The Voice on the Radio (10 page)

“Okay, the pressure’s on!” cried Derek Himself into the mike. “The interest is up, the calls are in, you guys want another janie tonight. Well, we got a special coming up. A twofer. Along with a couple of janies, Reeve’s promised us a hannah.”

Reeve flexed his arms, took the mike, felt the sweep of pleasure rushing from mike to heart. He prepared his best speaking voice, his best timing, his most dramatic pauses.

Janie didn’t go politely into being Jennie
.

She went fighting and spitting
.

The courts said Janie had to be returned to her biological family. To New Jersey. Lawyers took her down the same interstate we took the day we skipped school. But this time, it wasn’t a road. It was a tunnel of fear. Janie was being poured down some evil tube, where she could land in any kind of nightmare, because she no longer had parents. She was mad at Hannah, she was mad at the world, but mostly she was mad at her birth parents. How dare they want her back, when she liked her old life better
?

Janie found out something while she was living in New Jersey. She didn’t have enough love to go around. Janie turned out to have a limited supply of love. Not enough to fit in her real mother and father. Who needed them? Janie had a great life. They were clutter
.

Reeve felt strangely less cluttered himself. It dawned on him that one reason he was so good at this was because he, too, had ended Janie’s terrible year with a heart full of confusion and pain. He, too, needed the release of confession.

Janie lay inside her body and turned into plastic. A Barbie doll.

Reeve.

She couldn’t pull her lips together to say his name, or any other name, or any other word.

Reeve
.

Jodie thought it was a good thing she was not armed. If she’d had a shotgun, or a machete, she would have used it on Reeve Shields.

On the air
, that Janie never wanted to be one of us, Jodie thought.

On the air
, that Janie went back to her other family because she loved them more.

It would kill my parents.

Jodie felt like a gun going off, friction, powder, explosives, hot as a cannon. She felt white-hot and violent.
I’ll kill Reeve
.

Was this how her brother Stephen had felt all those years? Had Stephen been filled with this rage and had to control it? Who could live with this much fury? It was burning up her thinking.

I hate Reeve’s filthy guts.

She had to find some degree of control before she attempted speech. Otherwise nothing but swear words and meaningless shrieks would come out of her throat. I’m the oldest, thought Jodie, I have to set an example.

I’ll kill him.

Derek introduced the hannah.

Reeve could feel his listeners. It was an incredible hot sensation. He
knew
they were there. Glued, hungry, thirsty.

He was just as glued. He was hungry and thirsty to hear himself.

Who, really, is Hannah? Of course everybody was being kind to her parents, and pretending she was a misguided lost soul…but she wasn’t. She snatched a baby girl and left that family to worry forever. And that’s evil. Hannah was evil
.

The families, even the Springs, did not consider Hannah evil. Pathetic. Wrong. Lost. But not evil.

Reeve had learned, however, as all shock jocks before him had learned, that the best topic is always evil.

If you don’t have evil, invent it.

If it isn’t exciting enough, embellish.

And where is Hannah now
?

She’s out there
.

Somewhere…the sweet dishrag daughter…the thief of two families…is out there
.

All grown up
.

All evil
.

The word
evil
was heavy and coppery in Reeve’s mouth. He lingered on the word, so that his audience would taste it.

Then he upped the ante.

Ante
.

A card game term. A gambling term.

It meant: If things are exciting now, just you wait. I’ll make it more risky. And then we’ll see.

Reeve lowered his voice, as if in the privacy between a human and the Almighty, he was offering up a genuine prayer.

Janie had a prayer
.

The prayer was not to God
.

It was to Hannah
.

Dear Hannah, don’t show up in our lives. My parents can’t go through that. They’d have to see what became of you. And they and you would have to face a trial and the media. Hannah, there’s only one thing you can do for the mother and father you abandoned
.

Stay lost
.

Horror spread down Janie’s body like snakebite. The poison was cold, crawling through her system. It was cold inside her head, too. Air-conditioned nightmare.

Reeve Shields had sold her over the air.

While she had been heartsick over a page in the yearbook, Reeve—
her Reeve
—had been using her as evening entertainment for a whole city. A joke between Assassins.

There was nobody in the world you could trust. Your parents turned out to be somebody else entirely, and the boy you loved, your worst enemy.

Brian felt older than his sisters. He could be the parent here, the coach or teacher. The designated grown-up.

Janie had melted into the bed. Her face had a flat look, as if she had abandoned it.

Jodie looked like a losing tennis star. Ready to rip the net and bring her tennis racket right down over the head of her opponent and wrap it around his throat and strangle him while she was at it.

Brian stared at his two flaking-out sisters.
Reeve
, he thought. But we all loved you. You made it possible for us to forgive Janie for wanting to be a Johnson instead of a Spring. You were my hero, Reeve.

Brian felt destroyed around the edges. He picked up the telephone. He hit nine to get an outside line. Twice Derek Himself had given the phone number for WSCK. Brian was not usually strong on numbers, but he would never forget these seven.

Reeve set up two Visionary Assassins back to back. He was very attached to the Assassins.

Vinnie was out in the hall talking to somebody Reeve didn’t recognize. Derek had actually retreated to another room to study. Cal had a date.

The phone lit. Reeve was as exhausted as if his mind had been vacuumed. Broadcast took a lot out of you. He stared at the silent, visible ring of the phone. Then he picked it up. He was mildly surprised when the tape reel next to him began turning. Derek must have been recording.

“Hi there,” he said briskly into the receiver, finding his jock voice for another moment. “WSCK, We’re Here, We’re Yours, We’re Sick. How can I help you?”

The caller was a woman.

Not a girl. Not a college kid. Not young.

The voice was tired. The vocal cords rasped from too much smoking. The speech was slurred, as if the caller had had too much to drink. “This—this is the radio station?” said the caller.

Derek would have said No, this is the high command, give me your latitude and longitude so I can drop a bomb on you. We have too many stupid people in the world.