The Voice on the Radio

by Caroline B. Cooney

  Reeve didn’t get up. He sat hunched and sagging on his side of the room. “I promise.”

  “You will never use us on any radio station ever again.”

  “I promise.”

  Brian had never heard Janie say us before. Us meaning her real family.

  “Did I hear the announcer correctly?” said Janie. “Did he refer to me as a thing? A janie?”

  Reeve closed his eyes.

  Coward, thought Brian.

  Brian wanted Reeve still to be his hero. He wanted Reeve still to be tall and wonderful and good at everything. We’ll have to keep this a secret from Stephen, too, thought Brian, and he imagined hearing Stephen speak highly of Reeve at holidays.

  Janie envied Jodie’s tears. She, Janie, was blank; a computer disk that has not been formatted.

  Reeve looked so miserable. He was ashamed, she believed that. But his protests were another lie. He had known what he was doing.

  No, thought Janie. You said to yourself: Oh well, it’s only Janie, but a radio career is a radio career.

  She felt soggy, like a swamp.

  She thought of her Barbies, how firm they were, how solid and unchanging. If only life could be like that.

  But my life is like that. My mother and father and I—we work each day to be as solid and unchanging as dolls. This is what it is to be a doll. Somebody plays with you, and throws you down at the end of the day.

  “Janie,” whispered Reeve, and he moved toward her, and she shook her head, and he stopped.

  She tightened the blanket around herself. She could not imagine ever coming out from under the blanket.

  Reeve was sick from knowing himself.

  Janie had felt her way to the armchair. The beautiful hair seemed unconnected to her: It belonged to somebody who danced and laughed.

  “There’s one more thing,” said Brian. “This is a secret, Reeve. Even though you’ve told all Massachusetts, it’s a secret. We don’t tell any of our parents.”

  “Yeah, Reeve, we let the parents go on thinking you’re a nice person,” said Jodie.

  “We don’t tell Stephen,” said Brian, “we don’t tell Sarah-Charlotte, we don’t discuss your radio show again. Ever.”

  I sure don’t want them to know either, thought Reeve drearily. “What about your twin?” he asked Brian. “You tell him everything, don’t you?”

  “No, Reeve,” said Brian quietly. “You’re the one here who tells everything.”

  Reeve flushed.

  Janie had looked up. Reeve could not meet Janie’s gaze. There was something glinting about her, like a setting sun in his eyes. Without inflection, just plain words, as if reading a vocabulary list, Janie said to him, “Don’t call me. Don’t come to my house when you’re home.”

  “No, Janie, please,” he said, and his voice cracked. “I still love you. Let me talk to you alone. Please.”

  “If you even liked me, you would have stopped yourself from doing this.”

  “That’s not true. I just wasn’t thinking. I still love you.”

  “Oh, shut up,” said Jodie. “We hate you, so it’s hate, so shut up and leave.”

  Janie tightened the blanket, insulating herself.

  Brian put a light hand on Reeve’s sleeve and guided him out; out of the room, into the hall, onto the thick carpet; and then Brian shut the door and Reeve was alone in the hotel corridor. He could hear the ding of arriving elevators and a cluttery rush of ice cubes falling in their machine.

  I’ve raped Janie, thought Reeve.

  That’s what talk shows are. The rape of the soul.

  CHAPTER

  ELEVEN

  Boston.

  One A.M.

  A thin, mean rain was coming down.

  The T was closed. Reeve had no cash for a taxi. He walked.

  Even at this hour, in this weather, he was not the only person on the streets. Well-dressed people emerged from bars, drunks slept in doorways, police cruised in cop cars. Scrungy little convenience stores were full of light and customers.

  He could not go to his dorm. He didn’t even want to think about the thoughts he would have, trying to sleep.

  The next block was deserted. He found himself slinking through the shadows at the edges of buildings, instead of striding down the sidewalk. He was a thing that needed to stay hidden.

  Was this how Hannah had felt, when she made the final error, the ultimate betrayal of her up-bringing, and became a kidnapper? Hannah, hiding in her parents’ home with little Jennie Spring, telling them monumental lies: Did she know she had become part of the dark?

  Why was she calling WSCK?

  Is any spotlight better than the dark? Even the spotlight of arrest and trial and imprisonment?

  Reeve corrected himself. It was not, it could not be, Hannah.

  In his head, he replayed the Hannah call. From the inflection in that voice, he tried to get a picture of what the woman looked like.

  Radio was words. The listener had to supply the rest. The only photos of Hannah were from high school, so it was easy to think of her as a young, thin dishwater blond, head down, not making eye contact even on the yearbook page.

  The big question was still the question with which Reeve had opened his show: Now what?

  This is where we came in, Reeve’s listeners would say.

  He was exhausted. His knees wanted to quit. Reeve leaned against a building and slid down the bricks to the sidewalk, like a drunk. The expression on Janie’s face! The stunned blankness, as if he had slapped her. I did slap her, he thought.

  His heart wanted to quit.

  Now what?

  Brian was only thirteen. He was asleep by one A.M. Jodie, having driven from southern New Jersey, was even more tired, and she too fell asleep.

  Only Janie was awake in the night, in the dark.

  She stayed in the armchair. The drapes were open, and she looked out on a sliver of the city. It was a hard, building-edged slice, like an architectural drawing, yellow at the edges from the glow of streetlamps.

  It came to Janie Johnson that Reeve Shields was a soft person from a soft world. When he ran into a hard decision, he made a soft one.

  Whereas she, and Jodie, and even Brian—age thirteen—were hard, because theirs had been a hard world; and when they ran into hard decisions, they knew how to make a hard choice.

  How wrong that Reeve, her Reeve, was soft.

  He was physically stronger, taller, broader. He was all the good things, from handsome to fine company.

  And soft.

  I still love you, he had claimed. But love should make a person step back and think again. She no longer knew what love was. Or who Reeve was.

  Maybe, she told herself, he just hasn’t grown up yet.

  No. Because Brian’s grown up, and he’s only thirteen.

  She felt such pain through her heart that she did not know if she could live through it. But she had had pain before, and she knew that you did come out on the other side. You were not necessarily happier or better for it. But you arrived in another place.

  I don’t want some other place. I want Reeve the way he was.

  She watched Jodie and Brian breathing. She had to believe that some people were as steady and reliable as breathing.

  But who?

  Boston.

  Two A.M.

  WSCK broadcast around the clock. Hanging out at the station beat going back to his dorm, so Reeve entered WSCK.

  He was as surprised to see Vinnie as Vinnie was to see him. This hour was for new guys, for slaves. Vinnie knew something was wrong when Reeve appeared. Vinnie wouldn’t care what was wrong unless it affected the station. People were welcome to have all the nervous breakdowns they wanted, just not on Vinnie’s time. So Reeve said, “Couldn’t sleep.”

  Vinnie shrugged. People’s health problems did not interest him. “Want to introduce you,” said Vinnie. He waved forward two guys and a young woman. “This is Reeve, the guy whose program made you decide to show up here at two in the mor
ning.”

  They beamed at Reeve. “Hi, I’m Cathy!” said the girl. “I love your janies. WSCK sounded so fun. I wanted to do it so bad. Vinnie’s not a real fan of women, so it wasn’t easy getting on the future deejay list.”

  Reeve was not able to banter. “Great to have you aboard,” he said lamely. He slouched against the far wall.

  “Over here,” Vinnie said to the new volunteers, “is the air check. This tape comes on automatically when the mike is on, so it doesn’t record music, but it does record everything the jock says.” He grinned suddenly. “We got all the janies on tape,” he said, waving in the general direction of the messiest shelves. Vinnie was breathy and excited, like at the end of a tense game, when the score could go either way.

  Reeve’s anxiety rocketed.

  “We’re gonna sell ’em,” confided Vinnie. “Syndicate the janies to a hundred radio stations, like Rush Limbaugh or Howard Stern or Imus. I’m gonna assign one of you new guys to go through the tapes, ignore the crap on ’em, and make a single tape of the janies.”

  A leg cramp seized Reeve. His leg yanked up-ward, muscles screaming. He doubled over, massaging the kink, and sank down neatly, as if he’d meant to sit on the floor. The pain left him breathless.

  Once again, he had forgotten the very technology he loved.

  A tape was a collection. It had substance and life.

  Promising not to do another janie did not get rid of the janies that already existed.

  Vinnie and the new crew went into Vinnie’s office. Reeve stood. Pins and needles attacked his leg. He managed to shift his weight and cross the tiny room. Calling on his leg not to be a traitor, Reeve squatted down and tilted his head to check the dates on tapes.

  “…and you’ve been listening to WSCK!” said the deejay, the same old lines full of the same old exclamation points.

  In typical sloppy WSCK fashion, some tapes weren’t labeled or were labeled partially. He stacked those from Tuesday or Thursday evening, and checked a wall calendar to see what dates he might have missed.

  Vinnie came back in with his troops.

  Kicked under a shelf was somebody’s old book bag.

  “Now these are sliders,” said Vinnie, waving at the board. “Watch the deejay.”

  Reeve loaded the book bag. Eight-inch tapes were cumbersome. He buckled the closures and slung the book bag loosely over his shoulder. Then he turned slowly.

  All three volunteers were watching him. “Have a nice night,” he said brightly, moving toward the door.

  Vinnie gave him a look. He despised people who wished you a nice day, a nice night or a nice weekend.

  “Bye, Reeve,” said Cathy.

  He wondered what she had seen. Would she ask Vinnie why Reeve had taken those tapes with him?

  He shut the heavy glass door firmly behind him, taking measured steps up the stairs. His heart was pounding.

  Come on, he said to himself. What’s Vinnie going to do to me? Give me a lower grade in Disc Jockey 101?

  FCC rules required these tapes, but college stations tended to be rickety. Reeve doubted any official would ever check, and if they did, so what?

  We’re volunteers, he reminded himself, what can they do to a volunteer?

  Vinnie will hate my guts. He’ll go ballistic, he’ll say I stole station property. How am I going to come back here next Tuesday? By then these new guys will have discovered half those tapes are missing, and they’ll know it has to be me—and then I say, Oh, even though you have the highest ratings and the highest hopes of your radio life, Vinnie, I’m quitting; no more janies; but I still want to answer the phone. I’m expecting a call, see, and I want to be the one to pick up.

  Vinnie would be sorry they didn’t broadcast from a higher floor so that he’d have a window to throw Reeve out of.

  The rain had stopped, and the wind had turned bitter. Reeve stood under a dark sky and stared at buildings in which thousands of kids his own age slept.

  What explanation do I give for not being on the radio anymore? Oh, grow up! he thought, despising himself even more. You don’t owe explanations. Just stop.

  Hills College lay between neighborhoods where you’d like to spend your life and neighborhoods where you’d rather die first. The streets were scary in their emptiness, but scarier in the fullness of shadows. He walked half a mile to the bridge over the Charles River.

  The bridge had a pedestrian corridor. He walked to the center.

  One by one, he flipped the tapes like Frisbees into the water.

  Oh, Janie, he thought. This time last year, I was buying you a Thanksgiving present. Last year I bought you presents for every holiday. New Year’s, Valentine’s, St. Patrick’s.

  Well, this time he had given her something she could really remember him by.

  Don’t call me. Don’t come to my house when you’re home.

  The last tape slid into the water without a splash.

  There, he told himself, trying to believe this had accomplished something. The janies are gone. Destroyed.

  He found himself rolling the empty book bag tighter and tighter, strangling the canvas. All I have to do now is wonder if I’ve brought Hannah to life.

  How long would he have to wait before he could feel safe?

  A month, a year, a decade?

  Does a secret have a life span?

  And if so, whose?

  Reeve rested his cheek against the cold metal of the bridge, letting it lower his fever. He soothed himself with probabilities.

  Almost Thanksgiving vacation. After that, only two weeks of school, during which final exams would take over. Then vacation from December fourteenth till January twentieth.

  College kids had too much to think about to remember the janies that long. There was probably citywide attention deficit disorder. Two hundred fifty thousand students busily forgetting everything. People would have transferred and moved and broken up. Nobody would remember last year’s drivel on a pathetic little radio station.

  So it’s okay. I threw the tapes in the river, they’re history, it’s going to vanish and be okay.

  He found himself laughing nervously. A frilly sound. A skirt of ridiculous laughter. He felt like a trapped President in a bad movie.

  He could destroy all the tapes in all the radio stations in Boston…and if that voice was Hannah, and if Hannah decided she wanted airtime, somebody else would give it to her.

  He had no control.

  For the first time in his life, he was standing in the middle of a situation that would do whatever it wanted.

  CHAPTER

  TWELVE

  Jodie canceled her Hills College interview but decided to keep the afternoon appointment at Simmons. So after breakfast—a public breakfast, in the hotel restaurant: starched, heavy napkins folded like pyramids, with waiters pouring coffee and bringing expensive toast—they went out of the hotel and stood in the pale November sun.

  “Well, we’re here,” said Brian. “Let’s make use of Boston. Let’s walk to the Old State House, where the Declaration of Independence was read in July 1776.”

  Janie and Jodie looked at him as if he were an out-of-date computer chip.

  But in the end, they agreed, because they had to do something.

  Brian enjoyed Boston. It was not skyscrapery and overpowering. It was a friendly, low-ceiling kind of place. In such a city, surely a mere radio program would be absorbed, fall between cracks, blend with the rest of Boston’s violent history.

  “I didn’t want to go to Hills College anyway,” said Jodie, in the tone of voice that informed Brian she had been daydreaming exclusively of Hills. “It doesn’t have enough campus. I want grass and a quadrangle and trees to study under.”

  “I wonder if people really study under trees,” said Brian. “You see it in the photographs in college catalogs, but I don’t think real life people cry Aha! A tree! Let’s study!”

  Janie had studied beneath a tree with Reeve.

  Raked leaves with Reeve.

 
She knew the buttons on his sweater and the whorls of his fingerprints.

  Why had he not remembered these things? Or had he remembered, but they didn’t mean much?

  They meant the world to me, Reeve, thought Janie.

  She knew then that she would have to box up her love for Reeve. She wanted to keep it, like a rose from a corsage.

  Brian put his hand in front of her, to keep her from stepping off the curb into traffic; the world was thoughtlessly going on without her.

  How much discipline do I have? she thought. Can I loathe Reeve in the present, but still love him in the past? It doesn’t work in divorce.

  She wished she really were a Barbie. Plastic was good, paper was good. Hair and clothes were good. But hearts…what good were they?

  Jodie, Brian and Janie waited for a walk light, as if they had a place to go and a reason to cross. A car radio blared so loudly that the percussion seemed to be right on the sidewalk with them.

  Radio.

  Janie listened to radio for music, but Sarah-Charlotte loved talk shows. She used to play talk show the way other little girls played house. Sarah-Charlotte. The best friend who knew nothing.

  Janie’s head ached with thoughts of Sarah-Charlotte. Sarah-Charlotte continued to grow up, to acquire poise and depth, whereas she, Janie, seemed to get younger. She would not mature from this experience, she would weaken. And so would her friendship with Sarah-Charlotte weaken, because there would be more secrets than sharing.

  Her feet walked.

  Her ears heard Brian and Jodie speak.

  Sarah-Charlotte was wrong.

  Not much was fight or flight.

  It was plain old hanging on that mattered.

  They ended up at the Old Corner Bookstore, which Brian had read about in a tour guide to Boston. “Longfellow and Hawthorne and Oliver Wendell Holmes used to read here. Let’s go in.” Brian nudged the girls until they obeyed.

  It was a regular bookstore, less history-minded than Brian had expected. In fact, the local history shelves were quite manageable. I’ll buy one book, he thought. This will get me launched in actual reading. Out of the zillions of choices, I’ll find one here.