I Will Find You (15 page)

When she said that, a shiver went through my body, starting in my chest. I can hear myself on the recording, my sharp inhale, in the silence that followed.

That’s how he talked to me. Soft and low. Calm.

“When I get out, I will find you,” he said, just like that. With a kiss.

Lisa, who had been sitting on the floor across the room, saw that Charlene’s energy was fading. When the conversation came to a pause, she popped up with a big smile.

“Hey, Charlene,” she said. “I’d really like to take your picture.”

She made it sound like they were going to have so much fun together. I never managed to do that when I interviewed people.

Charlene surprised me. I thought she’d say no, but she stood and walked into her living room. Lisa pulled open the drapes, hoping for natural light. Charlene looked like I imagine I look when a camera is pointed at me.

“Laura’s gonna flip when she sees this,” Charlene said as Lisa’s camera clicked. “I’ve never let anybody take my picture.”

“Why not?” I asked, thinking that I should stop letting people take my picture, too.

“I guess because my father was Indian and we was raised like that,” she said. The camera kept clicking. Charlene didn’t smile.

One of Charlene’s grandsons came in and asked about dinner. She told him she’d start cooking soon, and I said we should probably stop, for now. But I wanted to talk again, if she didn’t mind.

Then I said yet another thing that makes me wince when I listen to the recording.

“Tomorrow is Sunday,” I said. “Are you planning on going to church?”

Charlene said no.

“We could take you to brunch,” I said, in that weird, enthusiastic voice.

Brunch
. I rewind the recorder.
Really? Where did I think I was, in an episode of
Sex and the City?

Charlene laughed. Sort of. In the transcript of the interview, I wrote: “Hahaha.”

“I’m happy with anybody who takes me anywhere,” she said. “I would love it. Just get me out of here.”

Later, I tried to fact-check Charlene’s stories, but reporting has its limits. Some of what happened in that house, away from the eyes of outsiders, was impossible to corroborate. But I found many of her claims backed up by criminal records, and some confirmed by other people.

For instance, Charlene told me that Philip—the brother in prison for rape—once got arrested for impersonating a doctor. “We called him ‘Inspector Gadget,’ because he was always making stuff up,” she said, tickled by the memory.

I was dubious; it was hard to imagine any of the brothers going from car theft and juvenile detention to striding into a hospital in a white coat. But when I checked his multipage Massachusetts rap sheet, there it was: Philip was arraigned in Boston District Court on September 25, 1981, for “Impersonation: Practitioner of Medicine.” He would have been twenty-three years old. His alias was Dr. Murray Everett.

It’s hard to pin down black magic, even if you practice the black arts of unearthing elusive documents. But eventually three siblings—independently of one another—told me about the midnight trip to the graveyard. They told me about their father hanging his sons on hooks. They told me their grandmother was an actual witch, with sinister powers. I figured that even if these and the other implausible stories weren’t exactly true, after a lifetime of repetition they were true to the family. They gave a narrative shape to the chaos of their childhood.

When we knocked on Charlene’s door on Sunday morning, she was dressed to go out for brunch, in white pants, a canary-yellow top, and gold shoes. She wore bracelets, several necklaces, and earrings and had put on makeup. She looked younger and happier.

I wore jeans and a black T-shirt. When I told her she looked great, she said, “The last time I wore this outfit was to Heavy’s funeral in 1994.”

Even though she was dressed up, she wasn’t sure about going to brunch. Her family was coming over later, and she had to get ready.

“On Sunday they all come around, all of them come up for dinner. We have a pretty close relationship now. The whole family, we’re just now trying to get ourselves together. I guess because everyone has seen me staying sober, so they’re all trying to walk away from it.”

We decided to talk in Charlene’s apartment. The flowers I had given her were in a vase on the table in the dining room. I sat down, embarrassed by them. Lisa tried to disappear on the other side of the room, as she had the day before,
so she could take pictures without Charlene—or me, for that matter—getting self-conscious.

“I always figured if I was doing drugs, I wasn’t hurting nobody but myself,” Charlene said from the kitchen. “It wasn’t bothering you; it was my money I was spending so what are you worried about it for? I was like, after I got sobered up, that’s when I realized I did mess up my kids with it, ’cause they had to put up with me passing out on the floor, fighting, running back and forth to different drug dealers, and stuff like that. So I’m glad I got it straightened up.”

She brought over two glasses of water and sat down. “I’m so tired,” she said. “I couldn’t sleep all night. I had nightmares. David was on my mind.”

She said she had called Laura, in Cleveland, before she went to bed. Laura told her something new.

“She said that they had said David murdered someone, which I didn’t know about. I have no idea what David did after he left Boston, but according to her, I guess he killed one of the guards in jail for trying to rape him or something. So it was a lot of mess that David had been through.”

“Can you give me Laura’s phone number?” I asked. “Do you think she would talk to me when I get back to Cleveland?”

Charlene read the number from her cell phone, then snapped it shut and leveled her gaze at me.

“Laura was surprised, just like I was, that they got a reporter up here that wants to do a story about David,” she said. “She was like, ‘Why would they do a story about David?’ I said, ‘I have no idea.’”

She paused, looking at me with an expression that made me nervous. I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t ready for this.

“I mean, there’s a lot of guys that die in prison,” she went on. “And most of them die violently. It seems strange that they would do a story about David.”

I stalled. “Do you and Laura talk very often?” I asked.

She shrugged. “It’s only been maybe three years since me and my sister have been back in contact. The whole family scattered, everybody was lost, nobody knew where anybody was.”

Charlene said Laura mentioned their brother Neamiah, one of the lost. Laura said the last time she saw him, he was in jail.

“He’s a bad heroin addict,” Charlene said. “The last time I saw Neamiah he was a boy, and according to everybody now he’s had a sex-change operation. So I wouldn’t know him if I went up to him. They say he’s calling himself Sherry now.”

I tried to imagine an addict who lived in a homeless shelter being able to get a sex-change operation.

“One time, he was living with me, and I came home and here he was sitting at the kitchen table wearing one of my dresses,” Charlene went on. “Which shocked me.”

Now I tried to imagine a transvestite trying to live peacefully at a men’s shelter, or in jail.

“Poor Neamiah,” I said.

“My father screwed us all up,” Charlene said. “He destroyed my whole family. He really did. I hated him. He turned my brothers into crooks and whatever else you want to call them. The girls were prostitutes. We were all on drugs and alcoholics. Two of my brothers turned out to be gay, one was murdered. Laura
and I lost both our kids to foster care, my daughter was on drugs and lost her kids. And Philip turned out to be a child molester.”

What?

“He molested my son,” Charlene said.

“He did?”

“I always trusted my brother. We’d drink together. He’d bring over big bags of vodka, and we’d party. But I come to find out that while I was drunk, he was molesting my son.”

She walked over to the family pictures hanging on the wall. I followed.

“Here’s a picture of my son,” she said. She pointed to a handsome, smiling young man.

“He was Philip’s favorite, and I had no idea that he was taking him to gay bars and porno theaters and all this. Now my son is in prison for molesting. He exposed himself to his sister. They took him at twelve, they kept him until he was seventeen, and he was worse when he came back. He’s twenty-two now, and he’s been in and out of jail ever since. He’s in prison now because he was going with a girl who said she was eighteen and she turned out to be fifteen. Philip messed him up, real bad.”

We returned to our seats in silence.

“David, now, David was one of the nicest kids you’d want to meet,” she said after a minute. “But Laura told me he grew up to be a real thug. He could get mean when he got mad, but the things Laura was telling me last night, that just didn’t sound like my brother. She said he tried to make her go out on the corner and work, he was trying to force her into prostitution, and that’s just something I don’t believe he would do, because David was always protective of his sisters.”

Charlene stopped talking. I took a sip of water and cleared my throat.

“So,” I said. “I have to tell you something. I really am a reporter, and Lisa really is a photographer for the paper, and I really am doing a story about David. But I’ve been waiting to tell you this until I knew I could trust you. I wanted to see if you were a nice person, a compassionate person, and I think you are.”

She nodded, but I could tell I was confusing her with all this windup.

“The reason I’m doing the story about David is because I was his victim,” I said.

“You? What do you mean, his victim?”

“He went to prison in 1984 for rape,” I said. “I was a reporter back then, too, and I went into a building for work, and it was empty, and he had wandered in, and he had a knife, and he cut me and attacked me and raped me.”

Charlene said nothing. I said nothing.

“Are you sure?” she asked at last.

“Yes,” I said. “He had a tattoo of his name on his arm.”

Silence. She looked down at the table, not at me. When she spoke next, her voice was quiet.

“I can’t believe it,” she said. “That just doesn’t seem like my brother. David was—I never knew David even to treat women badly. He always had respect for women. I don’t understand.”

She looked at me, trying to make sense of what I had told her. “David was good-looking,” she said, as though I might confirm this. “I mean, he had girlfriends; he didn’t have trouble getting girlfriends. He didn’t need to rape nobody.”

I didn’t want to get into a discussion of why men commit rape, so I filled the conversational gap with some history. I told her David was in prison—in Lucasville, the one she mentioned—when he was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease. I said they let him out on a mercy parole because they thought he would die soon. Seven days after he was paroled, he raped me.

Charlene was sobbing by this point. “I don’t understand this. I don’t believe it.”

After all the horrors she had described to me the day before, I was genuinely surprised this upset her so much. Her reaction raised troubling questions that I’d managed to push aside, questions of exploitation and appropriation that often lie at the very heart of journalism. Janet Malcolm, in
The Journalist and the Murderer
, wrote: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.”

This quote offends many journalists. The first time I read it, I felt a sting of recognition.

I tried to explain why I had come to her with the news that her brother was a rapist. I stumbled through it. “The rape made me a different person, Charlene. It changed my life. I was thirty years old when it happened, and since then I’ve been afraid of so much. I’ve lived in fear for twenty-four years.”

She wasn’t looking at me. I wasn’t sure if she was listening.

“A while ago I decided that the way to overcome your fear is to find out about your fear, what’s behind it. So I decided
to find him. And when I found out that he had died of cancer in prison, I decided to find his family.”

Charlene was shaking her head.

“And I came to Boston and found you,” I said.

She looked at me.

“Was he raping other women?”

I had wondered that, too. “I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t find any other arrests for rape.”

She didn’t respond.

“You know,” I said, “when it was happening, I remember thinking,
He’s doing this because someone did it to him
. That’s what I thought.”

“Well, Laura did say he killed somebody in prison for trying to rape him,” she said.

“I didn’t find anything like that in his record,” I said. “No murders.”

“I know he was capable of murdering somebody,” she said. “He had that thing, that uncontrollable rage. So yeah, if you had come to me and said, ‘Yeah, I’m here doing a story because David killed two or three people,’ that would have made more sense to me than him being a rapist. He was always good to women. Women liked him.”

She sighed. “I don’t know what happened to my brother.”

“That’s what I wanted to find out,” I said. “Because I had this sense that he had been a victim in some way.”

“Well, we all became victims. None of us came out normal, every one of us had problems. But I never heard any stories of my brothers raping anybody. I mean, except for Philip, and he was molesting kids.”

“Well, that’s the thing about your son,” I said. “They say a lot of molesters were molested by someone when they were kids.”

Charlene cried again, thinking of her son. He was such a sweet little kid, she said, and they put him away so young, and then he came out a different person. She worries about what’s happening to him in prison. She worries all the time.

We sat at the table, quiet, our worries and fears exposed and spread out before us.

Charlene was not finished, though.

“I know about rape,” she said. “I was raped myself. Three times. But I asked for it, because I was on drugs and I was prostituting. And I never reported it to the police because, ‘Hey, what the hell, you’re prostituting, what do you think you’re supposed to get?’”

“Charlene, wait,” I said. “You didn’t deserve it.”

I was saying to her what others had said to me, but in her case I believed it: “It wasn’t your fault. You didn’t deserve it. No one asks to be raped.”

Charlene shook her head.

“One of the times, I was high on drugs, and I went out to get more money to get more drugs,” Charlene said. “This guy promised to give me fifty dollars if I gave him a blow job. So I got in the car with him, and instead of paying me he raped me and beat me and threw me out the car. And I couldn’t go to the police because I was terrified. They wouldn’t believe me because I was a drug addict. I mean, they didn’t even give a shit about my brother when he was murdered, so why would they care about me?”

She looked up.

“And besides that,” she said, “he was a white guy.”

For Charlene, this was the final and most indisputable evidence that she’d asked to be raped, and that the cops would at best dismiss her claims and at worst arrest her.

There was so much I could have said about this, so much history and injustice and raw truth embedded in those four words—“he was a white guy”—but I didn’t. Instead of reminding her of what female slaves endured from white owners for so long, or talking about how American laws did not protect black women from white rapists during Jim Crow, I said nothing. I’d like to think that I was focused on listening to Charlene like a good journalist, with attention and without interruption, but as I listen to the tape I know something else was going on.

I felt shame when she said that. I feel shame now, when I play the recording, and I still don’t know what to do with it. By accident of timing and birth, and nothing more, I could report my rape without fearing that the cops would only make it worse. Charlene was, as James Baldwin wrote, “born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being.”