The Name on the Broadcast novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Broadcast
Laney hears her mother's name read as a girl missing twenty-six years, walks out of her shift into the radio station, and calls the number: "I think I'm the reason she never came home."
Twenty years after my mother's death, I heard a missing person announcement on the campus radio.
I was elbow-deep in the dish sink at the dining hall, scraping oatmeal off a hotel pan.
The kitchen radio was always tuned to the student station. Nobody ever changed it.
A boy's voice came on between two songs.
"This next one is a paid notice from a family. Please listen."
He cleared his throat.
"Annie Wooler. Female. Missing for twenty-six years."
"She was nineteen when she disappeared. A literature major here at the state university."
"Five foot four, dark blond hair, freckles. She was last seen leaving the campus library on a Friday night in October."
"Her family has never stopped looking. If you know anything, anything at all, please call."
He read out a phone number.
Then he read it again, slower.
The hotel pan slid out of my hands and hit the bottom of the sink.
Water slapped up over my apron.
Annie Wooler.
Wasn't that my mother's name?
"Haskett!" the line cook yelled. "You break that, it comes out of your check."
I didn't answer him.
I was hearing a song I hadn't heard in twenty years.
My mother used to sing it to me on the porch swing, very low, so it wouldn't carry to the kitchen.
My mama's name is Annie Wooler. Annie Wooler, Annie Wooler. She goes to the state university.
She made me sing it back to her. Every night.
One day Grandma Verna heard me singing it in the bath.
She washed my mouth out with soap and told me my mama's name was Annie Haskett, and that the other word was a silly made-up rhyme.
After that I only sang the first part.
Then my mother died, and I stopped singing it at all.
I peeled off my wet gloves.
I was doing math.
I was twenty-four. A graduate student in the same literature department the boy on the radio had named.
Annie Wooler went missing twenty-six years ago, at nineteen.
My mother had me at twenty-one.
Back home, the story went like this.
My mother came from down the hill. An orphan with no people. My father met her at a revival and brought her home.
That was the word everybody used. Brought home.
The man down the road brought home a wife the year I turned six. The feed store man brought home two, ten years apart.
None of those women were from our town.
None of them ever went back to visit their people.
None of them ever went to the store alone.
I had known all that my whole life.
I had never once let myself put my own mother in that sentence.
My hands were shaking.
I have one photo of her.
I keep it in the back of my phone case, behind the card for the laundry machines.
I slid it out right there by the sink.
A young woman on our front porch, freckles across her nose, holding a little girl on her hip.
The little girl is me, in a red corduroy jumper.
On the back, in round, loopy handwriting, it says "Annie and the bean."
I had always thought she looked young.
I had never thought she looked like a college girl.
She did.
She looked exactly like the girls in the undergrad sections I graded on Thursdays.
Then the other memory came, the one I keep in a drawer I don't open.
I was four.
It was summer and the porch boards were hot under my bare feet.
My mother came down the steps fast, with no shoes on, and she wasn't carrying me.
She was heading for the road.
I didn't understand where she was going. I only knew she was going without me.
So I ran after her and threw my arms around her legs and held on.
"Mom!" I screamed. "Mom! Mom! Don't go!"
I screamed it over and over, as loud as I could.
She stopped.
She stood very still in the dirt with my arms locked around her knees.
Then the screen door banged behind us.
My grandmother came down the steps, wiping her hands on a dish towel, not hurrying at all.
"Well," Grandma Verna said. "Look who's a good girl."
My mother bent down and picked me up.
She was crying.
I thought she was crying because I'd scared her.
A few weeks later Grandma Verna sat me on her lap and told me my mama had died of a fever in the night.
There was no funeral.
There was no grave that anybody ever showed me.
I put the photo back in my case.
I took my apron off and hung it on the hook.
"Where are you going?" the line cook said. "Breakfast rush is in ten minutes."
"I'm sorry," I said. "I have to go."
"You walk out, you're done."
I walked out.
The radio station is in the basement of the student union, at the other end of the quad.
I ran the whole way in my wet kitchen shoes.
The door said ON AIR in red letters, and the light was on.
I knocked anyway.
Then I opened it.
A tall guy in wire glasses and a station hoodie was sitting at the board with headphones around his neck. He held up a finger to stop me.
He said something into the mic about the weather and pushed up a slider.
Music came on.
He turned around in his chair.
"You can't just come in here when that light's on."
"The notice you read," I said. "The missing girl. I need that number."
He looked at my soaked apron shirt, and then at my face.
Whatever he saw there, he stopped arguing.
"Her mother calls me every year," he said. "Every October. She pays for the spot herself."
He tore a page off the log sheet and wrote the number down for me in neat block letters.
"Are you okay?"
"No," I said.
"Do you want to sit down?"
"I want to use your phone. Mine's almost dead."
He pushed the desk phone toward me without a word.
I dialed.
It rang four times.
Then a woman picked up, a little out of breath.
"Hello? This is Frances Wooler."
Behind her I could hear a dog barking and a kettle starting to whistle.
"Hello?" she said again. "Did you hear the notice? Do you know something about my daughter?"
I held the receiver with both hands.
The guy in the glasses was watching me.
"My name is Laney," I said. "I think I'm the reason she never came home."
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