The Voice on the Radio (19 page)

It was dark and very late when they got to Janie’s.

The shared driveway was full of Reeve’s family hugging good-bye. Suitcases were being loaded, instructions given, promises to be back for Christmas Eve. Maybe in the chaos, Janie could sneak inside without—

“Yo, Janie!” shouted Todd. “Come over and meet my fiancée, Heather!”

“I’m out of here,” said Jodie.

“No, you can’t, my parents will be very upset, Jodie, please, don’t drive away, come on in and—”

“Bye,” said Jodie. “You’re on your own. See you at Christmas.” Her sister blew a kiss, backed right out and took right off. Some ally, thought Janie.

Todd hauled her around the bushes and presented Heather. “Hi, Heather,” said Janie. “Welcome to Connecticut.” She tried not to see the rest of the family; she tried not to find out where Reeve stood, and what his expression was, and what clothes he had on.

“Janie! Kisses!” said Lizzie, who preferred to discuss these rather than bestow them.

“We’re just taking off,” said Megan. “See you at Christmas, Janie!”

And they were gone, and Mrs. Shields went indoors and Janie was standing on the driveway with Reeve. The light from the houses did not reach them. The dark swirled around them like wind.

Shadows took Reeve’s face and kept it. He could have been a stranger. Janie stared, trying to see the boy she had known. Reeve flinched and looked away. Twice he took a breath, preparing to speak, and twice wet his lips instead.

He needs a mike for courage, she thought. Oh, Reeve!

Her heart went out to him. She, Janie, had found her strength. Reeve—poor Reeve—had found his weakness.

Long ago, when Janie had decided on one family over the other, a cop had said to grieving, raging Stephen and Jodie: “You got a family that loves you and Jennie’s got a family that loves her. What else is there?”

What else is there? thought Janie, as Reeve struggled with speech. Well, there’s hurt, and deceit, and selfishness. And then, I guess, if there’s any hope of any love anywhere, there has to be the chance to try again.

I don’t need a blanket or a hiding place. I can make it with or without an ally. I am a Spring.

“Let’s talk, Reeve,” she said. She held out her hand, and he took it.

CAROLINE B. COONEY
is the author of many books for young people, including
Diamonds in the Shadow; A Friend at Midnight; Hit the Road; Code Orange; The Girl Who Invented Romance; Family Reunion; Goddess of Yesterday
(an ALA-ALSC Notable Children’s Book);
The Ransom of Mercy Carter; Tune In Anytime; Burning Up; The Face on the Milk Carton
(an IRA-CBC Children’s Choice Book) and its companions,
Whatever Happened to Janie? and The Voice on the Radio
(each of them an ALA-YALSA Best Book for Young Adults), as well as
What Janie Found; What Child Is This
? (an ALA-YALSA Best Book for Young Adults);
Driver’s Ed
(an ALA-YALSA Best Book for Young Adults and a
Booklist
Editors’ Choice);
Among Friends; Twenty Pageants Later
; and the Time Travel Quartet:
Both Sides of Time, Out of Time, Prisoner of Time, and For All Time
, which are also available as
The Time Travelers
Volumes I and II.

Caroline B. Cooney lives in Madison, Connecticut, and New York City.

Scroll down to read Chapter One from

Caroline B. Cooney’s

eagerly anticipated conclusion

to the Janie novels

Excerpt from
What Janie Found
by Caroline B. Cooney

Copyright © 2000 by Caroline B. Cooney

Published by Delacorte Press
an imprint of
Random House Children’s Books
a division of Random House, Inc.
1540 Broadway
New York, New York 10036

CHAPTER
ONE

Last seen flying west
.

Over and over, Janie read those last four words on the report.

I could do that, she thought. I could be “last seen flying west.” I too could vanish.

By not being here, I could be a hundred times more powerful and more present. No one could ever set me down. I would control all their lives forever, just by being gone.

She actually considered it.

She didn’t worry about the logistics—plane ticket, money, shelter, food, clothing. Janie had never lacked for shampoo or supper or shoes and she couldn’t imagine not having them.

She considered this: She could become a bad person.

In the time it took for a jet to cross America, she, Janie Johnson—good daughter, good friend, good student, good sister—with no effort, she could ruin a dozen lives.

She was stunned by the file folder in her fingers, but she was more stunned by how attracted she was to this idea—Janie Johnson, Bad Guy.

In all that had happened—the kidnapping, the new family, the old family, even Reeve’s betrayal—nothing had brought such fury to her heart as the contents of this folder.

She couldn’t even say, I can’t believe it. Because she could believe it easily. It fit in so well. And it made her so terribly angry.

She knew now why her older brother, Stephen, had dreamed for years of college. It was escape, the getaway from his massive store of anger.

She herself had just finished her junior year in high school. If college was the way out, she could not escape until a year from September—unless she escaped the way Hannah had, all those years ago.

Janie Johnson hated her father at that moment with a hatred that was wallpaper on every wall of every room she had ever lived in: stripes and circles and colors of hate pasted over every other emotion.

But gently she slid the police report back into the file folder and put the folder in among the others, pressing with her palm to even up all the folders so that the one that mattered vanished.

It took control to be gentle. Her fingers wanted to crush the contents of the folder, wad everything up and heave it out a window, and then fling the folder to the floor and drag her shoes over it.

The drawer was marked
Paid Bills
. Her father was very organized, and now that he could do nothing himself, her mother wanted Janie to be organized in his place. For a few minutes, it had seemed like fun; Janie Johnson, accountant and secretary.

The drawer contained a long row of folders, each with a center label, each label neatly printed in her father’s square typewriter-looking print, each in the same blue ink. Folders for water bills and oil bills, insurance policies and tax reports.

And one folder labeled with two initials.

H.J.

It was invisible in the drawer, hidden in the forest of its plain vanilla sisters. But to Janie it flamed and beckoned.

You don’t have to stay here, being good and dutiful and kind and thoughtful
, said the folder.
You can be Hannah
.

Reeve Shields was sitting on the floor, his back against the wall, his cutoff jeans and long tan legs sticking out toward Janie. Mrs. Johnson had been sure the project of Mr. Johnson’s papers would include plenty of work for Reeve, but so far she had not thought of an assignment for him. That was okay. He was too busy studying Janie to sort papers.

Janie had a very expressive face. Her features were never still but swung from thought to thought. If he could read cheeks and forehead and chin tilt, he could read Janie.

But although he had lived next door to her ever since he could remember, and although they had once been boyfriend and girlfriend and had been through two hells together, right now he could not read her face.

He did, however, know that he wanted to read the contents of that file. The label was very tempting. The way she had returned it to the drawer, the silence she was keeping—also very tempting.

Don’t even think about it, he told himself. How many times are you going to jerk her around? She tells you how to behave, you say, Sure, Janie, and then do exactly what you want. You going to do it now, too? She’s speaking to you again, letting you here in the house again, and once again, you can’t wait to trespass on her. You promised yourself you’d grow up. So maybe tonight would be a good time. Maybe tonight you should not look in that folder, which obviously contains the most interesting papers Janie has ever seen in her life.

But not for you, sport. Give it up. Offer a distraction, mention dinner, get out of the house, get away from this office, do not interfere.

So Reeve said, “Let’s all go get a hamburger. Brian? Janie? Mrs. Johnson? You up for McDonald’s? Or you want to go to Beach Burger?”

“Beach Burger,” said Brian Spring quickly. He loved that place. It had its own oceanfront, a tiny little twenty-foot stretch of rock, and you could get your hamburger and fries and milk shake, and leave your socks and shoes in the car, and crawl over the wet slimy rocks and the slippery green seaweed and sit with your toes in the tide. Of course, you had to get back in the car with wet pants and sticky salty skin, but he loved the smell of it: the sea scent you carried home and then, sadly, had to shower off.

Brian felt so included here. It was weird to be part of a large friendly family like his own family in New Jersey and yet never feel included. Up here, visiting Janie (his sister, but not part of his family), he felt strangely more welcome.

That wasn’t quite fair.

What he felt was less useless.

He missed his older brother, Stephen, badly. But Stephen was not going to return in any real way. A night here, a week there—but Stephen was gone.

Brian’s twin was no company at all, still a shock to Brian, who had thought they would be best friends all their lives. Brendan had not noticed Brian for a whole year. And with the close of school, and the end of baseball (Brendan, of course, was captain and his pitching won the local and regional championships and they even got to the semifinals) and now summer training camps—basketball and soccer—well, the best Brian could do was stand around and help fold his brother’s jeans when he packed.

(Brendan even said that. “At least you know how to fold T-shirts,” said Bren. “Although I don’t screw around with that myself, I just shove ’em in.”)

And the other good reason for going to Beach Burger was that Brian wanted food in his hands, so that he wouldn’t leap forward and yank that file folder out of Janie’s hands. Because he knew in his gut that she had found something important. And everything important to Janie was important to Brian’s family. Her other family.

But Brian at this moment did not feel a lot of affection for his own family. No matter what he did there, he was last in line. He was sick of it. Up here in Connecticut with Janie, he wasn’t first, but he was part of them, and he wasn’t going to wreck that.

What he was going to do, he decided, after the rest of them went to visit Janie’s father in the hospital tonight, was walk in here boldly and scope out that folder, as if it were his business.

Because he was pretty sure it was his business.

Mrs. Johnson was sitting at her own desk, which was at a right angle to her husband’s desk, where Janie was studying the bills, paid and unpaid. Mrs. Johnson had been using a small calculator to balance the checking account, and it was making her cry, because this was not her job, had never been her job. In the division of labor that every family requires, checking accounts belonged to her husband.

And now he was in the hospital.

A stroke
and
a heart attack.

She could not believe either of these things.

Frank was slim and strong and he worked out and ate well, and he was still, in her opinion, a young man. Well, not young. But he wasn’t old! He was not old enough to have a heart attack. He could not leave her now; he could not die. He could not end up speechless and drooling. She couldn’t go through that. She wouldn’t go through that.

She had to believe he would recover. Completely.

She mixed up numbers and skipped decimals and could not manage a simple subtraction.

And so she did not see her daughter blazing over the contents of a file folder in Paid Bills, and she did not see Janie’s former boyfriend staring in fascination, nor Janie’s real brother observing them all.

Mrs. Johnson said, “Yes. Beach Burger. I hope the rocks aren’t crowded. I want to sit on the rocks. Don’t you, Brian?” She was crazy about Brian. He was such a sweetheart. It was a ridiculous time to have a houseguest, but Brian was a treasure. In a weird way, Miranda Johnson was thrilled and honored to find that her family had extended from here in Connecticut down there into New Jersey, and that somehow, miraculously, she too had been adopted.

It will all work out, she said to herself, and she was actually almost happy. She turned and smiled at the three teenagers, but she did not see how quickly Janie’s smile came and went, nor did she attach any importance to Janie’s habit of lowering her face to let her heavy dark red hair cover her expression.