The Voice on the Radio (6 page)

Janie didn’t have her driver’s license yet. Everyone else lived for the moment of getting a license. Janie didn’t want one. After all these years of being so sheltered, she found that she was willing to go on being sheltered. She liked to have her mother or father drive her. She liked the comfort of getting into a car and having her parents smile at her and knowing that they would navigate and cope with traffic and she could just sit there and dream.

Last year Reeve had driven her to school, but this year it was Sarah-Charlotte. Sarah-Charlotte had one of the world’s less safe cars: a teeny Yugo with a hundred thousand miles on it, its upholstery rotted and split by the hot sun in the parking lot. Passengers spread towels on the disintegrating foam and hoped to be alive after a few miles of Sarah-Charlotte’s braking technique.

Sarah-Charlotte and Janie left after the volley-ball game and drove to Janie’s. Sarah-Charlotte clipped a curb and jumped two lights. “I’m insane to drive anywhere with you,” Janie said.

“It builds your character. Whoa, look, Janie! On your porch. It’s that reporter! The one who won’t let go.”

Janie recognized him. The question this particular reporter liked was the responsibility question. Who had created the Hannah who grew up to be a kidnapper? What had Mr. and Mrs. Johnson done so wrong, so badly, that their not-so-little girl Hannah had stolen the Springs’ little girl Jennie?

“You better come home with me,” said Sarah-Charlotte.

But Janie’s beautiful house, designed to be open to sun and sky, was blank. Her mother had pulled every blind and drape. “I have to go in. My mother’s alone.”

“Call if you need me,” said her friend.

“Let’s hope I won’t need rescue twice in one day.” Janie launched herself toward her own front door.

“Jennie Spring!” the reporter cried. “Good to see you again! It’s been six months since—”

Janie neither looked at him nor spoke. She knew by now that a silent subject did not make good copy.

The door opened from the inside, and together Janie and her mother shut it against the journalist.

Janie rubbed her mother’s cold hands between hers. Her mother had gotten so thin in the last year. Her fingers were bony and old. “What happened?” said Janie.

“They think their readers deserve an update.”

Everybody deserves something, thought Janie. Sarah-Charlotte deserves details, Ty deserves photographs, the readers deserve a piece of my mother.

She hated them.

Janie made a pot of coffee. Coffee relaxed her mother, but it put Janie on the ceiling. She needed to be the one on the ground. So much for telling Mommy about Lipstick Day and Tyler’s yearbook plans.

When Daddy got home from work and heard they’d had a reporter around, he just made it worse. Instead of brushing it aside, he actually confided, “I’ve been thinking about Hannah lately.”

They never admitted this: that Hannah was real, a real daughter, and must be thought of.

Janie had a sudden, terrible vision of her parents with a carrying case full of Hannahs under their bed. But they couldn’t take Hannah out, like a Barbie, and dress her, and fix her hair, and fix her life.

“I was on the Internet the other night,” said her father. His fingertips touched his wife’s, and Janie saw that her mother’s ring finger had gotten so thin that she’d wrapped tape around her wedding band to keep it from falling off. “On the Internet, you’re connected to a million strangers. Names without faces. Hidden people.”

In the Johnson family code, this meant Hannah.

“Do you think she’s out there?” whispered Janie’s mother, shivering not just with fear, but also with hope. Hannah was a lost daughter. Dangerous—but still, and forevermore, a daughter.

What would we hope for, if we hoped for Hannah? thought Janie. It’s too late for the good career, or the fine husband, or the healthy children.

I am their only hope, she thought. I am all that stands between them and hell.

It was Janie who insisted on dinner; Janie who assigned easy little tasks; Janie who asked casually if everybody was taking their heart medicine.

Her mother normalized. “Everybody? Well, I am, and your father is, but luckily
you
don’t need heart medicine.”

Oh, but I do, thought Janie. I do. And so does the world.

“Hi, you’ve reached WSCK!” said Reeve into the telephone. “We’re Here, We’re Yours, We’re Sick! How can I help you?”

“Hi, Reeve. Are you going to do a janie tonight?” The caller had recognized Reeve’s voice.

Awesome! thought Reeve. For the next call, he did a little test. “Hi, you’ve reached WSCK! We’re Here, We’re Yours, We’re Sick! This is Burt Smith, how can I help you?”

“Hi, Reeve. Burt Smith is a dumb name, don’t use it. Reeve is much sexier. Listen, I just have one question. I don’t understand how her kidnap parents are still the good guys.”

The phone was becoming nearly as much fun as the mike.

He felt like recording these calls, proof that he meant something in this world.

Call-ins were recorded only if the deejay intended to play them on the air, and only Derek ever did that. Derek loved stupid people. Stupid people would telephone the college radio station expecting answers to college questions. “Do exams really begin Tuesday morning?”

Derek loved these. “Omigod!” he would shriek. “Exams are over! You weren’t there? Oh, no, your semester means nothing now. How are you going to tell your parents you just threw away twelve thousand dollars?”

Therefore Derek tended to tape callers, in case there was a humiliating exchange he could play later. Everybody else just kept the log so that they could prove they had listeners. Reeve entered another janie.

What a difference a capital letter made. A
janie
was airtime. Drama. No person involved.

Reeve listened to Derek Himself’s spinning intro, the elongated vowels—“what yooooouuuu’ve been waiting for!”—and the exclamation points in Derek’s voice.

For me, he thought. For my voice. My story.

Derek slid out of the way, and Reeve took over. He fondled the fat sides of the mike.

That microphone gave him the most amazing freedom. Reeve could say anything.

And did.

Hannah
.

She was pretty in a limp sort of way
.

Like a used rag doll. Nobody is ever best friends with that kind. They’re on the fringes. Doomed
.

Hannah joined a cult, dropped out of regular life, probably thought she was one of the good guys, because her cult said that God was on their side
.

Years after she left her nice home and her nice parents, Hannah kidnapped a little girl named Jennie Spring
.

Why? Nobody knows. Maybe she just wanted company. A smiling face in the passenger seat. Somebody to have ice cream with. Maybe it sort of happened by itself and she didn’t know what to do afterward. Or maybe she wanted that poor family to suffer. To worry, year after year: Is our little girl in pain? Is she cold? Is she scared? Is she bleeding
? Is she alive?

Hannah took that little girl home to her own mom and dad, and she said, This is my baby. Your grandchild. You’ll be better parents than I am, so bye! Enjoy her! And Hannah left
.

She went back to her cult. Maybe. Nobody knows. Anyway, she disappeared forever, leaving only one instruction. “Enjoy her.” And they did. Oh, how they enjoyed her! Their little girl—they thought her name was Janie, not Jennie—was the light of their lives. When they were parents to Hannah, they must have made some really, really big mistake, though they never figured out what the mistake was, or when they made it. But you’ve got to admit, good parents don’t have daughters who join cults and abandon their babies. But now they could get it right. This time around, they’d be perfect parents. And Janie: It was her job to be the perfect daughter
.

Janie took out her Barbies.

She no longer had the large accessories: cars, beauty parlor, furniture, condo—these were long gone to fund-raiser tag sales.

She still had the clothing.

She sat on her bed and sorted wardrobes by career. Barbies liked to be onstage, so there were lots of choices: singer, ballerina or model. Barbies liked the professions, so they could be doctor, astronaut or soldier. And they loved sports, so they were always ready to go horseback riding, or teach swimming, or just get a tan.

The Barbies had had more careers in that suitcase than Janie had ever daydreamed of for herself.

In fact, trapped in yearbook visions, forced to think of graduation and college, Janie realized that she had never had any plans except to stay sane and keep the number of parents in her life as low as possible.

And marriage.

She wanted to be married the way both her Johnson and her Spring parents were married: for better or for worse, so that when the worst came, you held on to each other, until better returned.

Just because Reeve hasn’t checked his e-mail, hasn’t called, hasn’t written, doesn’t mean the world is over, she told herself.

Two years.

Two
years
before she could join Reeve at college.

Once again Reeve had been at WSCK so many hours that the cafeteria was closed by the time he remembered dinner. He was forced to eat from a row of vending machines that lined the student center.

“Hey, aren’t you the guy on Sick?” said a girl getting Fritos.

Reeve grinned and nodded. He loved being noticed.

“I’m Kerry.” She offered him some of her Fritos. “You do the janie thing! I haven’t missed a single janie,” said Kerry, like a collector.

What a trip! Back home, recognition and admiration had gone to his older brother and sisters. No wonder they enjoyed life so much.

“I liked that part where Janie had such bad nightmares she had to barricade herself in with pillows to keep the demons from attacking her spine or her toes while she slept,” said Kerry. “I had to do that when I was little.”

Reeve felt a funny dryness in his mouth, as if he had seen a bear on the path. I told about that? Her parents don’t know about that. Now Boston knows.

“My boyfriend Matthew is in love with Janie. He says he’d know her the minute he saw her, with that red hair swirled around her head.”

It had not occurred to Reeve that he had described Janie so well that strangers could recognize her. He wanted an audience, but at the same time, he didn’t want the audience to be real.

It doesn’t matter, Reeve said to himself. Janie’ll never hear my broadcasts. Nobody outside of Hills College listens to WSCK. I bet there are fifty stations around Boston and everybody is listening to them.

Statistics of probability always made Reeve feel better.

He walked down the street to his dorm. Hills College had no grass, no quadrangles; it simply filled several Boston blocks. Reeve had not explored Boston the way the other freshmen had. They went shopping on Newbury Street, or skated on Rollerblades down Commonwealth, or headed out Mass Av to Cambridge. He knew enough not to pronounce
Av Avenue
, but he had not actually taken the road himself. WSCK had absorbed him.

He picked his way around torn-up pavement and huge yellow equipment in front of his dorm. You couldn’t call it a construction site; nobody ever seemed to work here. It was more like a parking lot for bulldozers.