The Opposite of Hallelujah

by Anna Jarzab

  “Have you ever been to Poland, Pawel?” Mom asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “My mom and dad like to take us back every few years to visit family.”

  “That’s exciting,” she said.

  “Sometimes, but it’s mostly, like, hanging out at my grandfather’s farm and stuff,” Pawel told her. “And eating until I burst. My babcia is an amazing cook and she pretty much feeds us constantly the whole time we’re there.”

  “Have you ever gone anywhere else in Europe?” Dad asked.

  “Yeah, we’ve gone to Italy a few times, and France and Germany,” Pawel said. “And my mom has a sister who lives outside London, so we’ve visited them a few times.”

  “How wonderful,” Mom said. “We keep hoping we’ll be able to take the girls to Europe one day. We want them to see the world; Evan and I both traveled a lot when we were younger, and it drives us crazy that they haven’t gotten to have the same experience.”

  Pawel’s face contorted in confusion. The moment expanded and contracted quickly, and in that second I knew what he was going to say; I felt it coming at me like a freight train. I gripped my silverware hard; there was nothing I could do to stop him.

  “But, Hannah, you’ve traveled around a lot, right? Caro told me you were in Africa.”

  All the air in the room congealed, and it was like we were in suspended animation. Thoughts bounced around in my mind like balls in a bingo cage. I had asked him not to say anything! Was he doing it on purpose? He couldn’t be, he was Pawel, he cared about me, he promised me he wouldn’t. I couldn’t believe I had told him that stupid lie! My parents were going to kill me. What would Hannah say? What would I say? Why had I invited him to dinner? Why had I lied? Why oh why oh why had I lied?

  Hannah’s eyes narrowed, then widened in disbelief. My parents both glanced in her direction and then glared at me in fury. Nobody knew who should say something first as Pawel spooned a piece of chicken into his mouth and chewed, blissfully unaware that he had said anything wrong. I dug the tips of my fingers into his leg; when he caught the look of alarm on my face, it dawned on him that he had done exactly what he’d promised not to do, and he mouthed, Sorry! But it was too late. He didn’t even understand the gravity of what he had done. What I had done.

  “Caro told you I was in Africa?” Hannah asked.

  “Yeah.” Pawel squirmed. “In the, uh … Peace Corps.” He turned to me, my parents, sweeping an apologetic gaze across the whole table. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have …”

  “Actually—” I began, hoping that if I could do some damage control, he might not think I was a total psycho, but Hannah interrupted.

  “I wasn’t in the Peace Corps,” she said carefully, setting her fork down next to her plate and avoiding my eyes. “Until recently, I was living in a convent as a Sister of Grace.”

  Pawel turned his head to look at me. I gave him a pained shrug, the only thing I could muster.

  “You mean you were a …” He searched for the word.

  “Nun,” she said with purpose. “Caro lied to you.”

  “Why do you have to put it like that?” I demanded.

  “Because that’s what you did,” Hannah snapped, her saintly facade breaking. Her eyes filled up with tears, and she looked like she might slap me.

  “Why?” The bewilderment in Pawel’s voice made me want to cry, too. He had never considered the possibility that I would lie to him.

  “Caro, I cannot believe you would do this again,” Mom said, raging.

  “Again?” Pawel and Hannah said in unison. At that, I did start to cry. Not loud, ugly sobs that shook the room, but my eyes began to leak and I felt very close to losing it right there at the dinner table.

  “I didn’t mean to …,” I said weakly, gripping the edge of the table with the tips of my fingers.

  “I’m not hungry anymore, may I please be excused?” Hannah’s voice was so tight you could strum it. Mom nodded; Hannah got up from the table and disappeared into the hallway. We listened to her footsteps as she went up the staircase, and then there was silence.

  “I’m sorry,” Pawel said after a while. “I didn’t know.”

  “Of course not,” Mom rushed to assure him. “Please don’t feel bad. This is Caro’s fault.”

  Pawel finished his dinner quickly, apparently sensing that it was not a good night to linger. I couldn’t wait for him to go, but I knew his presence was the only thing holding back the avalanche of my parents’ wrath, and that once he was gone, I’d get the lecture of a lifetime, full of the screaming and grounding Mom and Dad were so good at.

  I was allowed to walk Pawel to the door, and once we reached it, he asked me if I would go with him to his car. I could hear the clatter of dishes being collected and loaded into the sink, so I nodded and followed him to the driveway.

  “What happened back there?” he demanded as soon as we were out of my parents’ earshot.

  “I warned you not to say anything,” I snapped.

  “Wait, you’re mad at me? You lied to me, Caro!” He was trying not to sound hurt, but of course he was. And irritated, too, maybe even straight-up angry. “You made me look like a total ass in front of everyone.”

  “I’m so sorry. Of course I’m not mad at you.”

  He turned and stared at me. “You need to talk to your family.”

  “No, I need to talk to you,” I insisted, taking his hand. He let me, but it was limp in mine. “I can explain the Hannah stuff.”

  Pawel ran his fingers through his hair and sighed. “You know what? It’s not even that big of a deal, and I know it’s not, but it’s still so weird that you’ve been lying to me all this time about something I don’t even give a shit about!” He shook his head. “No, it’s not that I don’t give a shit about it, but it wouldn’t have changed the way I felt about you if I knew Hannah was a nun or a sister or whatever. What exactly was the point of lying to me about that?”

  “Because I always have,” I told him. It was a stupid thing to say, but it was the truth. He rolled his eyes.

  “You don’t understand,” I continued. “I just didn’t want to have to explain what was going on with her, and I know it doesn’t matter but, like, sometimes things that don’t matter actually matter a lot, so I lied.”

  “You didn’t want to explain what was going on with her, or you didn’t want to find out what was going on with her?” Pawel asked, and I felt my stomach go into free fall. Of course he was right. I knew that. Lying about Hannah was the way I avoided having to figure out what to say about it, or what I felt about it besides anger and resentment.

  “Both,” I admitted. “But if it doesn’t matter, then why are you mad at me?”

  “Because. Look, I’m a pretty honest person, I think. I tell the truth. I don’t make shit up. And it’s important to me that the people I trust and care about are the same way. And if you lie about something small like this, then how can I believe you’d tell the truth when it’s something big?” Pawel looked at the ground and took his hand from mine.

  “You don’t understand,” I said again.

  “Yeah,” he said sharply. “I don’t.”

  “She’s so hard to deal with, Pawel, you have no idea.”

  “There’s something wrong!” he cried. “Can’t you see that?”

  “What?”

  “I can tell, and I don’t even know your sister. She looks miserable, and she looks—” He paused to choose his words carefully. “She looks too thin. Have you ever even asked her what’s going on with her, or do you just ignore it altogether? There’s something wrong, and you’re too scared to face it, so you lie and lie. I’m sorry, but that’s just—it’s just fucked up, is what it is.”

  “Pawel …” I couldn’t think of anything else to say, so I just let his name hang there like a white flag. Please don’t be mad, I thought, but I didn’t say it.

  “I’m going to go. I’ll see you later.”

  “When?” I pleaded, hating the desperation in my voice. />
  “I don’t know, just … later,” he said, getting into his car and turning the key in the ignition. “At school.”

  I could feel the tears pressing against the backs of my eyes, but I bit down hard on my lip to keep them in. I had some dignity. I wasn’t going to cry out here, where people could see me—where Pawel could still see me, in the rearview mirror, if he’d been looking. Which he wasn’t, I knew. My vision blurred, but no tears fell, and I was proud of that.

  15

  When I went back inside, the tribunal was waiting.

  “Caro, sit down,” Dad commanded, face like a thundercloud.

  “You don’t have to lecture me, I know exactly what you’re going to say.” I pouted, taking a seat.

  “Oh, I’m sure you do,” Mom said. “Because we had this same conversation four years ago.”

  “This is not the same,” I insisted. “I didn’t tell Pawel she was dead, I said she was in the Peace Corps.”

  “It’s not the lie, it’s the lying, Caro, Jesus!” Dad yelled.

  “Yes, let’s talk about Jesus for a second,” I yelled back. “Isn’t it all his fault in the first place? Hannah elopes with Jesus, they get divorced, and now we’re all forced to kill ourselves to accommodate her fragile self-esteem!”

  “You’d better lower your voice right now,” Dad growled.

  “Why? Because the baby might hear me? Come on, Dad, seriously. She’s not a child, she’s an adult, and I’m sorry if I hurt her precious feelings but how do you think I feel?” I asked.

  “Oh, we know exactly how you feel,” Mom said. “We spoiled you growing up and now you’re jealous of Hannah coming back into the family. You can’t handle it when everything’s not about you.”

  “That’s not true! I just can’t stand it that you both are so afraid of her. You think she left home because she didn’t love us, and now that she’s back, you don’t want her to hate you enough to leave again,” I said. Their expressions were stoic, but I could tell that I’d hit them where it hurt. There’s something wrong! Pawel had said. And they were just ignoring it. I wasn’t the only one who was afraid to face things. “She didn’t leave because she didn’t love us, she left because she was selfish and she came back because she’s selfish and we’re all selfish and that’s not going to change, so just stop treating her like she’s going to break and get a grip already. Can’t you see that all you’re doing is ignoring what’s really going on?”

  “Please illuminate us, Caro,” Mom said angrily. “What is really going on?”

  “Hannah is sick,” I said. Pawel had been the first one to say it, but I’d known it was true since the first time I’d laid eyes on her. “She’s skinny and she won’t eat and she sleeps all day. She’s depressed, can’t you see?”

  “That’s enough,” Dad said. “You’re finished talking. Now is the time to listen.”

  “What are you going to do, throw me in jail?” I grumbled.

  “First, you’re going to apologize to Hannah,” Mom said. “Again. You’re losing all your car privileges, and we’re grounding you indefinitely.”

  “Indefinitely?” I shrieked. “For telling one lousy lie?”

  “No,” Dad said. “For turning your back on Hannah and this family, for being hurtful to her when you should be supporting her. You’ve been rigid and mean about this from day one, you’ve never even made the smallest effort with your sister.”

  “We were giving you time to adjust, but you refused to, and that’s over now. You’re going to shape up and get on board with the plan of helping Hannah, and you’re not going to get your privileges back until you do.” Mom folded her arms and set her mouth in a stern line.

  “That’s what you think,” I said. “You can’t stop me from doing what I want to do.”

  “You grossly underestimate our power over you,” Mom said. “You can rage and cry and lock yourself in your room, but at the end of the day you’re going to do what we say if you want to have any kind of social life whatsoever, so if you’re smart, you’ll skip the drama and go apologize to Hannah right now.”

  “Over my dead body,” I snapped.

  “If it comes to that.” Dad got up and stood over me. “Go.”

  “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.”