I Will Find You (8 page)

Rape doesn’t hurt just one person. It wounds an entire family.

My rape created a vortex that pulled everyone in over the years. My mother, who never got over it. My sisters. My children, who were yet to be born.

The first person it engulfed, though, was my husband. The rape drove him a little mad, in both meanings of the word.

It took me years to understand it. I didn’t that summer, not at all. I needed him to be steady and sane. I wanted him to think only about me—about what I needed, about what I felt, about how to keep me safe.

He tried to do that. When he did, though, I felt smothered by his attention. Then, when he talked about the rape, when he showed how angry and frustrated he felt, I thought,
Stop it. This is MY rape, not yours
.

I was wrong. It belonged to both of us.

July, 1984. After the parole hearing—they revoke DAVE’s parole—I find out what my husband did while I was at my mom’s house in Minnesota. He was arranging to hire a hit man. Or hit
men
, I should say.

He tells me one evening in late July when he gets home from work. I’m lying in bed, as is my habit now. I will spend most of the summer here, in a gauzy stupor, like a Victorian lady who has taken to her bed with a vial of laudanum to treat her hysteria, drop by drop by drop.

Every day I get up and get dressed, telling myself it’s time to get over it and go back to work. But an hour later I find myself back in the bed, where I stay, alone in the stillness of the house as morning slides into afternoon.

What do I think about, lying there? I do not think. My body takes over, absolutely alert, tensing and freezing every time I hear a creak or thump from our old house. I am like a hunting dog on point. Ears up. Quivering.

(thump)

What was that? Was that a step on the stairs? Was somebody inside the house?

(creak)

Yes. It was definitely somebody. Can I reach the phone and dial without making a sound? How long does it take the police to respond? Does he have time to kill me before they get here?

My watchdog duties drain me, but I can’t sleep. I lie in bed, my nervous system flashing messages of panic like Morse code sent out to the universe.

The universe doesn’t answer.

Instead: Stillness. A breeze through the window. I start to relax.

But with the next random thump from the house, I can almost see DAVE at the bottom of the stairs, his makeshift dagger in his hand. Of course I know he’s in jail. But years of cop shows and horror movies tell me he’ll escape and find me. He said he would find me. It’s only a matter of time.

Every day, I wait in that bed for my husband to come save me. When he arrives, I listen to him climb the stairs. He always comes into the room like I’m on my deathbed, tentative and quiet, almost tiptoeing.

“Do you need anything?” he’ll ask.

Yes. I need everything. I need my old life back, my old self back, my feeling that the world is a safe and good place
.

“No,” I answer.

I’ve waited all day for him to come home, but within minutes I itch for him to leave me alone. His presence requires conversation and focus and attention to his emotions, which I cannot give. I resent having to think about his emotions, I resent his needs, I resent his sympathy. I’m awful, and I know it, and I can’t stop it.

Now I follow his back-and-forth march across the bedroom floor, wishing he would stop.

The wobbly ceiling fan rotates above me, stirring the hot air. Outside, two boys from a couple of houses down the block play lawn golf. They laugh as they hit balls up and down the row of front yards. This bothered me when we first moved in; I imagined divots pocking our lawn. I almost asked them to get
off our lawn, until I remembered I was only thirty years old, and that refrain from the e. e. cummings poem flashed through my head: “too soon! too soon!”

Now I don’t care. Dig holes and plant flags in our yard if you want, boys.

An ice-cream truck rolls slowly by, chirping, “It’s a Small World.” The smell of lighter fluid and smoke drifts in the window.

My husband is talking, laying out the plan. I try not to look at him. I’m crying, but quietly, hoping he won’t see the tears welling up. My throat is on fire with the effort to not cry.

“I’ve talked to Johnny,” he says. “He knows people.”

I know who Johnny is—he’s a guy my husband got to know as a cops reporter—and I have no doubt that Johnny knows people. I just don’t want my husband to know the people Johnny knows.

The plan, as put together by Johnny and my husband, is to pay off a guard, or maybe it’s two guards, that Johnny knows at the county jail. These guards will slip ground-up glass into David Francis’s food. He will eat it, and sometime later he will die a horrible death, bleeding from the inside out, alone in his cell. He will get what he deserves, my husband tells me.

The plan, as I see it, is that the two jail guards will see how ridiculous this plan is and go straight to the FBI to report Johnny, before anyone reports them.

The FBI will go to Johnny, who will tell them it was all my husband’s idea. The FBI will come to our house and lead him away in cuffs.

I will be left alone. Alone, with my husband and my rapist in the same county jail.

Lying there in bed, watching my husband pace, I try to figure out how I’ll find a lawyer for my husband, how I’ll pay the lawyer, how I’ll manage bail, how I’ll get through my own trial without him.

“You can’t do this,” I say. “I don’t want you to do this. Please. You’ll get caught. We could both be arrested.”

It occurs to me that I am pleading with my husband the way I had pleaded with David Francis:
Please don’t do this. Please
. And then later:
We’ll get caught
.

My husband keeps moving, explaining to me that it’s a solid plan, he won’t get caught, and with the rapist dead I won’t have to be afraid anymore. “He’s an asshole,” he keeps saying. “No one will miss him.”

The phone rings. My husband answers. “Hi, Susie,” he says.
My mother. Thank God
.

He tells her I’m doing OK. Then I hear him start in on the hit he and Johnny have planned, going through the scheme step by step with her the same way he did with me. I lie back and grind my teeth in time to the fan’s rotation. Maybe he won’t listen to me, I decide, but if my mother tells him to stop, he’ll listen to her.

He tells her about Johnny, what a good guy he is, and about the jail guards and the ground glass. He tells her I don’t like the plan, that I don’t want him to follow through. Then he stops talking and listens. “Uh-huh,” he says. “Uh-huh.”

I wait for him to say, “I guess you’re right,” or “No, it’s not too far along. I can stop it.”

I wait for him to hand me the phone. I wait to talk to my mother.

Instead I hear him say, “OK, I’ll tell her.” He hangs up.

“Tell me what? Why didn’t she ask to talk to me? What?”

My husband looks at me and smiles. “She said, ‘Tell Joanna I’ll pay half.’”

Years later, I asked my mother if she remembered offering to help pay for a hit man.

“Of course,” she said, as though I’d asked her if she pledged to NPR every year. “I thought it was a great idea.”

She was my mother. By then I had children, and I was well acquainted with the maternal primate that slumbers deep in my DNA. I had felt her awaken whenever someone hurt or threatened my children. If I allowed that mother to emerge and act on her instinct, to screech and roar and show her teeth, she would. If she could attack, she would.

But in 1984, childless, I burned with feminist outrage. I felt like I was my husband’s feudal property, like I was trapped in some medieval time warp. I was the wife in a revenge movie, the woman who gets raped or killed in the first act, triggering her husband—I always think of Mel Gibson playing him—to launch a rampage that produces buckets of blood and at least some visible human entrails.

Vengeance killing has a long and not-so-glorious history. It turns out that revenge movies may resonate with modern audiences because the impulse to seek revenge lives deep in genetically coded behaviors that reach back to our earliest ancestors. That’s according to evolutionary psychology, the
discipline that looks to Charles Darwin and his theories to answer questions that also live deep within us: Why do we act the way we do? Were we born with all these impulses of jealousy, love, revenge, and everything else, or did we learn them? What do we all share as human beings? What is the purpose of life?

Evolutionary psychologists—I’m generalizing here, since the discipline itself has evolved since it emerged in the mid-’70s—say we can find the answers to many of the mysteries of human behavior and emotion in what Darwin called adaptation and natural selection.

Robert Wright’s
The Moral Animal
, published in 1994, was one of the first books to explain and bring mainstream attention to evolutionary psychology. “Altruism, compassion, empathy, love, conscience, the sense of justice—all of these things, the things that hold society together, the things that allow our species to think so highly of itself, can now confidently be said to have a firm genetic basis,” he wrote.

Plenty of scientists disagreed with this application of evolutionary biology to human behavior, arguing that it ignored generations of cultural influences. They challenged the idea that the human mind evolved just as the body did. Fights broke out in academia and its journals.

But outside academic circles, the new ideas struck a chord, particularly the evolutionary explanations of sex and mating behaviors, which seemed to endorse infidelity, at least for men.

These were the headline-making observations of evolutionary behavior science: Men are hardwired to seek sex with as many women as possible, driven by the reproductive
impulse to spread their genes widely and propel them to future generations. Women, on the other hand, are hardwired to seek a mate with resources and power who will make a parental investment in their offspring, since her reproductive drive is to make sure her offspring—and genes—survive.

But our male ancestors did not want to waste their resources on offspring that did not carry their genes. They wanted monogamy from their mates. So males evolved to ensure their paternity by jealously guarding their mates from other males.

Steven Pinker, the author and experimental psychologist, tells us that the emotion of vengeance may have been tied to this.

In his book
The Blank Slate
, Pinker cites studies of prestate societies that show that men wage war for reasons other than arguably reasonable ones, like being short of food or wanting to take land from another tribe. “They often raid other villages to abduct women, to retaliate for past abductions, or to defend their interests in disputes over exchanges of women for marriage,” he writes.

Pinker goes on to say that “modern states often find themselves at odds with their citizens’ craving for revenge. They prosecute vigilantes….”

Which was my point all along. Despite its troubles over the years with burning rivers and fiscal default and so on, Cleveland was arguably still a modern state. It would prosecute my vigilante husband.

As July of 1984 seeps into August, I decide to go back to work. I don’t think about what, exactly, I will do once I get there. My job requires me to go into dark theaters, a prospect that fills me with dread. But alone in my house I feel trapped, waiting for DAVE to come for me. I need to escape, and in my fog of fear I transform the newsroom into an underground shelter filled with sympathetic friends and lifesaving provisions. My colleagues will shelter me.

This may well be the most naïve thought I have during this whole time period.

The first day, the walk from the door to my desk feels like a perp walk. I know that everyone knows. It’s a newsroom—of course everyone knows. Reporters, tireless gossips that we are, have honed our skills into a professional asset. We regard secrets much the way we regard the free booze at weddings and wakes: We can’t stay away from the open bar or the open secret.

No one says anything to me. People avoid walking past my desk, or pretend to be looking somewhere else if they happen to pass me on the way to the cafeteria. I feel alone in a spotlight, observed by an audience who does not want to be there and keeps averting its collective gaze.

I have nothing to do. Nothing. My editor, all hard-boiled bluster, comes straight out of the era of
The Front Page
, when reporters wore hats and chased scoops and their editors fumed. He gets his gray hair buzzed every couple of weeks and wears a wide tie with short-sleeved dress shirts, and, since they will not ban smoking in the newsroom until the following year, he lights up a cheap cigar every afternoon. I consider this a hostile act against a staff he makes no secret of disliking.

In my absence, he has assigned all my reviews and stories to other people, and when I return he doesn’t bother to give me anything else. He can barely look at me. I sit at my desk and try to look busy. I try not to cry. After a couple of hours, I tell my editor I have to go home. He nods but doesn’t look at me.

I go back the next day, and the next. Now I feel like I’m carrying an exotic disease and have been quarantined without anyone having informed me. No one says anything. I know they’re embarrassed; I know they have no idea what to say to me. In any case, they’ve probably picked up a signal I don’t even know I’m giving off, a signal that says, “Please don’t talk about it.” They’re right. The prospect of receiving a simple “I’m sorry” unnerves me, because I know I will have no control over my reaction. I’ve experienced this before: When my father had a heart attack on a tennis court and died when I was twenty-two, it was such a shocking and unexpected event,
I could not bear for anyone to offer sympathy. If they did, I would mutely nod and turn away, tears pooling in my eyes.

I can’t allow myself to cry at work. We’re in the old, open newsroom, cubicles still in the distant future, with desks pushed against desks, phones ringing, people talking. The place still has the pneumatic tubes that once carried copy upstairs to the typesetters. It would serve nicely as the set for a revival of
The Front Page
, if it weren’t for the massive computer terminals that have landed on the desks like spaceships from a 1950s sci-fi movie, one computer for every two reporters.

It is also, still, a very male atmosphere. A couple of years later, I will share a computer with the TV critic, a woman whose breasts are as big as mine—a cross I have borne from seventh grade on. One day, a reporter will saunter over and say, “What is this, the pulchritude corner?” Smiling. Waiting for one of us to answer.

The band of brothers gets away with this stuff. They also get away with leaving in the middle of the day to go to “lunch” at the Headliner, the joint on the next block where the smoke forms thick clouds over a wooden bar, the bar stools have cracked vinyl seats indented with the butts of generations of reporters, and the bartenders will run a tab if they know you. More than once an editor has had to send a copy aide over to the Headliner to haul a reporter back to the newsroom for an assignment.

So there I am, in the middle of the old newsroom, trying to look busy. You’ve heard the Tom Hanks line, “There’s no crying in baseball”? Well, there’s really, really no crying in newsrooms. I can no more cry in that open newsroom than
Carl Bernstein could have cried on Bob Woodward’s shoulder in the middle of the
Washington Post
newsroom.

Then, a few days in, two colleagues approach me.

The first is a reporter I’ve talked to a couple of times. We’re just starting to be friends. She asks if I want to go for a walk. We go outside, into the glorious summer afternoon, and she keeps her eyes on her feet hitting the sidewalk as she tells me about the time she was in high school and went for a hike in the ravine near her school. It was the middle of the day. There were three boys, older than her. Two held her down while the third raped her. Then they traded places. She didn’t know them. She never reported it and never told anyone; she was afraid her immigrant parents would freak out, not let her out of their sight, and even, possibly, not let her go away to college. She never again went for hikes alone, and she had never talked about it until now, with me.

The other is a colleague I don’t know at all. An editor asks her to talk with me, and so I find myself in the cafeteria, sitting across from a woman so tough I will always imagine her wearing military fatigues. You can bet no one in the newsroom comments on her pulchritude. I can tell she doesn’t want to be here, talking about her own rape. Her jaw tenses with every word. She tells me it happened in the parking lot of the newspaper, at night. A stranger slashed her tires and waited for her to get to her car, then approached her to offer help. She doesn’t go into detail. She did report it, the police came, but they never caught him.

Both women tell me what happened to them as though they’re reporting it to the police—just the facts, no emotion,
exactly the way I told the people who needed to be told. They don’t talk about the things I need to hear and they need to say: how scared they are now, how they wake up in the middle of the night sometimes with their hearts pounding, how hard it is to be alone, how they never go outside at night, how they battle this feeling of shame but still feel it to their core.

None of us talk about it with each other again.

And I’m OK with that—more than OK. I don’t want to talk about my rape or anyone else’s.

Therapists, though, consider it their job to get you to talk about it—“it” being whatever you’re trying not to talk about.

My husband and I go to the first therapist, in what will be a long line of therapists, shortly after I go back to work. She has filled her office with floor cushions and pillows, but no furniture. We lean into the cushions while she sits on top of one, like a Yogi. The first thing she tells us is that most marriages don’t survive this kind of trauma. She gives us a statistic, a pretty alarming one, though I won’t remember it later; maybe 80 percent? I barely listen to her warning. I’m sure it won’t happen to us. We separated once, in Minneapolis, but we got back together stronger than ever. The therapist’s statistics must be for marriages that are already in trouble. I don’t realize that I’m indulging myself in more magical thinking of the “It won’t happen to me” school. I should have learned from the rape: Nothing happens until it happens to you.

Next, the therapist has us both tell our stories of the rape. I tell mine the usual way—just the facts, ma’am—though by now I’m leaving out some of the details, the ones that made the cops wince and look away. My husband tells her about the
hospital, the police station, the lineup, and the parole hearing. He cries as he tells it.

Neither of us mentions the one thing that we most need to talk about to save our marriage: the hit-man plan. Which is dead, as far as I know. After several more crying fits, I’ve finally persuaded my husband to stop the plan, though I have this nagging doubt that keeps surfacing. Maybe one day a cop will call and tell me David Francis died in jail. Or maybe Johnny or one of the jail guards called the whole thing off, and my husband found someone else. I have no idea how far he went with it.

The hit-man plan, dead or not, marked the moment when I felt I couldn’t trust my husband to be rational. His plan, and my bitterness about having to deal with it when I was most vulnerable, opened a fault line in our marriage.

On our second appointment, the therapist asks me if I feel angry. In fact, yes, I feel plenty of anger—toward my husband, however, not the rapist. But I can’t talk about the plan. It embarrasses me, deeply, and I’m not sure if she would have to report my husband to some authority.

“No, I’m not angry,” I say.

She feels that I need to allow myself to be angry. She gives me one of the many pillows in her office and tells me to pretend it’s the rapist.

“Punch him,” she says. “Yell at him. Tell him what he did to you. Let it out.”

I give the pillow a halfhearted punch.

“Now go ahead and yell,” she says.

I stare at the pillow. After some thought, I decide I have nothing to say to the pillow.

“I can’t yell at the pillow,” I say. “I’m not sure I’m feeling anger right now.”

I believed that for the longest time. Twenty-three years later, when I decided to look for David Francis, it occurred to me that the therapist was right: My anger was there, waiting to attack, but I was afraid of it. It was too large, too unruly, too honest. There was no way I, raised to be a polite girl, could roar my terrible roar, and gnash my terrible teeth, and show my terrible claws.

So I banished my anger to a faraway cave, and in its absence I felt … nothing. Emptiness. I was a ghost, my body made of vapor. Maybe it couldn’t feel anything.

I welcomed this absence of feeling. I decided that it meant I’d recovered. In my inner dialogues, I talked to myself like the nastiest right-wing curmudgeon on talk radio, telling myself, “Get over it! You survived. Now stop thinking about it, stop acting like a victim, and for God’s sake stop whining. Just get on with your life.”

So I did. After three sessions, we quit seeing that therapist.

And after the trial, we stopped talking about the rape. We both thought about it—a lot, as it turned out—but we did not mention it.