This Is Not My Life Read online

  Sometimes before his move to the halfway house, I’d felt suffocated by his constant attention. When I once said, “You know, when you get out, we’re not going to be joined at the hip, we’re not going to be together 24/7,” he replied incredulously, “We’re not?”

  EARLY ON SUNDAY MORNING, I was jarred awake by the sound of banging and crashing in the kitchen. It was Thanksgiving, Shane’s first weekend home. The bed beside me was empty. I stomped into the kitchen grumbling. He was making a lemon meringue pie. I said I didn’t see the need to make a lemon meringue pie at six-thirty in the morning. He just laughed and carried on. I poured myself a cup of coffee and flounced into the living room in my housecoat. I tried to do my usual morning reading, but with the racket in the kitchen, reading was no more possible than sleeping. I have never made a pie in my life. Did it have to be this noisy?

  Perhaps I’d underestimated how hard it was going to be for me to have another person in the house. Perhaps I’d underestimated how cranky I could be. But that day I managed to get over it quickly enough, and by dinnertime, my silly morning meltdown had already been added to our file box of happy memories.

  Yes, it was Thanksgiving, and we were indeed thankful for many things, including being able to cook dinner together using my new pots and pans.

  When Shane was still at Frontenac, he had been a diligent peruser of the many sales flyers that showed up in the prison—the same flyers that filled up my mailbox at home and that I tossed into the recycling box without looking at. He liked to read the best bargains to me over the phone. Sometimes I found this charming, his way of trying to participate in the household when he couldn’t actually be here. Other times it just made me impatient, especially if the bargains were on things I’d never buy anyway.

  One day he spotted an excellent deal on a ten-piece set of KitchenAid cookware. Now this was something I could use. Usually retailing for four hundred dollars, the set was now on sale for half price. Shane had a pass that weekend, so we went directly to the Canadian Tire store near my house.

  Including three saucepans of various sizes, a five-quart Dutch oven, a ten-inch skillet, and a steamer insert, all stainless steel with break-proof glass lids, it was indeed a beautiful set. We stood proudly in the checkout line with our cart, holding hands, imagining what we’d cook first, feeling closer and closer, ever closer to normal. Shane set the box on the counter, and I got out my credit card. It felt like a commitment, that big box of pretty pots and pans, a step towards the future in which we would live happily ever after together in the free world.

  And now here we were on Thanksgiving, using the new cookware together just as we’d imagined we would. Our dinner was delicious, especially the pie.

  The next day, we were thankful to be able to sleep in, then putter around the house all morning. After a lunch of turkey sandwiches and the rest of the pie, we went outside and started getting the yard ready for winter. We raked leaves, put away the lawn chairs and the barbecue, and regretfully emptied the flowerpots we’d planted together in the spring.

  On his pass to Vera’s in May, we’d gone to the garden centre and loaded up the car with impatiens for the window boxes, a gigantic pink and purple fuchsia to hang at the front, assorted other annuals to be planted in decorative containers, and a few perennials for the shade garden I’d been trying to establish at the back.

  Shane had done some landscaping work at the prison, and that day, if he’d had his way, we would have bought much more. But when we got to the cash register, he could see why I’d been so prudent about my choices. At the prison, of course, he didn’t have to pay for the plants and had no idea how expensive they could be. We did, however, buy one special thing I’d always wanted to try: a smoke bush.

  We spent the rest of the day happily planting and playing in the dirt. We selected a spot for the smoke bush in the backyard. Then Shane dug the hole, and together we gently tucked the little plant in, filling all around it with compost and new soil and watering it generously. Not much more than ten inches high, the smoke bush was another nod to the future, to our future, as we imagined how lush and beautiful it would be in five years, ten, twenty.

  He said he’d rip out the weeds coming up through the cracks at the edge of my driveway. I said, “They’re not weeds, they’re bleeding hearts. They come up every year, and I like them.” Having been called a bleeding heart often enough myself, I felt compelled to defend and protect them.

  He laughed and said, “I get it. Don’t worry, I won’t touch them.” He contented himself with digging up some dandelions instead.

  Later we sat back in our lawn chairs and admired our day’s handiwork. Full of ideas for other projects we might tackle when he got home to stay, Shane outlined complicated detailed plans that would amount to a full-scale outdoor makeover. I resisted the urge to ask who was going to pay for all this. I could already see that sitting around making elaborate plans for the future, however grandiose and unrealistic, was a salient and vital part of prison life. Whether these plans were likely ever to come to fruition was not the important thing. What mattered was believing in the future and one’s own existence in it—a future of freedom, happiness, and success where the word security would mean something altogether different than it meant now. Telling the story of the future was the important thing, even if it was a future that might never come.

  And now here we were, thankful to be wrapping the smoke bush in burlap for the winter. It had already grown to twice its original size in just one season.

  All weekend we were thankful for one thing after another, especially being able to spend the whole night together in my queen-size bed. Not just one night, but three. Yes, I’d forgotten how loudly he snored. No matter what position he was in, no matter how many times I nudged, poked, or tried to roll him over, no matter how many Breathe Right strips I stuck across his nose, nothing would make the snoring stop. But it didn’t matter. I would get used to it. I would buy earplugs. Between the snoring, the sex, and the fact that I was completely unaccustomed to sharing the bed except with little Nelly, I didn’t sleep much all weekend. But it didn’t matter. I would get used to it.

  FOR THE TIME BEING, Shane would have a pass home every other weekend. Come January, provided all had gone well, his status at the halfway house would be changed to “five and two,” meaning he would be required to spend five nights a week there with two nights at my house in Kingston.

  In the two weeks between our Thanksgiving weekend and his next pass, he accomplished a lot. Because he’d been having UTAs, ETAs, and work releases in the community for several years, the outside world was not entirely foreign to him. He was not, after all, Rip Van Winkle. He knew what needed to be done, and, of course, he had that list we’d made together. He called often to keep me updated, usually three or four times a day, sometimes as many as seven or eight. I knew he was lonely, and I tried to be patient, figuring that once he got used to us living in different cities, he wouldn’t feel the need to call so often. Within a few months, Lenny too would be granted day parole and move to the Peterborough house. This did not help with the loneliness as much as I’d hoped.

  In his first two weeks in Peterborough, Shane had his first meeting with the CSC psychologist, Dr. Quinn, whom he would continue to see once a month as required by the Parole Board. He bought a bus pass and was learning the routes around the city. He began working out and swimming at the Y, a free membership being provided by the halfway house for each of the residents. He spent many frustrating hours on the phone trying to replace his lost birth certificate. As it happened, the office he was directed to was located in Thunder Bay (not my fault), and the person he was dealing with didn’t speak English very well (also not my fault). After several calls in which Shane repeatedly explained where he’d been for the last thirty years, this person said he could find no record of him anywhere. Given that Shane had effectively been “a ward of the state” for more than half his life, this was absurdly ironic. When he sarcastically said, “Does that m
ean I’m innocent after all? Does that mean I’ve been pardoned?” the man on the phone didn’t laugh.

  He had already found a job. He would be working at the Saint Vincent de Paul Society Thrift Store, primarily on the loading dock. He would work thirty-six hours a week, with Friday afternoons off so he could come home for the weekend. He would be paid minimum wage, which, compared to the amount he made inside, sounded like a veritable fortune. Now he needed to open a bank account into which his paycheques could be deposited. He still didn’t have the proper ID to be able to do this easily, so when I picked him up the next weekend, we went together to the bank. Because I was a long-time customer of that bank myself, opening a joint account in both our names was the simplest solution. He wouldn’t have access to any of my individual accounts, but I would be able to withdraw from this one. In this way he could contribute to the cost of gas and groceries for our weekends together.

  Knowing how anxious I was about winter driving, he said he would start taking the bus back and forth at the end of November. This was not expensive and would make things easier for me. On each pass weekend, I was spending twelve hours on the road, clocking eight hundred kilometres with the two round trips. For a person who doesn’t like driving even when the weather is good, this was a challenge. He planned to get his driver’s licence in the spring.

  AT FOUR IN THE MORNING ON Remembrance Day, the ringing phone woke me from a deep sleep. It was not a pass weekend. Shane was calling from the Peterborough hospital. He’d been rushed there by ambulance, he said. It might be a heart attack. He’d had one many years before. He admitted that he hadn’t been taking his blood pressure medication. He’d been feeling so good, he said, that he thought he didn’t need it anymore.

  I was up and dressed and on my way by four-thirty. The roads were all but deserted in the pre-dawn darkness. In the parking lot of the Tim Hortons in Kenworth, there was a cluster of pickup trucks and a dozen men in red and orange vests and hats. I saw similar configurations of men and trucks at other spots along the highway. It was deer hunting season.

  One of the (many) ways in which Shane and I were not alike was in our attitudes towards hunting. An avid hunter when he was young, he still reminisced fondly about how wonderful it was to be out in the woods enjoying nature. To which I invariably replied, “Couldn’t you just enjoy nature without killing something while you were out there?”

  Just the previous weekend I’d splurged and made a special dinner featuring one of my favourite dishes: grilled lamb chops. He tried but couldn’t bring himself to eat them, said he kept picturing those innocent little lambs gambolling in a meadow, oblivious to the fact that they were soon going to end up on somebody’s plate. He said it made no sense at all that I loved lamb chops while being so against hunting. I said it made no sense either that he, the tough-guy hunter, couldn’t eat lamb chops. I said it was a good thing that since he was under a lifetime weapons ban, this would only ever be an academic argument. Regardless of what I thought about it, there would be no more hunting for him.

  In the end, I made him a peanut butter sandwich and ate his lamb chops as well as mine. He said we humans are nothing if not a mess of contradictions. I said, “Mass. The saying is ‘a mass of contradictions.’” He said it was true either way. And that that was another way in which we were a lot alike.

  I arrived at the hospital at seven-thirty. He was still in Emergency, and they took me right in. I could hear him snoring before I got into the room, so I knew he was still alive. The nurse said they were waiting for the last test results, but it now looked like he’d had a severe episode of angina, not a heart attack. He drifted in and out of sleep for the next two or three hours, while I sat beside his bed.

  Once the test results were in, the doctor had checked him again, and the halfway house had been consulted, he was released into my care for the next twenty-four hours. He was still groggy and loopy from the medication they’d given him, but I managed to get him out to the parking lot and loaded into the car.

  We went to the Best Western, where, luckily, there was a room available, and I got the discounted hospital rate for one night. The rest of the day and the night passed peacefully with no further problems.

  In the morning, after breakfast at the hotel, I took him back to the halfway house. Kissing me goodbye, he said, “Don’t worry. I’m not going to die. I’m going to live to be a hundred.” This was the same thing he’d said nine months ago after the esophageal bleed.

  This time I said, “Is that a promise or a threat?”

  CHRISTMAS TOOK UP MOST OF the month of December, just as it always does. In addition to the usual hoopla, this year it also involved a lot of back-and-forthing on the bus. Shane was home for the weekend in the middle of the month. He would be back a week later on Christmas Eve for four days, then again for four more days at New Year’s.

  Shane and I decided to do the decorating on the mid-month weekend. Now that Alex was older, usually we just set up a small tree on a table in the corner of the living room. But this year, in honour of Shane being with us, I thought we should resurrect the big tree. I’d bought this six-foot artificial tree when Alex and I first moved to Kingston, the prospect of getting a real one every year by myself being more than I could handle at the time. This year I hauled it up from the basement along with the three plastic tubs of decorations we had accumulated over the years, these being a testament to the fact that although I’m not keen on Christmas myself, I had made a concerted festive effort for Alex’s sake. Shane and I put up the tree on Saturday night so Alex would be surprised when he got home from work.

  I took great pleasure in sharing the stories of all our special ornaments with Shane, who couldn’t remember the last time he’d decorated a Christmas tree. By the time we were finished, I was feeling quite nostalgic and sentimental, so I got out Alex’s baby book and the photo album of his first year back in Canmore. We sat together on the couch, and I spread the books open on the coffee table. Alex was an exceptionally well-documented baby from the very first ultrasound photo all the way to his first birthday in the backyard, him in a jaunty red and gold party hat grinning and waving his arms, with the blue and grey mountains keeping watch in the near distance behind him. I was so swept up in sharing my memories of Alex’s babyhood with Shane that I didn’t notice until I stood up to get the next album that he was scowling and grinding his teeth.

  “I wasn’t there,” he said angrily. “I should have been there. I should have been in those pictures too. But I wasn’t there.”

  I didn’t know what to make of this. Should I be touched, angry, disappointed, disturbed? I put the baby book and the photo album away. Maybe it was just too much all at once—Christmas, the tree, the decorations, the pictures, the memories—too much emotion for him to handle, too much of another life, my life long before he came along, my life with my son, the kind of life he might have had but didn’t.

  Maybe there would be another time, I thought, a better time to show him the rest of the albums, a time when he’d be able to enjoy sharing my earlier life with my bouncing brown-eyed baby boy. But there wasn’t.

  NOW THAT HE WAS WORKING, Shane was excited to be able to buy me a Christmas gift. He couldn’t resist dropping hints. It was an item of clothing, he said. He’d picked it out himself, he said. I was afraid to imagine what he might have chosen.

  Ever since we’d started sleeping together, he’d been trying to convince me to wear sexy lingerie. But I was happy with my granny nightie and did not oblige. When I did buy new sleepwear, it was an oversized T-shirt with a drawing of a large fish, a pair of red smooching lips, and the words KISS MY BASS. I bought him a pair of matching boxers with the same sentiment across the back. This pretty much summed up how I feel about a lot of things, including sexy lingerie. I find the idea of wearing such getups ludicrous, not because I think them offensive or demeaning or shameful, but because they just seem silly to me, the embodiment of a kind of cartoon sexiness better suited to the nocturnal tuggings of tee
nage boys than to the mature sensual pleasures of grown men. I was sure that if I ever did try wearing such a costume, I’d be overcome with a very unsexy fit of hysterical laughter. And maybe I was fonder of my fifty-something body than I realized. Maybe I thought it was alluring and sexy enough without the props.

  At Vinnie’s, Shane had often brought things from the warehouse to me in the kitchen, clothes he said he thought I’d like—more accurately, clothes he would have liked me to like. Considering that it was a religious organization run by elderly nuns, a surprising number of slinky nightgowns were donated. There was also once a donation of a large purple dildo. It too was brought into the kitchen, thankfully not by Shane but by one of our regular lunch patrons, who carefully arranged it on her table as a centrepiece. She was quite indignant when we made her put it away.

  Over time Shane had brought me, among other things, a pair of black pleather pants that would have been skin-tight even on an anorexic supermodel, a metallic silver top with a neckline that would have plunged all the way to my navel, a teeny tiny red bikini made of a shiny slippery material somewhere between plastic and rubber. He’d also often expressed a deep longing to see me in stilettos.

  He was crestfallen when each time he brought me an offering, I rolled my eyes, guffawed, and said, “You’re kidding, right?”

  But I knew he wasn’t kidding, and now when he tucked the store-wrapped box under the Christmas tree with the rest, I was worried. The box was too large to be underwear and too small to be shoes—but beyond that it offered no clues.