Janie Face to Face (11 page)

She thought of Reeve’s tiny rooms and his three pieces of furniture. The apartment would be hers, and she had always wanted to decorate her own place. Reeve would think anything she did was perfect. Was it right to get married just so she could paint a living room?

She was deafened by the clapping and calling and whistling of the crowd. Sort of a prewedding reception.

Reeve whispered, “I’ll get us two puppies. You can call them Denim and Lace.”

When she was in middle school, Janie had wanted to have twin daughters someday whom she would name Denim and Lace. Later on, of course, she knew that if she really did name her little girls that, they would sue her for bad parenting and call themselves Emily and Ashley instead.

Janie certainly wanted children. As many kids as her New Jersey family. But not now. She hadn’t figured out how to take care of herself yet, never mind babies. And puppies were babies. Perhaps Reeve wanted to marry her so that there would be somebody home to walk the dogs.

It made her laugh.

Laughter was good. It broke tears. “When exactly is ‘now’?” she asked.

“How about the Fourth of July? Because this deserves fireworks,” said Reeve.

“That’s six weeks. Do weddings come together in six weeks?”

“My sister’s wedding and my brother’s wedding each took a year of planning. Let’s not have that kind of wedding. Let’s just race down the aisle, say I do, and run off together.”

Janie and Sarah-Charlotte had passed many an hour planning their weddings, leafing through brides’ magazines and designing invitations. And now it was here, and Reeve just wanted to race down the aisle.

“That,” said Janie, “is the best wedding gift I will ever have. My guy just wants to race down the aisle and shout yes.”

They sealed it with a kiss.

“Ma’am?” said a guard courteously.

Janie had never been addressed as “ma’am.” Had she aged a couple of decades just because somebody proposed marriage?

“I don’t want to interrupt your whole future, ma’am,” he said, “but when does your plane leave? The other passengers are holding your place in line.”

Janie let go of Reeve. She backed into the line.

There were final cheers from the audience. Several people yelled, “Give me your cell phone number! I took pictures!”

“I took a video,” yelled somebody else. “Tell me where to send it.”

Janie never told anybody anything, but Reeve shouted out his cell phone number and everybody who had taken pictures on a cell phone got busy.

In a moment, Janie was holding out her driver’s license to be matched to her plane ticket. The license read
Jane Johnson
, which was not in fact her name. Had never been her name. It was just the name she used.

Who, exactly, will race down the aisle and say yes? Janie wondered. Somebody named Janie Johnson, who doesn’t exist? Or somebody named Jennie Spring, who was kidnapped, vanished, and has only partly emerged?

Now I never have to decide! I will be Mrs. Reeve Shields instead.

“Congratulations,” said another agent. “Take your shoes off, please.”

Janie was out of sight.

Reeve shook hands with total strangers and got hugs from women crying “That made my day!” and posed with tourists who wanted the picture for their scrapbooks.

He opened his iPhone. His witnesses vanished along with Janie, past the X-rays and into the airport, but their photos and videos were already his. Reeve opened the pictures of himself and Janie and watched the video.

It was good that he had these.

Without proof, Reeve would never believe that he had actually asked Janie Johnson to marry him, let alone that she had said yes.

He emailed the photographs and video to Janie. She was at the gate, she texted back, surrounded by well-wishers.

Reeve sat on a metal bench and emailed practically everybody whose number was stored on his phone. He didn’t write any messages. He attached the pictures and let them speak for themselves.

Then he uploaded everything to Facebook.

Then he watched his video again.

Janie was still saying yes.

In the trailer where she was living at the time, Hannah followed the milk carton story, glued to the news and talk shows on her little television. She even bought newspapers, especially ones with tall fat headlines, and scoured each article. They all referred to the Jennie/Janie as a “victim.” It was so annoying. The little girl had never protested! She had been perfectly happy to eat the ice cream Hannah had bought for her. Hannah was the victim! One afternoon taking a kid for a ride had led to a ruined life!

But the talk shows were stymied. Even though every professional and amateur psychologist out there had opinions, nobody in either family would give interviews. The New Jersey mother and father said things like “We’re confident everything will work out.” Hannah’s own mother and father were cowards; they turned their faces from the cameras and wore sunglasses.

Hannah could not get over that Frank and Miranda had believed her so completely. They knew she was a liar. They
knew she never bothered with the truth. And yet when it came to this huge thing—an actual living kid—they went and believed her. What was up with pretending to be the Jennie/Janie’s mother and father instead of her grandmother and grandfather? Maybe they wanted another shot at raising a daughter. Maybe they just wanted to fit in at the PTA meetings.

But one thing was for sure: two families were fighting to the finish to keep the Jennie/Janie. Nobody but the police wanted Hannah. In fact, in all the coverage of this case and the custody of the Jennie/Janie, the most important person was hardly ever mentioned.

Just about the only people who mentioned Hannah were the Spring parents. “Stop focusing on us,” they would tell the media. “Find Hannah Javensen.”

It was not healthy to want revenge like that. It was better to understand and forgive than to nurse anger. The whole thing had happened years ago. Hannah had hardly thought about it when it did happen and hardly thought about it after it happened, and anyway, that Jennie/Janie girl was fine.

Hannah came close to calling up some of those reporters. She yearned to tell everything. She would put an end to that “victim” nonsense. She would laugh in her parents’ faces and smirk at those Springs. But satisfying as that might be, it would end in jail. Hannah had done short stretches. She didn’t want a long one.

At the library, she tortured herself by gathering more details. You had to be careful at libraries. Librarians were always leaning over your shoulder. Other patrons liked to gab about
their projects, and the librarians followed everybody’s passion and scurried over with some new angle or book. You had to be especially careful when printing something out. They were bound to hover. Hannah had a fat folder with every photograph she had cut from a library newspaper and all the printouts from online sites. She didn’t want any snoopy librarian seeing it.

She liked to study those Spring people. There were so many of them, and they all had red hair. They looked like Easter rabbits dyed for the occasion. Some of them had curly red hair and some of them flat red hair and some of them redder red hair, but they were all healthy and freckled and proud of themselves.

Hannah had been too busy following the news to go to the post office. It had been fun, but now she had to get her money. She was not many blocks away from the branch when it occurred to her that her father would give her up. Now that the FBI knew that the Jennie/Janie wasn’t Frank and Miranda’s daughter and that their actual daughter had driven the Jennie/Janie up from New Jersey, Frank would tell! Frank would save himself, because he had always put himself first, and never Hannah.

Close to the post office, right this very minute, cops were probably hiding in parked cars, slumped behind steering wheels, sipping cold coffee, looking for a slim golden-haired young woman.

But she was smart and they were stupid. She swung away from the post office branch. She would have to go to Denver
for a while. But wait! Denver was very close. The police would think of looking in Denver!

She had no choice. She left the state. She was forced to travel a long way. She was forced to steal. The one good thing about all the publicity was that Hannah did not need a library or a television. She could just read the headlines in tabloids.

Nothing happened to her parents. No arrests. No trials.

The weeks became months. She was desperate for money. Shortly before the annual rent on the box was due, Hannah made her way back to Boulder, walked quietly into the post office lobby, and put her key in the lock of the little box—and there lay her checks.

Her father had not turned her in. He was still sending money. It wasn’t because he loved her. It was to buy her off.

She cashed her checks at her old bank and at last managed a nice long visit to a library. She had missed an important episode in the life of the Jennie/Janie. Through the courts, the Spring family had finally gotten their kid—but the Jennie/Janie left them and went back to Hannah’s parents.

Frank and Miranda
still
wanted these other people’s little girl more than they wanted their own little girl.

If only Hannah could make them suffer the way she had to suffer.

Brendan Spring’s first interview had been fun. He knew that Janie—always the star in her own personal soap opera—would hate it that he was talking to the media about her. Brendan rather enjoyed sticking it to her.

The second interview was difficult, seeing as Brendan had already told everything he knew. He wanted another free dinner, though, so he pretended he had more to say and was holding back.

The night before the third interview, Brendan had trouble sleeping. The long year of anger was over. He was just confused. He could not think of anything to do all day. He wasn’t interested in going to class. It hardly mattered now anyway. Classes were mainly over.

He wanted to pretend that he had never wanted success.

He wanted to pretend that success would come in the morning.

He wanted to have a better life handed to him.

A few hours before dawn, Brendan Spring realized that he was not the strong one in his family. He was the weak one.

When it was finally time to meet the interviewer at the restaurant, he remembered that Mom always said a good hot meal solved many problems.

Maybe she was right, but Brendan couldn’t eat. He didn’t know what he was doing here. He didn’t even know what he was doing on Earth.

For a while the researcher did the talking. Perhaps he couldn’t stand the silence. Perhaps he was hoping to jump-start Brendan. He told Brendan about the support checks Frank had been sending Hannah all these years.

Somebody in his family had done some serious talking. Brendan only knew about Frank’s checks because he knew there was some secret about that trip to Colorado that Janie and Reeve and Brian had taken. Brendan had pounded his twin until Brian gave it up. “How come we’re not telling the FBI?” Brendan had asked him.

“Because the one who’d be in trouble is Janie’s father, and she loves her father, and in fact, I like him too,” said Brian. “Frank is a good guy.”

“Good guys send money every month to kidnappers?” Brendan demanded.

His twin had been uncomfortable. They were always uncomfortable with Janie’s reality. But here in the restaurant, Brendan was really uncomfortable. This researcher knew more about the checks than Brendan did. Who had told him this stuff? Janie herself?

But Janie had practically hidden under the couch that day the FBI came and Dad kicked them out. Okay, sure, years had passed—she was older—but still. Brendan could not believe Janie had talked.

Stephen?

Stephen regarded the kidnapping and its effect on them as poison. Stephen wanted the kidnapper caught and imprisoned, but Stephen would not share intimate details with anybody about anything.

Jodie?

Brendan didn’t understand this sister. He could see taking a year off to hitchhike in Europe, although he personally didn’t care whether Europe even existed. But Jodie had gone to a third world island with no economy, fresh from earthquakes, waist-deep in rubble, where she was teaching English and tooth brushing. Yes, her cell phone worked and yes, she communicated all the time. You couldn’t tell she was living in another world. She could have dealt with this guy by texting or whatever. But Brendan doubted it. Jodie had been hurt more than any of them by Janie’s dislike of her real family. Jodie had made peace with their younger sister, but Brendan believed she was in Haiti partly to put serious distance between herself and the family. He did not think Jodie would tell a researcher anything.

Brian?

His twin was very bookish. Maybe he was in love with the idea of being part of a book. And for sure, Brian loved talking.

And yet, as the researcher moved into other topics and Brendan played with his food, he had a weird sense that the
researcher was quoting a woman. It just didn’t sound like a guy.

There was only one other female in the family.

Mom.

He tried to imagine her in a restaurant pouring out her heart to this man. What would be the point? Mom could talk forever about the kidnap and it wouldn’t change the fact that her kidnapped daughter preferred her kidnap family.

And Brendan himself could talk forever—although he’d never talked once—about being a failure, and that wouldn’t make him a success.

Brendan poured A1 sauce on his steak. Like everything else, it reminded him that he had not turned out to be A-one.

“How do you picture Hannah now?” asked the interviewer.

Brendan never thought of stuff like that, although the rest of his family was obsessed with the kidnapper. Hannah Javensen had been his age, and also in her second semester of freshman year, when she’d joined that cult.

Brendan felt a stab of sympathy for Hannah. She too had probably expected to be special. But no—she was just another invisible mediocrity. They probably offered her steak too, he thought. She probably dipped a bite in A1 sauce and knew she was actually C minus. And they probably said to her, “Come to us. We’re your new friends. In our group, you’ll be A-one. Which you deserve! Your parents were bad. They placed unfair demands on you. We will never do that.”