This Is Not My Life Read online

  Each time we went into the bedroom and shut the door, Nelly stood on the other side barking the entire time. When we opened the door afterwards, she’d come bounding up onto the bed, licking my face and then Shane’s until he squealed like a little girl. I imagined she’d eventually get used to our closed-door sojourns, but she never did.

  SHANE’S PERSISTENCE IN PURSUING A PLACE at the Peterborough halfway house was paying off. He was invited to go and stay there for a seventy-two-hour UTA in May. This would be an audition of sorts, on the basis of which they would decide whether to accept him for residency. Just as if he actually lived there, he would be required to sleep there at night and otherwise abide by the rules of the house. During the day, we’d be free to explore the city together, Shane having to check in by phone every four hours. He would also have to be interviewed at the police station and the Parole Office. I made a reservation at the Best Western and took my car in for a tune-up.

  Because I am afraid of driving on the 401, said to be the busiest highway in North America and stretching up to eighteen lanes across at some points, I mapped out a more northerly route on the secondary highways. It was a warm and sunny spring day, with only light traffic on an early Tuesday afternoon. The trip took exactly three hours door-to-door from the prison to the halfway house.

  Our visit began with a guided tour of the facility. Situated close to downtown, it was a large well-kept two-storey house near the end of a one-way street. Run by the St. Leonard’s Society, it was a Community Residential Facility (CRF), meaning that it was under contract to, but not operated directly by, CSC. This house specialized in working with older lifers like Shane and generally did not accept those inmates they referred to as the “young warriors.” It contained eighteen beds for the residents, two per room, and two cots for visiting inmates, one of which had been set up for Shane in the basement common room.

  On the main floor, across from the office area, was a comfortably shabby living room. Sitting on the couch watching TV was a grey-haired man Shane recognized from some prison somewhere decades ago. They greeted each other with much back-slapping and grinning. The large bright kitchen, homey despite its commercial-sized appliances, was the domain of not one but two cooks, both middle-aged women named Alice. Around the corner was the eating area, where snacks and coffee were available throughout the day and evening. Enjoying coffee and muffins at one of the tables were two more grey-haired men Shane recognized. More back-slapping and grinning. “It’s like an old-age home for convicts,” Shane said happily.

  While he met with the director and the supervisor, I went to the Best Western and checked in. The room was on the ground floor at the back, with a sliding glass door to a wooden patio just steps away from the banks of the Otonabee River. Waddling along the edge of the river was a Canada goose with six yellow goslings toddling along behind her. After coaxing them one by one into the water, she proceeded with what looked like a swimming lesson, and within minutes they were all bobbing in circles on the river. On the grassy bank were a dozen mallard ducks that came quacking towards me in straggly single-file the minute I slid open the patio door. Obviously they were used to being fed by the hotel guests.

  When I picked Shane up later in the afternoon, he was pleased with how his interview had gone, was almost sure he’d get in. On the way to the hotel, we stopped and bought a loaf of bread for the ducks. Just as we got into the room, my cell phone rang. It was Dorothy. I got comfortable on the bed for a chat, and Shane went outside to feed the ducks. When he came back in fifteen minutes later, I was still on the phone. I could see by his face that he was angry, but I couldn’t imagine why. I wound up the conversation and said goodbye to Dorothy.

  As often happened, he wouldn’t tell me what was wrong. He repeatedly denied being upset, but his voice was slippery with recrimination, and he would not look at me. Eventually I wormed it out of him. Knowing that Dorothy had her reservations about our relationship, he didn’t like the fact that she’d called “to check up on me,” that she was worried about me being out of town alone with someone like him. By this time I knew that whenever anybody, including Shane himself, said “someone like him” what they meant was a murderer.

  It didn’t matter how many times I assured him that this was not the case, that Dorothy always called me when I was out of town because we were friends and because she knew I didn’t like being away from home. He did not believe me. We’d been a couple for six months now, and I already knew that once he had a thought in his head, it would stay there, no matter how much evidence was offered to the contrary. Unlike the rest of us, who have come to realize that not all our thoughts are right, reasonable, or even sane, Shane seemed to give complete credence to every single thought that came into his mind, and no amount of reality would dislodge it. He also found it hard to believe that not everything was about him.

  This time I was the one who went outside to feed the ducks.

  As darkness fell, he came and stood beside me on the riverbank. He put his arm around my waist and sighed. I knew this was as close as he was likely to come to an apology. I thought about how easy it would be to push him in the river. That old Talking Heads song “Take Me to the River” was playing in my head. The rocks were slippery. It was dark. He had a bad leg. He didn’t know how to swim. It would look like an accident. No one would ever suspect someone like me. After all, he was the murderer.

  We got in the car, and I drove him back to the halfway house hours ahead of his curfew.

  TWO WEEKS LATER, JANICE MACKIE requested a meeting with both of us. As soon as we sat down, she handed Shane a letter. Reading it, he began to grind his teeth in the disturbing way he did when trying to control his emotions. The Peterborough house had accepted him.

  Janice congratulated him, reminded him that now he’d have to start thinking of himself as an ex-con instead of a convict. Then she got down to business. His hearing would take place in early September, and she would support him in his request for day parole. We had about three and a half months to prepare. Of course, I had no experience with parole hearings. The closest thing in my world to which I could liken it was having to defend your thesis, but the topic, in this case, was your criminal life and the outcome was not a degree but an increased measure of freedom. And it was a thesis you would have to defend not just once, but over and over and over again.

  Janice went through the details of how we might prepare. Then she said, “Here’s a tip. Whatever you do at that hearing, don’t grind your teeth like that!” and asked him to leave the room.

  As soon as the door closed behind him, she looked at me grimly and asked, “Do you know what he did?”

  I said, “Yes, I do.”

  She said, “Tell me.”

  Apparently she was satisfied with my reply. She asked if I intended to move to Peterborough, it being common practice for the wives and girlfriends of long-term prisoners to follow them from place to place. I said no, I wouldn’t be moving. My life was established here in Kingston, my son still lived with me, I owned my own home. For whatever length of time Shane had to live in Peterborough, we would manage long-distance, with him coming home on weekend passes. She seemed to approve of this plan.

  She called Shane back in. “This woman loves you,” she said. “I don’t know why, but she does. If you screw this up, I’ll have you back in jail so fast you won’t know what hit you.” As if, for a lifer, failing at a relationship was a criminal offence.

  Then she showed us the door.

  WHEN VINNIE’S CLOSED FOR THE SUMMER, we told them we wouldn’t be coming back in the fall, because Shane would be in Peterborough. At least we hoped he would. This was how it went when attempting to plan your life around CSC. We didn’t know for sure what was going to happen, but we had to plan ahead as if we did.

  He began working as a groundskeeper at the Cataraqui Cemetery. Established in 1850 and now designated as a National Historic Site, the cemetery occupies over ninety acres, designed with curving intersecting avenues like
streets in a town. It is the final resting place of many historically significant people including Sir John A. Macdonald; John Creighton, once mayor of Kingston, also warden of Kingston Penitentiary from 1871 until his death in 1885; William Cloverdale, architect and master builder of KP; Henry Traill, son of author Catharine Parr Traill, nephew of Susanna Moodie and Agnes Strickland, and the first Kingston prison guard to be killed in the line of duty, beaten to death by two convicts in July 1870 as they made their escape from KP. In a city as old as Kingston, first capital of Canada, history is everywhere, and prison is always part of it.

  Although it was sometimes difficult with his bad leg, Shane was much happier doing physical work outdoors than he had been cooped up in the crowded kitchen at Vinnie’s. Besides, as he pointed out, it was much quieter there. I too like cemeteries for their restful qualities. Our pass days that summer included several visits to the cemetery, where he showed me the gardens he’d worked on, and we explored the avenues. Most of the 46,000 people buried there were not historically significant at all but just ordinary people who had lived out their assorted lives for better or worse, then ended up here, their stories buried with them.

  We discussed where we’d like to be buried. From early on, Shane had often talked about how he wanted us to be buried together, side by side in a double plot. Peculiar as this might have been, it was comforting too. He also talked from early on about getting married. After he was divorced from Brandy, of course. They were still legally married but hadn’t seen each other in seven or eight years.

  He arranged his July pass to Vera’s to coincide with my birthday. I turned fifty-three that year, and he surprised me not only with a cake, but also with a ring. With Vera’s help, he’d ordered it from the Sears catalogue, a slim silver band with a setting of imitation diamonds and rubies, ruby being the gemstone for July. I must have hesitated when he gave it to me, because he was quick to assure me it was not an engagement ring. When the time came for that, he said, he’d buy me a real diamond, a big one. If I did hesitate, it was not because of the ring or the difficulties of the relationship itself, but because I wished Vera had had nothing to do with it.

  AT FRONTENAC, VISITING FELT FREER IN THE SUMMER, because we could now go outside to the visiting yard, an area just like any other family park anywhere, except maybe for the chain-link fence around it. But it was an ordinary chain-link fence, not more than four feet high, the kind you see all over the city. We sat at one of the wooden picnic tables arranged around the edges beneath large leafy trees. There was no air conditioning inside, so the shade was much appreciated, as was the fact that in the yard we could smoke. We watched the groundhogs ducking into and out of their burrows, tunnelling under the field adjacent to the yard, popping up by the bulrushes in the swampy area on the other side, comically perched on their haunches, swivelling their heads and sniffing the air in all directions.

  A large flock of Canada geese lived on the prison grounds. Driving in towards the parking lot, I often had to wait while a gaggle of them waddled nonchalantly across the road. They didn’t venture into the visiting yard when it was in use but evidently spent some time there when no one was around. Walking across the tidily mown lawn to the picnic tables was an intricate exercise in tiptoeing through the goose poop.

  If we sat with our backs to the stone wall of Collins Bay, we could look across the yard to the baseball diamond and the wooded area beyond the swamp. There we sometimes spotted a single white-tailed deer poised at the edge of the trees and, once, a coyote loping down to the swamp. The fragrance from the cow barns often drifted into the yard, pungent but not unpleasant. From this vantage point, it was easy enough to forget we were in a prison—easy enough, for that matter, to forget we were in the middle of a city at all.

  Occasionally a pair of guards came outside and strolled around the yard, but mostly they left the surveillance to several cameras installed in strategic locations around the grounds, cameras so high-powered, it was said, they could see all the way to the far parking lot, perhaps all the way to the shopping mall across the street, which wasn’t even visible to the naked eye from where we sat.

  The outside children’s area was a small playground in the middle of the yard, compact but complete with a combination slide and climbing structure, a sandbox, and a swing. Near each picnic table was a small cast-iron barbecue mounted on a metal post cemented into the ground. In those days, visitors could bring in a bag of charcoal, meat for the grill, and all the other requisite ingredients for a tasty afternoon barbecue. We could even bring our own lawn chairs from home.

  Alex joined us a few times for these barbecue visits, he and Shane together overseeing the grilling of the hamburgers or hot dogs, or even steaks if I’d found some on sale. Fortunately Alex was not there the day one of the wives was caught giving her husband a blowjob at the table in the far corner of the yard. After we ate, we often played a few rounds on the overgrown nine-hole mini-golf course just outside the yard, something inmates were only allowed to do when they had visitors.

  Seeing how much we all enjoyed the barbecuing, I decided to buy a barbecue for home. I’d once had a small gas one but was afraid of the propane tank and seldom used it. Eventually I gave it away. Now I certainly didn’t want and couldn’t afford one of those fancy gas barbecues that look almost as big as my car. At Canadian Tire, I bought a bag of briquettes and an old-fashioned round metal grill on legs, much like the one we had back in Thunder Bay when I was young. In addition to its nostalgia value, the little barbecue was also a nod to the future, to the day when Shane came home to stay, and we could barbecue in the backyard together, the three of us, just like a real family.

  SHANE’S HEARING WAS SCHEDULED for a Friday morning in early September. I submitted my Request to Observe a Parole Hearing. Anyone over the age of eighteen can apply to observe a hearing provided they have a valid reason for wanting to be there and pass the standard background security checks. An application would not be approved if the Board determined that the observer’s presence would disrupt the hearing or otherwise jeopardize “the security and good order of the institution.”

  I wrote my letter of support to the Parole Board. Janice said it shouldn’t be more than two pages—given the enormous volume of Shane’s accumulated paperwork, she said, they already had more than enough to read.

  I worked on that letter for days. I described the development of our relationship over the past twenty months. I told them about my writing career and about my son. I assured them that while Alex, like many young men, may have harboured some delusions about the “glamour” of the criminal life, Shane had gone to great lengths to demonstrate that this was not the way to live and there was nothing glamorous about it. I told them I understood that, as a lifer, Shane would always be under the supervision of CSC. I assured them that I understood this would have an impact on my life too and that I would help ensure that he met all the requirements of parole.

  I moved myself to tears as I wrote the final sentence: Shane and I share a joyful vision of our future together, and we intend to do everything we can to make these dreams come true.

  ON THE MORNING OF THE HEARING, I met Shane and Stuart from LifeLine in the visiting room at eight o’clock. Stuart would serve as Shane’s assistant, helping him through the panel process and speaking on his behalf at the end of the hearing. We were joined by Fred from Vinnie’s, also attending as a supportive observer. I was glad I wouldn’t have to sit by myself. As observers, Fred and I were not allowed to speak unless the Board chose to address or question us directly.

  Of course we were all hoping for the best, but we had no idea how today’s decision might go. Last year Shane had handled being turned down quite well, and I knew he would again this year if he had to. It was all part of the process. Much as this was the first parole hearing I had ever attended, he’d already been through many. I reminded him one more time that no matter what the outcome of this hearing, I loved him and our relationship would continue.

  Just
before eight-thirty, Janice Mackie took us upstairs to the hearing room. Shane sat between her and Stuart at a long conference table facing an identical table across the room at which the three Board members were already seated, two men and one woman. I took my place in a chair at the side, Shane to my right and the Board members to my left. Directly across from me sat the hearing officer, who outlined the details of how the hearing would proceed.

  Janice spoke first and was very positive about Shane’s progress in the two years she had been his parole officer. She noted that Jerry Anderson was out of town but had expressed no concerns and supported Shane’s request to go to Peterborough as well.

  The lead Board member then began by referring to Shane’s first criminal charge for break and enter back in 1969. I had been warned that a hearing could go on for hours. Now I was thinking, Good God, how long is this going to take?

  The questions continued, coming primarily from the lead Board member, with the other two interjecting with questions of their own. They were serious but not unpleasant as they progressed fairly quickly to his index offence, the murder of Philip Bailey in 1981. After covering this in graphic detail, they moved on to questions about his marriage to Brandy in 1994 and his subsequent escape in 1996. In his thoughtful lengthy answers, Shane displayed sincerity, honesty, and considerable insight into his own past actions. He remained focused and composed, and he did not grind his teeth. Eventually they made their way to the present and our relationship.

  To Shane the lead Board member said, “She’s here. Be careful what you say.” There was quiet laughter around the room. Shane began to cry as he talked about me. The hearing officer passed him a box of Kleenex.