Whatever Happened to Janie?

by Caroline B. Cooney

  The Springs were great milk drinkers, going easily through a gallon a day and often more. Janie found herself with a glass of milk in her hand. She set it back down.

  “I’m sorry, I forgot your allergy,” said Mrs. Spring. She poured Janie a glass of apple juice instead. Janie found apple juice a dull excuse for a liquid but she took it.

  “If you can’t drink milk, what were you doing with a milk carton to start with?” asked one of the twins.

  “I had a peanut butter sandwich,” she said, “and you have to have milk with that.”

  Everybody nodded.

  “Sarah-Charlotte was flirting with Pete. She wasn’t looking. I had had my juice and I needed milk, so I took hers and drank it. And when I set it down …” Her mind had spun like a color wheel, each of the bright primary colors screaming: No!—you have a father and a mother—a happy childhood—you were not kidnapped.

  As the facts spun like evil wool, weaving a truth Janie did not want, she had tried to think of nobody but Reeve.

  This was fine by Sarah-Charlotte. They intensively studied the prom issue of Seventeen because Sarah-Charlotte was sure Janie’d be going to the senior prom with Reeve. “He hasn’t asked me,” Janie had objected.

  “Boys never think farther ahead than the next meal. But you can’t wear just anything, with that red hair. Let’s pick a gown.”

  He’s asked me, thought Janie, and I still have to pick a gown. But my life—where did my life go since then?

  She stared through the doorway into the kitchen, where there were no eyes.

  The knobs on the cabinets were white porcelain with tiny blue tulips. Dog-eared phone books curled over a rack by the wall phone. Over the sink a small window was lined with African violets. A frilly polka-dotted curtain was held back by red ribbons. On the wall was a plaque, painted by a child in an art class. A very out-of-proportion house with a stick family leaning out of the windows bore an address in willowy script.

  114 Highview Avenue

  “We never moved,” said her father, following her gaze. “If the day came when you could get in touch, we had to be here.”

  Janie let go of the rest of her doughnut. Timidly, Mrs. Spring rested her hand on Janie’s. Janie turned her hand over, curled her fingers one by one, and held her mother’s hand. These are my parents. I know them by their suffering. I know by the price they paid.

  I’m not sorry anymore that I saw the milk carton. I’m glad they don’t have to worry. I’m glad they don’t have to think about the trunks of abandoned cars. I’m glad to know them. But what about Mommy and Daddy? Are they going to be all right?

  “You knew about Hannah before you came,” she said to Mr. Mollison. “You’ve already found out most things. Why are you really here?”

  “We need to find Hannah,” said Mr. Mollison, casually, as if it hardly mattered, as if finding Hannah were just another boring activity.

  “No, you don’t,” said Janie. “Everybody agreed we would let that go. We promised each other. Through Lizzie. It wasn’t Hannah’s fault, and even if it was, it wasn’t my parents’ fault, and even if it was, it doesn’t count. We’re not counting it. We agreed.”

  Mr. Mollison said gently, “Lizzie was wrong. She never studied criminal law, and she got her facts wrong.”

  Lizzie? Wrong? This had not happened in neighborhood history. Lizzie had never been one of Janie’s favorite people. Lizzie had never been one of Reeve’s either. His older sister was infuriating, pompous, and first in line even if she had to break other people’s ankles to get there.

  Janie could hardly wait to pick up the telephone. Reeve, she would say, it’s me, and guess what—great news! Lizzie was wrong!

  She and Reeve would party.

  “I’m the victim,” said Janie. “I was the one who was kidnapped and I refuse to prosecute the kidnapper. It’s okay with me. I know it was wrong, and it hurt everybody, but Hannah is my parents’ only daughter. You have to leave her alone. We agreed.” She looked at Mr. and Mrs. Spring. “Didn’t we?” she said.

  A grief Janie could not identify crossed their faces: not grief for the pain of the last twelve years, but a grief for today. For Janie. The room expanded with things to come, pain waiting to attack.

  “The law doesn’t work that way, Jennie,” said Mr. Mollison gently.

  All this soft-spoken gentleness was getting on Janie’s nerves. “Don’t hurt my parents,” said Janie, and weirdly, dizzily, parents meant all four adults who called themselves her mother and father.

  “Nobody is going to hurt your parents,” said Mr. Mollison. “They aren’t guilty of any crime. They really thought you were their granddaughter. In fact, we’re grateful to Mr. and Mrs. Johnson, because they kept you safe and happy.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “After a crime has been committed,” said Mr. Mollison, “and the police have been brought in, it stops being in your hands. The crime is still there, whether you consider it a crime or not. The person who committed the crime—in this case, Hannah Javensen—must be brought to trial. It doesn’t matter that you and the Johnsons and the Springs agreed to forget it. The law does not forget. We will find Hannah and bring her to New Jersey to stand trial for kidnapping.”

  CHAPTER

  15

  “Two years ago,” said Mr. Mollison, so slowly that the entire two years seemed to filter through the room, “Hannah Javensen was arrested in New York City. Her fingerprints are on file.”

  Two years ago! thought Jodie. When we were deciding whether to put Jennie’s picture on the milk carton. When we were wondering if there was any point in dragging it up again.

  Two years ago! thought Stephen. Then Hannah was local. She herself could have seen the milk carton. What if she had? Would she have remembered? Did Hannah ever realize what she did?

  Two years ago! thought Janie Johnson. When I was happy and nothing had changed. When my parents were perfect and my bedroom was beautiful and my friends were wonderful and my street was home and—

  She was exaggerating. Life is infrequently perfect. But her life had been closer than most. She had been surrounded by love as few are privileged to be.

  Surrounded, thought Janie. My parents really did surround me; I had my own private posse to protect me from the world. And now I have a second set surrounding me. I might as well be under house arrest for all they let me out of their sight.

  She tried to imagine Hannah in New York City—equidistant from the two families—Springs to the south of her, Johnsons to the north of her. Had Hannah thought even once of what she had done? Or, in reverse, did she think of it all the time? Was guilt what brought her back East?

  Janie had often gone into New York City with her parents. They loved the city. They loved its museums and restaurants and theaters. They loved to soak in the variety and the racket, the adrenaline and the chaos that was New York. Janie walked squarely between her mother and father. Surrounded, she thought.

  What if we’d seen Hannah on the sidewalk? You cannot recognize a three-year-old twelve years later. Could you recognize a thirty-year-old twelve years later?

  What if Mommy and Daddy and I were coming out of a restaurant, and on the other side of the street … alone and forlorn … was Hannah … watching people who were once her family being happy without her.

  To be happy. Such a reasonable goal. Had Hannah stolen baby Jennie in order to find happiness? Or had she stolen a child to destroy somebody else’s happiness? Lashing out, somehow, at a world she had chosen to leave behind?

  As for two years ago, arrested in New York, had she tried to telephone her parents, only to find that no Javensen existed? Because Frank and Miranda Javensen had disappeared as completely as Jennie Spring. If Hannah had wanted help when she was arrested, she could not have gotten it from home.

  Janie’s mind felt like hair caught in a rubber band—twisted and ripping away.

  “What did Hannah look like, anyway?” asked Jodie.

  “There are pictures
in the attic,” said Janie. What terrible self-discipline! To put every single photograph of your own child into storage. What sort of failure had Frank and Miranda been, as parents, to create Hannah? What sort of failure had Hannah been, as a daughter, to hurt Frank and Miranda so much? “She had long, sleek white-blond hair. I always wanted hair that would lie flat on my back like that.”

  “Was she pretty?”

  Janie considered. “In a limp sort of way. She was what Sarah-Charlotte calls Used Rag Doll.” She was sorry she had said it. It was a form of betrayal to the Johnsons.

  “Used Rag Doll,” repeated Jodie. “I can see her perfectly. Nobody is ever best friends with that kind. They’re always on the fringes. Doomed.”

  “Doomed,” whispered Janie. She turned for the first time for solace from Mrs. Spring. “Do you think there is such a thing? I mean, do you think a person could really be destined for good or evil? Do you think Hannah was doomed?”

  “No,” said her mother. “That’s what it is to be human. To make your own choices. Hannah was a weak teenager in bad times. Every turn in her life, she made the worst choice. But she was not doomed. She could have behaved differently. The rest of the world behaved differently.” The tone of voice was so motherly that Janie was comforted even though it was not the mother she wanted.

  “Was she religious?” asked Jodie. “Did she pray a lot and read the Bible for answers?”

  Janie shook her head. “Daddy said that we weren’t a religious family and she probably didn’t know much about that. He said that in another time and age, Hannah would probably have become a nun and spent her life meditating and praying, but that nobody in our family knew anything about praying and nuns and the Bible, so it didn’t come up.”

  The Springs exchanged looks. They were religious. They knew bunches about praying and nuns and the Bible. Janie felt a little cautious around the church part of their lives. She had been to Mass with them every week and found it a strange way to spend an hour.

  “But she knew, didn’t she?” said Stephen, excited. “Hannah knew that she needed to be religious. It was just a matter of finding a church.”

  “Yes, but she didn’t find a church,” said Janie. “Not a real one, anyway. She found a cult. Or actually, I guess the cult found her. A cult is a group that goes out and finds weak people like Hannah and preys on them, like hawks on mice. That’s what my father says. They dig their talons in and never let go.”

  “Weak?” objected Jodie. “She sounds strong to me. Look what she did to us!”

  “She didn’t know she was doing that, though,” said Janie. “She only knew she was holding hands with somebody.” Why am I defending Hannah? The woman ruined us, and I stick up for her. “Hannah never wanted to play with dolls or ride a bike. When she was a teenager, she didn’t care about boys or getting a tan or listening to the radio. She worried about goodness. About the nation. Whether it was behaving morally. She worried about right and wrong.”

  “I guess she liked wrong best,” said Stephen.

  “Stephen, try not to make things worse,” said Mrs. Spring.

  “Hannah worried about the unfairness of life. Why did her family have so much—money, love, housing, health, confidence, brains—and others so little? My mom could volunteer and come home happy because she’d done her share. But Hannah pointed out that poor people, or dumb or lost or sick people, didn’t have a wonderful home to go back to, or a loving family, or a great wardrobe.”

  “She was right,” said Jodie. “But everybody wonders about that. You drive by some incredible mansion and you think—how come we don’t live there? You sit next to some incredible brain in class and you think—how come I’m not that smart? You try out for drama and your competition is this gorgeous princess and you think—how come she got born beautiful and I didn’t?”

  “You are beautiful, honey,” said Mrs. Spring.

  Here we are discussing Hannah’s philosophy of life, thought Janie, and the mother has to jump in and insist her kid is beautiful. I like Mrs. Spring. “Yes, but you see, Hannah never thought about anything else.”

  “Anything?” said Stephen.

  “I know,” said Janie. “I don’t understand it either. You’d think at least once in a while she’d dance around, or kid around, or get on the phone, or be silly.” Janie had never understood what kind of person Hannah must have been. Her father had said once that Hannah was a true child of the sixties. What could that decade have been like? From what Janie had seen, the rest of the sixties children had been going to Woodstock, and wearing granny glasses, and picketing for peace. So where did Hannah fit in?

  “But what’s a cult for?” said Brendan. “I still don’t get it.”

  “It’s for making money, mostly,” said Mr. Spring. “You call yourself a priest of this cult you’ve just invented, and then you go out and find rich gullible kids who want somebody to take charge of them, and they give you all they have, and then you send them into the streets to beg for more.”

  It didn’t sound to Janie like a great way to make an income, but it was word for word what her own father had said.

  “Nobody would be that gullible,” protested Stephen.

  “I guess it’s the first semester of college where they really get you,” said Janie. “You’re homesick and you’re scared and you haven’t made friends and classes are hard and you don’t want to call home and admit it. You want somebody to help you, without having to ask, and the cult will. That’s what my parents say. I don’t get it either. I don’t see why Hannah didn’t just get sick of it and leave, but once you’re in a cult, you don’t leave. They own you. Even your brain.”

  “They wear costumes, depending on the cult,” said Mr. Spring. “Yellow robes and shaved heads in some of them.”

  “No,” said Janie. “I know she wasn’t wearing a yellow robe. And if she ever shaved her head it was a long time ago before she took me, because she had very long hair.” Janie had dipped so many times into the blurry, ancient memory of what must have been kidnapping that now she was not certain she remembered anything. The little details—a green counter—the napkins in a shiny metal box—were they really from a forgotten television episode?

  Stephen watched emotions chase each other over Janie’s face. He could almost see the kidnapping happening, in the folds and changes in her cheeks and around her eyes. It frightened him, the way she could vanish into the past like that and forget the people next to her, here in the present. He said loudly, “Why was Hannah arrested, Mr. Mollison?”

  “Prostitution,” said Mr. Mollison reluctantly.

  Janie imagined Hannah on some dingy garbage-strewn corner in the dark of night, meeting a strange man, moving into the shadows of some horrible alley, and … She stopped herself. It was too awful. This was her parents’ real daughter—Mommy and Daddy’s little girl Hannah.

  “How long was she in jail?” said Jodie.

  “Overnight.”

  One night. Hannah’s location had been known for one night. Two years ago.

  “New York is a big city,” said Mr. Mollison, “and two years is a long time. She could be anywhere now. Miami, Los Angeles, New York. She could be back on some rural commune in New Hampshire or Montana. She could be in San Diego or Bridgeport.”

  “Why didn’t you arrest her for the kidnapping when you had her?” demanded Brendan.

  “We didn’t know she was the kidnapper until you people put the face on the milk carton and Jennie recognized herself. Hannah was long-lost.”

  A hooker, thought Janie. “Do my parents know?” she said to Mr. Mollison.

  He looked at her with great pity. “Yes.”

  She hated Mr. Mollison then. “Why did you have to tell them?” she shouted. “Why should they have to deal with that?”

  Mrs. Spring said quietly, “It isn’t Mr. Mollison’s fault that Hannah came to this, Jennie. Don’t yell at Mr. Mollison.”

  More than anything she had ever resented, Janie Johnson resented being told by Mrs. Spr
ing how to behave. She felt herself coming to a boil, deep down where it mattered. She wanted to smash her fist into all of them, to break their belongings into little pieces and swear viciously. She wanted to let go of every molecule of self-control and attack like a rabid animal. Through clenched teeth, she said, “I’m telephoning my mother and father.”

  Mr. Spring cut her off. “No, Jennie.”

  She could not believe it. What did he mean, no?

  “What are you going to say to them?” he demanded. “Huh?”

  He was mad at her. Not mad like a stranger who expected something else, but like a father who expected something more.

  “Are you going to suggest that Mr. Mollison is lying? That Hannah is really a great kid, surfing somewhere in California?”

  Neither of her Spring parents had yelled at her before. She was amazed how deeply it cut. And how right he was.

  “You seem to think you’re the only one suffering. Let me tell you something, young lady. Mr. and Mrs. Johnson are suffering ten times more than you are. Their real daughter Hannah is a criminal and a hooker and God knows what else. When they had you, they could pretend otherwise, but now they don’t have you and they have to face the truth.”

  The volcano inside Janie died, replaced by tears so hot they scalded. Oh, Mommy. Oh, Daddy. If I were home with you right now, I could make it better. It wouldn’t hurt so much. Yd be your daughter and you could forget Hannah again!

  How could the happiness of her childhood have been built on such ugliness? The beautiful life she and her parents had led had been crushed like aluminum foil in the fist of a giant.

  Hannah, weak and worthless, had been the giant.

  Anybody can destroy the world, thought Janie. Even a Hannah.

  Mr. Spring held out his arms to Janie, no longer a blockade to keep her from the telephone, but a refuge for his child.

  She wanted comfort so much. She wanted to be wrapped in arms that held her tightly. She wanted physical love from a father who cared how she behaved and where she lived.