Whatever Happened to Janie?

A
fter their sister’s kidnapping, Dad not only took Stephen and Jodie to school every morning, he held their hands.

Not once—not once in a hundred and eighty days a year, kindergarten through sixth grade—were the remaining Spring children allowed to take a school bus. Not once had Jodie been allowed to walk in or out of the elementary school without her father there.

The children would get out of the car. Dad would take Jodie’s hand in his right hand and Stephen’s hand in his left. Then they would walk across the parking lot, into the building and down to Jodie’s classroom where he would transfer Jodie’s hand to the teacher’s. His eyes would scan the halls, as if kidnappers were lurking beside the winning poster from the science contest. When Jodie was safely in her teacher’s care, Dad would continue on with Stephen.

For years, Jodie thought this pattern was normal.

But when Stephen was in fourth grade, he said
if anybody ever held his hand again, he would bite it. He said if anybody had planned to kidnap another Spring child, they had given up by now. Stephen said he would carry a knife, he would carry a submachine gun, he would carry a nuclear bomb, and he would blow away all would-be kidnappers, but never again would he let anybody hold his hand.

From his fourth-grade heart had come the hidden rage they all felt and never dared say out loud.

“I hate Jennie!” Stephen had screamed. “I hate my sister for ruining our lives! The least Jennie could have done was leave her body there for us to find. Then we could bury her and be done with her. I hate it that we have to worry every single day. I hate her!”

Stephen was seventeen now. Jodie could remember that meal as if it were yesterday. Mom and Dad had sat as tight and silent as wind-up dolls. More vividly than anything else, Jodie remembered that nobody yelled at Stephen for saying such terrible things.

Years of worry had torn the family’s guts apart, like a tornado peeling the house walls away. Worry had separated them from each other, so they were not six people knit close in tight, warm threads of family, but travelers accidentally in the same motel.

There had been a long, long silence after Stephen’s outburst. Even the twins, who had been thick and annoying all their paired lives, knew better than to speak.

At last Dad had extended his hands from his
sides, straight out, like a Roman slave being crucified.

The whole family held hands every evening to say grace before supper. That was what Dad intended, and yet the stiffness of his arms, the awful lines around his mouth, did not look like grace.

Jodie had been scared, because she was between Dad and Stephen, and she would have to take Stephen’s hand, and she was pretty sure Stephen really would bite her.

But he didn’t.

He cried instead. Stephen had cried easily when he was little and the humiliation of that had left its mark; nothing would have made Stephen Spring cry now that he was seventeen. Where a ten-year-old had exhibited tears, the young man used fists.

So they had held hands, and Dad had prayed. Not grace. He didn’t mention food. He didn’t mention shelter. He said, “Dear Lord, tonight we are going to bury Jennie. We love her, but she’s gone and now we’re going to say good-bye. Thank you for the time we had Jennie. The rest of us have to go on living. Thank you for making Stephen tell us.”

Jodie was only nine. Only a third-grader. Jodie had needed to take her hands back from Stephen and Daddy so she could wipe away her tears, and Jodie never admitted to anybody that they were not tears of grief for her missing sister, but tears of relief that they were going to put Jennie on the shelf and be done with her.

“Give Jennie a guardian angel,” said Dad softly to the Lord.

Usually during grace, Jodie felt that Dad was
talking to his children, ordering them to behave and be thankful. Not this prayer. Dad was talking to the Lord; Jodie thought if she looked up she would see God, and that was even scarier than having to hold Stephen’s hand, so she didn’t look up.

“Take care of Jennie, Lord, wherever she is. Help us not mention Jennie again. Help us be a family of six and forget that we were ever a family of seven.” Dad squeezed Jodie’s hand.

Jodie squeezed Stephen’s.

The squeeze went around the circle, and the Lord must have been there, because the lump in Jodie’s throat dissolved, and the twins began to talk about sports—even when they were babies they talked about sports, they had been playing with basketballs and footballs and tennis balls from birth—and Stephen showed his B-plus geography paper; he had gotten forty-two of the fifty state capitals right.

The family sealed up, like a perfect package. Things fit again. Everything from the number of chairs around the table to the toppling stacks of presents under the Christmas tree. The Spring family had six people in it now. The seventh was gone.

Mom and Dad didn’t even telephone Mr. Mollison again. Mr. Mollison was the FBI agent who had been in charge of the case. For a while he had been as much a part of the family as Uncle Paul and Aunt Luellen.

The next year, nobody talked about Jennie on her birthday. Nobody sobbed on the anniversary of the day Jennie went missing.

Mr. and Mrs. Spring were still more careful
than any other parents in the state of New Jersey, but the children were more careful, too. It was not because Jodie and her brothers were worried that they might be kidnapped, too. They were worried that their parents would be worried. The Spring children were always lined up at telephones to let Mom or Dad know where they were. They were never late. They were children who knew, too well, one of the horrors of the world.

The thing Jodie could not get over, now that her sister Jennie turned out to be alive and coming home, was that
there had never been a horror.

They had imagined all of it.

Jennie had not died.

She had not been tortured.

She had not been cold or lost or drowned or raped or even frightened!

Jennie had been just fine all along.

It was incredible, when Jodie thought of the lancing fear the rest of them had endured for eleven and a half years. In most ways, of course, worry and fear vanished. When she was small, it vanished because Jodie believed in Daddy’s deal with God. If Daddy and the Lord both said Stop Worrying, well then, who was Jodie to worry? But as Jodie moved into her teens, the reality of her sister’s kidnapping often surfaced. When she brought a library book home … and the heroine was a redhead named Jennie. When Stephen had his first date … and her name was Jennie. When the late movie on television was about a kidnapping. When Jodie went in the post office and saw those black-and-white photos—
HAVE YOU SEEN THIS CHILD
?

She’d feel it again. The panic like burning acid, making it impossible to think of anything else. And the rage: the terrible, terrible anger that their lives had been so brutally interfered with.

Brian and Brendan were babies when it happened, still sitting in the double stroller, getting everything sticky. (Jodie’s relationship with her twin brothers began by steering around them lest they smear her with melting lollipop or contaminate her with Oreo-cookie crumbs. Somehow it had continued that way. Keeping clear was Jodie’s major activity with her little brothers.) But Jodie had been in kindergarten and Stephen in first grade, old enough to have memories, old enough to understand what had happened.

Well, no.

Not quite. Nobody had ever known what happened that day at the shopping mall. Nobody had ever known where Jennie was taken, or who took her, or for what purpose.

But all too well Jodie understood what happened to her family because of it.

It was so confusing and astonishing to find that all along, Jennie had been happy and healthy and warm and everything else that was good. The Springs had never needed to worry.

Mom and Dad were weak with relief and joy.

Jodie mentally laid her history of nightmares out on the bed, like laundry to be put away, and studied them, understanding less than ever.

Stephen, of course, was angry. Stephen didn’t even have a fuse; he just continually exploded. Stephen
yelled that Jennie ought to have suffered, since the rest of them had.

“Don’t talk like that once she comes,” warned their father. Dad was wildly excited. He and Mom kept bursting into shouts of laughter and hugging each other and hyperventilating. That was Jodie’s new word—hyperventilate. Jodie did not want her family getting overly emotional, or too noisy. She felt it was time to drop the hand-holding at dinner and the saying of grace. Jennie would think they were weird. “Don’t hyperventilate,” Jodie begged constantly. But her family was the hyperventilating kind.

When Mom thought nobody was watching, she would rearrange the dining table, seeing where the seventh chair fit best. The chair her missing daughter would sit in when she came home. Then Mom would do a little tap dance around the chair, fingertips on the wood. She looked so comic, a forty-three-year-old, getting heavy, going gray, wearing sneakers that squeaked on the linoleum instead of tapping.