The Voice on the Radio (3 page)

Were Derek Himself, Vinnie and Cal into his story? Had he pulled it off? Reeve didn’t risk looking at them. If they were laughing at him…

Reeve had found a beat. He felt instinctively that Janie’s story must be told slowly, in a rhythm of confusing omissions, so that people wanted more. It had to be the same puzzling nightmare that it had been for Janie.

“So it’s
you
on that milk carton.
You are a missing person
,” breathed Reeve.

The mike ate his words, hungered for more.

“Around you, everything is ordinary. People are still having Jell-O and sitting two to a chair. But your life just switched channels.”

Now Reeve’s mind was crammed with a whole library of radio time. Janie Johnson was a story to tell forever.

“What does
missing
mean?” asked Reeve. His eyes were fixed on the fat, gray mike. His fingers teased the adjustable arm, making friends with it, getting safe. “Does
missing
mean
lost
? Does it mean
run away
? Or does it mean…
kidnapped
?”

Janie and her two families had never given interviews.

Not once.

Not to anybody.

Reeve, and Reeve alone, knew both sides completely; knew more than Janie, really, because his parents had talked to Janie’s parents and to the police, back when Janie was still too horrified to hear or see or listen.

“Of course,” said Reeve, dragging his voice like a net to catch listeners, “the question is—
now what
? Because you love your parents. If you tell anybody you think you were kidnapped, well—think about it. Think about the media. The police. Your family would be destroyed. If these grown-ups you call Mommy and Daddy are really your kidnappers, and if you turn them in, you’ll send your own parents to prison.”

Two beats of silence. Then a lowering of the voice. “But if you don’t tell…
what about that other family
? Still out there? Still worrying, after all these years?”

Derek was staring, a pencil dangling in his hand. Vinnie’s mouth was half open, like a little kid at story hour. Cal was tilting back apprehensively, to get away from the idea that the family you love must have kidnapped you.

I have an audience, thought Reeve.

It was a hot, winning feel: like hitting the ball out of the stadium when the bases were loaded.

I can do this, thought Reeve. I’m good at it.

To the audience he could not see—might not even have—he repeated, “
Now what
?”

CHAPTER
TWO

Sarah-Charlotte needed to know exactly what wardrobe Janie was taking for her next visit back to New Jersey.

“It doesn’t matter,” Janie pointed out. She didn’t feel like discussing the impending visit, especially because she wasn’t going down there; they were coming here. With Sarah-Charlotte, Janie would find herself creating and keeping secrets there was no point in having. “I’ve gone back before,” she told Sarah-Charlotte carelessly, “they’re used to me, and anyway, they know my whole wardrobe from when I lived there, so it’s no big deal.”

“Clothing is always a big deal,” said Sarah-Charlotte crossly. “Don’t tell me you’re becoming one of these annoying people who pretends fashion doesn’t matter.”

Janie giggled. It was an all-purpose, change-the-subject giggle. “You know what? I care so much about fashion I just bought a new Barbie I didn’t have.”

Janie flung herself over the edge of the bed, and Sarah-Charlotte held her ankles while Janie groped around under the starched lace skirt. She yanked on the handle of her Barbie suitcase. They sprung the locks and took out the new purchase. Barbie on a High Stepper Horse. A palomino with even better hair than Barbie. Janie began to braid the horse’s hair.

“When I was eight, I would have killed for this,” said Sarah-Charlotte. She picked out the flexible gymnastics Barbie and began to dress her as a Pizza Hut waitress. “Why don’t you go visit Reeve?” she said. “Wouldn’t it be fun to stay in his dorm?”

Janie was feeling flimsy. She did not want to talk about Reeve. Boston seemed as distant as Tibet, and the college life that Reeve led as strange and unknown as the Himalayas. “
My
parents? Allow me to travel to Boston and stay in a boys’ dorm? Get a grip on yourself, Sarah-Charlotte.”

They both laughed. Janie’s parents, and of course “them,” in New Jersey, didn’t let anybody do anything. Not with their history.

“Get Reeve to drive down,” said Sarah-Charlotte. “Just for an afternoon, anyway.”

She knows how much I miss him, thought Janie. I’ve kept it from her, but she knows that even when Reeve couldn’t find the right words to solve things, he always had the right arms and the right shoulders. “He doesn’t have a car,” she said. “It’s Boston. What would he do with a car? He’d have to park it, which is impossible, and repair it when it gets broken into.”

Sarah-Charlotte nodded, letting Janie escape the subject of Reeve. “I had higher hopes for Barbie than being a waitress. I expected her to be an airline pilot. Barbie,” said Sarah-Charlotte sadly, “how did you slip to this?”

She really is my best friend, thought Janie.

Friend
. The word seemed like Barbie: warm and tan and always the same. I wonder, thought Janie, if it’s too late to be friends with my sister, Jodie.

WSCK was a music station, but it didn’t try to compete with commercial Boston stations. There was no point in featuring somebody from the eighties, like John Cougar Mellencamp, or somebody who would last forever, like Aerosmith. They didn’t wrestle with how close to Pearl Jam they should play Stone Temple Pilots (since those bands sounded exactly the same except different). They didn’t worry about whether to have a jazz hour, or whether to expand their reggae and rap.

WSCK did garage bands. Local bands. Hopefuls trying desperately to climb past unadvertised evenings in unknown clubs. Mostly, they did college dorm bands.

Boston was full of colleges. Northeastern, Simmons, Boston College, Boston University, New England Conservatory, Wentworth, and Reeve’s college, Hills. Just across the bridge were Harvard and MIT. Two hundred and fifty thousand college kids in Boston, and on every floor of every dorm were kids who wanted to make it as musicians.

All of them needed airtime. Bands walked constantly through the doors of WSCK, holding out their homemade tapes or CDs or even records; amazingly enough, people were still cutting records. Reeve loved the smell of vinyl. He loved the musicians, whether they were garage bands or just garbage. They tried so hard. They were so brave and willing to be humiliated, as long as they got heard.

The playlist at WSCK was not a computer-generated work of art. No research team was finding out if the listening audience on Huntington Avenue wanted more or less Melissa Etheridge. Nobody cared about Melissa Etheridge. They cared about themselves.

Only at ten
P.M.
did the format change.

From ten to eleven, the station featured talk. Sometimes it was right-wing, sometimes left-wing. Sometimes it was hate, sometimes it was New Age love. It was opinion on legalizing marijuana. Or opinion on retiring all current professors at all currently existing universities. (People were in favor.)

But mostly, it was the radio jocks themselves. Teenagers who wanted talk shows. Jocks who wanted to go back to their home states and do the wildly sick and funny and famous morning shows for commuters in Los Angeles or Chicago or Miami. Jocks who wanted to make it with their speaking voices, just as the bands wanted to make it with their songs and drumbeats.

Reeve thought: I’ll be the next talk-show king.

He loved the vision of himself—famous and surrounded by admirers and sought after by other famous people. He could hardly wait to listen to the tape of himself after his hour was done.

Janie didn’t tell. She kept it a secret between herself and the milk carton
.

Janie researched her own kidnapping in
The New York Times.

Can you imagine? You go to the library and read about yourself on microfiche? You see a photograph in the
Times
of a sister and three brothers you never knew you had? An uncle and an aunt and grandparents…but most of all, a mother and father
?

But even
The New York Times
doesn’t know who took you. They only know the family that got left behind. The FBI, the Jersey police, nobody ever had a clue
.

But
you
know. It has to be the parents you have right now
.

Radio is partly about phone calls. Would anybody call in? Would even two or three people bother?

The part of Reeve that was conscious of anything beyond the mike was conscious of the phone.

Please, let it ring. Let it prove people are listening to me.

Trouble is, your parents are good, nice, responsible people. And you love them. Kidnapping is evil. Does this mean the mother and father you love are evil
?

If you go and telephone that 800 number on that milk carton, hey—it’s finished. Over. You lose. No more family
.

So you try to figure out a way that you could be wrong. That it’s made up. That the face on the milk carton is not you
.

But you start finding proof
.

Like a box. In an attic. Under the eaves
.

Brian Spring and his mother were still at Price Club. Mom’s workdays were long, and by the time dinner was over, and homework supervised, and she could think of shopping, it was always late. In their new Dodge Caravan, they had headed out to stockpile food and drink and plastic bags and detergents.

When the twins were little (actually, a year ago), both Brendan and Brian loved shopping days. The huge warehouse was as awesome as an airplane hangar, with checkouts like tollbooths. You bought vast quantities of food—a case of hot dogs, econo-packs of towels, a gallon of Wesson Oil.

Now Brendan scorned shopping. Brendan had better things to do. Along with the soccer team, he’d added weight lifting and swimming, so that he could become one of those guys who are scary before they’re even out of junior high. He was planning to shave his head and get a tattoo.

For thirteen years the two boys had been sealed up like an envelope. They had lived in synchrony, without effort or bickering.

But now Brendan was a sports star and Brian hadn’t even made the team. Brendan was quick to accuse people, including his twin, of being a girl. There was nothing worse than somebody who threw like a girl, or ran like a girl. When Mom asked who wanted to go shopping, Brendan said, “
Shopping
! That’s for
girls
.” He gave Brian his look of contempt reserved for people who were girls.

Jodie also refused to go shopping. She had college catalogs to study.

So Brian had to go because his mother looked lost.

It was during shopping that they had lost Janie all those years ago. Whenever she took the remaining four children shopping, their mother was a dog trainer, her children on mental and eyeball leashes. You did not scout out a different display, because kidnappers might lurk only an aisle away.

But they were too old for that now. If somebody rotten appeared, they’d just whap the kidnapper with a gallon of applesauce.

Now Mom was the one who was lost. Mom was trying to get her bearings in a world that had changed as much for her as school had changed for Brian.

School this fall had ended Brian’s twinny life.

Since he and Brendan were reflections of each other, Brian had studied and read not one minute more than his twin, which was pretty much zero minutes.

On his own in a new school, and on his own in the huge, new house, with a private room for the first time in his life, Brian found out that he and Brendan were twins only on the surface. While Brendan was off being a star, Brian found himself in an American history class with the best teacher he had ever had; the only teacher to whom he had ever really paid attention.

Brian found history astonishing and wonderful. He loved the conquistadors, the explorers of the Northwest Passage, the frontiersmen, the Indians who fought back.

Book bags were key.

People thought you were carrying extra sneakers. Nobody, including your twin, suspected that you had library books. Brendan, who thought reading was for geeks who hit balls like girls, did not know that his very own twin had fallen in love with information.

The Springs were not an academic family.

Mom and Dad expected their children to do well in school. Stephen did well because he wanted to get into a distant college. Jodie did well because she liked to come in first. Brendan did well because the school imposed standards on athletes.

Only Brian did well because he loved learning.

I didn’t know that before, he thought. It took a room to myself to find out what I love.

Whenever Stephen telephoned, Brian wanted to tell his big brother everything. But no useful sentences came out of his mouth. He said things like “Hey, Steve, how’s Colorado? You climbed any mountains yet?”

Stephen—who had wanted so much to be a different person with a different family—would be happy for him. Stephen referred to his twin brothers as wasps. Friendly, but ready to sting if anybody interfered with their twinny lives. Brian wanted to tell Stephen that he didn’t have a twinny life anymore: He missed it terribly, it hurt him like knives, and yet he was glad it was gone. Like Janie, he thought.

But he told Stephen nothing, and in return Stephen told him nothing, and Brian thought: No fair.

Mom piloted an immense shopping cart down wide aisles at Price Club. It was shrink-wrap heaven. Brian wished he had invented shrink wrap. Toothpaste, tuna fish, paint cans—all secured with plastic wrap so strong it might have been fending off chunks of space debris.

And the new house had acres of storage, so nobody had to surrender precious closet space to ten-packs of paper towels. Mom could buy meat lockers of hamburger, a dozen boxes of Cheerios.

Brian thought of early settlers planting a few grains of corn in a hill, a few seeds of squash to encircle them. He thought of little boys fending off crows and rabbits, of mothers drying and storing that grain, of long winters without enough to eat.

His mother heaved an immense strip of plastic-jacketed barbecued ribs into the cart. His mother seemed a complete stranger to him, just as his twin now seemed a stranger. Like Janie, he thought again. I stand around watching strangers who are related to me. I love them, but who are they? And why?

His mother suddenly whipped around, eyes too wide, hands out.