I Will Find You (7 page)

When we get home from police headquarters, I know it’s time to tell my mother and sisters. Past time. I have invented reasons not to do it, but the reasons no longer apply. I sit on our bed and pick up the phone. I put it down. I do this over and over, unable to call my mother. I want to protect her from this news. I worry that she won’t be able to bear it, hearing what has happened to me, her middle daughter. I worry that she will cry or scream, and that I won’t be able to bear that.

“I was raped.” Why is it so hard to say these three words? They are simple, declarative. But I can’t do it. The words will always burn in my throat.

It would have helped to know, back then, that this is how almost all rape victims feel. It would have helped to know that we shared a silence as ancient as the Greek myth of Philomela,
who was raped by her brother-in-law Tereus. When it was over, Philomela, a virgin, vowed she would tell everyone what he had done, then changed her mind and begged Tereus to kill her.

As Ovid told the story in
Metamorphosis
:

I didn’t know the myth before I was raped, but I had read Philomela’s story without realizing it. It has inspired countless variations. Shakespeare revived it in his bloodiest, most savage play,
Titus Andronicus
, with the gang rape and mutilation of Lavinia. T. S. Eliot devotes a stanza to it in
The Waste Land
. In
The World According to Garp
, John Irving created the Ellen James Society, a group of women who voluntarily cut out their own tongues in solidarity with the eleven-year-old Ellen James, who was raped and then mutilated into silence.

In the myth, Tereus holds Philomela hostage in a house in the forest and tells her sister, Procne—his wife—that she is dead. The myth ends with the muted Philomela figuring out how to break her silence: She weaves her story into a tapestry and sends it by secret messenger to Procne. When Procne sees what her husband has done, she rescues Philomela and then
proceeds to lose her mind. She kills their son, cuts him up, cooks him, and serves him to Tereus. When the meal is finished, she tells her husband what—or rather, who—he has just eaten.

With this revelation, Tereus goes mad and tries to kill both Procne and Philomela, but the gods intervene and change them into birds. Procne becomes a swallow and Philomela becomes a nightingale. The sisters fly off together.

I find refuge in my sister, too. After deciding I can’t call my mother, I call Nancy, the person I followed and adored and copied from the time I could toddle after her, calling, “Wait for me,” through our years at the University of Minnesota, which I chose because she was going there. Nancy and our little sister, Claire, are both living in New York, Nancy in Brooklyn and Claire on the Lower East Side.

When Nancy answers the phone, I open with a warning. “I have something bad to tell you,” I say.

I don’t say, “Are you sitting down?” but even so I feel as though I’m following a script. I’m observing myself again, detached from what I’m doing, speaking with a calm that Nancy will always remember. She waits for me to tell her something has happened to our mother. I say the three words. “I was raped.”

Without a pause, Nancy starts crying. “Oh, Jo, oh no. Oh, Jo.” She keens. “Oh, Jo, poor Jo.”

I don’t cry with her. I wait and watch and listen from above.

When she quiets, I tell her how it happened. She breaks in with “Oh, Jo” at different points. The scissors. The blood. I don’t go into detail about the rape itself. I don’t want to cause her more pain.

“I need for you to do something for me,” I say.

“What? You want me to get on a plane and come to Cleveland?”

I do. I realize at that moment that I really, really want Nancy there. But first I want something bigger.

“I need you to tell Mom. I can’t do it.”

Nancy doesn’t understand why I can’t, but she says she’ll take care of it. I lie down on the bed and wait.

Ten minutes later, the phone rings. My mother is not crying.

“It’s OK, Jo, it’s OK,” she says. “Nancy told me what happened. You don’t have to tell me.”

On the phone, she is the exact opposite of what I expected. But I should have known. After all, she is the mother who put her hand on my forehead when I had a fever, the mother who brought me dry toast and ginger ale on a tray when I was sick, the mother who let me stay home from school even when I wasn’t sick, because she could see I had a reason.

On the phone, she becomes what she was all along. She is my mother, but she is also a nurse. Through the decades, while we kids were growing up, she worked just about every job a nurse could have. When we were really little, and they really needed the money, my dad worked at newspapers during the day and she worked night duty at hospitals as a floor nurse. When we were teenagers, she was a rehab center nurse
who came home with tales of boys who had been paralyzed in motorcycle accidents, stories she told not just because she wanted to scare us away from motorcycles, which she did, but because she came home still thinking about those poor boys. She was a junior high school nurse for as long as she could stand dealing with hyperactive thirteen-year-old boys. She was a Head Start nurse for preschoolers, teaching their teenage moms how to be mothers. She was a visiting nurse, an HMO nurse, and finally, after going back to college when we were in high school, a certified nurse practitioner who saw patients on her own and worked alongside doctors, not for them.

She had learned, so deep was it in her bones, how to handle a crisis. She knew how to do what I had just learned: how to detach herself and get on with the job.

Now, on the phone, she’s in professional mode. She tells me she’s going to make plane reservations for me to come home, as soon as the police will let me go. I can stay there as long as I need her. “Everything will be OK,” she keeps saying, as much for herself as for me.

When we hang up, I lie back and fall asleep. My husband lies beside me, not touching. An hour or so later, the phone wakes us up.

My mother.

“What happened to the people you were supposed to meet at the theater?” she asks.

“They left. The building was open, though, so I went in.”

“No one locked up?”

“No.”

“Sue ’em,” she says. “Sue the pants off them.”

Her anger flattens me. A lawsuit won’t help me deal with this. I want it to just go away, not get bigger and more complicated.

“I can’t do that,” I say. “It wasn’t their fault. I was late. They got tired of waiting for me. It was my fault.”

My mom doesn’t say anything. I don’t say anything. Neither of us knows yet what you should say when rape victims blame themselves: “It was not your fault.”

It was not your fault, even if you were drunk, even if you were wearing a low-cut minidress, even if you were out walking alone at night, even if you were on a date with the rapist and kind of liked him but didn’t want to have sex with him.

Even if you were late. It was not your fault.

But in my self-lacerating mind, that’s true only for all the other victims and survivors, not for me. I was late, I was not paying attention, I was stupid, I walked into the theater. It was my fault.

As the days and weeks pass, my mother keeps urging me to sue the university and the theater group and anyone who was on the premises when they left the building wide open.

“They’re responsible for this,” she says almost every time we talk. “They need to know they made a big mistake.”

She needs a focus for her anger, and since David Francis is in jail, her gaze has landed on the people she thinks abandoned me to him. But when she keeps bringing it up, and I keep saying I don’t want to do it, all I can see is that she doesn’t know me, her daughter. She doesn’t know what I need or want. I become the thirteen-year-old who cried all day one Christmas when my mother gave Nancy the coolest suede jacket ever, the color of a fawn, and gave me a wool suit. It was brown tweed, it had
a skirt that went below my knees, and it spoke to me. It said: “Your mom hopes you’ll consider a career in secretarial work.” A suit for a thirteen-year-old. A suit that told me she didn’t know me at all. And now here she is, trying to get me into another.

If not a lawsuit, what do I need? I need a sensory deprivation tank guarded by large men with guns. That alone will give me the two things I yearn for: withdrawal from the world, and safety. But I don’t know what my mother or my husband can do for me, any more than they know. And if I did, I wouldn’t be able to ask for it anyway.

The truth is, I know a lawsuit will lead to a trial, and a trial will lead to me on the stand, testifying to my own foolish, blind actions while expensive lawyers hired by the university and their insurance companies take aim and fire everything they’ve got at me.

Not long after this conversation, I go to Minnesota. Nancy goes, too. We shop. We eat. We sit around. I do not contact any of my old friends. I live like a convalescent at a sanitarium, overseen by my mother the nurse. Not long ago, I found a photograph from that week: My mother, my sister, and I are in my mother’s backyard. I look vacant and completely spent, like I’ve recently undergone electroshock therapy. My mother and my sister have their arms around me.

By the time I get back to Cleveland, I’m more exhausted than when I left. I get into bed, curl into a fetal position, and stay there.

Only later does it occur to me that after fleeing my mother and her lawsuit, I try to re-create a place I cannot possibly remember: I want to be back inside my mother’s womb.

As I went through the prosecutor’s files in 2007, I came upon a subpoena, addressed to me, ordering me to an “on-site parole hearing regarding David Francis.” The site was within the Cuyahoga County jail.

As I read the subpoena, I felt again the old terror lighting up my nerves. To this day, I don’t know why that hearing had been necessary.

Up to that point in my career, I had never reported on crime. I had never been inside a jail or prison. I had never been in a courtroom. I had never spoken to a cop, except through my car window as I handed over my license and registration. I had never met a parole officer.

I had seen this country’s justice system only in the abstract, from a safe distance. I thought I knew how it worked from news accounts and the little I learned in high school and college classes. I thought it was just, at least most of the time. This was before President George H.W. Bush’s escalation of the War
on Drugs in 1989 led to the mass incarceration of black men, before DNA testing that began in 1989 exonerated more than three hundred wrongly convicted prisoners, 70 percent of them minority. Even so, I find my ignorance back then breathtaking.

In the summer and fall of 1984, I saw the system up close, though not entirely from the inside. I saw how the game is rigged against defendants. I saw how so many defendants are poor, and black. I saw how easily mistakes can be made, and how unreliable eyewitness testimony is. I understood how the intricate and often impenetrable network of police, prosecutors, courts, parole officers, even defense lawyers—all of whom work together frequently—makes outsiders not only of the defendants but of the victims, too.

Six days after the lineup, David Francis’s parole officer calls. He tells me what I already knew: Francis was let out of an Ohio prison on parole on July 2, a week before he raped me.

The parole officer tells me that I have to testify in a parole revocation hearing. He can send someone to my house with a subpoena, he says, but it would be easier and faster if he could just give it to me when I come downtown to the county jail. The hearing is scheduled for July 24 at 1:00 p.m., but he’d like me to get there twenty minutes early.

He goes through his explanation so quickly it takes me a minute to catch on to the main thing he’s telling me: It’s a parole revocation hearing.

“I don’t understand,” I say. “He’s already locked up, so why do you need to revoke his parole now?” As I ask him this, my anxiety flutters, ready to take wing. “I mean, they’re keeping him locked up, right? They aren’t getting ready to let him go, are they?”

No, no, the guy says. He explains the need for the hearing, which has something to do with the fact that Francis has only been arrested for this new crime, not convicted. If he were convicted, it would be an automatic parole violation; a mere arrest demands a hearing and a witness statement.

I still don’t understand. “Why can’t they just wait for the trial and conviction? What’s the rush?”

The parole officer tries again, but he might as well be speaking to me in another language. He is, I will realize in 2007, when I try to read the Ohio Revised Code and Ohio Administrative Code to figure it out. The codes and laws appear to have been encrypted by the Enigma machine, impossible to decipher for anyone who has not been to Bletchley Park or law school. The maze of rules keeps turning you in different directions and leading you into dead ends.

As the parole guy and I go another few rounds, I begin to think he agrees with me. He doesn’t say so, but he finally sighs and says, “Look. It’s just the law.”

He winds up the conversation fast, telling me that the hearing will take place in lockup, inside the county jail. Oh, and one more thing: I can’t bring my husband with me. That’s the law, too. He’ll see me on the 24th.

I hang up, stunned. I have to go into the jail and sit in a room with the man who raped me, with only a parole officer between us? I decide I can’t. I won’t. I have not been served with a subpoena that forces me to appear, I have only been called. What can they do if I don’t show up? Let him go? It seems unlikely.

My husband isn’t stunned when I tell him. He’s furious. He calls the parole officer, who tells him I can bring my lawyer with me. He forgot to mention that to me.

One problem: I don’t have a lawyer, and we can’t afford to hire one.

The prosecutor can’t help me. “My” rape case isn’t mine at all—it’s the state’s, as in
The State of Ohio v. David Francis
. The prosecutor works for the people of Ohio. I am just a witness.

My husband calls the Cleveland Rape Crisis Center to see if they have a staff lawyer. They tell him they don’t, but they do have an intern from the Case Western law school who might be able to help.

On the day of the hearing, we meet Justine, the law student, outside the county jail, which is in the same complex as the police department and the Justice Center. We leave my husband in the waiting area and go through the metal detectors and the pat-down. Inside, the parole officer introduces himself and leads us to the jail’s common area, where the inmates usually eat. They still do, but now bunks line the walls, too. “They’re overbooked,” he jokes.

Our entrance relieves the boredom of the dozens of inmates, who now have something to do: stare at Justine and me. The room goes quiet; the air feels charged with a furious
energy. I shrink into Justine’s side and keep my head down as we walk past the staring men and toward my rapist.

The guards, standing in a cluster near the door, ignore it all and continue their conversation. The parole officer leads us to a small, glass-walled room, where the inmates can still watch us. Which they do, intently.

After we sit at a small table, the parole officer opens a file folder and looks through printed forms. When two guards bring David Francis in, Justine grabs my hand under the table and squeezes it.

Perhaps there is a defense lawyer. Perhaps there is a court reporter transcribing everything. I will not remember these details in the years to come. I remember only that David Francis takes the chair directly opposite me, slouches until he is almost parallel to the floor, rests his cuffed hands on the table, and fixes me with a steady gaze that he will hold for the entire hearing. I avoid eye contact, but I can feel his eyes on me.

The parole officer asks me to tell what happened on the afternoon of July 9, 1984. By now I am visibly shaking. Across the table, Francis makes derisive, clicking sounds while I talk. In my peripheral vision, I see him sit up straight when I mention that he kept losing his erection and that he never climaxed. He makes a sound that draws my eyes to his face. When he’s sure I’m watching, he purses his lips into a kiss. Justine tightens her grip on my hand. Beyond the glass, the inmates enjoy the unexpected show.

This is my first official testimony. Giving it, I do not feel I now have the upper hand with David Francis. I do not feel safe. This hearing, this stupid, stupid hearing, breaks me into
pieces I’m not sure I can put back together. I’m not sure I can testify anymore.

But I have to. In early August, I testify to the grand jury. David Francis is not present. On August 17, the jury indicts him on eighteen counts of rape, kidnapping, felonious assault, attempted rape, gross sexual imposition, and aggravated robbery, each count with a violence specification. At his arraignment, he pleads not guilty. The judge sets bail at $150,000.

We will go to trial in October. I will testify again.