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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ