The Voice on the Radio

  Reeve had been braced for a fake Hannah. Not a real Brian Spring. Reeve’s head splintered. Brian and Jodie? But they would tell Janie.

  “We’re at the Marriott. We’re not alone, Reeve. Janie came up with us,” said Brian. “The Marriott. Room six sixteen. You better come here.”

  Janie was here.

  Janie had listened.

  It felt as if the blood had been siphoned right out of his body.

  He had thought Hannah’s voice the worst-case scenario.

  No. Janie hearing his worst janie was.

  An hour ago, Reeve had considered it his best.

  The coldness in Janie’s system made it hard to think. She was freezing up like an arctic pipe-line.

  Could she have borne it if Reeve had spilled her to a sympathetic roommate? Maybe.

  But he had chosen the world. Radio existed wherever a dial existed. Millions of locations. Millions of listeners.

  And so many lies! He was a gofer, he’d said, the new kid on the block, a filer of papers and a sorter of cassettes. Not so.

  “I don’t want him in this room with me!” Janie shouted at Brian. In times past, when life or truth had threatened, she’d had torrents of weeping, bad dreams, woozy desperation for weeks. Go through that again, without Reeve to lean on? Instead, Reeve to blame it on?

  Jodie found an extra blanket on a shelf and put it over her shivering sister. Janie cocooned in it, rolling up into the wool. Only her hair showed, a frizzy ripple of red at the end of a green cloth tube.

  “What do we say to Reeve once he gets here?” asked Brian.

  “You’re the one who called him,” said Janie from inside her muffler. “I’m certainly not going to say anything to him. He sold me! Like he opened a store, and I was the product!”

  “You can’t breathe like that,” said Jodie, yanking the blanket down a little.

  I don’t feel like breathing, thought Janie.

  Jodie flopped down next to her. “But Reeve is the good guy! I can’t understand how he could have done this.”

  “If somebody told us,” said Brian, “we wouldn’t believe it. But we heard him.”

  “Maybe I should call Mom and Dad,” said Jodie nervously, getting up off the bed again.

  “What?” Brian jumped between her and the phone. “Forget it! We’re going to get rid of this, not make it bigger. Bring parents in? Are you crazy?”

  “Right,” said Jodie, “you’re right, Bri, I was crazy.”

  Yet another enormous horror that I cannot tell my mother and father, thought Janie.

  She thought of the tremendous effort she had put into protecting her parents. Her “I’m okay, we’re okay, it’s okay” stance. She knew as an absolute that neither parent could endure this betrayal.

  She would have to bear it.

  Reeve had not thought of the janies going down roads, into hotels, inside travelers’ cars. The dorms, yes; the student center, the occasional professor’s house.

  He saw himself as an ignorant fool; somebody who really did not understand the technology behind radio.

  It existed. It had a life. Anybody could turn that life on.

  The phone at WSCK continued to ring. Three more calls.

  His bright, cheery voice identified the station. “How may I help you?” said his very own voice.

  They were not Hannah. They were not Brian. They were two janie and one Grateful Dead requests. “We don’t do the Dead,” Reeve said, “call a commercial station for that.”

  For the first time since he had begun at WSCK, he wanted the phones to shut up. No more calls. Don’t invade me! I have to think.

  But I’m not the one who was invaded. Janie was.

  He glanced at the air check. He would play back tonight’s tape, listen to his janies, so that he could—what? Plan his defense? He didn’t have a defense.

  He saw the unfolding of this evening. Janie telling her mother and father, who would be sick and shocked and would hate Reeve. The Johnsons telling his own mother and father, who not only would be sick and shocked, but also hold themselves responsible, because they should have brought him up better. He saw Thanksgiving vacation, only days away, during which his excellent sisters and brother would tell him how worthless and disgusting he was. And they’d be right.

  “Reeve?” said Derek. His voice was strange. Reeve could not analyze it. “You okay?” said Derek.

  It was concern. Derek, who was jealous of him, was concerned.

  “I’m fine,” said Reeve. He still couldn’t focus on the Coke; Derek had to hand it to him. Everything was air. Air talk, airtime, air check, air brain.

  “You didn’t even log in the last few calls,” said Derek.

  Reeve’s neck bent with difficulty, as if he had a brace on it, and he saw that he had made no entries.

  There was no record of the Hannah call; no record of Brian.

  The person who really counted was Janie, and of Janie there was a record, all right. Weeks and weeks of it.

  Courtesy of Reeve.

  Brian and Jodie discussed the death penalty, and whether there was something worse and more painful for Reeve to suffer.

  Janie lay motionless in the itchy, woolly dark of the blanket.

  When she and Reeve were apart, whether for an hour or a month, she got so eager to touch him that when he appeared, she could not touch. She would find herself dancing around him. He’d have to touch her first and break the spell.

  Oh, Reeve!

  She wanted to cry. Tears were both wrenching and comforting. But she was not near crying; she was in some grim, dark place without tears or hope.

  This is where my parents are over Hannah, she thought. Hannah’s betrayals sent them forever into tearless, hopeless dark.

  She saw the years of her parents’ suffering, and shrank from it. No, please, don’t let it hurt me that long and that badly!

  But it would. Because it was Reeve.

  Reeve, whose presence was beneath her, around her, with her, supporting her. As if she were a swan, floating on the ocean of Reeve’s steadiness.

  Oh, Reeve!

  What was I to you, in the end?

  Is this the end?

  Well, of course, it has to be.

  The end, she thought, and the two words were horrible and bleak. She had thought the two words would be I do. No. The two words were the end.

  “We don’t tell anybody,” instructed Brian. “You listening to me in there, Janie? We don’t tell anybody.”

  As if I could tell a soul, thought Janie. As if I could pick up the phone and say, Sarah-Charlotte, guess what?

  “What about Brendan?” Jodie asked. “He’s your twin.”

  Brian had not told his twin much in months, and his twin had told him nothing. It no longer ranked as betrayal. Not with Reeve for comparison.

  In the midst of his shock over Reeve, Brian felt a great relief about his brother. It was okay to be twins and be different. One was an athlete and one was academic.

  Out loud he said, “I don’t tell Bren much anymore. And he doesn’t have an imagination.”

  Brian had not known that until his mouth said it, and then he realized that was half the problem. “Brendan doesn’t think about us,” said Brian. “He won’t lie awake at home tonight wondering if he missed something by not coming to Boston.”

  Home. Brian had an image of people who slept soundly, safe in what they did not know.

  Brian would have said that if anybody was safe, it was Reeve.

  “It makes me think of the leaf-sucker,” said Janie.

  “Ick,” said Jodie. “Some kind of insect? Sucking juice out of leaves?”

  “No. In the fall, when the leaves come down…beautiful maple leaves, orange and crimson and gold…you rake your leaves into the street. The town crew comes by with a leaf-sucker machine, and they suck them up and grind them into tiny, dusty shreds. I hated the leaf-sucker when I was little. It was so scary, all those beautiful leaves, turned into brown shred.”

  “Ye
ah, well, you’re not brown shred,” said Brian, “you’re still our sister and Reeve is still—well—”

  “Brown shred,” said Jodie.

  Eleven o’clock must have come, because Vinnie took over the mike.

  Reeve sat where he was.

  He felt like the carpet on the wall. Thick and gray and stuck with pins.

  Vinnie barely glanced at him. He set out the CDs, cassettes and records he was going to play. Then he introduced the next song. Vinnie was inside the mike, unaware that another human being occupied the room with him.

  Reeve rewound the tape that recorded call-ins. As easily as that, he was rid of the Hannah voice. It had been taped but not aired, and now it wasn’t taped either. It hadn’t happened.

  He left the building.

  City lights cast a pinkish glow upon a cloudy sky. The air was crisp, as if the weather had plans.

  I can’t face Janie, he thought.

  He had to close his eyes against her image, but he knew her so well that the image was within him and did not go away.

  She’ll hate me, Reeve thought, and the certainty of this stabbed him.

  He headed for the T.

  I don’t have to go to the Marriott, he thought. I could go back to the dorm. And do what? Lie there staring up at Cordell’s mattress, knowing Janie’s waiting?

  When the train came (quickly, which was not fair; you were supposed to wait at night) he thought of riding the car to the end of the line. Getting off wherever that might be and picking up a new life. He thought of trying to explain himself to Janie. Explaining to her parents, and his parents, and the New Jersey parents, and on top of that—what if it was Hannah?

  It just couldn’t be. Surely it was Vinnie. Or Visionary Assassins. Or Pammy. Or the professor’s wife.

  Or Hannah.

  CHAPTER

  TEN

  The hotel was quiet and undemanding at this hour. Lobby, ferns, palms, flowers, desks. Reeve walked to the distant bank of elevators. Nobody looked his way. He was the wholesome type. People trusted Reeve.

  The elevator moved swiftly to the sixth floor.

  He had mike fright. The blank horror of his own speech.

  Mirrors reflected him too many times. He did not want to look at himself. He kept his eyes on the doors, and when they opened he stepped through. The hotel was thickly carpeted. He walked silently, as if he weren’t coming after all.

  If only that were true.

  He wondered if the excuse that he had needed confession would work; that talking had been good for him.

  But the Catholic Church knew what it was doing when it kept confession down to a tiny room with two people. Confession to millions is not the same. Brian and Jodie, good Catholics, were going to cut that argument to pieces pretty fast.

  He had planned to stand in the corridor thinking things through before he knocked, but they were waiting. Jodie opened the door and stood back. She was more pixielike than Janie, but the look she gave him was not elfin.

  Inside 616 was a little hall painted gum-wrapper green. Past Jodie was a large room with two enormous beds and an enormous television resting on a long bank of drawers. There was an armchair, a round table and a little sofa, the kind called a love seat.

  There was Brian, looking very young: more elementary school than junior high. Bobbling around like a kid on a playground ready to fight.

  Janie, presumably, was the roll of blanket.

  Nobody said anything.

  The radio was off. The television was off. They were too high to hear traffic.

  My turn, thought Reeve, and he was afraid. “I’m sorry,” he said finally.

  There was no fight-or-flight reaction in Brian.

  Only fight.

  He wanted to slam Reeve to the floor, kick his ribs in, bash his skull. He wanted to hit—bite—kill. It was so primitive, so complete, that Brian’s mind didn’t have sentences in it; just images.

  Brian despised himself for being little, for being short and thin and a crummy athlete. He hated how Reeve’s eyes passed over him, ruling him out. He wanted to protect and fight back, not be the little boy watching to see what the big boys did.

  But if he attacked, Reeve would just hold him off, and Brian would be pathetic, and the girls would have to waste time separating them, and somehow this would make it easier on Reeve.

  So Brian stood still, pressing his angry arms against his heaving sides.

  “You sold us!” said Jodie. “You took our story, the hard parts, the insider stuff, the things that hurt most, and you sold it.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Reeve again. He was sorry. He was horribly sorry.

  “You didn’t think you’d get caught, did you?” said Jodie.

  “No.”

  Janie’s hair had spilled out of the blanket tube. If only he could fling the blanket off Janie, and tighten his arms around her, and muss up her hair, and convince her that he really was a good guy. A mistake, sure, but hey. Shrug it off, Janie.

  “How could you do it, Reeve?” screamed Jodie without raising her voice; a scream of intensity, not volume. “How could you actually say things like Janie not wanting us? Janie not having enough love to go around? Bad enough to mention what people already know from newspaper and television. But to tell what we kept safe in our hearts? How could you do that to us?”

  The word safe and the word heart were terrible. “It didn’t feel real,” he said. “It was just airtime. It’s just you and the mike. You’re alone in a glass room and it isn’t real.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t buy that. We’re radio fiends, too. The first thing in radio is to hook the listeners. You knew the audience was out there. You were buying listeners, Reeve.”

  He swallowed. “Yes.”

  “Buying them through me,” said Janie.

  Her voice jolted him terribly. It was still her voice. She’s still who she was, he thought confusedly. A lump in his throat like broken pavement blocked speech.

  “For fame?” said Jodie. “Was this part of your master plan to be rich and famous?”

  “I guess so,” he said. Janie did not move inside the blanket; she could have been dead. He said to the blanket, “Radio is exciting. It’s live. People recognize your voice, and they call up the station and ask for you, and you have automatic friends. Strangers smile when they meet you.” But Janie, he thought, Janie isn’t going to smile when she meets me. Oh, God.

  “If you did it so people would know you, why didn’t you talk about yourself instead? The freshman experience or something?” said Jodie.

  “Because I started so early,” said Reeve. “I’d hardly even been a freshman when I began.”

  “You’ve been talking about us since August?” hissed Jodie. “How many of these little stories have you woven? How many nights a week? How many details? How many times?”

  He could not answer that. It was too damning. He took refuge in his first sentence. “I’m sorry.”

  He looked at the misshapen blanket that contained the person who mattered most to him in the world. He sat heavily down on the bed, the way he always sat, letting go completely, so that the springs touched bottom.

  He peeled the blanket down, and Janie’s tired eyes stared back at him. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I didn’t mean to. I was just being stupid.”

  It was Jodie who began to bawl.

  Brian’s sister was not given to tears; she was battle-prone, and often damaged her brothers. Jodie sobbing made Brian feel uneven, tippy. Wishing they had called Mom and Dad after all.

  Brian felt defused. He had expected a monster. But Reeve was still Reeve. The same endearing, good-looking, nice person. The need to damage Reeve faded. Brian just felt mixed up, with a headache on the side.

  “We were getting there!” Jodie cried. She was mad at herself for crying, wiping tears away as fast as they fell. “You wouldn’t even know my mother and father if you came down. They’re happy. They’re not worrying. They can let go of us. And look what you did. Threw us o
ut there, like raw meat in front of wolves. Saying on the air that Janie had better things to do than make an effort to love us.”

  Reeve didn’t defend himself.

  “You’ve ruined Boston for me. How am I supposed to get excited about attending school in a town where they know private, personal family hurts?”

  Reeve tried to explain how it had begun, how it had snowballed. He described the first night, the agony of having nothing to say. How Derek and Vinnie and Cal were going to laugh at him, along with his entire dorm.

  Brian hated it that Reeve was a coward. Afraid of being a jerk for five minutes in front of some other jerks? That gave him the right to sell out the family?

  “But I never used last names,” said Reeve. “I never said Johnson or Spring. So it matters less than you think.”

  “It doesn’t matter less, Reeve!” shouted Jodie. “It matters all the way, through and through!”

  “People never called in and asked for last names?” said Brian.

  “Constantly. That was the point. Make them call in.”

  “Don’t you pretend to yourself or us that you didn’t have a choice, Reeve Shields!” Jodie was going to hit him. Brian wondered what Reeve would do. “I don’t care how it snowballed. You’re a big boy, Reeve, you could have stepped aside and let the snowball go past.”

  Reeve swallowed. “That’s true.”

  “So what’s your excuse?” shouted Jodie.

  “I don’t have one!” At last Reeve’s voice was as strained as Jodie’s. Brian was glad to hear the radio richness gone and the ragged nerves showing.

  “I was in love with the sound of my voice, I guess. In love with being important. Daydreaming about how famous I would be.”

  His eyes were still on Janie, and he had a puppy look, with that moppy hair, and Brian thought, If Janie tells him it’s okay, she loves him anyway, not to worry about it, then Stephen is right, let her sleep in a coffin.

  “I want you to promise me,” said Janie, sliding off the bed, keeping it between herself and Reeve, keeping the blanket on, “that you will never say another sentence about us.”