The Voice on the Radio

by Caroline B. Cooney

  “You get a job at Dairy Mart,” said his father, “making change for people buying a candy bar, and you might just as well lie down in the driveway and I’ll run over you until you’re part of the asphalt.”

  Reeve stared at his father.

  “You think we went through eighteen years of raising you so you could work at a convenience store?”

  “Well—”

  “Well, we didn’t. I don’t care how you feel about Boston. You’re staying in college!”

  Reeve felt as if he had skipped some really important part of life. His parents were mental cases. He had never expected this. In fact, he’d forgotten to think about his parents, he’d been so busy thinking about the janies or Janie and the hannahs or Hannah.

  “Are you failing?” shouted his father. “Are they going to kick you out anyway, is that what this is about?”

  He had no idea whether he was failing. It was a possibility.

  “You quit,” said Reeve’s mother courteously, “and don’t come home thinking you’ll find free room and board here. You quit college and we’re done paying your bills.”

  Reeve sank back in his chair. He tried to regroup. “Maybe I could transfer to a state university, which would be cheaper, and maybe—”

  “You finish your freshman year where you are,” said his father.

  Reeve wondered what Janie, Jodie and Brian were talking about on the drive to southern New Jersey. Scum Reeve, probably.

  The only people who still liked him were people he hadn’t met yet.

  “Is this about Janie?” his father asked, more calmly. “Are you so stuck on her that you can’t be separated?”

  He wondered if his father had ever been such a complete jerk that it changed the course of his life and wounded others. “I don’t know, Dad,” he said finally. “College wasn’t what I thought it would be. I’m not what I thought I would be.”

  His mother did not seem to think this was a major issue. “Just try harder then, dear,” she told him.

  Mr. Spring felt like a teenager.

  What pure joy when his oldest child, his beloved Stephen, got off the plane for four whole days at home. So tall now. Such an adult. Stephen was a strong, good person. Too sheltered, yes; Mr. Spring could admit now that he and his wife had overdone the protection angle. But Stephen had rarely failed to give his parents what they needed, and since they needed to see him over Thanksgiving, he had come.

  Mr. Spring loved everything about Stephen. He had resigned himself to losing this son when Stephen had left for the West. He knew the burden Stephen planned to leave behind, and he agreed with the decision.

  But Stephen had come home grinning and easygoing.

  Stephen had hugged his father at the airport, and the hug was long, and was repeated. It was strange to have a son so much taller than he was. Strange to realize that Stephen, if he chose, could grow just as bristly and red a beard.

  And the new house, on this first holiday, was fine, too.

  Saying good-bye to the cramped split-level was saying good-bye to so much pain.

  Back when his baby girl had gone missing, Jonathan Spring had needed to hear his other children in the night; needed to be a thin wall and a whisper away in case they needed him.

  That was over.

  This fall, he had a sense of youth. He loved his job again, loved the expanse of the new house, loved the huge garage and the workshop and most of all the kitchen, where at last they had enough room for soft drinks to last the week and enough space to sprawl out and enjoy each other.

  And when Janie came down to visit, by her own choice, though she was not as happy and easy as her father wanted her to be, still, it was pure thanksgiving.

  Thanksgiving without the capital T.

  Generic everyday wonderful family thanksgiving.

  They were together.

  CHAPTER

  SIXTEEN

  Seldom had Reeve found his family more exhausting. Todd expected worship of Heather. Megan expected discussion of her brilliant contributions to computer technology. Lizzie expected admiration of her fabulous new job.

  Reeve wished he knew when their planes left.

  Sunday breakfast seemed to last even longer than Thanksgiving dinner had.

  Todd patted Heather and grinned like an idiot when Heather patted back. Reeve tried to be glad for his brother, falling in love and being happy, but he got sick when he thought how he’d killed it with Janie. Never mind how sick he got when he thought of returning to Boston and fending off Vinnie and Derek.

  Reeve retreated to the little den, where the old furniture and the small TV huddled. To his dismay, Lizzie followed.

  Reeve had omitted Lizzie from his radio talks; snippy older sisters weren’t good talk show material. But Lizzie had been part of the unraveling of the Janie mystery. She had helped make some crucial decisions.

  Lizzie came in carrying a glass of ice water and the fruit bowl. Lizzie was very thin; she didn’t even eat two grapes in a row. She closed the door firmly. “We have something to talk about, Reeve. It’s about Hannah.”

  Fear lanced him. Did Lizzie know about the janies? But how could she know? She was a lawyer in California.

  He did not want Lizzie to despise him.

  He sat across from Lizzie, waiting for her to begin.

  “As you know, the cult Hannah joined is based in California. Evidence began to appear that drug smuggling was the moneymaker that kept the cult going. My law firm has been involved. I happened to get access to the files.”

  Reeve felt toasted. “And?”

  Lizzie frowned at her brother. She had especially good frowns. “I do not want you to tell Janie.”

  Not a problem, thought Reeve dizzily. I’ll add it to the list of ten thousand things Janie is not going to allow me to tell her anyway.

  “The cult,” said Lizzie, “kept decent records, considering what a strange mind-set those people had. Among their off-the-wall beliefs was the—”

  “Who cares what their commandments were? What about Hannah?” demanded Reeve.

  “I found her.”

  Sunday afternoon, Stephen was flying out of Philadelphia. Mr. Spring drove him to the airport. The family, including Janie, gathered for farewells.

  How courteous Stephen was to Janie this time, his hostility laid to rest. He’d smiled hello when Janie, Jodie and Brian hauled in from Connecticut. Now, as he and his father left for the airport, Stephen gave Janie an almost-kiss on the cheek. His lips did not touch her. Or maybe she had pulled back. She didn’t know. “Good-bye, Stephen,” she said. And then, uncertainly, “I’ll see you at Christmas.”

  Stephen actually grinned. “That’d be great, Janie.” This time his kiss landed. He got into the driver’s seat. College kids didn’t get driving time; they had to seize it during vacations.

  Her father did not get into the car right away. He frowned slightly at the tires, as if the treads had chosen this particular moment to wear down. “I won’t be back from the airport by the time you leave, Janie,” he said.

  A huge part of Janie grew up.

  Because the sentence had nothing to do with airports. He was asking—as Sarah-Charlotte asked questions—without the question. He was asking her to miss him, too.

  And I will, she thought. She flung her arms around him. Even though she had not planned the hug, it didn’t surprise her that it happened so well and so fast. Dad’s hug back did surprise her. It was a grateful hug; a let-my-breath-out-at-last hug. Janie started to say Thank you for having me, but it sounded like a guest speaking, not a daughter, and she heard herself say, “Drive carefully, Dad,” and she knew how much older she was. Because that sentence didn’t mean cars, either: It meant Don’t you get hurt! I love you. Come home safe.

  Janie and the Springs waved until the car was out of sight. Reeve had accused her of being the brat who’d made this year so hard. It was true. Look how they offer themselves, time after time, while I—I pick out the blanket I’m going to hide in.
/>   She followed the rest back indoors.

  In one way, the new house was the same as the old: The family gravitated toward the kitchen, coming together as close to the refrigerator as they could get. Reeve had claimed on the air that her Spring parents were just clutter. Clutter was a good word for how the Springs lived. Everybody’s everything was everywhere. But they weren’t clutter.

  The old tears, last year’s tears, heated up behind her eyes. I’m so sorry, she thought.

  Brian had been assigned dishes. There were a lot after a huge Sunday dinner. (Brendan, of course, was at school. Different sport, same hours.) Brian scraped, rinsed and loaded. Then he filled the sink with the pots and pans and soapy water. When he was done, the dishtowel was soaked. Brian wrung it out over the sink, wrenching his fingers in opposite directions. Then he strangled it the other way, his expression brutal.

  “What are you doing?” exclaimed their mother. “Practicing murder?”

  Brian blushed. “I don’t have a victim yet,” he said. He did, of course: Reeve. “Just a style.”

  “Stop it,” said their mother predictably. “Don’t talk like that.”

  My mother, too, thought Janie. I’m here in my kitchen with my mother and my sister and my brother.

  How thoroughly she had avoided their love. Stephen grew up, she thought. I wonder if I could ever grow up.

  The family room where they sat was directly off the kitchen. Winter sun touched lightly on freshly painted walls. Thin shadows from each square pane of glass crisscrossed the carpet. Mrs. Spring had brought in the geraniums of summer, and pot after pot still put forth cherry-red handfuls of bloom.

  For a moment it seemed like a dollhouse to Janie. The doll family was large, as doll families were, because you kept buying more.

  She didn’t need dolls anymore. She needed a parent. Janie said, “Mom?”

  Brian turned from the sink.

  Jodie looked up from her term paper.

  “Mom, I need to tell you what happened in Boston,” said Janie. Her tears rose up like a great and awful fountain, lifting, arching through her, spilling over.

  Found her.

  Found Hannah.

  Reeve’s head spun. He felt as if his mind, like a bottle cap, could be screwed right off.

  So the voice had been Hannah!

  Hannah did exist.

  The worst was about to happen. And the worst not only for Janie’s two families, but also for Reeve, because now he could not hide this from Janie. If she had thought him roadkill before, now she would want to shovel him up and dispose of him.

  What he had done was very little. Just talk. But the results of what he had done…

  Reeve felt like an aluminum soda can, caught in a fist, squashed out of shape, all his smooth life turned to knife edges.

  We hate you, so it’s hate, so shut up and leave.

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

  Don’t call me. It hurts me. Stop hurting me.

  Oh, God, and the hurt had only just begun.

  Reeve tried to find something to cling to, but there was nothing, not in his head, not in this room.

  “She’s dead,” said Lizzie. “The cult file notates her death five years ago.”

  The dizziness left Reeve slowly, screwing the cap of his brain back down. Dead.

  Hannah was dead. Had been dead all along.

  So the voice on the radio—the voice had been somebody just like Reeve, wanting to up the ante. Wanting radio time. Wanting to hear herself on a broadcast. Let’s have fun, said the voice on the radio, let’s not worry about what this could do.

  Dead was no threat. Dead was no publicity. It was the best thing for Hannah to be. Not lost, but dead. “Why haven’t the Johnsons been notified?” he said.

  Lizzie shrugged. “They probably don’t know there’s a connection yet. Eventually word will filter back to the authorities who were searching for Hannah, and then the information will reach the Johnsons. Don’t tell Janie, Reeve. Or anyone else. I know I can trust you.”

  She knows she can trust me not to tell anybody anything, thought Reeve. Shame flattened his heart, as if Lizzie had run over him with a truck and he really was roadkill. Janie, too, had known she could trust him.

  “Why tell me?” he said. He was very tired. What if it showed? What if Lizzie saw through to his untrustworthy core?

  “I was so relieved when I found out that I had to share it,” said his sister. “Hannah was such a threat. Happiness is so precarious. Hannah alive could have tilted the balance so that neither Janie nor her parents could be happy again.”

  He was touched that Lizzie, too, had this core: gentle and thoughtful. His radio prayers had been fake. A joke between assassins. This one was real: Please, God, let my core be something good. Let me not be weak in the center.

  Lizzie nibbled a grape. How could she snack on one grape? Grapes were hardly even food to start with. Abruptly Reeve was hugely hungry. “You’re sure about this, Lizzie?” He stood up to go into the kitchen and construct himself a many-layered sandwich. “You’re sure you have the right person and Hannah’s really dead?”

  Lizzie, for whom gentleness was a passing thing, glared at her brother. Information she passed out was flawless. “Hannah was buried in Los Angeles County. Public record.”

  “It’s not somebody pretending to be Hannah?” said Reeve.

  “Why would anybody pretend to be that pathetic failure?” snapped Lizzie. “She wasn’t even good at being a cult member. Yes, I’m sure it’s Hannah and I’m sure she’s dead.”

  Janie was in the arms of the mother who had not rocked her in more than twelve years. Tears and words fell together. “Oh, Mom, I’m so sorry, Brian and Jodie and I agreed not to tell our parents, we agreed that it was too hard, and it is too hard, and I didn’t want you to know, because you have enough hard things, but my other mother—she isn’t strong—she can’t take anything more. And I don’t know what to do.”

  It is too hard, thought Brian. Much too hard. I’m glad I’m the youngest here and I don’t have to pretend I can solve anything.

  Mom smoothed Janie’s hair. Brian was struck by the motion. His mother was not rocking sixteen-year-old Janie Johnson but three-year-old Jennie Spring. “What happened, honey?” she said, in the warm, round voice of one who will kiss it and make it better.

  But Janie was unable to get the words out.

  “Not me,” said Brian.

  So Jodie told. She left out nothing.

  Mom’s hands continued to soothe, but her face grew harsh. She looked away from Janie’s red curls, looked briefly at Jodie and Brian, who shared that hair, and then looked at nothing. Into the terrible past, perhaps, which had just turned active again.

  Jodie wrapped up. “And Reeve keeps calling Janie. And he says he’s sorry and she should let him explain. Like there’s an explanation! Other than the fact that he’s slime. He even wants her to forgive him.”

  Their mother said nothing. She just rocked and cuddled.

  When Janie was done crying and had straightened up, and the Kleenex box had been passed, and Brian had gotten everybody another Coke, Mrs. Spring finger-combed Janie’s curls. “I’m proud of you, honey. You are protecting your mother and father. You know they can’t bear any more, so you won’t allow it to hit them. You are so strong, Janie. And I am so proud.”

  The room was quiet. Brian felt the sun on his back. The Coke was cold in his hand. He could hear the tiny ping of its bubbles rising and breaking, like their hearts.

  “But now what?” said Janie.

  It was always the question. Now what?

  “Janie, to go on in this world, you have to let painful things become history. History has a certain beauty. You can leave things there. Your kidnapping is history. Hannah is history. Those lost twelve years in our family, they’re history. I think it’s Reeve’s turn to be history.”

  For a moment there, as he wolfed down his turkey on rye, Reeve’s life seemed ok
ay again. He could get Janie back, he could—

  No.

  He could not get Janie back.

  Hannah dead did not change that. His voice would still be a voice that hurt.

  Janie wasn’t a thing that he could go over and get.

  If only he could tell her all that he had learned!

  But she was right not to let him, because he had learned on her, as if she were a computer program, with little graphics of large and small J’s.

  He still had to stay away from WSCK. Maybe Vinnie was right; maybe he was addicted to the sound of his own voice and had to stay away from radio, like Hannah from the cult, or an alcoholic from bars.

  Jamming his hands down into his pockets, Reeve walked into the deep backyard, which was heavy with pine trees; he stirred up cardinals and bluejays.

  He wanted to share the great news with somebody: It wasn’t Hannah!

  But nobody else had ever worried. And he had to quit sharing great news. That was what had got him here to start with. Too much sharing.

  Jodie thought about history.

  I’m letting Reeve and the radio station dictate to me. I’m letting him decide what college I go to, what city I live in. I have to make Reeve history. Make my own decisions without thinking of him.

  She felt released. The future would work after all.

  Brian thought about history. History for him was alive. The history of this family would live as long as they did. Could painful things be set aside? Should they? Shouldn’t you keep history alive, remembering the bad, not letting it happen again? Remembering the good, struggling to repeat it?

  Janie thought about history. Hers included Reeve. She could not bear the thought of discarding him. Yet he, time and again, had discarded her. She knew the shape of the box in which memories of Reeve must be stored in the dark. But I still love him, she thought.

  Janie’s mother thought of history. Her lost daughter had finally said us. Mom. Dad. This lost sister wanted to see Stephen at Christmas. This missing child had at last allowed her to be a mother, and to hug and rock and comfort and kiss.