What Janie Saw (6 page)

Now, when she looked back—which wasn’t far; it had happened only three years ago—she saw a long string of goofs and stubbornness. If only I had been nicer! she sometimes said to herself.

But being nice in a kidnap situation is tough.

Janie’s college essay spilled more truth than she had ever given anybody but her former boyfriend, Reeve. Still, it omitted two other reasons for going to college.

She wanted to make lifelong girlfriends. Sarah-Charlotte would always be her best friend, but at some disturbing level, Janie wanted to be free of Sarah-Charlotte; free to go her own way, whatever that was, and at her own speed, whatever that was.

And she wanted to meet the man who would become her husband.

Janie still loved Reeve, of course. But the boy next door had hurt her more than anyone. Whenever he was home from college (he was three years ahead of her), Reeve would plead, “I was stupid, Janie. But I’m older and wiser.”

He was older, anyway. And still the cutest guy on earth. But wiser?

Janie didn’t think so.

Reeve was a boyfriend now only by habit. She and Reeve texted all the time, and she followed his Facebook page. She herself didn’t have a photograph or a single line of information on her own wall; she was on Facebook solely to see what other people were doing. She never posted.

Janie’s other mother, Miranda Johnson, was excited and worried for Janie. Miranda’s life had collapsed, and this year, she was living through Janie. Miranda was so eager to see Janie launched at the university. It was Miranda who drove Janie into the city on the day her college
dorm opened.

Later, Janie learned that each of her Spring parents had arranged to take that day off from work so that
they
could bring her to college. But Janie said no to them, which she had pretty much said ever since they first spoke on the phone. (“Is it the only syllable you know?” her brother Stephen once demanded.)

On the first day of college, Janie and her mother took the dorm elevator to the fifth floor and found her room. The single window had a sliver view of the Hudson River. Janie could hardly wait for her mother to leave so she could begin her new life. She refused Miranda’s help unpacking and nudged her mother back into the hall, where Miranda burst into tears. “Oh, Janie, Janie! I’ll miss you so, Janie!”

Janie tried to stand firm against her mother’s grief. If she herself broke down, she might give up and go home.

The hall was packed with everybody else moving in, each freshman glaring silent warnings to their own parents:
Don’t even think about crying like that woman
.

“Good-bye, Janie!” cried her mother, inching backward. “I love you, Janie!”

At last the elevator doors closed and Janie was without a parent. She sagged against the wall. Had she done the right thing? Should she run after Miranda and somehow make this easier?

A friendly hand tapped her shoulder. “Hi. I’m Rachel. And you are definitely Janie!”

Everyone in the hall was smiling gently. In minutes, she knew Constance and Mikayla and Robin and Samantha. Nobody bothered with last names. I can skip my last names! thought Janie.

“I’m actually Jane,” she said. “Only my mother calls me Janie.” She had never been called Jane. She felt new and different and safe, hiding under the new syllable along with the
new hair. “Jane” sounded sturdier than “Janie.” More adult.

Her actual roommate appeared so late that Janie had been thinking she might not even have a roommate. “Eve,” said the girl, who flung open the door around eleven o’clock that night. “Eve Eggs. I’ve heard every joke there is. Do not use my last name. You and I will be on a first-name basis only.”

“I’m with you,” said Janie.

Her new friends—girls who seemed so poised, and whose grades and SAT scores were so much higher than Janie’s—were nervous in the Big Apple. They thought Janie was the sophisticated one. Everybody she knew back home would think that was a riot.

Rachel loved ballet and wanted Janie to help her find Lincoln Center.

Constance wanted Janie to teach her how to use the subway.

Mikayla had planned to study fashion, but her parents said fashion was shallow and stupid, so Mikayla ended up here, and wanted Janie to take her to fabulous New York stores and fashion districts that dictated what women would wear.

Eve had a list of famous New York places, and wanted to see them with Janie.

She did it all. She even managed to alternate weekend visits with the Springs in New Jersey and the Johnsons in Connecticut. Every Sunday morning, she’d catch an early train and go for brunch with one family or the other.

When she met her academic advisor, the man did not seem to know her background. In fact, he kept glancing at his watch, resentful that thirty minutes of his precious time was being spent on her. She loved it. Maybe the sick celebrity of being a kidnap victim was over.

When her sister, Jodie, came into the city for a weekend visit, Janie primed her. “They know nothing. They don’t even know my last name! I’m just a girl named Jane. It’s so great.
Like having my own invisibility cloak.”

Jodie was always prickly. “You enrolled here as a Johnson,” she snapped. “Which happens to be your kidnap name. If you really don’t want to be a kidnap victim, you would use your real name. You’d be Jennie Spring.”

It’s true, thought Janie.
I’m
the one extending the situation. I shouldn’t have changed my name from Janie to Jane. I should have changed my name to Jennie Spring.

And if she said that out loud, Jodie would point out that being Jennie Spring was not a name change. It was her name.

When their weekend came to a close, Jodie said, “I have to admit that I thought being away from your Connecticut home would destroy you. But you’re doing fine. You’re Miss Personality here.”

“I had plenty of personality before,” said Janie.

“Yes, but it was annoying.”

They giggled crazily, and suddenly Janie could hug Jodie the way she’d never been able to. “I was annoying,” she admitted. “I was worthless and rude.”

“Totally,” said Jodie. “But now you’re fun and rational. Who could have predicted that?”

Janie laughed. “I’m coming home for the summer,” she told her sister.

“Home?” Jodie was incredulous. “You mean, my house? That home?”

“If you want me.”

“Oh, Janie, we’ve always wanted you.
You
never wanted
us
!”

The wonderful weeks of freshman year flew by.

Eve began talking about Thanksgiving. Eve’s family had several hundred traditions,
including who mashed the potatoes and who chopped the celery for the turkey stuffing. “I have the most wonderful new family here,” Eve said, “especially you, Jane, but I can hardly wait to get home to my real family.”

Even Eve, with whom Janie shared every inch of space and many hours a day and night, did not know that Janie Johnson had both a real family and another family. Like everybody else in the dorm, Eve vaguely assumed there had been a divorce and remarriage.

In contrast, Mikayla and Rachel acted as if they barely remembered home, family, and Thanksgiving. Janie could now see why parents might dread the departure for college: that beloved child could put away the last eighteen years like a sock in a drawer.

For Janie, the last eighteen years was more like clothing she had never been able to take off, never mind forget.

Janie telephoned her real mother. “Mom?” she said to Donna. It had taken her three years to use that word with Donna and just as much time to think of the Springs’ house as home. “May I come home for Thanksgiving?”

“Yes!” cried her real mother. “Everybody’s going to be here. Stephen’s coming from Colorado and Jodie’s coming from Boston! Brian promised not to study on Thanksgiving Day and Brendan promised not to have a ball game.”

The twins were still in high school. Brian was still academic and Brendan was still athletic. Brian was always part of the Sunday brunch when Janie came out to New Jersey, but Brendan never was. If he didn’t have a game, he went to somebody else’s.

Next Janie planned the difficult call to her other mother.

A few years ago, her other father had had a serious stroke. Miranda was not strong enough to move and lift Frank. Over the summer, while Janie was preparing to move herself to a
college dorm, she had also moved her parents into an assisted living institution, where Frank was much better off. For poor Miranda, it was prison. Miranda should have found herself her own apartment close to all her girlfriends and volunteer work and ladies’ lunches and golf. But she could not bear to live alone or to abandon Frank to loneliness.

Miranda would be counting on Janie’s presence for Thanksgiving.

Miranda did not know how to text and rarely emailed. She loved to hear Janie’s voice, so in this call, as in others, Janie started with gossip about Eve, Rachel, and Mikayla. Finally she came to the hard part. “For Thanksgiving, Mom?” Her throat tightened and her chest hurt. She hadn’t even said it yet and she was swamped by guilt. “I’m going to take the train to New Jersey on Wednesday and spend Thanksgiving Day and Friday with them.”

“New Jersey” was code for Janie’s birth family; “them” meant the Springs.

“Saturday morning I’ll get myself to Connecticut and stay until Sunday afternoon with you,” she added brightly. “Then you’ll drive me to the train station Sunday night so I can get back to the city.”

Miranda’s voice trembled. “What a good idea, darling. If you came here, we’d have to eat in the dining room with a hundred other families and the cranberry sauce would come out of a can.”

Normally, Janie caved when her mother’s voice trembled. But Jodie’s visit had been profound. The name change, and the soul change, could not be from Janie to Jane. It had to be from Janie to Jennie. All the vestiges of the kidnap, even the ones she cherished, needed to end. She wasn’t ready yet. But in her mental calendar of life, becoming Jennie Spring was not too many months away.

“I know it won’t be the perfect Thanksgiving for you, Mom,” Janie said, which was a
ridiculous remark. It would be awful for Miranda. “But I’ll see you on Saturday, and that will be great. I love you.”

“Oh, honey. I love you too.”

Vacation by vacation, Janie slid out of the Johnson family and into the Spring family. The Springs rejoiced; the Johnsons suffered.

When freshman year ended, Janie divided her summer. She lived Monday through Friday with her birth family. She got a job at a fish fry restaurant. She came home with her hair smelling of onions and grease. Fridays she worked through lunch, went home, shampooed the stink out of her hair, and caught the train from New Jersey into New York. From there, she took a subway to Grand Central, and another train out to Connecticut, where her mother picked her up at the station. Her father always knew her. Frank could smile with the half of his mouth that still turned up, and sometimes make a contribution to the conversation. But mostly, he just sat in his wheelchair.

A few years ago, when Frank suffered the first stroke, Miranda stayed at the hospital while Janie handled the household. Janie was struggling with bills when she stumbled on a file in Frank’s office. To her horror, she found that Frank had always known where his daughter Hannah was and had sent her money every month. Of course, for twelve of those years, neither he nor anybody else dreamed that Hannah had kidnapped Janie. But when the face on the milk carton was produced and the truth came out, when the FBI and the police and the media and the court got involved, Frank Johnson knew exactly where the criminal was, and he never breathed a word. He had been writing a check to Janie’s kidnapper on the very day the FBI was interrogating him.

It had been such a shock to learn that she was a kidnap victim. But Janie almost buckled when she understood that her father was aiding and abetting the kidnapper. Only to Reeve did Janie spill the secret. One of the comforts of Reeve was that he knew everything. It was always a relief to be with the one person who knew it all.

And then came another surprise: at college, she found out that it was more peaceful to be among people who knew nothing.

During freshman year, Janie saw Reeve only at Thanksgiving and Christmas. The summer after freshman year, Janie saw him only once, at the fabulous college graduation party his parents gave him. It was so much fun. Reeve had more friends than anybody, and they all came, and it was a high school reunion for his class. He and Janie were hardly alone for a minute. During that minute, he curled one of her red locks around a finger, begging her to come back to him.

She didn’t trust herself to speak. She shook her head and kissed his cheek.

He didn’t know why she couldn’t forgive him. She didn’t know either.

The following day, Reeve left for good. He had landed a dream job in the South and had to say good-bye to her in front of people. His departure was stilted and formal. She said things like “Good luck” and he said things like “Take care of yourself.” And then it was over: the boy next door had become a man with a career.

Her heart broke. But she wanted a man she could trust, and she only half trusted Reeve. It was so painful to imagine him lost to her, living a thousand miles away and leading a life about which she knew nothing. She kept herself as busy as she could. One good thing about her parents’ move to the Harbor was that they no longer lived next door to Reeve’s family: she no longer used the driveway on which she and Reeve learned to back up; no longer saw the yard on which they raked leaves; no longer ran into Reeve’s mother and got the updates she both yearned for and was hurt by, because she wasn’t part of them.

By July that summer, Janie was not visiting her Connecticut parents until Saturday mornings. By August, she was borrowing her real mother’s car, driving up for lunch on Saturdays, and driving home to New Jersey the same night. As her visits dwindled, so did her Connecticut mother. Miranda became frail and gray.

Is it my fault? thought Janie. Or is it just life? Am I responsible for keeping my other mother happy? Or is Miranda responsible for starting up new friendships and figuring out how to be happy again? I’m eighteen. Do I get to have my own life on my own terms? Or do I compromise because my mother is struggling?