The lawyer’s voice hardened as he went on to say that the Board should carefully consider my credibility, given that at the previous hearing, I had represented everything as being fine between us when it was not. He said it was now in the record that I had alleged that Shane broke into my house and confronted me when I was naked in the bathtub. If this was true, why were no charges laid?
Given his final chance to speak, Shane said he was thankful for having had at least a taste of a true loving relationship and bore no ill will towards me. He said maybe neither of us had the right tools to handle the situation in a prosocial manner. That word again.
We were all asked to leave the room. Angela and I were escorted out first, led by the guard back to the empty room where we’d waited beforehand. As soon as we were alone, I told her that the whole bathtub story was incorrect. He did not break into my house. He still lived there at the time. He did not confront me naked in the bathtub. The argument took place in the kitchen. Angela asked me if I wanted her to return to the Board and tell them. I said yes, and she did.
When we were called back in to hear the decision, the lead Board member began by stating that he’d like to clarify that there had been no allegation of Shane breaking into my house as was previously stated. Then he said they had decided to revoke his parole and that he needed to have a period of stability before being considered for release again. He noted that Shane was clearly comfortable within the confines of a federal institution and maybe that was one of his problems. He said he might well be institutionalized and could face additional difficulties when back in the community in the future. He made it sound like this was the first time anybody had considered this possibility.
No one was surprised by the revocation, not even Shane. He asked if he could say one more thing. The lead Board member smiled and nodded. Shane said, “When I didn’t show any feelings, they called me a psychopath. Now I’m crying all the time, and you keep calling me an emotional wreck.”
The lead Board member said gently, “Or else you’re somewhere in between. Just like the rest of us.”
PART FOUR
September 2009 to November 2011
I will generally fight the urge to cry as vigorously as I fight the urge to vomit. In both instances, I am successful 99 per cent of the time. Many times Louise and I had discussed my aversion to crying and why I feel ashamed of myself when I give in to the impulse. Crying is not a sign of weakness, she said, but a healthy way of releasing pain. We worked on trying to ferret out the reasons why I am so afraid to cry. Part of it, I suppose, might be because when I was young, my mother often told me I sounded like a stuck moose when I cried. I didn’t know then and don’t know now exactly what she meant by that. A moose that was stuck somewhere, like between a rock and a hard place? Or a moose that had been stuck somewhere, like with a dagger in the heart? Either way, this wasn’t something I wanted to look or sound like.
Over time I was able to explain to Louise that I’m afraid that if I start crying, I will never be able to stop. That if I let loose that vast Pandora’s box of unshed tears I’ve been sucking back for decades, I’m sure I will drown in them and die. It is one thing to die trying, quite another to die crying. This epiphany also helped me understand why I am especially afraid to cry when alone, am more likely to do it when I’m with someone else, someone who surely wouldn’t let me die but would administer mouth-to-mouth while calling for an ambulance.
Although I had told Louise just three days before the revocation hearing that I was ready, in fact, once again I was not. In the aftermath, I cried for the rest of the day and most of the next—quietly in the backyard or in the bathroom when Alex was home, loudly all over the house when he was not. Alex was not in the category of “someone else” I wanted to cry in front of. Louise was on holidays, and I wasn’t scheduled to see her again for three weeks.
At home alone, I was crying with abandon and didn’t much care whether I died or not. I was either letting out great gulping heaving sobs while clutching a cushion to my chest on the couch or wandering from room to room weeping into my hands. For once in my life, I didn’t care how I looked or sounded, stuck moose or worse. I could not have specifically named the source of my tears: grief, anger, guilt, sorrow, regret, frustration, all of the above. At first, my rampant crying alarmed the little dogs, but soon enough they got used to it, accepting it as simply a new part of the daily routine. The cats, as always, were unfazed by the incomprehensible habits of humans.
I was also talking to Shane again—in my head when Alex was home and out loud when he wasn’t. By Sunday morning, I had started writing it all down. By Sunday evening, I was writing him a letter. I didn’t intend to send him the letter, but trusting in the therapeutic value of writing, I thought it might help. By Monday afternoon, I was making phone calls to have the no-contact order lifted so I could send him the letter and he could write back if he chose to. By Tuesday the letter was ten typewritten pages. By Wednesday I had talked to Stuart, Jerry Anderson, Deirdre Lang at Bath, and the lead Board member. They all agreed, with lesser or greater degrees of reservation, that it was okay for me to send him the letter. By Thursday it was fourteen pages long.
On Friday I read the letter over one more time and went to the post office.
Dear Shane,
I came to your hearing for two reasons: because I wanted to see you and hear what you had to say, and because I thought some of my questions would be answered. But they weren’t. I was anxious about attending, of course. I was worried that you would say horrible things about me and blame me for everything that happened. I was also worried that I’d be completely overwhelmed by memories of all the bad times. I didn’t expect that I would be completely overwhelmed by memories of all the good times instead.
Dear Shane,
For a person my age, I am far too trusting. Because I’m a lousy liar and generally don’t tell lies myself, it seldom occurs to me that other people often do. The last time I checked, being naive, even at my age, was neither a sin nor a crime. But I certainly won’t be so foolish in the future. The bottom line is this: I’m asking you to come clean. Please tell me the truth. You have no reason to lie to me now. I am so frustrated by still not getting the whole story from anyone.
Dear Shane,
Sometimes I get so angry it feels like the top of my head is going to blow off.
Dear Shane,
We were BOTH damn fools to be arguing about things like laundry.
Dear Shane,
I want to be sure you understand this is NOT me saying: I still love you and I want to get back together. This is me saying: I do still love you, and I want to open this communication between us in the hope that we can figure out what the hell happened and why, and that by doing so, maybe we can find some peace. Whatever happens further down the road is not something I can think about now.
FOUR DAYS LATER, WHEN THE PHONE RANG in the middle of the afternoon, the words “Government of Canada” in the call display were fairly glowing with radioactive energy. The male voice on the other end identified himself as the chaplain at Bath and said Shane would like to speak to me.
He tried to say hello, but he was crying. I don’t remember what I said. He said over and over again how much he missed me, how much he loved me, how sorry he was for everything that had happened. He told me that when they took him to the Temporary Detention Centre at KP, the intake nurse asked him if he wanted to see Psychology—and was he feeling suicidal? Yes, he said, he needed help. They stripped him naked, took away his clothes, gave him a set of fire-retardant pyjamas he called “baby dolls,” and put him in a cell with only a sleeping mat, a hole in the floor for a toilet, and a camera in the ceiling so they could watch him. They kept him there on suicide watch for ten days. Now I was crying on the phone too.
We couldn’t talk long. This was not strictly an approved call. I’d have to be officially put back on his phone list. In the meantime, we agreed that over the weekend he would answer my letter in detail, and
I would write more to him too.
BY THE TIME I SAW LOUISE AGAIN in mid-September, I had written four more long letters to Shane and received ten from him in reply. His handwritten letters filling up my mailbox were more in quantity, but mine, typewritten and double-spaced, were definitely more in number of words. I held nothing back in those pages. I spent hours writing and rewriting them as carefully as if they were my next manuscript about to be submitted to my editor. As clearly as I possibly could, I articulated every detail of my anger, my pain, my disappointment, my regrets, and my questions, so many questions. His letters too were filled with questions. But even more, they were filled with apologies for the damage he’d done to our relationship, with declarations of how he had always loved me, still loved me, would never stop loving me no matter what. His letters were also filled with hope. Despite my insistence in the first letter that I was not saying I wanted to get back together and that I was not ready to think about the future, we had already slipped into talking about exactly that, about what we had learned from our mistakes and how we might do things differently this time.
Although his parole officer Deirdre Lang had been reluctant to give her approval, I was back on his phone list. Calls to cell phones were now permitted, so that number went on his list too. Deirdre had insisted that as long as I was still registered with Victim Services, I couldn’t possibly be on his phone list. When I called Victim Services to check, they said this was not the case. There was no policy to prohibit me being both with Victim Services and on his phone list. After some back-and-forthing, however, to avoid a stretch of bureaucratic wrangling that might well take months while they figured out their own rules, I decided to deactivate my Victim Services registration with the understanding that I could reactivate it at any time and that I would remain on the Parole Board’s Registry of Decisions.
When I told Alex that Shane and I were talking about giving our relationship another try, he was ambivalent, hovering between skepticism and relief. In the end, his desire to see me happy again was enough to outweigh his doubts. If Louise was alarmed when I told her the news, she, ever the consummate professional, did not shriek, gasp, or rend her garments. She did, however, send me an email early the next morning in which she reiterated some of the suggestions she’d made during our appointment and listed a number of questions I should ask myself.
Be cautious. Be aware of all that was happening. Think about everything very carefully and rationally, taking out the emotions. Reread my letters to him and his to me.
Was he showing the same type of behaviour he’d shown when we first became involved? Was he manipulating me? Was he just telling me what I wanted to hear?
Was this the real Shane?
How had he changed?
Had he asked me to come and visit him?
Yes, he had.
Five days after that appointment with Louise, I submitted my visiting application form. This time I didn’t care what the men at the camera store did or did not think. This time I understood about extenuating circumstances. Rather than try to explain it all in the single allotted line, I typed up a Reader’s Digest version of our story and attached it on a separate sheet. Again I went to the post office. This time it took a month for my application to be approved, but finally it was. Visits to Bath could be made by appointment only, and they must be booked by telephone no less than forty-eight hours and no more than seven days in advance.
On a Thursday, exactly one year since Shane had been granted full parole, I called and booked my first visit for Sunday, exactly one year and one day since he’d come home to stay.
WHAT WAS I THINKING?
I was thinking that I loved him. I was thinking that he had touched a part of me no one else ever had. I was thinking that if we had the proper support, we could make our relationship work. I was thinking that I knew more now than I’d known then. I was thinking that now I understood that rarely does somebody spend thirty years in prison and come out a better person. Joan Didion, in her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, wrote: “Time is the school in which we learn.” True. Also true that for Shane, doing time was the school in which he’d learned. I was thinking that by loving him and helping him, I could show him there was another way to be, another way besides angry, miserable, malevolent, and full of hate. I was still thinking I could shine my light and lead him out of the darkness.
I believed in the redemptive power of love—for both of us. I was thinking that together we could rewrite both our lives. I was thinking our story could still have a happy ending after all.
WHAT WAS I THINKING?
Louise said that only 5 per cent of relationships that begin while the man is incarcerated are successful after he gets out. I was thinking we could be part of that 5 per cent. Who doesn’t want to believe they can be the exception to the rule? She also said it takes a long-term prisoner at least three to five years to adjust to life in the community, even if he has all the support in the world. I was thinking we had given up too easily.
WHAT WAS I THINKING?
I was not thinking. I was feeling. I did not know how to follow Louise’s advice and consider the situation rationally while removing my emotions.
I was feeling intoxicated, exhilarated, defiant. Throw caution to the wind! To hell with trying to be smart, reasonable, wise! Follow your heart! Love conquers all!
I was feeling that in my heart of hearts I knew I hadn’t been 100 per cent committed to him the first time. This time I would be ALL IN. Maybe this is the feeling people have when parachuting out of an airplane, diving off a cliff, bungee-jumping off a bridge—if not the overpass. Here there were no transport trucks and buses lined up on the highway to break my fall.
I HADN’T EXPECTED THAT MY FRIENDS would jump for joy about my relationship with Shane in the first place, and they didn’t. Now here we were in the second place, getting back together.
Months earlier I’d once hazarded to admit to Valerie, the community chaplain, that sometimes I thought about getting back together but I was afraid that if I did, I would lose my friends. Predictably she said, “Then you’ll know who your friends are.” What this really means, of course, is “You’ll know who your friends aren’t.” I didn’t see it that way. I just knew some people would be able to handle it and some wouldn’t. I wasn’t sure ahead of time who would fall into which category.
When it came to the actual telling, I didn’t handle it well. I didn’t tell them all at once, and I didn’t tell them in the right order. As if we were back in high school, I told one friend I thought would understand and then asked her not to tell another I thought wouldn’t. Some people I didn’t consider close friends I didn’t tell at all, assuming the gossip would find its way to them soon enough. It did.
Much upset and outrage ensued all around.
Only my friend Lily remained neutral about it. She’d been cautiously optimistic when we got together in the first place and now again seemed willing to give this unexpected development the benefit of the doubt. For that I was grateful. Some of my friendships were severely strained but recovered. Others were damaged beyond repair and ended. In a couple of cases, it seemed that the amount of work it would take to preserve the friendship coupled with the amount of work I knew it would take to make things right with Shane was just too much. There wasn’t enough of me to go around. Nor was I prepared to go forward with Shane while always having to justify or defend our relationship to other people. There was no comment at all from Walter, who had called me first “stupid” and then “lucky.” Perhaps there was simply no word in the entire English language to describe this mind-boggling turn of events.
After some stumbling, Dorothy and I came to the conclusion that while it is easy enough to be friends when your friend is doing something you agree with, the hard part comes when they’re not—when they’ve chosen to follow a path you don’t approve of and are behaving in a manner you find pretty much incomprehensible. She seemed to understand that I was still the same person I’d always been for
the twenty years we’d known each other. We agreed that we weren’t about to stop being friends over this. Without actually laying out a new set of guidelines, we managed to maintain our friendship over the coming years. She never said anything negative about Shane, but she never asked about him either. With him being back in prison, it wasn’t as if she ever had to see him. For my part, I tried not to mention him too often, and I didn’t go into much detail when I did.
If we were having problems, I discussed them only with my therapist Louise. I was, after all, an old hand at hiding parts of myself, even from my closest friends.
THE DAY BEFORE I MADE MY FIRST VISIT to Shane at Bath, I drove one hundred kilometres east to give a reading at the Thousand Islands Writers Festival, held in the grand and impressive Brockville Courthouse, a designated National Historic Site, to which is attached the city jail. The readings took place in one of the actual courtrooms. I sat in the judge’s chair and then in the prisoner’s box to see what it felt like. My life has never been short on irony.
The next morning, I pulled into the Bath parking lot promptly at eight-thirty. I waited at the gate just as I had with Angela two months before. Today there were two other women also waiting. They were chatting, but I was too anxious and excited to make small talk. We waited some more, and then I spotted something I hadn’t noticed when I went in for the hearing: a buzzer on the fence to the right.
As I eyed it, my hand moved involuntarily towards it, and one of the women shrieked, “Don’t do it!”
“It just pisses them off, and then they’ll make us wait even longer,” said the other.
Together they laughed the knowing cackle of experience.
Finally the first gate groaned and began to grind slowly open. We entered, and it ground closed behind us. Then the second gate opened, closed. We walked along the sidewalk to the building. The first door clicked open, then shut. Second door, open, shut. We were in. This was all much more disconcerting than going into Frontenac had ever been, and much more unnerving without Angela beside me.
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