Whatever Happened to Janie?

by Caroline B. Cooney

  She looked into his hug as if looking into the front door of a different house.

  And stepped in, and let him hold her, and became his daughter.

  CHAPTER

  16

  Anything Janie knew of trials came from television, which cleaned up courtroom procedure and accomplished in an hour what in real life might take months. Television packed each episode with amusing attorneys, interesting witnesses, and at least one romance.

  What would a real trial be like?

  It would be in some dingy New Jersey courtroom. A squadron of police would haul a pathetic undernourished Used Rag Doll before a judge. Handcuffed. In prison clothes.

  Her Connecticut parents would be there, watching their two girls: the adult doomed to the fringes and the teenager living somewhere else. How would they survive the trial, the assault of the media trailing after them, the pop psychologists analyzing where Miranda and Frank Johnson had gone wrong?

  And her other parents would be there, too, because they would never let Janie be unescorted.

  The court would call her Jennie Spring. She would testify. She would have to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Swear on a Bible. Answer the questions of an attorney who would look like Lizzie Shields: thin in the brutal way of women too busy and too ambitious to have time for lunch.

  I went willingly. I didn’t fight back. She didn’t make me. It was fine with me. Those would be the answers to the questions.

  Mommy and Daddy would endure exposure so complete Janie did not see how they would even leave the house, let alone come to New Jersey. They too would have to testify … against their own daughter. Their words would put Hannah in prison. Jennie Spring couldn’t swear who took her when she was three … but Miranda and Frank could.

  It was one thing for the Johnsons to believe that Hannah was safe (weird, but safe) in the enclosure of a cult. It was quite another to help put that same daughter in prison, with the human animals that would constitute the prison population.

  It had never occurred to Janie that the police would go after Hannah whether or not she gave them permission. Janie was the victim. She had rights, didn’t she? Hadn’t her families suffered enough? Couldn’t they just say—Quit that! Leave it alone!

  No, it turned out. They could not.

  Janie wanted to be left in peace to think about this horrible new development. But this was the real world. It included meals and homework, ball games, changing the sheets, finding a prom dress. There was no peace. There was not even five minutes alone, because this was the Spring household, and there were too many Springs for anybody ever to be alone.

  Janie struggled with a history fill-in-the-blank homework sheet. The phone rang. She was closest to the kitchen wall phone, so she picked it up, although she rarely answered the Springs’ phone.

  “Hi. Sarah-Charlotte,” said Sarah-Charlotte, who always began a conversation as if she were telephoning herself.

  Janie had not talked with her former best friend since she left Connecticut. “Hi,” she said, feeling cornered. Sarah-Charlotte would expect real conversation. Janie couldn’t even think, never mind talk.

  “I miss you,” said Sarah-Charlotte excitedly, “but Reeve told me today about the prom! It is so neat! You’ll be back here! We’ll go together. You will absolutely never never never in a thousand million years guess who I’m going to the prom with, Janie.” She waited for Janie to guess.

  Janie was too disoriented to think of a single boy from the entire Connecticut high school. “Who?” she said at last.

  “Devon!” shrieked Sarah-Charlotte. “Devon asked me out!”

  Janie could not bring a Devon to mind. She could not bring anything to mind. She was not sure she even had a mind. “That’s terrific, Sarah-Charlotte. Tell me about Devon.”

  Sarah-Charlotte told her about Devon.

  Janie jumped herself up on the kitchen counter to sit with her feet dangling. She twirled the phone cord in her hand like a lasso.

  On the kitchen table, the twins finished their homework and set up the Monopoly board. “Shove over, Jo,” said Brendan. Jodie made an irritated face and moved her Japanese notebook exactly one inch. Jodie never heard anything when she was doing Japanese. She said it was so hard you had to put your ears and mouth and fingertips into it as well as your brain. That was enough of a clue for Janie; she’d stick with French.

  “I stayed home from school today to think about what kind of prom gown I want,” said Sarah-Charlotte. Sarah-Charlotte had had a habit of doing that kind of thing. She loved talk shows. If Oprah and Donahue looked sufficiently interesting, she pretended to have the flu. Sarah-Charlotte yearned to be part of a family that harbored some evil trait or scandalous past, so that she too could appear on national television and tell the world. But of course she had been born into a depressingly normal family whose biggest problem was forgetting the cents-off coupons when they went to the grocery.

  Janie was not surprised when Sarah-Charlotte abandoned the prom-dress topic for a line-by-line discussion of the day’s talk shows.

  “You know, Janie, you could be a big hit on talk shows. Think of it!” said Sarah-Charlotte joyfully. “A panel of people who were once kidnapped and didn’t even know it!”

  I can hardly talk about it inside my own mind! How could I talk about it in front of a million strangers?

  What made people do that? On television, they were asked questions nobody should ever be expected to answer. And yet they answered. They said things out loud that must have sliced through their hearts and souls, and damaged the people with whom they had to have supper that night and live with the rest of their lives.

  And yet they answered.

  Part of my problem, thought Janie, is that I don’t want to answer. I don’t want to talk to the Springs. I don’t want to talk to the police. I don’t want to talk to Sarah-Charlotte. I just want to go home, and be normal, and be what I was. I want to put the past in a drawer and never open it.

  “Can’t you just see the audience?” said Sarah-Charlotte, getting into it. “It would be dynamite.” Sarah-Charlotte whooped. “You’d be famous.”

  Janie had always thought what fun it would be to be famous. Wrong. Because she was famous, in her way, at the new school. Strange eyes continually assessed her. Whenever kids sat down with her in the cafeteria or the library, she wondered why. Did they hope to be players in a game of What Happens Next?

  Brendan dealt out Monopoly money.

  It’s all a game, thought Janie. We’re just players on a board; eventually the game will end and we’ll be dumped back into the darkness of the box.

  Sarah-Charlotte imitated Oprah very well. She was playing Talk Show the way, when the girls were little, they once played House.

  My best friend, Janie thought. I don’t want to talk to her, I don’t want to hear her voice, I don’t want to waste time on this. “Listen, Sarah-Charlotte, I’m really sorry, but you know how it is in a house full of people.” Sarah-Charlotte didn’t, but Janie rushed on. “Jodie has to use the phone. I have to get off.”

  Jodie raised her eyebrows.

  “Yes. Great talking to you. Say hi to Devon.” Whoever he is. “Yes, I’ll let you know what color my prom gown will be. Great. Great. Bye.”

  Jodie finished a vertical line of Japanese characters. “So,” she said. “Do I get an explanation of this?”

  Janie shrugged uncomfortably. “She was kind of annoying.”

  Jodie slammed her homework into a pile, her personal stamp of finishing up. “Caitlin and Nicole are annoying me right now, too.”

  Janie knew. She’d seen them. She was pretty sure it had something to do with her, but hated to ask. Why uncover yet another problem? “Sometimes,” said Janie, “you wonder how you picked that person to be friends with anyway.”

  It softened Jodie to have Janie confide. Jodie leaned forward. “Are you going to double-date for the prom? What is Devon like?”

  Janie had to giggle. It was a relief
to know she still had the skill. “I never heard of him. Sarah-Charlotte told me I would never in a thousand million years guess who had asked her and she was right-Mr. Spring bounded into the kitchen. “Hey! What’s with the couch-potato posture?”

  “Nobody’s lying on the couch, Dad,” said Brendan, buying a hotel. “This is a chairs and counter group.”

  “The first truly warm evening we’ve had this spring, you could be out in the yard practicing for baseball tryouts, we could be Rollerblading—and you’re in here on the phone and playing board games. Everybody up. We’re going skating together.”

  “Not me,” said Mrs. Spring.

  “Not me,” yelled Stephen from the other room.

  “Not us,” said the twins.

  “I’ll go,” said Janie.

  The twins dropped their play money. Mrs. Spring sloshed her coffee over the edge of the mug. Stephen came in from the living room to look at her more closely. “We should have Sarah-Charlotte call more often,” said Jodie.

  Janie giggled right along with them. “Stop it. I just want some exercise.”

  Everybody went. How could they not, with Janie volunteering to participate for the first time ever?

  Janie was getting better at this particular family hobby, though she still had to clutch somebody in order to stop. Three blocks away was a hill that was fine going up, but terrifying going down. “I’ll hang on to you for the hill,” Mr. Spring promised.

  Janie nodded. They set off, Janie less steady than the rest, but keeping up, marginally. The twins vanished. Anything athletic brought out their competitive spirit. Stephen skated ahead, skated lazily back, circled Janie twice, and still got to the corner ahead of her.

  “Show-off!” said Janie.

  Stephen grinned. “Race you,” he offered.

  “No, but I’ll accept a tow.” She grabbed his belt. Now she need only balance and she sailed in Stephen’s wake. It was great fun, the wind blowing through her hair, the success of skating without actually having to skate successfully.

  This is why Hannah joined a cult, she thought. Hannah wanted a tow through life. And so do I. So do I! It’s too hard, there are too many decisions, it hurts too much.

  CHAPTER

  17

  Tomorrow was May 10. Her birthday. She would be sixteen.

  Janie lay in bed, listening to Jodie snuffle, turn, mutter, and even creak like a door. She found it endearing now—this undefended person, who could not hear and could not see, innocently making her presence known.

  It was incredibly important to turn sixteen. But nobody had said anything about Janie’s birthday.

  The Springs had an excuse—they didn’t know. Frank and Miranda Johnson had made the birthday up. Hannah went back to the cult on May 10, leaving little Janie, and they honored it by making it Janie’s birthday.

  Her memory shot down a long parade of birthdays. They never had parties, with games and prizes and races. It was always a journey.

  How vividly she remembered her ninth birthday, in which she and her parents, Sarah-Charlotte, and Adair O’Dell had gone to New York. Neither Sarah-Charlotte nor Adair had ever been to New York before, and so Janie had been the sophisticated hostess, showing off the Statue of Liberty and the elevators at the World Trade tower as if they were hers.

  Her twelfth birthday, her father rented tents and took Janie and her seven best friends (in sixth grade you had multiple best friends) camping on Cape Cod. There had been sand dunes on one side of the campground and a miniature golf course complete with castles and pirates on the other. The water had been far too cold for swimming. Night was so cold they ended up two to a sleeping bag, giggling crazily till dawn.

  Fourteenth birthday: just the three of them at Disney World. Janie had loved every minute of it, even standing in line.

  Fifteenth—her last before the milk carton—her last before the world exploded—she and Mom flew to Washington. They’d done it all, from the Smithsonian to the Vietnam Memorial. This was when Janie decided to live in a city when she was grown up. None of this removed-from-the-world small-town stuff.

  The Johnsons had never given presents on birthdays. Packages were for Christmas. Birthdays were for trips.

  But they had done cakes. Fabulous sheet cakes special-ordered from the bakery. The year Janie was ten was the year of the Barbie doll; Janie and Sarah-Charlotte between them had every outfit that existed. The cake that year had featured Barbie skating on the icing. Mom had brought the cake into fourth grade, and the whole class dug in to have a bite of Ken or Barbie.

  She had hoped to hear from Mommy and Daddy, wishing her happy birthday, but that was unfair. They knew all too well they had made up May 10. As for Reeve, who had been sending her cards wholesale, he’d never been invited on a birthday trip and probably didn’t know her birthday. Boys, till recently, had been too icky to have around on important occasions.

  I know your birthday, Reeve, she thought. February 28. You sneaked in eight minutes before leap year. I didn’t send you a card this year either. I was busy being a whiny little creep with my new family.

  Eventually it was one A.M., and then two. Love and sorrow kept her company through the long night.

  If she crept out of the bedroom, down the thin hall, into the square kitchen … if she lifted the phone and dialed home, she was willing to bet her Connecticut mother was wide-awake, too.

  Hannah, this is your fault, thought Janie. You did this to us. Where are you now, Hannah? You sick wrong bad mean horrible woman. I hope you’re suffering. I hope life did something terrible to you. Because you did something terrible to all of us.

  But I hope we never find you, Hannah. I hope that all the police and all the FBI in all the world cannot track you down.

  Mommy and Daddy can’t go through anything more. Do you understand that, out there in whatever hell you deserve?

  Don’t be found.

  There’s only one thing that you can do for the mother and father who gave birth to you.

  Stay lost

  And then it was three A.M.

  And finally four A.M.

  Mrs. Spring often sang hymns to herself when she did housework. They were not familiar to Janie, who had not been brought up on religious music. She had learned a few of them from Mrs. Spring. “Balm in Gilead.” “For the Beauty of the Earth.” But the one Mrs. Spring sang most was “Amazing Grace.”

  “I once was lost,” went the last lines, “but now am found. Was blind, but now I see.”

  At four in the morning, Janie found something. And could see.

  She cried a little, but less than she would have expected. She felt certain, for the first time in so long. She also felt cruel.

  When you do the right thing, thought Janie, it should be right all the way around. It shouldn’t leave harsh edges. Just being right should be enough. But it isn’t. I will be right, but I will be mean.

  She was not sure what “grace” was, but she needed it, and the part of her that was a Spring prayed for it.

  When Janie got up, after three hours of sleep, only Mrs. Spring was in the kitchen. “Good morning, Jennie,” said her mother, breaking into a wide smile.

  “Good morning.”

  Mrs. Spring boiled water for instant oatmeal and dealt bowls onto the table. She ripped the envelopes open, pouring Cinnamon Raisin in one, Apple Nut in another.

  At home, Mommy would be making French toast. They always had French toast and bacon and eggs on Saturdays. That was why Reeve had breakfast with them. His own mother was sick of breakfast, having announced years ago that anybody who still wanted breakfast knew where the cereal boxes were.

  Janie stirred her oatmeal until it thickened and became semi-real. She reviewed her four A.M. decision and it was still correct and still right … and still cruel.

  I am sixteen—even if the calendar says I’m not.

  I am Janie Johnson—even if the birth certificate says I’m Jennie Spring.

  I am the daughter of Miranda Johnson—even if this
nice woman is really my mother.

  The world settled like a blanket on a bed, gently, filling in the dips and wrinkles. I am going to be like Hannah before me, thought Janie, crushing them in my fist as if they were aluminum foil. “Mom?”

  Mrs. Spring beamed, so infrequently did she hear that word from this member of the family. “Yes, honey?”

  Janie’s heart pounded. Her hand on the stainless-steel spoon became sweaty. Her head ached. Her clothes felt loose. Her tongue was thick. “Mom, I want to go home. For good. I’m sixteen today. Even if that birthday is not true for you, it’s true for me. I tried. Stephen and Jodie are right, I didn’t try as hard as I could have, but I tried some. I’m sorry. I truly am. I’m getting to like all of you very much. But my mother and father need me. I love my parents, and they’re not you, and it’s time to go home.”

  All her life she would carry with her the expression on this woman’s face. The moment in which Janie took away hope and light. The sagging of Mrs. Spring’s cheeks. The slow, stunned closing of her eyes.

  This is my mother, thought Janie, and look what I’m doing to her.

  Her real mother’s hands trembled. She had trouble finding the chair and she sat down heavily, too heavily, as if into a grave. Emotional pain was so physical You could never get away from your body.

  “No,” whispered Mrs. Spring.

  Look what I am doing to this woman who did not ask for it. She did not ask for it from Hannah and she did not ask for it from me. How could the world dish this out to her? thought Janie. But the world isn’t. I am.

  She nearly said she was sorry, nearly said she didn’t mean it, she’d try harder, stick it out. But the words did not come. Her heart was elsewhere.

  Or perhaps, thought Janie, I have no heart.

  “You know the words in your hymn, ‘Amazing Grace’? I once was lost, but now am found. Was blind, but now I see.” Janie could hardly go on. “I see now which is my real family. The people who brought me up. The people who need me most.”