Stephen felt oddly insulated by the policeman, as if they were behind plate glass now, removed from the crush of the sidewalk, so it became a sideshow instead.
The policeman seemed relatively young, and yet tired enough that he also seemed rather old. Stephen wanted to ask his age but couldn’t think of a courteous way to do it. The cop asked no questions. He listened without expression. Surely even an experienced, jaded Manhattan cop was not used to stories like Hannah’s.
When Jodie was done, he just said, “Still think the train home’s a better idea.”
Stephen remembered how much Jennie hated voices of authority getting all gentle on her.
“We can’t go yet,” said Jodie. “We’re going to find Hannah. I want Hannah Javensen to pay. I know she’s here. I know she is! If we go home now, we’ll always wonder. Would Hannah have been around the next block? At the next shelter? I still want to get her!”
The cop tossed his empty can in the trash. He didn’t seem like the kind of man who ever missed, and he didn’t.
Jodie said, “Are you people actually looking for Hannah? I do not have the feeling that you are really looking.”
The man’s eyes revealed nothing. Stephen had no idea what he was thinking or expecting.
Fashionable businesswomen, kids on Roller-blades, derelicts shuffling, bikers making deliveries, tourists listening to guides went past like surfers on waves. And like the sea coming in, were endlessly replaced by more.
He thought of his parents in historic Williamsburg, with its charming colonial houses and sweet brick paths. What sidewalks could be more different?
“That’s Hannah,” said the cop softly, pointing.
Stephen’s jaw fell.
Jodie whirled.
A figure swathed in layers of filthy clothing stood in the gutter, picking up cigarette butts and examining them to see if there was anything left to smoke. It wore greenish pants, two cardigan sweaters, and a torn overcoat in spite of the heat. The hand not grubbing in refuse clung to the rim of a rusted shopping cart with a missing wheel. Plastic and paper bags filled the cart, and an old bowling-ball bag sat in the child’s seat. A large pink plastic doll with no arms stuck out of the bowling bag.
The creature straightened up. Its hat had once been a baseball cap and the bill hung in ribbons over its face. Its fingers remained twisted, stuck permanently in a scavenging position.
Stephen would not even have known it was a woman. He saw no resemblance to the photograph of Hannah.
Jodie was staring like a two-year-old with her nose pressed up against the car window. This thing was the daughter of Frank and Miranda Javensen? “Arrest her!” said Jodie.
Stephen’s mind cleared. There were loopholes here. “You don’t know who that is,” he accused the cop. “We told you about Hannah. You never heard that story before. You never saw that photograph before.”
The policeman smiled without showing his teeth. It was more of a non-smile. It carried a deep understanding, the kind Stephen remembered from his grandmother.
“I don’t know who that is,” the cop agreed. He put a hand on Stephen’s shoulder. It seemed too much weight for a hand. “But I know some things. When a person gets too old for a cult, when they can’t bring in money, when they get sick, who needs ’em? Not the cult. Your sweet little girl from 1969? Your thoughtful college kid from 1972? Street people now. That’s Hannah, even if we can’t tell if it’s a man or a woman. That’s Hannah, even if she’s a different race. Someday maybe we’ll stumble over Hannah Javensen. Maybe we’ll know it and maybe we won’t. But you don’t need to take revenge on Hannah. Life already has.”
The cop’s partner appeared. A woman. She tapped the radio strapped to her waist. “Come on.” She jerked her head in the direction he was to come.
Jodie ignored this inconvenient interruption. “Do you think Mr. and Mrs. Johnson know?”
“Who are they, exactly?”
“They’re the parents of Hannah and the ones who brought Jennie up.”
“Oh, yeah. Yeah, they know what happened to Hannah. Why do you think they live in some pretty little Connecticut town in the middle of nowhere? Because they know. Why live in New York and see it, too?”
They know, thought Stephen. His heart, never before willing to enter the state of Connecticut, broke for the Johnsons. “Jennie went back to them,” he said. He felt perilously close to tears. Crying would be the ultimate horror.
“Sounds okay to me,” said the cop. “Everybody’s happier than they were, even if they aren’t completely happy.”
Jodie put her arms around him and hugged him. She was a girl and did not mind when her tears spilled over. “Thank you for coming,” she said, as if she had invited him to a party and would miss him once the festivities were over.
The woman cop rolled her eyes. “Can’t leave you alone for a minute,” she teased.
Their cop smiled again. Tight, kind of sad, kind of nice. “Don’t worry about Hannah,” he said. “She’s beyond worry. Beyond punishment. Listen to me. You got a family that loves you, and Jennie’s got a family that loves her. What else is there? Huh?”
The train was already at the platform, waiting.
They got on.
The train pulled out.
New York vanished behind them.
The train lurched past some stations and stopped at others.
“I’m glad we went in,” said Stephen.
“Me, too.”
“We found Hannah.”
Jodie looked at him.
“Found her enough to count,” said Stephen. “Found her enough to stop thinking about it.”
The train went farther and farther south, closer and closer to home. By the time it reached their station, Stephen was a different person, almost as much as Jennie and Janie had been different people. His resident anger, his layers of hostility, were gone. He felt unusually peaceful.
He thought he really would go to visit Janie this summer. Get to know the Johnsons. And Reeve.
… Jodie stared out the train window at the thousands of occupied cars heading home for the long weekend. Thousands of houses would welcome them. So many strangers with so many sorrows.
But joy, too.
She would write to Janie after all. Like a sister. Maybe Janie would visit. If Reeve came, too, Janie wouldn’t be afraid of the door shutting behind her and keeping her there. Maybe they would take the bed back down from the attic, so Janie could see she still had a place if she ever wanted it.
Stephen was right: they had found Hannah enough to count.
And the policeman, he was the most right of all.
You got a family that loves you, thought Jodie Spring, and Janie’s got a family that loves her. What else is there?
TURN THE PAGE FOR A SNEAK PEEK AT
THE VOICE ON THE RADIO AND THE
CONTINUATION OF JANIE’S STORY.
Whose voice will help Janie when she must face not only her incredible past but also her unknown future?
Excerpt copyright © 1996 by Caroline B. Cooney
Published by Delacorte Press
an imprint of Random House Children’s Books
a division of Random House, Inc., New York
CHAPTER
ONE
FROM: [email protected]
TO: [email protected]
SUBJ: unfair ccalendar practices rfor studentsc
You have been at college 3 9 days = how have i survived without you? Not easily. Why do i need high school? 599 days before i graduate. Come get me — i have THSD … terminal high school disease. Only cure = you. loooooooove janie
FROM: [email protected]
TO: [email protected]
SUBJ: h.s. diploma
Necessary 4 you to pay full price of high school like every other American, remember that 599 days is really only 19 monthys, which is a very low number, cannot come and get you til I am rich and famous, which is soon … in ONE HOURr … thats 1 hour … I, yours truly, will be a real li
ve dj on a real live radio station … Reeve
He ran out of things to say.
Reeve had never expected to have mike fright.
How could he have run out of things to talk about?
Eleven minutes into the hour for which he had begged and pleaded, and he was about to blow it. His tongue was drying out. Another sixty seconds and he wouldn’t even be able to make sounds.
Reeve felt he could go to war in the jungle and not be scared. Be a cop at night in the projects during a drug war and not be scared. He was in a radio station with a mike at his mouth and nothing to say, and he was scared.
Dead air. You could kill a lot of things in a big city and nobody would look up, but people don’t stayed tuned to dead air. Dead air is a dead jock.
Derek Himself, an experienced deejay, was sitting in one of those office chairs that bend backward, so he was grinning at the ceiling, flopping his right hand toward Reeve, planning to take back the mike.
Reeve grabbed himself a safety zone. “This is WSCK, We’re Here, We’re Yours, We’re Sick! Coming to you live from the basement of your very own administration building. Now let’s hear a brand-new release from Visionary Assassins, a Revere Dorm band.”
Visionary Assassins were three guys who hadn’t known each other when college began on August twenty-seventh, but now, October fourth, they had a band and a demo tape and wanted to be famous, respected and rich, performing live to packed, adoring audiences nationwide.
Reeve had loved radio all his life: talk shows and call-in shows, hard rock and soft rock, country and western and acid rock—anything except Easy Listening. He could even stand the two-hour news programming his parents liked at dinnertime, and now and then, for laughs, he’d tune in the local station—lost dog descriptions and advertising so pathetic he was embarrassed.
But he had never thought of being a jock himself.
Radio was so completely a thing for the car or the house that it never occurred to Reeve that radio could be him.
He had walked into the studio of WSCK only because the freshman dorm made him nervous: fifteen hundred college students he didn’t know. How did you find a life among so many strangers? His roommate gave him the creeps. Reeve could not believe he was going to have to share a ten-by-twelve cubbyhole with this animal for nine months. Cordell didn’t brush his teeth, didn’t wash his underwear, didn’t plan to change his sheets. It was a stage, Cordell said proudly. Well, move on to a better one, said Reeve, who was inviting smokers to drop by in order to cover the odor of his roommate.
How Hills College had ever admitted Cordell was a mystery. An even greater mystery was that girls were flirty with Cordell.
But after just one night volunteering on the college radio station, roommate problems became too minor to bother with.
Reeve knew what he wanted in this world: the sound of his own voice on the air. People listening to him. People saying Hey, shut up, everybody, Reeve Shields is coming on.
Of course he wasn’t using his last name. He wanted to be one of those few people on earth for whom one name is plenty. Reeve.
And here he was: so scared he was in danger of forgetting his name, never mind making it immortal.
Inside the headphones, Reeve listened to Visionary Assassins. The music was so live. The drumbeats meshed with Reeve’s pulse, and the bass thrummed in his heart. The headphones were extremely good: soft and easy to wear, no sense of weight or pressure. Just complete enclosure within strong, hot sound.
Unfortunately, this was supposed to be a provocative talk hour, not a music hour.
Derek Himself smiled an I-told-you-so smile. Derek had a purple Mohawk, seven earrings in one ear and three in the other. “Hey, honey,” he said, “want me to take over for you?”
“I’m fine,” said Reeve, smiling falsely. One dark night, he would ambush and mutilate Derek for calling him honey.
Through most of his life, Reeve had had one goal: to top six feet. Having done that, he had yearned for muscles. Having acquired those, he had been willing to consider studying. By that time, it was his senior year in high school. It was kind of a kick to get A instead of C minus. Reeve had had every intention of studying at college, too. Studying was cool. It was him, it was good, it was the whole point behind his parents’ forking over tens of thousands of dollars.
When he had wandered into WSCK, though, that had been it for studying.
Now—all six feet of Reeve looking at all five-five of Derek—Reeve understood that muscles and strength were meaningless on radio. Ability to go on talking was what counted. Broad shoulders were not going to rescue him.
“Think of a topic you can run with,” said Derek. “Maybe you’ll be lucky and some creep will call in and you can get mileage out of a sick phone call. Or maybe you’ll be so boring that a normal person will call in and ask you to yield the mike to Derek Himself.”
This was Derek’s name on the air: Derek Himself. Derek managed these two words as if he were introducing the President of the United States.
Visionary Assassins unfortunately had a short opening song. It ended.
Reeve had forty-six minutes to fill and nothing to say.
• • •
Janie and Sarah-Charlotte sat on Janie’s bed studying brides’ magazines. They had split the cost of two new ones. Sarah-Charlotte, who was very practical, read the articles on joint checking accounts. Janie, who detested practicality, looked at gowns.
“Your marriage will never last,” observed Sarah-Charlotte, “because you’re too romantic. The only reason you’d get married is to wear a long white dress. Remember, you only get to wear the dress for a few hours.”
“Who asked you?” said Janie. “Anyway, if I marry Reeve, he’s a romantic too.”
“Wouldn’t that be fun?” said Sarah-Charlotte. “I can just see Reeve waiting for you at the altar.”
So could Janie. Ever since senior prom, the first and only time she had seen Reeve in a tuxedo, she had had wedding dreams. The crisp black and white, the formal tension of starch and cuffs—she could transfer whole hours of prom memory into her future wedding.
Of course, she didn’t tell Reeve about this. She was a high school junior and Reeve a college freshman. If Janie said “wedding” out loud, he’d probably buy a sailboat and circumnavigate the globe for a decade or two.
There was no stopping a Reeve fantasy once it took off. Now Janie saw herself keeping house on a yacht.
Sarah-Charlotte studied flower arrangements for modern brides. “Janie, which of your fathers would walk you down the aisle?”
This was a serious problem. Janie considered Daddy her father, of course; and he was; he had brought her up. But there was also her New Jersey dad, of whom she was becoming quite fond. “I could have both of them,” she said. “One on each arm.”
“Yikes! Would they do that for you?”
“Sure,” said Janie. Could I do that to them? she thought. It would be so hard on them both. Of course, I’ve done everything else to them—why flinch now?
“But,” said Sarah-Charlotte, who had learned to ask for details without a question, “everything should be settling down now.”
She’ll probably be a reporter, thought Janie, getting silent people to talk by saying something they have to contradict. “I don’t think things ever settle down in this kind of situation,” said Janie. “It’s like an extra-extra-extra-extra-wicked divorce.”
“I don’t know if it’s four-extra,” said Sarah-Charlotte. “Two-extra, tops.”
They heard Janie’s mother on the stairs, tucked the brides’ magazines under the bed and began a loud, pointless discussion about chemistry assignments. Mrs. Johnson went into her own room and, moments later, ran back downstairs.
“I don’t know why we act as if we’re doing something bad,” said Sarah-Charlotte, retrieving the magazines. “Every normal girl dreams of her wedding day.”
“We’re supposed to be reading investment magazines so we can plan our Wall Street careers, or
computer magazines so we can plan our high-tech careers,” agreed Janie, “when all we want to do is design our wedding invitations.”
They designed a wedding invitation. How pleasingly the names Reeve Shields and Jane Elizabeth Johnson rested on the page.
“You’ll have to get married under your real name, you know,” said Sarah-Charlotte. “Otherwise it won’t be legal.” Sarah-Charlotte wrote another wedding invitation.
Reeve Shields and Jennie Spring.
The name Jennie Spring still made Janie queasy. She felt that she had barely escaped demolition; she was a building that had been scheduled to be blown up. The switch was still there, and Jennie Spring was still an explosive device.
Janie changed the subject. “Let’s do one for you, Sarah-Charlotte.” Janie drew a rectangle for another wedding invitation. “You still have a crush on Alec, don’t you?”
“Yes, but not on wedding invitations. His last name is too hideous. Kinkle. Ugh. He’s going to have to take my name instead.”
“Sarah-Charlotte Kinkle. I don’t know, it has kind of an interesting sound. Nobody would forget you.”
Sarah-Charlotte was insulted. “I will have such a spectacular career that nobody will forget me anyhow.”
“Cool. What will you do?”
“I don’t know yet, but I’ll do it better than anybody.” Sarah-Charlotte turned to the beginning of the magazine and studied the masthead. “Editor-in-chief,” she said. “That’s a possibility. I’ll put out a magazine so startling it will change the wedding world.”
Janie giggled. “I don’t think brides want to be startled.” Janie would have been happy to stay on frothy subjects, but Sarah-Charlotte, of course, got sick of it, stopped being subtle and said, “So what exactly is happening in New Jersey, Janie?”
New Jersey was code for the Other Family. The Biological Family. The Springs.
The Springs had actually visited Janie, in this very house. Well, the kids, of course, not the parents. The parents she had dumped were not ready to visit the parents she preferred. But Stephen, Jodie and the twins had come twice. Amazingly, her Spring brothers and sister seemed peaceful about the two families.
Whatever Happened to Janie? Page 15
