Whatever Happened to Janie?

by Caroline B. Cooney

  His mother literally could not live through a child being late. If Stephen said he’d be home at five-fifteen and he got home at five-forty, he would find her white-faced and trembling, pacing the house, hyperventilating, her icy hands touching the telephone and then yanking back. She had a habit of jamming her fingertips fiercely down into the pockets of her jeans. If she ran to the door and her hands were still thrust into her pockets, it meant she was terrified; she was holding on to herself in some desperate way.

  She would greet Stephen with the peculiar combination of wrath and relief common to all frightened parents whose children come home at last.

  Except that Jennie had never come home at last.

  The family fear extended to many things. Having lost one child, Stephen’s mother and father were terrified of losing another. They fretted about traffic, hot oil in the frying pan, a chain saw, deep water.

  They taught their remaining four children to look both ways not only when crossing the street, but also at every other intersection of life: be cautious, be careful think twice, reconsider, weigh the possibilities.

  Worry was like another person living in the house. A person who, unlike Jennie, never left.

  Stephen hated it. He could take care of himself. They lived in New Jersey, and Stephen’s daydreams were of the opposite coast: he usually dreamed of California, occasionally of Oregon, Washington, Utah, Montana, Wyoming. Distant realms, where they could not see him to worry about him. From which he would telephone once a week: Hi, Mom, I’m fine, life’s good, lots of friends, see you at Christmas.

  He had trained his body not to show his fury. He did not clench his fists, he did not grit his teeth, he did not narrow his eyes, he did not turn red or white. The fury instead raced inside his veins, a circulating demon. He had never gone to a counselor, although the family itself often had. He did not want to talk about his wrath, partly because it shamed and mystified him, and partly because it would give his mother and father just one more thing to worry about. They would feel responsible.

  But they were not responsible.

  Jennie was.

  Okay, he knew that was unfair. A little three-year-old who got lost in a shopping center could not be blamed for the following dozen years. He knew this little sister of his, whom he could barely remember, but who had left him a legacy of unending pain and fear, had had suffering of her own.

  They should have moved away; they should have left the nightmare of Jennie’s kidnapping right in this house, locked the doors and driven away.

  The split-level was not large. You came into the house in the middle, of course, on the landing, and went up directly into the kitchen-eating area. To the left was the L-shaped living and dining room. To the right were the bedrooms, two medium and one large, and a single ordinary bathroom. Downstairs were a two-car garage, a laundry room, and a playroom with a fireplace.

  When Mr. and Mrs. Spring bought the house, fierce with pride that they had managed to come up with the down payment, they had had two children: Stephen and Jodie. It was the perfect size house. Stephen’s bedroom was painted bright barn red and Jodie’s bedroom sunshine yellow.

  The house quickly became too small: baby Jennie’s crib was crowded into Jodie’s room and the new twins had to fit into Stephen’s. Mr. and Mrs. Spring had their eye on a colonial in another development: a house with four bedrooms and three bathrooms. A house with an immense kitchen, a workshop, and a yard big enough to play football in. They were close to making an offer on the big house on the day that Mrs. Spring took her five children shoe shopping.

  Sometimes Stephen still drove down that road, even though it was a dead end and he didn’t know anybody who lived there. They never moved. Mr. and Mrs. Spring wanted Jennie to know where to find them.

  Even the FBI man, Mr. Mollison, said they could not build the rest of their lives on a missing, and presumably dead, baby girl. Even Mr. Mollison said, as the years went on, “Move. You need the space.”

  But Mom didn’t want a different phone number. She didn’t want a different address. “What if …” she would begin.

  And of course not finish. What possible finish could there be? Jennie was not coming home. Even if she were, a three-year-old wouldn’t remember her address or her telephone number. If she had remembered it, she would have phoned them to start with, wouldn’t she?

  Sometimes, crammed in that tiny bedroom with his twin brothers, Stephen would think: Jennie, it’s your fault I don’t have a room of my own.

  And then of course, would come the slamming guilt, like a door in his face, hitting so hard he should have a bloody nose. Jennie, who had been tortured and left dead in some tangled wood in some other state. Jennie, who had not grown up to have the life she deserved. And he was whining because Brian and Brendan swarmed over him like friendly wasps?

  Stephen never felt as if he knew Brian and Brendan. He lived practically on top of them, and yet they remained strangers. They were so enclosed in each other they were like a sealed envelope. Being a twin must be nice, but living with twins was not.

  Stephen had plenty of friends. He was popular. But he had never shared his soul the way Brian and Brendan routinely did each other’s. The twins did not even have to talk a great deal of the time. They could synchronize without speech.

  “I wish,” said his mother once, years ago, “that I could synchronize with Jennie like that. That just once, for just one conversation, I could touch Jennie with my mind, my heart, my need.”

  But Jennie remained hidden in the secret of her disappearance.

  Stephen knew kids who believed in ESP—that with your spirit, if you tried hard enough, you could communicate with another spirit. He knew better. His mother had tried so hard to communicate with Jennie; had listened so carefully to hear Jennie’s cries.

  But there had been none.

  The weird thing was that Stephen’s parents were nevertheless very happy people. They adored their four kids. Their lives revolved around family. They were busy and full of laughter. It was just that Jennie was always there.

  Or rather, not there.

  Her loss lay beneath everything, measuring it.

  Sometimes Stephen would see his mother pause at the kitchen sink as she rinsed a dish to go in the dishwasher; see her eyes glaze as she stared out the little window into the backyard. “What are you thinking about, Mom?” he would say, although he knew: she was thinking about Jennie, and whether Jennie was cold, or scared, or hurt.

  “Wondering if it’s going to rain,” his mother would say, turning to smile at him. Her trembling smile, her cover-up smile.

  Sometimes Stephen would go along with her. “I don’t think it’s that cloudy,” he’d say.

  Sometimes Stephen had to open the wound. “She’s dead, Mom. And that means she’s okay. She’s not cold or scared or hurt.”

  Sometimes, when he was older, and especially after he became taller than his mother, he would put his arms around her and silently hold her, and feel her pain right through the fold of his embrace.

  * * *

  One week before Christmas, Stephen was nuking himself a hot dog. The twins had a basketball game at six-thirty and nobody had time for a real supper. Jodie was eating ravioli straight from the can, an act so disgusting that Stephen had to turn his back. “You look like a possum eating from the garbage pail.”

  Dad, holding his own hot dog into his mouth while chewing at the tip, ran to the bedroom to yank off his suit and get into his favorite cords and his bright red, team-color sweater. Mom had toasted bagels for herself and was spreading cream cheese, muttering about whether she would have time to brush her teeth before they had to pile in the car and head for the middle school. Brendan and Brian were both starters, so it was important to arrive for the first minute of play.

  In the living room behind them, the star on the Christmas tree scraped the ceiling. Presents were stacked five deep under the lowest branches. Stephen had outgrown the need to squeeze and pinch but the twins had been ducki
ng under the tree for days, feeling up the gifts. A silver bowl filled with glittering glass Christmas balls sat in the middle of the dining table, but like all the Springs’ decorating choices, it was largely hidden by mail, homework, receipts, and unread newspapers. The refrigerator was completely covered with Christmas cards, which they would open and reread while on the phone.

  Stephen bit off half the hot dog and concentrated on not choking to death.

  The phone rang. He would have answered, but his mouth was pretty full, so Mom shifted her bagel to the other hand, grabbed the phone off the wall, and said, “Hello?”

  They were a fair-complexioned family, redheads with translucent skin that tanned poorly. But they were not actually white, of course, like sheets of paper. Mom turned white. The color left her face so dramatically that Stephen actually looked at the floor to see if blood had puddled at her feet. Her eyes opened extremely wide, then fluttered closed. He got up to catch her, thinking that she was fainting, that something terrible must have happened. Somebody had died—somebody—

  “It’s Jennie,” whispered his mother. “She saw her picture on the milk carton.”

  A month ago.

  A month filled with his parents’ hope and his own anger. Resentment that Stephen could taste backwashed in his mouth. It ruined every meal.

  I’m going to adjust, he told himself. I’m the oldest. I have to set an example.

  All he could think of was cramming yet another person into this tiny house.

  CHAPTER

  5

  The first few days were such a blur, Janie wondered if she needed glasses. Or a tranquilizer. Maybe a guidebook. Maybe a guide dog.

  She was physically afraid.

  It was absurd. For the first time in twelve years, she was with her real family, in her real house. And for the first time in twelve years, she was truly frightened. She was not the bright, sophisticated daughter of Frank and Miranda Johnson; she had weirdly, terrifyingly, turned into the three-year-old daughter of Jonathan and Donna Spring. Her vocabulary fell away; she could speak only in monosyllables. Her view of the world was so limited she might have been three feet tall, while the strangers around her were towering monsters.

  They are not monsters, she told herself. They are your real parents. Your real brothers. Your real sister. You started this. Now you have to leap in. Come on in, Janie, the water’s fine.

  But she hovered on the edge of the pool, so to speak, unable to dip a toe into the water, let alone start swimming.

  It was so strange to be sitting among people who looked like her. Thick masses of red curly hair went all the way around the table.

  Her new sister Jodie’s red hair was very short, a circle of fine silky curls that she never brushed. Jodie was pretty, in a pixieish way. She was also very noisy in sleep. Jodie turned and thrashed and moaned. She flung the covers off during the night. She went to sleep with a rock station on and left the radio playing.

  Except for spending the night at Sarah-Charlotte’s, or Adair’s, which were special occasions and hardly ever involved sleep, Janie had never shared a bedroom. It turned out that sharing a bedroom with Jodie Spring hardly ever involved sleep either. And even if she could get used to Jodie’s breathing and thrashing, every sound in the house was wrong and threatening.

  Her new twin brothers, Brian and Brendan, the sixth-graders, had hair so red and gold it glittered. She could not tell them apart. They were not identical; it was the names that did her in. If one had had a B name and the other something completely different, she would have done better. But she kept calling Brian Brendan and Brendan Brian. They did not like it. She did not blame them.

  “You want we should wear name tags?” said Brendan at last. Or else Brian.

  Janie swallowed and tried to keep smiling. “Maybe a clue. What’s my guideline?”

  “I’m handsomer,” said Brendan. “I have more freckles, browner eyes, and more girlfriends.” He grinned. He also had teeth more in need of braces.

  Brendan—braces, thought Janie. Remember that. Now as long as he keeps his mouth open, you’ll know who he is.

  Her oldest brother was Stephen. His hair was a darker red, and lay smoothly. He combed it frequently. Stephen was tall and skinny, with immense feet. It was difficult to believe that a human being could have feet that large. You had to assume that his body would grow to match, in which case Stephen would become a man of splendid proportions.

  Stephen’s eyes settled on Janie with a sort of vengeful dislike. Perhaps he wished that Janie had just been killed back when she was three. It would have been so much easier, emotionally, to have found a grave marker instead of a living stranger.

  Even being afraid of Stephen, Janie found it easier to look at him, or at Jodie, or Brendan, or Brian, than to look at her new parents. She felt no connection whatsoever with this man and woman. She might as well have gone into some bank or grocery and been told to call the managers Mom and Dad.

  She could not hug them. The imprint of her mother’s last hug clung to her like a beloved perfume. The brush of her father’s last kiss was still on her forehead.

  So she called them Mr. and Mrs. Spring. It was ridiculous, and yet what else was she supposed to do?

  Mostly she managed not to call anybody anything. She pasted on a quivering facsimile of a smile, her lips as dead as if the dentist had given her Novocain.

  They called her Jennie, of course. That’s who she was. The girl they had spent twelve long years searching for. It made Janie feel as if she had an invisible twin; as if, like Brendan, she had a Brian close by. When they said “Jennie” it never felt that they were talking to her, Janie.

  Get a grip, Janie told herself over and over.

  She tried breathing deeply, she tried meditating, she tried lecturing herself, she even tried praying, which she had never come across before. Her family was not religious. But the Springs were. They prayed every night before supper, a lengthy grace, during which they held hands.

  Who were these people? They could not be her family.

  Mrs. Spring was very talkative. Stories about her day poured out of her. She laughed, teased, and interrogated her kids about every quiz, ball game, and book report. She was revved up at high speed, whipping through her own workday, charging into her kids’ afterschool activities. She was always out of breath and halfway into her next move.

  Mr. Spring was very physical with his kids. He picked them up as if they were still toddlers. He wrestled with the boys, he bear-hugged, he threw pillows at them, he raced them to see who would get the TV remote control. Janie shrank back, keeping herself near a wall or large furniture, lest he hoist her into the air, too.

  The house even smelled different. The scrubbed quiet of the Johnson home was such a contrast to this house full of boys’ sneakers and athletic jackets thrown on the floor while baseballs, bats, and mitts were left for anybody to trip over in the hallways.

  Nothing was right. Even breakfast was wrong. The Springs had apple juice, not orange juice. Anybody knew you had to start the day with orange juice. They had instant oatmeal, the flavored kind in individual envelopes. It tasted like cedar chips for hamsters. She wanted cinnamon toast and half a grapefruit. They didn’t even have bread in their house! Nobody ate sandwiches. How could you get through life without sandwiches?

  Homesickness actually made her sick. Her stomach hurt. Once with Reeve, who had in mind driving around to find a dark secluded spot to be alone with his girl, Janie had gotten so sick from what she was starting to understand that she made Reeve pull over so she could throw up in the bushes. She felt that way all the time here.

  I’ll never be able to swallow again, she thought, so what difference does it make if they don’t have sandwiches?

  There was only one bathroom.

  Janie had had her own bath all her life.

  She could not believe she had to share a bathroom with six other people! They had a timer you had to set before you took a shower. You could use hot water for exactly
three minutes, then you had to get out. Three minutes! Janie couldn’t even get wet that fast.

  Nor was there room in the bathroom to keep anything but your toothbrush in there. Everybody had a plastic pail in which to carry their shampoo and shower cap and stuff back and forth.

  People were always lined up for the bathroom. And if Janie got in, they grilled her. “What are you going to do in there?” they demanded. “Hurry up. I have to do my makeup.” “I have to leave in five minutes.” “You wait for me instead, Jennie.”

  This family did not know what leisure was.

  They were stacked up like planes for landing.

  When they were not studying her, or in line ahead of her, or serving her food that was completely different from the food she had grown up on, they were asking her trick questions.

  “Would you like to look at your baby pictures?” said Mrs. Spring.

  On the one hand, Janie would love to see her baby pictures. On the other hand, that was one of the things that had forced Janie’s back against the wall in Connecticut: her parents had no photographs of Janie as a little girl. After a pause in which Janie weighed the possibility of looking at these baby pictures, and seeing herself among these people as a family, in their arms, in their high chair, in their car seat, she pressed her lips together and shook her head no.

  “It isn’t being disloyal to Mr. and Mrs. Johnson to start liking us, Jennie,” said Mrs. Spring softly.

  Janie began to cry.

  “I know you’re not ready to call me Mom, or call your father Dad,” said Mrs. Spring, beginning to cry herself. “I know those are precious syllables. I know this is going to take time, and it’s going to hurt. But it’s okay to relax here, Jennie. It’s okay to have a good time, or laugh, or even let somebody hug you.”

  I’m not Jennie! she thought. I’m Janie! She managed a nod. She managed to let Mrs. Spring put both arms around her. She stood very still inside the hug and could not imagine that she would ever hug back. But she was able to receive one.

  “Whew!” teased Brendan. Or Brian. “Wipe the sweat off your brow, Jennie. You survived a hug! Give that girl a medal!”