The Face on the Milk Carton Page 9

  Then she went into the booth and looked up Spring.

  There was one listing, and one only. How ordinary it sounded. How suburban and middle class.

  Spring, Jonathan Avery … 114 Highview Avenue.

  She walked into the gas station. A youngish man in need of a shave and a good weight-loss program sat in filthy blue coveralls behind a greasy table and leered at her. She said, “Would you please tell me how to get to Highview Avenue?”

  For a moment she thought he would refuse. That would be a sign, wouldn’t it? That she was not meant to know. That even total strangers knew better than to let Janie Johnson near Highview Avenue.

  But he said, “Long way, baby. South on this road about two miles, left on Mountain Road, it’s down Mountain somewhere. Read the street signs. Easy to miss. Good luck.”

  She got back in the Jeep, dripping wet. Reeve turned the heater blower up high to dry her off. “South on this road,” she told him.

  “Janie, I think we should go home.” He was white and pinched. “I thought when you said skip school together you really wanted to do something neat with me, Janie. I didn’t know you just needed a chauffeur for something like this. I don’t want to be part of it. No matter how much you want to know, I don’t want to know at all! I was thinking that you—” He broke off.

  He was thinking that I liked him, she thought. I do like him. I adore him.

  Her head pounded on and on. She had never had a headache like this. Hammers and spotlights behind her eyes.

  She touched the cuff of his shirtsleeve where it stuck out of his jacket and then very softly, nervously, touched the skin of his wrist. She traced his wrist on each side of his watchband. She wanted to kiss his wrist, and the golden hairs that almost invisibly caught in the spiral tension of the band. If he had not been driving, she would have yanked him toward her, kissed him forever.

  Reeve said, “Janie? In the leaves? That day?”

  But the part of her not suffering a headache and the part of her not aching with love was reading street signs. “There’s Mountain Road, Reeve. Turn right there.”

  They got caught behind a school bus.

  “What time is it?” said Janie, frowning.

  Reeve held up his wrist for her but she couldn’t read upside down. “Two o’clock,” he said. “They must get out early here.”

  Two o’clock in the afternoon! she thought. We won’t get home till after dinner. What am I going to tell my parents? They’ll be so mad at me! They’ll never let me—

  She had to take her hand away from Reeve’s wrist and put it over her own mouth to stifle hysterical laughter.

  The yellow school bus stopped once. Stopped twice.

  The third stop was for Highview Avenue. The one hundred block.

  It was a development, perhaps twenty years old: mostly split-levels with identical front bay windows opening into pleasant yards and thick shrubs. Each house had a two-car garage, and most had hedges between them. The similarity among the houses was rather comforting, as if this were a neighborhood where you could predict what would happen next, and be safe.

  It had momentarily stopped raining. Enormous puddles attracted the children as they leaped off the school bus. The boys jumped square into the puddles, soaking their sneakers, splashing mud on the girls, who screamed happily and threw things, like lunchbag apples they hadn’t eaten.

  Reeve stopped the Jeep while the children crossed the street.

  Two boys, about sixth-graders, went to number 114.

  Spring, Jonathan Avery … 114 Highview Avenue.

  The boys had red hair. The color of Janie’s.

  She subtracted the years she had been gone. Had they sat in high chairs in that kitchen once while she spilled milk on the floor?

  We had a dog, thought Janie. A big dog. Yellowish. I used to hug the dog and she’d lick my face and my mother would yell at me. Honey was the dog’s name.

  The front door on number 114 began to open for the redheaded boys. They were not latchkey kids. Somebody was home to welcome them. The inner wood door was bright red. A hand reached to push open the storm door. Janie covered her eyes and sank down in the seat. “Drive past, hurry up, Reeve, drive past.”

  There were too many children dancing on the sidewalks, wild with release from school, to drive fast. He drove about ten more houses and parked the car. “The woman who opened the door has red hair, too,” he said.

  “It’s not true!” said Janie. She could not tell if she was whispering or screaming. Her skull was vibrating as if dentists’ drills had gone crazy inside her. “I refuse to have it be true. Reeve, take me home. You were right. We have to make up a good lie, we can’t tell anybody about this.”

  From the other direction came a second yellow school bus. It stopped quite close to them at the intersection of the two-hundred block. It was the high school bus. A handful of teenagers got off, none interested in each other, going their separate, bored ways.

  A tall, skinny boy, from whose right shoulder swung a nearly empty book bag and a pair of enormous sneakers, headed toward them. “Now those are serious feet,” said Reeve admiringly. “I hope the rest of his body grows to fit. Look at the size of those feet.”

  Look at the red hair, thought Janie Johnson. That’s my brother.

  The boy never saw her; he checked out the Jeep, and he checked out Reeve, but was not interested in the passenger. The sneakers, hanging by tied laces, banged his chest as he walked. She turned very slowly in the seat and watched him. He crossed the street; he glanced in a newspaper cylinder. He put his right hand on the fender of a parked car and used it for leverage to toss himself over a hedge. He leaped into the air to touch the sagging, leafless branch of tree. The branch snapped back and jittered. It began to rain again, as if the twig had punctured the cloud.

  The boy went in the front door of number 114.

  The drive home took forever.

  They had not known there was this much traffic in the entire world, let alone New Jersey to New York to Connecticut. Reeve was exhausted. His hands gripped the wheel, his eyes darted around. He would never have admitted it, but the pressure of the racing cars, the huge trucks inches away, the endless turnpike entrances where cars nudged his fenders, trying to squeeze in, visibly frightened him. Neither one had driven anywhere but their own safe, slow corner of the world.

  Janie kept looking at his watch.

  “Should we call them?” she said nervously. “Tell our parents we’re fine, but we’re going to be late?”

  Reeve said, “Well, if you can think of anything to say to your parents, go ahead and call. Ill stop at a McDonald’s on the Connecticut Turnpike.

  But I know what my parents are going to think. They’re going to think you and I went to a motel to learn about sex. My sister Megan did that with her second boyfriend. His name was Philip. My mother still gets a fever whenever she hears the name Philip.”

  They crossed the Hudson River and hurtled on toward Connecticut. There seemed to be no way out of the traffic; it had a nightmarish, eternal quality; as though they might be doomed to race wheel to wheel with the rest of the world, never reaching any destination.

  Janie said, “A motel.” She tried to think in terms of romance. Or at least sex. Both were certainly easier subjects than kidnapping and another set of parents. Spring, Jonathan Avery, whose family consisted of at least three brothers.

  And a missing daughter.

  The radio brought traffic reports. Highways they had never heard of were jammed for miles; bridges they had never crossed were impassable; alternate routes with preposterous names were suggested.

  Reeve’s hands suddenly loosened on the wheel. “It’s not too late,” he said.

  “For what?”

  “For the motel.”

  The speed in their lane never slowed. Nobody had ever heard of the fifty-five mile per hour limit. Anybody driving fifty-five would have been crushed beneath the wheels of a thousand automobiles, each flattening them a little more, til
l there was nothing left in the road but the metallic gleam of a car that drove too slowly.

  She could touch him in places she had never touched another human being. She could lean on a chest not covered by layers of wet jacket and buttoned shirt. “I don’t think I could concentrate,” she whispered, wetting her lips.

  “Maybe if I concentrated enough for both of us?” said Reeve.

  CHAPTER

  12

  They were in Connecticut. They passed the beautiful suburbs from which commuters went daily to New York City, then hurtled through the ugly mill towns and smog-rimmed cities that lined the shore farther east.

  Reeve took an exit.

  “Are we out of gas?” said Janie.

  Reeve shook his head. Down the exit ramp they went, and the sudden release from traffic and noise was like taking off heavy coats. Janie felt thin and easy again.

  Reeve turned left at the stoplight, went back under the turnpike, and there in front of them was a motel.

  The motel was nasty: flat-roofed, crouching rows of cheap pinky-yellow doors. “How will you pay for this?” said Janie.

  “I have my father’s American Express card.” They both registered. Reeve wrote in his tall, cramped handwriting “Reeve Shields.”

  She took the pen and froze up. I have no name. I am not Janie Johnson nor Jayyne Jonstone nor Jane Javensen nor Jennie Spring.

  The clerk saw her hesitation and gave her a sick, sly grin.

  She wrote “Jane Johnson.”

  The clerk turned the registration card around and read the names out loud. “Jane Johnson?” he repeated, smirking. “Big imagination, lady.”

  Reeve’s fist came out, terrifying them all.

  The clerk leaped backward.

  Reeve grabbed the key instead of decking the clerk. His hand locked on Janie’s arm and he hauled her outside. They stood panting in the smoggy, rain-laden air of industrial Connecticut. She said, “Reeve. I can’t.”

  She expected an argument but she got none. He just nodded. He looked for a while at the cement blocks that were peeling with old vanilla-colored paint, and the rain puddling through rusted gutters. They both knew if he had gone to a different sort of place, with a safer, richer, cleaner feeling, they could have. Would have.

  Reeve shrugged. He stuck the key in the motel mailbox and they went back to the Jeep.

  Janie said, “When we do it for real, Reeve, it won’t be like this.”

  “When?” said Reeve softly. His long face seemed thinner than ever, and his open mouth a stranger’s. Then his wonderful joyful grin split his face, and he turned back into Reeve, her trusty, rusty next-door neighbor, and he grabbed her waist and swung her around, then stood very still, kissing her.

  It was a full-length kiss; she felt him down the entire length of their bodies, through their clothes, through their coats. The ice of her fears was replaced by a shimmering heat. A heat that was Reeve.

  “I don’t think I can drive,” said Reeve when they were in the Jeep.

  “Well, I can’t, not in this traffic.”

  “You want driving experience, take it.”

  Neither of them wanted driving experience. It was another experience altogether they wanted. “Start the motor,” said Janie.

  “Believe me, it’s running,” said Reeve, and they giggled desperately.

  “What time is it?” said Janie. She blew a long puff of air upward, lifting her hair off her rain-wet forehead.

  “Late,” said Reeve. “I don’t know why we worried about New Jersey calling the police. If we don’t get home soon, our parents will be the ones to call the police.” He touched her hair (hair he had yanked a million times when he was nothing but an annoying brat next door) as if she might refuse him permission; as if he were touching gold. He took a breath so deep she thought his rising chest might split his shirt, and then he fell back against his own window instead of against her.

  “Reeve, we registered. There’s going to be a bill. It’ll come through on your parents’ American Express next month. Your mother will talk about Megan and Philip,” she said. She gripped the seat belt when she wanted to be exploring him.

  “I don’t think my mother wants to go through that a second time,” said Reeve. “I always planned to keep it a secret from her when it was my turn. Why does my turn always come so much later than Lizzie’s and Megan’s and Todd’s turns?”

  They managed to talk. He managed to drive. Neither of them, radio addicts though they were, remembered to turn on the radio. The car was filled with rhythm and rock of their own thoughts.

  The journey that had lasted so long rushed by toward the end. They fell silent. He took their exit. Drove through their town. Passed the houses of their friends, the streets of their childhoods.

  “Janie,” said Reeve suddenly. His voice shocked her in the quiet of the car. “Your parents have been my parents, too. They raised me as much as my own. Whenever Lizzie and Megan and Todd were driving me nuts, I’d be at your place. I haven’t figured out the truth in this New Jersey stuff, but Janie, we can’t jump to conclusions.”

  “Oh, okay, sure,” said Janie. She was sick with nerves. “Just because they have my hair and I remember the dog Honey and it’s my dress on the carton, we won’t jump to any conclusions.”

  “Okay, so the conclusions are there staring us in the face. The fact is, your parents are going to be there staring us in the face in about a minute. What then, Janie?”

  I promise, you’ll never have to go through this a second time. She herself had said that. And meant it. But Janie had not quite realized she would have to go through it, too. And not just once. All her life she would be part of whatever had happened in that shopping center in New Jersey.

  Reeve drove up their hill.

  The lights of both the Shields and Johnson houses were on from attic to cellar, as if their parents had been searching for bodies in hidden corners.

  “This is it,” said Reeve.

  “I don’t want to go in alone.”

  “I don’t want to go in at all.”

  But there was no need to go in.

  Four angry, screaming parents came out instead.

  CHAPTER

  13

  It was wonderful to be yelled at. It was so parental.

  Her mothers face, taut with worry and rage, was a mothers face. Her fathers hands, rigid with wanting to shake her by the shoulders till her teeth rattled, were a parents hands. They loved her. Parents who loved you bothered to get mad.

  Once years ago, furious at Sarah-Charlotte, Janie had stomped on Sarah-Charlotte’s glasses and purposely broken her friend’s retainer. When her parents saw the pink plastic splinters on the sidewalk, Janie thought they would kill her. And that time she cheated on the math test in sixth grade. That occasion was memorable first for the screaming, and second for the failure her parents had insisted she get for the entire marking period, even though the teacher was willing to forgive Janie. And of course the time she and Sarah-Charlotte, aged ten, decided to see whether it was true what they heard at a slumber party, that you died when you had Coke and aspirin at the same time. The time her mother said Janie was old enough now to do her own laundry and ironing, and Janie replied, “Forget it. You do it or I’ll stay dirty.”

  Ah, the yelling.

  They’re my mother and father, Janie thought. That’s why they’re so mad. That’s what mothers and fathers do.

  “Janie! How could you do this! No matter how upset and angry and confused you were, you know what a telephone is.”

  They yelled and she basked in it; it was like sunshine in summer, seeping into her pores.

  “You could at least show some remorse,” shouted her father, “instead of smiling at the driveway!” while next to him Mr. Shields bellowed, “Reeve! How could you have done this! Did you know about this Hannah nightmare? And yet you purposely the very next day whisked Janie off so her mother and father had to go through it again? That was horrible of you! What kind of person are you?” />
  Those people in New Jersey are just people in New Jersey, thought Janie. I don’t want them and I don’t care about them. “I’m sorry, Mom,” she said. “I’m sorry. Daddy. We decided to cut school so we could talk. We just drove around for hours. Nothing happened.”

  “Nothing happened?” repeated her father. He had aged. Tonight he was indeed a grandfather. Lines creased his cheeks as if he had slept on a pile of books. The distinguished hair was just a tired gray. “We paced the floor for hours in complete panic. Wondering if you’d ever come back. Wondering if you’d bother to let us know. And you dare tell me nothing happened?”

  Reeve simply stood still, waiting it out. Boys did that.

  Janie’s mother, exhausted from worry and relief, burst into tears. “Janie, why didn’t you tell us at breakfast you were that upset? Why did you lie and insist everything was fine? We would have done anything. Hannah ran away like that! I thought you were—”

  “We weren’t running away,” interrupted Reeve. “We were talking. That’s all. I know we should have called and said we were fine, but we didn’t. I’m sorry. Everything’s fine.”

  “You have a very strange concept of the word Tine,” said Reeve’s father. “Let me assure you, you are not fine right now. You are about to get the punishment of your life. Get in the house.”

  Reeve and Janie looked at each other. They won’t let us see each other again, thought Janie. I won’t be able to ride to school with him. His father will ground him the rest of senior year. “But Reeve helped me,” said Janie desperately. “I needed him and he was there.”

  The yelling stopped.

  Their parents stood quiet and limp. Nobody had touched. Nobody had reached out to forgive or hold.

  Reeve’s mother surprised them all. “Then I’m proud of you, Reeve,” she said huskily. “Frank and Miranda told us about Hannah and the cult.

  It must have been a terrible shock to you, Janie. It certainly was a shock to us. Now that you’re back, and we know you’re safe, I suppose I can admit that helping Janie work this out was much more important than a day at school.”