I Will Find You Read online

  From the outside, my performance 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 high above a stage and looking down at myself.

  That 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 camp
us 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 looked back at us. We cooed.

  And then he looked right at me and said, “Hi.” He really did. 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 n
ights 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.