This Is Not My Life Read online

  The day after my application was approved, Shane had a seventy-two-hour Unescorted Temporary Absence, a UTA, to his mother’s in Kenworth. A higher-level privilege than an ETA, a UTA means the inmate is allowed to be away from the institution for a specified purpose at a specified location for a specified period of time without a certified escort. I found it odd that he required an escort to be at Vinnie’s for just a few hours but he did not require one to be away from the prison for a whole weekend. Not only that, but now there were no rules about who was permitted to drive him back and forth. So, although I was no longer an approved escort, I could pick him up at the prison at three o’clock and take him to Kenworth. It was Friday, December 22. He had to be back at Frontenac by three o’clock on Monday, Christmas Day.

  He was waiting on the front steps with his duffle bag when I arrived. I didn’t even have to go in to the horseshoe and sign for him. He was the same person, and I was the same person, but now the rules were different.

  Before we left Kingston, we had to check in at the Parole Office, which was very near my house. There, his community, or “outside,” parole officer, Jerry Anderson, would check his paperwork and go over our plans for the pass, which Shane had written out in detail. Whenever he was away from the prison, he had to carry his paperwork at all times, one document identifying him as a federal offender serving a life sentence for murder, the other indicating that he was on an authorized temporary absence from the institution.

  A month later, Jerry Anderson would come to my house to do a Community Assessment. This was something like a job interview, during which he checked out my house and asked many questions about my past and present life to determine if my home was an appropriate environment in which Shane might spend time and if I was a suitable “prosocial” person with whom he might associate. I got the job.

  This word prosocial, so important in the prison world, was not familiar to me. I only knew its opposite. I’ve often described myself as being “antisocial” when I don’t feel like going out, want to stay home in my pyjamas and read or watch TV, preferably while eating popcorn or ice cream, or both. The word antisocial is often used to describe the writing life in general, involving as it does long stretches of solitude during which the writer tries to remain focused on writing while fending off the demands and distractions of daily life. Indeed, one definition of the word does mean feeling not sociable, not wanting the company of others. More often than not, this describes me perfectly. But it is the other definition of antisocial that is implied in its opposition to prosocial.

  antisocial. adjective. Contrary or averse to the laws and customs of society; devoid of or antagonistic to the practices, principles, and instincts on which society is based: as in a dangerous, unprincipled, antisocial type of man.

  Although Shane was an avid reader, he didn’t share my obsession with language or my fascination with the finer points of definitions and usage. Why would he? He didn’t need to know any of this to be proud of his FUCK SOCIETY tattoo.

  That first day in his office, Jerry Anderson was casual, relaxed, and cheerful. Shane was anxious, agitated, and defensive. A large vein in his forehead was bulging, and he was grinding his teeth and having trouble forming coherent sentences. I had never seen him like this before. As we left the office, Jerry reminded us that Shane was restricted to a range of forty kilometres in any direction from Kenworth and that I was to call him after the pass and let him know how everything had gone.

  Back in the car, Shane calmed down. He said he was just paranoid that something was going to go wrong at the last minute, that Jerry would suddenly cancel his pass for no good reason.

  After we arrived in Kenworth, before going to his mother’s, we had to check in at the provincial police detachment, the town not having a municipal police force. Shane had to show them his paperwork, verify where he would be staying, show them our itinerary, and so on. I assumed they’d have some questions for me too, would at least want to know who I was and check my ID, but they didn’t. We got back in the car and drove on to his mother’s apartment.

  Now I was nervous. It had been at least twenty years since I had met the mother of a man I was seeing, and that mother didn’t much like me, said I was “prickly.” This mother, Vera, lived on the ground floor at the back of a seniors’ complex, so we went in through the door of her small patio. We stepped directly into the living room, at the far end of which was a small table and three chairs set against a half-wall, and beyond that was the tiny open kitchen. Not part of the kitchen but not part of the living room either, a large upright freezer stood halfway between. To the left were the bedroom and the bathroom, the only two separate rooms in the apartment, the only rooms with doors. Compact and crowded with furniture, the whole place could not have measured more than five hundred square feet.

  Shane had made it abundantly clear that he wanted me to stay overnight, but I had insisted on leaving my options open. I’d packed a small bag in case I did decide to stay, but I’d left it in the trunk of the car. I had also insisted that he bring condoms from the prison, where they were freely available to all inmates. He had said he was tested—they were all tested—for AIDS every six months. I had said I wanted to see the paperwork, and until I did, we would have to use condoms. He’d requested a copy of this paperwork but had not yet received it. That day his jacket pockets were optimistically stuffed with condoms, as well as with similar little shiny packages of lubricant, which were also freely available to all inmates, he said, no questions asked.

  His mother seemed happy to see us, hugged us both and welcomed us in. She had been in ill health with multiple medical issues for many years, although it wasn’t clear to me exactly what was wrong with her. She talked a lot about her bowels, her kidneys, her headaches, her nerves, and she walked with a cane, stiffly bent over and in obvious pain. She looked much older than her seventy-three years. She was only sixteen when Shane was born.

  Vera made a pot of coffee and offered us some lemon meringue pie. I declined because it was getting on to five o’clock, and we were planning to go out for dinner just the two of us to a Chinese restaurant downtown, a place called The Imperial that Shane remembered fondly from his youth. He had two pieces of pie anyway.

  We sat around the kitchen table, where a collection of at least a dozen prescription pill bottles sat like a centrepiece along with the salt and pepper shakers. This gave me a jolt of déjà vu because my father in his last years had also kept his medications on the kitchen table.

  We made some small talk: the weather, the winter, Christmas. Vera didn’t seem much interested in anything about me, but she did say she was glad to see I wasn’t like any of the other women Shane had been “mixed up with” over the years. She made disparaging comments about him and his bad behaviour, referring to him in the third person as if he weren’t sitting right there too. Calling her a “heretic,” he responded in kind, and they went back and forth across the table, baiting and insulting each other.

  She had a list of things she wanted him to do including clean the ceiling fan that hung between the living room and kitchen areas. She said her cleaning lady had done it just last week, but it didn’t look clean enough to her. We talked about household matters for a while. Vera said you couldn’t get the floor really clean unless you got down on your hands and knees and scrubbed it properly. I agreed. Vera said once you’d opened a block of cheese, you should wrap it in plastic and put it in a Ziploc bag to keep it fresh in the fridge. I agreed. These were the only two things Vera and I ever actually agreed on.

  Although Shane seemed to be signalling me to be quiet, I remarked on the photograph of a bug-eyed brown pug pinned to the wall above the kitchen table.

  “That’s my sweet Popeye,” Vera said, and, groaning, she hobbled over to the TV set. She returned with a little wooden box in her hand, a smaller version of the same photo taped to the lid. She opened it to reveal what could only be the ashes of the little dog. “I miss him every day,” she said tearfully. “I loved
that dog more than anybody else in the whole world.” Shane snorted. “Sometimes I don’t know why I even bother trying to go on without him,” she continued. “Every night when I go to bed, I turn my troubles over to Jesus. But then every morning when I wake up alive, I take them back again.”

  Shane snorted again and stomped to the bathroom. When he returned, he announced that it was time for dinner. Vera waved us out the door, saying not to worry about her, she was too upset to eat; she’d just have a piece of toast or something.

  We drove downtown to The Imperial, which turned out to be like any old Chinese restaurant anywhere, a veritable twin to the Bamboo Garden where I’d hung out as a teenager back in Thunder Bay, right down to the faded paper lanterns, the giant plastic menus, the booths upholstered in cracked red plastic patched with duct tape. We took a booth at the back and held hands across the table. The food when it finally came was so greasy and salty as to be almost inedible. This didn’t deter Shane, who filled his plate three times. I picked at mine, but he didn’t notice and I didn’t complain. The novelty of this being our first restaurant meal together more than made up for the deplorable food. The fortune cookies were stale, but the dispatches inside were encouraging, if not grammatically correct. Mine: Your life is be peaceful and fulfilling. His: Good news are on their way. I tucked them into my wallet for safekeeping. Shane ordered a piece of pie, Boston cream this time. I could see he had a prodigious appetite for pie.

  It was still early—too early, we agreed, to go directly back to Vera’s apartment, so we drove around town for an hour. Shane played tour guide in the darkness, pointing out places of interest including the elementary and high schools he had attended; the Baptist church where he said the organist had molested him when he was eight, and when he told his mother, she said he was lying; the rink where he played hockey and had all his teeth knocked out; the football field where he had broken his knee; the intersection where his cousin, sixteen years old and driving drunk, had been killed; the corner store he’d once robbed and the owner forgave him without pressing charges; the cemetery where his father, his grandparents, and miscellaneous other relatives were buried. He was very matter-of-fact about all of it.

  By the time we arrived back at his mother’s building, I had made up my mind without realizing I’d done so. I took my overnight bag out of the trunk and followed him inside. Vera was still up but in her housecoat now, getting ready to retire to her bedroom and watch TV. Her favourite shows, Law & Order and CSI, were always on some channel, somewhere. To me, Shane said, “She loves watching killers on TV, but she doesn’t much like having one in the family.” To her, “I hope you’re going to shut the bedroom door.” She insisted that she absolutely could not shut the door, because she’d feel like she was suffocating, and then she’d have a panic attack. To me, Shane said, “Suffocation. We can only hope.” To her, “Never mind.”

  Vera’s final bedtime preparations took a very long time and included tidying the already tidy kitchen and rearranging her pill bottles on the table. Then there was a lengthy and fruitless search for a missing earring and a protracted stay in the bathroom. Also apparently fruitless. When she finally emerged, she grunted, “Still constipated,” and went into her room without closing the door or saying good night.

  Meanwhile Shane and I had been sitting side by side on the little sofa pretending to watch TV. Mostly we’d just been clicking through the channels. Now we were just waiting for her to fall asleep. This also took a very long time, but finally her TV was turned off, her light turned out. Her door remained open.

  We pulled out the sofa bed and made it up with the sheets, blankets, and pillows Vera had left stacked on an armchair. We were both giggling. I used the bathroom first, then waited in the bed in my nightgown while he took his turn. Despite my habitual concern with wearing the right clothes for any and every event, it somehow hadn’t occurred to me to buy new lingerie for this occasion, so I had packed the same nightgown I always wore at home: white jersey printed with a pale blue toile pattern, mid-calf length, sleeveless, with a scoop neck and a buttoned placket down the front. Shane made no comment that night but forever after referred to it as my “granny nightie,” the perfect accompaniment to my “granny panties.”

  He came out of the bathroom in his boxers and a pair of white prison-issue plastic flip-flops and went into the kitchen. He took out his false teeth and put them in an empty margarine container on the counter. He had a glass of water, brought me one too. Then he got into the bed beside me, and we waited some more just to be sure Vera was asleep. We pretended to watch the late-night news while he rubbed my feet and I examined his tattoos, all of them visible now on his arms, legs, back, and chest.

  Over his heart was the name BRANDY in letters at least an inch high. I threatened to cover it with duct tape, which, I said, I would very much enjoy ripping off afterwards. Later he looked into having this tattoo removed but was told it would be a lengthy, painful, and expensive process. I said never mind. It didn’t matter. After a while, I didn’t see it anymore anyway. Like a lot of things.

  That first night at Vera’s he distracted me from Brandy’s name on his chest by whipping out his penis and waving it at me.

  Eventually we couldn’t wait any longer.

  It was a very small bed. He was a large man. We were both nervous and out of practice. I had never kissed anyone without teeth before. Much to my surprise, it was extremely sensual and arousing. There were accommodations to be made for his recent surgery, and for my vertigo, which meant there were certain ways I couldn’t move my head. But all things considered, it went very well. I had an orgasm. He went on. I had another orgasm. I thought he had one too, but he went on. I was more than satisfied, and still he went on. Finally I was so exhausted I had to ask him to stop. As we lay there panting, he grinned and admitted that condoms and lubricant weren’t the only things he’d brought with him from the prison. He had also managed to buy some Viagra from another inmate. He confessed that he’d been so worried about not being able to perform that he had taken not one, not two, but three of them.

  We were both gasping and giggling when a loud voice came from the bedroom. “Shane,” Vera hollered, “there’s still some pie in the fridge if you’re hungry!”

  Without hesitation, he got out of the little bed and limped to the kitchen, our exuberant activity having aggravated his bad leg and, apparently, also his appetite. He opened the fridge and stood naked in its cold white light. He offered me a piece of pie, but I said no thanks. He stood there and ate the rest of it right out of the box, went to the bathroom, and then came back to bed.

  As I tried to fall asleep beside him, there was a kind of tugging in the back of my mind. A small hand wiggling for attention. An anxious voice whispering, What have I done? Oh God, what have I done?

  But I steadfastly ignored it.

  THE NEXT MORNING I DROVE HOME ALONE and spent the rest of the day finishing up my Christmas preparations. The following day, Sunday, was Christmas Eve, and we planned to attend evening mass at the convent. Alex was off, so he would come too. Late in the day, I drove to Kenworth to get Shane and bring him back to my house. Because his forty-kilometre range included Kingston, he could come to my house but, because he had permission to stay overnight only at his mother’s, he could not sleep there.

  This would be the first time he’d be inside my house. He always called his cell his “house,” but my house really is a house—an almost sixty-year-old white stucco bungalow with turquoise shutters, about 1,200 square feet with three bedrooms, a partially finished full basement, and a large bright kitchen at the front facing the street. It is located on a short block of ten single-family homes, two triplexes, and four low-rise six-unit apartment buildings.

  My neighbourhood is what we like to call “diverse,” with residents of all ages, backgrounds, incomes, and ethnicities. We are straight, gay, single, common-law, married, divorced, widowed, other. We are employed, unemployed, self-employed, retired. We are middle class, wo
rking class, hard to say, somewhere in between. We have many dogs and cats among us—even our pets are friends. We are collectively very fond of our little street, have all mastered the fine balance of caring about and looking out for each other without sacrificing our privacy in the process.

  I bought the house in the fall of 1987, when Alex was two years old. We’d been living in Kingston for a year then, in a rented house on the other side of town. My mother died earlier that year and left me enough money to make a good-sized down payment. I was proud of the fact that I’d managed to buy a house on my own as a single mother at a time when such an accomplishment was uncommon. I had now lived in this house almost as long as I’d lived in my childhood home in Thunder Bay.

  That Christmas Eve, after Shane was happily reunited with Sammy the kitten, I gave him the tour, trailed by Nelly, who was friendly enough but keeping a close eye on him, barking wildly every time he touched me. Shane wandered from room to room admiring everything, especially the inviting expanse of my queen-size bed made up with a gold-patterned bedspread and many colourful cushions.

  We went into the living room, where, as usual, our old cat Max was asleep on the couch. When Shane reached down to pat his head, Max opened one eye and growled at him. “Grumpy old bugger,” Shane said, laughing. “Just like me.”

  Five years earlier, I had fulfilled a lifelong dream by having wall-to-wall floor-to-ceiling bookcases built in on the west wall of the living room. Eighteen feet long, this wall now houses at least a thousand books. There are bookcases of varying sizes in all the other rooms too, but this one is the showpiece. When I had it built, I foolishly thought I would never need more book space again. When we moved from Alberta to Kingston, I brought a hundred boxes of books with me. Thanks to another twenty years of unbridled book buying, there are now books everywhere, some, for want of a shelf, packed in bankers’ boxes under the bed and in the back room. I’ve often defended my book habit by pointing out that it could be worse: it could be heroin. As a former heroin user himself, Shane found this especially amusing.