Yesterday I started and finished reading the book: “The Voice on the Radio” by Caroline B. Cooney. It is the third sequel of this story of a girl who was kidnapped and didn’t even know. Here’s a little something about the story.
PS: This is Reeve, Janie’s boyfriend, talking in a radio station.
“Once upon a time…
Once upon a time…
I dated a dizzy redhead. Dizzy is a compliment. Janie was light and airy. Like hope and joy. My girlfriend. You know the type. Really cute, fabulous red hair, lived next door. Good in school, of course, girls like that always are. Janie had lots of friends and she was crazy about her mom and dad, because that’s the kind of family people like that have. Except, except one day in the school cafeteria, a perfectly ordinary day, when kids were stealing each other’s desserts and spilling each other’s milk, Janie just happened to glance down at the picture of that missing child printed on the milk carton. And the face on the milk carton was Janie herself. They can’t fit much information on the side of a half-print, but the milk carton said the little girl had been missing since she was three. Missing for twelve years. Can you imagine if your daughter, or your sister, had disappeared twelve years ago? Twelve years have gone by, and yet you still believe. Surely somehow, somewhere, she must be waiting, and listening. You haven’t given up hope. You refuse to admit she’s probably dead by now, probably was dead all along. You believe there is a chance in a million that if you put her picture on a milk carton, she’ll see it. Well, she saw it.
So it’s you on that milk carton. You are a missing person. Around you, everything is ordinary. People are still having Jell-O and sitting two to a chair. But your life just switched channels. What does missing mean? Does missing mean lost? Does it mean run away? Or does it mean…kidnapped? Of course the question is now what? Because you love your parents. If you tell anybody you think you were kidnapped, well, think about it. Think about the media. The police. Your family would be destroyed. If these grown-ups you call Mommy and Daddy are really your kidnappers, and if you turn them in, you’ll send your own parents to prison. But if you don’t tell…what about that other family? Still out there? Still worrying, after all these years? Now what?
Janie didn’t tell. She kept it a secret between herself and the milk carton. Janie researched her own kidnapping in The New York Times. Can you imagine? You go to the library and read about yourself on microfiche? You see a photograph in the Times of a sister and three brothers you never knew you had? An uncle and an aunt and grandparents…but most of all, a mother and father? But even The New York Times doesn’t know who took you. They only know the family the got left behind. The FBI, the Jersey police, nobody ever had a clue. But you know. It has to be the parents you have right now. Trouble is, your parents are good, nice, responsible people. And you love them. Kidnapping is evil. Does this mean the mother and father you love are evil? If you go and telephone that 800 number on the milk carton, hey-it’s finished. Over. You lose. No more family. So you try to figure out a way that you could be wrong. That it’s made up. That the face on the milk carton is not you. But you start finding proof. Like a box. In an attic. Under the eaves.
The milk carton became Janie’s blanket. She used my penknife to slit open, so she could flatten it out. She carried it under the clip in her blue-cloth three-ring binder. You know the kind. Where you write in ballpoint pen on the cover. After the milk carton, she was still my dizzy redhead, but dizzy meant stumbling and scared. If the milk carton was right, she had been kidnapped when she was three. Janie sort of moved deeper toward being a three-year-old, as if that way, she could understand. Maybe even remember. It was just a matter of time before she started sucking her thumb. Meantime, a flattened milk carton from Flower Dairy became her blankie.
Well, see, from The New York Times, Janie found out the address of her real family, down in New Jersey. And one day, I’m driving us to school, because we lived next door, and I had my own Jeep, and Janie says, “Let’s cut school”. And I’m thinking of reasons that I would cut school, and things I would do with Janie if we were alone all day long, and Janie says, “Let’s drive to New Jersey and find them”.
So we drove to New Jersey. And we found them.
Remember I told you about Janie’s hair? Serious hair. As much hair as any two or three regular people. Auburn-copper hair that she wore long. Once the physics teacher defined chaos as Janie’s hair. And there, on the right street, across from the right house, a school bus stops. And kids with the very same red hair get off. the hair-and presumably, therefore, the genes-are a perfect match. Janie really is the sister.
I’m hanging on to the steering wheel with white knuckles, I’m so surprised. I hadn’t believed it till then. I’m almost sick. Because I like Janie’s parents so much as I like my own. How could htye steal Janie and still be nice? There couldn’t be a nice answer to that. There could only be a terrible answer. And Janie, my poor Janie, is practically on the floor of the Jeep, hiding from them, so they can’t see her red hair and know who she has to be, whispering, “Drive on, keep driving, get out of here, Reeve.”
So we got out of there. We didn’t tell. We didn’t tell our families in Connecticut, or the authorities, or the family in New Jersey. But we knew. We knew it was true. Janie Johnson had been kidnapped. So there was the same question. Always the same question. Now what?
Of course, the question you’re phoning in with is…who’s the bad guy here? There’s gotta be a bad guy. You can’t have a kidnapping without a bad guy. But Reeve, you tell me over the phone, you make Janie’s parents sound like great people, and you make Janie’s kidnap parents sound like great people.
There’s a problem here. Somebody has to be the bad guy.
You’re right.
There was a bad guy.
And her name was Hannah.
Hannah.
She was pretty in a limp sort of way.
Like a used rag doll. Nobody is ever best fri9ends with that kind. They’re on the fringes. Doomed.
Hannah joined a cult, dropped out of regular life, probably thought she was one of the good guys, because her cult said that God was on their side.
Years after she left her nice home and her nice parents, Hannah kidnapped a little girl names Jennie Spring.
Why? Nobody knows. Maybe she just wanted company. A smiling face in the passenger seat. Somebody to have ice cream with. Maybe it sort of happened by itself and she didn’t know what to do afterward. Or maybe she wanted that poor family to suffer. To worry, year after year: Is our little girl in pain? Is she cold? Is she scared? Is she bleeding? I she alive?
Hannah took that little girl home to her own mom and dad, and she said, This is my baby. Your grandchild. You’ll be better parents than I am, so bye! Enjoy her! And Hannah left.
She went back to her cult. Maybe. Nobody knows. Anyway, she disappeared forever, leaving only one instruction. “Enjoy here.” And they did. Oh, how they enjoyed her! Their little girl-they thought her name was Janie, not Jennie-was the light of their lives. When they were parents to Hannah, they must have made some really, really big mistake, though they never figured out what the mistake was, or when they made it. But you’ve got to admit, good parents don’t have daughters who join cults and abandon their babies. But now they could get it right. This time around, they’d be perfect parents. And Janie: It was her job to be the perfect daughter.
Janie didn’t go politely into being Jennie.
She went fighting and spitting.
The courts said Janie had to be returned to her biological family. To New Jersey. Lawyers took her down the same interstate we took the day we skipped school. But this time, it wasn’t a road. It was a tunnel of fear. Janie was being poured down some evil tube, where she could land in any kind of nightmare, because she no longer had parents. She was mad at Hannah, she was mad at her birth parents. How dare they want her back, when she liked her old life better?
Janie found out something while she was living in New Jersey. She didn’t have enough love to go around. Janie turned out to have a limited supply of love. Not enough to fit in her real mother and father. Who needed them? Janie had a great life. They were clutter.
Who, really, is Hannah? Of course everybody was being kind to her parents, and pretending she was a misguided lost soul…but she wasn’t. She snatched a baby girl and left that family to worry forever. And that’s evil. Hannah was evil.
And where is Hannah now?
She’s out there.
Somewhere…the sweet dishrag daughter…the thief of two families…is out there.
All grown up.
All evil.
Janie had a prayer.
The prayer was not to God.
It was to Hannah.
Dear Hannah, don’t show up in our lives. My parents can’t go through that. They’d have to see what became of you. And they and you would have to face a trial and the media. Hannah, there’s only one thing you can do for the mother and father you abandoned.
Stay lost.”
