This Is Not My Life

by Diane Schoemperlen

  I didn’t have time to send him cards and letters. Our relationship was making for a much busier schedule than I was used to. I was always trying to find time for housework, errands, cooking, and laundry, not to mention my son, my pets, my friends, and my writing. I was often tired, cranky, and overwhelmed, a messy state of mind Shane called “frazzled.” Generally speaking, I prefer to do the same things every day in the same way, and I am mightily resentful when my routine is disrupted. I was now so busy that I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a quiet routine day.

  Sometimes I considered cutting down on the number of visits, but I knew how much they meant to Shane. I was his only visitor. His mother and other family members lived nearby, but I’d never seen them visit him. He said they used to, but over the years their visits had dwindled down to nothing. He thought they couldn’t be bothered and had given up on him. He thought they were ashamed of him.

  I was not ashamed of him. I’d like to say I never hid my relationship with Shane from anyone. But that’s not strictly true. I was well aware that there was a stigma attached to having a relationship with a prison inmate, and that even in a prison town like Kingston, it wasn’t something everyone would find acceptable.

  I had entered this territory as a neophyte, but I soon developed an instinct for knowing who and who not to tell. This wasn’t because I was ashamed of him, but because there were awkward conversations I preferred to avoid. In certain situations where I didn’t know the people involved, I thought it best to prevaricate. Once, at a book club gathering made up of snobbish wealthy conservative matrons, I mentioned his name a few times when we were having coffee afterwards.

  One woman then asked the classic small-talk question: “What does your husband do?”

  Have I mentioned that I do not suffer snobs gladly? Give me a fool any day.

  Without saying he wasn’t my husband and without consciously deciding to skirt the issue, I said, “He’s with Corrections.” (True.)

  She said, “Oh, that’s interesting. How long has he been with them?”

  I said, “Thirty years.” (Also true.)

  She said, “He’ll be getting ready to retire soon then.”

  I said, “Yes.” (More or less true, depending on how you interpret the word retire.)

  THE ONE THING THAT MADE THE HECTIC SCHEDULE of that first year bearable, if not any less stressful, was that we believed it wouldn’t last long. Shane was almost out. His next parole hearing would be in August or September. Having been turned down for day parole to an Ottawa halfway house last year, he had now set his sights on a house in Peterborough, a small city about two hundred kilometres west of Kingston.

  Despite the number of correctional institutions in Kingston, there is only one federal halfway house for men in the city, and it was mainly taking sex offenders, was no longer accepting lifers. The Salvation Army’s Harbour Light facility accepted a limited number of federal parolees, but after Shane applied and met with them, it was determined that he was not eligible, because he didn’t have a current substance abuse problem. He was born and raised in the Kingston area and his entire support network was here, but because he was neither a sex offender nor a drug addict, he would have to go elsewhere to complete his day parole, which would take at least a year, possibly longer.

  Although we weren’t entirely sure how we’d manage a long-distance relationship, he assured me repeatedly that once he got to Peterborough, everything would be wonderful. I wanted to believe him. So I did.

  LIKE ANYBODY WHO FALLS IN LOVE with someone who has a child, even a child who is twenty-one years old and technically an adult, Shane struggled to figure out the nature of his relationship with Alex. Should he be his father figure? Should he be his buddy? Should he be some combination of both or something else entirely? Having been a single parent from the beginning, I didn’t know either.

  Alex’s father was a man I’d been with very briefly out west. By the time I found out I was pregnant, he had disappeared, and I was glad of that. Alex had never met him, nor ever expressed any desire to do so. Shane had once jokingly offered to have someone find him and “dump him.” In my world, getting or being dumped meant the sudden end of a relationship. In his world, it meant something else. I said, “No thanks, we’re good.”

  Now, in an effort to spend more time with Alex, Shane suggested that he submit a visiting application too. Once he was approved, we chose a Tuesday evening near the end of February to visit Shane together. I made a pot of chili, put it in a Tupperware container in the cooler along with sour cream, grated cheese, fresh buns. Once inside, I set the table, while Shane and Alex heated up the chili and the buns. Shane had two large bowlfuls. For dessert we had peanut butter cookies baked by one of the other guys in his unit. The rest of the evening passed quickly with conversation and Shane trying to teach Alex how to play cribbage. He, like his mother, has no natural aptitude for cards.

  Near the end of the visit, Shane had the prison photographer called down. For a dollar a photo, inmates could have their pictures taken in V&C by the inmate who’d been given this job—a job more sought after than many, I supposed, and one, I observed over the years, filled by men with varying levels of ability or lack thereof.

  There we were in the photograph, all three of us grinning at the camera with a still life of three placemats, three cans of Coke, a pair of salt and pepper shakers, and the crib board on the table in front of us. Behind us was the microwave and three large uncurtained windows blank with winter darkness.

  Whether taken inside V&C or out in the yard, these photos were always carefully posed to be sure that no other people were accidentally included in the frame and to be sure there was nothing in the shot to identify the setting as a prison. Perhaps this was done so the pictures could be put in the family album without embarrassment or explanation, or perhaps it was another instance of CSC protecting its own privacy.

  The next morning, when I picked up Shane to go to Vinnie’s, we agreed the visit had been a great success. But he said he wasn’t feeling well; his stomach was upset and he had terrible gas. He joked that perhaps I’d poisoned him with my chili. I said no, I hadn’t, but I’d keep that idea in mind for future reference. By mid-morning he was feeling worse and asked me to take him back to the prison.

  After I did, I returned to Vinnie’s to finish serving lunch. Because we were left short-handed on what proved to be an exceptionally busy day, I didn’t get home until well after two o’clock, at which point I headed directly for the couch. I was almost asleep when the phone rang. I could see by the call display that it was him. Annoyed at having my nap interrupted, I let it ring. He called right back. This time I answered it, even more annoyed.

  “I’m bleeding like a stuck pig,” he said without preamble. He was going to KGH, Kingston General Hospital. The ambulance was on its way.

  I knew this must be serious. If it was anything less than life-threatening, he’d be taken to the hospital at Kingston Penitentiary instead. He had time to explain only briefly that after sleeping for a couple of hours, he had decided to have a bath. In the tub, he started vomiting blood. He was barely conscious when Lenny barged in and found him in the blood-filled tub. Lenny pulled him out and called for help on the emergency phone to the horseshoe. The guards came on the run, he said, and then I could hear them pulling him away from the phone. The ambulance had arrived.

  I spent the next hour pacing around the house. As a visitor, I was only supposed to call the prison in the event of an emergency. Surely this qualified. I was put through to the keeper on duty. The person in charge of the daily operations of the prison, the keeper, next to the warden, is the boss of the place and much more accessible. Today it was one of the female keepers, Irene Henry, of whom I was especially fond. Kind and concerned, she said Shane was still in Emergency, but I could not go there or contact him by phone. All I could do was wait. Irene said if he was admitted, then I’d be allowed to visit him, but this would have to be arranged through Regional Headquarte
rs.

  After I’d spent a long sleepless night with no news, the phone rang early the next morning. I didn’t recognize the name or number in the call display. When I grabbed the receiver, a male voice introduced himself as Father Monaghan calling from KGH. I assumed the worst, that Shane was dead or dying, and the priest was there to perform the last rites. But no, he was quick to assure me he was at the hospital to minister to someone else, and Shane was still very much alive, recovering in Emergency from what they’d now determined was an esophageal bleed.

  Shane had told me he had something called Barrett’s Esophagus. When I’d looked it up, I’d discovered this is a complication of GERD (gastroesophageal reflux disease) in which the normal tissue that lines the esophagus changes to tissue resembling that of the intestinal lining. Considered a premalignant condition, Barrett’s Esophagus significantly increases the risk of esophageal cancer, for which the mortality rate is over 85 per cent. Most patients diagnosed with esophageal cancer survive for less than one year.

  Father Monaghan said that although it was against the rules, Shane had begged him to call me and let me know he was okay. “He’s a very persuasive man, your Shane,” the priest said, chuckling.

  By the next morning, Shane had been discharged and taken back to Frontenac. He called as soon as he got there, his usually deep strong voice so weak I could hardly hear him. He said if I called Irene Henry again, maybe she’d let me come for a visit that afternoon. Irene was agreeable to this, and I was allowed to go and sit with him for an hour. One of the prison nurses led him into V&C and sat at the table with us. He was pale and shaky but already trying to make light of it.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m going to live to be a hundred.”

  “He will too,” joked the nurse. “He’ll live forever just to spite the rest of us.”

  Shane said with a weak smile, “Only the good die young.”

  SHANE CONTINUED TO HAVE MONTHLY seventy-two-hour passes to Kenworth. Although I’d passed the Community Assessment, this series of UTAs was approved to his mother’s, and he was still not allowed to sleep overnight at my house. Vera had dropped the niceties of the Christmas pass. Now when we came through the door, she no longer welcomed or even greeted us. Now she started talking where she’d left off the previous month, with a long litany of complaints about her health, her neighbours, her cleaning lady, and Shane.

  The hostility between them escalated each month, as did the list of things she wanted done. Our first task each time was to go grocery shopping for her. She had her extensive list and the money ready. This despite the fact that I seldom saw her eat anything except toast and pie. She already had enough food jammed into her freezer to feed a family of twelve for a year, as well as enough toilet paper packed ceiling-high in the hall closet to last well into the next decade.

  The first time Shane and I went together to the Loblaws in Kenworth, we briefly lost track of each other in the sprawling store. I found him in the produce department, standing stock-still in front of an artful display of red and green apples stacked in a perfect pyramid, so shiny they were fairly glowing. It wasn’t even apple season.

  Transfixed before them with his head slightly bowed, he looked as if he were praying. “They are so beautiful,” he said softly, and he kissed me.

  Not every grocery shopping expedition was as poignant as that first one. Vera was very particular, and her lists were very specific. Once, next to the word milk, in brackets she’d written like homo. In front of the dairy case, we studied the many varieties of milk for several minutes.

  “There it is,” I said finally, pointing to a carton that announced in large letters with an exclamation mark, TASTES LIKE HOMO!

  “Tastes like homo?” Shane said loudly, grinning. “How does my mother know what a homo tastes like?”

  “How old are you?” I snarled.

  A man standing near us snickered. I turned on my heel and stormed away, charging down the aisle with the half-filled cart in front of me and Shane with the milk in his hand and his mouth hanging open behind me.

  Regardless of how careful we were with Vera’s shopping, she was never satisfied. We always got something wrong: the wrong soup, the wrong crackers, the wrong pie. After each shopping trip, there were harsh words, directed not at me but at Shane, who, according to Vera, could do nothing right, never had been able to, never would be able to, and it was no bloody wonder he ended up in prison.

  I had problems with my mother too, but not to this extreme. Long after her death, my aunt Clara, congratulating me on my Governor General’s Award win, said it was a wonder I’d ever accomplished anything at all, considering how hard my mother had been on me. But her methods of denigration were usually more subtle, if no less insidious, than Vera’s. Except when we hit puberty and menopause in the same year, and she began telling me often that I was a mistake and she had never wanted me anyway. Except when I told her I was pregnant, unmarried with no man in sight, and she temporarily disowned me, would not answer my letters or speak to me on the phone.

  By the time Alex was born, she was over it enough to spend some time with him, her only grandchild, before she died of cancer eighteen months later. When Alex and I flew to Thunder Bay for her funeral, I discovered that she had not told a single person about him, not even her best friend, with whom she had coffee almost every afternoon. Her friend was so hurt and angry that she refused to go to the funeral. She stayed home and looked after Alex instead.

  SOMETIMES VERA’S SHOPPING LIST EXTENDED beyond groceries, involving then a trip to Walmart for a rubber mat for the patio door (because Shane never wiped his feet properly), a vegetable steamer (there was never fresh produce of any kind in her kitchen), or a dozen washcloths (which must not be too fluffy, she said; she couldn’t stand the fluffy ones). I chose the thinnest washcloths I could find.

  One day she requested a new bedside lamp, because her old one was broken. I could see how much, despite everything, Shane still wanted to please her. I could also see this was never going to happen. I realize now that me trying to please him was a mission as impossible as him trying to please his mother or me trying to please mine. That day, when he led Vera into the bedroom to show off the new lamp he’d chosen and installed, she said it wasn’t as good as the old one, but it would have to do. He was angry and unreachable for the rest of the day, mired in the miserable state of mind he called “twisted.”

  Vera often tried to engage me in a rousing round of Shane-bashing, but I wouldn’t play. She told me stories of the awful things he’d done as a child, the way another mother might have shown me his baby pictures. Soon her nastiness was extended to cover me too. I ignored her. Easy for me—she wasn’t my mother. I tried to help Shane by suggesting that instead of going over to the dark side with her, he should stay in the light with me. This made sense to him, and it almost worked. But he could never resist her cruelty for long.

  When the weather warmed up, we spent as much time away from her apartment as possible. We went for walks, we washed the car, and occasionally we stopped in to visit his relatives who lived on the other side of town. These visits were unpredictable and often included someone saying, “I’ll never speak to you again. You are dead to me.” I told Shane that much as I was prepared to take on him and all his issues, I was not prepared to take on his entire dysfunctional family. He said that was fine with him.

  We fell into the habit of having picnic lunches in the park beside the river in the shadow of the train bridge. One afternoon we saw a great blue heron standing on one leg on a rock in the middle of the river. I had never seen one before, and was awed by its dignified stillness. After eating our lunch, we would spread a blanket on the grass beneath one of the big trees and read together in the shade. Usually Shane fell asleep beside me. Sometimes we had ice cream cones and pretended we were carefree and young again. Now, whenever I happen to be on the train going over that bridge, I look down and try to see us sitting there, innocent and peaceful. But nothing looks familiar.


  After a few months I stopped sleeping over at Vera’s in the little pullout bed. Instead, after we made love, I got up, got dressed, and drove home. I couldn’t bear to be around her any more than I had to, nor to watch how Shane changed in the face of her abuse. His responses to her taunts and jibes became increasingly rancorous and vindictive. The two of them would then became so furiously embroiled in painful episodes from their shared past that it was as if these things had happened last week, not fifty years ago. I could do nothing to stop them and usually fled to the patio, where I’d sit smoking and feeding peanuts to the squirrels while inside they continued attacking each other. At the end of a weekend of such venomous acrimony, I could not bear to watch Vera hug him, slip him some money, and tell him she loved him. I could not bear to hear him say he loved her too.

  Soon we were spending more and more hours of our pass days in Kingston instead. Each time, our itinerary was approved by Jerry Anderson. As long as Shane slept at Vera’s, we could spend some of our time in Kingston. The day after each pass, I called Jerry to report that all had gone well. He didn’t seem to require a lot of detail, and I didn’t say much about the difficulties with Vera other than that she was hard to get along with. Now when I took Shane to or picked him up at her apartment, I didn’t even go inside. I just dropped him off and drove back home or waited in the car for him to come out.

  Having so little time alone together, we tended not to socialize much during the hours we had in Kingston. Mostly it was just the two of us playing house, delighting in these short stretches of freedom. On the days we spent together at my house without guards, security cameras, or his mother, we were finally able to make love alone when Alex was at work. We were getting to know each other’s bodies and the unbridled pleasures of my queen-size bed. There was time now for tenderness, playfulness, and the perfection of his already excellent foot-rubbing and full-body massage techniques.