I Will Find You Read online

  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 with something that spoke for him. He lifted his T-shirt to show me: A heart, like an old-fashioned Valentine with “Mom” on a ribbon inked across it, bloomed on his chest. He had tattooed me on his heart.

  It looked like it hurt.

  I had told my children. I had pulled on the vine, but I knew I had not unearthed it completely. I had to pull on it some more, pull it all the way out, kill it, do something to stop the panic from rising in my chest, stop the whoosh of adrenaline that came without warning and made my heart beat so hard you could almost see its movement under my clothes.

  I had seen the rapist five times: When he raped me. When I identified him two days later in a lineup. When I sat across a table from him in the county jail three weeks later, to testify in a parole revocation hearing that would keep him in jail. At the trial. And at the sentencing.

  I knew he had gone to prison. Beyond that, I didn’t know much more than his name. Now it came to me that if I made a list of the most influential people in my life, he would be near the top, with my parents and husband and children.

  If it’s true that fear grows out of ignorance, which I believe, then maybe I needed to confront the ignorance to get at the fear. I needed to learn more about the man who stood above me and pushed my head toward his penis, the man I thought would be the last human being I would see on this Earth.

  The last thing he said to me was, “I will find you,” and deep inside the primitive, alarm-prone amygdala at the base of my brain, I still believed him. He had lurked in the shadows of my life all those years, watching me, waiting for me. I still dreamed about him. I still floated out of my body when I thought about him. I thought about him all the time. He was going to find me.

  But all I knew was his name—David Francis—his age, that he had lived in Boston at some point, that he had been in prison before, and that he was caught and convicted and sentenced to thirty to seventy-five years in prison.

  It occurred to me only much later that I had been sentenced as well, to a mixture of chronic fear, silence, and shame—a shame that never made sense to me, but that I would one day learn I shared with almost all rape victims. Why do we feel this shame? What do we do with it?

  After David Francis raped me, I never shook my fists toward the heavens and asked, “Why me?” I knew, or thought I knew, the answer to that one: I was trusting and stupid. But now I wanted the answer to a slightly different question: “Why him?”

  We were almost the same age. We both grew up in America in the ’60s and ’70s. We lived in the same city, just five miles apart. But when my path crossed with his that July day, it brought about a collision of two people who might as well have lived in two different countries. What brought us to that intersection, and what happened to us afterward?

  He had been in prison for twenty-one years. He could have been released on parole, but I thought he was probably still locked up. I wondered how prison had changed him, and whether he’d talk to me now. Maybe sitting across from him, with glass between us and guards all around, would make me feel brave, if not fearless.

  He’d said he would find me. Maybe I should find him instead.

  The familiar dread flooded in when I contemplated this, accompanied by a trembling thought that whispered, You can’t do this. It was a long time ago. He’s still in prison. Leave it alone.

  My husband didn’t want me to look for him, either.

  “He’s a monster,” he said, not realizing he was echoing the fears that came to me at night. “You don’t need to know any more about him than that.”

  I disagreed. I knew I wouldn’t be done with David Francis just by deciding I was. I’d already tried that.

  I needed to make sense of my rape. I make sense of things by writing about them. When I was a movie critic, I discovered what I thought about a film through the process of writing about it. Over the years, I had tried this with the rape. I wrote about it, and all that followed it, in an on-again,
off-again series of journals I still have. I started and abandoned a novel about it. But this was different.

  I hoped writing about David Francis would make the fear go away, but I wanted more. I wanted this random act of rape to have meaning. I wanted to do what human beings have done for thousands of years—tell the stories that help us understand who we are and what happened in our lives to shape us. The way to do it, I figured, was the way I knew best: as a reporter.

  In the summer of 2006, not long after Zoë graduated from high school, I started. I wasn’t ready to talk to David Francis, not yet, so I began by calling the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office to request the public records in my case. A few days later, they handed over a thick, messy file of police reports, witness statements, rap sheets, subpoenas, lab reports, trial notes, briefs, and indictments, all stuffed together in no particular order and bound with a rubber band.

  At home, while sorting the stack into a semblance of order, I came to a page that stopped me.

  Across a court record, someone had scrawled the word “DECEASED,” and underlined it three times.

  David Francis had died in prison on August 18, 2000, sixteen years after he raped me. My search for him was over before I started it.

  I sat at my desk with my piles of records, disappointment giving way to relief, relief swinging back to disappointment. I would not get to confront my rapist. On the other hand, I would not have to confront my rapist. The decision had been eliminated for me. David Francis was dead, and so was my story.

  The “DECEASED” record sat on top of a large stack of papers. Not knowing what else to do, I started sorting them again, skimming the pages as I went along. I came to his juvenile record from Boston. It had fifty-three entries, detailing crimes and misdemeanors he committed before he turned eighteen. They began when he was twelve.

  It occurred to me that while David Francis couldn’t talk to me, he still had a lot to tell me. I could follow his path through all these records. I could try to find his family in Boston. Maybe I could find his friends in Cleveland. He had at least a few; I remembered that an alibi witness testified, and lied, for him during his trial. I decided to check the trial transcript to see who she was and what she had to say when she testified.

  The Old Courthouse opened in 1912, when Cleveland was an industrial powerhouse and the sixth-largest city in the country. It was a town on the go, alive with energy and commerce and immigrants and newcomers, a town many people even now believe could have overshadowed Chicago, with the right leaders and a bit of luck.

  The courthouse was one of the public buildings the city leaders envisioned in 1903, when they commissioned a grand civic plan to echo the mall in Washington, D.C. The plan, which grew out of the City Beautiful Movement, called for a formal grouping of Beaux Arts–style buildings around a broad, grassy mall that led to a vista of Lake Erie.

  The second building to go up, the courthouse was intended to inspire awe among the citizens who entered it seeking justice. A hundred years later it still does a pretty good job of it. Life-size bronze statues of Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton flank the wide stairs leading to the front entrance. Above them, on a ledge surrounding the building, stand statues of the great lawgivers of history, from Moses on. Inside, twin marble staircases curl up the three-story marble rotunda, where a stained-glass window of Lady Justice looks down from a perch positioned to catch the rising sun.

  Eventually the county outgrew the courthouse, and in 1976 most court operations moved to the ugly new Justice Center tower across the street. The graceful Old Courthouse remained open, though, home to the domestic relations and probate courts, where the people of Cuyahoga County go to get their marriage licenses and, later, their divorces, and where they go to deal with death.

  The grand staircase led me down to the basement, a dim warren of offices and storage rooms. A canteen near the stairs sells tepid coffee and off-brand packaged snacks, and every time I went there I passed divorce lawyers huddled at the wobbly tables with their clients, most of them weeping.

  In this basement, the county’s Clerk of Courts keeps all of its millions of pages of transcripts and criminal evidence. In 2006, when I first went there, none of the records were digital, and the archives of documents overwhelmed the space allotted.

  In the hallways, towers of stacked file boxes along the walls formed a cardboard canyon of mortgage foreclosures, divorce actions, child-custody battles, competency hearings, property disputes, robbery trials, murder trials, rape trials. These were the records that would not fit in the overstuffed file rooms, where more boxes were stacked to the water-damaged ceilings.

  As I walked through the canyon of files, I felt like a visitor to the Catacombs of Paris, wandering through tunnels lined with skulls and bones. I had entered an ancient repository of grief, a place that held the memories of the collective pain, bitterness, fear, and sorrow of the people of Cuyahoga County. My small piece of it came in the file of Case Number CR-193108: The State of Ohio v. David Francis.

  I filled out a printed form and handed it to a clerk in a crowded office at the end of the hall. He returned a few minutes later carrying two expandable dark red envelopes stuffed with files, each held together with a rubber band. He gestured toward a table in the hallway and said, “Don’t take these out of this area.” That warning was the extent of the court’s security system.

  I opened the smaller envelope. Out tumbled the evidence from my trial: a gold cross on a chain, a dozen Polaroids, some mug shots, and two tiny glassine envelopes containing pubic hair samples, mine and the rapist’s. I had forgotten about the embarrassing collection of the hair. I put the envelopes back with my fingernails, as carefully as if they contained anthrax.

  The Polaroids showed my body, most without my head. Two of them showed my back, an abstract design of red lacerations and bruises turning blue and purple. Others showed a small red gash on my neck and puncture wounds on my fingers. I studied them. The photos looked like porn for a scar fetishist. They were crude shots of a body without the woman inhabiting it, a portrait of everything the rape did to me. I slid them back into the envelope.

  The second one, much thicker, held the trial transcript.

  On the first page, I read: Be it remembered, that at the September, 1984 term of said court, to-wit, commencing on Wednesday, the 17th day of October, this cause came on to be heard …

  I trembled, surprising myself.

  Be it remembered.

  I turned to my testimony. There, on the onionskin pages, I found the Joanna of twenty-two years before. She was trembling, too, I remembered, as she told the jury what happened that day.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “If I have to go to prison, I’ll miss you”

  Monday, July 9, 1984. Cleveland.

  On the last day of the first part of my life, I’m running late. As usual.

  Damn it, damn it, damn it.

  I’m driving up Euclid Avenue in my Toyota hatchback, fifteen miles an hour over the speed limit, pushing it to twenty, headed east out of downtown Cleveland for a 5:00 p.m. interview at Case Western Reserve University.

  It’s already 5:00. Rush hour starts at 4:30 here, and I’m trapped in the daily exodus of workers leaving their offices in the city for the suburbs, all of them stepping on the gas through the bad parts of town, speeding past the brick housing projects and the weedy vacant lots that mark the spots where riots burned through in the ‘60s.

  At East 55th Street, the borderline between downtown and the inner city, you can almost hear the steady beat of car locks clicking down, the percussive sound track to Cleveland’s deep racial divide.

  I slalom from the left lane to the right lane and back, swearing and scolding myself the way I always do.

  Why don’t you leave more time? Jesus. What’s wrong with you?

  It’s high summer, and I’m worked up and jittery, hitting the steering wheel as I talk. The car has no air-conditioning. My open window lets in the heavy, hot fumes of summer, melting
tar and truck diesel. All I want to do is get to Case, do a quick interview, and then head to my neighborhood pool for an evening swim before it closes. I’m thinking more about the pool than the interview, which I’m doing only because the guy who runs the little summer theater on the Case campus bugged me so much about it. I’ve agreed to watch a rehearsal of their next show, and then talk to the playwright, someone I’ve never heard of, who’s in from Peru. I’ve been so busy I haven’t read the play or anything about the playwright. I’ll wing it.

  At this point, I’ve lived in Cleveland only ten months. I still get lost, still don’t know all the shortcuts. I keep up the yelling at myself and other drivers as I head into the rush-hour snarl of University Circle, a hub of culture, education, and verdant parks at the eastern edge of the city. The Circle is the rose on the lapel of Cleveland’s threadbare jacket, financed by the likes of John D. Rockefeller and the city’s other titans of the Gilded Age as the home to the Cleveland Orchestra, the Cleveland Museum of Art, two history museums, a botanical garden, art and music schools, and Case Western Reserve University.

  On the many occasions when our civic dignity is wounded, Clevelanders always invoke University Circle to restore our pride. It’s no easy task. Magazines continually put us on soul-crushing lists, naming us the fattest city in America, or the poorest, or the least sexy, or—the latest—the most miserable city in America. I like to imagine teams of statisticians with clipboards going door to door, measuring the misery of an entire city, offering tissues and hugs as they listen.

  I forget how this one determined misery. The choices are many, topped by dreary winter weather, high unemployment, and the sorry history of our teams. Cleveland still has three major-league teams, but they all lose so often, and so spectacularly, that my newspaper calls it a “streak” if any of them win two games in a row. The nickname for the stadium where the Cleveland Browns play is “The Factory of Sadness.” After LeBron James took his talents to South Beach, ESPN found few reasons to even mention Cleveland, and resumed paying attention only when he came back in 2014. Before the first home game after LeBron returned, Clevelanders filled the streets downtown, the mass celebration reaching a level of joy and mayhem that other cities might reserve for a World Series or Super Bowl win.