In late August, my basement was flooded again by another downpour only slightly less torrential than the first. Fortunately it was only water this time, not sewage, and everything down there that could be destroyed already had been. The day after the second flood, I had to have our old cat Max put to sleep. He’d been diagnosed with chronic peritonitis when he was young, had suffered and recovered from many bouts of it since. But now he was fifteen years old and this time could not recover. The new roof had to be installed, and I had to find four thousand dollars to pay for it. Both the microwave and the TV set died and had to be replaced. There was an electrical fire in my oven, and as I tried to rescue the lovely and expensive roast of lamb inside, I burned my right hand badly, necessitating a trip to Emergency. Then I had to buy a new stove. The car required the fourteen-hundred-dollar replacement of the front control arms and stabilizer links. There was a problem with the bathroom plumbing, again due to the existing pipes not being compatible with anything now available. In the end, I had Bath Fitter install a whole new unit complete with a fancy hand-held showerhead that I chose with Shane in mind.
I was broke and exhausted, well beyond frazzled. For every task, event, or obligation I completed and crossed off my list, there were three or four more to be added the next day. For every crisis dealt with or averted, there was another one waiting in the wings, biding its time, getting ready to blow. I was always clenched—not my teeth or my fists or my jaw, but all of me—bracing for the next thing.
And still there were readings to be given and attended, a story commissioned by CBC Radio to be written and recorded, a short piece to be completed for a national magazine. I was having problems with this piece, and when I complained about it to Shane, he said, “You keep talking about how much you love writing, but you’re always just bitching about it. Maybe you should find a new line of work.”
If I’d hoped that by now Shane was getting the idea that life out here in the free world was not a piece of pie, so to speak, I was sadly mistaken. It seemed there’d been a time limit on how long he was prepared to be my Rock of Gibraltar. After about two months, his warrant as my sturdy support system had abruptly expired. I had used up all my let-me-lean-on-you credits, and he had reverted back to his former stance as the needy one—aggrieved, benighted, and unwell.
Throughout the fall, he had again been having problems with his esophagus. The follow-up tests he was supposed to have after the esophageal bleed back in 2007, and that were again recommended by Dr. Chapman at the end of 2008, had never been done. Now it was becoming increasingly difficult for him to swallow food of any kind without choking or vomiting or both. After he’d been rushed to both outside hospitals a number of times, finally the follow-up tests were scheduled.
We had now been back together for as long as we’d been together in the first place. Things were not going well. It wasn’t that I had stopped loving him. Rightly or wrongly, I did love him. But I could no longer convince myself that this would ever be a healthy relationship. It had been a very long time since we’d had anything to add to our file box of happy memories. But that other box was filled to overflowing. We were back on the Tough Guys train without a rainbow in sight. I had to admit that I was unhappy more often than not, that both my hope and my faith were fading—my hope that through the sheer force of my will, I could make this relationship work—my faith that if only I could be strong enough, patient enough, devoted enough, we would live happily ever after, amen.
I had been as strong as I could be for as long as I could be. Now I had been feeling frazzled and anxious for so long that when there did come a quiet peaceful day in which I had no real reason to feel that way, I did anyway. I thought this must be what it was like for Shane: when there did come a time when he had no reason to feel angry, miserable, and filled with hate, he did anyway. If only because he didn’t know what else to do, didn’t know how else to be. His anger and hate, I could see now, were what kept him going. I could also see that my hope, my faith, and my love were no match for that. Things were not getting better. Things were getting worse. I had to admit to myself that I couldn’t go on much longer. Perhaps he knew it too.
I finally understood that he had to live in a constant state of chaos and crisis. No matter how often he claimed to want a quiet, simple, peaceful life, every time he got anywhere close to that, he couldn’t stand it. He could only go for a few days in a state of relative calm. If a crisis didn’t then present itself, he would manufacture one to satisfy his need for drama and destruction. He loved nothing more than an uproar, especially one he’d created himself. That was his comfort zone. I could seldom keep myself from being sucked into the vortex of his twisted misery.
Brenda from the prison group had once given me a fridge magnet made by Tammy’s inmate husband. Illustrated with a large wooden cross planted in a bed of pink tulips, it featured the words WAIT, HOPE, TRUST, REJOICE in a rainbow arc across the top, and across the bottom, a quote from the Bible, Romans 8:28: All things work together for good. Brenda was a devout Christian. She said the magnet would give me strength. I took it off the fridge where it had been for a year or more and put it in the junk drawer.
SETTLING IN TO EAT MY SUPPER while watching the six o’clock news on a Friday evening in late October, I was startled to recognize a familiar intersection in the video footage of the lead story. There was my Tim Hortons. There was Subway and the sushi place. There was the apartment building where Shane had lived. And yes, there was the call centre—with a cluster of police vehicles in front and many uniformed officers bringing people out of the building.
The call centre had been raided earlier that day. Nine people were arrested in Kingston and another twelve in Belleville at the second branch of the operation of what police were now calling “a major telemarketing scam.” By early estimate, thousands of people and businesses in both Canada and the United States had been defrauded of more than three million dollars since 2008. Kingston Police had begun investigating the call centre in late May, the news announcer said, and were joined over the summer by the OPP and the RCMP.
Just minutes after the story ended, the phone rang. Shane had been watching the news too.
Over the next few days, we learned that concerns had been expressed early on about the wisdom of sending inmates to work at the call centre, that the police had advised against it due to the ongoing investigation. I might have pursued this issue with more determination had other events not intervened.
IN EARLY NOVEMBER, after all the medical testing had been completed, Shane had an appointment to see a gastroenterologist at Hotel Dieu Hospital to discuss the results. We were very worried. The last time I’d asked if I could accompany him to a medical appointment, his parole officer, Dennis Walker, had said I was probably planning to take him a gun and help him escape, so this time I didn’t even ask.
I paced around the house all morning waiting for the phone to ring. When it finally did, I grabbed it in the middle of the first ring.
I said, “Hello.”
Shane said, “Cancer.”
THREE WEEKS LATER, we were back in the same upstairs room at Frontenac where the first parole hearing I’d attended had been held just over four years ago. Today’s hearing was to address Shane’s request for a series of UTAs to an Ottawa halfway house, a preliminary step towards doing day parole there. It had been twice postponed, because the necessary paperwork had not been done.
That morning I met Shane and his lawyer, as well as Stuart and Edward Blake, in the visiting room at eight o’clock. After some time waiting there, we went upstairs and waited some more in the staff lunchroom across the hall from the hearing room. There was some kind of commotion farther down the hallway—a raised voice, a slamming door, hurried footsteps. Perhaps this was what was causing the delay.
Finally we were ushered into the room where two male Board members and the female hearing officer were already seated at one long table. Shane and his lawyer took their places at the second table. Stuart, Edward,
and I sat in three chairs close behind them. I was in the middle, staring directly at the bald spot on the back of Shane’s head. Last to enter was Dennis Walker, who sat down beside Shane. They did not look at each other. In fact, Dennis didn’t look at anyone. He was visibly upset, his face was red and shiny, and although it was a chilly late-November morning, he was sweating so profusely that under the arms of his tight lilac dress shirt, there were dark wet circles almost down to his waist. While the hearing officer went through the usual preliminaries, Dennis was breathing hard and flipping violently through the paperwork on the table in front of him. For a whole year, Shane had been complaining about how strange and unbalanced he seemed. I had never met him nor even spoken to him on the phone, but now I could see that Shane might not have been exaggerating.
Following the usual procedure, Dennis, as the parole officer, was asked to speak first. He sounded blustering and belligerent. He made it abundantly clear, however, that he absolutely did not support either UTAs or day parole for Shane. He’d written to the Ottawa Parole Office about Shane smoking on his work release, because this was indicative of his inability to follow the rules. Consequently the Ottawa Parole Office, he said, had withdrawn their support of him coming to their city.
Again following standard procedure, the lead Board member took Shane back to the beginning of his criminal activity, then followed a circuitous path to the present day in a tone that was consistently stern and humourless. Passing and non-specific reference was made to Shane’s current health problems. The second Board member, who looked and sounded like a marine, added only a couple of questions, then concluded that every time Shane had been released or even come close to release, he had screwed it up.
From there they moved on to the current issue—the issue, it was soon obvious, about which Dennis Walker was so upset. Now there was conflicting information. There had been an email just two days ago stating that the Ottawa halfway house was still in support of Shane coming there. Dennis said he hadn’t seen this email until that very morning, right before the hearing. The discussion that followed did little to help clear up the confusion.
By the time they were done hashing it out and Shane’s lawyer had said a few words on his behalf in closing, we were feeling quite optimistic when we went back to the lunchroom to await the decision. We all agreed that Shane had acquitted himself well.
Beckoned back into the hearing room after not more than ten minutes, we were stunned when the lead Board member said, “Denied.”
I WAS PERMITTED TO STAY WITH SHANE in V&C for some time afterwards. They were obviously watching closely to see how he would react to this outcome. I couldn’t help but feel they were expecting me to keep him calm. In fact, he was calm—filled with purpose and not thinking about cancer now. Being well aware of the rule that states “an offender may appeal any negative decision regarding conditional release that is made by the Parole Board, as well as any grant that is more restrictive than was requested,” Shane spent this time gulping down bad coffee from the vending machine and making notes for his appeal.
PART FIVE
December 2011 to July 2012
“What exactly did the doctor say?”
It was the morning after the hearing, and I’d arrived back at Frontenac at eight-thirty with my little blue bag. We had had four twelve-hour PFVs in the interim, and this was to be our first twenty-four since the kite and the cancellation back in June. There were no problems getting in, and by nine-thirty, we’d made the bed, hung up the towels, put away the food, and were in the kitchen making coffee and toast.
This time we were in the trailer closest to the visiting room, the one we’d been in for our first PFV, facing the stone wall and the guard tower of Collins Bay. Usually I preferred to be in one of the other two, with their backs to the prisons, but this time I was glad to be in the closer one. I hadn’t told Shane that I was anxious about this PFV. What if he suddenly took ill? What if he started choking and gagging, what if he passed out, what if he started vomiting blood all over the place? I am not, generally speaking, good with sick people, especially if there is vomit involved. Yes, there was an emergency phone in each trailer, but I knew from experience—once when we had to call because the sheets we’d been given were too small for the bed and another time when the coffeemaker wouldn’t work—that they didn’t always answer. What would I do if I needed help in the middle of the night? I didn’t think it would be a good idea to run out of the trailer and try to climb over the fence to get to the building. I would be directly in the sightline of the armed guards in the Collins Bay tower. No, definitely not a good idea. At least in this trailer, we were close enough that I figured if I stood outside waving my arms and screaming for help, they’d see me and hear me and come on the run.
“What exactly did the doctor say?” I asked as we sat down at the kitchen table. I also hadn’t told Shane that I had some questions about the cancer diagnosis. It had been almost a month now, and it seemed that none of the prison staff knew anything about it. Visiting one Saturday since, I’d mentioned it to a member of his CMT who was working that day. She looked at me strangely and said, “He never told me about that.” I knew that once a cancer diagnosis was made, the medical team quickly went into high gear to begin treatment. I assumed this would be true even if the patient was a federal inmate. But nothing was happening. I didn’t know whether to be suspicious or concerned.
“What exactly did the doctor say?”
Maybe Shane had misunderstood. A year before I met him, I had to have a biopsy on my left breast after a suspicious mammogram. Thankfully it revealed the presence of nothing more than benign calcifications. But early in our relationship, Shane had persisted in referring to this as the time I had cancer. Perhaps I still hadn’t made him understand that I never had cancer, that a biopsy doesn’t mean you have cancer, but is simply a test to determine if you do or don’t.
Now, thanks to the combination of doctor–patient confidentiality and CSC’s privacy policies, I had no way of getting more information about his condition.
“Did he say you have cancer? Or did he say you have to have a biopsy to see if you might have cancer?”
“How the fuck am I supposed to remember what he said?” Shane snarled and went into the bedroom.
Things went downhill from there. We were both exhausted after a stressful month and upset about the negative outcome of yesterday’s hearing. I wanted only to spend the day relaxing on the couch reading and watching TV. But he was already in bed, and it was clear what he wanted. I stayed in the living room.
The day passed. We were counted, then we had lunch. We were counted again, then we had supper. We were counted one more time, then we watched TV. By the time we went to bed, I was feeling better. But Shane said he was feeling sick now, he was too tired to have sex now, it was too late—why did I make him wait so long? Shutting the bedroom door behind him, he went back to the living room. I stayed in bed and tried to sleep.
The room as usual was bathed in white stripes by the Collins Bay spotlight. I lay flat on my back and looked down at them falling across my body. I stretched my arms up and wiggled my fingers in the stripes. I imagined I could feel them across my face.
I heard Shane coming back down the hall. He flung open the door, flicked on the ceiling light, and stood there staring at me. I stared back at him and said nothing. He shut the door and went away. Half an hour later, he was back again, coming into the room this time to get his clothes.
I dared to ask, “Where are you going?”
He grunted and said, “Nowhere. As usual.” He left the bedroom again.
He came back several more times, dressed now, and stood in the doorway in the stripes of white light.
I pictured the phone on the wall at the other end of the hallway. What would he do if I tried to use it? I pictured the knives in the kitchen drawer. I pictured him in the living room equidistant from the knives on one side and the phone on the other. What if I called them, and they didn’t come fast
enough? What if I called them, and they didn’t come at all? I got up and got dressed.
I went down the hallway to the living room without looking at the phone. He was sitting in the dark scowling at the TV just like he used to at home. When he saw me with my clothes on, he said, “Here we go. Now I suppose you’re going to call them.”
“No, I just thought since you had your clothes on, I’d put mine on too,” I said inanely.
I sat down on the couch beside him. It was still dark. I don’t remember what time it was. I don’t remember what was on TV. I don’t remember if we talked. We sat there until the sun came up. Then I went back to the bedroom and packed my bag, brought it out to the living room. He cleaned up the kitchen, stripped the bed, put the sheets in the basket with the towels. He vacuumed the whole place just like he always did. At eight-thirty they came to let us out.
We followed them into the building, and with Shane standing over me, I filled out the form indicating that all had gone well. Just like I always did. I signed out on the clipboard, date and time. It was December 1: the fifth anniversary of the day I gave him the I-love-you card. We went into the bubble, where we were interviewed by the keeper. Just like we always were. I don’t remember which keeper was working that day. What was the point of this post-PFV interview? I wondered. Just like I always did. With Shane sitting right there beside me, I said everything was fine. Just like I always did.
Shane went back to his cell, and I went home. He called shortly after I arrived. Just like he always did. “Are you okay?” he asked.
“Yes, I’m fine,” I said. But I was lying. I knew what I had to do.
MY TERM AS WRITER-IN-RESIDENCE AT QUEEN’S began the second week of January. I was excited and anxious—excited because it had been a long time since I’d had a “real job,” not to mention a real paycheque at the end of each month; anxious because I didn’t know how Shane was going to handle all the changes to our routine that the job would necessitate. What were the chances he was going to make my life easier rather than harder? Would he be able to “let me” do what I needed to do instead of trying to sabotage me, as he’d often seemed to be doing in the past?
This Is Not My Life Page 29