Having never been for therapy before, I was nervous and didn’t know what to expect. In my first email, I’d told her only that I needed help getting over a broken relationship. I hadn’t mentioned prison. What would she ask me? What would I say? Would I cry? I hate crying. How much would I cry? Would she mind if I cried? What if she said she couldn’t help me? What if she said I was a hopeless case?
We sat in two chairs facing each other with a small round table between us. There was a loveseat with several cushions against the wall. She said I was welcome to sit there, but I chose the chair. Within ten minutes, I was entirely comfortable with Louise. Within fifteen minutes, I’d launched into the abridged version of the last three years. She listened attentively. I cried. There was a box of Kleenex on the table. I took several. I cried some more. She listened some more. By now I wanted to throw myself at her feet, cling to her ankles, and cry, “Help me! Help me!”
As we neared the end of our appointment, and I began trying to pull myself together enough to leave her office and go back out into the world, I could see she was smiling. I was still helping myself to the Kleenex and wiping my wet face.
“I know I can help you,” she said.
Thank God. My whole body went weak with relief. Now she was grinning. She explained that not only had she worked in the prisons for years as a facilitator of the Alternatives to Violence Program, but some time ago, one of her close family members had spent several years in prison. We agreed that I would continue seeing her every Tuesday at five o’clock.
Week after week, I got comfortable on the loveseat and told her everything. I soon realized that despite all the pain and destruction of my relationship with Shane, there was one thing I had to thank him for. It had all screwed me up so badly that finally I’d been desperate enough to get therapy. I should have done it decades ago.
IN AN UNSUCCESSFUL ATTEMPT to cleanse the ghost of Shane from my house and my head, I had already ripped the smoke bush out by the roots and thrown it in the compost pile. I had already disposed of most of the things he’d given me—but not the beautiful jacket—as well as most of what was in the garbage bags he’d dumped on the back step at Christmas—but not my own books signed to him. And perhaps because I am of such an archival bent that I was reluctant to destroy the evidence even of my own misery, I had also kept all the cards and letters he’d torn to pieces.
One afternoon in June, after I’d been seeing Louise for about a month, I decided I had to do something more to erase him. It was one of those days when I was feeling so angry at him that I’d spent the entire morning pacing around the house talking out loud to him and accomplishing exactly nothing. Alex was working the day shift, because someone had called in sick. I went to Canadian Tire and bought a bag of briquettes. I hauled the bag of torn-up cards and letters out of the basement. I moved the barbecue to the far end of the backyard. When I bought it two summers ago, I’d thought of it as a nod to the future. This was not the future I’d had in mind. I spread a layer of briquettes in the bottom and lit them. While the charcoal turned from cold black to hot grey, I dumped the contents of the bag on the grass. I flipped through the torn pages and ripped them into even smaller pieces.
In both my real life and my fiction, I had considered performing this exorcism-by-fire before, after the dissolution of other rotten relationships. But I’d never actually done it, had convinced myself it was too immature, too melodramatic, too made-for-TV-movie even for me. Besides, I had reasoned when talking myself out of it in the past, with my luck, one of my neighbours would see the smoke and call 911. Either that or I’d burn my house down in the process and end up on the evening news.
Not this time. I unrolled the garden hose and placed it near the barbecue just in case. When the charcoal looked to have reached the proper heat, I neatly placed a layer of the scraps of paper on top and watched, mesmerized, as they browned, curled, smoked, then burst into flames. I fed paper into the conflagration a few bits at a time. Occasionally I stepped back and clapped my hands in delight. Then I stopped being careful and started chucking in the pieces of paper by the handful. The cards burned the most dramatically, their dyes and glitter crackling and popping in the fire, sending up sparks and pretty purple smoke. Over and over, I watched the words I love you, Shane in my own neat handwriting being gobbled up and swallowed by the flames. When I got to the end of them, I ran back into the house and rummaged through the linen closet to find the box in which I’d kept all the cards and letters he’d sent me. Back outside at the barbecue, I tore each of them into tidy pieces and tossed them in.
By the time the last I love you, Diane in his scrawling handwriting had been reduced to ashes along with the rest, the entire immolation ceremony had taken almost two hours. I turned on the hose and, while filling the barbecue with water, giddily contemplated the similarity between the words incinerate and incarcerate.
For a few hours that evening, I felt exuberant and unburdened. But when I got up the next morning, I was disappointed to discover that he was still there, sitting at the kitchen table as he always had, not scowling now but smirking with triumph.
“Good morning, asshole,” I said into the empty kitchen and made myself a pot of coffee.
SHANE’S POST-SUSPENSION HEARING was scheduled to take place at Bath in late August, by which time he would have been there for seven months. After some discussion with both Jerry Anderson and Louise, I submitted my Request to Observe a Parole Hearing. This time, in the box “Reason for Wanting to Attend,” I wrote that I believed it would help me in my recovery from this traumatic relationship.
I was still so angry, hurt, and confused that I couldn’t seem to go forward with my life. I still had so many unanswered questions. I wanted to hear what Shane had to say for himself. Yet, after everything that had happened, how could I believe anything he said now? I didn’t write that there was also a part of me that wanted to see him because I missed him. I still could not reasonably explain this, not even to myself.
My application was quickly approved. I knew that, according to CSC and Parole Board policies of “sharing,” the fact that I’d be attending would be passed on to Shane. There were to be no secrets or surprises, at least not for him. I enjoyed imagining his reaction. I hoped he was upset and anxious. I hoped he was afraid.
Because I was registered with Victim Services, I would be escorted to the hearing by a Parole Board staff person, a young woman named Angela. I still didn’t think of myself as a victim but was just as glad I’d have someone with me. Angela sent me an information sheet titled “What an Observer Should Know” with subheadings on various topics including “Entering an Institution” and “What Happens at a Hearing.” Being a veteran of both entering an institution and attending a hearing, I knew more or less what to expect. But still, I read this sheet over so many times I practically had it memorized. Each time I read it, I was mildly amused by the cautionary note at the end: If the hearing extends into the lunch period, no food or cafeteria will be available. It seemed to me that the regrettable absence of lunch would be the very least of my worries that day. Angela assured me that although there would be no food, there would be water and also Kleenex if I needed it.
She asked me where I would like to sit in the hearing room. I could either be directly behind Shane, where he couldn’t see me once the proceedings began, or I could sit to the side in full view of everyone in the room. I chose the second option. I wanted to see his face as the hearing unfolded, and I wanted him to see me. I especially wanted him to see exactly what he had lost.
ON THE LAST WEEKEND OF JULY, I was giving a reading at the Leacock Summer Festival in Orillia, a hundred and fifty kilometres north of Toronto. This was one of the several literary festivals Shane and I had been to together last year. The day before I was to take the train to Toronto, where I’d be picked up and then driven to Orillia with two other writers, the VIA Rail engineers went on strike. I took the bus instead.
This was the first public reading I’d given si
nce everything fell apart. I was relieved that it went well, that I felt comfortable and confident being back on the stage, proving, if only to myself, that I was on my way to a full recovery from the train wreck.
The festival housed all participating writers in a small luxury boutique hotel in downtown Orillia. Staying there again, alone now in a room identical to the one Shane and I had shared last summer, was much harder than giving the reading—not because we’d had a difficult time there, but because it had been especially pleasant. In fact, it wasn’t just a room—it was a suite with a fully equipped kitchen and a sitting room. Behind a pair of French doors was the bedroom, decorated in elegant shades of cream and grey, featuring a large flat-screen TV and a king-size bed.
Getting into the enormous bed alone that night, I tried not to think about how dazzled Shane had been by the sheer size of it, how at three in the morning I awoke to the feel of him patting the expanse of mattress between us, whispering, “Where are you?”
In the morning, I made coffee and tried not to think about how Shane, still in his pyjama bottoms, had gone outside to have a smoke and then returned with a tray of breakfast from the restaurant downstairs.
I took my coffee into the sitting room. Last year we’d sat on the sofa together to have our breakfast, and then I’d read aloud to him from Donald Barthelme: The Genesis of a Cool Sound, the biography of one of my favourite writers written by his former wife, Helen Moore Barthelme. I read from the chapter called “The Creation of a Strange Object,” in which Helen describes the strict discipline of Donald’s daily morning writing routine, how everything else in their lives was planned around that, how he’d adopted this custom when he was only twenty-nine and stuck to it, even on weekends, until his death. We had a lot in common, me and Donald Barthelme. He too read every sentence he wrote out loud. He too was a slow writer who might have only one or two pages to show for four or five hours’ work. He too used canary yellow newsprint for his drafts, as I’d done until it was no longer sold in stationery stores (a development so distressing at the time that I was afraid it might well mark the end of my writing life). He too was afraid of fire and at the end of each writing session took his ashtray into the kitchen and emptied it. On this safety issue, I did Donald Barthelme one better—I didn’t empty my ashtray in the kitchen but put it on the counter and covered it with a pot lid, for fear a smouldering butt would start a fire in the garbage can.
Shane quickly got the point of this impromptu reading. “So,” he said, “you’re trying to tell me you’re not the only one who has all these weird habits.”
Now I repacked my overnight bag and checked out of the hotel with relief. The good news was that the rail strike had been settled. The bad news was that train service wouldn’t resume until late that evening. So I would take the bus home. I was given a ride directly to the Toronto bus station.
The bus pulled out of the station right on time. Traffic heading out of the city on a Sunday afternoon was light. On the other side of the median, traffic coming into the city was much heavier. I tried to read, but my eyelids were too heavy, also my heart. I dozed briefly, opened my eyes again when I felt the bus slowing down. We crawled along for some time, then came to a complete stop. There were sirens coming from all directions, it seemed, and no oncoming traffic now across the median. A collective sigh rippled through the bus. There must have been an accident. How long were we going to be stuck here?
We sat for several minutes, and then the driver opened the door to admit a police officer, who came halfway up the steps. I was sitting near the front but not quite close enough to hear what he was saying. He got off the bus and began directing the driver to move into the outside lane, which had somehow been cleared. The rest of our side of the highway looked like a parking lot. There were other officers on the highway too, motioning a number of transport trucks into the lane ahead of us. We were nearing an overpass on top of which I could see more officers, more police cars. What the hell was going on?
When we reached the overpass, we could see that the officers had cleared all the lanes directly below it on both sides of the median and were now directing transport trucks—and us on the bus—into the space. Finally the bus driver made an announcement. There was a man up there, a distraught man threatening to jump off the overpass. “And we,” he said, “are going to do whatever we can to save him.”
He manoeuvred the bus to within inches of the transport truck on our left, which was itself positioned tight up against another truck pulled up against the concrete pillar supporting the overpass. Another truck slid into place on our right and another on its right. Within minutes, all lanes below the overpass in both directions were blocked solid by transport trucks just inches apart. We were the only bus. If the man jumped, he could not fall all the way to the ground. He could fall only as far as the top of one of those trucks—or the top of the bus.
Directly below the overpass now, we could not see what was happening above. A line of officers stood in front of the line of trucks, all of them looking up. On the bus, we held our collective breath. After several minutes, the officer in front of our bus nodded, grinned, and threw both hands in the air with his thumbs up. They had talked the man into a police car. He had not jumped. He was safe.
The bus filled with cheering and applause, the truckers leaned on their horns, the officers on the highway shook hands and slapped each other on the back. Then they got on with the matter at hand: unravelling the arrangement of trucks and getting the traffic moving again.
Like me, everyone else on the bus seemed awestruck at having witnessed this event, elated at having played some small indirect part in saving a desperate stranger’s life. Half the passengers were on their phones now, telling the whole story to whoever would listen on the other end. Except for the man sitting right behind me, who said to his seatmate, in a deep gravelly voice much like Shane’s, “He won’t thank them for saving him. If he’s in that much pain, he’ll just find another way to do it next time.”
The rest of the way home I thought about pain. That invisible cargo we are all carrying, every single one of us. Perhaps this is the one thing we all have in common: pain of one sort or another, the burden we are all labouring under, the ball and chain we are all dragging along behind us, the weight we are all bearing until maybe one day we cannot bear it anymore. Then we have to either make a change or line up on the overpass. I thought about how sometimes we hold so tightly to that pain because we have come to believe it makes us who we are. It has become our anchor in the world, the way we recognize ourselves, that which sets us apart from the madding crowd, that which makes us special and unique. Who would we be without the pain we so desperately cling to?
AS THE HEARING DREW CLOSER, my anxiety level was increasing daily. Angela assured me that I always had the option of changing my mind. Even right up to the moment of standing at the gate, I could still opt out, get back in my car, and go home. Knowing this made my anxiety even worse. I didn’t want to have the option of losing my nerve at the last minute.
I saw my doctor and begged her for some Ativan. Being well aware of what she called my “addictive personality,” she was reluctant. But she was also well aware of my situation with Shane. In the end, she wrote me a prescription for six—and only six—with no refills. I promised her I would take one the night before, one the morning of, one the afternoon following, and the remaining three pills one at a time as necessary in the immediate aftermath.
I thanked her profusely and went home and took one. Just one.
HAVING NEVER PUT MUCH STOCK in that old warning to beware of any enterprise requiring new clothes, I went to the mall to look for my parole hearing outfit. I wandered through the ladies’ department of The Bay, amusing myself by thinking that in my world when someone said they were going to The Bay, they didn’t mean the department store. They meant Collins Bay, the prison. It was Saturday afternoon, and the store (as opposed to the prison) was crowded with shoppers. I deflected the solicitous attention of thr
ee different sales clerks asking, “May I help you?” I could not imagine saying, “Yes, please, I’m looking for something special for a parole hearing.”
As an observer, I would not be allowed to speak at the hearing. I would have to say everything I wanted to say with my appearance alone. After trying on at least a dozen disappointing outfits, I was ready to abandon the mission and try again another day. On my way out of the store, I gave a few racks one more half-hearted look-through—and there it was.
There was only one, a single dress hanging on the end of a rack with many other dresses entirely unlike it, probably placed there by accident. It was a little black dress, Jones New York, with a shirt collar, cap sleeves, fitted waist, slightly flared silk-lined skirt, black-on-black embroidered eyelet designs at the bodice, the waist, and the scalloped hem, which fell just below the knee. A little black dress is often said to be the all-purpose perfect choice for any special occasion. Perhaps that included parole hearings too.
I went back to the dressing room and slipped it on. It fit like the proverbial glove. It said everything a dress could possibly say and then some. It cost three times as much as I had intended to spend. At the cash register, I whipped out my credit card with barely a quiver of misgiving.
With renewed determination, I embarked on the second stage of my shopping expedition: the shoes. On a tiered stand at the front of the very first shoe store I came to, I spotted a dressy black sandal with a three-inch wedge heel. It was simple and stylish, with two thick bands across the top of the foot and a subtle silver embellishment between. What set it apart was the light blue inner sole.
I took the single sandal to the salesclerk. Yes, they had my size. Yes, she’d be happy to bring me a pair to try on. Yes, they fit me just fine. They were comfortable enough, and I could walk fairly well in them, well enough that I figured, with some practice at home beforehand, I’d be able to manage them without walking like a stork, twisting an ankle, or falling flat on my face in front of Shane and the Parole Board. Like the dress, the shoes were priced well beyond my budget. Again, I handed over my credit card with barely a qualm and was soon on my way home grinning.
This Is Not My Life Page 19