This Is Not My Life

by Diane Schoemperlen

  Apparently it had. I happily settled in at my desk that morning, looking forward to a full day of work and to the particular comfort a quiet rainy day can bring. Shane had changed jobs again, was now working on the prison loading dock, and he’d been doing a good job of not calling until either right before or right after the four o’clock count.

  As was my custom when hunkering down to work for an extended stretch, I didn’t open the drapes. I find a window as distracting as a TV set, a riveting rectangle demanding to be gazed out of, even if all it revealed was my little street deserted as usual on a weekday morning. With my desk in the living room, I worked facing the wall of books. By the sound of the rain pounding on the roof, I could hear that the light showers of early morning had turned into an all-out downpour—no thunder, no lightning, just heavy rain. I hoped my dentist was happy.

  Time passed unnoticed and unchecked, just as it always does when I’m deeply immersed in my writing. When I finally looked at the clock, it was nearly noon. I could hear that it was still pouring, and the sump pump in the basement had been coming on frequently. I pushed my chair back from the desk, stood up, and took a step towards the window. My bare foot landed on something wet. Having lived in a house full of pets for so long, my first thought was, Who peed on the rug? I may well have said it out loud. But the wet spot I was standing in was very cold.

  I went to the window and pulled back the drapes. It was raining so hard, I could barely see across the street. Turning back towards the desk, I stepped in the wet spot again. I looked up. There was water dripping from the ceiling light. This could not be good. With the drops being silently swallowed up by the carpet, I had been completely unaware of what was going on right behind my back.

  I ran to the basement and turned off the power. There was water on the floor down there—not an unusual occurrence in itself as the basement tended to leak. Although this was aggravating, it had never presented a big problem. The basement was only partially finished, divided into three rooms but used only for storage, laundry, and a place to put the kitty litter box—not as a living space.

  For the moment, I was far more alarmed about the roof leaking, something that had never happened before. I grabbed a bucket from the laundry room and headed back upstairs, only to meet Alex just coming out of his bedroom with the news that there was a leak in his ceiling too. And, I discovered, another in the back room as well. I ran outside to get more buckets from the tool shed. It was still raining so hard that even with my jacket on, I was instantly soaked to the skin. Overwhelmed, I started to cry as I ran back into the house with the buckets. I had never had to deal with anything like this before.

  I didn’t know what else to do so, for the first time in my life, I called 911. The dispatcher answered immediately and asked the nature of my emergency. In the background, I could hear what sounded like utter bedlam. I pulled myself together enough to explain about the leaking ceilings and that I’d turned off the power. After she assured me that I’d done the right thing, and after I assured her that for the moment we were okay, she said, “Now I’m going to have to put you on hold, dear, just for a minute. All hell is breaking loose here. But don’t hang up. I’ll be right back.”

  I clung to the receiver with one hand and held my head in the other. Alex was monitoring the buckets and the pets, and patrolling the rest of the house to be sure we weren’t springing any more leaks. When the dispatcher came back on, I clung to her voice as hard as I’d been clinging to the phone. I told her I could now hear what sounded like a waterfall running into the basement. She said not to go down there, but if I could see from the top of the stairs that the water was reaching the level of the electrical outlets, I should call the fire department. Then she said, “Whatever you do, dear, don’t go out. Don’t go on the roads. Half the city is flooded.” I loved her calling me “dear” and took some fleeting consolation in the knowledge that Alex and I weren’t the only ones in trouble.

  By mid-afternoon the rain had ended, the ceilings had stopped dripping, and from the top of the stairs, I could see with my flashlight that although there was now six or seven inches of water in the basement, it had stopped rising and hadn’t reached the electrical outlets. But there was a terrible smell wafting up the stairs that I knew was more than water.

  This definitely qualified as an emergency at home, so I called the prison. The officer who answered was Graham, with whom we were quite friendly, and he was suitably concerned and sympathetic. He said he’d go and get Shane and have him call me right away. When Shane phoned back, it took him a few minutes to grasp the gravity of the situation. He didn’t know what to do any more than I did and was certainly not in a position to come home and help me, but he was reassuring, and just hearing his voice calmed me down considerably.

  Alex was due to work at five o’clock. By then the flash flooding on the streets had subsided, and it was safe to go out. Much as I wanted him to stay home, there seemed no point in that—I didn’t know what I was supposed to do now, let alone what he could do—so off he went, promising to call during the evening. Even with the power off, the phone was working, and luckily I’d charged my cell phone the night before.

  I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me to call any of my friends for help that day or in the difficult days ahead. I don’t know what this said about me or them or what was wrong with my life.

  I did know the deep smelly water in the basement was not something I could just mop up myself the way I had on previous leaky occasions. I also knew I wasn’t about to go down there and turn the power back on while standing in it. I recalled seeing a number of company trucks around the city proclaiming FIRE AND FLOOD RESTORATION and 24-HOUR EMERGENCY SERVICE. I got out the phone book and started making calls. All lines were busy. I went down the list until finally someone at a company called Winmar answered. She was kind and calm, and my eyes pricked with tears when she said, “Don’t worry, we can help you.” She also said the same thing the 911 dispatcher had said earlier: “All hell is breaking loose here.” After I gave her my details, she asked, “Is this an insurance claim?” If she didn’t already know that I had no idea how to handle this, she knew it for sure when I burst into tears and said, “I don’t know.” In an even kinder, calmer voice, she said I should call my insurance company and then call her back.

  I had never had to call my insurance company before, had simply paid my premiums year after year for twenty-four years, seldom giving it another thought except to note it was awfully expensive. I wasn’t even sure where my insurance documents were. If I’d ever imagined that I was prepared and knew what to do in the event of an emergency, I had been kidding myself.

  By the time I found my documents, it was after six o’clock, so I called the toll-free after-hours number. When I told the young man who answered that I was calling from Kingston, he said pleasantly, “My God, we’ve had a hundred calls from Kingston in the last half hour!” He was in Vancouver. He took down the details and gave me the claim number I needed to proceed. I called the Winmar woman back, and the process was set in motion.

  The rest of the evening in the steadily darkening house was filled with phone calls on both the land line and the cell phone. With Shane and Alex periodically calling to check on me, sometimes I was talking on both phones at once while taking notes by flashlight at the kitchen table. By ten o’clock that night, after many calls from a man named Frank at Winmar, arrangements had been made for the next day.

  The electrician was here by eight o’clock in the morning, wearing a pair of hip waders. He removed the ceiling light, turned the power back on, and checked the water heater and the sump pump, which, he said, should now be able to take away most of the water. It ran for four hours straight. Frank from Winmar arrived with his camera to take pictures of the damage both upstairs and down. He said the furnace and the washer and dryer would also have to be checked by professionals. As it turned out, the furnace was fine; the washer and dryer were not. Because this was also a sewer backup, Frank said e
verything that wasn’t well up off the floor or stored in plastic tubs was now contaminated and would have to be destroyed. Including the walls. In the afternoon, he returned and set up four gigantic fans and two even larger dehumidifiers in the basement. With all six of them running at once, even upstairs it was like being inside an airplane.

  Frank left me with a dozen cardboard boxes, into which I was to put the undamaged items. I went to Canadian Tire and bought a pair of rubber boots and a mop. The store was crowded with other people doing the same. With the power back on, I now had more information. Kingston, it was said, had received over a hundred millimetres of rain in less than four hours. Hundreds, possibly over a thousand, homes and businesses had been flooded. For the next few days, the television news and the local paper were filled with pictures of cars submerged in parking lots and on downtown streets, of damaged homes now sprouting in their driveways ever-growing piles of soggy smelly furniture, drywall, clothing, and children’s toys. As was mine.

  On Sunday morning, I visited Shane, crying off and on at the table, feeling comforted not only by him but also by the guards, all of them offering sympathy, suggestions, and some flood stories of their own. Then I came home and got back to the task at hand. Alex and I, with help from some neighbours, spent the next three days hauling stuff out of the basement and piling it in the driveway. We were also packing up all that could be salvaged and moving it upstairs. Soon the kitchen, the hallway, and the back room were filled with boxes.

  I have always been something of a pack rat, and for years, I’d been guilty of stashing things in the basement—things that were broken, worn out, or just no longer of any use to us, things about which I invariably said, “I’ll just put this here for now.” I called this “storage,” but in fact, it was just me not being very good at letting things go. As a friend had once said of herself, I was about three boxes away from an episode of Hoarders. So although the basement was only partially finished, it was completely full of stuff. For the insurance claim, I’d been told to keep a list of all we were tossing on a form poignantly titled “Schedule of Loss.” Six-foot artificial Christmas tree, obsolete desktop computer, five-foot wooden toboggan, floor polisher, carpet sweeper, vacuum cleaner, circular saw, three suitcases, two ancient TV sets, white wicker loveseat and two matching chairs, coffee table, rollaway bed, dog crate, two floor lamps, several mats and throw rugs. The list grew longer. The pile in the driveway grew higher, wider, deeper.

  On Wednesday morning, the full cleanup crew arrived, six men in white haz-mat suits who removed the heavy items, including the ugly plaid water- and sewage-filled sofa bed that was down there when we moved in and that now had to be hacked into pieces with a chainsaw to be removed. They pulled up all the floor coverings and ripped out the drywall that had sucked up the water and was now saturated with sewage. The cats hid under the bed, and I spent most of the day trying to comfort the little dogs, who were quivering and barking and peeing on the floor.

  In the midst of the chaos, the insurance adjuster arrived to assess the damage. They would cover the basement but not, she said, the roof and the now cracked and ruined plaster ceilings in three rooms on the main floor. If the storm had ripped shingles off the roof, it would have been covered, but the roof had leaked because the shingles were old, she said, and that was not covered. That was my own damn fault, she seemed to be implying, for having been negligent in the maintenance of my home. The shingles had looked fine to me, no worn or lifted areas, no evidence of crumbling or breaking. How was I to know that twenty-five-year shingles are not what they claim to be? I’d had the roof done in 1992, so those shingles were only nineteen years old. I thought they had a few good years left in them yet. Winmar would patch the roof for now, and I would have to make my own arrangements to have it redone and figure out how to pay for that and the interior ceiling repairs myself.

  Shane could not help me in a practical hands-on way, but he proved to be an unflagging source of moral support. In other situations, he had seemed to have a knack for making my life harder than it needed to be, but in this case, except for the one time he suggested maybe I was getting a little too fond of this Frank person, he was indeed making my life easier. He didn’t complain about the fact that I was missing visits and phone calls, that I wasn’t paying much attention to him, that I was often irritable and impatient. In fact, this was the upside of the whole flood fiasco: yes, he could put himself aside and be there for me. Yes, he could be the person I could lean on. It had been a long time since I’d felt this.

  In retrospect, the other upsides of the flood were that my basement had finally been cleaned out, I was completely cured of my pack rat tendencies, and from here on in, I would always know the exact location of my insurance documents.

  IT HAD BEEN NEARLY THE END OF JULY before any progress was made on getting our PFVs reinstated. Not surprisingly this was not the simple process we’d been led to believe it would be. For weeks Shane had been trying to get answers, and then he was reprimanded for asking too many questions and bothering his CMT. I had sent a letter to the warden requesting a meeting or a phone call to discuss the issue. I received no reply. A lengthy report had been prepared by his CMT, most of which was a reiteration of many previous reports, with emphasis on the one regarding his 2009 revocation, which still said he had broken into my house and confronted me naked in the bathtub, even though I had corrected this at the hearing, and on the letter he’d sent me from the TD Centre at KP, which was still being described as “threatening and disturbing,” even though it had not been. Eventually we were told we could now have four twelve-hour PFVs before being reviewed and considered for longer ones.

  The first of these took place ten days after the flood. I had an extra house key made for Frank, so Winmar could continue their work in the basement while I was at Frontenac. The crew would spend the day cleaning the floors and spraying everything with disinfectant. Alex would keep track of the pets.

  For those twelve hours in the trailer, Shane pampered me, fussed over me, cooked for me, and patiently held me while I cried. At home alone, I was still resisting the urge to cry, but there in his arms, it felt so good to let it out. In the afternoon, we watched the Vince Vaughn romantic comedy Couples Retreat. Curled up there in our own couples retreat—hardly a tropical island resort, but a retreat nonetheless—I realized it had been years since Shane had reminded me of Vince Vaughn.

  IT HAD TAKEN MERE HOURS for the flood damage to be done, but I could see it was going to take months for the recovery—both the physical recovery of the house itself and my emotional recovery. My “Schedule of Loss” extended well beyond the two five-ton truckloads of stinking junk that had been hauled out of the driveway. There were also all those unclaimable items that hadn’t even made the list. Like my comprehensive collection of empty cardboard boxes of all sizes that I’d kept because you never know when you’ll need a box and because in my family, perhaps since my mother worked in a post office, we considered a good sturdy box to be a thing of beauty. Like the wooden sled that was mine as a child, that I’d used to haul baby Alex around the neighbourhood on winter walks, and that the insurance adjuster said was not quite an antique and so could neither be valued nor replaced. Like any pleasure I might have once taken in the sound of rain on the roof. Like my now-shattered sense of my house as my sanctuary, my refuge, my safe haven, the one place in the world where I did not have to be afraid.

  Along with all that I’d lost in the flood, both tangible and intangible, I had also gained a ramped-up sense of my own insecurity, an escalation of my lifelong fear and anxiety, an unrelenting awareness of my own vulnerability, of being perpetually at the mercy of forces beyond my control, of waiting, always waiting, for the next terrible thing to hit me, knowing that whatever it turned out to be, there would be no one here to help me. Irrational though I knew it was, I kept thinking that if only I’d been prepared, if only I hadn’t foolishly dropped my usual hypervigilance that morning, if only I’d been paying attention, somehow
the flood would never have happened. In my own skewed version of magical thinking, it was entirely possible that it had all been my own damn fault. I had also added a new fear to my repertoire, this one called ombrophobia or pluviophobia: the fear of rain.

  There are thousands, probably hundreds of thousands, of people in the world who have been through far more severe floods than mine, not to mention hurricanes, tornadoes, tsunamis, earthquakes, wildfires, and volcanic eruptions. Try as I might to put my own small disaster into perspective, still it was mine, and I couldn’t seem to get over it and move forward in the aftermath. This was one more project Louise and I would have to tackle together. Where were my inner resources? Consumed perhaps by Shane? Where was my resilience? Lost perhaps in the welter of the prison world? When I told Louise I was praying for strength every night and sometimes half the day too, she laughed and said, “You’d better stop that. Every time you pray for strength, God will give you something else to prove you are already strong.”

  I WAS SUPPOSED TO BEGIN a three-month tenure as Writer-in-Residence at Queen’s University in early September. I didn’t see how I could possibly do a good job there with everything at home still in such an uproar after the flood. I was relieved when the English Department saw no problem in postponing my residency until the January term instead. This proved to be a wise decision. Despite the fact that I was now scrupulously not praying for strength as Louise had advised, in the following weeks, there was no remission in the relentless cascade of challenges requiring exactly that. Most of these had nothing to do with prison. Most of these were just my life.