Stephen began to feel better. All was not well in New York after all. There were still street people and he could pick them out and Hannah would be among them.
They walked uptown toward the first soup kitchen on their list.
On the next two blocks they struggled for sidewalk space. Confusingly, they were being assaulted by plastic-wrapped prom dresses and bright shapeless garments that hurtled past on long metal racks. The men pushing these racks seemed to be on a very tight schedule. Definitely not the kind to move over for tourists. Stephen could not imagine what they were up to.
It seemed logical to turn down a side street to get out of the crush.
It was not.
Stephen knew immediately that New Yorkers steered clear of this street.
There were no moving masses of humanity, but there were crowds. Although perhaps the word gang was better. A knot of young men, thin and hostile, leaned against obscene graffiti painted on a long-gone store. Across the street from them, against an abandoned car—or at least, a car whose wheels were in the process of being removed—lounged another group. All male. Their T-shirts were shredded, as if to display their destructive tendencies, and their earrings were weapons: miniature knives and guns hung from their earlobes.
Stephen felt like a dog, posturing, hackles up. Mistake, he thought, this was a mistake. It was a zone of some kind—whether a war zone, a drug zone, or what, he did not know. He could not read the signals passing between the groups. For all he knew they were just out shopping. Should he stare them down, or pretend they were not there? Grab Jodie and run back where they’d been, or walk on as if he always walked here, and knew it well? But what would be on the next block? More? Worse?
Jodie, apparently noticing nothing, moved ahead in her pretty new jeans and her soft pink blouse. The men began grinning. One by one, they came off the walls and stepped out, like scavenger dogs forming a pack.
Jodie chose this instant to pull out the map and peer around the neighborhood, squinting, trying to read distant street signs. “Put the map away,” Stephen breathed.
The young men smirked. Stephen tried to be nonchalant. He was furious with himself for being afraid. He was not sufficiently street smart to know if these were men he ought to be afraid of, but he knew very well they were men Jodie ought to be afraid of.
“The first soup kitchen is right around here somewhere,” said his sister, surging ahead. Stephen was forced to follow behind his sister, and he knew perfectly well the knots of men were laughing at him. He flushed and was careful not to meet any eyes.
Nothing happened.
What had he expected to have happen? How much of the dread specter of New York was truth, and how much was nonsense? How much were those guys just doing their bit to uphold legend and how much were they truly a threat? Reeve, he thought, would know.
He didn’t look back, so he never would. And Jodie was correct. The first soup kitchen was two blocks away.
It was early for lunch, but the kitchen was open. People were going in.
Jodie was satisfied. This was what she had expected to find at Penn Station: the dregs and disasters of humanity. This soup kitchen was not serving people who had lost their jobs in a recession and needed a speck of help for a few weeks. This soup kitchen was for people who would always need help, or who were beyond it.
As they crossed the street and came within reach of the doors, Jodie’s heart and courage failed her.
This is real, she thought. These people are really hungry. These people didn’t take a train in from New Jersey. They really and truly do not have bathrooms and showers and after-school snacks. We can’t go in there, and gawk, and peer at them, and show them Hannah’s photograph! We’re rich New Jersey tourists, is what we are.
Sun baked the street.
Stench filled Jodie’s nostrils. Urine, she thought, trying to imagine living where people used the sidewalks. Booze. Vomit. She thought of the beautiful Johnson house in Connecticut. Of Hannah, who could have lived there. Who had chosen squalor instead.
Jodie would have gone straight home, but Stephen simply entered the building. They joined the line. The room was just a room, full of tables, but the people were not just people.
Nobody shoved, but the line, like the city, was crowded and full of chaotic energy. Jodie felt pressed upon even though nobody touched her, and encroached upon even though nobody looked at her. She was afraid of every single person in the room. Not one of them could possibly have a life she understood. Not one of them could ever have been at high school, worrying about friends and popularity and final grades.
Nobody said why were they there, or what were their names. A woman heaved noodle-y soup into their bowls as if she were shoveling a garden. She was very squat, with hundreds of warts. Jodie fought back a shudder when she took her bowl. She studied her soup. It was thick, but with what?
Stephen murmured in Jodie’s ear, “We don’t have to ask half of them, anyway.”
“Why not?”
“The black half aren’t Hannah.”
Jodie nodded seriously. “Got it.”
It was a relief to sit and have only eight people next to her instead of hundreds. The table became a little tiny neighborhood, their own. She stirred her soup and felt oddly comfortable.
Stephen took out his photograph of Hannah. “We’re looking for this woman,” he said to their lunch companions. He was faintly surprised to be using English. These people were so different he felt as if he should speak some other tongue. “She was in New York two years ago. Have you seen her?”
They regarded Stephen with narrow, unblinking eyes. Finally one man said suspiciously, “Why you want her?”
They were on Hannah’s side! It had never occurred to Stephen that people might see him, and not Hannah, as the bad guy. If he said, She’s a kidnapper, we want to make her pay, they’d really be on Hannah’s side. He heard himself lie. What he actually said out loud was, “She’s my sister.”
How weird, he thought, that I even thought of that. But in a way, she is my sister. Because she’s sort of Janie’s sister, and Janie is definitely my sister.
There was nothing to be heard except the intake of soup.
Noodles sloshed into hungry mouths.
The woman on Jodie’s left said, “Pretty girl like that, if she wanted to go home, she’d go home. Maybe you better leave it alone. Pretty girl like that, maybe you doan wanna know what’s she doin’ now.” Her voice was kind and sad. She was white, or would have been with a bath. Jodie breathed through her mouth.
“It’s an old picture,” said Stephen. “She’s in her thirties now. I don’t think she’s pretty anymore.”
“They doan stay pretty very long,” agreed the woman. She smiled. Her mouth was full of gold teeth. One bore a silver star. “She a junkie by now,” said the woman with satisfaction. “Like me. How ole you think I am?”
Jodie thought she was a hundred. Maybe an old-looking ninety.
“Thirty-six,” said the woman.
Jodie’s face fell apart, her jaw sagging, her eyes widening. She stared so intensely and so long it became an invasion. She could feel the woman getting hostile, but she could not stop. This woman is thirty-six? This hag? Then Hannah? What will she look like after all this time?
Jodie was too swamped in her thoughts to make another move, but Stephen gathered his courage and circled among the tables, showing his photograph, asking if they had seen his sister, who was older now, and probably not so pretty.
People seemed willing to look at the picture. But few spoke even a single syllable and most did not so much as shake their heads. They just waited for him to move on.
When he got back to Jodie, a new set of people were eating around her and she was sitting straight and tight and terrified among them. He and Jodie cleared their places, careful to do exactly what everybody else did. Neither of them had eaten a thing. He had to pour a full bowl of soup into the garbage. The attendant glared at Stephen from under sagging lids, for
the crime of discarding food that others needed. But the man said nothing. That seemed to be the main rule of etiquette here. Say nothing.
For a moment they were afraid to leave. The dining hall was a safety zone, where they would be spared. But outside, on the hot sidewalks, among the hostile young men …
They left anyway, and again nothing happened.
They followed a short block back to Eighth Avenue, then Seventh. Here the men were wearing suits, not torn T-shirts. Subdued ties, not skull earrings. The streets here had half the energy and twice the safety.
Jodie felt calm enough to study the map again, working out the route to the next soup kitchen.
Stephen was counting human beings. He was trying to estimate the sheer volume of bodies they were seeing. He could not. It was unfathomable, how many people were out at noon in the summer sun.
They were looking for only one.
One.
Stephen’s resident rage attacked him again. For a moment he was one with the hostile unemployed men leaning against the storefronts.
Hannah has defeated us again! Hannah always wins. She always will. This is pointless. We were fools to think about it for a minute, let alone come into the city and try.
What a child he had been, thinking that he—Stephen the Bold, Stephen the Strong—would find Hannah, the Evil Kidnapper.
Stephen felt young, and there was nothing he hated more.
They went into another soup kitchen, this one part of a church. St. Somebody that Stephen was not sure how to pronounce. These people were less derelict, if there was such a description, but more sullen. Nobody could identify the photograph.
The third kitchen was so skanky they could not make themselves cross the street and get near. By the time they reached the fourth on their list, it had closed until supper. Hanging around were people with nowhere to go. Nobody among them would even look at the photograph. Most of them would not even look at Stephen. They seemed in a stupor. From the heat, perhaps. Or drugs. Or the unending defeats of life.
Jodie and Stephen wandered.
They found themselves in front of the public library, which they recognized by the famous stone lions. It too had vast steps on which hundreds of people rested. They bought ice cream and sat high up on the steps, gazing out at New York.
Building-wise, Jodie could not see much. People-wise, she felt that at least one million of New York’s many million had walked by. She was close to tears. It was hard to swallow the ice cream, and it melted on her and she didn’t have a napkin and had to lick her hand.
To Stephen, Forty-second Street was full, not of potential Hannahs, but of successful businessmen in fine suits, who knew what they were doing, whose days were not stupid and futile, who would laugh if they knew what grandiose plans Stephen had brought with him on the train that morning.
Give it up, thought Stephen drearily.
And yet … against all odds … a little girl two states away had picked up a milk carton she normally would not touch, seen an old picture that nobody could recognize … and she had recognized it.
Against all odds …
Would they find Hannah against all odds?
He thought of all the hopeful young actors and actresses who came from their high-school plays to make it in New York; who must, like him, be shocked and scared by the city and the odds. But the odds were this: the ones who gave up and went home could never make it. The ones who trudged on just might.
Friday afternoon on a holiday weekend. Commuters were heading home early. Offices emptied as if the hands of God had turned the skyscrapers upside down and shaken out another zillion.
Fortified by the ice cream, they followed the laminated map to the next soup kitchen.
Stephen felt as if other humans had breathed in the available oxygen, leaving him gasping for air. They took up the available sidewalk, shouldering him against pillars and building projects. But they didn’t, really. Nobody touched him. Like the school of fish he had first thought they were, they slipped around him. Irritably. He was always swimming the wrong way.
They accomplished nothing at the next soup kitchen, and never located the shelter supposedly near it.
Stephen no longer cared whether they were in safe neighborhoods. He didn’t care what color or what disease or what clothes anybody had. He just wanted to get home without anybody finding out what a jerk he was.
“Check the train schedule,” he said to Jodie. “When’s the next one?”
Jodie was not there.
He looked back, through the sweating, hurrying crowds.
She was gone.
His heart lurched, as his mother’s had before him, twelve years before, when another Spring child vanished in the crowd.
Never to be seen again.
CHAPTER
23
Stephen hunted for Jodie. His heart pounded so hard his ribs hurt. What will I say to Mom and Dad? he thought. How can this happen to us twice?
Where is she?
I have to find her!
The people of New York tightened in a hideous, evil net, impenetrable, and permanent. He could not break through, or see among them. He had thought he could pick Jodie out anywhere with her shining cap of red hair, but suddenly the world was full of redheads, and extremely full of people tall enough and wide enough to block Stephen’s view of anything.
Jodie!
He found himself losing his mind, becoming disoriented and shocky. He ran to one corner, crossed the street, and crossed right back on the same street.
Every legendary nightmare on which he had been brought up—the trunks of six abandoned cars—the twirling soda-fountain seat on which his baby sister had last sat—filled his mind and exploded.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, he thought. Not again! Not Jodie!
His arm was caught by somebody’s hand and he was jerking free, ready to scream, I’m busy! Don’t get in my way! when he saw that it was a policewoman. Pleasant-looking but calculating, estimating his potential for trouble the way Stephen would estimate the answer to a math problem.
“Something wrong?” she said politely.
“My sister.” It was all he could manage. Explanations would be so long and involved that there was no point even starting. “I’ve lost my sister.”
The policewoman just nodded. She did not let go of his arm.
Another voice said, “How old is she? She have red hair like yours?”
Stephen’s turn to nod.
The other voice belonged to a policeman, thin, Hispanic, full of amusement. The cop pointed across the street. There was Jodie, talking with many gestures to another policeman on the opposite corner.
Stephen’s terror turned abruptly into humiliation and a wave of scarlet shame completely enfolded him. The two cops next to him were laughing. He was a hick, a rube, a tourist.
“Walk light’s on,” said the policewoman, giving him a push into the street.
Stephen was so embarrassed he would not have minded being hit by a truck. But of course no truck hit him, and he reached Jodie, and now he was raging again, because his stupid worthless sister had left his side. It was her fault he had behaved so pitifully. Stephen was careful to keep his back turned to his pair of police.
Jodie’s cop was a black man, built extremely wide, as if his shoulders had come from some other mold entirely than Stephen’s. His skin seemed more solid than white skin would; in fact, his entire body seemed more solid. His muscles went all the way through.
Jodie was discussing soup kitchens with him. She had the rest of the list, places far enough way that they needed to take subways. The cop did not seem to be impressed with Jodie’s plan of attack.
“Not neighborhoods for you two,” said the cop firmly. “Stupid idea. Your parents know you’re doing this?”
Stephen lied. “Sure they do.”
The cop knew a lie when he heard one. “Sure they don’t,” he said, grinning. “Catch a train, kids. Go home.”
“You don’t understand,” sa
id Jodie, frowning. “My sister was kidnapped.” Jodie, incredibly, was prepared for this discussion. She had a flattened milk carton with her, which she showed to the cop. Stephen had not known Jodie possessed one, let alone that she had brought it.
The cop glanced at the picture of Jennie Spring, age three. Stephen knew he had never seen it before. He knew immediately that among all the hype he’d heard in his life, it was hype from Mr. Mollison that New York police were hunting Hannah down. New York police did not know the first thing about the Jennie Spring case.
“You’re looking for Jennie?” said the cop.
“No. Jennie is safe now. She’s with—well, her other set of parents, so to speak. We’re looking for the kidnapper.” Jodie showed the photograph of Hannah to the policeman. “You’ve seen this,” she informed him. “New York police are looking for her.”
Just when Stephen thought he could not be more humiliated, he was more humiliated. Jodie sounded like Nancy Drew.
The cop rubbed his upper lip. “Mmm,” he said, which was not very revealing. “And you two are hitting every soup kitchen in New York to locate this woman?” He looked at Stephen as if he had expected somebody Stephen’s age to be more sensible. Stephen flushed.
“This calls for a Coke,” said the cop. He handed a dollar to a vendor and popped open a can for himself. Stephen was low on funds. He bought one to share.
Jodie was encouraged by the presence of a police officer. She started so far back in the story of Jennie and Hannah that Stephen thought they would be here for days; that the policeman would have to bring in a second shift to hear the ending.
Whatever Happened to Janie? Page 14