The Voice on the Radio (12 page)

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.”

“Yeah, 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 out 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.”

Reeve didn’t get up. He sat hunched and sagging on his side of the room. “I promise.”

“You will never use us on any radio station ever again.”

“I promise.”

Brian had never heard Janie say
us
before.
Us
meaning her real family.

“Did I hear the announcer correctly?” said Janie. “Did he refer to me as a thing? A janie?”

Reeve closed his eyes.

Coward, thought Brian.

Brian wanted Reeve still to be his hero. He wanted Reeve still to be tall and wonderful and good at everything. We’ll have to keep this a secret from Stephen, too, thought Brian, and he imagined hearing Stephen speak highly of Reeve at holidays.

Janie envied Jodie’s tears. She, Janie, was blank; a computer disk that has not been formatted.

Reeve looked so miserable. He was ashamed, she believed that. But his protests were another lie. He had known what he was doing.

No, thought Janie. You said to yourself: Oh well, it’s only Janie, but a radio career is a radio career.

She felt soggy, like a swamp.

She thought of her Barbies, how firm they were, how solid and unchanging. If only life could be like that.

But my life is like that. My mother and father and I—we work each day to be as solid and unchanging as dolls. This is what it is to be a doll. Somebody plays with you, and throws you down at the end of the day.

“Janie,” whispered Reeve, and he moved toward her, and she shook her head, and he stopped.

She tightened the blanket around herself. She could not imagine ever coming out from under the blanket.