The Face on the Milk Carton

  She was smiling when she reached the black trunk. Probably my baby clothes, she thought. If Mom saved all my sweaters, I bet she saved all my baby clothes.

  It was such a nice thought. Janie could hardly wait to see them: eensy, sweet, smocked things she loved to look at in stores.

  The trunk was big and cheap, the sort you bought from Sears or Montgomery Ward, metal trim now tarnished.

  It was locked.

  A label was taped to the top. A single letter was written on it.

  H.

  Who was H? Her mother was Miranda, her father Frank, she was Jane. None of the four grandparents had been an H either.

  An old Christmas-tree holder, three splayed feet and a cup for the trunk, lay gathering cobwebs. Janie wedged its metal foot behind the long, narrow lock-plate of the trunk and yanked.

  The lock broke.

  How old it must be, thought Janie. It’s rusted through.

  She lifted the heavy lid carefully, tilting it back against the wall. The trunk was filled with papers and photographs. She was immediately bored. Old school reports, old term papers, old fill-in-the-blank maps and quizzes. Somebody named Hannah. She had never heard of anybody named Hannah.

  How could an unknown Hannah merit this stack of attention? Janie felt irritable and coughed again from the dust and the mothballs.

  Beneath a sixth-grade report on “The Beginning of Mankind: Mesopotamia.” and a sheaf of mimeographed maps where Hannah had wrongly penciled in Germany on France, was a school photograph. Janie recognized the cardboard folder immediately: the kind that offered your parents six different purchase agreements, so many wallet sizes, so many eight-by-tens.

  She flipped open to see what Hannah looked like. A pretty girl—perhaps twelve or thirteen— looked back at her. Sweet, blond, mild. The kind Sarah-Charlotte would refer to as a Used Rag Doll. “Not much stuffing in that one,” Sarah-Charlotte liked to say of girls who were short on personality.

  The dust was annoying Janie’s lungs. It would be the pits if it turned out she had a dust allergy along with a milk allergy. How would she survive in this world if everything made her choke and cough?

  From behind all the papers a little piece of fabric stuck up.

  White cloth.

  Tiny dark polka dots.

  With hands of ice Janie plucked at the material, shifting the layers of school papers until she could pull it up.

  It was the dress on the milk carton.

  CHAPTER

  8

  For supper her mother had made a pot roast, with potatoes, turnips, onions, and a rich, dark, thick gravy. Janie had no appetite. The smell, which ordinarily would have brought her into the kitchen with her father, moaning and clutching at things, pretending starvation and deprivation, made her ill. She ate nothing.

  “Janie, honey, don’t you feel well?”

  She shook her head. “I’m fine.”

  “What can I fix you, then?” said her mother. “Would you rather have soup and toast?”

  “I’d rather have a McDonald’s cheeseburger,” said Janie. “I hate this old-fashioned, heavy-duty, mom-in-the-kitchen stuff with gravy.” It was like stabbing her mother. She had to look away from the hurt on her face.

  “My child of this century.” Her mother struggled to make a joke out of it. “Pizza Hut is better than my chicken potpie, and a McDonald’s cheeseburger beats out my pot roast.”

  Her father had seconds and then thirds to make his wife feel better. He complimented her extravagantly on the texture and flavor of the gravy. Janie knew they were waiting for her to take the initiative and apologize, so they didn’t have to tell her to.

  “How was school?” said her father. “Oh, you know. School.”

  Her father drew a long breath. “We had a great practice. I can’t wait for the next game. Lincoln Middle School graduated all its competition, so we ought to slaughter ’em. Janie, I want you to come. You haven’t seen my team play yet. How about coming to tomorrow’s game?”

  He was as eager as a little boy to show off his team.

  I could put an ad in the Sunday classifieds down there in New Jersey, thought Janie. What could I say? Need more details. Describe Jennie Spring. Who is Hannah?

  But that would give those New Jersey parents hope that I exist. That I am out here, and I miss them, and I want them.

  I exist. But I don’t want different parents.

  I like everything exactly the way it is.

  How can I have a mother—or a father—or both— that I don’t miss and don’t want? Am I some kind of monster?

  But now that I know they’re out there, how can I leave them hanging? Never knowing that I’m fine?

  Why am I fine? How could Mother and Daddy do it? Are they monsters?

  Her father pulled her thick red hair back into a ponytail and brushed his face with it. “Come on, Janie,” he coaxed. “I need you out there cheering. Bring a crowd. Make all those high school kids come and yell for us.”

  “Daddy, don’t pull my hair like that.” She tugged herself free. Now she had hurt her father as well.

  He loves me, she thought. How could love arise from a crime like kidnapping?

  “There’s a great movie on tonight,” said her mother. “Want to watch it with me?”

  “Can’t. Too much homework.” Janie left the table, clearing her entirely clean plate. She went up to her room, shutting the door firmly. She tried to put her parents out of her mind, but Janie was peace loving. The little fight stuck her like needles.

  She calmed herself going through her clothes, deciding what to wear tomorrow. There was an Honors Breakfast. The marking period had ended; the first quarter was over. It seemed to her they were shooting through fall, rocketing toward winter, that Christmas would have arrived before she had even gotten her winter coat out. She was in the mood for an entire new wardrobe. She wondered if her mother would take her—

  —shopping.

  Shopping.

  Memory struck like an ax. It was the clearest daymare yet, complete with dialogue.

  They were clothes shopping.

  (They. Who were they? She could not quite see them. But she could hear them.)

  “No, you can’t have that, Jennie, you’ve got loads of hand-me-downs.” “But Mommy—”

  “Not now! Can’t you see I’m busy with the twins?”

  “But Mommy—”

  “No! You don’t need a patent leather handbag.”

  Jennie stomping off by herself. Finding that store with those high, swiveling stools. Sitting at the counter. Swinging herself in circles. Pushing herself by the edge of the counter.

  The counter was a pale, greenish-flecked Formica; the napkins popped out of a little stainless steel box.

  The woman with the long, shiny hair sat next to her.

  Bought her a sundae.

  Toward eight o’clock her father knocked on her door. “Kitten? May I come in?”

  “Sure.”

  Who was the woman? thought Janie. My mother downstairs? Another wife of Daddy’s? The shopping mother? She called me Jennie. And I answered. It was my name.

  Her father entered tentatively, as if he did not know her or the room. “Something wrong, honey? Why are you mad at us?” He was a big man, lean, able to have seconds on gravy without a thought. He had gone gray early, but lost no hair. The mass of gleaming silvery hair was distinguished.

  She said evenly, “Why would you think that?”

  “Because you are. You’re hostile and mean. What’s going on?”

  “You tell me.” She wanted to force answers out of him, but she did not want to ask the questions. They screamed at each other, and theirs was not a screaming family. Janie could not remember when she had thrown ugly words at her parents.

  But in the morning she had to rush to school for the Honors Breakfast: jelly doughnuts, orange juice, and coffee supplied by the Parent/Teacher Association for anybody with the grades. It was dumb and embarrassing but nobody ever missed it. You didn??
?t get the rounds of applause for a B average that you got for playing football, nor the spotlight for a terrific term paper that you got for the jazz band. You had to settle for a jelly doughnut and one line in the newspaper listing.

  Reeve was there.

  “Reeve?” said everybody, staggering around, clutching their hearts, running to the principal to double-check the honors list. “This is Reeve? Our Reeve? Reeve whose arms have never been weighted down with those paper and cardboard things known as books?”

  “Drop dead,” said Reeve. But he was grinning.

  Janie beamed at him. “Reeve, I didn’t know you were doing so well,” she accused him. “You made me think you were going to have to repeat your entire academic career.”

  Reeve shrugged like a little kid. “I wasn’t sure I could get the grades,” he admitted to her. “I never tried before. Grades are what Megan and Lizzie and Todd do, not me.”

  “Mr. McKane,” Sarah-Charlotte said to the principal, “did Reeve pay you off? Or is he just a misprint on the honors list?”

  “Reeve studied brilliantly,” said the principal. “Reeve is becoming a fine, fine student, indeed, just like—”

  Don’t let McKane say just like his sisters and brother, thought Janie. It will ruin it for Reeve. Let this be Reeve’s, not some spin-off. “Just like me!” she said, striking a center-stage pose and flinging her vast quantity of red hair around.

  “Oh, yeah,” said Sarah-Charlotte, “you who sneak in here with exactly point one percent above the minimum. Reeve, if you’re going to imitate anybody, imitate me.” She flirted madly with him, seizing his wrist and beginning to dance wildly. Reeve grinned.

  Joyfully, the PTA president announced that it was time to sit down. “What a fine, fine chance for all you brilliant young people to get to know each other better and find new friends,” she said, trying to make them talk to people they didn’t want to talk to.

  She had no success.

  It appeared that nobody wanted any new friends. With much grumbling they tried to shuffle place cards and sit with their old friends. PTA mothers intervened. Janie ended up at a table with all juniors and seniors, none of whom she knew. She looked yearningly for somebody to switch with, but Reeve had landed with seniors who were giving him a ritually hard time for having joined academic ranks, and Sarah-Charlotte was lost in the crowd.

  “Introduce yourselves to the person next to you,” caroled the PTA mother. Janie was very glad her own mother had been president when Janie was in middle school, and she had been spared this humiliation. She knew who the PTA president’s kid was just by checking out the hunched shoulders.

  “Hi, I’m Dave,” said the boy next to her dutifully.

  “Janie,” she said.

  “Tell me about yourself,” dictated the PTA mother, as if they were memorizing lines from a play.

  “Tell me about yourself,” repeated Dave.

  “Well, I was kidnapped at age three from a shopping center in New Jersey …” Janie panicked. Had she said that out loud? Had those words really fallen out of her mouth? No, surely not!

  “Just the basics,” said Dave teasingly. “This isn’t an autobiography for advanced comp. Where were you born, who are your parents, how long have you lived in Connecticut, that kind of thing.”

  The room shifted and the table slanted. She wondered why the coffee did not spill, why the doughnuts did not slide to the floor. Dave blurred when she tried to face him. Parents and Hannah, kidnaps and cars, drove through her eyes and crashed at the back of her brain. “I—uh—play tennis a lot.”

  “She’s afraid of you,” said a senior girl. “Gee, that’s pretty neat, Dave. You’re not only an honor student, you’re a Big Bad Wolf.”

  The older kids all dropped their voices an octave. “You’re biiiiiiggg,” they drawled, pointing at Dave, “and you’re baaaaaad, and—”

  Janie’s head cleared. She said, “I faint every morning if I don’t have all the jelly doughnuts in sight. Somebody quick pass me a jelly doughnut.”

  “We ate all the jelly doughnuts,” said the girl. “You have to have a plain one.”

  “She can have mine,” said Dave. “Look. Chocolate icing. Now there’s an energizer.” He held it out of reach, so she would have to make an effort— touch his hand—lean toward him.

  Dave was interested in her. Interested. That world of dating and movies and the backseats of cars. If she smiled back in the right way, one thing would lead to another. She wondered if Reeve was watching. If she flirted with Dave, would Reeve be angry? Jealous? Would he decide to speak up and claim her before Dave did? And Sarah-Charlotte, was she watching?

  Janie looked more carefully at Dave, to assess his personality and appearance. She became aware that Dave had asked her another question. “Ummm,” she said. “I—um—wasn’t listening.”

  “I said,” said Dave very clearly, “where are you from? I just moved here last year from Colorado.”

  She knew he was trying to start a real conversation. That being from Away—having First Impressions of This Part of the Country—was a classic opener.

  But I don’t know where I’m from, she thought. Or who I am.

  The breakfast was over. Half the people at her table had already left. One of them was Dave.

  Sarah-Charlotte came over practically hissing. “Janie Johnson, you could at least talk to the guy. What’s the matter with you these days?”

  “I don’t know,” said Janie. She tried to imagine herself telling Sarah-Charlotte the kidnap stories.

  “It’s not like he’s asking you to sleep with him, you know,” said Sarah-Charlotte.

  Janie did not know why Sarah-Charlotte had to go so far in her plans for Janie. One kiss with Reeve and Sarah-Charlotte had decided Janie had a sexual history.

  “And he was so adorable,” said Sarah-Charlotte. “I never noticed him before. It’s odd how you can be in school with people you never see.”

  School that day was a queer and floating place.

  Janie filled her spot. She talked, wrote, wended her way from hall to class. But she was a mind floating in an ocean of confusion, battered against milk-carton photographs and attic trunks.

  It was raining again that afternoon, so Reeve gave her a ride home. She wanted him to say I love you. Or, Let’s go to a movie. Or, Don’t be friends with Dave, be friends with me. But Reeve just poked the radio buttons endlessly, dissatisfied with every station. She wanted him to kiss her again and she wanted him to suggest it, or start it.

  “I can’t make small talk,” she said. “Breakfast was awful. It was like filling out a form.”

  Reeve laughed. “I loved it. All the girls flirted with me.”

  Why did he say that? she thought, utterly miserable. I don’t want to be the one who’s jealous! “Dave kept asking me questions I didn’t know the answers to.”

  “He asked where you were born,” said Reeve. “You couldn’t come up with that?”

  “Reeve, I don’t know the answers to questions like that.”

  Reeve moaned. “That sounds like my philosophy class. I hate that kind of thing. Don’t you start it.”

  “Reeve, if I tell you something, will you keep it a secret?”

  “The Johnsons have secrets? I don’t believe it.”

  “I don’t believe it, either. That’s half the problem. I can’t tell if I’m going insane, or taking drugs in my sleep, or if …”

  “If what?”

  But it was too preposterous to say. Especially to Reeve. He more than anybody would find it absurd: he knew the family too well.

  “Janie,” said Reeve loudly, as if saying it for the tenth time, “we’re here. Get out.”

  She stared at him. Who was he? Had she ever seen him before? Her fingers fumbled for the handle. Her hands were stiff and numb, as if she were going into rigor mortis.

  She remembered leaving the stool. The stool that could only be in that shopping center in New Jersey. Remembered hopping down from that green counter and leaving
that half-eaten vanilla ice cream sundae. Remembered somebody taking her hand, saying, “Let’s go for a ride now.” She remembered herself laughing … delighted … and going.

  I gave up my real family for a sundae? thought Janie Johnson.

  She crossed the shrub barrier between their driveways. Both her parents’ cars were there. She walked slowly, rain pouring on her hair and her face. Inside the side door she scuffed the bottoms of her wet shoes on the rubber mat.

  Her mother had made a pot of coffee. Janie could smell it. Filling the house like breakfast and warmth. She walked into the kitchen. It was like a child’s scene built in a shoebox for second grade. Her father pouring milk in his mug; her mother filling the sugar bowl; the clock chiming; the snack they were having—a Pepperidge Farm cake—defrosting on the counter.

  I will go mad if I don’t find out, she thought. If I’m not already mad.

  Still dripping from the rain, clinging to her book bag, Janie said, “I want to know why there aren’t any photographs of me until I’m five. Even if you didn’t buy a camera until then, you would have had a baby portrait done. I want to know who Hannah is upstairs in the trunk. I want to know why you won’t let me see my birth certificate.”

  CHAPTER

  9

  A silence as long as some lives.

  Janie thought she might fall over.

  Her father’s hand was molded to his coffee mug. Her mother’s hand stuck to her spoon.

  Janie could not step closer. She could not run away.

  The demon had seized them all in his daymare.

  Her mother sank very slowly into a chair. Her father very slowly raised his chin to look into his wife’s eyes. Like puppets they nodded.

  Screams rioted in Janie’s skull.

  She gripped the book bag as if she planned to throw grenades.

  In syllables that dropped as softly as notes on a flute, her mother said, “Hannah is your mother, Janie. We are not really your parents.”

  No! cried Janie’s soul. No no no no no—