I Will Find You by Joanna Connors

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 hada 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.