The Opposite of Hallelujah

by Anna Jarzab

“Sure you do, Hannie!” Dad exclaimed. “I’ve got a few of his prints on the wall in the office.”

  Hannah shrugged. “I guess I never noticed.”

  “He’s this artist Dad and I love,” I explained. I pointed to the image on the cover. “I have that one on my binder, and every time I look at it nowadays, I just—I don’t know—think of you.”

  She ran her hand gently over the cover. “It’s so … strange.” But she said it in awe, like she was looking through a window into a whole other world and couldn’t believe what was right in front of her eyes. “Thank you. I love it.”

  “You’re very welcome,” I said. She smiled at me, and I smiled back. I remembered what Mom had said about how when I was a baby, I would run straight into her arms when someone brought me home. For the first time since Hannah came back, it didn’t seem like just a story; it seemed like a memory, a deeply ingrained connection between two sisters. The feeling was precarious, though; I was afraid that any second she would say something, or I would, and the soap bubble of our fragile sisterhood would pop under the pressure of everything we weren’t saying.

  “I’m glad you like it,” I said. I got up off the couch and started scooping the trash into a black plastic bag, careful not to disturb the peace that had descended on our house.

  23

  A couple of weeks after Christmas, I decided that I was ready to confess my deepest sin to Father Bob. I brought the shoe box with me to his office, even though I had no real intention of showing it to him. My reading the letters was bad enough; I wasn’t going to put them in the hands of someone else. Still, I knew that if they weren’t burning a hole in the bottom of my backpack, I might punk out and not bring them up. But I had to talk about them. I’d pretty much given up on getting any answers from Hannah and my parents, and I needed Father Bob to tell me where to go from here.

  When I got to Father Bob’s office that afternoon, he knew instinctively that there was something on my mind.

  “What’s bugging you, Caro?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You look tense,” he said, leaning back a bit in his chair and fixing me with a penetrating gaze, as though if he looked hard enough, he could see right through me. “Are you all right?”

  I shrugged. “Sure. Yeah, I’m fine. I just … I have something to confess.”

  “We’ve talked about this, Caro,” Father Bob said. “This isn’t a proper confession. We’re just having a conversation.”

  “Okay, then I have something to converse with you about,” I said. I took out Hannah’s box and placed it on my lap. All the letters I’d found were fastened together with a rubber band and placed on top of the rest of the stuff.

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “It’s Hannah’s,” I said. “From when she was younger. It’s got a bunch of stuff in it, like old birthday cards and movie stubs and stuff, but there are these … letters, too. To St. Catherine.”

  Father Bob nodded.

  “You look like that makes sense to you,” I said. “Which is weird, because it makes precisely zero sense to me.”

  “It’s an exercise I’ve seen teachers give in Catholic schools sometimes,” he explained. “They have their students choose a saint and then write a letter to them. It’s a lesson on intercession. St. Catherine is the patron saint of young girls.”

  “Um, okay. Fair enough.” I’d gone to St. Robert’s, too, and I’d never had to write a letter to a saint. But I guessed it wasn’t the craziest thing I’d ever heard. “Anyway, in the letters, Hannah mentions someone named Sabra, who I’ve gathered was a friend of hers.” Father Bob leaned forward in his chair. He looked alarmed. His expression was freaking me out.

  “I think Sabra died,” I continued. “But I don’t know how, or why Hannah would feel so guilty about it.”

  “Is that what she says in the letters? That she blames herself?” Father Bob seemed to know exactly what I was talking about, and what it meant, and there I was just babbling away, totally in the dark as always.

  “Basically,” I said. “This rings a bell?”

  “Caro, I want you to come with me,” Father Bob said, getting out of his chair and grabbing a thick sweater off a hook on his door. “Grab your coat.”

  “Where are we going?” I asked. He waited somewhat impatiently in the hallway while I wrangled my belongings together.

  “To the school,” he told me as I trailed him out of the rectory office and into the meat freezer we were calling an atmosphere.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “There’s something there that I want to show you,” he said. “It might have the answers to a couple of your questions.”

  Answers to my questions. That sounded promising. But I wasn’t relieved. I felt like maybe I was about to find out something I didn’t want to know. I wasn’t a very brave person, just very curious. I was suddenly unsure that if I finally solved the great mystery of Hannah’s unhappiness—if that truly was what was about to happen—I would be able to act on such a discovery.

  The halls of St. Robert’s were quiet. Father Bob marched me straight down the main corridor, and I was buffeted by the sights and sounds of my past, which wasn’t painful or joyful, just strange. I hadn’t been inside St. Robert’s School since I’d finished the eighth grade. It was as though any memories I’d accrued at St. Robert’s belonged to someone else and had just been implanted in my brain. It wasn’t sad; it was just … weird.

  Actually, growing up was just one weird thing after another. Friend weirdness, school weirdness, boy weirdness, family weirdness. Weirdness of the self. An endless cycle of weird, your life curling into a shape you didn’t recognize, like an Escher lithograph, full of impossible objects and warped reflections.

  We turned left into a small, rarely used hallway that I’d nearly forgotten was there. It had a couple of classrooms that used to be for first and second grade when the rectory was still attached to the school, but after they built a new rectory across the parking lot and tore the old one down, they remodeled most of the school and moved the little kids closer to the library. This had happened while I was still in third or fourth grade.

  A second before we arrived, I realized where Father Bob was taking me: the trophy case. I hadn’t laid eyes on it in years and years, since I never played a sport or won a trophy in my life and it was a bit out of the way; there was another, more impressive one near the new gym. We stopped in front of it and stared—or rather, I stared, and Father Bob pointed to a large plaque directly to the right of the trophy case, next to a giant statue of Mary. The plaque held an eight and a half–by–eleven school portrait of a girl with long dark hair with a razor-sharp part straight up the middle and a wide smile that showed off a row of glinting braces.

  “Who’s that?” I asked, even though I was pretty sure I knew.

  “Read it,” he said. Father Bob was all about this, discovering things for yourself. He said a priest’s job was to lead a horse to water, but only if it was thirsty.

  The little plate below the photograph read:

  Sarah Marie Griffin

  b. August 7, 1983

  d. January 9, 1996

  This plaque was erected on May 23, 1996, in memoriam of Sarah Griffin, called Sabra by her family and friends. Sabra was a sweet, loving girl who brought joy to everyone who knew her. Though her life was tragically cut short, her memory will carry on in our minds and hearts as long as we live.

  The students and staff of St. Robert’s School

  “What happened?” I asked Father Bob in a whisper. Of course. In her letters to St. Catherine, Hannah had mentioned a memorial near the entrance to the school. When she was attending St. Robert’s, this had been the entrance to the school; they’d moved it during the renovation. We were standing with our backs to the old main doors.

  “I asked about it when I first started here,” Father Bob told me. “Evidently, Sabra and a friend were sledding in a field behind her house when she fell into an underground well. F
or some reason the cover had been removed, and the well was covered with snow, but she went right through it. By the time help was called, she was gone.”

  After a few moments, I asked, “Who was the friend?”

  “I didn’t think to ask at the time,” Father Bob said carefully.

  “I have to go home,” I said. I took off without another word and only looked back at Father Bob when I reached the door. He just nodded at me.

  24

  I was hoping that nobody else would be home when I got there, so that I could talk to Hannah in private, but my parents were sitting in the family room. I’d been at Father Bob’s a lot longer than I’d thought. But maybe it was for the best; once Hannah and I had had our talk, we could all hug it out as a family.

  Because I really believed that once I told Hannah that I knew about Sabra, it would all get better: Hannah would stop being depressed and start eating, we would bond, and our family would feel whole. And maybe when I told Pawel how I had fixed my sister, he would like me again. And I would ace my—our—science project. And my life would be perfect.

  But the more you thought you had things figured out, the more likely it was that everything was about to blow up in your face in a spectacular supernova of suck. So I probably should’ve been a little more calculated when approaching Hannah about what was, presumably, her deepest, darkest secret. But I wasn’t.

  I laid my burdens down in my bedroom, extracting Hannah’s St. Catherine letters from my schoolbag, then took the stairs two at a time to the deserted second floor. When I’d passed through the family room, my parents hadn’t even looked up from the television. If only they’d known what I was about to do, they would’ve stopped me for sure.

  I knocked on Hannah’s door and got a soft “It’s open” in return. When I stepped into the room, Hannah was sitting on her perfectly made bed, slowly flipping through the Escher book I’d given her for Christmas. I felt a twinge of pride. I knew she would like it.

  “Hi,” she said, more chipper than usual. “Caro, thank you so much for this book. I can’t stop looking at it. They’re all so … strange, and beautiful.”

  I sat down next to her on the bed. “I’m glad. Which one is your favorite?”

  “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 te
ars 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.