LITMIR.BIZ

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did, too, feeling a reckless thrill whenever a car pulled over and the passenger door opened and we ran to it, not knowing who would be sitting in the driver’s seat. I walked alone in the dark, everywhere, breaking the rule girls learn early in life from the Grimm Brothers: Never venture into the dark forest alone. At sixteen, I decided that rule did not apply to me. If a man could do it, then I should be able to do it, too.

      What happened to that headstrong girl? Whenever I thought about her, I felt a wave of melancholy. I missed her.

      Now I was afraid of sitting in a movie theater. Since I was by that time the film critic for my paper, this made my job complicated. When I went to a screening alone, which happened fairly often in a one-newspaper town, I sat with all my muscles clenched, struggling to focus on the movie. I finally asked the theater managers to lock the doors on me, which they did, though it must have broken fire department regulations. With this and countless other silly but imperative solutions, I organized my life to avoid risk.

      I also became practiced at avoiding everything to do with the rape. After it was all over, after I had told the police and the doctors and the prosecutor and judge and jury, after they’d sent the rapist to prison for a long time, I stopped talking about it. I took what had happened and buried it inside myself, as deep as I could. I didn’t tell my friends. I didn’t tell my two children when they were old enough to hear it. I didn’t talk about it anymore with my husband or sisters or mother. I told them, and myself, that I was fine. Fine! Just fine.

      But here’s the thing I discovered: I might have buried this story, but it was not dead. I had buried it alive, and it grew in that deep place I put it, like a vine from some mutant seed, all twisted and ugly and tenacious as kudzu. As it grew, it strangled a lot of other stuff in me that should have been growing. It killed my courage and joy. It killed my trust in the world.

      Worse, the vine reached out to entangle my children. When I was raped, I was married but I did not have children yet. My son was born a year and a half after the rape, my daughter a couple of years after that. But even though they were not alive when it happened, research shows that they inherited my rape and the terror that came with it. They lived in its twisted grip with me.

      I was always waiting for something terrible to happen to them. I imagined those terrible things in documentary detail. Car accidents. Kidnappers. Pedophiles. Murderers. They filled my brain like the inventory in a torture chamber. When Eric Clapton’s “Tears in Heaven” came out and I read the backstory—he wrote it for his four-year-old son, who fell to his death from an apartment window—the song became the inner sound track to my days. I imagined these things and rehearsed my grief, which always ended the same way: I would not be able to go on.

      I would not write a beautiful song about them. I would not make art or sense out of their death. I would jump out of the window right after them.

      I knew all parents worry about safety. The minute they are born, our children make us all hostages to fortune. But these parents considered the dangers in the world and figured out ways to avoid them. They baby-proofed their kitchens and medicine cabinets; they kept their eye on their children when they played outside and made sure they wore helmets when they learned to ride a bicycle.

      I was not one of those reasonable parents. I baby-proofed our entire lives, putting locks on everything, including the children themselves.

      I hovered and fretted over them nonstop, zooming to red alert if I heard a random shriek when they played in the backyard. When they went for a sleepover at a friend’s house, I stayed awake all night, waiting for the emergency call from the hospital.

      When I returned to work six months after my son was born, we hired a babysitter, an affectionate middle-aged woman with a musical voice and a lap like a pillow. She made our baby son giggle when she arrived each morning.

      I had checked her references, but, based on nothing, I felt uneasy about her. At work, I worried about what she might do to my son. This was before nanny cams, but if they had existed I would have mounted one in every corner of the house.

      I asked my husband, who was then a police reporter at the paper, to do a criminal-records check on her. In most states it’s easy to access these public records now, online, but in 1985 it involved an in-person visit to the Clerk of Courts.

      When he turned up nothing, I was not reassured. One night I followed her home and parked on the street, watching her apartment windows like a cop on a stakeout. Then I went to see her boss at the nearby mall, where she worked every Saturday and Sunday night, cleaning after the stores closed. He refused to tell me anything about her, even when I started crying. I left, hating him, and the next day I let her go. I couldn’t get over my fear that she would hurt my son.

      I started working at home, where I could keep an eye on the new babysitter we hired. A friend had recommended her. I began to nurture suspicions about her, too.

      My dark thoughts spread. For a time, I even imagined my husband might be abusing our son. I had no evidence of this, none at all. My husband loved our son more than he loved me, but it didn’t matter that I had no reason to suspect him. I hated leaving him alone with my baby. Once I left to do errands and returned ten minutes later, much sooner than I’d said I would, thinking I would catch him in the act. They were outside, sitting on the grass, examining an earthworm.

      I was aware that this was not normal. I suspected that I was close to being delusional. Even so, I could not turn it off. I couldn’t tell anyone about these fears, either. I knew it would make me look crazy—I was sane enough to see that, at least.

      So I turned my life into performance art. I acted normal, or as normal as I could manage, all the while living on my secret island of fear. As time went on, the list of my fears continued to grow. I was afraid of flying. Afraid of driving. Afraid of riding in a car while someone else drove. Afraid of driving over bridges. Afraid of elevators. Afraid of enclosed spaces. Afraid of the dark. Afraid of going into crowds. Afraid of being alone. Afraid, most of all, to let my children out of my sight.

      From the outside, my performance worked. I looked and acted like most other mothers. Only I knew that my entire body vibrated with dread, poised to flee when necessary.

      I suppose it’s lucky I realized I was on a quest only when it was almost over.

      It began on another college campus, twenty-one years after my rape. It was 2005, a time when the world seemed to be collapsing. That summer, terrorists had attacked three trains and a bus in London, murdering fifty-two people and injuring seven hundred. A series of terrorist bombs in Bali killed twenty-six people. In the United States, Hurricane Katrina hit in August, leading to the deaths of almost two thousand people in the aftermath of flooding and violence, and destroying much of New Orleans, the Gulf Coast, and Americans’ sense of trust in the fairness of our government. I was feeling, along with the rest of the country, a new form of anxiety about the future. It felt like we were all standing on a precipice.

      That fall, my son left for his second year of college and my daughter started her last year of high school.

      The schools had been prepping the kids since third grade for college admissions, and when October came, it was time for her Big College Tour—a ritual that puts teenagers and their parents in a car together for several days, where they bond over the shared conviction that it really is time for the teenager to go away from home for a while.

      We were on Day Two, at college number three or four. Zoë was in that senior-year stage where half the time she was so impatient and annoyed with me that I couldn’t wait for her to leave and take her sighs and silences with her, and half the time she was the sweet, funny little girl who used to squiggle down under the covers with me at night, or play Dolphin in the Pool. In those games, I was her trainer, feeding her pretend fish for each somersault she did below the surface, her little body slipping like mercury through the water.

      Sweet Zoë was on this trip, keeping me laughing and choosing all the CDs as we drove, a heavy rotation of Modest Mouse’s CD, Good News for People Who Love Bad News. Appropriate. Zoë’s good mood might have had something to do with the three days she was taking off from school. Still, I was surprised that she was walking with me on the campus tours rather

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