Janie Johnson - Voice On The Radio Part 10

The coldness in Janie's system made it hard to think. She was freezing up like an arctic pipeline.

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 ca.s.settes. 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 coc.o.o.ned 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 m.u.f.fler. "I'm certainly not going to say anything to him. He sold me! Like he opened a store, and 1 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 a.n.a.lyze 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 c.o.ke; 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.

* S.

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."

S S *.

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.

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.

S S *.

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, ca.s.settes 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 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 ~f it was Hannah?

It just couldn't be. Surely it was Vinnie. Or Visionary a.s.sa.s.sins. 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. n.o.body 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 hail 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.