This Is Not My Life Read online

  DEDICATION

  This book is dedicated to my beloved friend

  Joanne Page

  1943–2015

  EPIGRAPH

  Never in a million years did I expect to be part of this story, but then isn’t life really what we thought would never happen in a million years?

  —BRIDGET KINSELLA, VISITING LIFE: WOMEN DOING TIME ON THE OUTSIDE

  If memory is a fiction and our identity the result of the stories we tell ourselves, how can we ever know the truth of our own lives?

  —TRISTINE RAINER, YOUR LIFE AS STORY

  This is not my life. These are not my cobwebs. This is not the darkness I was designed for.

  —COLUM MCCANN, LET THE GREAT WORLD SPIN

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  PART ONE: January 2006 to September 2007

  PART TWO: September 2007 to October 2008

  PART THREE: October 2008 to August 2009

  PART FOUR: September 2009 to November 2011

  PART FIVE: December 2011 to July 2012

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  There’s the story, then there’s the real story, then there’s the story of how the story came to be told. Then there’s what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too.

  —MARGARET ATWOOD, MADDADDAM

  This is my story, my version of the story, built on my experiences, my observations, my perceptions, and my memories. I like to think I am a reliable narrator, but writing it all down changes things—for better and for worse.

  Most of the names I’ve used are pseudonyms, except those of myself and my son, as well as those of public figures like former Prime Minister Stephen Harper and former Public Safety Minister Vic Toews. Some identifying details and place names have also been changed.

  For reasons of both privacy and length, I’ve had to leave a number of people and events out of these pages. For those who are disappointed not to find themselves here: I’m sorry. For those who are relieved: you’re welcome.

  PART ONE

  January 2006 to September 2007

  It is safe to say that never once in my life had I dreamed of being in bed with a convicted killer, let alone one with his teeth in a margarine container in the kitchen, his mother in the next room, and the word HI! tattooed in tiny blue letters on his penis.

  Years have passed, almost ten years now since I first met Shane. After all was said and done, my friend Dorothy, shaking her head in disbelief, said, “I still can’t believe you thought that story was going to have a happy ending.” But I did. For the longest time I did.

  Sometimes I can come close to understanding why I stayed with him for almost six years, why I went back to him after everything fell apart, why I fell in love with him in the first place. Other times it’s as if it all happened to somebody else, somebody who looked just like me, lived in my house, slept in my bed, wore my clothes, and wrote my books.

  And where was I then? Where was I when all of this was going on?

  HE WAS A POWERFUL-LOOKING MAN, somewhere in his late fifties, tall and well-built with broad shoulders, muscular arms and slim hips. From a certain angle, he reminded me of Vince Vaughn, one of my favourite actors. He walked with a limp, barely noticeable at first, but growing more pronounced as the hours passed. He was clean-shaven, with perfectly straight white teeth and thick shiny brown hair so dark it looked black, with a small bald spot at the back.

  I’d been volunteering at the Saint Vincent de Paul free hot meal program for three months when Shane arrived in early January as our new Friday dishwasher. We all knew where he’d come from, but we didn’t know how long he’d been there or what he’d done to end up in prison in the first place. We were curious but not especially concerned. We are used to prisons here. With eight of the eleven federal institutions for men in Ontario located in or near Kingston, including the legendary maximum-security Kingston Penitentiary, our small city is indeed the prison capital of Canada. Our modest population of fewer than two hundred thousand includes a relatively large number of ex-convicts and parolees and their families. Many of the men who came to eat regularly at Vinnie’s had done time.

  We were already busy with the lunch preparations when Shane came in that morning and didn’t have time to pay him any extra attention. Once the director had introduced him around, we put him to work, thankful for another pair of hands, wherever they came from.

  He was on an Escorted Temporary Absence, an ETA, not to be confused with what this acronym stands for out here in the free world: Estimated Time of Arrival. In the prison world, an ETA allows an inmate, either alone or in a group, to leave the institution accompanied by one or two correctional officers or by an approved citizen escort. Shane’s escort was an elderly nun named Sister Frances. We didn’t any of us say what we were thinking: that she didn’t fit the picture of what we thought we knew of “escorts,” shapely women for hire prancing around in stilettos and skimpy skin-tight skirts. Given the age and frailty of Sister Frances and the fact that Shane had come from Frontenac, a minimum-security prison, we assumed his crime couldn’t have been too serious, certainly not anything violent.

  On that first day, Shane didn’t say much to anyone except Sister Frances. When he did speak, his voice was gravelly and deep. As well as taking care of the dishes, he helped with the preparation of our usual Friday lunch: soup, coleslaw, french fries, and grilled cheese sandwiches, a deceptively simple meatless meal that involved a lot of chopping and dicing and the buttering of at least two hundred slices of bread. He worked quickly and efficiently. He also helped serve the meals, which were delivered one plate at a time to the tables in the dining room. He avoided making direct eye contact with anyone, a tendency I took to mean he was shy. Soon enough I would learn that this matter of not making eye contact was a protective prison habit. He was definitely not shy.

  With tattoos on the backs of both hands and one creeping above his collar, he certainly looked the part. After the oven was lit and the kitchen began to heat up, he rolled up his sleeves and there were more on both arms.

  I like a tattoo, have liked them since long before they became a mainstream embellishment, no longer the radical or rebellious expression of outlaws and outsiders. Even Shane’s crude prison tattoos I didn’t find unattractive. Standing next to him at the sink, I could see a small teardrop tattooed just below his left eye. Much as I liked them, I was not then familiar with the language of tattoos. Nor, it seemed, were any of the other volunteers. Nobody mentioned it.

  That first day, after we were all done cooking, serving, and cleaning up, Shane, Sister Frances, another volunteer, and I happened to be heading out to the parking lot at the same time. With more than seventy patrons for lunch, it had been a hectic day, and we were all tired. The other volunteer said she could hardly wait to get home and put her feet up, have a beer or two.

  In his first show of levity all day, Shane said, “Not me.” Then he looked directly at me and said, “You?”

  His eyes, now that I could actually see them in his handsome face, were dark and intense. Later I would discover that while the intensity of his eyes never varied, the colour did: usually dark brown, as they were that first day, but sometimes hazel, and other times more green than brown. If only I could have figured out a pattern in those shifting colours, could have used them as a kind of ocular mood ring. But the colour changes, as far as I could ever see, were inconsistent and provided no clues as to what might be going on inside his head.

  That day in the parking lot, I la
ughed and said, “Me neither. I haven’t had a drink for almost fourteen years. Today’s not the day.”

  He said, “Good for you. Been clean and sober six years myself.”

  That was the extent of our first personal conversation. Later he would say this was the day he fell in love with me. I never did believe this, but still, I liked it when he said it.

  IT WAS MY FRIEND DOROTHY who got me started volunteering at Vinnie’s. I was suffering from yet another broken heart after yet another regrettable relationship gone wrong. In times of emotional distress, my creativity tends to desert me, so I was also suffering from writer’s block and had been for months. I’d turned fifty-one that summer and was wondering where my life had gone wrong. Dorothy had been volunteering at Vinnie’s for many years, and for several weeks, she’d been trying to get me to join her there. She said it would be good for me, she said I would enjoy it, she said it would lift me out of my misery. I kept resisting, saying I couldn’t come because it was from eight-thirty in the morning until two in the afternoon, and that was my prime writing time. Finally Dorothy said, “You’re not writing anyway.” She was right.

  But still I said no. Because any day now I was going to start. Yes, I was. Any day now I was going to have a thought worth writing down. Most mornings I was just sitting in front of my computer trying to put one sentence after another. And failing. Most afternoons I was napping or hanging around in bookstores torturing myself.

  On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, the phone rang early, shortly before nine. Dorothy was calling from Vinnie’s. She said they were desperate. They were serving their big Thanksgiving meal that day, and several of the volunteers hadn’t shown up. They were likely to have ninety or more people for lunch. Could I please come and help? I said I had no idea how to make lunch for ninety people—how could I possibly be of any help? She asked if I knew how to peel potatoes. I had to admit that yes, I did.

  Dorothy said, “We’ve got fifty pounds here that need peeling. Please come. And bring your potato peeler. Ours is crappy.”

  So I went, potato peeler in hand.

  Dorothy met me at the door and outfitted me with an apron and a baseball cap. She introduced me to the other volunteers (of whom there seemed to be plenty) and also to the fifty pounds of potatoes.

  I had the best day. If I’d expected a soup kitchen to be a grim and depressing place, it was anything but. It was lively, rowdy, and rude, vibrant with a raw intensity of life I’d never experienced before. I was hooked.

  AT VINNIE’S, I HAD THREE GUIDING PRINCIPLES. Two of them were passed on to me by Dorothy: don’t judge and don’t assume. The third was of my own making. Shortly after I started volunteering, I heard a radio interview with a photographer whose current project was a series of portraits of the mentally ill. He told the story of one woman who looked puzzled after he’d taken her picture. When he explained again what he was doing, she asked with surprise, “Can you see me?” When he said yes, he definitely could, she said, “That’s funny. Most people can’t see me.”

  I imagined this was how our lunch patrons must feel when they were out in the world. Invisible. I made it my mission to show them they were not.

  Don’t judge.

  Don’t assume.

  Can you see me?

  Despite once being advised by another volunteer never to make eye contact with any of them, I held fast to these principles, and they served me well.

  I have never felt entirely comfortable within myself, but at Vinnie’s, not only was I lifted out of my misery as Dorothy had predicted, but I could forget about myself altogether, possibly for the first time in my life. This came as a great relief.

  Working there among the wounded, the damaged, the addicted, the broken, the broke, I would look around and find my spirit swelling with joy. Over and over again, I thought, These are my people. Finally I felt like I belonged. Not because their wounds were worse than mine but because there I didn’t have to pretend I wasn’t also wounded.

  There had always been a curtain between me and other people, the people I called my friends. They had all lived lives so different from mine, lives that seemed clearer, calmer, simpler, more refined. None of them, I thought, had ever made any serious mistakes or bad choices, had ever screwed up their lives, not even once, not even a little bit. With them, I always felt less than. I realize now that I have too often fallen into the trap of what Anne Lamott in her book Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life calls “that business of comparing my insides to other people’s outsides.”

  I come from the working class in Thunder Bay, a small city of just over 109,000 people located on the western shore of Lake Superior at the head of the Great Lakes—a city that has long prided itself on being “a lunch-bucket town,” a city that has more than once had the highest homicide rate in the country. Almost everyone I knew in Kingston came from much higher-class backgrounds. They were what Shane called “uptown” people. He said this in the same sneering, scornful tone my mother used when referring to someone successful and well-off: “Oh, he thinks he’s a big shot.”

  I know I had class issues. Perhaps I had a chip on my shoulder. None of my friends had grown up in a rough part of a rough city in a tiny wartime bungalow with mice in the dugout and plastic lawn ornaments in the front yard. Both my parents came from large Manitoba farming families. Neither of them had finished high school. My father worked in a grain elevator; my mother ran a post office outlet in the back of a drugstore. They didn’t understand me any better than I understood them. I’ve often wondered where my early love of books and writing came from. The only books we had in our house were an old edition of Webster’s New World Dictionary that my father used when doing crossword puzzles and a set of the Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia you could buy at Safeway, one volume per week for ninety-nine cents each. I always spent my weekly allowance on books. My mother found this disturbing. She often asked why I couldn’t just buy a blouse or a skirt or earrings or something—“like a normal girl.”

  I never felt that I belonged there, but I didn’t feel that I belonged here in Kingston either. Perhaps I’m just a chronic malcontent, always longing for the other place, the other person I could have been, the other life I could have lived. One of my son’s elementary school teachers once described him as being like Pluto, always on the edge of the group. I was the same with my friends, an outsider circling on the periphery, never fully part of the group, any group.

  I was not raised to like myself. I was raised to compare myself to others and find myself wanting. My mother instilled this in me from an early age: why couldn’t I be more like my cousin Connie, why couldn’t I be more like my friend Holly, why couldn’t I be more like Shelley Morton, who lived across the street? I don’t remember now what it was about these other girls that my mother wanted me to emulate. I only remember knowing that I was not good enough.

  After she died, my father stepped up and continued the family tradition. One evening he called to tell me he’d run into Shelley Morton at the drugstore, and she said she remembered how I’d been so smart in school when we were kids, how she’d always envied and admired me. On the phone my father snorted and said, “You sure had her fooled!” When I once made the mistake of telling him I was nervous about an upcoming television interview, he said, “No wonder. What have you got to tell anybody about?” I come from Alice Munro territory, not geographically, but in the psychological sense—deeply entrenched in the treacherous province of “Who do you think you are?” One year when my father was here for Christmas, and I was all dressed up in a new outfit to meet friends downtown for dinner, he looked me over and sneered, “Who are you supposed to be?” Indeed.

  Only once in my life do I remember him telling me he was proud of me. In 1999 I was given the Lakehead University Alumni Honour Award and went back to Thunder Bay to receive it at spring convocation. My mother had died twelve years earlier; my father was suffering from Alzheimer’s by then and living in a nursing home. My aunt Clara brought him
to the ceremony. Afterwards he said he was proud of me. Ten minutes later he didn’t know who I was. I don’t remember my mother ever saying she was proud of me. I don’t remember either of them ever telling me they loved me.

  In Kingston I envied my friends their unwavering certainty about where they belonged in the world, their self-confidence, their money, their perfect immaculate houses. I envied them their travels too, even though I don’t like travelling. Quite justifiably one of the seven deadly sins, envy is something nobody ever wants to admit to. As poisonous as cyanide and as corrosive as battery acid, a large helping of envy is inevitably served up with savoury side dishes of self-pity, resentment, guilt, and shame.

  I know this was my problem, not my friends’. I wanted to be just like them and knew I never could be. I’d spent years hiding parts of myself, trying to pass as one of them, trying to convince them and myself that I belonged. It was exhausting and self-destructive. It made me dislike myself even more.

  BEFORE I MET SHANE, the only encounter I’d ever had with an actual prisoner had taken place almost twenty years earlier. My son, Alex, was four years old. He was having digestive problems, with recurrent bouts of severe cramping and constipation. It wasn’t until he was seven that we finally received a diagnosis, thanks to the work of a diligent pediatric allergist who determined that he had an intolerance to milk protein, easily remedied by dietary changes. But in the years before that, his pain was sometimes so intense that we ended up in Emergency. This was one of those times.

  I’d kept him home from daycare, and when the pain hadn’t subsided by mid-morning, we went downtown to Hotel Dieu, the smaller of the two hospitals in the city. As usual, the waiting room was almost full, and we had no idea how long it would be before we could see a doctor.

  We settled in, Alex on my knee crying quietly and me trying to comfort and distract him with the children’s books buried in the pile of newspapers and old magazines. I knew he was starting to feel better when he got down off my knee and went over to the toy box in the corner. We’d been there often enough that he knew exactly what he was looking for. He pulled out the blue plastic truck that had become his favourite hospital toy.