I Will Find You (11 page)

She says he left at about 4:30 to go pick up some shoes downtown. He was gone about an hour, she says, “because he come back at five.” He stayed at her place until 8:00. She knows this, she says, “because I asked him to go to the store, you know, to get me a
TV Guide
and get me a beer.”

The
TV Guide
will prove pivotal to this testimony.

I’m not in the courtroom, but I when I read the transcript later, I have a vision of Levenberg slowly stalking the young witness.

He knows something about her: She is on welfare and her boyfriend lives with her, and that makes her ineligible for the welfare. Levenberg has told my husband he’s going to bust her there on the stand and get her kicked off welfare. When I hear about his plan, I hate Levenberg even more. The tactic feels sleazy, like he’s cheating to win by taking advantage of her poverty. As it turns out, he doesn’t have to use his trump card.

He begins his cross-examination asking her where she lives, and who lives with her.

“Me and my son,” she says.

“No one else lives at that address?”

They go around that question a few times, with the witness maintaining that her old man lives in East Cleveland with his mother.

Then Levenberg gets lucky. He asks her on what date she last saw David Francis.

“July ninth,” she says, the date he raped me.

They discuss the shoes, and the
TV Guide
, and the beer. The witness explains that she asked Francis to get the
TV Guide
for her because her old man was over at a neighbor’s, getting a skillet.

“You don’t remember what day of the week that was, do you?” Levenberg asks.

They say lawyers should never ask questions without knowing what the witness will answer, but I think her answer surprises even the wily Levenberg.

“I think it was a weekend,” she says. “Yes, it had to be a weekend because he was going to get me a
TV Guide
, which was Friday. Right. Friday, that is when they come out.”

“And you needed a new
TV Guide
, right?”

“I get them every Friday.”

July 9 was a Monday.

The judge sends the jury to lunch. After they leave, the public defenders immediately ask for a bench conference.

“I just want the record to reflect this,” one of them tells the judge. “In my professional judgment and opinion, the testimony that was just elicited from this witness, and that which I intend to put on from the next witness, I can’t vouch for the credibility of these people at all. I am only putting them on because my client has instructed me to do so.”

The second alibi witness leaves the Justice Center and does not come back. David Francis does not testify. The defense rests its case.

In the closing arguments, which I am allowed to see in court, one of the defense lawyers drops the suggestion that the first time I saw the “DAVE” tattoo was when I saw David Francis in the lineup. Levenberg erupts at that one when his turn comes: “Unless I missed something here entirely, that information about the tattoo was provided to the police department on July ninth, 1984!”

When the jury files out, Levenberg tells us not to worry, that it’s done, we won. I worry for the entire hour the jury deliberates. Their verdict: Guilty on all eighteen counts.

The next day, Friday, October 26, Judge Hanna sentences Francis. I sit in the courtroom between my husband and my mother, gripping their hands. Francis clicks his tongue once or twice and refuses to speak when the judge gives him the opportunity, but instructs his lawyer to say
that he is innocent and he will appeal. Of course he will. This will never be over.

The judge looks at me for several moments, and then turns to Francis.

“Those of us who believe in God and try to live by God’s law are also taught to try to see the Lord in all of his creatures,” he says. “In this position, that is getting increasingly harder. Today with you, Mr. Francis, it is nearly impossible. It is an evil and vile thing you did. Fortunately for her, and unfortunately for you, you picked on a woman who had the courage to fight back and stand up to you and prosecute you, so that at least she has spared the July tenth victim that you were looking for, and all of the other victims that you may have looked for, because there will be none. She prosecuted you, the jury convicted you, and for my part, sir, I shall bury you in the bowels of our worst prison for as long as I can.”

He sentences Francis to thirty to seventy-five years. “I hope I am giving you a life sentence,” Hanna says, “because that is what you deserve. And if I am not here in twenty years when you go before the board, these words will be. They will be part of your file. That is all.”

I did not look at David Francis after the judge spoke. But now I know he looked at me. When I went through the prosecutor’s files in 2007, I found a report from the sheriff’s deputies who guarded him during the trial. It was just one page, unmarked and loose in the stack of papers, like an afterthought.

“He stood and looked in the direction of the victim and said, ‘Yeah. Go ahead and celebrate. Pass out cigars,’” the report read.

He must have mumbled; I didn’t hear him. The deputies told him to sit down.

“Some moments later,” they reported, “the defendant, David Francis, again turned around to face the victim and stated, ‘I’m gonna fuck you up.’”

David Francis was true to his word. He did fuck me up. Not that I recognized it. I thought it was all over, that he was gone for life.

I was determined not to play the self-pitying victim, that despised female role that the writer Leslie Jamison describes as “The Girl Who Cried Pain,” so I wore the costume of a woman who had never been a victim, never been raped. I had strength and resilience. I was Woman. Hear me roar.

If I got depressed sometimes, well, didn’t everybody?

I had a pattern. One day, for no reason I could ever discern, I would awake filled with foreboding. A gloom would slip over my spirits—just a shadow at first, easy to deny. Over the next few days, the shadow would grow deeper. I would carry on,
acting as though all was well. But all was not well. I would feel the way I felt as a child when I walked home from a friend’s house at dinnertime, the sky turning dark. I’d look into the windows of the houses I passed, catching glimpses of mothers cutting onions or stirring something on the stove, kids doing their homework at the kitchen table, fathers watching the news in the living room. From the outside, those lighted windows looked like pure happiness, yet they brought on a feeling I couldn’t name until much later. Melancholy.

When I admitted to myself that I was depressed, again, I would find a therapist, go for three or four sessions, talk about my childhood and my marriage and my stressful job but gloss over the rape—“I got over it,” I insisted—and then abruptly stop going when the therapists suggested otherwise. When they wanted to prescribe antidepressants, I refused. They scared me.

In between therapy attempts, I pushed against the depressions with restless activity. I couldn’t curl up in bed and give in to them: I had two children, I had a job with daily deadlines, we owned a house that always needed something repaired, usually something expensive. I drove to doctors’ appointments and hockey practices and dance classes. I attended school parents’ nights and volunteered in my children’s preschool and elementary school classes. Once a month, I prepared healthy afternoon snacks for those classes. I bathed my children in oatmeal when they had chicken pox. I bought poster board and felt markers for school projects, and helped my son set flame-resistant baby clothes on fire for a science fair experiment. I decided to completely gut and renovate my kitchen. I kept myself so busy with ordinary life and insane home improvement projects, I
didn’t have time to resolve anything about David Francis for the next two decades.

He and the rape remained where I left them, buried and secret, until the next depression arrived, the next three sessions with the next therapist, the next time I had to tell the story to someone new.

After the trial, I went to the second therapist in my string of therapists. This therapist saw both my husband and me, but separately, and had me take several psychological tests. The only one I remember clearly was the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, a test that makes you answer “true” or “false” to statements like, “I am very seldom troubled by constipation” and “Once in a while I think of things too bad to talk about.” When I came to that one, I wanted to write in: “Only once in a while?”

As a student at the University of Minnesota, where the MMPI was developed in the late 1930s, I was automatically part of the ongoing control group and had to take it fairly often, often enough to remember that it focuses on the frequency, consistency, and color of one’s poop with the fervor of a toddler during potty training, though without the giggles.

The therapist wrote up a five-page report on the tests and her impressions, which I discovered not too long ago in an old box of files in my attic.

“Shortly after the rape occurred,” she wrote, “Ms. Connors stated that she felt she had completely lost control of her life.
She experienced ringing in her ears, dizziness, and an inability to concentrate on her work. Further, she panicked when she had to be alone, and she often retreated from her husband and spent much time curled up in a fetal position.”

I don’t remember the ringing-in-the-ears part, or the dizziness, but the difficulty concentrating on my work—or on anything else—endured. Part of this undoubtedly came from having children, who want your attention all the time, and part from the steady encroachment of technology, which also wants your attention all the time. But it started with David Francis.

After seeing my husband, the therapist wrote that he said my personality had radically changed. “The Joanna who went into that theater is not the one who came out,” he told her. He said he felt he had lost his wife.

The therapist quotes me saying, “I just felt like I would never be happy again. I wasn’t considering suicide or anything, which is what everyone was trying to intimate very subtly.” Who was “everyone”? I’m not sure. My husband? My family?

Maybe I was the one doing the hinting, subconsciously. Because I did think about suicide, even though I told no one. I lied to that therapist and all the therapists who would follow over the years.

They asked about it right away, usually framing it as “Are you thinking of hurting yourself?” For some reason, the word “suicide” was taboo. I always said no. Doesn’t just about everyone say no? How many people would be committed to institutions right now if we all gave the honest answer? Which was, for me and probably for a lot of other people: “Sometimes, yes. Sometimes I do think about it.”

When I thought about suicide, I was taking my part in the retelling of an old story. Livy, in his massive
The History of Rome
, recounts the story of Lucretia, a noblewoman of the sixth century B.C. who was known for her great virtue.

Lucretia was married to a soldier who liked to brag about his wife. Around about 510 B.C., he told some of his fellow soldiers that his wife’s virtue was purer than any other wife’s in Rome. With this challenge laid down, the men rode to Rome to check her out. There, they spied upon Lucretia and her handmaidens spinning wool. The sight of Lucretia was too much for Sextus Tarquinius, a soldier and the son of the tyrannical seventh king of Rome, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus. A few days later, Sextus snuck back to Lucretia’s house and threatened to kill her if she did not succumb to him.

When the rape ended, Lucretia told her husband and father what happened, fell to her knees, cried for vengeance, and plunged a dagger into her heart. Legend, or history, says that her rape and suicide sparked a revolt against the tyrant king, which led to the creation of the Roman Republic.

I wasn’t thinking about suicide, and I was thinking about it. The way I put it to myself was: I can see why other people do it. I can imagine what a relief it would be. That’s what suicide seemed to me: a relief. No more fretting. No more waking up with my heart thumping so high in my chest it seemed to have migrated to my throat. No more nightmares, with DAVE slipping into my room and putting his hand over my face. No more leaden days in bed, listening to the clock ticking the seconds to evening.

With one therapist, I ventured to go beyond my standard “no” and say that I could see why other people commit suicide.
She asked if I had a plan, and I said, “No. No, of course not.” Again, doesn’t everyone say that, even—especially—the ones who really do have a plan?

But I did think about how I would do it. Sort of.

I thought about it mostly when I swam. I went to the pool at Cleveland State University almost every day, escaping the newsroom for an hour to be alone in the water. I had been swimming laps for years so I wouldn’t get fat, but now swimming did something else for me. It offered a retreat from the world that felt almost sacramental.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that so many religious rituals involve water. Christians wade into rivers for baptism, Catholics dip their fingers into holy water as they enter the church, Jews go to the
mikvah
for purifying baths, Muslims wash before the five daily prayers, Hindus go to the sacred Ganges. Immersing yourself in water is like praying. It’s a surrender, an elemental act that is the closest we humans can get to returning to where we started, curled up in our watery maternal bath, submerged in both safety and oblivion.

Oblivion is what I was after. I always entered the pool at the deep, deep end, where the diving towers loomed above the deck, three levels of concrete as high as a circus trapeze platform. I never jumped into the pool. I eased myself in from the side, slowly, feet, ankles, legs, knees before finally letting go, dropping like a stone into the water. At first I swam fast to warm up, then I eased back a little, my strokes matching the rhythm of my breathing, the only sound the pool pump as it whooshed in and out, in and out, like a heartbeat, surrounding me, supporting me.

I could let go
, I thought. Just sink down to the bottom of the deep end, drown myself in relief.

I didn’t think further than that, in my delusional fantasy of escape. Drowning oneself isn’t so easily accomplished, in the absence of injury or weights. The body overrules the mind and claws toward the surface, determined to save itself. Virginia Woolf had thought it through when she put rocks in her pockets to stay down.

The therapist prescribed an antidepressant. This was before Prozac came along, and I was afraid of the side effects of the early antidepressants doctors were giving patients. I didn’t fill the prescription, I stopped seeing that therapist, and I never told another one that I understood the appeal of suicide.

With time, the thoughts went away on their own. Years later, I told my sister Nancy about my suicide ideations. “I guess I wasn’t serious, but I really thought about it a lot,” I said.

Nancy was the one who had to point out the flaw in my fantasy, a flaw so obvious it’s remarkable I had never thought of it myself.

“Jo,” she said, “I don’t think the lifeguards would have just sat there and watched you drown.”

Then, just like that, I began to pull my hair out.

I don’t remember when I started, or how, but I do remember that it quickly became a habit that was hard to break. Every day I vowed I would stop pulling my hair, and every day I would find myself in the middle of it. I would be reading, or
watching TV, and my fingers would begin to stroke my hair, combing through the thick locks, examining the different textures. I would carefully separate the wiry ones, select a strand and pull. It had to come out clean, not break off, and it was only satisfying if it hurt a little bit. The ritual, and maybe the pain, too, brought on a calming reverie. In an hour of reading, I often pulled hundreds of strands, dropping them on the floor beside me. Later, when I cleaned them up, the thick clump in my hand horrified me. But not enough to make me stop.

My hair has always been thick, so I thought the pulling was my humiliating little secret until the day my mother, who was visiting, stood over me at the dining room table and said, “Jo! You have a bald spot!”

I renewed my vows to stop. I gave myself stern talks and bought gloves to wear when I read. Nothing worked. When I realized I couldn’t control this new compulsion, I did some research and discovered that hair-pulling is common enough to have a name: trichotillomania. Psychologists aren’t entirely sure what causes it, but many believe it is a form of self-soothing stress relief related to depression, anxiety, and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

In an online search, I found a therapist who listed the compulsion as one of her areas of expertise. When I went to see her, though, I found myself too embarrassed to tell her why I was there. After she coaxed me into talking about it, and I heard myself describing the careful selection of each hair, the toying with it, the final tug, the whole ritual felt bizarre and sad.

We talked about my depression, my work anxieties, the panic I felt about my children, my extreme surveillance of
their lives. I did not think to bring up the rape until the second session.

“But I got over it right away,” I told her. “He went to prison, so I didn’t have anything to worry about, and I went back to work. I was OK.”

She was silent.

“And then I had the kids, so I was pretty busy,” I said.

Still silent.

“I tried not to think about it.”

She took my hand, something no therapist had ever done.

“I’m so sorry that happened to you,” she said. “And I have to tell you, I don’t think you got over it.”

Without any buildup or warning, I started crying. I clutched her hand and sobbed.

She went through the symptoms I had described—the hypervigilance, the insomnia, the emotional avoidance and withdrawal, the occasional flights into disassociation—all of which, she added, had appeared after a serious trauma: the rape.

“This adds up to post-traumatic stress disorder,” she said. “Your hair-pulling is another symptom. It’s strongly related to PTSD.”

I shook my head, still crying. “That can’t be true,” I managed to say. The PTSD I knew about happened to soldiers. To my mind, it belonged exclusively to combat veterans who lived through the waking nightmare of war, to men and women who had watched their friends die and expected the same for themselves. It belonged to heroes. It did not belong to a woman with a bald spot on her scalp.

The therapist suggested Prozac, which was fairly new at the time and thought to be helpful with obsessive-compulsive disorders. I had always said no to antidepressants, out of fear of the side effects. Weight gain. Sexual problems. Suicidal ideation. This time, though I was still reluctant, I agreed to take it. Anything to stop pulling my hair out.

Recent studies have suggested that Prozac and similar antidepressants do not help with trichotillomania. Perhaps not, perhaps it was purely placebo effect, but after a few months I stopped pulling out my hair, at least most of the time. I still fell into depressions, and my anxieties continued to flare, but the drug had the odd effect of flattening my moods much of the time. I wasn’t “better”—I just didn’t care as much about anything. My sister Nancy called it the “Que sera, sera” pill, which instantly put the sugary voice of Doris Day on a loop running through my brain: “Que sera, sera; What will be, will be; The future’s not ours to see; Que sera, sera.” I hear it every evening, when I shake the capsule into my hand and pop it into my mouth.