The Opposite of Hallelujah (22 page)

“You have got to be kidding me,” I mumbled under my breath as I trudged up the stairs. I waited outside Hannah’s door for several minutes, listening to her moving around in there, hoping she’d turn off the light and go to sleep and I wouldn’t have to deal with this until the morning. When it seemed as though there was no hope of that, I knocked softly.

“Come in,” Hannah said.

I walked in and shut the door behind me. Hannah was sitting in an armchair near her bed, reading. She closed her book, using her finger to mark the page, and dropped it into her lap.

I glanced at the shelves Dad had built into the wall, where the overflow from my own bulging collection of books came to gather dust. It was like she was working her way through my entire sophomore-year reading list, title by title. Was it intentional? I wondered. Was she trying to find me in the books I read? If she was, this wasn’t the way to do it. The books I loved—the books that had become a part of me, or had a part of me in them to
begin with—were all downstairs in my nightstand, near enough for me to reach over on a sleepless night and crack their well-worn spines. I kept the important things close.

I sat down on the edge of Hannah’s bed. “Look, I’m sorry.” It came out sharper than I had intended.

“For what?” she asked. There was a hard look in her eye that banished any hope I might’ve had that she wouldn’t be angry. A sudden wave of guilt flooded over me.

“What are you sorry for, Caro?” Hannah prompted me again when I remained silent. I guess I hadn’t expected her to be so difficult, but something had changed inside her in the past half hour. There was a toughness in her voice that was new to me, and I considered the possibility that she wasn’t as fragile as she let on.

“For lying about where you’ve been,” I said. “I guess I didn’t realize how much it would hurt you if you found out.”

Hannah sighed. “Is that the best you can do?”

“What?” I asked.

“Because if it is, then you should leave,” she said. “I don’t have the energy for you anymore.”

The condescension in her voice sprang loose all the anger that the guilt had pushed away. “
You
don’t have the energy? What about me? I’m so sick of having to tiptoe around you, Hannah!” I cried. No matter what I had
done wrong, it didn’t erase the facts that Hannah had left and that nothing right was going on in our house.

“You’ve made that much pretty clear. I’m sorry to have inconvenienced you.”

“You chose to leave. You don’t just get to come back and have everything be perfect, you know,” I told her. “You have to deal with the messes.”

“Like what?” she said, challenging me.

“Like Mom and Dad and how devastated they were when you left home like that,” I said. I wanted to point out that she’d starved herself into another mess, but I was too scared to bring it up.
Coward
, I thought to myself meanly. “Like the fact that you and I didn’t grow up together and you can’t manufacture a relationship instantly just because it suits you. You
left
. You don’t get to pretend like we’re the ones who need to change.”

She shook her head. “I really wish I could make you understand.”

“What’s so difficult to explain, Hannah?” I challenged her. “I’m not a little girl anymore, and neither are you. We should be able to talk about these things.”

Hannah paused to think. Finally, she said, “I’m sorry you’re so angry with me.” Her eyes softened. “I never meant to cause you any pain. You or anyone else. I know you’re being protective of Mom and Dad. It was hard on them when I left. They felt like they’d done something wrong. That wasn’t lost on me. And I’m sorry. I should
have told them. I never, ever wanted to make them feel like they failed me in some way.” She said these things with such earnest sincerity that I was struck by a sudden shame, as deep as the melancholy echo of a church bell.

I took a long breath and held it. I did that sometimes, when I felt like I didn’t have a good grasp on things, and it was strange but the seconds without air would stretch and loop like taffy in a puller in a candy shop window, and it seemed like I could go forever, because there was no panicky scrambling feeling in my chest, just a sense of calm that spread through me like warm water.

“You see …,” Hannah continued, watching me closely. I let the breath out. “I thought I was doing what God wanted me to do. I thought I was being called to a higher purpose. When you believe something like that, you have to be willing to make the sacrifices necessary to fulfill that purpose. Does that make any sense?”

“I guess.” I shrugged. It didn’t, really, to me, but I could see how it might to her. Maybe it was just that I didn’t believe in a higher power, Judeo-Christian God or otherwise, but I suppose that if I had, it wouldn’t have been such a big leap.

“Do you remember me from before I went to the convent?” she asked. “I mean, in a real way? I know you were really young.”

“Not as much as I should,” I admitted.

“I had a rough adolescence,” she told me. “I didn’t
have any friends in junior high and high school. I was lonely, and I spent a lot of time in my head. And in church. I thought … I thought I was being punished for something. I chose a religious life because it asks so much of you, and I wanted to give everything up. Maybe I just wanted to prove that I could. I thought it would wash away my sins and bring me closer to God.”

“What sins? What did you think you were being punished for?” This was what I most wanted to know, but even though I said the words, they came out tasting like dirt. It felt crude and gossipy to ask this question of my sister. And why should she want to tell me? How had I earned that sort of honesty?

Hannah didn’t answer the question, and I felt a strange sense of relief. “Maybe it was because I was lonely that I wanted it so badly, but I really believed that I had no friends for a reason—that it would distract me from my true contemplative purpose. I thought the quicker I could get into a cloister, the better. I didn’t know then how hard it would be, and how unprepared I was. How young.” She stared down at the book in her lap, stroking the edges of the pages with her thumb. “You never know how young you are.”

“So you became a nun because you were unpopular in high school? That seems a little extreme,” I said.

“Caro, you’re not listening.” Hannah pressed her lips into a thin line. “I’m trying to explain to you why I left.”

“Okay,” I whispered.

“I went because I thought God wanted me to go,” Hannah said. “And to me, at that time of my life, that was the most important reason to do anything. Maybe it was selfish, and maybe I should have given more thought to how it would impact the people that loved me, but I believed so completely in my vocation that I couldn’t imagine delaying a second longer than I absolutely had to.”

“And it was harder than you expected?”

“No,” she said. “It was exactly as hard as I expected, but not in the same way. What I finally had to come to terms with was that even though I went into the cloister, I was still the same person. I was convinced that if I sacrificed everything, I would be changed. That I would be better, more whole and less afraid. But I was no different in there than I was outside, and I wasn’t prepared for how difficult that would be. I was too naive. I didn’t know anything about God.”

“Like what? What didn’t you know?”

She smiled. “Let’s just say maybe I should’ve joined the Peace Corps instead. At least then I would’ve spent eight years doing something useful.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, genuinely interested. I thought of what Father Bob had said about active orders versus contemplative orders. Maybe Hannah had simply chosen the wrong order. But something told me that the vein I had struck ran deeper than that.

“It’s okay, Caro,” she said, a tone of finality in her voice. “It’s not easy to explain the choices I made—I’m finding it hard to do so myself. I understand why you lied. I’ll talk to Mom and Dad for you, try to get you a stay of execution.”

I waved her off. “No, that’s okay. They’re right. I shouldn’t have lied about you. It’s not like you were in jail or something. Nobody has to be ashamed, least of all me.”

“Jail,” she said, turning the idea over in her head. “Now, that’s the story you should’ve told.”

Something shifted inside me during my conversation with Hannah that night, and I went to sleep feeling better than I had in months, but I woke up early with a heavy feeling in my stomach. The yelling match with my parents and the talk with my sister had taken so much out of me I’d forgotten all about Pawel and how freaked out he was by my craziness—personal and familial. In the bright light of the early morning, though, I remembered, and I was afraid of what would come next.

When Reb showed up in my driveway, I was sitting on the porch with my bag in my lap, picking at a piece of plastic that was coming loose from my sneakers. As I trudged to the car, she rolled down the passenger-side window, leaned over, and called out, “Morning, sunshine!”

I didn’t respond, just grimaced as I opened the door and slid in. She frowned and said, “You don’t look good. What’s up?”

I rubbed my eyes. “I’m fine.”

“I don’t believe you, Caroliar,” she joked. I jerked up, surprised by the nickname. I hadn’t heard it in a long time, and I felt a brief twinge of paranoia—had someone
told
her?—but then I reminded myself that even Reb, she of a thousand friends, didn’t really know anyone I went to grade school with, and that it was just a coincidence. It wasn’t even that clever of a pun. “Spill.”

I glared at her. “
Don’t
call me that.”

“What?”

“ ‘Caroliar,’ ” I said. “I don’t like that.”

“Okay, crazy,” she said, rolling her eyes. She pulled out of the driveway without even turning around and set off down the street like we were in
The Fast and the Furious
. It was amazing to me that Reb had managed to get her license when Hannah could not. “What’s your problem, Caro?”

“Ugh,” I groaned. “I just did a really stupid thing and now I’m grounded and I think Pawel hates me and I just want to crawl under the covers and die.”

“That’s a bit much for a Monday morning, even for you,” Reb said. “What exactly happened?”

I sniffled. “I told Pawel that my sister was in the Peace Corps. Which he blurted out at your party. And which I confirmed.”

“So? Is it a big secret?” She looked at me, and I realized that Pawel wasn’t the only person I’d lied to.

“No, it’s not true,” I told her. I stared at myself in the side mirror in an attempt to avoid her gaze. “She was a nun.”

“Like … a nun?” Reb asked. “Like, a crucifix-and-penguin-suit-wearing, Mother Teresa kind of nun?”

“Isn’t a penguin suit a tuxedo?” I asked, laughing a bit.

“I don’t know, maybe. Why did you lie?” she wondered. In her typical Reb way, she was asking out of interest, not anger.

“Personal reasons,” I said vaguely, hoping she would just drop it.

“And what does this have to do with Pawel?” she asked.

I told her about what had happened at dinner the night before. Reb let out a low whistle.

“Sounds like you really freaked him out,” Reb said carefully.

“I think I did,” I said. “And he doesn’t know me well enough to know that I’m not crazy.”

“Well, in all fairness, I know you pretty well and I still think you’re crazy,” Reb said. When I didn’t laugh, she punched me softly in the shoulder and smiled so wide it was like she thought she could grin me into a better mood.

“Don’t joke,” I whined. “Can’t you see I’m in pain?”

“Yes, I know.”

“I might be a little nutty, but I’m not a compulsive liar or something,” I insisted. “It’s just that things with Hannah are complicated and I didn’t have the energy to explain something to him that I didn’t even understand. I didn’t know how much I’d end up liking him, or that he’d end up liking me, and now I’ve ruined everything just as it was getting good.”

“I’m sorry, friend,” she said. “It does sound pretty crappy. Let me know if I can do anything to make it easier.”

“Well,” I said. “You can take us through the McDonald’s drive-through so I can get a Diet Coke as big as my head. That might help.”

“You got it,” she said, taking the next right.