Whatever Happened to Janie? (19 page)

She had expected dreary desolation. Wasted leftovers of humanity staggering through garbage-filled gutters. She had expected the bathroom in Penn Station to be so disgusting that she would gag. She had expected knots of terrifying gang members to accost them. She had expected to be filled with fear and trembling.

Even the police were laughing, friendly-looking young men and women who resembled basketball or field-hockey coaches. They stood in pairs or trios, decorating street corners with their sharp uniforms, sauntering among the crowds.

Yellow taxis spun close to the sidewalk. They slid down an endlessly refilled row, like marbles spurting from a toy …

Stephen and Jodie stood outside Penn Station for several minutes, mesmerized, trying to adjust their thinking. Stephen said, “How many people do you think we can see from here?”

Jodie shook her head. She was stunned by the number of human beings passing before her. “Several hundred?”

“And that’s just on one corner,” said Stephen. “How many corners are there in New York?”

“Let’s walk all the way around Penn Station,” said Jodie. “Get oriented.” Get oriented to what? she thought. She had the soup-kitchen list in her purse, but if Hannah had any cash at all, finding Hannah where she ate was not going to be easy.
Cheap eating abounded. Just from where they stood, they could see McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Roy Rogers, David’s Cookies, four sidewalk hot-dog vendors, three ice-cream vendors, and a Chinatown Express.

The laminated folding map of Manhattan went less than halfway down into her jeans pocket. Jodie did not want to look like a tourist so she didn’t pull it out the rest of the way.

They circled. On the other side of the vast railroad station was the largest and most beautiful post office Jodie had ever seen or imagined. The steps leading up to its many doors and its splendid columns were a block across. Hundreds of people sat licking ice-cream cones, nodding to music in their earphones, dozing in the sun. The massive stone steps might have been their own front porches. Insofar as people were dressed at all in this heat, they were dressed well.

There were thousands and thousands of people just on these sidewalks! Jodie and Stephen were actually trying to identify
one
of them?

I won’t lose heart, Jodie told herself. This will be like a term paper. One sentence at a time. The longest journey begins with a single step and so forth.

Stephen refused to be overwhelmed. He had set himself a task and he was going to execute it. He looked into the masses, instead of around or through them. At first his eyes saw only a crowd: a black, white, and yellow blur of humanity. They were strangely alike, as if he were seeing a school of fish.

You weren’t supposed to meet people’s eyes in
New York, you were supposed to be careful of staring. But nobody Stephen saw could care less. Nobody was bothering to look back at Stephen.

Slowly, among the hordes of ordinary and unthreatening people, he began to pick out others.

A bag lady of indeterminate race pushed her belongings in a cart, on top of which she had balanced a broken-legged plastic chair and a bag full of returnable bottles she was plucking out of garbage cans. At one garbage can, she reached right between the legs of a black man who had draped himself like a corpse over the wire mesh. His snores blended into the throbbing from dozens of radios passing by on people’s shoulders. A tall, dramatic woman with remarkably high heels strode by, and as she passed, Stephen thought, That’s a man! He would have given this some consideration except that as they waited to cross the next street, he stood next to an unshaven and filthy white person, from whose toothless gums hung long yellow strands of some terrible food or disease.

Stephen began to feel better. All was not well in New York after all. There were still street people and he could pick them out and Hannah would be among them.

They walked uptown toward the first soup kitchen on their list.

On the next two blocks they struggled for sidewalk space. Confusingly, they were being assaulted by plastic-wrapped prom dresses and bright shapeless garments that hurtled past on long metal racks. The men pushing these racks seemed to be on a very tight schedule. Definitely not the kind to
move over for tourists. Stephen could not imagine what they were up to.

It seemed logical to turn down a side street to get out of the crush.

It was not.

Stephen knew immediately that New Yorkers steered clear of this street.

There were no moving masses of humanity, but there were crowds. Although perhaps the word gang was better. A knot of young men, thin and hostile, leaned against obscene graffiti painted on a long-gone store. Across the street from them, against an abandoned car—or at least, a car whose wheels were in the process of being removed—lounged another group. All male. Their T-shirts were shredded, as if to display their destructive tendencies, and their earrings were weapons: miniature knives and guns hung from their earlobes.

Stephen felt like a dog, posturing, hackles up. Mistake, he thought, this was a mistake. It was a zone of some kind—whether a war zone, a drug zone, or what, he did not know. He could not read the signals passing between the groups. For all he knew they were just out shopping. Should he stare them down, or pretend they were not there? Grab Jodie and run back where they’d been, or walk on as if he always walked here, and knew it well? But what would be on the next block? More? Worse?

Jodie, apparently noticing nothing, moved ahead in her pretty new jeans and her soft pink blouse. The men began grinning. One by one, they came off the walls and stepped out, like scavenger dogs forming a pack.

Jodie chose this instant to pull out the map and peer around the neighborhood, squinting, trying to read distant street signs. “Put the map away,” Stephen breathed.

The young men smirked. Stephen tried to be nonchalant. He was furious with himself for being afraid. He was not sufficiently street smart to know if these were men he ought to be afraid of, but he knew very well they were men Jodie ought to be afraid of.

“The first soup kitchen is right around here somewhere,” said his sister, surging ahead. Stephen was forced to follow behind his sister, and he knew perfectly well the knots of men were laughing at him. He flushed and was careful not to meet any eyes.

Nothing happened.

What had he expected to have happen? How much of the dread specter of New York was truth, and how much was nonsense? How much were those guys just doing their bit to uphold legend and how much were they truly a threat? Reeve, he thought, would know.

He didn’t look back, so he never would. And Jodie was correct. The first soup kitchen was two blocks away.

It was early for lunch, but the kitchen was open. People were going in.

Jodie was satisfied. This was what she had expected to find at Penn Station: the dregs and disasters of humanity. This soup kitchen was not serving people who had lost their jobs in a recession and needed a speck of help for a few weeks. This soup
kitchen was for people who would always need help, or who were beyond it.

As they crossed the street and came within reach of the doors, Jodie’s heart and courage failed her.

This is real, she thought. These people are really hungry. These people didn’t take a train in from New Jersey. They really and truly do not have bathrooms and showers and after-school snacks. We can’t go in there, and gawk, and peer at them, and show them Hannah’s photograph! We’re rich New Jersey tourists, is what we are.

Sun baked the street.

Stench filled Jodie’s nostrils. Urine, she thought, trying to imagine living where people used the sidewalks. Booze. Vomit. She thought of the beautiful Johnson house in Connecticut. Of Hannah, who could have lived there. Who had chosen squalor instead.

Jodie would have gone straight home, but Stephen simply entered the building. They joined the line. The room was just a room, full of tables, but the people were not just people.

Nobody shoved, but the line, like the city, was crowded and full of chaotic energy. Jodie felt pressed upon even though nobody touched her, and encroached upon even though nobody looked at her. She was afraid of every single person in the room. Not one of them could possibly have a life she understood. Not one of them could ever have been at high school, worrying about friends and popularity and final grades.

Nobody said why were they there, or what were
their names. A woman heaved noodle-y soup into their bowls as if she were shoveling a garden. She was very squat, with hundreds of warts. Jodie fought back a shudder when she took her bowl. She studied her soup. It was thick, but with what?

Stephen murmured in Jodie’s ear, “We don’t have to ask half of them, anyway.”

“Why not?”

“The black half aren’t Hannah.”

Jodie nodded seriously. “Got it.”

It was a relief to sit and have only eight people next to her instead of hundreds. The table became a little tiny neighborhood, their own. She stirred her soup and felt oddly comfortable.

Stephen took out his photograph of Hannah. “We’re looking for this woman,” he said to their lunch companions. He was faintly surprised to be using English. These people were so different he felt as if he should speak some other tongue. “She was in New York two years ago. Have you seen her?”

They regarded Stephen with narrow, unblinking eyes. Finally one man said suspiciously, “Why you want her?”

They were on Hannah’s side! It had never occurred to Stephen that people might see
him
, and not Hannah, as the bad guy. If he said, She’s a kidnapper, we want to make her pay, they’d
really
be on Hannah’s side. He heard himself lie. What he actually said out loud was, “She’s my sister.”

How weird, he thought, that I even thought of that. But in a way, she is my sister. Because she’s sort of Janie’s sister, and Janie is definitely my sister.

There was nothing to be heard except the intake of soup.

Noodles sloshed into hungry mouths.

The woman on Jodie’s left said, “Pretty girl like that, if she wanted to go home, she’d go home. Maybe you better leave it alone. Pretty girl like that, maybe you doan wanna know what’s she doin’ now.” Her voice was kind and sad. She was white, or would have been with a bath. Jodie breathed through her mouth.

“It’s an old picture,” said Stephen. “She’s in her thirties now. I don’t think she’s pretty anymore.”

“They doan stay pretty very long,” agreed the woman. She smiled. Her mouth was full of gold teeth. One bore a silver star. “She a junkie by now,” said the woman with satisfaction. “Like me. How ole you think I am?”

Jodie thought she was a hundred. Maybe an old-looking ninety.

“Thirty-six,” said the woman.

Jodie’s face fell apart, her jaw sagging, her eyes widening. She stared so intensely and so long it became an invasion. She could feel the woman getting hostile, but she could not stop.
This woman is thirty-six? This hag? Then Hannah? What will she look like after all this time?

Jodie was too swamped in her thoughts to make another move, but Stephen gathered his courage and circled among the tables, showing his photograph, asking if they had seen his sister, who was older now, and probably not so pretty.

People seemed willing to look at the picture. But few spoke even a single syllable and most did not so
much as shake their heads. They just waited for him to move on.

When he got back to Jodie, a new set of people were eating around her and she was sitting straight and tight and terrified among them. He and Jodie cleared their places, careful to do exactly what everybody else did. Neither of them had eaten a thing. He had to pour a full bowl of soup into the garbage. The attendant glared at Stephen from under sagging lids, for the crime of discarding food that others needed. But the man said nothing. That seemed to be the main rule of etiquette here. Say nothing.

For a moment they were afraid to leave. The dining hall was a safety zone, where they would be spared. But outside, on the hot sidewalks, among the hostile young men …

They left anyway, and again nothing happened.

They followed a short block back to Eighth Avenue, then Seventh. Here the men were wearing suits, not torn T-shirts. Subdued ties, not skull earrings. The streets here had half the energy and twice the safety.

Jodie felt calm enough to study the map again, working out the route to the next soup kitchen.

Stephen was counting human beings. He was trying to estimate the sheer volume of bodies they were seeing. He could not. It was unfathomable, how many people were out at noon in the summer sun.

They were looking for only one.

One.

Stephen’s resident rage attacked him again. For
a moment he was one with the hostile unemployed men leaning against the storefronts.

Hannah has defeated us again! Hannah always wins. She always will. This is pointless. We were fools to think about it for a minute, let alone come into the city and try.

What a child he had been, thinking that he—Stephen the Bold, Stephen the Strong—would find Hannah, the Evil Kidnapper.

Stephen felt young, and there was nothing he hated more.

They went into another soup kitchen, this one part of a church. St. Somebody that Stephen was not sure how to pronounce. These people were less derelict, if there was such a description, but more sullen. Nobody could identify the photograph.

The third kitchen was so skanky they could not make themselves cross the street and get near. By the time they reached the fourth on their list, it had closed until supper. Hanging around were people with nowhere to go. Nobody among them would even look at the photograph. Most of them would not even look at Stephen. They seemed in a stupor. From the heat, perhaps. Or drugs. Or the unending defeats of life.

Jodie and Stephen wandered.

They found themselves in front of the public library, which they recognized by the famous stone lions. It too had vast steps on which hundreds of people rested. They bought ice cream and sat high up on the steps, gazing out at New York.