This Is Not My Life Read online

  “Do you think God forgives me?” he often asked.

  I knew enough about God to feel confident that the answer to this question was yes. I never doubted the depth of Shane’s remorse, but I didn’t know if he would ever be able to forgive himself.

  SHANE HAD BEEN TELLING ME EVERY DAY for weeks that he loved me. I had not yet reciprocated. I wanted to say it. I thought it often enough. I’d spent many sleepless nights trying to sort out my feelings for him. In the end, it was something like what he had said about manslaughter: I didn’t plan to fall in love with him, I didn’t intend to fall in love with him, but I did.

  The reasons I shouldn’t become involved with him were self-evident—even to me. I sometimes wonder now if I took Dorothy’s advice—don’t judge, don’t assume—too far in his case. Perhaps in my time at Vinnie’s I went overboard in perfecting my practice of acceptance without judgment or assumption. My own better judgment should have told me not to get involved with him. I should have assumed, as everybody else did, that falling in love with a man in prison, let alone a man in prison for murder, was not a good idea. It would be easy to say that I was blinded by love. But I wasn’t. I knew this was a risky thing to do.

  In retrospect I also wonder if the intensity of his desire for me meant more to me than it should have. Perhaps I didn’t realize at the time how much I wanted to be wanted, how deeply I needed to be needed.

  Tossing and turning all night, I asked myself many questions. If he’d killed Philip Bailey three years ago instead of thirty, would I get involved with him? No. If he’d killed a woman? No. If he was a sex offender, a rapist, a child pornographer, a pedophile? No. If Alex was a little boy instead of a twenty-one-year-old young man? No. If I was a young woman myself, with my whole life ahead of me? No. If I hadn’t already come to know him as a person before I knew he had committed murder? Maybe not.

  I drew lines around what I would and wouldn’t have been able to accept. I had to arrange it all in my mind in a way I could live with. Did getting involved with him mean I condoned, overlooked, or otherwise minimized the gravity of what he’d done in taking another person’s life? No. Absolutely not. The day my son was born I knew that I would kill for him. This is still true even though he’s now six foot four. Having acknowledged my own capacity to kill someone meant I could understand how murder happened. Was it possible to love the man while hating the crime? Yes. Did I wish he hadn’t killed Philip Bailey? Yes. Did I wish he wasn’t in prison? Yes. Could I change either of these things? No. Did I forgive him for what he’d done in the past? Yes. Did I believe he was no longer the same person who’d killed Philip Bailey? Yes. Did I believe people could change? Yes. Did I believe in second chances? Yes.

  Only convicted criminals (and perhaps a few celebrities) are forever defined and labelled by the worst thing they have ever done in their lives. The rest of us can be more than one thing. We can be both good and bad. We seldom ever even have to reveal the worst thing we’ve done in our lives, except maybe to our therapists. What if the next time you went to the grocery store everyone filling up their carts with apples, juice, and Cheerios was wearing a sign stating the worst thing they’d ever done in their lives? What would your sign say?

  Yes, he was a murderer. But he was not only a murderer.

  Did I believe he loved me? Yes. Did I love him? Yes.

  I did not look at him every day and see MURDERER. I looked at him every day and saw SHANE, the man I loved.

  When faced with a romantic situation where I must choose between following my head or my heart, I have always chosen the latter. I have always been able to override the rational voice in my head. I have never been able to—and could not this time—silence or dismiss the obsessive clamouring in my heart.

  Did I sometimes wonder if I was crazy? Yes.

  REGARDLESS OF HOW BIZARRE IT MIGHT BE that I’d fallen in love with a murderer, I also knew that with Shane, more than with any other man in any other circumstance, when I told him I loved him, I would be making a commitment that was bound to be complicated—a commitment that was going to change my life. I was sure I loved him, but I also had to be sure I was ready for what lay ahead. As it turned out, it did change my life, but by then what I was living was not my life, bore little or no resemblance to any life I had expected or intended to live.

  Even when I was ready to tell him, I didn’t do it directly. I wrote it in a card. Not surprising for a writer, I suppose. To my dear devoted Shane, I began. It didn’t take long to write—I knew what I wanted to say. The problem then was figuring out the best time to give it to him. I could have mailed it, but I knew all incoming and outgoing inmate correspondence was checked, and I didn’t like the idea of an officer reading it before he did. The only time we were ever alone was in the car.

  When I picked him up the next morning, I intended to give it to him as soon as we were on our way. But he was upset because someone in his unit had drunk all the juice and didn’t replace it and wouldn’t admit it either. This led to a full-scale rant about how nobody else, including Lenny, ever did anything, and he was the only one who ever cleaned the fucking toilet. He wasn’t housed on the range in a regular cell but in one of a number of special units in which five or six inmates lived communally, each with his own bedroom, sharing the kitchen, the living room, the chores. These were the Phoenix units, intended to provide the men with an experience of everyday life more like that which they would have to navigate once they were released—once they, like the mythical bird, had risen from the ashes of their criminal lives and been reborn.

  I let him complain until we got to Vinnie’s. Once inside, I slipped him the card. The other volunteers were already coming in, so I suggested he take it to the basement and read it alone.

  When he came back upstairs, his face was red and he was obviously upset. I couldn’t understand it; I had thought he would be thrilled. After stomping around the kitchen in his apron for a few minutes, he said angrily, “Demented! I am not demented. You called me demented.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about. He took the card out of his pocket and shook it at me, pointing to the first line. “There,” he said, “right there.”

  I looked closer. I still didn’t get it. He read his interpretation of the offending line out loud: “To my dear demented Shane.”

  I’ve often been complimented on my neat handwriting, but apparently it wasn’t clear to him. “Devoted!” I cried. “It says devoted, you idiot!”

  Five hours later, after we’d served lunch to more than eighty people, wiped all the tables, done all the dishes, and put them away, we went to the basement to hang up the wet dishtowels. Leaning up against the freezer, he put his arms around me and kissed me. He’d tried before, but I had always pushed him away. This time I didn’t. The kiss was deep, passionate, and thrilling—but sadly cut short by the sound of someone else coming down the stairs.

  I said it out loud. “I love you.”

  He said, “Demented or not, I love you with all my heart.”

  I said it again. “I love you too.”

  BEFORE I GAVE SHANE the I-love-you card, I’d asked him more than once if he was sure he wanted to be with a woman. The first time, he seemed surprised by the question. I reminded him that he’d been open about his previous sexual encounters with men. He said yes, he was absolutely sure. He was also sure that woman was me.

  After I gave him the card, I said, “You are my person,” a line I’d lifted from an episode of Grey’s Anatomy. “But if you go back to drinking and drugs, I will leave you. If you go back to doing crime, I will leave you. If you ever cheat on me, I will leave you.”

  Love is not supposed to be like parole, is not supposed to come with conditions. But those were mine. As time went on, it became clear that we both had trouble with the concept of “unconditional love.”

  I HAD DECLARED MY LOVE TO SHANE. We’d had our first kiss. It had taken almost a year to get to this point. Now things began to happen quickly. It appeared that those three
little words could have as much of a snowball effect in the prison world as anywhere else.

  Despite newly-in-love couples everywhere feeling they are encased in a bulletproof bubble of happiness, no romantic relationship takes place in a vacuum, and this is never more true than when one of those would-be lovers is a prison inmate. Our relationship could not possibly develop according to its own natural timetable. Taking place under the auspices of the Correctional Service of Canada, it could only proceed as they permitted, step by step, rule by rule, document by document, at a pace that proved over the coming years to be sometimes much too fast and other times maddeningly slow, more often the latter than the former.

  Relinquishing my position as Shane’s approved escort and becoming his regular visitor instead was not without its difficulties. When he informed his parole officer, Janice Mackie, that I wanted to make this change so we could pursue a romantic relationship, she was not impressed. She was sure he must be coercing me, muscling me to suit his own devious purposes, most likely grooming me to become his drug mule. I did my best to convince her that this was not the case, that I had fallen in love with him and was making this decision of my own free will. She remained skeptical. This conversation took place on the phone. I hadn’t yet met Janice in person, but I was sure that once I did, she’d see that I was not a likely candidate for either being muscled or lugging drugs. When I did meet her later that week, her attitude had not softened any, and meeting me seemed only to aggravate her mistrust of us both.

  Janice reprimanded me for having let Shane call me while I was his escort. She said it was absolutely against the rules for an inmate to be calling his escort for personal reasons. I said I didn’t know it was against the rules. She said Shane obviously did know, and he should have told me that. He didn’t. Nor did I recall this rule having been mentioned when I attended the volunteer training session to become his escort in the first place.

  This was the first time, but definitely not the last, that I wanted to say, “I would be more than happy to follow all your rules if only you would tell me what they are. Preferably before, rather than after, I’ve broken one.”

  I am, generally speaking, a rule-abiding person. I don’t jaywalk or cross the street on a red light even if it’s pouring rain or forty below. I never park my car where I’m not supposed to, even if it means driving around the block three or four times to find a spot. I obey the watering restrictions imposed by the city in the summer, and I don’t shovel my snow onto the street in the winter. I’m careful about my garbage and recycling, keeping both the collection schedule and the details of what goes in which box posted on the side of my fridge. I have no problem with rules.

  I didn’t make my comment on the rules to Janice that day, but I did say it later, to another officer at another prison. He snorted cheerfully and said, “Nobody knows what all the rules are.”

  Later still, I would have occasion to say, “I would be more than happy to follow your rules if only they stayed the same from one day to the next.”

  DESPITE HER MISGIVINGS, Janice Mackie took my name off the escorts list and let me submit my visiting application form. It was a simple enough document, requiring my basic personal information, an emergency contact, and the type and number of the piece of identification I would use when visiting. In the section regarding the nature of my relationship with the inmate, the choice of boxes to be checked included Father, Mother, Spouse, Common-Law Spouse, Brother, Sister, Son, Daughter, and Other. I checked Other, which then required me to specify the type and length of the relationship. After some deliberation, I wrote girlfriend, despite this striking me as rather juvenile when we were both in our fifties. In the next box, “Explain if extenuating circumstances,” I summed up the situation as best I could in one line while contemplating the implications of the word extenuating in this context.

  My signature at the end of the form was my consent to a criminal background check, which they’d already conducted when I became an escort, and my acknowledgment that I understood I would be subject to searches of various types whenever I entered the institution, including a frisk search or a strip search should it be deemed “necessary to find contraband or evidence” and that my “oral, visual or telecommunications with an inmate may be subject to interception.”

  The completed form was to be accompanied by two current photographs (full face view, head and shoulders only) of a specified size. I went to the downtown camera store where they did passport photos. The man behind the counter was someone I’d known for years, although not especially well. His wife was also a writer, and we often ran into each other at literary events. When I told him I needed to have my picture taken, he asked if it was for a passport. I said, “No, it’s for a prison visiting application,” and showed him the form. I expected him to make some comment on this request. Perhaps I wanted him to. But he betrayed no interest whatsoever, no curiosity, no concern, no nothing. He pointed me towards the backroom, where I was met by another man, one I didn’t know, who glanced at the form and took the photos quickly, again with no questions asked. Because this step from escort to visitor felt so momentous to me, I was disappointed to discover that the eccentric quirks of my love life were of such little import to the men at the camera store.

  WE HAD OUR FIRST OFFICIAL DATE on Friday, December 8, 2006, Feast of the Immaculate Conception. I’m not Catholic, but I did write a novel about the Virgin Mary, so I knew this was the day Catholics gathered to celebrate the immaculate conception of Mary, who then remained free of original sin for the rest of her life. December 8 was also my mother’s birthday. She would have turned ninety that day.

  Also on December 8, back in 1980, John Lennon was shot and killed by Mark David Chapman on the steps of the Dakota Hotel in New York City. Lennon’s murder twenty-six years earlier had no bearing on our story beyond the fact that it seemed to have happened so long ago, back when Shane was already in prison for bank robbery but had not yet committed murder, not yet commenced serving a life sentence; and I was already living on my own in Alberta, working as a bank teller, but had not yet published my first book, not yet become a mother, not yet imagined myself moving back to Ontario, not yet begun inching anywhere near the fateful intersection of my life and his.

  Shane had an ETA to attend the evening celebration at St. Mary’s Cathedral downtown, and I had permission to meet him there. I gave a lot of thought beforehand as to what I should wear, not sure what might constitute appropriate cathedral attire. This would be the first time Shane would see me all dressed up. For the entire eleven months we’d known each other, he had only ever seen me in my Vinnie’s clothes: baggy old pants and plaid flannel shirts from the warehouse, a full-length apron looped around my neck and tied at the waist, a backwards blue baseball cap with a Planet Hollywood logo that I’d bought for Alex a dozen years ago during a trip to Montreal.

  Finally I decided to wear what I called my “power suit.” Purchased some years earlier for an American book tour, it was of a slightly shiny grey fabric with a calf-length pencil skirt and a fitted jacket decorated with jet beading at the collar and cuffs. Paired with my knee-high black leather boots, it was the most stylish and sophisticated outfit I had ever owned.

  St. Mary’s Cathedral, built in the mid-nineteenth century of limestone quarried by Kingston Penitentiary inmates, is a magnificent example of religious architecture in the Gothic style, with soaring buttresses, stone pillars and statues, dozens of stained glass windows, and a ninety-foot vaulted ceiling. But beyond an overall impression of grandeur and godliness, I was not taking in the splendour of the crowded cathedral as I walked straight down the centre aisle, my boots echoing on the stone floor. I was focused on the back of Shane’s head, which I’d spotted midway up on the right-hand side. I would have recognized that bald spot anywhere. Just as I reached his row, he turned his head. Looking more than a little flustered, he stood up and welcomed me in to sit between him and his escort. Afterwards, he said he’d heard the clack-clack of my boots as I ca
me up the aisle but was afraid to look—afraid it was or wasn’t me.

  His escort was a small smiling woman named Hannah, who was clearly enjoying the prospect of being our chaperone for the evening. On the other side of her sat Fred from Vinnie’s and his wife, Rita. They too were beaming parentally as Shane reached for my hand.

  After mass we all went to the basement for coffee and treats. Shane knew many people in the crowd and took obvious pleasure in introducing me to every single one of them. I was overwhelmed but happy. Outside afterwards, we lingered in the street saying goodbye, Hannah, Fred, and Rita still beaming as we kissed chastely in the cold night. For a moment, I thought they were going to applaud. Then we walked to our cars and drove away, Shane with Hannah back to the prison, Fred and Rita to their home, and me to mine, grinning and giddy all the way there.

  I have never been religious, but still I felt reassured by the church setting of this first date. In my own version of magical thinking, I couldn’t help but feel our relationship was being sanctioned, if not sanctified, by history, the Catholic Church, and the Virgin Mary herself. I let this outweigh any niggling misgivings I might have. What could possibly go wrong?

  As with all couples, this first date became one of the signposts of our relationship, an essential part of our mythology, a happy memory we could take out often and relive in detail, as if there were a file box, something like the little box in which my mother had kept her recipes, a collection of all the best moments that we could refer to whenever we needed to remind ourselves how much we loved each other.

  As time went on, there came to be a second file box too, a collection of all the worst moments—the pain, the anger, the tears, the destruction, and the despair. Those memories were taken out often too, relived, rehashed, and returned to the box unresolved.

  MY VISITING APPLICATION WAS QUICKLY APPROVED just before Christmas. Perhaps the warden didn’t share Janice’s reservations. I never did meet that warden. In fact, I never met or spoke to any warden at any prison at any time during my years with Shane.