Janie Face to Face (21 page)

The plane was coming down over New Jersey, her beloved state, and below her was an ocean of small roofs and wide roads, hurrying cars and fat green trees.

They landed.

She would have kissed the ground if she had been at ground level.

At the gate, she had a drink of cold water from a fountain, and thought how Haitians would love such a thing, and then went to the ladies’ room and marveled at how clean and white and sweet-smelling it was.

She turned on her cell phone and called her parents.

“We’re waiting at baggage claim!” shrieked her mother, as if she needed to project volume all the way to Haiti.

When Jodie got to baggage claim, hundreds of other arriving passengers were on their cell phones, describing exact locations, but Jodie could skip that step. Hers was the crowd of redheads. Mom’s was getting gray and Dad’s was vanishing to a curly rim around a bald head, but that massive mane of red hair could only be Janie.

The difficult sister cared enough to come.

And then they were all hugging and laughing and saying pointless things like “How was the flight?”

“I want to hear all about Haiti,” said Janie.

Jodie thought, I could never explain Haiti. I didn’t understand while I was there. “First, I get to hear all about the wedding,” she said.

Haiti receded as if it had been a dentist appointment instead of another world and a year.

“Get in here, Reeve!” shouted his boss.

Reeve’s gut tightened. He’d done everything, hadn’t he? In the right order? In a timely fashion? Every detail correct?

He trotted into Bick’s office.

“So, how far have you gotten with these wedding plans? Because we have a problem.”

“We do?”

“I shouldn’t have okayed July eighth so fast. We’ve got the Big East preview that weekend and I want you on it. I can give you the second week in September, or else next weekend. June third. I figured things were gonna be pretty loose, seeing the way you proposed and all. You didn’t engrave the invitations yet, didja?”

Oh, great, thought Reeve. Career or wedding. Love when that happens. “Let me talk to Janie real fast.”

He went out of Bick’s office. Out of the whole building. Into the shade of an overhang. Good thing there were cell phones. He was pretty sure Janie was in New Jersey for Jodie’s welcome home party, but a person could get confused following Janie’s family schedule.

“Janie? Problems. They don’t want to give me July eighth after all. How do you feel about either June third, or else September?”

They both burst into crazed laughter.

“That’s it? Those are our choices?” said Janie.

“Yup.”

“If we wait until September, I’ll be a crazy woman all summer. But there’s no way to put a wedding together in—oh, wow—that’s ten days!”

“Aren’t we just serving sandwiches out in the backyard, though?” asked Reeve. “And aren’t you getting a dress off the rack at the bridal mall?”

“Ten days,” Janie repeated.

“Come on, woman,” said Reeve. “I’ve crammed all my studying for entire semesters into ten hours. We can figure out how to say I do in ten days.”

“Except guess what—the actual wording is ‘I will.’ ”

“Will what?”

“I
will
take this man to be my wedded husband, to love and to cherish from this time forth. I love that word, ‘cherish.’ ”

“And will you want to cherish me in ten days or in four months?”

“I’ll call you back in a few minutes, Reeve.” Janie flew downstairs to find her mother. “We have to change the wedding date. How does June third sound?”

“Insane,” said her mother.

“True, but will you and Dad be here?” Janie giggled. “I know my other parents don’t have any trips abroad planned.”

“Let’s think. Brendan and Brian aren’t a problem. They’ll be home from college by then anyway, and all we have to do is button them into their wedding clothes. I’ll call Stephen immediately. He’ll be irritated, but he always is. Let me check with Father John and make sure we can get the church. It’ll be very exciting. There will be so much to do, nobody can sleep from now on.”

“It’s only ten days,” said Janie. “Who needs sleep?” She stood close to her mother’s cell phone to hear the conversation with the priest. Father John just laughed. Yes, they could get married on June 3.

Janie called Reeve back. “June third is on. Are your parents
okay with that? What about your brother, Todd? What about Lizzie?”

“Oh, yeah, I forgot all of them. Can you text me a list?”

“How about I just handle them?”

“Wow,” said Reeve. “My bride isn’t just beautiful. She’s willing to be slaughtered on my behalf.”

Dozens of people had only one thing to say on Facebook:
Ten days?

Mrs. Shields telephoned her son. “Ten days?” she said fiercely.

“I know. Even for me, it’s a little speedy.”

“Ten days is impossible, Reeve.”

“All you have to do is show up, Mom. You’re only a few hours from New Jersey. We’ve scheduled the wedding for two o’clock in the afternoon, so no matter how bad the traffic is, you’ll make it. Ideally, though, you’ll come Friday and we’ll have a wedding rehearsal and a dinner. Mrs. Spring is working on hotel rooms.”

“The Friday rehearsal dinner is our responsibility,” said his mother grimly. “I’ll call Mrs. Spring right now and she’ll have to make the reservations. What’s her first name again?”

“Donna. You’ll like her, Mom.”

His mother said nothing.

Reeve said, “Or could you pretend to, Mom? Please?”

“The third of June?” repeated Stephen Spring. “Are you serious? You expect me there in ten days?”

“Actually, I need you in seven days,” said his mother. “We
have to get you fitted for a tuxedo and you have to help with a million details.”

“Has there ever been a time when Janie wasn’t a pain?” he asked.

“Jennie,” she reminded him. “And I think it’s Reeve being the pain this time. And so what? We get to put on a wedding. Now don’t dillydally. Get your plane tickets.” His mother hung up.

Kathleen was laughing. “When I get married,” she said, “it’s going to be a lot more organized.”

Stephen didn’t ask who she planned to marry. He didn’t ask her to come to his sister’s wedding either. He said, “Let’s get our bikes. We need to track down those other two Hannahs.”

The final check was big. Hannah spent it on three things.

First, a dentist. The man had some nerve to charge that much for one silly tooth. But Hannah had known how to handle people from the day she got Tiffany Spratt a post office box. The dentist agreed to be paid in installments. She proved how reliable and honest she was by making payments each month for four months when he hadn’t even done anything yet. He was impressed and agreed to fix the tooth while she would keep paying him.

What an idiot. Like she would keep paying after her mouth looked good.

Second, she got her own cell phone. She’d been stealing them, and enjoyed playing the games and exploring the apps, but the phones were quickly canceled. And once everybody in the world got a cell phone, public phones vanished. Her own cell phone was a necessity.

Third, a computer.

She no longer needed the library; instead she needed the
phone company and the Internet supplier. They were harder to scam than the dentist. You had to pay them. And Frank’s money was now gone.

She had to work two lousy jobs instead of just one lousy job.

She always disguised herself. When she was a maid at motels, she wore street clothes under her uniform so she’d look fat. But it was just habit. She no longer really believed anybody was after Hannah Javensen. She was old news.

Also, they were stupid. She was smart.

Sometimes she liked to read through her collection of old Jennie/Janie articles, where they said they were going to bring the kidnapper to justice. “Justice” sounded like a town, with streets and sidewalks and a courtroom. Well, they couldn’t bring her to the town of Justice. She had vanished better than anybody.

That year, Hannah had her forty-sixth birthday. She could hardly imagine being that old. But she was. She thought sometimes about turning fifty. Or sixty. It was terrifying.

They couldn’t expect her to scrub toilets and vacuum hotel rooms when she got old. Already her knees hurt and her back hurt.

The coffee shop was hard. She bussed tables, loaded dishwashers, and put away the mugs when they were still so hot they burned her.

The customers were always clean and chipper and chatty and young. They loved their little mugs. When she returned a mug to the display wall, she had to hang it with the customer’s name visible.

They all got to use their real names. It was so unfair!

She kept track of names of people she hated. There was the woman who got hired in Hannah’s place when a motel canned her. There was the woman who told on her when she was sneaking the waitresses’ tips out of the jar. The woman who ratted when she smuggled meat from the restaurant refrigerator. People had no sense of kinship.

Sixteen years after that day in New Jersey, Hannah was watching TV in a sports bar. The bar was a rough place, but that was not a problem, because Hannah was a rough person. She did not have the cash to pay for her drink and was more focused on that than some college ball game. She pondered how to get money out of Frank and Miranda.

Supposedly, knowledge was money. But Hannah had acquired a lot of knowledge and it hadn’t brought money.

On wide screens in front of her, to her left, to her right, and behind, the announcers fumbled their patter. They ended up laughing. Those guys were probably paid a million dollars and when they made a mistake, everybody just laughed. When
she
made a mistake, they fired her.

“We’ve just been saved!” said the commentator. “Our terrific researcher produced the facts.”

“Let’s give credit where credit is due,” said the second guy. “Don’t we have a camera near that kid? Reeve Shields, take a bow.”

Reeve Shields? It was not an ordinary name. Could it be the boy next door to the Jennie/Janie? The one who wouldn’t friend her on Facebook? The one who came here with the Jennie/Janie to visit the Stephen?

For two seconds, the television showed this person Reeve
in a cubicle somewhere. He was very young and very handsome, with moppy hair and a long narrow face split by a huge happy grin. He got to be on television and he was cute and people loved him and they remembered his name!

Hannah had put up with a lot in this world. She was not putting up with this. That Jennie/Janie not only got two families—including Hannah’s own—but also this cute guy?

That girl deserved nothing! That girl had just gone along for the ride.

And that girl even had Hannah’s money! They probably had written their wills, those slimy parents of hers, and cut out their real true daughter in favor of this girl Hannah herself had given to them!

Out of her rage burst a brilliant idea.

It was an idea so amazing that it glittered, a jewel resting on velvet in a store window.

After a while she could touch the idea and glow in its light. The idea solved everything. She would have money.

And the Jennie/Janie would be very sorry.

Nicole gave Jodie a welcome-home party.

Nicole’s house was a split-level, with the rec room on the lower floor opening to a big screened porch and a big untended yard. Kids poured in and out of the house, music reverberated, and neighbors looked tense.

“Your welcome-home party is like a preview of Janie’s wedding,” Nicole told Jodie. “You weren’t due home till the end of the summer and that’s when I expected to give a party. My mother said just have the party in August anyway, but I said you can’t welcome somebody home three months after she gets here. So I slapped this together. You get what you get.”

Nicole was serving giant subs, plus those round plastic trays from the supermarket filled with vegetables or fruit and dip. Nobody had touched them yet, even the vegetarians. A stack of paper napkins, a thousand cans of soda, and a cooler of ice wrapped up party preparations.

How awed and excited the little kids in Haiti would be by such a party. But Jodie skipped the Haiti comparison.
“Nicole, this is perfect. I’m thrilled to see everybody. Especially you. Thank you so much. And we have so much to talk about.”

Nicole nodded. “Real quick, while everybody is popping open a soda can, I’ll start on my cousin Vic. You’ll be so disappointed. That post office box where Frank sent the checks? It was closed two years ago. Nobody remembers a single thing about the woman who rented it. Her name was Tiffany Spratt. The police found a Tiffany Spratt who went to college there ages ago, but she never had a post office box and she is who she is, and she’s not Hannah. Her backpack was stolen once, when she was a freshman, and it had her wallet in it, and it was a real pain getting another driver’s license and canceling her credit card and her debit card. They’re guessing Hannah used Tiffany Spratt’s ID to rent the post office box, but the real Tiffany Spratt never got billed for a charge that wasn’t hers, and so she had no idea that anybody had used her driver’s license. It’s a dead end.”

It wouldn’t have been a dead end if Janie had told the authorities about the box. Don’t go that way, Jodie told herself. Remember the plan: to love Janie.

Okay, in a little dark corner of her heart, Jodie could still be furious that Janie had put comatose Frank and pathetic Miranda first. Jodie spent a few minutes in the little dark corner and then she joined the party.

Stephen Spring not only wanted to be in the wedding party, he wanted it to
be
a party, with noise and dancing and toasts and tears. He was going to need a party after chasing three
Hannahs. He wanted to locate the woman, or rule her out, and be done with it.

He and Kathleen found the second possible Hannah slumped on a chair in a tiny side yard by a tiny garage apartment. She was very thin. Her old sweat suit had once been peach or pink. Now it had bleach stains. A cigarette hung from her lips. Her lips were thin, as was her hair. If “down and out” was your criterion, she fit. If thin and formerly blond were the criteria, she fit.