, she doesn't want to get close to any of them.
Sometimes she plays gin rummy. Helen's game is bridge, but gin rummy passes the time. She plays with a hooker, and a woman who is charged with stabbing her boyfriend 16 times, and a woman who slit her husband's mistress's throat.
"I try not to make them mad," she reports. "They cheat if they can, but I don't say anything."
The other women seem to know each other from the street. But Helen keeps her life close to her chest. "I've tried not to say too much about my private life," she explains. "It's difficult to say I've been married to a doctor for 24 years. It puts me into a group they don't necessarily relate to."
Her husband has filed for a divorce, but she doesn't tell them that either.
Her probation officer pays a visit and asks for her address and phone number and suddenly it dawns on Helen that she has neither. Her husband has sold their house, given away their dog and moved to an apartment.
So Helen is homeless. In pencil, on the yellow lined paper, she writes: "I'm alone here in jail with my ghosts and the treacherous feeling that I do not really exist at all."
In her green jumpsuit, her hair gone bad, her skin gray, lying on a bunk in a room full of bad women lying on bunks, she no longer is sure of anything. How long does it take a middle-class housewife to become somebody else?
She's doing time now. Doing time, working at it, the way someone on the outside might do something useful. When she's too nervous to sit still she walks around the metal tables bolted to the floors. Somebody once must have measured it off: 50 times around the tables equals one mile. Some days Helen walks four miles, each tiny lap eating up more time.
A friend from her bridge club writes her a letter. The friend can't bring herself to write "Metro Jail" on the envelope. Instead she puts "Correctional Facility." She can't imagine Helen in there.
She wanted to write and say, "I bet you've been named Prisoner of the Week,' " but she changed her mind.
Helen cries when her friends come to visit. And she cries, day after day, in the cell. She cries for the mess she has made of everything. She cries for her marriage and her children, for her house, for her past, for everything that might follow.
On the lined yellow tablet Helen chronicles her days in jail and mails the letters to her husband.
May 2: I really would like to be able to communicate with you as I always considered you my best friend - the only one I wanted to talk everything over with and tell everything to. . . . I hope you don't stop coming to see me. If we see each other when we talk, maybe our emotions won't be so misinterpreted.
May 16: I feel like I don't exist anymore, like I'm disappearing, belong nowhere. You probably wish I would just disappear.
May 27: Got a step-by-step lesson on how to make crack. Also am learning who the reliable cocaine and heroin dealers are, where to get it, how to know it's good. Made popcorn the other day. We had cornflakes for breakfast so I put them in a sack with the margarine and salt they gave us and then put it in the dryer to melt and mix it. I could get in trouble for that but it was good.
June 17: The noise! It is breaking me down. It has taken form and is pounding on my head, my whole body. Someone coughs, I jump; someone laughs, I shudder; a cup bounces on the floor, I cringe. I can't get away. I'm trapped.
June 19: My hair is falling out.
June 19: I will fortunately survive this, but I no longer have hope or expectations for the future.
June 20: Met a guard today that seemed normal. He was nice and didn't swear. Hardly knew how to respond.
Helen's sentence is six months. But there is one month off for jail crowding and five days for each month she has worked as a trustee, and now her lawyer puts forth an idea: If the judge agrees, Helen will check into an alcohol rehab facility in St. George in lieu of her last month in jail.
So on a hot morning at the end of July she is suddenly out. There she is, wearing the jeans and white shirt she walked in wearing three months before. Her parka is stuffed into a black garbage bag. Her face is puffy and pale; her bleached hair shapeless and limp. She is wearing eyeliner applied that morning with a No. 2 lead pencil.
A representative from a local alcohol rehab group is at the jail to pick her up and drive her to the airport.
In the car she pulls out a card. On the outside is a little bell, drawn in pencil by one of the inmates. It looks like a porcelain bell, the kind someone in a fancy house might use to call the dinner guests.
The women don't generally make cards for each other in jail. On the inside of Helen's card are little messages. "Helen, you're a beautiful person" says one. "Don't ever settle for second best. And you soar with the angels always. Love always, a friend."
The worst day of a child's life can begin with a request. Please, Daddy, take me up to the lake, Helen begged. She was 9, the youngest by far of the family's eight children.
Helen's daddy was a postal worker. He was 55 when she was born. Her mother was 46, a fact that embarrassed Helen's sisters. Annoyed with the new baby, the sisters would sometimes feed her spit. That's how Helen remembers it.
On that hot summer day, when Helen was 9, some of her sisters had already gone up to a cabin at a lake about an hour away from their home in Mishawaka, Ind. Please, Daddy, take me to the lake, too, Helen begged, until her father finally relented.
That afternoon, sitting around the cabin, her father had a heart attack. It took a long time for the ambulance to arrive, and by then he was dead.
If he had stayed at home, though - if Helen hadn't begged him to go to the lake - things might have been different. The family's house was right across the street from a hospital.
Her daddy had been the loving parent, Helen says. Her mother was the cold one, the one who hadn't wanted an eighth child.
Years later, after Helen married, she and her mother had a better relationship. But about five years ago, after what Helen describes as a misunderstanding between her mother and the youngest five siblings, her mother became distant again. Their phone calls were infrequent, terse and tense. She wrote Helen out of her will.
Maybe every alcoholic can point to pivotal moments when drink suddenly seemed like an answer. Maybe every alcoholic can distill a lifetime's pain into one or two nouns. After months of therapy, Helen has named hers. Abandonment. Guilt.
She drank to avoid feeling either. And the irony, of course, was that the drinking eventually brought her more of both.
Jena Sandberg's mother, Leann Taft, learns from a reporter in the end of September that Helen has been out of jail since the end of July. Taft does the arithmetic. Three months in jail when the sentence was six.
"It isn't the amount of time in jail that's important, but three months doesn't sound right," she says. "It's like society is saying, `We were just kidding.' " It's as if the rest of us have forgotten about Jena.
Jena is 16 now. A high school student. She goes to school in the mornings, to resource classes, then someone escorts her to the door, where her mother is waiting to pick her up and take her home.
The effects of Jena's brain injury are hard to describe, says Taft. It's nothing you can put your finger on when you first meet her or if you didn't know her before. You wouldn't see right away that Jena's old friends are taking biology and going to football games; you wouldn't see right away that Jena stays home and colors with her crayons.
Her parents worry about her lack of judgment since the accident. They know she'll do anything to get someone to pay attention to her, that she can so easily come under someone's influence.
They wonder if she'll ever be able to live on her own. "A prisoner the rest of her life," her mother says.
Taft says she has worked hard at not being angry at Helen. Taft's own father was killed by a drunken driver nine years ago. She knows how a family can get stuck in the mire of grief and bitterness. She knows Helen has to get on with her life.
But she wonders why Helen hasn't called to ask how Jena is doing.
Maybe Helen should have been sentenced to the hospital, she says. Maybe she should have had to see Jena hooked up to those machines, her face bloated and purple. Maybe she should have been there when Jena's family stood by her bed and prayed. Maybe she should have to come over now and watch Jena color with her crayons.
And now it's October. Helen is living at her neighbor's house. Sometimes, she says, driving up Willow Creek Drive after she's been out somewhere, she'll forget for a moment that she no longer lives in the big house two doors away.
She is looking for a smaller house to buy. She is trying to get used to living without a husband. Her children worry about her but blame her for the divorce. She is attending Turning Point classes at Salt Lake Community College, trying to figure out a career for the rest of her life.
She is testing out her old life, too, so one day she comes back to bridge club. Everyone is nice. No one says anything about jail. But all Helen can think of is how ashamed she feels. How ashamed and worthless.
She knows what it feels like for everyone to expect you to fail, she says. It's the lesson she learned from jail, the very premise of jail: You're the kind of person who does bad things and you'll probably do them again, maybe even right there in jail.
In an odd way, though, jail was the easy part. Doing time there was just about letting the minutes pass. Now that she's out of jail she has to prove that, in the face of temptation and loneliness and life's inevitable frustrations and heartaches, she can stay sober.
She is trying now to balance her weakness, a given, against her strength, an unknown quantity. Some days she feels that anything could push her over the edge.
What she needs now is another Life Saver trick: not some pieces of candy dissolved in water but something to hold onto, something to keep her from going under again. She thinks she knows what it is, and it's the opposite lesson from the one she learned in jail.
She is worth saving: that has to be her lesson now.
She was once a nurse, she reminds herself. A person who helped people. She is a kind and gentle person. She tries to balance that against the horrible thing she did.
On a rainy October afternoon Helen drives out to Riverton, where Jena and her family now live.
Helen feels jittery as she heads west on 106th South. She has brought along a rose and a Halloween pin, but she isn't sure what she will say once she gets there. Just a few weeks ago she had thought herself too fragile to make this visit, but when the reporter tells her that Jena's mother wonders why she hasn't called, Helen asks for the Tafts' phone number.
So, on a rainy afternoon 22 months after the accident, she rings the doorbell and suddenly there are Leann and Jena in front of her.
"I caused you a lot of pain and I'm sorry," Helen says.
She stays for 30 minutes and reports later that Jena is beautiful and engaging. They talk about Jena's school and the family's two horses.
They do not talk about Jena's 497 doctor appointments or her I.Q. of 82. They don't talk about how Jena's pain and Helen's may not be equally divided, they don't talk about how jail tried to even the score. Before Helen leaves, the two women and the young girl hug each other.
Later, Leann reports that Jena had been apprehensive about meeting Helen. But Leann had told her it was important. "You need to see she's not a monster," Leann told her daughter. "She's suffering through this, too."
Justice is about balance, but grace never is.
The story of accident victim Jena Sandberg was featured in a Deseret News report on Feb. 15, 1996.