The Opposite of Hallelujah

by Anna Jarzab

  ALSO BY ANNA JARZAB

  All Unquiet Things

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2012 by Anna Jarzab

  Jacket photograph copyright © 2012 by Kelly Miller

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Service Publishing for permission to reprint lyrics from “The Opposite of Hallelujah” by Jens Lekman, copyright © 2005 by Jens Lekman. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Service Publishing.

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Jarzab, Anna.

  The opposite of hallelujah / Anna Jarzab. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: For eight of her sixteen years Carolina Mitchell’s older sister Hannah has been a nun in a convent, almost completely out of touch with her family—so when she suddenly abandons her vocation and comes home, nobody knows quite how to handle the situation, or guesses what explosive secrets she is hiding.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-89408-4

  1. Sisters—Juvenile fiction. 2. Ex-nuns—Juvenile fiction. 3. Guilt—Juvenile fiction. 4. Children’s secrets—Juvenile fiction. [1. Sisters—Fiction. 2. Nuns—Fiction. 3. Guilt—Fiction. 4. Secrets—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.J2968Opp 2012

  813.6—dc23

  2012010882

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  This one’s for Alicia, of course, with love;

  and in memory of Helena Bieniewski.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  But sister, it’s the opposite of Hallelujah.

  It’s the opposite of being you.

  You don’t know ’cause it just passes right through you.

  You don’t know what I’m going through.

  —JENS LEKMAN

  Provability is a weaker notion than truth.

  —DOUGLAS R. HOFSTADTER, Gödel, Escher, Bach:

  An Eternal Golden Braid

  1

  When I was twelve, I started telling people at school that my older sister, Hannah, was dead. I didn’t put a lot of thought into it. I just figured it would be easier than explaining what had actually happened to her. You’d think the phrase “contemplative nun” would mean something to kids who’d been attending Catholic school their entire lives, but it really didn’t. To them, nuns were old women who wore nude panty hose to hide the varicose veins in their legs and seemed like they’d slap you with a ruler as soon as look at you. Nuns were practically prehistoric, and it didn’t make any sense for my then twenty-three-year-old sister—tall, thin, blond as Barbie—to be working on her fourth year at the Sisters of Grace convent in Middleton, Indiana. But she was.

  So I lied. I didn’t get what the big deal was. I hadn’t seen Hannah for longer than half an hour a year through an iron grille since I was eight, and those visits consisted mostly of my parents nervously babbling about work and how I was doing in school while Hannah sat with her hands folded in her lap, serene, listening but saying virtually nothing. She wasn’t dead, but she wasn’t part of my life anymore, so I simplified the story.

  It wasn’t long before my teachers caught wind of the rumor. When Ms. Hopeshed, my music teacher, who was very sensitive, heard, she called our house to express her sincerest condolences over the loss of my sister. Mom and Dad were furious with me.

  “How dare you tell people that Hannah is dead!” Mom screamed. I’d never seen her so angry, and she very rarely yelled at me. I was practically an only child, and my parents and I were close, or I thought we were. It didn’t occur to me that they might have other loyalties.

  Stubborn and defiant as always, I refused to deny the pragmatism of my plan. “Well, it’s sort of like she’s dead,” I pointed out. It was, I thought, an unassailable argument. “We never see her. She never calls or comes home. What am I supposed to say?”

  Mom took a deep breath and steadied herself before answering.

  “If you talk like that in school, people are going to think you wish Hannah was dead,” she told me. “They’ll think you’re a liar who hates her sister. Is that what you want? Is that who you are?”

  I stared at my shoes. “No, I guess not.” I knew a losing fight when I saw one, but I didn’t quite see where all this was coming from. It was a lie, yes, and lying was wrong; I’d been told that a million times over the course of my life. I knew it was possible I hadn’t done the right thing, or the best thing. But how was I supposed to explain my sister’s absence when nobody had ever given me the words? So I’d improvised. One look at my mother’s face and I knew I’d be better off keeping that justification to myself.

  “Good.” She didn’t sound convinced, but I think she knew that was as much as she was going to get out of me. To my mom, this was a problem that couldn’t be solved with an apology, and even as we stood there not looking at each other, she was formulating a game plan. “I told Ms. Hopeshed the truth, and I expect you to do the same with everybody you told that horrible lie to. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  She paused at the door and pointed at me. “You’d better fix this, Caro.”

  “I will,” I promised.

  I’d severely underestimated what this would mean for me at school. The next day, deathly afraid my mother would have them make an announcement over the PA system if I disobeyed, I took back my lie and started telling people it felt like Hannah was dead, but that she was alive and (presumably) well at the Sisters of Grace convent in Middleton, Indiana. The kids in my class labeled me “Caroliar,” which became a popular playground taunt, and the reputation stuck with me until I went to high school and made new friends and everyone except them basically forgot I existed.

  Hannah was a touchy subject in our house for years. We almost never talked about her, and after she’d been at the convent for two years, Mom packed up all her things, hid them in the garage, and let me move downstairs into her old room. There were only a few photos of her in the house, none of them taken when she was older than eighteen. “We’re going to Indiana” was the euphemism
my parents used when we’d been scheduled for one of our annual visits to the convent, and apart from the traditional “she seems happy,” nobody ever said anything on the topic on the way there or the way back.

  So it wasn’t like I was the only liar in the house. We all acted like Hannah was dead; all I did was take it one step further and bury her.

  Telling the truth wasn’t my only punishment. My parents arranged for me to have three one-hour counseling sessions with Father Bob, the pastor of our church. We weren’t what you would call devout Catholics, but we went to Sunday Mass every once in a while and never missed on holidays. I’d had all the appropriate sacraments and so had Hannah, even before she decided to marry Jesus.

  Father Bob was very concerned about me, or so he said. My parents had asked him to explain the ins and outs of religious vocation to me, so that I might be a little more prepared the next time someone asked me what had happened to Hannah: why she had gone away, why she was never coming back. Father Bob was nice and patient, but I didn’t care to hear anything about Hannah’s chosen life.

  “Carolina,” Father Bob said. “It was God’s will that Hannah go to the Sisters of Grace. It was God’s will that I become a priest. That’s how vocation works.”

  The word “vocation” made me want to barf. To me it was a synonym for “prison,” for a particular kind of abandonment. I hadn’t seen much of the world at that point, but I knew it was full of things I wanted. I knew I would want a boyfriend, and eventually a husband, maybe a couple of kids. I knew I would want a house and a yard and a dog—I wanted the dog most of all at that age. I knew Hannah couldn’t have those things, and it was bizarre to me that she would give it all up. At one time, I believed that Hannah hadn’t chosen to leave, that she’d been taken, but that was only when I was very young.

  “Do you mean she had to be a nun? That she didn’t have the option not to be?” I asked. I knew what it was like to be told where to be, what to do, how to act, and what to say every moment of your life, but I’d always believed that once you were grown up you got away from all that—you got to be your own person. I didn’t know what to think about Hannah’s “vocation.” Did she have the choice to go away, or didn’t she?

  “No, not exactly. God doesn’t force us to do anything, even his will. He only calls us to be our best selves, to serve our natural purpose as his creation. For Hannah, that purpose is sisterhood. For me, it’s priesthood. For you, who knows? You’re still young. Maybe God will give you a vocation, too.”

  “No way!” I cried out. “I’m never going to be a nun. I don’t even like church.”

  “Okay then,” Father Bob agreed. “Maybe not.”

  In the last week of August before my junior year of high school, something unexpected happened. I was still on summer vacation, slowly finishing up the summer assignments I’d been carefully avoiding since June. I talked to my best friend Erin on the phone for a couple of hours (she was at her grandmother’s house outside Minneapolis, dying of boredom), swam in the pool in the backyard of my other best friend, Reb, and put in some quality time in front of the TV. Mom called me in to dinner at seven; when we were all seated, I noticed that they weren’t eating, and I asked what was wrong.

  Dad explained; Mom didn’t seem to have the words. They had gotten a phone call earlier that afternoon from Mother Regina, the superior at Hannah’s convent, saying that Hannah had decided to renounce her vows and leave the Sisters of Grace permanently. They were taking the news exactly as I would’ve expected them to—with shock and disbelief. I asked if they’d spoken to Hannah, but evidently she was too upset to talk to anyone just yet. I wondered whose choice it was for her to leave—hers, or Mother Regina’s.

  “And she’s going to come and live here?” It was a stupid question, really. Where else would she go? She’d entered the convent when she was nineteen and she’d been gone eight years. There was no way she had any friends left after such a long absence; I didn’t get the impression that she’d ever had friends to begin with. Hannah had never been on her own before. It seemed impossible that she could make it alone.

  “Of course!” Mom snapped. Whenever Hannah came up in conversation, Mom got sharp with me.

  Then it occurred to me to ask the question that probably should’ve been my first. “Why?”

  “Why what?” Dad poked at the chicken on his plate. There wasn’t an appetite left at the table.

  “Why is she leaving the convent? I thought she loved it there.” My parents had stopped dragging me to their yearly visitation with Hannah when I was thirteen. I’d never hated anything more in my life than going to that convent; it was too unnervingly quiet, too sterile, too cold, not to mention totally boring. Not long after the whole “my sister’s dead” fiasco, I wasn’t having any of it. The fit I threw when they tried to cart me down to Indiana to talk to a virtual stranger through iron bars was epic. I screamed and pouted and threw things and made myself sick rather than go.

  Mom and Dad made a valiant effort at forcing me; they shouted back, threatening me with unprecedented restriction and even, in a moment of desperation, resorting to bribery. Eventually they gave up.

  They always came back from Indiana saying that Hannah looked happy, in a way. Always “in a way,” later clarified by the word “serene.” She was calm and quiet, neither excited to see them nor bothered by their presence. She never fully engaged, just listened patiently to their stories (mostly about me, Mom admitted) and responded carefully and clearly to their questions. She never revealed too much, she never gossiped or chatted, and she never seemed happier to see them than she did to see anyone else. I once overheard Mom crying to Dad that Hannah didn’t care about them or seem to recognize them as her parents. Mom almost never cried, and the sound of it broke my heart. Vocation or no vocation, retreating like that was Hannah’s choice alone.

  “Apparently she’s not happy there anymore,” Mom said. She was tense and upset, I could tell, but I didn’t understand why. Wasn’t this what she had wanted since Hannah went away? They’d desperately wanted her to fail as a nun; maybe they’d even prayed for it, although everybody’s faith in God had taken a hit when he stole my sister away. They’d wanted her vocation to be false, for her to despise the convent and come back home, even if it meant she had to be kicked out. I think they’d wanted it so much because they were afraid it wouldn’t happen. From the moment she hit puberty, Hannah and the habit seemed destined to collide.

  I didn’t remember much about Hannah, and I wasn’t even sure if the memories I did have were true or just cobbled together from photographs and other people’s stories. One of the things I did recall was that Hannah always wore her school uniform, even when she was at home or in public. She wore pajamas to bed, but that was it. Mom bought her tons of clothes that ended up stacked neatly on her shelves and in her drawers with the tags still on; she wouldn’t back down, despite Mom’s begging.

  “She could be just as stubborn as you when she wanted to be,” Mom said after I found a photograph of Hannah wearing her uniform at the Saint Louis arch, a vacation I didn’t even remember, although I was definitely there for it, age two, sitting atop Dad’s shoulders, wearing a pair of plastic yellow sunglasses with lenses shaped like stars. My poor mother. She wanted Hannah to be happy, but she would’ve settled for normal. Hannah didn’t stop wearing that uniform until she graduated from high school, when she started attending Loyola University, but even then she was nothing but the picture of modesty.

  “When?” I asked.

  “Next week,” Mom said, searching my face for something, though I wasn’t sure what. “Saturday.”

  “Fine,” I said, shoveling a spoonful of peas, now cold, into my mouth to keep from having to say anything else.

  “Fine? That’s it?” Dad asked, a little anger creeping into his voice now, too. They were both furious, my parents, but they didn’t appear to know why or at whom. They had never understood Hannah’s decision to go into the convent, which I guess was why they were n
ever able to explain it to me, and also why I never really tried to talk to them about it. Now that she was coming back, we were all more confused than ever.

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “Aren’t you happy your sister’s coming home?” Mom was practically pleading with me to say, yes, I was totally stoked about Hannah’s leaving the convent.

  I couldn’t say it, though. I couldn’t think of anything to say, which was unusual for me. I just shrugged.

  “How can you not care?” They stared at me, like I was some kind of unfeeling monster, which was unfair. I didn’t care because there was nothing to care about. Who was Hannah to me? A few albums full of pictures tucked away in a drawer and a handful of letters and Christmas cards full of distant religious platitudes. There had been a point in my life when I wished there had been more, but that was over now.

  “I barely know her!” I reminded them. “She left when I was eight and I haven’t seen her in four years—”

  “By choice,” Mom said.

  “Yeah, I remember. But you can’t expect me to jump for joy about this—she’s practically a stranger to me.”

  “She’s not a stranger, she’s your sister,” Mom said. Dad shook his head in disappointment.

  “May I be excused?” I requested, not waiting for an answer before pushing my chair out and gathering my plate. “I’ve totally lost my appetite.”

  Back in my room, I wanted to call someone, but every time I reached for the phone I thought about what I would say, and put it back down. “My sister, who ran away to become a nun, is coming home”? My friends would think that sounded like a good thing, and to the untrained ear I guessed it did. I wanted to call Derek, my … boyfriend was probably the proper term, although we’d never called each other by those words: “boyfriend,” “girlfriend.” We’d been going out for close to four months, but two of those had been over summer break and he’d been away at camp in northern Wisconsin for six weeks. He wasn’t due back for another week, the same day we were supposed to pick up Hannah from the train station, and he was unreachable by cell phone. No reception. A letter wouldn’t get to him in time, either. And anyway, I wondered if maybe Derek wasn’t really the sort of guy you told things like that to. I supposed I would find out soon enough, but in the meantime it looked like I was on my own.