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