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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ