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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ