I Will Find You: In Search of the Man Who Raped Me. Joanna Connors

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

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