This Is Not My Life Read online

  The lead Board member noted that Shane had received a number of strong support letters and singled mine out as being “exceptional and very well-written.” This time we all laughed out loud.

  After an hour and a half, we were asked to leave the room, all of us except the Board members and the hearing officer. Janice went to her office, and Shane, Stuart, Fred, and I went back down to V&C to await the decision. We were anxious, hopeful, and prepared to be disappointed all at once. Within ten minutes, Janice reappeared to take us back upstairs. She said the speed of the decision could be a good sign or a bad sign. Only one way to find out. Returning to the hearing room, we again took our seats.

  When the lead Board member said, “Day parole is granted,” it was all we could do not to leap up and cheer. Then he explained the conditions they had imposed: in addition to abiding by all the rules and requirements of the halfway house, Shane must not consume, purchase, or possess alcohol or drugs; must not enter any establishment where the primary source of income is alcohol; must not associate with anyone involved in criminal activity; must follow any psychological counselling as arranged by his parole officer. These are standard conditions for most federal parolees.

  In conclusion, smiling, the lead Board member said, “You are a very fortunate man to have found someone who will help you in your return to society. You must cater to and develop this support. You must cherish this woman who loves you.”

  PART TWO

  September 2007 to October 2008

  We’d been warned that it could be a month or more before there was room at the halfway house, but only a week after the hearing, a bed became available. He was to be there on Wednesday at noon. We had four days to get ready. He didn’t have much to pack: clothes, toiletries, shoes, lamp, CD player, paperwork, photographs, a few keepsakes he’d managed to hang onto over the years. Also his three-ring binder full of certificates in plastic sheet protectors—from the university courses in sociology, philosophy, and anthropology he’d taken by correspondence; from the Bible studies he’d done through the convent; from the dozens of CSC programs he’d completed over the years: Anger and Emotions Management, Alternatives to Violence, Cognitive and Living Skills, Community Integration, Personal Development.

  Trying to think of things that would help keep him occupied on his own in Peterborough, I put a selection of pens and blank notebooks into the box I was making for him. I also added two paint-by-number kits. He once said Lenny did these and he’d like to try it too, so I bought him a pair of lighthouse scenes to signify the light at the end of the tunnel and a pair of wolves in the forest because the wolf was his favourite animal.

  For sentimental value, I gave him the old pillow from my childhood bed that I had kept safe with me for over thirty years and the carved wooden cane I once gave my father, returned to me by the nursing home after his death.

  THE EVENING BEFORE I WAS TO DRIVE Shane to Peterborough, I made what I believed would be my last visit to Frontenac. One of the officers on duty was Lorne Matheson, a man who’d been with CSC as long as Shane, on the opposite side of the fence, as it were. I found it ironic and oddly touching that inmates and officers alike invariably phrased it in the same way: “I’ve done thirty years.” To hear Shane and Lorne tell it, they were both angry and aggressive when they were young, their conflicts frequent and intense. But now they had both mellowed considerably and were friends, or at least as close to friends as they could be in this context. Lorne was a member of Shane’s Case Management Team, and he’d even written a support letter to the Parole Board in which he described him as “a model inmate.” I had already noticed that in prison, the standard of what constituted model behaviour was set quite low. Still, this was a valuable recommendation, perhaps the prison equivalent to having your favourite famous author write a glowing blurb for the back of your new book.

  When I went in that evening, Shane was waiting impatiently behind the glass doors as usual, and Lorne seemed especially glad to see me. He and Shirley, one of my favourite female officers, led me down the hallway to the ion scanner. I handed Lorne my driver’s licence for testing as usual. He swiped it and put the little square of cloth into the machine. Within seconds, it sounded the alarm indicating that the presence of drugs had been detected, an alarm loud enough to be heard all the way back to the horseshoe and beyond, all the way to behind the glass doors where Shane was standing.

  In more than a hundred visits during the past nine months, I had never once hit positive on the machine. How could it be happening now? How could it be happening tonight of all nights? I was well aware of the dismal array of possible consequences of a positive hit: this visit denied, all future visits denied, a permanent black mark on Shane’s record. It could even be enough to cause the postponement or cancellation of his move to the halfway house.

  When I turned to Lorne in shocked disbelief, he and Shirley started to laugh, slapping their thighs and giving each other high-fives. Then Lorne twisted a knob on the machine so the alarm went off again, even louder this time.

  “My goodbye present to Shane,” he said. “I set it to go off. I just wanted to piss him off one more time.”

  Shane was not exactly amused.

  THE NEXT MORNING, I ARRIVED back at Frontenac at eight o’clock. Shane was waiting inside at the horseshoe with his duffle bag, backpack, and boxes, clutching his paperwork and a small brown envelope. If there had been no one to drive him, they would have paid for his bus ticket. But I was there, and the envelope contained the twenty dollars that had been left in his account and the eighty dollars each inmate received upon release. Shane said they held this eighty dollars to cover the cost of your body bag if you died inside, but I was never sure if this was true or the carceral equivalent of an urban legend.

  Lenny was waiting with him. Janice Mackie was there too, and after we’d put the last of his belongings in my car, she shook his hand and said with a grin, “Good luck, Shane. I hope I never see you again.” He and Lenny shook hands too but said nothing.

  With no further fanfare, we got in the car and drove out of the parking lot. No balloons, no cake, no gold watch, no brass band, no fireworks—but we were on our way.

  In the car we listened to the CDs I’d made for him. At his request, I’d started with sounds of nature for relaxation and Buddhist chants for meditation. Then I asked him for a list of songs he’d like to have. It turned out to be a very long list, including “The Air That I Breathe” by The Hollies, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” by The Platters, “Memories Are Made of This” by Dean Martin, “Never on a Sunday” by Connie Francis, “Little Green Bag” by George Baker, “Talk Back Trembling Lips” by Johnny Tillotson, “Crying” by Roy Orbison, “Time in a Bottle” by Jim Croce, and, of course, “Unchained Melody” by Sam Cooke.

  Although Shane was only five years older than me, clearly we had very different tastes in music. Some of these songs I’d never even heard of, and the rest I thought of as “old man music,” songs my father would have enjoyed. The only ones I liked too were those by Roy Orbison and Jim Croce. I was mystified by this list, until I realized these old songs were all from the years before he went to prison. This was the music he’d loved when he was in his teens and early twenties, when he was a healthy young man excelling at football and hockey, a handsome young man married at the age of twenty-one, soon to be a father. Yes, he’d been in some trouble by then, and yes, he’d started down the wrong road with drinking and drugs, but it was not too late. His life, still full then of potential and possibility, could have gone in any direction. When he was that young man listening to this music, the word life did not yet mean a life sentence.

  For good measure, I’d also made a CD of some of my favourite music from the past, and we listened to that too: The Rolling Stones, Janis Joplin, Little Feat, Eric Clapton, Meatloaf, John Lee Hooker, B.B. King, Joan Armatrading, “Wild Thing” by The Troggs, “I Am Woman” by Helen Reddy, “Total Eclipse of the Heart” by Bonnie Tyler, “Walk on the Wild Side” by Lou Reed,
“Let’s Give Them Something to Talk About” by Bonnie Raitt.

  Following the same route we’d taken back in May, we arrived at the halfway house just before noon. Shane would be sharing a basement room with another man. Visitors not being allowed in the residents’ rooms, I only stepped in briefly while we carried in his belongings. With a window on the far wall, two built-in closets on the opposite wall, and two single beds with storage lockers beneath them, there was, as my mother would have said, barely enough room to swing a cat. But Shane was overjoyed with his new accommodation, the best thing about it being what it wasn’t: prison.

  While he unpacked, I waited in the office area upstairs, chatting with the supervisor. Several of the other residents passed in and out, most of them older men like Shane, some looking more like criminals than others, all of them pleasant and polite. I studied two large bulletin boards, one covered with notices—of job openings, church services, AA and NA meetings, bus schedules, a lost dog—and the other covered with lists—of lunch and dinner menus, upcoming passes, a chore list for the next two weeks. Shane had already been assigned to clean the bathrooms, a task I knew he would actually enjoy. As for passes, after he’d been there for two weeks, he too would be able to come home for the weekend—to my home, not his mother’s—and, fittingly, it would be Thanksgiving.

  I had once again booked a room at the Best Western. I planned to spend Wednesday and Thursday nights there and then drive home alone on Friday afternoon. In the meantime, there was much to be done to help Shane start getting settled in his new city. First he had interviews with the police and his new parole officer. Although the supervisor told him to get used to the place for a week or two before looking for a job, he checked in at two different employment agencies and picked up pamphlets on how to prepare a proper resumé.

  We went to the library so he could get a card and start borrowing books right away. One of the problems with having been in prison for so long was that Shane had none of the standard pieces of identification: no driver’s licence, no credit card, no health card. He didn’t even have a birth certificate anymore, it having been lost somewhere along the way. All he had was his federal inmate ID card—and me. Whatever reservations the librarian may have had about him, they were banished once I introduced myself and she recognized my name. If there’s any place where being a writer can come in handy, it is a library. We came out an hour later with a library card, a stack of books, and an invitation for me to give a reading there when my new novel, At a Loss for Words, came out in the spring.

  On Friday morning, I picked him up at the halfway house, and we went back to the Best Western for breakfast. On the patio outside our room, we sipped our coffee and fed the ducks. I took pictures of them clustered around Shane’s feet, quacking for more bread, took a picture too of the boldest duck, who waddled right into the room and sat looking out at us from beside the bed, as if he might like to hop up there and have a nap.

  We’d done what we could to get Shane organized, and the halfway house staff would help him with the rest. I got out pens and a notepad, and we set about making a list. We were both never happier than when making a list.

  Shane rolled up his sleeves and said, as he often did, “You and I are a lot alike.”

  Our tastes in music and the fact that he was a Coke drinker while I preferred Pepsi notwithstanding (was it even possible, we joked, to be a two-cola couple?), yes, we did have more in common than you might expect. Making lists, making plans, making lists of plans. Reading, of course. Crossword puzzles and all word games. Bookstores. Cemeteries. Afternoon naps. Perhaps these were small things. But there were deeper things too that we shared. Don’t we all do this when we fall in love—don’t we all search for signs of ourselves in the other? You can always find them if you look hard enough.

  There was our mutual connection to banks, of course: he was once a bank robber and I was once a bank teller. Shane tended to think of bank robbery as a “victimless crime” as long as no one got shot. After I told him how frightening it was for me the day a foolish old man stepped up to my wicket at the bank in Canmore, cocked his hand like a gun, stuck his index finger in my chest, and said, “This is a stick-up, give me all your money,” he revised his opinion. Having once noticed him looking a little too long (and a little too longingly) at a Brink’s truck idling beside us at a red light, I had taken to hollering, “Cover your eyes! Cover your eyes!” every time we passed one. Much hilarity ensued. We both liked to laugh.

  We both tended to obsess about things, and we were both inclined to depression and anxiety. We were both thin-skinned and easily hurt, although he tried harder to hide this about himself. We both sometimes felt sorry for ourselves. We were both very emotional, although he was uncomfortable with what he called his “soft feelings.” He did not trust kindness, caring, tenderness, happiness, harmony, love. He had the same emotional repertoire as anyone else, but any negative feelings—fear, disappointment, anxiety, regret, embarrassment, loneliness, shame—always came out as anger. Later I discovered that sometimes his soft feelings came out that way too.

  We had both struggled for years to feel we belonged somewhere, anywhere, with someone, anyone. Shane said that when he went to prison, it was the first time he’d ever felt a true sense of family and fraternity. And me? I felt I belonged with him.

  We both had fond memories of having fried baloney for supper when we were kids. This perhaps meant more to me than it should have. For me it was the baloney of belonging. Once when I was waxing nostalgic to Dorothy about the delights of this delicacy, the circles of baloney brown and crispy around the edges, curling up like little cups on the plate, she said she’d never heard of such a thing. She said, as she had on several occasions about other topics, “It’s a class thing.”

  Shane liked to say we’d both been in prison before we found each other. He said that although my prison had been much cozier than his, still I’d been living a sexless, loveless, unfulfilled life until he came along, and that no matter how many books I read or wrote, no matter how comfortable my house was, still I was all alone. I pointed out that I was not alone, I had Alex. He meant alone with no one to lean on, he said, no one to help me, no one to hold me, no one to rub my feet or wash my back. There was some truth to this, but I didn’t agree with the prison metaphor. I knew, though, that it was part of how he liked to tell himself the story of our relationship, that it wasn’t just me helping him, that he’d helped me too, rescuing me from my sad lonely life and setting me free.

  We both had what my friend Evelyn called “busy brains,” our minds never still, our thoughts constantly galloping around in all directions at once. When she first said this about me, I instantly recognized it as the perfect description of what sometimes felt like static in my head or the sizzling snow that used to fill the TV screen when the station went out. Recently I heard a radio program about memory in which it said the average person has seventy thousand thoughts a day. How do you count or measure a thought anyway? Is thinking, I love you, I don’t know why I love you, I wish I didn’t love you, one thought or three? The researcher went on to say this number is much higher for “the very thoughtful and painstakingly neurotic among us.”

  I like to think my busy brain is an integral part of my creativity. But I know it has its dark side too, is a prime contributor to my anxiety, my neuroses, my obsessions, my chronic insomnia. On a good day, I get along well with my busy brain and appreciate its inexhaustible energy. But there are other times when my thoughts are swarming uncontrollably, my brain seems to be filling up with psychedelic zigzag lines rocking to some horror movie soundtrack, and all I want to do is turn it off. As for Shane, the fractious firestorm that sometimes erupted in his brain was even worse, and it could be contagious. I already knew that if he started a conversation by saying, “I’ve been thinking,” there was a stretch of rough road directly ahead, possibly laced with land mines.

  That morning at the Best Western, after we’d completed our list, run out of bread for
the ducks, and taken advantage one more time of having a room with a bed in it all to ourselves, I delivered Shane to the halfway house in time for lunch and headed for the highway. I drove home with a sense of relief and anticipation. Our prison days were done, and we had stepped now into the next chapter of our story. I was looking forward to having more time to myself, to resuming my regular routines, to no longer feeling frazzled all the time, to being able to get some writing done.

  LONELY OR NOT BEFORE I MET SHANE, I count solitude as one of the basic requirements of daily life, right up there with air, water, food, shelter, and books. To paraphrase Gibbon, who paraphrased Cicero, who recorded what was said by Scipio to Cato: “I am never less alone than when by myself.” This has been true since I was very young, perhaps because I was the only child of older parents and had to learn to amuse myself. It is a good character trait for a writer, and I’m not one to complain about the “isolation” of the writing life. If anything, I am more likely to complain about not having enough isolation. This was one way in which Shane and I were not alike. He most often took my need for solitude as an affront.

  One of the mistaken preconceptions I had about a man who’d been in prison for thirty years was that he too would be good at being alone and keeping himself occupied. In hindsight, I realize I should have given more thought to the fact that prison is a place where being forced to be alone is one of the ultimate punishments. Call it “solitary confinement,” “segregation,” or “the hole,” it is now widely considered a violation of basic human rights and a form of psychological torture when continued for too long.

  Shane did not like being alone. But he also might as well have had a tattoo that said HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE. Most of us interpret this sentiment from Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit as meaning that all the pain in our lives is caused by other people, and the world would be a much better place if there weren’t so many of them in it. For Shane, this matter of other people was a double-edged sword. He didn’t much like them either collectively or individually. His friendships seldom lasted for more than two weeks. Lenny, it seemed, was his only long-term friend. But he couldn’t stand to be alone either.