Читать книгу I Will Find You: In Search of the Man Who Raped Me - Joanna Connors, Joanna Connors - Страница 8

I was thirty years old when I left my body for the first time.

When it happened, I had not taken any drugs, not for a couple of years. I was sober, it was the middle of the day, I was working, and I did not believe out-of-body reports any more than I believed a man could bend a spoon with his mind.

I worked for a newspaper, where facts mattered and skepticism was essential, and I tried to develop the cynicism I saw in older reporters while praying no one would figure out I was a fraud who had no business being in a newsroom.

I had just moved to Cleveland from Minneapolis to start work at The Plain Dealer, the city’s daily paper, and, as it proclaimed in the front-page banner, “Ohio’s Largest Newspaper.” It was my second job in what amounted to the family trade. My grandfather had worked at The Knickerbocker News in Albany, New York, my father was a reporter and editor at the Miami Herald when I was a girl, and I had worked at the Minneapolis Star (now the Star Tribune) before going to Cleveland.

I had resisted following in my father’s wake until I was nineteen. I didn’t want his career. By then, he was a magazine editor, and I was determined to separate myself from everything about my parents and their suburban lives. On visits home, I used the term “bourgeois” a lot. I was very young.

The only reason I walked into my college newspaper to ask for a job was because my sister Nancy worked there and told me they paid ten cents a column inch. I found my career and met my husband in that little basement newsroom, where I discovered that newspaper work takes you places you’d never get to go otherwise, and introduces you to people you would never come near without a press pass. Even better, newspaper people know how to have fun. I learned that early in life, when I was seven years old and my parents had a Miami Herald party in our backyard. I stayed up late with my sister, peeking through the window, watching them drink and laugh and flirt and, when it got very late, jump into the pool naked. My parents didn’t get naked, which would be too disturbing to recall, but the party did end dramatically, with my mother stepping on a broken glass and having to go to the hospital for stitches in her foot. I remember one of the men saying, “I’ll just pour some gin on it, Susie,” and my mother shouting, “No!” and everybody laughing. This frightened and thrilled me in equal measure.

Going to work in a newsroom used to be like going to a cocktail party every day, with all your clothes on and without the booze or the blood. Usually. Every newspaper has its feuds, gossip, and vanity; most have a legend or two of a newsroom brawl. At The Plain Dealer, people swore that a reporter once threw a typewriter—a heavy electric one—at an editor and then left the building, never to return. Everyone remembered the fight; no one remembered the reason for it.

Cynicism is both a badge of honor and a professional liability. Newspaper people don’t start out that way; almost everyone I know started out as an idealist wanting to bring justice to an unjust world. Cynicism seeps in over time, a slow acidic leak that erodes the idealism, the natural result of being told lies all day long, of calls not returned and records withheld, of corners cut to get a story in on time.

So I did not believe that out-of-body experiences were real. And yet: At 4:30 p.m. on a hot July afternoon, on a college campus in Cleveland, Ohio, I slipped away from my body and rose, up and up, until I was hovering somewhere in the air.

I looked down at the stage of a small theater, where I was on my knees in front of a man who held a long, rusty blade to my neck and was ordering me to suck on his penis.

“Suck on it,” he said, pushing on my head.

From my perch above this scene, I watched with a calm I’d never felt before.

It had come in an instant, this leaving my body. It happened as soon as I saw my own blood on my hand. The blood stunned me. I had not felt a cut, just the cool metal at my throat, as the man dragged me across the stage, but I didn’t know he had used it until a few minutes later, when I put my hand to my neck. It felt sticky.

I looked at my hand, and saw a smear of red.

Dread struck at once, slithering through my chest and into my stomach. I felt its venom spread outward, through my limbs, and then up into my throat. The poison worked in quick stages: shock, then panic, then paralysis.

By the time my brain began to work again, I was looking at myself from high above, up in the theater’s fly space among the ropes and lights. From that vantage point, I watched the man rape me.

I observed with an odd detachment. It was as though what was happening on that stage was happening to someone else. I was viewing a Hollywood thriller, and we had come to the inevitable rape scene. They were actors; I was the audience.

The woman on the stage looked up at the man. She moved in slow motion.

“Suck on it,” he said again. “I got to get off.”

I wondered when he would kill the woman. Not whether he would do it, but when. I knew it would happen, the way you know certain secondary characters will be killed in a movie. From my position above, I accepted it as a necessary plot element.

I was not sad, or scared, hovering up there. If anything, I was curious. How would he do it? What would I feel?

I understood that the girl on her knees was alone, but soon she would not be. She would join all the other girls who had been raped and then killed. I wondered if this was how they felt when it happened to them. Detached. Alone. Floating out of time.

All those dead, lovely girls. I still think of them, all the time.

We printed their high-school graduation pictures in our newspaper, their faces turned and tilted by the photographer so that they seemed to be gazing toward a future they had just started to imagine, their long hair so shiny you could practically smell the Herbal Essences shampoo when you looked at them.

Our editors sent reporters and photographers to the woods and roadside ditches where sheriff’s deputies were digging, where the girls had lain, ever patient, waiting to be found. The reporters interviewed their keening mothers while the silent fathers, stunned by loss and fury, tried to comfort them. The reporters took their graduation pictures back to the newsroom, and when the time came they covered the trials of the men who killed them. If the time came.

And then, a week or a month later, we forgot them. We went on to the next one. There was always a next one.

I pictured all the girls together, somewhere. Maybe they were watching this happen, just as I was, and waiting for me.

I guess you could call this the story of a quest. When it all started, though, I didn’t think of it as one. The great quest stories all revolved around men—men going off into unknown lands on brave adventures. Kings and gods sent them off on their journeys, sometimes giving them magic swords. Poets sang of them, telling stories of heroes who sailed ships on wine-dark seas, rode over mountains on the backs of elephants, searched for holy treasure, rescued beautiful women.

I was a middle-aged, middle-class working mother, living in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio, a woman who once thought of herself as fearless but now was afraid of just about everything.

I did not undertake journeys. When I had a choice, I rarely left my house.

This was not how I always was. There was a time when I hitchhiked everywhere, when everyone I knew did, too, feeling a reckless thrill whenever a car pulled over and the passenger door opened and we ran to it, not knowing who would be sitting in the driver’s seat. I walked alone in the dark, everywhere, breaking the rule girls learn early in life from the Grimm Brothers: Never venture into the dark forest alone. At sixteen, I decided that rule did not apply to me. If a man could do it, then I should be able to do it, too.

What happened to that headstrong girl? Whenever I thought about her, I felt a wave of melancholy. I missed her.

Now I was afraid of sitting in a movie theater. Since I was by that time the film critic for my paper, this made my job complicated. When I went to a screening alone, which happened fairly often in a one-newspaper town, I sat with all my muscles clenched, struggling to focus on the movie. I finally asked the theater managers to lock the doors on me, which they did, though it must have broken fire department regulations. With this and countless other silly but imperative solutions, I organized my life to avoid risk.

I also became practiced at avoiding everything to do with the rape. After it was all over, after I had told the police and the doctors and the prosecutor and judge and jury, after they’d sent the rapist to prison for a long time, I stopped talking about it. I took what had happened and buried it inside myself, as deep as I could. I didn’t tell my friends. I didn’t tell my two children when they were old enough to hear it. I didn’t talk about it anymore with my husband or sisters or mother. I told them, and myself, that I was fine. Fine! Just fine.

But here’s the thing I discovered: I might have buried this story, but it was not dead. I had buried it alive, and it grew in that deep place I put it, like a vine from some mutant seed, all twisted and ugly and tenacious as kudzu. As it grew, it strangled a lot of other stuff in me that should have been growing. It killed my courage and joy. It killed my trust in the world.

Worse, the vine reached out to entangle my children. When I was raped, I was married but I did not have children yet. My son was born a year and a half after the rape, my daughter a couple of years after that. But even though they were not alive when it happened, research shows that they inherited my rape and the terror that came with it. They lived in its twisted grip with me.

I was always waiting for something terrible to happen to them. I imagined those terrible things in documentary detail. Car accidents. Kidnappers. Pedophiles. Murderers. They filled my brain like the inventory in a torture chamber. When Eric Clapton’s “Tears in Heaven” came out and I read the backstory—he wrote it for his four-year-old son, who fell to his death from an apartment window—the song became the inner sound track to my days. I imagined these things and rehearsed my grief, which always ended the same way: I would not be able to go on.

I would not write a beautiful song about them. I would not make art or sense out of their death. I would jump out of the window right after them.

I knew all parents worry about safety. The minute they are born, our children make us all hostages to fortune. But these parents considered the dangers in the world and figured out ways to avoid them. They baby-proofed their kitchens and medicine cabinets; they kept their eye on their children when they played outside and made sure they wore helmets when they learned to ride a bicycle.

I was not one of those reasonable parents. I baby-proofed our entire lives, putting locks on everything, including the children themselves.

I hovered and fretted over them nonstop, zooming to red alert if I heard a random shriek when they played in the backyard. When they went for a sleepover at a friend’s house, I stayed awake all night, waiting for the emergency call from the hospital.

When I returned to work six months after my son was born, we hired a babysitter, an affectionate middle-aged woman with a musical voice and a lap like a pillow. She made our baby son giggle when she arrived each morning.

I had checked her references, but, based on nothing, I felt uneasy about her. At work, I worried about what she might do to my son. This was before nanny cams, but if they had existed I would have mounted one in every corner of the house.

I asked my husband, who was then a police reporter at the paper, to do a criminal-records check on her. In most states it’s easy to access these public records now, online, but in 1985 it involved an in-person visit to the Clerk of Courts.

When he turned up nothing, I was not reassured. One night I followed her home and parked on the street, watching her apartment windows like a cop on a stakeout. Then I went to see her boss at the nearby mall, where she worked every Saturday and Sunday night, cleaning after the stores closed. He refused to tell me anything about her, even when I started crying. I left, hating him, and the next day I let her go. I couldn’t get over my fear that she would hurt my son.

I started working at home, where I could keep an eye on the new babysitter we hired. A friend had recommended her. I began to nurture suspicions about her, too.

My dark thoughts spread. For a time, I even imagined my husband might be abusing our son. I had no evidence of this, none at all. My husband loved our son more than he loved me, but it didn’t matter that I had no reason to suspect him. I hated leaving him alone with my baby. Once I left to do errands and returned ten minutes later, much sooner than I’d said I would, thinking I would catch him in the act. They were outside, sitting on the grass, examining an earthworm.

I was aware that this was not normal. I suspected that I was close to being delusional. Even so, I could not turn it off. I couldn’t tell anyone about these fears, either. I knew it would make me look crazy—I was sane enough to see that, at least.

So I turned my life into performance art. I acted normal, or as normal as I could manage, all the while living on my secret island of fear. As time went on, the list of my fears continued to grow. I was afraid of flying. Afraid of driving. Afraid of riding in a car while someone else drove. Afraid of driving over bridges. Afraid of elevators. Afraid of enclosed spaces. Afraid of the dark. Afraid of going into crowds. Afraid of being alone. Afraid, most of all, to let my children out of my sight.

From the outside, my performance worked. I looked and acted like most other mothers. Only I knew that my entire body vibrated with dread, poised to flee when necessary.

I suppose it’s lucky I realized I was on a quest only when it was almost over.

It began on another college campus, twenty-one years after my rape. It was 2005, a time when the world seemed to be collapsing. That summer, terrorists had attacked three trains and a bus in London, murdering fifty-two people and injuring seven hundred. A series of terrorist bombs in Bali killed twenty-six people. In the United States, Hurricane Katrina hit in August, leading to the deaths of almost two thousand people in the aftermath of flooding and violence, and destroying much of New Orleans, the Gulf Coast, and Americans’ sense of trust in the fairness of our government. I was feeling, along with the rest of the country, a new form of anxiety about the future. It felt like we were all standing on a precipice.

That fall, my son left for his second year of college and my daughter started her last year of high school.

The schools had been prepping the kids since third grade for college admissions, and when October came, it was time for her Big College Tour—a ritual that puts teenagers and their parents in a car together for several days, where they bond over the shared conviction that it really is time for the teenager to go away from home for a while.

We were on Day Two, at college number three or four. Zoë was in that senior-year stage where half the time she was so impatient and annoyed with me that I couldn’t wait for her to leave and take her sighs and silences with her, and half the time she was the sweet, funny little girl who used to squiggle down under the covers with me at night, or play Dolphin in the Pool. In those games, I was her trainer, feeding her pretend fish for each somersault she did below the surface, her little body slipping like mercury through the water.

Sweet Zoë was on this trip, keeping me laughing and choosing all the CDs as we drove, a heavy rotation of Modest Mouse’s CD, Good News for People Who Love Bad News. Appropriate. Zoë’s good mood might have had something to do with the three days she was taking off from school. Still, I was surprised that she was walking with me on the campus tours rather than ten yards behind me, the way my son had on his tours. Dan had hung back with the other kids who were concentrating on the sidewalks, pretending they did not know those dorks ahead of them in the unfortunate mom jeans—who, I want to point out, included many of the dads. It didn’t help when I knocked over an entire row of bicycles, domino style, at one of the recreation centers.

“Sorry!” I kept saying as I tried to put twenty-five bikes back on their stands. “Sorry!”

When I looked around, Dan had vanished. I didn’t blame him.

But Zoë was with me all the way. She was making me miss her before she even packed the first of the sixty-three boxes of stuff she took with her the next year. All of this made me feel unexpectedly buoyant. I had loved everything about college, especially the going-away-from-home part. I even skipped my senior year in high school to get there a year early. The University of Minnesota was where I found myself and my tribe, that day I walked into the subterranean offices of the Minnesota Daily, the college paper, and asked for a job. Half the staff was in the darkroom, smoking a joint. The rest of them were sitting around talking about Hunter S. Thompson. Everyone wanted to do his gonzo journalism that year, or imitate Tom Wolfe’s new journalism, and since the students controlled the paper, a lot of them did. It made for unusual coverage of the Board of Regents meetings.

The rain started just as Zoë and I pulled into the visitors’ lot at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, a college best known for its psychology program, which she had decided was where she wanted her life to go. When Sigmund Freud made his first and only trip to America, in 1909, he went to Clark to deliver his famous lectures. A life-size bronze statue of Freud, deep in thought, sits on a bench on the campus.

Inside the admissions office, a cluster of parents at the windows murmured about whether to do the tour in the rain or skip it. Zoë wanted to see the campus, so when the tour guide called out that it was time to start, we buttoned up our jackets, opened our one umbrella, and fell in with the swarm of parents and seniors.

Our guide, a skinny boy with fogged-up glasses, walked backward and ignored the rain, which had started as a drizzle but now came down steady and cold. We stopped to see the same things we’d seen at the last campus: a dorm and a dorm room, the cafeteria, the gym. By this point, the tour had sustained several dropouts.

“Now we’ll head over to the library,” the guide said.

At the back of the crowd, Zoë and I held the umbrella between us, the rain dribbling down her right side and my left. We lurched along, like mismatched partners in a three-legged race.

“Listen, I’m prepared to take it on absolute faith that every university does, in fact, have a library,” I said. “I don’t need to see to believe.”

Zoë smiled, but she also sighed. I recognized that sigh as my own when I was seventeen, a sign that the mother-daughter bonding was coming unglued.

I was about to suggest cutting away from the group and going for coffee when the guide stopped on the path. Freud sat nearby, awaiting what had been building up inside me for two decades to emerge. He knew more than I did.

The guide gestured to a glowing light and said, “You’ve probably noticed these blue lights around campus. They’re safety stations. If you’re walking alone at night and you think someone is following you, or you might be in danger, you get to one of these blue lights, call, and help will be there within five minutes.”

All the parents nodded, reassured.

Those parents were idiots.

“Five minutes?” I whispered to Zoë. “Who are they kidding? Five minutes is too late. Way too late. You could be dead in five minutes.”

Zoë, who remembers it now as a stage whisper that everyone heard, looked at me for a long pause, shook her head, and went on with the group, leaving me standing alone beneath the blue light.

I watched her walk away, the hem of her jeans dragging on the wet pavement. I felt the same way I always feel when I look at her: amazed that this girl, so unlike me, is my daughter. Zoë was like the girls I envied at that age, the girls who blazed through the halls of my high school, while I thought only about cutting class and going anywhere else. She was strong, confident, smart, beautiful. She was funny. She was not afraid to speak her mind and ask for what she wanted.

I looked at my daughter and saw a young woman who was ready to go out into the world and make it her own. But now I saw something else, too.

She was prey.

I was sending her to a campus. I could see her standing in a pool of blue light on a dark path, scared, alone, calling for help, watching a man walk toward her while she waited for someone to come save her.

She had five minutes.

The venomous snake returned, slithering through my body. Panic dropped from my chest to my gut so fast I thought I might throw up. My vision blurred and narrowed, dark at the edges. The ordinary campus sounds around me turned into a muffled roar in my ears. I dropped the umbrella and grabbed the post with the blue light with both hands, willing myself to keep standing.

Then I felt myself float up into the air like a balloon escaping from a child’s fist. I saw the middle-aged woman below, rain dripping off her hair into her face.

I was back at that other campus, twenty-one years before, suspended high above a stage and looking down at myself.

That was our last college tour. I couldn’t walk any more blue-lighted pathways that week. As we drove west, back to Cleveland, we didn’t talk much.

I clocked the miles asking myself the question: Should I tell them? One mile I would think, Yes, now they are old enough. The next I would think, No, no matter how old they are, it’s too much for children to think of their mother with a knife at her throat. A few miles on, I would think, But I need to warn Zoë. I can’t let her go by herself to a college campus without knowing what can happen there. This was several years before campus rape became a widely discussed and reported issue, and I was not thinking of the dangers she faced by simply going on a date, or to a party at a fraternity house—dangers that, statistically, were far more prevalent than encountering strangers in empty buildings.

And so it went, through Massachusetts and New York, along Lake Erie into Pennsylvania and finally Ohio, Zoë listening to Modest Mouse and singing along.

How do you tell your children a story you never want them to hear? How do you explain how it made you the mother you were?

This is why I hovered over you. This is why my internal alarm clanged constantly, why I treated every tumble and scrape as an emergency, and every sleepover party as a potential kidnapping situation. I wanted you to embrace the world and live boldly, but I worry that my actions taught you to fear the world and not trust anyone. I hope this will explain my thousand-yard stare, the one you hated because it meant I was not paying attention. I hope it explains all those times I vanished into myself and you waved your hands in front of my face, saying, “Mom!”

Can you forgive me?

The pendulum swung from yes to no for two weeks. When I finally stopped it on a yes, I should tell them, I decided to do it in the car. A friend once told me that that’s the best place to have difficult conversations with your kids. “They’re trapped with you,” she explained. “So they have to listen. But you aren’t facing each other, so it’s easier. Less confrontational. Let them pick the music, too.”

I wanted to tell them separately, so on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, I talked Zoë into driving to Cincinnati with me to pick up Dan from school. I would tell her on the way down. I would wait and tell Dan on another car trip.

We left early, driving south under a low, leaden sky. Rain hit the windshield in icy splotches that would turn into sleet, and then snow. All of Ohio seemed to be going the same direction, the holiday traffic forming a funereal procession on the slippery highway. The car felt like a cozy refuge as we drove through the open farmland and fog-shrouded valleys. South of Columbus, we came to the black billboard that looms over the highway going south, announcing “HELL IS REAL” in giant white letters. On the return highway north, two identical black billboards list the Ten Commandments, five on each billboard.

The “HELL” sign lets you know you’re close to Cincinnati.

It was time.

How did I put it? Not long ago, I asked Zoë what she remembered of that day.

“You said, ‘I have something I want to tell you,’” she told me. “You kind of scared me. I thought maybe you were going to say Grammy had died, or you and Dad were getting divorced.”

After that she didn’t remember, and I didn’t, either. I probably said an awkward and pause-filled version of, “I was raped when I was thirty years old, on a college campus, and it scares me that you’re going to college.” That’s what I know I felt: I had to tell her what had happened to me as a kind of magical insurance policy, so it would never happen to her.

We both remember that she started crying, almost instantly. Not the vocal kind of crying, but the kind she inherited from me, silent and stricken, our chins trembling and our eyes filling with tears until they spill over and run down our cheeks.

I told her the story I had told so often in the hours and days after the rape: I was working, I was late for an interview, the building was empty, the guy was there, he cut me on the throat. I didn’t talk about what he did to me after that.

I remember clearly one thing she said. “Now I see why you and Dad were so overprotective. Especially Dad.”

This was news to me. I thought I was the one driving them crazy with my hovering. I was so wrapped up in my fears, I hadn’t even noticed that my husband was tied up in his own knots of worry and fear over our children.

“Really?” I said, looking over at her.

“Sometimes it feels like you guys are stalking me,” she said.

I told Dan a few months later, when I picked him up for summer break. This time I drove to Cincinnati alone, thinking the whole way about how and why he had come into the world.

It occurred to me that he was a child born out of my fear.

The night I was raped, twenty-one years before, my husband took me home from the hospital to a bare house, a center-hall colonial built in 1927 in Shaker Heights. We had just moved into it, our first house after years of apartments, and we had no furniture for three of the four bedrooms, let alone the two extra bedrooms on the third floor. Our parents joked that we had to do something to fill all those rooms up. Meaning children.

But I wasn’t sure I wanted children, and the “not-sure” teetered toward “never.” I hated babysitting when I was a teenager. I avoided other people’s children at parties, and if someone forced a baby into my arms, it never failed to start wailing. Those twinges of yearning women call baby lust? I never felt them.

Freud wrote that we cannot truly imagine our own death. “Whenever we try to do so we find that we survive ourselves as spectators,” he wrote. “At bottom, no one believes in his own death, which amounts to saying: In the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his immortality.”

But I was no longer convinced. I had glimpsed my own death in a gloomy theater, in a smear of my own blood, and it changed everything. I lay awake through the nights, aching with the knowledge of what Harold Brodkey called “this wild darkness.” While my husband slept next to me, I started thinking about what I wanted from this too-short life. I began to think about having a child. I hate the drugstore perfume of sentimentality, but one thought broke through my barricades: I could push back death by bringing life into my life.

By the anniversary of the rape, I was pregnant. My son was born October 7, 1985, eleven days after his due date, no more ready for this than I was. We named him Daniel and gave him my last name as his middle name. The nurses cleaned him up before they handed him to me, wrapped like a burrito in a blanket, showing only a thick head of black hair and a face all battered and bruised from the suction-cup delivery that came after a thirty-six-hour labor—a story I would repeat probably way too often in the coming years, usually on Dan’s birthdays. Lucky boy.

The labor ended only when the doctor gave me the thing all journalists must have: a deadline. Deliver within two hours, she said, or we do a C-section. With the help of copious drugs and the suction device, I delivered. When the nurse presented him to us, my husband said, “He looks like he was mugged on his way here.”

When I held my bruised baby, my heart cracked into a mosaic of intense love, opiate-fueled bliss, and hideous, morbid fear. I felt like the mother in “Sleeping Beauty,” cradling my child against the curse of a jealous witch.

My husband took my tears to be of happiness, and I let him think it. He sat next to me on the hospital bed, and we passed our burrito baby back and forth as we admired him. He looked back at us. We cooed.

And then he looked right at me and said, “Hi.” He really did. We both heard it, and nothing will ever persuade us it was just a burp.

Once home from the hospital, I started crying and could not stop. I wept as I nursed my son, filling him with milk laced with my anxieties as I watched my tears drizzle down my breast. It did not take long for him to begin crying, crying endlessly, cramped with colic and the calamitous fears I fed him. We cried together. I wept alone in bed. I wept in the shower and I wept at the dinner table while my husband, my mother, and my stepfather sat in silence, heads down, the food going cold.

“I’m fine!” I kept telling them. I tried to form a smile. “I don’t know why I’m crying!” And I really didn’t know why. I had a healthy baby who would be beautiful as soon as his birth bruises faded and he stopped crying. I had a home, a job, a husband who loved me.

My mother, who had arrived in Cleveland before I was even out of the hospital, patted my back as I wept and told me all I needed was a good long sleep.

“Let me get up with him for a few nights and feed him from a bottle,” she said. “We can put his cradle in my room.”

I heard this kind offer as if it were a threat to kidnap my baby.

I was still weeping when my mother and stepfather left, still weeping when the other grandparents arrived, still weeping when they left, still saying, “I’m fine!”

Two weeks passed this way. My husband went back to work. That first morning, I sat on the couch in the quiet, my baby on my lap. We were alone.

One of the twenty-six baby books I was consulting at the time advised parents to keep up a steady stream of conversation with their baby. I looked at Danny on my lap, and he looked back at me. He had that look of intense, worried concentration babies sometimes get. He was ready to listen, but I didn’t have anything to say. What did the book mean by “having a conversation” with an infant?

I propped him up a little higher on my leg and gave it a try. “So here we are,” I said. “You and me.” We stared at each other in silence. I pressed on. “I want you to know that I will always be here.”

Now he looked puzzled. “I am your mother,” I explained, “and you will always have me. I will always love you. I will protect you, and I promise I will never, ever let anything bad happen to you.”

He listened carefully. Then his face crumpled, and he started crying.

And now here I was, two decades later, driving to pick him up from college. I wondered: Does Dan have a memory, all these years later, a relic buried deep but almost reachable, of what I told him those long, slow mornings and afternoons? Do he and Zoë know that my attachment to them, so much of the time, was based in fear?

That fearful attachment was offset by my recurring detachment. I hovered above my family much of the time, observing us from a distance; and as my children grew older, they began to notice when I checked out. They learned to call me back, demanding my attention. “Mom! Mom!”

How much of their childhood did I miss? How much mothering did they miss? When I ask myself these questions, I grieve those day-by-day, year-by-year losses like a death.

I arrived in Cincinnati all tender and melancholy, but Dan broke my mood as soon as he got in the car and slid a Dropkick Murphys CD into the player. We stopped to pick up coffee—when had he started drinking coffee?—and headed north, at which time we proceeded to converse in our usual manner: I interrogated him about school, his roommate, his professors, the food in the cafeteria, his friends, girls, his classes, and the dorm. Dan gave the most circumspect answers he could manage without his lawyer present. Since middle school, he had kept my husband and me on a need-to-know basis, and felt it was entirely reasonable that we didn’t need to know anything about him or his life.

I drove on, listening to Dan’s CDs and trying hard to like them.

We passed the Five Commandments. Then the next Five Commandments.

After we got through Columbus, we stopped for gas. I was losing my nerve, allowing myself to think I could always tell Dan on the way back to school. There was no deadline on this, after all. But then I thought of Zoë, having to keep it to herself, not talking about it, just the way I had for twenty years.

I had armed myself for this talk by bringing the story that had run in The Plain Dealer two days after the rape, a yellowed artifact I’d saved in a hidden folder all those years. Under the headline, “University Circle rape suspect jailed,” the story began: “University Circle police last night arrested a Cleveland man, 27, they believe raped and robbed a Shaker Heights woman at Eldred Hall, the Case Western Reserve University theater.”

I gave the paper to him and waited while he read. Then he looked at me, silent and puzzled, not unlike the way he’d looked at me the day of the baby conversation.

Years later, Dan told me he couldn’t figure out why I wanted him to read it. He thought maybe I was trying to tell him not to rape women at the University of Cincinnati, but he wasn’t sure why I thought he would ever do something like that. It didn’t make sense.

When he didn’t say anything, I said, “The unnamed Shaker Heights woman in that story was me.”

“What?” he said, louder and more emphatic than I had heard him say anything for almost a year. He looked at the story again. “When?”

“It was 1984. A year before you were born.”

Silence. He read the story again. I waited. When he finished, he again said nothing.

“I never really knew if I would tell you and Zoë about it,” I said. “When you were older, I thought about it a lot, and I decided I had to tell Zoë when I took her to look at colleges. I wanted her to know that this could happen. It could happen to anyone. And if I was going to tell Zoë, I was going to tell you, too.”

We both focused on the road ahead of us. In the silence, it occurred to me that I had not felt the need to tell Dan about the rape, or to warn him, before he went to college. I had barely noticed the blue lights on every campus we visited. Why? I wondered. Was I, a feminist, being sexist? Was it because statistics show that 1 in 5 American women are raped in their lifetime, versus 1 in 71 men? Was it because he was six-foot-one and had played varsity hockey all through high school?

“Where is this guy now?” he asked.

“Still in prison, I think. There was a trial and the judge gave him thirty to seventy-five years. It was 1984, so I think that means he can’t get out until 2014.”

“I hope somebody raped him there,” he said. He didn’t say anything else.

“Are you OK?” I asked several times. He said yes each time, but nothing more. We didn’t talk about it again as we drove home.

Zoë and I talked about it often, though now I remember that I was usually the one to bring it up. When she went to Indiana University, she told me during one phone call that she had talked to some girls in her dorm about my rape.

“They all think it will never happen to them,” Zoë said. She was crying.

“That’s normal,” I said. “If we always thought about the bad things that could happen to us, we’d be too scared to do anything.”

My son never again brought it up, and I didn’t, either. But a few days later, silent Dan came home with something that spoke for him. He lifted his T-shirt to show me: A heart, like an old-fashioned Valentine with “Mom” on a ribbon inked across it, bloomed on his chest. He had tattooed me on his heart.

It looked like it hurt.

I had told my children. I had pulled on the vine, but I knew I had not unearthed it completely. I had to pull on it some more, pull it all the way out, kill it, do something to stop the panic from rising in my chest, stop the whoosh of adrenaline that came without warning and made my heart beat so hard you could almost see its movement under my clothes.

I had seen the rapist five times: When he raped me. When I identified him two days later in a lineup. When I sat across a table from him in the county jail three weeks later, to testify in a parole revocation hearing that would keep him in jail. At the trial. And at the sentencing.

I knew he had gone to prison. Beyond that, I didn’t know much more than his name. Now it came to me that if I made a list of the most influential people in my life, he would be near the top, with my parents and husband and children.

If it’s true that fear grows out of ignorance, which I believe, then maybe I needed to confront the ignorance to get at the fear. I needed to learn more about the man who stood above me and pushed my head toward his penis, the man I thought would be the last human being I would see on this Earth.

The last thing he said to me was, “I will find you,” and deep inside the primitive, alarm-prone amygdala at the base of my brain, I still believed him. He had lurked in the shadows of my life all those years, watching me, waiting for me. I still dreamed about him. I still floated out of my body when I thought about him. I thought about him all the time. He was going to find me.

But all I knew was his name—David Francis—his age, that he had lived in Boston at some point, that he had been in prison before, and that he was caught and convicted and sentenced to thirty to seventy-five years in prison.

It occurred to me only much later that I had been sentenced as well, to a mixture of chronic fear, silence, and shame—a shame that never made sense to me, but that I would one day learn I shared with almost all rape victims. Why do we feel this shame? What do we do with it?

After David Francis raped me, I never shook my fists toward the heavens and asked, “Why me?” I knew, or thought I knew, the answer to that one: I was trusting and stupid. But now I wanted the answer to a slightly different question: “Why him?”

We were almost the same age. We both grew up in America in the ’60s and ’70s. We lived in the same city, just five miles apart. But when my path crossed with his that July day, it brought about a collision of two people who might as well have lived in two different countries. What brought us to that intersection, and what happened to us afterward?

He had been in prison for twenty-one years. He could have been released on parole, but I thought he was probably still locked up. I wondered how prison had changed him, and whether he’d talk to me now. Maybe sitting across from him, with glass between us and guards all around, would make me feel brave, if not fearless.

He’d said he would find me. Maybe I should find him instead.

The familiar dread flooded in when I contemplated this, accompanied by a trembling thought that whispered, You can’t do this. It was a long time ago. He’s still in prison. Leave it alone.

My husband didn’t want me to look for him, either.

“He’s a monster,” he said, not realizing he was echoing the fears that came to me at night. “You don’t need to know any more about him than that.”

I disagreed. I knew I wouldn’t be done with David Francis just by deciding I was. I’d already tried that.

I needed to make sense of my rape. I make sense of things by writing about them. When I was a movie critic, I discovered what I thought about a film through the process of writing about it. Over the years, I had tried this with the rape. I wrote about it, and all that followed it, in an on-again, off-again series of journals I still have. I started and abandoned a novel about it. But this was different.

I hoped writing about David Francis would make the fear go away, but I wanted more. I wanted this random act of rape to have meaning. I wanted to do what human beings have done for thousands of years—tell the stories that help us understand who we are and what happened in our lives to shape us. The way to do it, I figured, was the way I knew best: as a reporter.

In the summer of 2006, not long after Zoë graduated from high school, I started. I wasn’t ready to talk to David Francis, not yet, so I began by calling the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office to request the public records in my case. A few days later, they handed over a thick, messy file of police reports, witness statements, rap sheets, subpoenas, lab reports, trial notes, briefs, and indictments, all stuffed together in no particular order and bound with a rubber band.

At home, while sorting the stack into a semblance of order, I came to a page that stopped me.

Across a court record, someone had scrawled the word “DECEASED,” and underlined it three times.

David Francis had died in prison on August 18, 2000, sixteen years after he raped me. My search for him was over before I started it.

I sat at my desk with my piles of records, disappointment giving way to relief, relief swinging back to disappointment. I would not get to confront my rapist. On the other hand, I would not have to confront my rapist. The decision had been eliminated for me. David Francis was dead, and so was my story.

The “DECEASED” record sat on top of a large stack of papers. Not knowing what else to do, I started sorting them again, skimming the pages as I went along. I came to his juvenile record from Boston. It had fifty-three entries, detailing crimes and misdemeanors he committed before he turned eighteen. They began when he was twelve.

It occurred to me that while David Francis couldn’t talk to me, he still had a lot to tell me. I could follow his path through all these records. I could try to find his family in Boston. Maybe I could find his friends in Cleveland. He had at least a few; I remembered that an alibi witness testified, and lied, for him during his trial. I decided to check the trial transcript to see who she was and what she had to say when she testified.

The Old Courthouse opened in 1912, when Cleveland was an industrial powerhouse and the sixth-largest city in the country. It was a town on the go, alive with energy and commerce and immigrants and newcomers, a town many people even now believe could have overshadowed Chicago, with the right leaders and a bit of luck.

The courthouse was one of the public buildings the city leaders envisioned in 1903, when they commissioned a grand civic plan to echo the mall in Washington, D.C. The plan, which grew out of the City Beautiful Movement, called for a formal grouping of Beaux Arts–style buildings around a broad, grassy mall that led to a vista of Lake Erie.

The second building to go up, the courthouse was intended to inspire awe among the citizens who entered it seeking justice. A hundred years later it still does a pretty good job of it. Life-size bronze statues of Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton flank the wide stairs leading to the front entrance. Above them, on a ledge surrounding the building, stand statues of the great lawgivers of history, from Moses on. Inside, twin marble staircases curl up the three-story marble rotunda, where a stained-glass window of Lady Justice looks down from a perch positioned to catch the rising sun.

Eventually the county outgrew the courthouse, and in 1976 most court operations moved to the ugly new Justice Center tower across the street. The graceful Old Courthouse remained open, though, home to the domestic relations and probate courts, where the people of Cuyahoga County go to get their marriage licenses and, later, their divorces, and where they go to deal with death.

The grand staircase led me down to the basement, a dim warren of offices and storage rooms. A canteen near the stairs sells tepid coffee and off-brand packaged snacks, and every time I went there I passed divorce lawyers huddled at the wobbly tables with their clients, most of them weeping.

In this basement, the county’s Clerk of Courts keeps all of its millions of pages of transcripts and criminal evidence. In 2006, when I first went there, none of the records were digital, and the archives of documents overwhelmed the space allotted.

In the hallways, towers of stacked file boxes along the walls formed a cardboard canyon of mortgage foreclosures, divorce actions, child-custody battles, competency hearings, property disputes, robbery trials, murder trials, rape trials. These were the records that would not fit in the overstuffed file rooms, where more boxes were stacked to the water-damaged ceilings.

As I walked through the canyon of files, I felt like a visitor to the Catacombs of Paris, wandering through tunnels lined with skulls and bones. I had entered an ancient repository of grief, a place that held the memories of the collective pain, bitterness, fear, and sorrow of the people of Cuyahoga County. My small piece of it came in the file of Case Number CR-193108: The State of Ohio v. David Francis.

I filled out a printed form and handed it to a clerk in a crowded office at the end of the hall. He returned a few minutes later carrying two expandable dark red envelopes stuffed with files, each held together with a rubber band. He gestured toward a table in the hallway and said, “Don’t take these out of this area.” That warning was the extent of the court’s security system.

I opened the smaller envelope. Out tumbled the evidence from my trial: a gold cross on a chain, a dozen Polaroids, some mug shots, and two tiny glassine envelopes containing pubic hair samples, mine and the rapist’s. I had forgotten about the embarrassing collection of the hair. I put the envelopes back with my fingernails, as carefully as if they contained anthrax.

The Polaroids showed my body, most without my head. Two of them showed my back, an abstract design of red lacerations and bruises turning blue and purple. Others showed a small red gash on my neck and puncture wounds on my fingers. I studied them. The photos looked like porn for a scar fetishist. They were crude shots of a body without the woman inhabiting it, a portrait of everything the rape did to me. I slid them back into the envelope.

The second one, much thicker, held the trial transcript.

On the first page, I read: Be it remembered, that at the September, 1984 term of said court, to-wit, commencing on Wednesday, the 17th day of October, this cause came on to be heard …

I trembled, surprising myself.

Be it remembered.

I turned to my testimony. There, on the onionskin pages, I found the Joanna of twenty-two years before. She was trembling, too, I remembered, as she told the jury what happened that day.