The Voice on the Radio Page 4

  He could not say to his mother, “The colors I like are Janie’s mom’s colors. Drive up to Connecticut, will you, check them out, match them perfectly.”

  Connecticut meant The Enemy.

  And yet, from the first visit, they weren’t the enemy anymore. And after that first visit, for Brian, although it was not right for Janie to prefer her kidnap family to her real family, it was okay.

  So he said, “I like red, Mom,” and to prevent her from choosing wallpaper with sailboats or ducks, he said, “Just red paint. Like a barn.” He hoped his twin would not recognize where he got his color choice from.

  “It’s after eleven,” said their father. “How come nobody’s in bed yet?”

  Brian grinned up at his father. Brian remained a child in height and weight, the only Spring who was still little: The rest, including his very own twin, were tall. Brian wanted to talk about history, not bedtime or red paint or soccer. Nobody in this household cared.

  It was his first taste of being alone inside his family.

  * * *

  Well, see, from The New York Times, Janie found out the address of her real family, down in New Jersey. And one day, I’m driving us to school, because we lived next door, and I had my own Jeep, and Janie says, “Let’s cut school.”

  And I’m thinking of reasons that I would cut school, and things I would do with Janie if we were alone all day long, and Janie says, “Let’s drive to New Jersey and find them.”

  So we drove to New Jersey.

  And we found them.

  Remember I told you about Janie’s hair? Serious hair. As much hair as any two or three regular people. Auburn-copper hair that she wore long. Once the physics teacher defined chaos as Janie’s hair. And there, on the right street, across from the right house, a school bus stops. And kids with the very same red hair get off. The hair—and presumably, therefore, the genes—are a perfect match. Janie really is the sister.

  I’m hanging on to the steering wheel with white knuckles, I’m so surprised. I hadn’t believed it till then. I’m almost sick. Because I like Janie’s parents as much as I like my own. How could they steal Janie and still be nice? There couldn’t be a nice answer to that. There could only be a terrible answer. And Janie, my poor Janie, is practically on the floor of the Jeep, hiding from them, so they can’t see her hair and know who she has to be, whispering, “Drive on, keep driving, get out of here, Reeve.”

  So we got out of there. We didn’t tell. We didn’t tell our families in Connecticut, or the authorities, or the family in New Jersey. But we knew. We knew it was true. Janie Johnson had been kidnapped. So there was the same question. Always the same question. Now what?

  * * *

  Mrs. Spring watched her family heading for bed. Her husband went down the hall to shut off the computer. Her big, hulking thirteen-year-old, Brendan, took the stairs two at a time. Already his immense sneakers had left black scuff marks on the freshly painted risers. Her small, thin thirteen-year-old, Brian, followed slowly, dragging.

  She had to be a better mother and not go out at these ridiculous hours on a school night; this was way too late for Brian.

  Upstairs, doors closed, shoes dropped, faucets ran. She loved having everybody upstairs and safe.

  She looked happily around her living room.

  New furniture would arrive tomorrow. She was excited. All this space in which to put lovely, comfy furniture. Big, fat easy chairs to flop on and curl up on with a book. Big, roomy couches to nap on or watch television on. A dining table to fit everybody comfortably, including aunts, uncles and neighbors.

  Everybody except Jennie.

  Jennie, who had happily gone back to being Janie.

  Every time Mrs. Spring got too busy to remember, there it was again, creeping like a vine, twisting itself around the good things and strangling them.

  The loss of Jennie.

  In some terrible way, deep and black as an abandoned coal mine, Mrs. Spring was still waiting.

  Waiting for Jennie to come home.

  CHAPTER

  FOUR

  It was Lipstick Day. You had to do something to kick off a dud month like November.

  Everybody—boys and girls—slathered on bright red or Halloween orange or hot-pink lipstick. The goal was to acquire as many lip prints on your face as possible.

  Janie was fully printed, her face covered with neatly outlined lips. Some people smeared on their kisses, but Janie made them do it neatly or not at all.

  Ordinary kids became barbarians getting ready for battle. They were live theater art: a stage event for face patterns.

  Nobody kissed on the lips. That wasn’t the point. You were writing on people.

  Of course, there were the skanky kids, that you didn’t even want to be in the same room with, or share a calculator with, and you were supposed to purse your lips together and plant a serious kiss on their cheek. In these situations, you fell to the floor in your death throes rather than kiss them.

  Sarah-Charlotte had some really evil lipstick colors. “My mother didn’t get the color gene,” explained Sarah-Charlotte, “so the house is full of disgusting purple-bruise lipsticks.” During lunch, Sarah-Charlotte passed these out to people who had come unarmed.

  Janie felt light.

  Not low-fat light; not a substitute. Janie’s light was whipped cream or the scent of lilacs. Today she was the right person for her hair: She was an armload of red. I’m back, thought Janie. You do get past the bad parts. I’m here, I’m me, I know what I’m doing.

  “Janie,” said Van, who had shaved his head and consequently had much more lip print space than people with hair, “I covet your print.”

  “My print is pretty special,” agreed Janie. She had always liked Van. When you were steadily dating a boy, as she was Reeve, and this was known to everybody, it freed you up to be friends with boys. You could skip the worry factor, the impress-him factor. “Where do you want your print, Van?”

  “I’ve given skull space to ordinary lips,” said Van, “but for you, Jane Elizabeth Johnson, I have reserved an entire jawbone.”

  There was a round of applause and whistles.

  Sarah-Charlotte repainted Janie’s lips a revolting magenta, so much lipstick that it felt like pancake batter. Janie held Van’s head between her hands to steady it and aimed carefully for the wide part of his jaw. She planted her kiss firmly and long. Then she stepped back to admire her handiwork.

  Sarah-Charlotte, who thought of details nobody else remembered until it was too late, had brought a large hand mirror, in which Van admired his jaw.

  One year ago, in this cafeteria, a little girl on the back of a milk carton had stared out at Janie Johnson. The photo had shown an ordinary toddler: hair in tight pigtails, one against each thin cheek. A dress with a narrow collar and tiny, dark polka dots. Janie had clung to that cardboard while her mind slipped and her brain turned to glass. She remembered that dress.

  Janie had shouted Sarah-Charlotte’s name, trying to tell her best friend that good had just changed to evil, but her lips had not moved. She had made no sound.

  It seemed to Janie now that for months she had made no sound. But today the past was past. This was just school, full of friends and cheeks and jaws.

  Janie heard herself laugh, and she recognized the laugh: pre-milk carton laughter. She could hardly wait to telephone Reeve: I’m here, I’m laughing!

  After school, Sarah-Charlotte wanted to go show off their lip prints. The only real choice was the volleyball game. Janie had never cared for volley-ball. She had never figured out how to serve without hurting her wrist, and although she was less afraid of a volleyball than of a baseball, still she hated a ball coming at her. She was awestruck by athletes who loved balls coming at them, who leaped forward and flung themselves into the path of the ball.

  She and Sarah-Charlotte sat on bleachers in the midst of a crowd of printed cheeks.

  Yearbook photographers converged on the pack. Tyler, who was in charge of candids, cl
osed in on Janie.

  Janie shook her head and turned her face away.

  “Come on, look at the camera, Janie, give me a full-face shot!” Tyler leaped up the bleachers, missing innocent people’s hair and glasses by microns. He took three shots with Janie’s hand in the way. Janie glared at him and he snapped that, too.

  “Stop it! I’m not a senior.”

  “We need it for the yearbook, Janie. We’re going to do a milk carton page.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Come on, Janie. You’re famous. The face on the milk carton. We lived through you. People have scrapbooks about you. We’re going to have the whole thing in the yearbook.”

  This terrible part of her life she wanted forgotten? And they were going to make a separate section in the yearbook?

  How could she touch a yearbook ruined like that? What if people signed her yearbook and nobody wrote I’ll miss you, what great times we had, good luck! but instead they wrote Your kidnapping story was so exciting, I’ll always remember the time network TV came to the school.

  TV, which had tried to slice her up, ruin her family, chase them down, make her parents admit that this tragedy was their fault—this would get a yearbook page?

  Janie wanted to rip the camera out of Tyler’s hands. She wanted to yank out the film, tear it into pieces with her bare hands.

  So she did.

  She had had only Tyler’s attention. Now she had the entire gym gaping at her. Parents and teachers rushed to referee. Janie was freaked, and looked like a freak. Face coated with flaming lip prints, hands trying to kill a camera.

  I’ve got to get out of here, thought Janie, and she started to plunge down the bleachers, to run for the girls’ room, scrub the lipstick off her face, hide out. Janie had spent plenty of time hiding out: under the covers, in girls’ rooms in New Jersey and Connecticut high schools, behind her hair, behind her silence.

  “Don’t run,” said Sarah-Charlotte quietly, forcing her back down on the bleacher. “Just smile and wait. They’ll go.” Sarah-Charlotte handed the empty camera back to Tyler. “Beat it, Ty.”

  “I have to get out of here,” whispered Janie, “they’re staring at me.”

  “Stare back. But don’t you run.”

  Janie felt as exposed and unraveled as the film hanging from her hand. But Sarah-Charlotte was right. In a minute or two, people had moved on, watching the game, leaving Janie alone.

  “Primitive response,” explained Sarah-Charlotte, “is fight or flight. But you can’t do both. You’re always doing both at once, Janie. You’re the one tearing yourself apart. Next time you start a fight, stay in the fight.”

  How come Sarah-Charlotte, who never had problems, was the one with wisdom? How come she, Janie, was the one who had not learned anything? This hardly seemed fair.

  “I believe,” said Sarah-Charlotte, “that last year, your response was flight, the whole flight, and nothing but the flight. And look where it got you. One nightmare after another.” Sarah-Charlotte made it sound as if there were no nightmare, merely Janie’s failure to sit still. “This year, choose fight,” instructed Sarah-Charlotte. “That way, it ends fast.”

  Ends.

  Reeve’s older sister, Lizzie, had been a lawyer for Janie. When will it end? When will it be over? Janie had asked Lizzie. When will I be an ordinary girl with an ordinary family?

  It will never be over, Lizzie said.

  Oh, Reeve! thought Janie. She didn’t want her girlfriend. She wanted her boyfriend. Reeve, when you’re here, it is over. I don’t have to choose between fight or flight.

  If only the chronology of being a teenager were not so rigid. After high school came college, period, and so Reeve had gone into a college world. Period.

  She closed her eyes and brought him home in her heart.

  WSCK was rarely able to fill requests. Requests were for commercial radio stations. WSCK played bands that were formed and fell apart in a semester, bands that chose a new name every month, bands whose name stayed the same but whose singers came and went like traffic.

  Naturally no listener could remember the names of these bands, so requests were “You know, those guys on the sixth floor of Cushing Hall? With the beards? Play their tape.” How were you supposed to know from the tape whether people had beards?

  “Play that band you did the other day, those guys that sang, remember them?”

  Derek did not stay polite to stupid people, but Reeve continued to be nice, and struggled to figure out what they meant.

  But on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, the callers called about Janie.

  Every week the numbers climbed. Thirty-nine no longer seemed astronomical. “Any questions?” Reeve would say, halfway through his hour. “Call the station if you need a janie boost.”

  They called.

  Reeve could not get over how, with the mike at his mouth, he could say out loud things he never would have said in actual conversation.

  He would never have told his own parents about Janie’s crying jags. He had not told his best friend a single detail of the suffering Janie had forced upon the Springs. He hadn’t told Sarah-Charlotte when she tried to pump him.

  It had taken no effort for Reeve to keep the secrets of his girlfriend’s heart and soul. Janie wanted it private, so it was private. Reeve just sat with her while she spilled over, like a glass of water. To Reeve, Janie was clear and beautiful, like spring water, while the circumstances around her were muddy and infected.

  He tended to stop listening to Janie’s troubles, actually, wishing this could be happening in the summer, when she would have less clothing on and he could rub sunscreen lotion on her skin. All her skin. Skin he had not yet seen.

  Then he would wake up from his reverie on the beauty and wonder of girls to find that his own personal beauty and wonder was still crying about parents. He wanted to say: They’re only parents! Give it a rest! Look who’s holding you up! A boy. A boy who wants you so much he cannot believe that you are still talking about parents. Or even talking. Don’t you realize there’s a time and a place for talk, and this isn’t it?

  No, Janie went on failing to realize that it was time for physical involvement, instead of mental or emotional.

  Reeve’s sister Lizzie, now, she loved to talk, so she picked a talking profession: law.

  Lizzie’s head was packed with argument. She liked silence, so that she could fill it with a lecture. She liked questions, so that she could answer them at great length. She liked not getting together with her family, because they thought they should be able to talk, and this was not correct: Only Lizzie should be able to talk. Other people should listen.

  Reeve felt a real kinship with Lizzie now. Other people should listen.

  * * *

  Of course, the question you’re phoning in with is…who’s the bad guy here? There’s gotta be a bad guy. You can’t have a kidnapping without a bad guy. But Reeve, you tell me over the phone, you make Janie’s real parents sound like great people, and you make Janie’s kidnap parents sound like great people.

  There’s a problem here.

  Somebody has to be the bad guy.

  You’re right.

  There was a bad guy.

  And her name was Hannah.

  * * *

  Derek took over at the mike, pushing an on-air contest. “You can go to a real concert, instead of the crap produced on this campus!” said Derek, trying to get the phones to ring.

  Derek was jealous and hurt. Vinnie fawned over Reeve. He, Derek, got treated like reliable old equipment. Reeve just trashed his girlfriend for a few sentences and the phones went crazy.

  But trash sells.

  The nickname of which Derek was so proud—Derek Himself—was foolish now; in one short month, he’d become nothing but Reeve’s lead-in.

  Derek didn’t have a girlfriend. He thought Janie sounded wonderful; beautiful; the kind of girl who deserved a Once upon a time beginning, complete with handsome prince. Well, Janie might have a lot
of stuff, but she sure didn’t have a prince.

  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.”