This Is Not My Life
Page 33
Sometimes still I caught myself wanting to tell Shane things. I wanted to tell him that the collage book had found a publisher. That I was renovating the back room and had repaired the damaged ceiling and installed the new flooring all by myself. That I was still afraid of rain. That Alex’s girlfriend had broken up with him, and he was devastated. That my dear Nelly had suddenly become very ill, and I’d had to have her put to sleep. She was eleven years old and had never had a bad day in her life, until the last four. I wanted to tell him that for weeks afterwards, Maggie would pull all the toys out of the wicker basket one by one and spread them around on the living room rug, then sit there in the middle of them with her sad little chin resting on her crossed paws, waiting for Nelly to come and play with her.
I wanted him to comfort me when things were going badly and to share my happiness when things were going well. With Louise’s help, I understood that this was me slipping back into the story, that beautiful story in which he would have done both those things—whereas in reality, he had seldom been able to do either of them.
That summer it took me some time to adjust to the news that he was out of prison and living at the halfway house in Ottawa. Since the breakup, I’d always known where he was—right there at Frontenac, not ten minutes from my house. When he was moved to Ottawa, two hundred kilometres away, I had to relocate him on my internal map. I also had to wonder if he might show up at my door one day. I kept reminding myself that he was smarter than that, and besides, he wasn’t allowed to leave the city of Ottawa without permission. He didn’t.
That summer one of the dozen bleeding heart plants that grew through the cracks in my driveway heaved up a chunk of asphalt two inches thick, four inches wide, and eight inches long. I measured it. I took this as a sign, a very good sign. I would give up on rainbows and put my faith in the power of bleeding hearts instead.
“WHY THE HELL WOULD ANYBODY want to do that?” Dorothy asked.
Laughing, I said, “I’ll take that as a rhetorical question.”
We’d resumed our old habit of long leisurely phone conversations once or twice a week. That day it had been announced that after Kingston Penitentiary was entirely emptied of inmates and formally decommissioned on September 30, it would be opened for public tours for a three-week period as a fundraiser for United Way.
“Tell me you’re not,” she said.
“I am.” I could hear her rolling her eyes.
“It’s only going to upset you.”
“It might,” I conceded.
“Why torture yourself?”
“Another rhetorical question, I presume,” I said and changed the subject.
Three days later, the tickets went on sale, online only, twenty dollars each for a ninety-minute tour. Apparently I was not the only one who wanted to do that. More than nine thousand tickets were sold out within minutes. I considered myself lucky to get one for an early afternoon tour in mid-October.
WHEN I PULLED INTO THE PARKING LOT beside the looming east wall, the sailboats in the adjacent marina were bobbing gently, and the water of Lake Ontario was sparkling in the sun. The lot was already crowded with vehicles. We would be going through in groups of two dozen, each group led by a CSC employee. By force of habit, I locked my purse in the trunk and put my driver’s licence in my pocket. Before leaving home, I had managed to resist the reflex to do my usual cleaning routine, but I still found it hard to believe that, as stated in the tour information, there would be no security measures in place. Equally strange to me was the fact that tour participants were encouraged rather than forbidden to bring their cameras.
I was anxious about going in. Maybe Dorothy was right—maybe I was just torturing myself. I had been doing well—so well, in fact, that I’d now graduated to seeing Louise only once a month instead of every week. Maybe I was just setting myself up for more misery and a major setback in my recovery. This was why I wanted to make the tour by myself, so I could, as Louise always advised, feel what I was feeling and not have to keep reassuring someone else that I was okay if I wasn’t. Shane and I had now been apart for sixteen months. I was still in the habit of counting this out on my fingers, not now as a register of anxiety or dread but as a victorious tally of getting on with my life.
Anxiety aside, I was also curious. I had spent thousands of hours at both Frontenac and Bath, but I had never really been “inside,” had never been in deeper than the visiting room and the trailers. Nor had I ever been into a maximum-security institution. Whether curiosity killed the cat or not, this was my chance.
It was a short walk from the parking lot to the entrance, and with each step I could feel my body changing as I assumed my old prison stance—head up, spine straight, shoulders back, arms a peculiar combination of relaxed and ready. I took long steady strides up the sidewalk, my cowboy boots resounding firmly on the concrete. By the time I reached the gatehouse, I had put on my prison face—a complex layering of cordiality, gravitas, innocence, experience, compliance, courtesy, and confidence—topped off with a tiny dollop of defiance.
Still astonished that all I had to do was sign my name and hand over my ticket—no ion scanner, no metal detector, no drug dog—I followed the rest of my group down a twisting hallway through a series of doors that I knew would otherwise have been locked but that were now propped wide open. We were ushered into the visiting room to meet our group leader, a middle-aged man who introduced himself as someone who had taught in the prisons, including this one, for more than twenty years. I didn’t recognize him or any of the other tour participants, two dozen strangers of all ages with their cameras in hand who seemed to be collectively excited and eager to be amazed, astounded, and horrified.
We stepped out on the other side of the gatehouse into a labyrinth of iron gates and razor-wire-topped fences, paved exercise yards, concrete walkways, manicured lawns, looming guard towers, and two-, three-, and four-storey limestone buildings with metal roofs, massive arched doors, and dozens of tall barred windows. I was stunned by the sheer size of it, ten acres at least, all completely invisible from the outside. From behind the walls, the outside was invisible too, except for the tops of a few trees just beginning to change colour beneath the arching bright blue October sky.
I hung back from the group, trailing along behind them, while the leader pointed out various attractions around the grounds. I wanted to take it all in as privately as possible. I still did not know if or how much this was going to upset me.
We made our way to the actual cellblocks. This was what I most wanted to see: the inside of the inside.
The hallways were narrow, dingy, and unclean, the concrete walls marked with peeling paint and graffiti: WHEN IS ENOUGH ENOUGH!? EMBRACE SUFFERING! PLEASE FUCK OFF. Above a burned-out electrical outlet in black felt marker it said: DON’T PLUG TOASTER AND MICROWAVE IN THIS! It was not hard to imagine the sound of rats’ claws scritching down these hallways at night, a sound Shane said had haunted him for years.
Set in two levels down one side of each range, there were eighteen or twenty cells per level, classic prison cells with bars, locks, and no windows. Many were decorated with drawings, posters, writings, and photos cut from magazines: hockey team emblems, racing cars, buxom women in bikinis, two loons on a lake, three horses in a field, a snow-covered mountain beneath a full moon.
Several cells were open and still furnished, as if the prisoner would be back in a minute. Had these men abandoned everything when they were moved out, or had these cells been staged for our benefit? We were allowed to go right inside and have a good look around. No more than five feet wide and nine feet long, these were all single cells—no room for double-bunking here. The narrow bed sprouted out of one side wall, taking up half the width of the room. Below it was a desk area and below that a small storage space. At the back of each cell was a built-in set of four shelves and beside that a mirror above a shiny metal combination sink and toilet with no lid.
I was not amazed, astounded, or horrified. It was all exactly as Sha
ne had described it. I took pictures along with everyone else. I was moved but not upset. I could not see him there. He was gone.
As I drove home afterwards I knew it was finished. I knew I was free.
TIME HAS PASSED. THINGS HAVE HAPPENED. More time will pass. More things will happen. I have become myself again, but I am not the same. Perhaps I never will be. Perhaps that is a good thing. If this were a novel, I would know how to end it. But this is not a novel. This is my life, and I’m going to live it. I know there will never come a day when I can once again drive past the prisons and think they have nothing to do with me. But there will come a day when I do not think of them or him, not even once. There will come a day when I can shine my light into the darkness and not see his face.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
So many people have helped me in so many ways during the years of writing this book. Some of them must remain nameless: you know who you are!
As for the rest, thank you to Lauren and Ron Davis, Stacey Hannem, Madelyn Iler, Philomene Kocher, Shannon Moroney, Audrey Ogilvie and Norman Peterson, Joanne and Steve Page, Kathy Page, Barbara Sibbald, Carolyn Smart, Karen Smythe, Susan Barbara Townsend, Carol Whitehead, and Deborah Windsor. As always, but especially in this case, thank you to my dear son Alex, ever the light of my life.
Thank you to my agents, Bella Pomer and Samantha Haywood, and her assistant, Stephanie Sinclair, for taking such good care of me and my book. Thank you to my wonderful editor, Jennifer Lambert, for her sensitivity, her sense of humour, and for gently pushing and pulling me through the long and sometimes difficult writing process.
For financial assistance, I am grateful to the Ontario Arts Council Writers’ Reserve Program and the Woodcock Fund of the Writers’ Trust of Canada.
I am especially thankful for the fact that on October 19, 2015, the Harper government, after almost ten years in power, was soundly defeated by the Liberals, and Justin Trudeau was elected the twenty-third prime minister of Canada with a solid majority. During the campaign, the Liberals made a commitment to reopening the prison farms. Newly elected Liberal MP for Kingston and the Islands and former mayor of the city, Mark Gerretsen has said he will make this issue a priority. There is great hope that by implementing this and other changes to reverse the Harper government’s Tough on Crime policies, the Liberals will bring Canada back to a more humane and effective criminal justice system based on research, evidence, the respect of human rights, and the true protection of public safety.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DIANE SCHOEMPERLEN is the Governor General’s Award–winning author of twelve works of fiction and non-fiction, most recently By the Book: Stories and Pictures, a collection illustrated with her own full-colour collages, which was longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. She is a recipient of the Marian Engel Award from the Writers’ Trust of Canada.
WEB: WWW.DIANESCHOEMPERLEN.COM
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CREDITS
COVER PHOTO COURTESY OF DEBORAH PENDELL/ARCANGEL.COM
COPYRIGHT
THIS IS NOT MY LIFE
Copyright © 2016 Diane Schoemperlen
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EPub Edition: March 2016 ISBN: 9781443434225
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