The Voice on the Radio (2 page)

This was the sort of thing you did not say to any adult. Adults were quick to leap off their chairs and out of their minds and force you once more to go to counseling.

This is my best friend! she thought. And I feel as if she’s a police officer interrogating me.

Janie had learned, this year, to take questions in her hands and bend them off to the side. “I guess New Jersey doesn’t matter as much as Boston,” she said.

Boston meaning Reeve. Boston meaning boy-friends.

Oh, Reeve! thought Janie. If only you were here! I’m under siege from my own best friend, who won’t give it a rest.

The stab of Reeve gone was like a medieval spear; an iron lance leaving a hole in her life. She didn’t want him crisp and starched in a tuxedo, but soft in cords and his old fleece jacket. The part of his anatomy she wanted most was his shoulder, where she used to tuck herself in, and close her eyes, and let Reeve decide what happened next. Sometimes she wanted to go next door to Reeve’s house, steal his old jacket, and have it to hold.

“He still faxing you every day?” said Sarah-Charlotte.

“It’s slacked off a little. And sometimes it’s telephone or e-mail or a Hallmark card.”

But none of that helped much. Reeve just plain wasn’t here. He lived in a dorm she had never seen, had friends with whom she had never spoken, had a new wardrobe she had never seen him wear.

When Janie and Reeve got together, they didn’t talk about
it
because
it
was old stuff for them. Been there, done it, seen it. With Reeve, Janie was no paper doll. Best of all, she was not Jennie Spring, explosive device.

She drew a necklace of hearts around the wedding invitation that said
Jane Elizabeth Johnson
.

There was nothing she had not shared with Reeve.

Well, within reason. She had not shared with Reeve her hobby of drawing up their wedding invitations. She aimed for the new yacht fantasy and tried to step aboard, tried to stand on the teak deck and hear the wind whipping in the sails.

“Ooooh, here’s a great maid-of-honor gown!” squealed Sarah-Charlotte. “Dark wine-red velvet. Perfect for a winter wedding. Just my color.”

“It’s a beautiful gown,” Janie agreed. Sarah-Charlotte’s white-blond hair would look like its own veil against that deep wine red.

But I have a sister now, thought Janie. A sister with auburn-red hair like mine. Isn’t your sister supposed to be your maid of honor? And Jodie would look better in green. How do I tell Sarah-Charlotte she can’t be my maid of honor? How do I sort out the fathers of the bride?

It’s just as well that Reeve doesn’t know about the wedding, she thought. I’m not quite ready myself.

She ached for Reeve. It was physical, that ache, located inside her arms. She needed to curve around him.

Think of a topic! Reeve yelled at himself.

His mind was a clear space.

Politics? He didn’t know anything.

The world? Nobody on campus cared.

Music? He couldn’t think of the name of a single band on the face of the earth.

Nature? Women’s rights? Traffic jams?

What do people talk about on the air? thought Reeve.

His mind was as smooth as the polish on a new car. His brain was buffed. The microphone was waiting; Derek was laughing silently and gladly.

Reeve had been a deejay for the first time from three
A.M.
to four
A.M.
—an hour when even college kids slept and the number of listeners probably hovered around two. It came easily: no clenching up, no fumbling for words, no mispronunciations. After two weeks at three
A.M.
, Reeve had talked his way into prime time.

Derek’s advice had been against Reeve, and Derek was about to be proved correct.

Reeve had told everybody. Two of his classes were lectures with five hundred strangers. When the prof asked for questions at the end of class, Reeve stood up and announced his broadcast hour. His other two classes had twenty-five kids, and he’d told them, and of course he’d told the guys on his dorm floor and the girls on the floor below—people he had to live with.

Why, oh why, hadn’t he chickened out? Every single person he would ever know at Hills College was going to hear him being a jerk and a loser.

Of course, they might not be listening.

It was just a college station. They were probably listening to real stations.

If I fail, it’s okay, he told himself. Nobody but me cares, and it’s no big deal, and—

If he failed, he would transfer to another college.

It would be fun asking his parents for another ten or twenty thousand dollars in order for their son not to be humiliated on the air.

It’s nothing but a microphone, he said to himself. Say something. Say anything. “Once upon a time,” said Reeve.

Derek Himself stared incredulously. Cal, a deejay, and Vinnie, the station manager, who were the other two guys at the station tonight, looked up from their paperwork. All three began to snicker, and then actually to snort, with laughter, although background noise was forbidden when the mike was on; it would be picked up and broadcast.
Once upon a time
? A beginning for kinder-gartners. A beginning for fairy tales and picture books.

Reeve would never live it down. He really would have to transfer.

He pictured Cordell laughing at him. Laughed at by a roommate stupider and smellier than anybody on campus? He imagined the guys in the dorm yelling
Loser! Loser
! Guys he wanted to be friends with but hadn’t pulled it off yet. Guys who would not be polite about how worthless Reeve was.

“Once upon a time,” he repeated helplessly, stuck in horrible repetition of that stupid phrase.

And then talk arrived, like a tape that had come in the mail. For Reeve Shields really did know a story that began with “Once upon a time.”

“I dated a dizzy redhead. Dizzy is a compliment. Janie was light and airy. Like hope and joy. My girlfriend,” he said softly, into the microphone. Into the world.

“You know the type. Really cute, fabulous red hair, lived next door. Good in school, of course, girls like that always are. Janie had lots of friends and she was crazy about her mom and dad, because that’s the kind of family people like that have.”

Never had Reeve’s voice sounded so rich and appealing.

“Except,” said Reeve, “except one day in the school cafeteria, a perfectly ordinary day, when kids were stealing each other’s desserts and spilling each other’s milk, Janie just happened to glance down at the picture of that missing child printed on the milk carton.”

His slow voice seemed to draw a half-pint of milk, with its little black-and-white picture of a missing child. It was almost visible, that little milk carton, that dim and wax-covered photograph.

“And the face on the milk carton,” said Reeve, “was Janie herself.”

He deepened his voice, moving from informative into mysterious. “They can’t fit much information on the side of a half-pint,” said Reeve, “but the milk carton said that little girl had been missing since she was three. Missing for twelve years.”

In radio, you could not see your audience. Reeve could not know whether he really did have an audience. Radio was faith.

“Can you imagine if your daughter, or your sister, had disappeared twelve years ago? Twelve years have gone by, and yet you still believe. Surely somehow, somewhere, she must be waiting, and listening. You haven’t given up hope. You refuse to admit she’s probably dead by now, probably was dead all along. You believe there is a chance in a million that if you put her picture on a milk carton, she’ll see it.”

Beyond the mike, Reeve imagined dormitories—kids slouched on beds and floors, listening. Listening to him.

“Well,” said Reeve, “she saw it.”

To Jodie, the space of the big, new house was incredible. Only a year ago, especially during that brief, terrifying time when Janie lived with them, there had been five kids and their friends. The little split-level had been jammed with kids: kids on the couch, kids on the floor, kids in the refrigerator, kids spending the night, kids practicing the clarinet, kids throwing balls, kids fighting, millions of kids.

Now there was a big, clean, empty space with Jodie rattling around.

The new house was such a good idea. What color wallpaper should go in the twins’ bathroom? Should there be sliding doors to the deck or French doors? Jodie’s parents got very involved. Paint chips became a major part of their lives, and of course, no matter what you decide on paint, and whether lemon yellow turns out to be right or wrong, it’s only paint. Paint it again if you goofed.

After Janie, it was pretty decent to have things you could just paint over when you were wrong.

Jodie’s brother Stephen was at college for the house event. Everybody on the East Coast had to go through a Colorado stage, and Stephen was deep in his, happy to have Birkenstocks on his feet and mountains in his backyard.

Not only was Stephen gone, but nobody really noticed. It was natural and easy to have him out of the family. Whereas when Jennie had left to become Janie again, it had been unnatural and terrible and it had ruined their sleep and their eating and their lives.

So last year there had been five Spring children, and then Jennie had left and there were four, and then Stephen had left and there were three.

The twins had been thick and annoying all their paired lives, and they simply continued. There was no need to think about Brian and Brendan because they had each other and did enough thinking between them.

Jodie felt as if she were the only child. It was quite wonderful. Mom consulted her over everything: carpet swatches and the locations of electrical outlets and the colors of bathroom sinks. Mom and Dad were so tickled, bursting out of the old, cramped place. They had refused to change addresses or phone numbers after the kidnapping, even when a decade had passed and missing three-year-old Jennie was unquestionably dead and gone.

But Jodie’s parents had questioned. They had put their little girl’s picture on a milk carton, and the right little girl had seen it.

After all these months, it could still chill Jodie’s bones that Janie Johnson had seen herself on a milk carton and had understood that she must be Jennie Spring.

Jodie put aside her shattered hopes for a sister, the one whose name would match and who would be as close to her as a twin, and considered college instead.

Stephen, now—her brother Stephen had always known he would leave; leave for good; put hundreds of miles between himself and this family. Jodie was not sure she could do that. She felt that her mother and father needed her more than they had needed Stephen. Or perhaps it was different for sons; perhaps parents yielded their sons more easily.

But Jodie was the only daughter—Janie having quit—and Mom and Dad were frightened when she looked through college catalogs from California or Texas or Michigan. There weren’t many schools in New Jersey and if the college experience was going to count, Jodie at least needed to get out of state. So she was looking in New York and Pennsylvania. Connecticut she would skip, because
Connecticut
was the Spring family word for kidnap and loss and rage. That brought her eyes up the map to Rhode Island and Massachusetts. If she went to school in Providence or Boston, she’d be on the railroad line and could get home easily. Nobody would have to rearrange a life to come get her in the car.

It was autumn.

The time, for high school seniors, of looking at college campuses. Jodie Spring looked at the catalog for Hills College, and she thought, Janie’s boyfriend goes there. He’d show me around the campus. It would be cool to see Boston with Reeve.