The Voice on the Radio

by Caroline B. Cooney

  Of course, they might not be listening.

  It was just a college station. They were probably listening to real stations.

  If I fail, it’s okay, he told himself. Nobody but me cares, and it’s no big deal, and—

  If he failed, he would transfer to another college.

  It would be fun asking his parents for another ten or twenty thousand dollars in order for their son not to be humiliated on the air.

  It’s nothing but a microphone, he said to himself. Say something. Say anything. “Once upon a time,” said Reeve.

  Derek Himself stared incredulously. Cal, a deejay, and Vinnie, the station manager, who were the other two guys at the station tonight, looked up from their paperwork. All three began to snicker, and then actually to snort, with laughter, although background noise was forbidden when the mike was on; it would be picked up and broadcast. Once upon a time? A beginning for kinder-gartners. A beginning for fairy tales and picture books.

  Reeve would never live it down. He really would have to transfer.

  He pictured Cordell laughing at him. Laughed at by a roommate stupider and smellier than anybody on campus? He imagined the guys in the dorm yelling Loser! Loser! Guys he wanted to be friends with but hadn’t pulled it off yet. Guys who would not be polite about how worthless Reeve was.

  “Once upon a time,” he repeated helplessly, stuck in horrible repetition of that stupid phrase.

  And then talk arrived, like a tape that had come in the mail. For Reeve Shields really did know a story that began with “Once upon a time.”

  “I dated a dizzy redhead. Dizzy is a compliment. Janie was light and airy. Like hope and joy. My girlfriend,” he said softly, into the microphone. Into the world.

  “You know the type. Really cute, fabulous red hair, lived next door. Good in school, of course, girls like that always are. Janie had lots of friends and she was crazy about her mom and dad, because that’s the kind of family people like that have.”

  Never had Reeve’s voice sounded so rich and appealing.

  “Except,” said Reeve, “except one day in the school cafeteria, a perfectly ordinary day, when kids were stealing each other’s desserts and spilling each other’s milk, Janie just happened to glance down at the picture of that missing child printed on the milk carton.”

  His slow voice seemed to draw a half-pint of milk, with its little black-and-white picture of a missing child. It was almost visible, that little milk carton, that dim and wax-covered photograph.

  “And the face on the milk carton,” said Reeve, “was Janie herself.”

  He deepened his voice, moving from informative into mysterious. “They can’t fit much information on the side of a half-pint,” said Reeve, “but the milk carton said that little girl had been missing since she was three. Missing for twelve years.”

  In radio, you could not see your audience. Reeve could not know whether he really did have an audience. Radio was faith.

  “Can you imagine if your daughter, or your sister, had disappeared twelve years ago? Twelve years have gone by, and yet you still believe. Surely somehow, somewhere, she must be waiting, and listening. You haven’t given up hope. You refuse to admit she’s probably dead by now, probably was dead all along. You believe there is a chance in a million that if you put her picture on a milk carton, she’ll see it.”

  Beyond the mike, Reeve imagined dormitories—kids slouched on beds and floors, listening. Listening to him.

  “Well,” said Reeve, “she saw it.”

  To Jodie, the space of the big, new house was incredible. Only a year ago, especially during that brief, terrifying time when Janie lived with them, there had been five kids and their friends. The little split-level had been jammed with kids: kids on the couch, kids on the floor, kids in the refrigerator, kids spending the night, kids practicing the clarinet, kids throwing balls, kids fighting, millions of kids.

  Now there was a big, clean, empty space with Jodie rattling around.

  The new house was such a good idea. What color wallpaper should go in the twins’ bathroom? Should there be sliding doors to the deck or French doors? Jodie’s parents got very involved. Paint chips became a major part of their lives, and of course, no matter what you decide on paint, and whether lemon yellow turns out to be right or wrong, it’s only paint. Paint it again if you goofed.

  After Janie, it was pretty decent to have things you could just paint over when you were wrong.

  Jodie’s brother Stephen was at college for the house event. Everybody on the East Coast had to go through a Colorado stage, and Stephen was deep in his, happy to have Birkenstocks on his feet and mountains in his backyard.

  Not only was Stephen gone, but nobody really noticed. It was natural and easy to have him out of the family. Whereas when Jennie had left to become Janie again, it had been unnatural and terrible and it had ruined their sleep and their eating and their lives.

  So last year there had been five Spring children, and then Jennie had left and there were four, and then Stephen had left and there were three.

  The twins had been thick and annoying all their paired lives, and they simply continued. There was no need to think about Brian and Brendan because they had each other and did enough thinking between them.

  Jodie felt as if she were the only child. It was quite wonderful. Mom consulted her over everything: carpet swatches and the locations of electrical outlets and the colors of bathroom sinks. Mom and Dad were so tickled, bursting out of the old, cramped place. They had refused to change addresses or phone numbers after the kidnapping, even when a decade had passed and missing three-year-old Jennie was unquestionably dead and gone.

  But Jodie’s parents had questioned. They had put their little girl’s picture on a milk carton, and the right little girl had seen it.

  After all these months, it could still chill Jodie’s bones that Janie Johnson had seen herself on a milk carton and had understood that she must be Jennie Spring.

  Jodie put aside her shattered hopes for a sister, the one whose name would match and who would be as close to her as a twin, and considered college instead.

  Stephen, now—her brother Stephen had always known he would leave; leave for good; put hundreds of miles between himself and this family. Jodie was not sure she could do that. She felt that her mother and father needed her more than they had needed Stephen. Or perhaps it was different for sons; perhaps parents yielded their sons more easily.

  But Jodie was the only daughter—Janie having quit—and Mom and Dad were frightened when she looked through college catalogs from California or Texas or Michigan. There weren’t many schools in New Jersey and if the college experience was going to count, Jodie at least needed to get out of state. So she was looking in New York and Pennsylvania. Connecticut she would skip, because Connecticut was the Spring family word for kidnap and loss and rage. That brought her eyes up the map to Rhode Island and Massachusetts. If she went to school in Providence or Boston, she’d be on the railroad line and could get home easily. Nobody would have to rearrange a life to come get her in the car.

  It was autumn.

  The time, for high school seniors, of looking at college campuses. Jodie Spring looked at the catalog for Hills College, and she thought, Janie’s boyfriend goes there. He’d show me around the campus. It would be cool to see Boston with Reeve.

  Were Derek Himself, Vinnie and Cal into his story? Had he pulled it off? Reeve didn’t risk looking at them. If they were laughing at him…

  Reeve had found a beat. He felt instinctively that Janie’s story must be told slowly, in a rhythm of confusing omissions, so that people wanted more. It had to be the same puzzling nightmare that it had been for Janie.

  “So it’s you on that milk carton. You are a missing person,” breathed Reeve.

  The mike ate his words, hungered for more.

  “Around you, everything is ordinary. People are still having Jell-O and sitting two to a chair. But your life just switched channels.”

 
Now Reeve’s mind was crammed with a whole library of radio time. Janie Johnson was a story to tell forever.

  “What does missing mean?” asked Reeve. His eyes were fixed on the fat, gray mike. His fingers teased the adjustable arm, making friends with it, getting safe. “Does missing mean lost? Does it mean run away? Or does it mean…kidnapped?”

  Janie and her two families had never given interviews.

  Not once.

  Not to anybody.

  Reeve, and Reeve alone, knew both sides completely; knew more than Janie, really, because his parents had talked to Janie’s parents and to the police, back when Janie was still too horrified to hear or see or listen.

  “Of course,” said Reeve, dragging his voice like a net to catch listeners, “the question is—now what? Because you love your parents. If you tell anybody you think you were kidnapped, well—think about it. Think about the media. The police. Your family would be destroyed. If these grown-ups you call Mommy and Daddy are really your kidnappers, and if you turn them in, you’ll send your own parents to prison.”

  Two beats of silence. Then a lowering of the voice. “But if you don’t tell…what about that other family? Still out there? Still worrying, after all these years?”

  Derek was staring, a pencil dangling in his hand. Vinnie’s mouth was half open, like a little kid at story hour. Cal was tilting back apprehensively, to get away from the idea that the family you love must have kidnapped you.

  I have an audience, thought Reeve.

  It was a hot, winning feel: like hitting the ball out of the stadium when the bases were loaded.

  I can do this, thought Reeve. I’m good at it.

  To the audience he could not see—might not even have—he repeated, “Now what?”

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  Sarah-Charlotte needed to know exactly what wardrobe Janie was taking for her next visit back to New Jersey.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Janie pointed out. She didn’t feel like discussing the impending visit, especially because she wasn’t going down there; they were coming here. With Sarah-Charlotte, Janie would find herself creating and keeping secrets there was no point in having. “I’ve gone back before,” she told Sarah-Charlotte carelessly, “they’re used to me, and anyway, they know my whole wardrobe from when I lived there, so it’s no big deal.”

  “Clothing is always a big deal,” said Sarah-Charlotte crossly. “Don’t tell me you’re becoming one of these annoying people who pretends fashion doesn’t matter.”

  Janie giggled. It was an all-purpose, change-the-subject giggle. “You know what? I care so much about fashion I just bought a new Barbie I didn’t have.”

  Janie flung herself over the edge of the bed, and Sarah-Charlotte held her ankles while Janie groped around under the starched lace skirt. She yanked on the handle of her Barbie suitcase. They sprung the locks and took out the new purchase. Barbie on a High Stepper Horse. A palomino with even better hair than Barbie. Janie began to braid the horse’s hair.

  “When I was eight, I would have killed for this,” said Sarah-Charlotte. She picked out the flexible gymnastics Barbie and began to dress her as a Pizza Hut waitress. “Why don’t you go visit Reeve?” she said. “Wouldn’t it be fun to stay in his dorm?”

  Janie was feeling flimsy. She did not want to talk about Reeve. Boston seemed as distant as Tibet, and the college life that Reeve led as strange and unknown as the Himalayas. “My parents? Allow me to travel to Boston and stay in a boys’ dorm? Get a grip on yourself, Sarah-Charlotte.”

  They both laughed. Janie’s parents, and of course “them,” in New Jersey, didn’t let anybody do anything. Not with their history.

  “Get Reeve to drive down,” said Sarah-Charlotte. “Just for an afternoon, anyway.”

  She knows how much I miss him, thought Janie. I’ve kept it from her, but she knows that even when Reeve couldn’t find the right words to solve things, he always had the right arms and the right shoulders. “He doesn’t have a car,” she said. “It’s Boston. What would he do with a car? He’d have to park it, which is impossible, and repair it when it gets broken into.”

  Sarah-Charlotte nodded, letting Janie escape the subject of Reeve. “I had higher hopes for Barbie than being a waitress. I expected her to be an airline pilot. Barbie,” said Sarah-Charlotte sadly, “how did you slip to this?”

  She really is my best friend, thought Janie.

  Friend. The word seemed like Barbie: warm and tan and always the same. I wonder, thought Janie, if it’s too late to be friends with my sister, Jodie.

  WSCK was a music station, but it didn’t try to compete with commercial Boston stations. There was no point in featuring somebody from the eighties, like John Cougar Mellencamp, or somebody who would last forever, like Aerosmith. They didn’t wrestle with how close to Pearl Jam they should play Stone Temple Pilots (since those bands sounded exactly the same except different). They didn’t worry about whether to have a jazz hour, or whether to expand their reggae and rap.

  WSCK did garage bands. Local bands. Hopefuls trying desperately to climb past unadvertised evenings in unknown clubs. Mostly, they did college dorm bands.

  Boston was full of colleges. Northeastern, Simmons, Boston College, Boston University, New England Conservatory, Wentworth, and Reeve’s college, Hills. Just across the bridge were Harvard and MIT. Two hundred and fifty thousand college kids in Boston, and on every floor of every dorm were kids who wanted to make it as musicians.

  All of them needed airtime. Bands walked constantly through the doors of WSCK, holding out their homemade tapes or CDs or even records; amazingly enough, people were still cutting records. Reeve loved the smell of vinyl. He loved the musicians, whether they were garage bands or just garbage. They tried so hard. They were so brave and willing to be humiliated, as long as they got heard.

  The playlist at WSCK was not a computer-generated work of art. No research team was finding out if the listening audience on Huntington Avenue wanted more or less Melissa Etheridge. Nobody cared about Melissa Etheridge. They cared about themselves.

  Only at ten P.M. did the format change.

  From ten to eleven, the station featured talk. Sometimes it was right-wing, sometimes left-wing. Sometimes it was hate, sometimes it was New Age love. It was opinion on legalizing marijuana. Or opinion on retiring all current professors at all currently existing universities. (People were in favor.)

  But mostly, it was the radio jocks themselves. Teenagers who wanted talk shows. Jocks who wanted to go back to their home states and do the wildly sick and funny and famous morning shows for commuters in Los Angeles or Chicago or Miami. Jocks who wanted to make it with their speaking voices, just as the bands wanted to make it with their songs and drumbeats.

  Reeve thought: I’ll be the next talk-show king.

  He loved the vision of himself—famous and surrounded by admirers and sought after by other famous people. He could hardly wait to listen to the tape of himself after his hour was done.

  * * *

  Janie didn’t tell. She kept it a secret between herself and the milk carton.

  Janie researched her own kidnapping in The New York Times.

  Can you imagine? You go to the library and read about yourself on microfiche? You see a photograph in the Times of a sister and three brothers you never knew you had? An uncle and an aunt and grandparents…but most of all, a mother and father?

  But even The New York Times doesn’t know who took you. They only know the family that got left behind. The FBI, the Jersey police, nobody ever had a clue.

  But you know. It has to be the parents you have right now.

  * * *

  Radio is partly about phone calls. Would anybody call in? Would even two or three people bother?

  The part of Reeve that was conscious of anything beyond the mike was conscious of the phone.

  Please, let it ring. Let it prove people are listening to me.

  * * *

  Trouble is, your parents are good,
nice, responsible people. And you love them. Kidnapping is evil. Does this mean the mother and father you love are evil?

  If you go and telephone that 800 number on that milk carton, hey—it’s finished. Over. You lose. No more family.

  So you try to figure out a way that you could be wrong. That it’s made up. That the face on the milk carton is not you.

  But you start finding proof.

  Like a box. In an attic. Under the eaves.

  * * *

  Brian Spring and his mother were still at Price Club. Mom’s workdays were long, and by the time dinner was over, and homework supervised, and she could think of shopping, it was always late. In their new Dodge Caravan, they had headed out to stockpile food and drink and plastic bags and detergents.

  When the twins were little (actually, a year ago), both Brendan and Brian loved shopping days. The huge warehouse was as awesome as an airplane hangar, with checkouts like tollbooths. You bought vast quantities of food—a case of hot dogs, econo-packs of towels, a gallon of Wesson Oil.

  Now Brendan scorned shopping. Brendan had better things to do. Along with the soccer team, he’d added weight lifting and swimming, so that he could become one of those guys who are scary before they’re even out of junior high. He was planning to shave his head and get a tattoo.

  For thirteen years the two boys had been sealed up like an envelope. They had lived in synchrony, without effort or bickering.

  But now Brendan was a sports star and Brian hadn’t even made the team. Brendan was quick to accuse people, including his twin, of being a girl. There was nothing worse than somebody who threw like a girl, or ran like a girl. When Mom asked who wanted to go shopping, Brendan said, “Shopping! That’s for girls.” He gave Brian his look of contempt reserved for people who were girls.