The Opposite of Hallelujah (33 page)

“It’s hard to choose,” she said, and I nodded. “But I guess if I had to, it would be this one.” She turned
immediately to the correct page, and I noticed that she’d bookmarked it.

The lithograph she’d chosen was called
Hand with Reflecting Sphere
, which depicted—in case this isn’t totally obvious—a hand holding a reflective sphere, sort of like the Bean downtown in Millennium Park. In the sphere, you could see a slightly distorted self-portrait of M. C. Escher in his study, surrounded by books and furniture. It was a little unsettling, because Escher seemed to be looking straight at you, because of course he was looking straight at himself.

“ ‘If you turn it this way … it will show you your dreams,’ ” I quoted.

“What?”

“
Labyrinth
?” Hannah shook her head. I shrugged. “Never mind.”

She smiled and went back to the book. “Okay.”

“Hey, Hannah?” She was fixated on the Escher and didn’t even look up at me. I put my hand on the book and slowly closed it. “I have to talk to you about something.”

“Okay,” she said, putting Escher aside. “Actually, I wanted to talk to you, too. I wanted to apologize for being so short with you lately. I know you’re just trying to help, but …”

I nodded. “That’s fine, don’t worry about it.” Here was my opportunity. I could still turn back, accept the little olive branch she’d handed me and walk away.

But I was sick of being a coward. As hard as my self-protective instincts were kicking at me, I was determined to ignore them.

I brought out the St. Catherine letters and laid them in her lap, in the exact spot Escher had just vacated. “I was cleaning my room a while ago and I found a box in the garage. It was your keepsake box, and it had these … letters in it. I was hoping we could talk about them.”

She stared at the packet of letters as if it was some kind of alien creature, not with a lack of recognition, exactly, but an expression of utter disbelief. “You found these?”

I nodded.

“You didn’t read them, did you?” she asked, her voice rising several panicky octaves.

“A little,” I admitted.

“You shouldn’t have read them,” she said. She was eerily calm but deathly serious. I was a bit frightened by her.

“I know,” I said. “I know, but I was curious.…”

“You were
curious
?” As what I had done started to really sink in, her face contorted with anger. “You had no right to read them. They don’t belong to you!”

“I know,” I said again. “I just wanted to understand.…”

“Understand what?” she fumed. When I didn’t answer immediately, she asked again—shouted, actually, barked in a way that scared me, at least for a second—
“Understand what?”

I had never seen her so angry. I don’t think I’d ever seen anyone so angry, or at least that kind of angry, with nothing behind it but betrayal and fear, radiating like waves.

I didn’t think she expected an answer to her question, but she repeated it, her entire body rigid and shaking. She was gripping the packet so hard that her fingertips were turning yellow-white and the pages were crumpling in her grasp. It took me a second to figure out how to use my vocal cords. Finally, I managed to gasp out, “Why you …” And then I ran out of air.

“You never should’ve read them!” she screamed. All I could do was nod. I knew she was right; I’d known it from the very beginning, before I’d read a single word. But surely this was an overreaction?

“You are a horrible, selfish monster,” she spat. “You had no right to pry into my life like this, Caro, no right.”

After I got over the shock of Hannah’s shouting at the top of her lungs directly into my face, I started to get pissed, too. “I’m a monster?” I shouted back. “I’m selfish? What about you? You ran away from this family without any concern for anybody else, and when things got too hard, you ran away again. Now you’re sick and damaged and you won’t even let us help you.”

This stunned her. She looked surprised to be standing there, clutching that book like she was going to break it in half, in full battle with me. But she wasn’t finished.

“You don’t know anything about me,” she said.

“I know enough,” I said. “Take a look at yourself, Hannah. If what happened to Sabra has something to do with why you’re sick, you need to deal with it, because it’s tearing this family apart!”

“You don’t have any idea what you’re talking about, Caro,” she said, the warning tone in her voice zooming its way up the threat-level charts to orange. “Get out.”

“Let me finish,” I said.

“You’re finished,” she told me.

“But—”

“Get out!”
she cried. She pushed me back forcefully by the shoulders. “Get out of my room right now!”

I stumbled but didn’t fall. Still, she’d shoved me hard. I looked up at her face and saw a whirling panic in her expression, like she was quickly losing control of her carefully constructed world, and all she had in her arsenal to save it was pure instinct. The only way I can describe it is that she was like an animal protecting her cub, ripping apart everything that stood in the way. Her hair was in a wild tangle, her face bright red and her breathing labored.

“I know about Sabra,” I told her finally, my last-ditch effort to turn everything around, but I knew in my bones it was too late. “I saw the memorial at St. Robert’s. I know who she is, what happened to her. I know you were there.”

“Don’t,” she said, pushing me again, this time in a direction—toward the door.

“Hannah—”

“Don’t!”
she screamed. She reached around me and swung the door open. Now I was crying, deep wrenching sobs of anger and frustration, and I could see tears in her eyes.

I toppled into the hallway and she slammed the door so hard that it knocked a picture loose from the wall. It crashed at my feet, the glass shattering. I pounded my fist against the door.

“You can’t shut us out forever!” I cried, hitting the door again and again and again. “Someday you’re going to have to let someone help you or you’re going to die!”

My father appeared and grabbed me from behind. He dragged me a few feet away from the door. “
What
is going
on
up here?” he asked.

“All I wanted was to talk to her,” I wailed, burying my face in his shoulder. “I just wanted her to tell me the truth.”

My mother reached the top of the stairs, steadying herself with a deep breath. She gave me a stern look, then knocked softly at Hannah’s door. “Honey? What’s wrong?”

“Go away!” Hannah bleated. “All of you, just
go away
.”

“Come on, let’s get you to your room,” Dad said, steering me toward the stairs. I let him lead me; the fight
with Hannah had drained me of all my energy. I felt like the walking dead. I crawled into my bed and clutched a pillow close to my body while Dad sat on the floor, patting my head like he used to do when I was sick as a kid. “What happened?” he asked.

“I know what happened to Sabra,” I told him. His face sagged. I had never seen my father look so lost.

“Hannah won’t talk about it.”

“Why?”

“It was the most terrifying day of her life,” Dad said. “She’s spent all these years trying to forget. Talking about it would mean remembering, and that’s the last thing Hannah wants.”

“It wasn’t her fault,” I said.

“I know,” Dad told me. “She knows. But knowing doesn’t make it hurt any less. You have to understand, Hannah was very young when her friend died. She witnessed it. It damaged her. We didn’t know how much until she came back home.”

I couldn’t say much. I just cried. I’d once thought I hated Hannah. I’d thought all she was was a problem, an interloper who came in and stole my parents’ attention and pretended she was my sister when she was really a stranger. But she
was
my sister. We had the same small earlobes, too thin to be pierced; the same blue eyes; and the same straight teeth, perfected by years of orthodontics.

But Hannah wasn’t the only one who refused to admit to the past. I’d been pretending I had no memories of her, but that wasn’t true. I remembered one afternoon—I couldn’t have been more than six—when she played an endless succession of games of Candy Land with me, always letting me win. I remembered the Christmas present she gave me when I was five, a delicate blown-glass ornament with my name engraved on it. It sat nestled in our tree every Christmas. I remembered how she begged my parents for a dog, and how she hassled me because I refused to eat carrots. Just tiny, insignificant things, bits and pieces of a shared childhood, but they were there.

Finally, I asked the question that had been bugging me. “Why didn’t you help her?”

“We’re trying to help her,” Dad said defensively. “But you know as well as anybody how resistant she’s being.”

“No, I don’t mean now, I mean back then,” I said. As mad as I was at Hannah for how she had hurt our parents, how she was still hurting them, and, through them, me, I was also growing more and more angry with Mom and Dad. She had been only a kid when Sabra died. What had they done to help her? Couldn’t they have prevented this?

“We did,” Dad said. “But it’s obvious it wasn’t enough. We wanted to find her a proper therapist. We knew she needed to talk to someone right away but we were afraid that a psychiatrist would push us to put Hannah on
medication, so we took her to see a grief counselor we found through the church. Hannah saw her every week for a year. Sometimes we went with her, sometimes she wanted to go alone, but after a while the counselor told us that she had no reason to believe that Hannah was traumatized by what had happened. She said that, in her professional opinion, Hannah was fine. Completely well adjusted.”

“And you believed her?” I asked. “Hannah could’ve been faking it.”

“I don’t think that she was trying to fool her,” Dad said. “I think she believed that if she just turned to God, everything would be okay. She started going to church every day; she would make me get up early to drive her to six-thirty Mass. And she was always religious, more than any other child I’ve ever seen, and we just thought … we thought that was her way of processing her grief.”

“Now what do you think?”

“That it was really her way of denying her grief,” Dad said. He looked awful, as if all the misery Hannah had suffered over the death of her friend had somehow flooded into him. Maybe that was why the lives of parents always seemed so difficult: because everything their child felt and experienced was carbon copied inside them. “And by deluding ourselves into thinking she was well, we drove her into the convent even though she wasn’t ready.” Dad sighed. “It was all our fault.”

“No, Dad,” I assured him. “It wasn’t.”

“I don’t want to put all this on you, Caro,” Dad said. “But I think we’re learning that the less you talk about something, the bigger it gets. You can’t sweep something under the rug forever, can you?”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“How did you find out, anyway?”

“I saw the memorial at St. Robert’s,” I said. “And I found these letters she wrote to St. Catherine. Father Bob helped me put the pieces together.”

“Father Bob?”

I told Dad everything. I’d never before mentioned what I liked to think of as my “afternoon sessions” with Father Bob, like he was my therapist or something, which I guess he was. For a while, it didn’t seem worth bringing up, and then it seemed so weird that I hadn’t said something earlier that I didn’t want to bring it up at all. But my conversations with Father Bob were some of my favorite times in the past few months. He didn’t pass judgment on me; all he did was ask me questions and try to get me to think deeper about the universe and my place in it. And he really listened to the answers.

Dad was a little stunned that I’d gone to see a priest. “You’re the last person I would’ve imagined would seek religious counseling, Caro,” he admitted.

“I’m not really ‘seeking religious counseling,’ ” I said. “I just wanted to … talk to someone.”

“About what?”

“About … stuff,” I said lamely.

“About … God?” Dad pressed.

“Not really,” I said. “I still don’t know if I believe in God, you know, in the traditional way. Mostly we talk about science.”

“You talk to Father Bob about
science
?” I’d really twisted Dad’s brain with this whole Father Bob thing.

“And math, sometimes,” I said. “And Escher.”

“Ah. Paradoxes. Impossible objects. Great metaphors.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s gotten me thinking about a lot of stuff. About Hannah, about how she could’ve gone into a convent without really believing in God.”

“Hannah believed she believed,” Dad said.

“She thought being with the Sisters of Grace would fix everything,” I said. “But she never did find the faith she needed.”

“Still. Your mother might not agree with this—in fact, I’m sure she wouldn’t—but I think Hannah had to go,” Dad admitted. “All of us, including Hannah, are acting like she made this big mistake, like she failed something, or something failed her. But I’m not so sure that’s the case.”

“What do you mean?”

“For the first time in her life, Hannah has nowhere left to run,” Dad said. “And for the first time in
our
lives, your mom and I can’t protect her. My hope is that now
that everything’s out in the open, we can really start to move forward, as a family. But it all starts with Hannah, and I think she’s almost there. She wouldn’t have reacted the way she did upstairs before if she was still capable of denying it to herself.”

“Does she know that what happened to Sabra wasn’t her fault?” I asked. “Did you tell her that, back when it happened?”

“Of course,” he told me. “We told her that a million times. The Griffins told her that; so did her teachers.”

“Did you know the kids at school teased her?” I asked. Dad’s eyes widened; this was news to him. “It’s all there in the letters. We ran into one of the girls who used to bully her at the nutritionist’s office. I’m pretty sure that’s why she didn’t want to go back there.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?” Dad asked. “We need to know things like that, Caro.”