Janie Face to Face

by Caroline B. Cooney

  “I’m being romantic. Have you ever heard of romance?”

  “It’s all I’m thinking about,” said Brian. “Reeve set the bar awfully high for the rest of us.”

  “Mainly it’s insane,” said Jodie. “She’s twenty, they have no money, she’s dropping out of college, Reeve can take only three days off, there’s no honeymoon, and he can’t afford a ring, so he wants to tattoo one on her finger.”

  Brian was laughing. “Mom around? Lemme say hello.”

  Jodie handed their mother the phone.

  Brian let his mother talk wedding talk. He had his own tuxedo from when he sang tenor in the high school concert choir, so he would not have to get there early to rent one.

  “I can’t talk long,” said his mother. “We’re working on bridesmaid dress sizes. We’re going to have emergency alterations. Heard from Brendan lately?”

  “We’re doing better,” said Brian cheerfully. “By the time we’re thirty, we might behave like twins again. Or bond at the wedding. Listen,” he said. “I don’t have any money to contribute, but I just want you and Dad to know that hot dogs on the grill won’t cut it. Janie needs more of a party.”

  “I totally agree. Janie doesn’t know, and I’m not sure she cares, but we’ve found the only caterer in New Jersey willing to take on a wedding where nobody knows how many people will show up. The food will be fabulous.”

  Conversation swirled around Miranda Johnson. Reeve’s mother, who for years had been Miranda’s dearest friend, babbled on and on. “Reeve is practicing using the name Jennie,” she said. “He hasn’t quite mastered it.”

  Miranda hadn’t quite mastered it either.

  She sat on her little tufted velvet bench and watched her daughter step out of gown number seven. Not my daughter, she reminded herself. Donna’s daughter.

  Way back, in a misty past Miranda rarely allowed to surface, there had been another daughter. How thrilled she and Frank had been with their pretty little Hannah.

  Their beloved daughter. Difficult from the day she was born. Nothing came easily to Hannah. Not sleep, not eating, not potty training. Not school, not friends, not piano, not softball.

  The pediatricians had been comforting. “Every child goes at her own pace” was a favorite remark.

  But Hannah did not have a pace. She just stood there while life flowed around her.

  What hadn’t they tried? From horseback riding to tennis, slumber parties to Girl Scouts, public school to private school.

  “She’ll come into her own” was another pediatrician’s piece of nonsense.

  There were all these new syndromes today, like Asperger’s, that you never heard about decades ago when Hannah was growing up. Miranda had read extensively about these and their symptoms did not match hers. But if Hannah were a teenager today, Miranda thought some psychiatrist somewhere would be able to name her condition.

  “It’s fine for a child to daydream,” the pediatricians would say.

  Indeed, Hannah had loved to sit in a daze and tell her mother she was planning to be a yacht captain or a filmmaker or a spy or a poet. But she never did anything about a goal. She just sat.

  If only they had known enough to bypass the pediatricians and go straight to a psychiatrist. But when a child is pretty and smiling and cooperative, what does a parent say? “There’s something wrong” was all she and Frank could come up with, and every doctor dismissed it, laughing.

  Janie stroked the fabric of the seventh wedding gown, smiling as if she and the gown were friends.

  Miranda had known that a wedding was not a likely outcome for Hannah. But she never dreamed that Hannah would drop out of college—a huge choice; a choice that seemed way beyond Hannah’s capacity to make—to join some quasi-spiritual group that hid her away for a few years and then sold her body on the streets for a few more. Miranda and Frank had fought in court for the right just to visit Hannah, who didn’t want to see them. They won. Hannah hated them for it. Her return home lasted less than a week.

  Hate was not an emotion Miranda had ever felt, and to see it possess her daughter like the devil in some terrifying story could still reduce her to trembling.

  When Hannah showed up all those empty years later with that lovely, sweet, chatty toddler, asking her parents to bring up her baby for her, Miranda had known that it was the one good act of Hannah’s adult life: saving her child from the life Hannah was leading.

  Miranda also knew that when Hannah was back in her group, the group would want that baby again. So she and Frank changed their names and hid themselves and Hannah’s lovely child.

  When the truth came out, Miranda was stunned.

  Hannah had never had a good moment after all.

  She had had only evil moments.

  My daughter, Miranda would think, unable to fathom how this could be.

  In the last few months, sitting in the parlor downstairs at the Harbor, often the only available activity, Miranda sometimes wondered if she and Hannah led the same life—just sitting, dreaming of things that could not be, pretending the past had a different shape.

  When Miranda looked into the future now, there were only shadows. Frank was no longer a companion but a responsibility. She still loved him. But the man who had been her rock and her joy had mostly departed.

  And now Janie had turned into Jennie and was moving a thousand miles away, and Miranda might see her once a year for a few days. And Donna would be kind, and the Spring family would be courteous, and life was over, really.

  “Reeve keeps repeating his vows,” Janie was saying. “ ‘I, Reeve, take thee, Jennie’—as if some other bride might leap into my dress and take over.”

  An inexplicable sense of horror paralyzed Miranda.

  Brendan took the subway to the Upper East Side and the address he had found online. It was a big white-glove building whose large tasteful awning extended from the front door to the curb, so that residents getting in and out of limos or taxis would not have to deal with the weather. The two uniformed doormen, very spiffy-looking, were never going to let him in.

  Nevertheless, Brendan walked right up.

  “May I help you, sir?” asked one doorman.

  “Sure. I’m here to be interviewed by Calvin Vinesett.”

  They held the door for him.

  Brendan grinned.

  And the moment they opened the real door, Brendan knew that the next door would open too. After all, the man was writing a book about Brendan’s family. Calvin Vinesett had the notes from Brendan’s three interviews. Calvin Vinesett would explain everything and Brendan would feel at ease and the author would agree to let it drift until Janie was safely married.

  The foyer was small and elegant. Mirrors and black marble, leather benches and immense green ferns. Smiling people at the desk also wanted to help him.

  “I have an interview with Calvin Vinesett,” said Brendan. “Could you let him know Brendan Spring is here?”

  “Of course.” The concierge picked up her house phone, called the apartment, and then frowned slightly. “He doesn’t remember scheduling anything,” she said.

  “Tell him I’m Janie Johnson’s brother Brendan.”

  “It’s Janie Johnson’s brother Brendan,” repeated the concierge. Then she handed the phone to Brendan.

  “I’m sorry,” said a deep voice. “I don’t know the name.”

  The author of the book did not know the name of his subject? “The kidnap book you’re writing?” said Brendan. “Janie Johnson? The face on the milk carton?”

  There was a long silence.

  The deep voice said, “I’ll be right down.”

  THE TWELFTH PIECE OF THE KIDNAPPER’S PUZZLE

  Every day, sometimes ten times a day, Hannah checked Facebook. Everybody else out there had a life. Success. Friends.

  Every day, sometimes ten times a day, Hannah counted her money. Every day it dwindled. The day came when there was none left.

  She lay down in the nest of old coats she kept on the floor, when
it seemed easier to be a cat or a dog instead of a person. She did not awaken until morning, when her alarm rang. She had to work at the Mug.

  The Jennie/Janie would never have to bus tables.

  Hannah struggled to her feet. She wanted to curl back up in the nest. But without money, she could not keep even this miserable excuse for a home.

  She could take no comfort in her brilliant plan. Without money, it could not proceed.

  She took a quick peek at Facebook before she left for the Mug. Adair really did have 476 friends and they all had posted. They all had something to say about the wedding.

  What wedding?

  Hannah scanned the material.

  That parent thief was getting married in July!

  She remembered her very first plan, when she had been sitting on a stool at an ice cream counter. When she decided to show a stupid smiling three-year-old that not everybody was a friend.

  The plan had not worked.

  Everybody was the Jennie/Janie’s friend.

  Except me, thought Hannah Javensen.

  She thought of a white gown spattered with red blood.

  The alarm rang a second time, the way she had programmed it to do. She had to run all the way to the Mug, and when she got there, the owner was very rude, lying that Hannah was not clean and she smelled. They wouldn’t let her bus tables because they pretended she would upset the customers. But they would let her do the dishes, because they had nobody else.

  She hated that word, “let.”

  Customers came in and out of the Mug at warp speed, throwing coffee down their throats. The owner kept snapping at Hannah to work harder. Nobody cared how difficult her life was. In the tiny kitchen, next to the huge sink, Hannah opened the dishwasher to load it with juice glasses and mugs and oatmeal bowls. Each glass was slippery. Each plate was heavy.

  The owner was yelling now.

  Hannah was already going as fast as she could.

  Mug after mug had to be turned upside down, and the silly handles jiggered so they fit against each other. She repositioned a dark red mug with navy blue writing.

  Stephen Spring

  One of those red rabbits had been here? In her space? In her life?

  She flung the Stephen Spring mug against the tiles of the floor. It shattered into sharp nasty triangles, long and thin, that you could cut a person with.

  Yes! She would! She would show them!

  She took a second mug and threw it harder, and then a glass. Shards flew around the floor and sparkled on the tiles. She emptied the dishwasher, throwing, throwing, throwing. It was wonderful. Sound and glitter and smash!

  The owner and the prep cook walked her out the back door, their shoes crunching on the glass and china. They deposited her in the alley among the trash cans. “Don’t come back, Jill,” said the owner. From her voluminous apron pocket, the owner pulled out cash, paying Hannah what she was owed and not one dime more. That woman didn’t even care that Hannah had to face next week and the week after that!

  The cook usually left the back door open to get fresh air into the tiny kitchen. But they closed it this time, and she heard it lock, and she was alone with the garbage.

  She opened her hand.

  The longest, thinnest, sharpest piece of Stephen Spring’s mug lay in her palm.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Kathleen hadn’t finished her explanation for wanting to talk to her father about the three possibles, and Stephen was on his bike. He left Kathleen without a glance and without a word.

  Her parents were right. The distance between Stephen and her hopes was too great. She was always putting a foot wrong, and it was always over Janie, whose history was an octopus—sticky horrid tentacles. “I was trying to help,” she said to the person who was no longer there.

  “Some wounds don’t heal,” her father had said once, and Stephen Spring might never heal from the blows dealt his family.

  Kathleen clung to her cell phone. Surely Stephen would call her back and tell her he was sorry and had acted thoughtlessly and would she please forgive him?

  But he didn’t.

  This was going to be his way out. He could extricate himself from his tiresome girlfriend and feel good about it—she would have been a traitor anyway. Nosing around in private family problems—bringing in the FBI—ruining Janie’s wedding!

  Even if I do call my father, she thought, I don’t have anything to tell him. And what would Dad do next? There aren’t any next steps.

  In her smartphone she had the Evernote photos of the preface and the Hannah list.

  The other night, killing time, she had gone online, trying to find the same public records the researcher had used. But phone bills, water bills, electricity bills, cable TV bills—any bills she could think of—were not public.

  Only property tax was public.

  Kathleen easily figured out how to research the owners of buildings. Combining that with people searches, she had quickly established that the first possible Hannah did not own the building in which she lived, but she had been at that same address for twenty-two years. Before Janie had been born! Back then, Hannah would have been with the group. Even if she had resembled Hannah in any way, that woman couldn’t have been a possible.

  How could the researcher have put her on a list, then?

  The other two names didn’t show up on anything. Kathleen figured that if you were a renter and you moved a lot and you had a cell phone, not a landline, and you’ve never had a car loan, say, you wouldn’t show up. That fit with the marginal existence they figured Hannah would have, but it did not fit with Calvin Vinesett’s list. How did he get the names if the names weren’t anywhere?

  She could think of one thing she’d like to do. But if she and Stephen were no longer a couple, who cared whether those women were Hannah? Who cared about anything?

  The good person, she remembered from Mass, is a person who does not walk by. The good person gets involved and helps strangers.

  But it didn’t help me! she shouted silently at God. When I tried to get involved, it wrecked everything.

  Donna and Jonathan Spring’s house was only ten minutes from the bridal mall.

  They all drove back to inspect the yard and discuss the reception. It was a big yard—the kind the kids would have enjoyed so much when they were little. But by the time the Springs had moved there, only Brian and Brendan were young enough to play in a yard. Brian never went outdoors if he could help it, and Brendan was so busy with organized sports at school that he rarely noticed the space behind his own house.

  Huge maples and oaks towered in the neighbors’ property, giving wonderful shade and greenery to the Springs’ yard. The back-to-back neighbors had edged their property in yellow and gold daylilies. The neighbors on the left had a rose garden and the neighbors on the right had planted a row of weeping cherry trees. The Springs had grass.

  “This will be lovely,” said Reeve’s mother, obviously surprised that anything in this wedding was working out to her satisfaction. “Don’t you think so, Miranda?”

  “I do,” said Miranda obediently.

  Jodie fixed a tray of lemonade and iced tea, cookies, chocolates, and fruit and brought it out to the deck. Miranda and Mrs. Shields sat on big comfy chairs. Mrs. Shields filled her chair. Miranda hardly made a dent in her cushion.

  “Be right back!” trilled Jodie, making her getaway.

  Janie was whipped. She had not expected the dress event to be so emotional. She had not expected to worry so much about Miranda. When she saw her dad, she summoned the energy to beam at him and he gave her the usual bear hug. “How’s my little girl?”

  He always said that, as if he still thought of her as her missing three-year-old self.

  “I’m good, Daddy. Mom is getting her bridal gown out to show me.”

  He laughed. “You haven’t had enough gowns? You tried on so many! My personal fave was eight.”

  “Jodie sent you photographs of each one?”

  “Yup. Brian liked eig
ht too. Stephen said he would settle for whatever you settled for, but that Kathleen liked nine.”

  “Nine was gorgeous,” called Jodie, as if she and gown number nine had a long acquaintance. “Kathleen has good taste.”

  “Is Stephen bringing Kathleen?” asked their father. “If he loves this girl, and she’s our next bride, we want her. Maybe Stephen can’t afford the airfare.”

  “I think it’s more likely he can’t afford the implication,” said Jodie. “Bringing your girlfriend to your sister’s wedding is a statement.”

  “Talk to him,” their father ordered her. “Tell him Mom and I will get Kathleen a ticket if he wants her to come.”

  “You talk to him,” protested Jodie.

  “He’d argue with me. He’d say he wants to be independent. Oh, and Janie, by the way, you have mail.”

  Except for letters from Calvin Vinesett, Janie didn’t get mail. It was probably more of the book stuff.

  Or maybe not! Maybe she was about to get her first wedding present!

  But it was not either of these. It was a business envelope with the ESPN logo and a Charlotte return address.

  It was not like Reeve to use the U.S. mail. He had gone through a greeting-card stage a few years ago, trying to convince Janie that he wasn’t so bad after all. He didn’t know what to say, so he let greeting-card poets try. Janie had not been impressed and told him so. Since then, all communication had been electronic.

  Jodie and Dad were waiting for her to open the letter.

  She felt a shiver of worry. No greeting cards existed for guys who wanted to back out. This very day, Mr. Shields had flown down to Charlotte. Janie knew what Reeve’s dad would be saying: that Reeve was too young. She knew what Lizzie had been saying: Janie was not stable. She had read all the posts on his wall. Marriage is for old guys. Your life is over, Reeve. She knew what his boss was saying: he still had to work sixty-hour weeks.

  And his heart?

  What would Reeve’s heart be telling him, now that reality was sinking in?

  Was he saying, “Uh-oh. I actually asked a girl to enter my life for good. To live in my tiny apartment and share my toothpaste and credit card. Maybe I’ll just scribble a note, so I don’t have to say it out loud.”