The Opposite of Hallelujah

by Anna Jarzab

  “Didn’t you pass the test?” I asked once we were both buckled in.

  “No.” She wouldn’t meet my eyes. “Can we go home, please?”

  “Yeah.” I started the car and pulled out of the parking spot. “I wouldn’t worry too much. You can retake the test.”

  “I know.”

  “I failed the first time, and look at me now!” She looked so miserable I couldn’t help making a little attempt to cheer her up.

  “I’m going to retake the test.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “Nothing.” She stared into her lap.

  “Seriously, what is your deal? People fail that test all the time.”

  “I know that,” she said sharply. But being Hannah, she was immediately contrite. “I’m sorry. I guess I’m just a little upset.”

  “Hannah, it’s not the end of the world,” I said.

  “I didn’t fail it the first time I took it,” she said quietly.

  “That was a long time ago, and you’d probably just finished driver’s ed,” I said. “Maybe you should’ve practiced more before coming here.”

  “I’ve never failed a test before,” Hannah said, gazing out the window. It was almost as if she wasn’t talking to me when she said it.

  “Yeah, well, first time for everything.” I turned onto our street.

  “Who was that boy you were talking to?” Hannah asked, abruptly shifting topics. I swerved a little on the road. “Was that Derek?”

  “No, it wasn’t,” I said. “He’s just a friend from school.”

  “A good friend?”

  “A new friend,” I said.

  “I thought all your friends were girls,” she said, squinting at the windshield.

  “We’re not all nuns,” I snapped.

  Hannah sighed. “I know you’re angry at me, but I’m having a hard time figuring out why.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “We’re sisters,” Hannah said. “You can’t stay mad at me forever.”

  “Is that a challenge?”

  “No!” Hannah put her hands over her face. I thought she might cry, but when she removed them a few seconds later, there were no tears. Instead, there was a look of determination I’d never seen before. “I would appreciate it if we could talk about this like adults.”

  “I don’t have anything to say.” I pulled into the driveway and put the car in park.

  “It seems like you have plenty to say, Caro,” Hannah said, unbuckling her seat belt. “You just prefer to be passive-aggressive. Do you really think being rude to me will make me go away?”

  “No,” I said, getting out of the car. She did the same, staring at me over the white-hot roof. After a moment of silence she shook her head at me and walked off toward the house.

  11

  “I have a project for you,” my mother announced over breakfast that Saturday.

  “What is it?” I demanded, putting my fork down and staring at her. My father shook his head but made no attempt to jump in, and Hannah wasn’t even at the table; she was upstairs, apparently suffering from a nasty cold. She’d been up there since the morning before, and I hadn’t seen her at all.

  Mom raised her eyebrows at me. “Excuse me? What is your problem?”

  “You always have a ‘project’ for me, Mom,” I said. “All week long it’s school, homework, bed, repeat. The weekends are for relaxing. I want to sleep in and watch TV and hang out with my friends. Is that too much to ask?”

  “I’m sorry that the everyday tasks of taking care of the house have fallen on your overburdened shoulders, Caro,” Mom said, sarcasm dripping off her tongue. “But we all have to chip in.”

  “I don’t understand why you don’t just hire a cleaning lady,” I said.

  “I don’t need a cleaning lady,” she said, turning back to her eggs on toast. “I have children.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “There’s more than one of us now. Shouldn’t Hannah have to do stuff, too? She’s home all day, every day. She doesn’t even have a part-time job or take classes.”

  “She’s working on it,” Dad chimed in. “Now that she has her license, she can find a place to work until she can reenroll at Loyola.” He said it like it was a done deal, but from the way Hannah had been talking about it the other day, I could tell it was their plan, not hers. Had they even asked her what she wanted? If I was her, I would’ve resented the interference, but Hannah didn’t put up a fight about much. Maybe she just didn’t have it in her.

  “When did Hannah get her license?” I asked, surprised.

  “Didn’t you take her on Thursday?” Dad asked.

  “Yes, and she failed the test,” I told him. Mom and Dad were both staring at me now, looking completely baffled. “Didn’t she tell you that?”

  “No,” Dad said slowly.

  “You mean she lied?” A wicked smile crept over my face; I couldn’t help it. It was so out of character for sweet, saintly Hannah to lie to my parents. I was torn between being impressed and finding it a little pathetic.

  “I’m sure she didn’t lie.” Mom jumped in, always quick to defend her baby. “She just neglected to give Dad the details.”

  “I asked to see the license,” Dad said. He sounded like someone had just let the air out of him. They wanted badly to believe in Hannah, and she made it pretty easy for them. It must’ve been a real disappointment to find out she was human. “She told me it was upstairs and she’d show it to me later.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us she failed the test?” Mom asked me.

  “Oh, no, you are not pinning this one on me.” I shook my head. “I’m not Hannah’s accomplice. I did what you told me to, I took her to the DMV. I’m not responsible for anything else.”

  “God forbid,” Mom muttered.

  “If it makes you feel any better, she probably only lied because she didn’t want to disappoint you,” I said. “You know how she puts so much pressure on herself to be perfect.” Mom and Dad nodded, and we dropped the subject.

  Well, not entirely.

  “Hannah did say that she saw you talking to a boy from school at the DMV,” Dad said slyly, not looking up at me, like it was no big deal, like he was barely interested. My parents were so nosy, and so bad at espionage it was kind of sad.

  “Are you going to tell us who it was?” Mom gazed at me in interest.

  “Who are you, the conversation police? It was just a new boy from school.” I was being pouty, which even I found unpleasant, but I couldn’t help it. Their curiosity was annoying, their insistence that I bond with Hannah infuriating. I just wasn’t in the mood for Happy Family Time.

  “What’s the boy’s name?” Dad asked, cutting to the center of the issue, the way he always did when arguing with me became boring.

  “Pawel,” I said. “We have a bunch of classes together, and he was getting his license, too. Only he passed the test,” I added meanly.

  “That’s an interesting name,” Mom commented.

  “It’s Polish,” I said.

  “So he’s Catholic.” My mom smiled to herself. She loved to do that, act as though I was going to marry every boy I ever spoke to. I think mostly she did it to annoy me, but there was a bit of girlish hope in it. “That’s good news.”

  “Odds are I’m not going to marry a Catholic, Mom,” I warned her. I didn’t get what her hang-up was. We barely even attended Mass now that I didn’t go to St. Robert’s anymore. What did it matter if I married a Catholic? “You should just come to terms with that now.”

  “Whatever,” she said, dismissing the comment with a wave of her hand. Mom had a streak of if-we-don’t-talk-about-it-then-it-doesn’t-exist in her. “Is he cute?”

  “Hannah said he was,” Dad said. He had a goofy, let’s get Caro smile on his face. They just loved this game. “She said he was boy-next-door handsome. Not very tall, but tall enough for Caro.”

  “Dad, she spent the last eight years living exclusively with women, most of whom were around before ancient man invent
ed language,” I said. “She probably thinks the mailman is hot.”

  “He does have a certain je ne sais quoi,” Dad said, turning to Mom with a conspiratorial wink. “What? You don’t think so?”

  “You think you’re so funny,” I said, wrinkling my nose at him.

  “If you’re honest with yourself, so do you.”

  Leave it to Mom to get us back on track. “Do you think he’s cute?” she asked.

  “Who? The mailman? Not my type.”

  “You know what I meant,” she said, laughing. In that moment it felt totally normal—nice, even—to be sharing something with my parents. It wouldn’t last—it never did for long—but it made me remember how much I actually liked Happy Family Time.

  My mother’s “project” for me was to clean out my bedroom closet. I complained about it for a while, which got me nowhere, then avoided the chore for a bit longer, until Mom threatened to stand in the doorway and watch until I was completely finished. My closet was a total disaster, and I didn’t relish having to sort through several years’ worth of old clothes, school notebooks, and the other flotsam and jetsam that had built up over the years.

  The job was dismal until I found where Mom had put Hannah’s things after the great purge. Lots of that stuff got packed up and shoved into various nooks and crannies in the garage, and I unexpectedly unearthed it when I was looking for a place to put my own boxes.

  Hannah’s possessions were way more interesting to me than anything I’d ever owned. It was like looking at relics from somebody’s past life. First of all, Hannah was spot-on when she said she’d never failed a test; there was an entire Rubbermaid container full of old homework assignments, pop quizzes, exams, and essays, all with bright red As and sometimes happy faces. There was a whole other box filled with swimming awards, medals and trophies, won in the club team she’d competed on in junior high and her first year of high school.

  It was funny to imagine Hannah as part of a team. It made sense that she’d chosen an individual sport, but I knew swimmers: those girls were tight. Reb was one. Maybe she’d never had any friends on the team; maybe that was why she’d quit. Most of the hardware had been awarded for participation or personal bests; she was good, but not a star, especially after she got to high school, which was another possible reason. From the looks of it, Hannah never wanted to be less than perfect at anything. My English teacher would call that her tragic flaw.

  Without really understanding why, I felt compelled to go through Hannah’s boxes. I was sure she wouldn’t want me to; maybe that was part of the allure: the idea that if she found out, she would be angry. But I was curious, even if I would never tell anyone that I wanted to know my sister better.

  All we had ever wanted was an explanation. When Hannah left, she said that God was calling to her, that she felt it deep in the recesses of her heart, but it never seemed like enough. My mother sobbed on Hannah’s last day at home. I’d never seen my mother cry, never in my whole life. But she cried that day. It was as if Hannah was going to her execution.

  There were other things in the cabinet where Hannah’s boxes were stored, including a few old photo albums. I opened the nearest one and started flipping through it, looking for pictures of myself. There was a whole series of photos I didn’t remember having seen before, images of my parents and me at the Grand Canyon. I couldn’t have been older than three, but I knew it was me, because I was wearing the same outfit as I was in one of the framed pictures Mom had on the mantel in the family room, so Hannah must’ve taken it. I didn’t think we’d ever gone to the Grand Canyon, though.

  Mom burst through the door and grabbed a bottle of sparkling water out of the mini-fridge we kept in the garage.

  “How’s it going with your closet, Caro?” she asked, narrowing her eyes at me as if she already knew the answer.

  “Hey, Mom, when did we go to the Grand Canyon?” I asked her.

  She looked confused for a second. “I don’t think we’ve ever taken you there. Dad and I and Hannah went once, when she was little.”

  “But look at this picture,” I said, handing it to her. I pointed to myself. “That’s me. That’s my dress.”

  She shook her head, handing the picture back. The bottle made a soft psst noise as she cracked it open. “That’s Hannah, sweetheart,” she said. “It was her dress first; we kept all her clothes in case we had another girl, and wouldn’t you know it?”

  “Mom, that’s me,” I insisted. “I’ve seen pictures of myself at this age before, it looks exactly like me.”

  “I know,” she said, patting my head gently. “Keep working; I expect you to be finished by dinner.” She walked into the house, and I replaced the photo album in the cabinet, unsettled by it. I’d never liked being reminded that my family had once existed quite happily without me in it.

  I was about to put Hannah’s boxes where I’d found them—after all, it wasn’t my responsibility to organize Hannah’s things—when I spied a large square shoe box shoved into the back of the cabinet on its side. It was old and battered, not like the labeled Rubbermaid containers the rest of the stuff was stored in, and my interest was piqued. I tugged on it hard and fell back a little on my heels as it came free and landed in my lap.

  The box was soft and worn, as if it had been used over and over again for years, and fastened shut with two oversized rubber bands, which broke when I tried to remove them. The top of the box had been elaborately doodled on with Magic Markers; it was mostly just swirls and curlicues, but in one corner there was a beach flanked by two palm trees, with a sun shining brightly above, and in another, in Hannah’s perfect but still somehow childlike penmanship, this quotation: You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body. —C. S. Lewis.

  I lifted the top of the box and set it down gingerly on an old coffee table that had escaped being sent off to Goodwill during Mom’s last flurry of redecorating. It was like some kind of time capsule, what Mom called a keepsake box. I had one, too, a plastic container filled with pictures of me and my friends at various points in my life, old assignments from elementary school that Mom deemed “too cute” to throw out, bad kindergarten art projects, and some random postcards I’d accumulated over the years.

  For a long time—it seemed like eons—I just sat there, staring but not touching. I’d poked around through Hannah’s other stuff, but there was something about this box, a weird feeling I got while holding it, that told me looking through it would be a violation, like walking through her dreams. But eventually my curiosity won out; I had to see what Hannah thought was worth keeping.

  The box was mostly a jumble of old Christmas and birthday cards, most of them from our grandparents or other relatives, aside from one jarring handmade card from me. It was on a piece of white printer paper, folded in half, with a red-and-blue scribble on the front and a green-and-yellow scribble on the inside, underneath which my mother had neatly printed Happy thirteenth birthday, Hannah. Love, Caro. There were also a headband with fake pink roses and ribbons glued onto it from when Hannah was a flower girl in someone’s wedding; three rosaries, two plastic ones in blue and pink and a nicer one with wooden beads; a handful of small buttons with smiley faces on them; a Christmas ornament shaped like a teapot; a Russian nesting doll the size of my thumb; a well-loved pink elephant eraser; three blue ribbons, all with the word EXCELLENT! printed on them, which were either too special to go in the box with the rest of the awards or not special enough; a tiny blue origami wishing star; a key chain from Miami, Florida; and a jumble of small notebooks, postcards, and loose sheets of paper taken from what looked like several different notepads and stationery sets.

  Okay. That was far enough. I’d seen what sort of things Hannah wanted to keep forever, and as such things normally were, they were entirely sentimental. It was time to put them all back in the box nicely and start working on my closet before Mom caught me avoiding the task and had some kind of stress-induced aneurism.

  Except: the papers. More specifically, the n
otebooks. Like, for example, the top one with the pink plastic cover on which someone had written HANNAH with a gold paint pen, embellishing the tips of each letter with little dots. Otherwise it looked like a regular academic notebook, but then why wasn’t it in the box with all Hannah’s old school papers? Was it a diary? A dream journal? Or was it where Hannah kept all her old games of M-A-S-H (not that she seemed the type to play M-A-S-H)? I flipped it open before I could stop myself; the first few pages were blank, but then I found something. A letter. The strangest letter I had ever seen. It was written in a loopy, girlish script.

  Dear St. Catherine,

  This morning I went to Mass by myself. Mom and Dad slept in, and Caro’s too young to go without them. So I got a ride with the Dyers from next door. I was afraid they would expect me to sit with them in church, so I pointed to a couple of girls from school sitting in a pew by themselves—they’re sisters, and their parents were in the vestibule talking to Father Greg, who had stuck around from the Mass before, which he had celebrated (I memorized the schedule)—and told Mrs. Dyer that they were my friends and I was going to sit with them. When I was sure the Dyers were settled in one of the front pews, I went to the back corner of the church, the last row, where the stained glass makes a puddle of multicolored light on the floor. I like to be alone at Mass. It helps me drown out everything else and remain attentive to the voice of God.

  I closed the book and scrunched up my face. The book confused me. Was it a diary? It read like one, except all she wrote about was Mass. And it was addressed to St. Catherine. When had she even written it? From the handwriting I would have said maybe middle school. Hannah and I had both attended St. Robert’s School, and we as a family belonged to St. Robert’s parish—not St. Catherine’s.

  The first entry ended on the observation about Mass. I turned the page to the next one, hoping to find something a little juicier. It began the same way.

  Dear St. Catherine,

  Amanda Brenner told another lie about me today. She told everyone in homeroom that I’m retarded, because I spend so much time with Sister Ruth in the special-needs classroom. She asked me in front of everyone if I was born stupid, or if I had knocked my brains out when I fainted in assembly last year. I tried to explain that I like to help Sister Ruth prepare for her classes, because she’s old and her arthritis hurts her, but everyone just laughed at me. Just because I’m quiet doesn’t mean I’m not smart. But even Ms. Turner treated me like I was dumb until I got a 100 on our first history test, and to make up for it she always says nice things about me to the class when I do well. It sounds like she’s babying me. Amanda Brenner makes fun of me for that, too.