I Will Find You Read Online Free

slippery highway. The car felt like a cozy refuge as we drove through the open farmland and fog-shrouded valleys. South of Columbus, we came to the black billboard that looms over the highway going south, announcing “HELL IS REAL” in giant white letters. On the return highway north, two identical black billboards list the Ten Commandments, five on each billboard.
    The “HELL” sign lets you know you’re close to Cincinnati.
    It was time.
    How did I put it? Not long ago, I asked Zoë what she remembered of that day.
    “You said, ‘I have something I want to tell you,’” she told me. “You kind of scared me. I thought maybe you were going to say Grammy had died, or you and Dad were getting divorced.”
    After that she didn’t remember, and I didn’t, either. I probably said an awkward and pause-filled version of, “I was raped when I was thirty years old, on a college campus, and it scares me that you’re going to college.” That’s what I know I felt: I had to tell her what had happened to me as a kind of magical insurance policy, so it would never happen to her.
    We both remember that she started crying, almost instantly. Not the vocal kind of crying, but the kind she inherited from me, silent and stricken, our chins trembling and our eyes filling with tears until they spill over and run down our cheeks.
    I told her the story I had told so often in the hours and days after the rape: I was working, I was late for an interview, the building was empty, the guy was there, he cut me on the throat. I didn’t talk about what he did to me after that.
    I remember clearly one thing she said. “Now I see why you and Dad were so overprotective. Especially Dad.”
    This was news to me. I thought I was the one driving them crazy with my hovering. I was so wrapped up in my fears, I hadn’t even noticed that my husband was tied up in his own knots of worry and fear over our children.
    “Really?” I said, looking over at her.
    “Sometimes it feels like you guys are stalking me,” she said.
    I told Dan a few months later, when I picked him up for summer break. This time I drove to Cincinnati alone, thinking the whole way about how and why he had come into the world.
    It occurred to me that he was a child born out of my fear.
    The night I was raped, twenty-one years before, my husband took me home from the hospital to a bare house, a center-hall colonial built in 1927 in Shaker Heights. We had just moved into it, our first house after years of apartments, and we had no furniture for three of the four bedrooms, let alone the two extra bedrooms on the third floor. Our parents joked that we had to do something to fill all those rooms up. Meaning children.
    But I wasn’t sure I wanted children, and the “not-sure” teetered toward “never.” I hated babysitting when I was a teenager. I avoided other people’s children at parties, and if someone forced a baby into my arms, it never failed to start wailing. Those twinges of yearning women call baby lust? I never felt them.
    Freud wrote that we cannot truly imagine our own death. “Whenever we try to do so we find that we survive ourselves as spectators,” he wrote. “At bottom, no one believes in his own death, which amounts to saying: In the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his immortality.”
    But I was no longer convinced. I had glimpsed my own death in a gloomy theater, in a smear of my own blood, and it changed everything. I lay awake through the nights, aching with the knowledge of what Harold Brodkey called “this wild darkness.” While my husband slept next to me, I startedthinking about what I wanted from this too-short life. I began to think about having a child. I hate the drugstore perfume of sentimentality, but one thought broke through my barricades: I could push back death by bringing life into my life.
    By the anniversary of the rape, I was pregnant. My son was born October 7, 1985, eleven days after his due date, no more ready for this