I Will Find You (20 page)

In it I heard an echo of
Paradise Lost
, when Adam asks God: “Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay to mould me man, did I solicit thee from darkness to promote me?”

Who was Top Cat but the maker of these tragic lives? Was he the one to blame for my rape, and whatever else David Francis did in his chaotic, violent life? Or did it go back to an earlier generation, to Top Cat’s mother, the woman her grandchildren swear to this day was a witch? Or to his father, the ghost in the graveyard where Top Cat left his children crying in the dark?

How far back do you have to go to find the origin story of a monster?

Mary Shelley placed that quote from
Paradise Lost
at the very beginning of
Frankenstein
, one of the most famous of the monster-origin stories. But of course the monster of Shelley’s gothic tale is not the unnamed creature. The true monster is his creator, Victor Frankenstein, the arrogant would-be God who assembles his creature from raw materials supplied by “the dissecting room and the slaughter-house,” gives him life, and then—disgusted by his hideous creation—abandons him.

Like Top Cat Francis, Victor Frankenstein is a terrible father to his child. Any one of Top Cat’s children could have said what the Creature says to Frankenstein when they meet at the end of the novel.

“I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend.”

By the winter of 2008, I had two places left to visit on David Francis’s path.

The first was the Corrections Medical Center in Columbus, now called the Franklin Medical Center. The center is officially a prison, with a warden, corrections officers, many inmate counts through the day, and a locked-down maximum-security unit. But it also serves as an outpatient clinic, a hospital, and a nursing home.

David Francis died there at 11:10 a.m. on August 18, 2000. That’s what his death certificate says, though when I went to visit the center in 2008, the assistant warden told me they had no record of him dying there. She checked with the corrections department. They had no record of him dying anywhere.

The death certificate reports his cause of death as unspecified Hodgkin’s, the same cancer that had won him a mercy
parole in July of 1984, the week before he raped me. It notes that they did not perform an autopsy. It lists his occupation as electrician, and his last known address as Lebanon Correctional. He was forty-four at the time of his death. He had been in prison for my rape for sixteen years.

If the certificate was right, he died in one of the two rooms at the end of a long hall that function as hospice rooms. As we made our way to them, past men in wheelchairs, the assistant warden said the rooms can’t, legally, be called “hospice.” I forgot to ask the reason.

We stopped at the last room. The door was open. From his bed, an old man raised his can of Coke to us in a toast and smiled. He had no front teeth.

“How are you doing?” the assistant warden asked.

“Oh, this is nice,” he said, still smiling. “For a prison cell, you can’t beat it.”

Old men don’t go to prison. Statistics show that the vast majority of inmates enter in their late teens and their twenties. It’s likely this old man had been in prison most of his life. At the end, he found dying “nice.”

The assistant warden told me that many of the healthy inmates who live and work at the center—a plum assignment—are trained to become ministers through Stephen Ministry, a Christian program that teaches laypeople to offer spiritual comfort during difficult life passages.

“They put on a vigil,” she said. “Someone is always there, round the clock, so that the man will not die alone.”

When David Francis died, he was awaiting his final parole hearing, the last of his many attempts to win freedom over the sixteen years. He first went up for a review consideration, the initial step toward an actual hearing, in July of 1991. Denied. Then again in 1995. Denied. A risk assessment form at that time noted that his alcohol usage problems ranked as the worst: “Frequent abuse, serious disruption, needs treatment.” His drug problems ranked in the middle: “Occasional abuse, some disruption of functioning.”

He could obtain both alcohol and drugs through the prisons’ covert network. At the medical center, the assistant warden told me they get a lot of patients who have poisoned themselves with homemade hooch and contraband drugs.

In 1997, the parole board reconsidered whether to give David Francis a review hearing. His request was again denied. The next hearing was supposed to take place in July of 2000, a month before he died. No record exists to report whether the hearing was held, but in April of that year, they began the process for his review.

I found the parole documents in the file from the prosecutor. His prison case manager reported that in 1998 David Francis received nine days of disciplinary control for disobedience of a direct order and fifteen days for threats, and that in 1999 he spent ten days under disciplinary control for disobedience of a direct order and possession of contraband.

During his time in prison, he completed three programs: He got his high school GED. He participated in a weekend religious program called Kairos, described as “a short course in Christianity.” And he went to a program described only as “Depression.”

When I saw that notation on his parole report, I let out a bark of a laugh that made me think of Philip—a laugh that wasn’t angry or bitter, and that definitely was not amused. It was a dead laugh.

No one claimed the body of David Francis. They called only Ida Taylor. She said, “You’ll have to do with him what you do.”

The State of Ohio sent him to a Columbus funeral home, where they put him into a plain pine casket. From there he went south, to the Pickaway Correctional Institution, just outside of the town of Orient. The grounds manager arranged in advance for a backhoe to dig his grave.

No family or friends came to his burial. As they lowered him into the ground, the prison chaplain said a few words. After two inmates filled in the grave, they sank a brick-size marker into the earth.

When I went to the Pickaway cemetery on a January morning in 2008, I was the first person who had ever asked to visit his grave. The day was clear but cold. The coils of razor wire surrounding the prison like a giant Slinky glinted in the weak winter sun. The frozen grass crunched under our feet as the prison investigator led Lisa and me up the hill.

At the top of the hill, under trees that spread their limbs over the dead, we came to the old part of the cemetery. The headstones, some with angels or lambs perching on them, date from the late 1800s, when this place was known as the Orient
Feeble Minded Institute and housed those with mental illness, mental retardation, epilepsy, and disorders that no one understood but were serious enough for families to commit their children. The name was eventually changed to the Orient State Institute, but the mission remained, even in 1950, to “care for the feeble-minded.” It shut down in the early 1980s, one small part of the great wave of such closures across the country that were brought on both by revelations of terrible conditions at many institutions and government spending cuts.

In 1984—when the prison system was well on its way to becoming America’s de facto largest mental health institution—the Orient State Institute reopened as the Pickaway Correctional Institution.

An invisible line separates Orient’s pitiful dead from the graves of the unclaimed prisoners, who all lie in an open field on the hill beyond the old cemetery, 1,236 of them when I visited, their presence marked only by those brick-size stones. No angels or lambs watch over them. No one ever etched loving words on their stones. They don’t even have names: In death, as in their life on the other side of the razor wire, they are identified by numbers. As the seasons change, grass grows over the small stones and covers even their numbers. The dead inmates disappear into the field.

David Francis, No. 130, was among those who had disappeared. The investigator said that the cemetery manager had marked the grave for me with a stake tied in yellow and red ribbons. I didn’t see the stake, so I hunched over and walked
up and down what seemed to be rows, pushing away leaves and grass. I eventually found 133, but it did not lead to 130 in any direction. The investigator, who didn’t see the stake, either, went to call the manager while I paced off what seemed the right distance, bent down, and started pulling at the matted grass where No. 130 should have been.

I uncovered a tiny corner of stone, grabbed a stick, and kept digging. The stick broke. I dropped to my knees and dug in the dirt with my hands again, uncovering more stone. The earth was as cold as it was hard. My frozen fingers clawed at it, my nails breaking as I dug.

It took a while, kneeling there in that cold graveyard, for me to realize what I was doing.

I was trying to dig up DAVE from the place he was buried.

The investigator returned with the cemetery manager, who pointed at the stake at the far end of the field, about fifty yards from where I was digging. I walked over; the two men hung back and let me go alone. So did Lisa.

They had already uncovered it for me. I looked down at the stone: No. 130. After having spent eighteen months looking for this man, only now did it occur to me that I’d never thought about what I would say, or even what I might feel, when I found him. I felt that the occasion called for something—a ritual, a pronouncement, some acknowledgment that my rapist and I were sharing the same patch of Earth again.

Minutes passed. The men were silent, waiting. A wind had come up, cold and damp, as though signaling me to hurry along. I decided I should say something, so I looked at “130”
and said, “Well, Dave, Charlene and I are the only ones who really thought about you after you died.”

Talking to him that way felt contrived. From twenty-three years in the past, a memory appeared—of my newborn son, sitting on my lap, intent on my face as I conduct an awkward conversation with him. I cried then, but I did not cry now at the grave of David Francis.

I was cold. I had nothing to say. I thought of Laura, vowing to spit on her father’s grave, but I did not feel her anger. I just wanted to leave the cemetery and its ghosts, and go instead toward warmth and life.

As a reporter, I have gone to cemeteries with grieving families. I’ve listened to them talk to their loved ones at the grave, watched them plant flowers and pull weeds and carefully place mementos. Once I went with a mother whose son had died of a heroin overdose at the age of twenty-one. She parked near her son’s grave, opened the door, and played Phish from her car’s CD system at top volume, filling the silent cemetery with the music he loved.

I understand the comfort and meaning a grave can offer mourners, the physical place it gives them to make a spiritual connection. I envy those who believe that life continues after death, that the people we loved are waiting for us across a wide river. For them, death is a beginning, not a terrible mystery that we fear and deny and will never solve.

I don’t believe the dead can hear us speak, or watch over us, or wait for us. I don’t believe that anything meaningful remains in their graves. I don’t believe we have souls that will live on somewhere else after death.

All I know is that the dead live on within the people who remember them. They come back to life when we think about them.

I had kept David Francis alive, all this time.

Not long after finding his grave, I decided I had one more place to visit. I had to go back to Eldred Theater, where David’s and my paths had collided.

I had not been there since July 9, 1984. A sense of foreboding emerged from the past and cast its shadow over me as I thought about going through that door again.

“I dread going back,” I told Lisa.

I dread Eldred. How odd I had never noticed the pun.

I returned to the theater in late January, on one of those Cleveland days that come in a dozen shades of gray, turning the campus into a living daguerreotype. Students walked through the quad carrying their massive backpacks like Sherpas, heads down against the sleet.

The manager met me at the top of the stairs and let me go into the theater alone. It was dark, lit only by the ghost light in the middle of the stage. The single bulb glowed like
an eerie beacon, leaving the edges and corners in deep gloom. I felt a charge in the air.

Some say ghost lights originated in Shakespeare’s time, when theater companies left candles on the stage to ward off the ghosts of performances past. I had no doubt that the ghosts of my past lived here, in this haunted place.

I walked down the aisle. Lisa waited at the back, near the entrance, her camera still in her bag. I needed to be alone on that stage.

When I climbed the three steps up, the ghost light cast a huge, hulking shadow of me on the back wall. I walked toward the back corner where David Francis had dragged me. My shadow followed me, a giant bodyguard hovering over each step.

Painted scenery flats leaned against the wall in stacks, crowding the corner. I tried to see the stage the way the hundreds of students and actors and stagehands had seen it over the years—as a place to perform, nothing more.

But to me this was sinister and sacred ground. Here was the place where I had been certain my life would end, the place where I lost part of myself.

I felt disoriented, but my body was alert, flooded with an anxiety that made my knees lock. I sat on the edge of the stage to calm myself.

I thought about my children.

I used to wonder if, in trying to hide my depression and fear from them, I had instead passed it all on, like a genetic disease. Not long ago I read about a study that suggested I probably did pass it on to them—not
like
a genetic disease, but
as
a genetic disease. This study, conducted by a team of
psychobiologists and published in the journal
Biological Psychiatry
, showed that rats subjected to stressors before they got pregnant passed that stress on to their offspring—not through anxious parenting styles but biologically, at the molecular level.

I suddenly wanted to ask my children, “Was I a good mother to you?”

This is a question that has only one answer. I know they would tell me that yes, I was a good mother. I am the only one who dares to say “No.” That answer comes from the piece of me that lives inside, the piece that is afraid and wants me to hide from the many dangers of life.

That piece of me is afraid of so much, but what she most fears is that I am not good enough. That piece whispers that I am a fraud, that I will be revealed one day, that I am damaged and I damaged my children. That piece always looked at other families and decided they were perfect.

The tears that didn’t come at the grave of David Francis ran down my face.

I thought about my husband, who had gone through the misery following the rape with me, and had gone through the silence that lingered. I thought the rape was mine alone, but I was wrong.

In the end, my husband and I divorced, for this, and the hit man, and many other reasons, most of them my fault. I did not treat him well when he wanted to protect me in the years that followed the rape. We separated while I was investigating David Francis, but even then, he helped me by showing me how to get the prosecutor’s files and where to go for the trial transcript.

Sitting there in the dusky theater, I realized why I had not felt anything when I stood at David Francis’s grave. That cemetery was where the prison had buried him. But here, in this theater, was where I had buried him. I had gone out to find David Francis. I thought if I unearthed his story, I could discover the reason that our paths crossed. And if I knew and could understand that, I could protect my children.

I had found David Francis. I learned that he had a horrifying childhood, that he learned violence from his father, and that he took that violence and damage with him when he went out into the world at the age of twelve.

I did not deserve what happened to me, as Charlene said.

And David Francis did not deserve what happened to him.

When I started my search, my husband said, “He’s a monster. Why do you want to know anything more?”

I think the answer is that I wanted to know the monster in myself, the monster born in 1984. This monster is clever. Elusive. It doesn’t show itself by taking a child into a church to rape her, or beating a son. This monster lurks so far in the background, no one knows it’s there. It infused me with fear, a fear that made me hide from the world and harbor malign suspicions of other people.

Not long ago, a small benign cyst I had had on my neck for years started to get bigger. It doubled in size, tripled, and then turned red and tender. I made an appointment at my clinic, and the first doctor available turned out to be from Germany.

“Why are you in Cleveland?” I asked, the question all Clevelanders ask people who have moved here.

As he bent to my neck and prodded at the lump, he told me doctors can do more good in the United States than in Germany.

“Everyone should have access to good health care,” he said. He told me he volunteers at the Free Clinic, and he can’t believe what he sees there. “Hardly anyone knows that we have a third world right here, a few miles away, in the wealthiest country in the world. I mean, poverty that people wouldn’t believe, right under our noses.”

He rolled back on his little doctor’s stool to the computer. “I’m going to refer you to Surgery,” he said. “That cyst is infected. It should come out.”

This sounds like something a writer would invent, a tidy symbol, but it is true.

The cyst had grown on the side of my neck right where David Francis had cut me. Two weeks later, a surgeon cut out the cyst and told me it was too infected to stitch up. Another infection could bloom, making it worse. Even though the wound was quite deep, he had to leave it open to heal, from the bottom up.

“It might leave a scar,” the surgeon said.

It did. The scar is faint. Only I can see it.

I went out looking for David Francis, but during my search I found what I was really looking for all along.

I found Charlene, who stopped doing drugs and drinking, got her family back, and in time forgave and buried the
father who hurt her. Charlene, who reacted to her rapes with the same shame and self-blame I did.

I found Laura, who took me to the church that had saved her, and pushed me to the altar when the time came for saving me. Laura calls me “sister” and “sweetie” every time we talk. She tells me she loves me.

I found Father Tom Gallagher, who marched from Selma to Montgomery with the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and would not let being held at gunpoint, tied up, and locked in a closet stop him from doing what he was put on this Earth to do.

I needed to hear their stories. They needed to tell them.

“We did our part; we kept it inside so long,” Laura said to me. “It’s something that needed to be told.”

I’ve gone to Laura’s church many times, even though I don’t have the religious faith that she has. I often wish I did. I find my faith in the power of stories to bring us together and heal. As a reporter, I have asked so many other people to open themselves up and let me tell their stories, all the while withholding my own. I owed this to them. I owed it to other women who have been raped. I owed it to my children.

As I worked on the story that went into the newspaper, I kept saying, “I’m having a hard time with this. I can’t write it.” My therapist said, “Maybe you’re saying, ‘I can’t right it.’”

Maybe.

And maybe that is the point, in the end. James Baldwin wrote, “Whatever one’s journey is, one’s got to accept the fact that disaster is one of the conditions under which you will make it.”

We all have burdens we carry through life, grief and disappointments that we can’t change. But we can make them lighter if we don’t hide them, if we don’t try to bear them silently and alone.

I cannot protect my children. I know this. It is the terrible truth of being a parent: The day comes when we have to send our very hearts out into the world, unprotected.

That day came while I was working on my story. They are out in the world now, in cities so far away I have to board a plane to see them. I try not to do it too often. They don’t want my protection, any more than I wanted my husband’s protection after I was raped.

They are smart and funny. I look at them with amazement and pride, most of all because they are kind to everyone. My son works as a lawyer for the homeless and for poor tenants facing evictions. My daughter studied psychology and plans to train to be a therapist.

They have some of me in them, and though I can disappear for hours into deep pools of guilt over some of what I passed on, they don’t seem to mind.

They had veto power over the story that ran in
The Plain Dealer
in May of 2008, and over this book. They did not ask for any changes. My daughter cries when we talk about the rape. My son doesn’t like to talk about it.

I know now that while I was focused so intensely on protecting them, my children were also protecting me, all those years. They tethered me to all that is hopeful. They made me brave. They held me to this life until I was ready to come back to myself.

Sitting there in Eldred Theater, I looked back up into the fly space. What happened to me in 1984, when I floated up there, has a name: disassociation. It’s a well-known psychological term, though I didn’t know it back then. Disassociation is how our psyches protect us from experiencing trauma we can’t handle. It removes us from the event and gives the pain to someone else. That someone else is us, floating somewhere above.

She was up there. She was always up there, watching me, removing me from my life. She helped me push away the pain I was afraid to experience but needed to experience. The Buddhists’ First Noble Truth says: Life is suffering. They teach that we live fully only when we stop pushing the pain away and accept that suffering is part of life.

I looked up again. I’m OK, I told her. You can come back now.