The Opposite of Hallelujah

by Anna Jarzab

  “I think he came with some kind of paperwork,” Pawel said. “Can I take your coat?”

  “Such a gentleman,” I said, shrugging off the sleeping bag I was wearing and handing it to him.

  “Nah, just well trained,” he countered. “Do you want something to eat or drink?”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “Should we get started?”

  “Yeah, let me put this away and we can go upstairs,” Pawel said. He disappeared down a short hallway for a second, then returned without my coat. “Okay. Do we have everything we need?”

  “Did you get the poster board?” I’d asked Pawel to pick up a trifold from the office supply store.

  “Yeah, it’s upstairs. You have all the pictures and stuff?”

  I nodded. “And my notes. I figure we can type up the abstract and the picture captions and print them out on colored paper in the computer lab. That way the board will be more dynamic.”

  “Dynamic, huh?” he asked, raising his eyebrows in what I hoped was amusement.

  “To distract the judges from the fact that we don’t actually have a demonstrable experiment,” I explained.

  “Do you really care how we do in the science fair?” Pawel asked, starting up the stairs. I followed.

  “No,” I admitted. “I just want a good grade. I don’t care about winning or anything.”

  “Good,” he sighed. “Neither do I. I just want this thing to be over with.”

  Something crumpled inside my chest. Did he mean he was sick of working with me?

  “I don’t really like physics,” Pawel confessed as we approached the end of the upstairs hallway. There was a closed door to my left; I assumed it was his, but we stopped in front of it and he made no move to go in.

  “So you don’t like French, and you don’t like English, and you don’t like physics,” I said. “What do you like, then?”

  “Well, okay. I do like physics—I just don’t like physics class.” He shrugged.

  “Is this your room?” I asked, pointing to the door.

  “Yeah.”

  “Are we going to go in, or just stand in the hallway all afternoon?” My shoulder was starting to buckle under the weight of my bag.

  “Okay, so here’s the thing. There’s a lot of, um, stuff in my room that normally I wouldn’t show anybody because it’s embarrassing, but I sort of forgot you were coming over today until like ten minutes ago and I didn’t have time to put it all away, so …” He sighed. “Just so we’re clear, they’re not toys.”

  “Pawel, you’re freaking me out,” I said. “What aren’t toys?”

  He sighed. “I guess it’s easier to just show you.” He opened the door and I followed him through it.

  When I glanced around the room, what I saw sure looked like toys. Every spare surface of Pawel’s room—dressers, desktops, windowsills, bookshelves, and even parts of the floor—was covered in motion machines made entirely of K’nex, a plastic building set I remembered playing with at day care a long time ago. As I was backing up to get a better look at the array, I bumped into one sitting on a table behind me and set it running. A small plastic container at the very top tipped over just far enough to release a red Matchbox car, which ran down a ramp and crashed into a little plastic tab, which activated a miniature Ferris wheel, which did one full rotation before dumping a glass marble onto a small set of scales. The weight of the marble pushed the other side of the scale up and released another marble, which traveled down a spiral ramp and fell with a plink into a cup filled with them.

  I looked up at Pawel. “This is so cool!” I said. “Are these the Rube Goldberg machines you were telling me about?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “It’s a stupid hobby of mine.”

  “It’s not stupid,” I assured him. “It’s awesome. I love them.”

  “Me too,” he said with a proud grin. “My sisters tease me a lot about them. They call them my inventions, but really they don’t do anything. I just like thinking them up and building them.”

  “That’s what you draw in your notebooks,” I said, remembering the doodles in the margins of his papers.

  “Uh-huh,” he confirmed. “I should probably be taking notes, but these are just a lot more interesting to me.”

  “I can see why.”

  He blushed. “Well, we should get started. I looked at the assignment sheet and presentation is like sixty percent of the grade or something.” He handed me a plastic jewel case with a disk inside. “I made a DVD of the results.”

  “Great, I’m borrowing Erin’s portable DVD player, so we can use that at the fair. Cross your fingers no one steals it when we’re not looking—I cannot afford to replace it,” I said.

  “Maybe we should hire an armed bodyguard to keep an eye on it,” he suggested. “Or we could just get Jake to do it. He’s amazingly good at kicking people in the shins.”

  I laughed.

  Two hours later, we’d made significant progress on the written portion of the project. I closed my laptop with a satisfied sigh. “Getting closer.”

  Pawel hoisted himself up off the floor. “I’m going to go to the bathroom. Do you want anything to drink? Are you hungry at all?”

  I shook my head. “I’m fine. Thanks, though.”

  “No problem. Be right back.”

  I walked around the room, looking for another Rube Goldberg machine to test. They looked so delicately poised I didn’t want to disturb anything, but I was enamored of them and wanted to watch another one do its thing. I was just about to set the one on his dresser in motion when my cell phone rang, startling me. I rooted around in my bag for it and answered just before the last ring. The caller ID said “Mom.”

  “Hey, Mom, what’s up?” I asked, running my fingers lightly over the mechanics of one of the Rube Goldberg machines.

  “Caro, I don’t want to scare you, but we’re at the hospital.” My mom rarely panicked, but I could tell that she was genuinely upset.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, my mind awhirl with all the frightening possibilities. “Did something happen to Dad?”

  “No,” she said, her voice cracking under the strain of trying to sound normal. “It’s Hannah. I came home from work and found her on the floor in her bedroom. Where are you?”

  “Pawel’s house,” I told her. “We were working on our science project—is Hannah okay? She’s not—” I couldn’t bring myself to say the word “dead.” I thought about how quiet and inert she’d been that morning, how I couldn’t even get her to come out from under the covers. What if I’d lost my sister just as I was getting to know her?

  I had to get to the hospital immediately.

  “No! No, no,” my mother repeated, nearly shouting now. “But she’s very sick, and you know she hasn’t been eating as much as she should.… Do you have the car? Can you come here right away?”

  “I’ll be there as soon as I can,” I promised her.

  “Okay, please hurry, Caro. I love you.”

  “I love you, too.” I hung up. I sank down onto the bed, and for a few moments I just sat there, unsure of what to do. I knew I should run down to my car and drive to the hospital, but I’d started to shake and my vision was blurred by unshed tears. I didn’t know if I could drive. I tried to imagine navigating the dark streets in my condition and froze. I needed help.

  When Pawel came back a few minutes later, I hadn’t moved. He was carrying two cans of grape soda, but as soon as he saw the look on my face, he put them down on a nearby dresser and rushed toward me.

  “Caro, is everything okay?” He knelt down at my feet and looked up at my face, his hands on my knees. “Something’s wrong. What is it?”

  I explained as much as I knew.

  “Hannah’s in the hospital?” Pawel said. He was stunned for a second, then rallied into action. “Well, okay, let’s go, then.”

  “Can you drive me?” I asked. “I can’t—I don’t think I should.”

  “Of course,” he said, exhaling a flood of air, as if he’d been hol
ding his breath. “I’ll take you in your car and Magda can come pick me up later or something.” He stood and took my elbow. I paused for a second, took a deep breath to stifle the sobs, and got back on my feet.

  Pawel led me down the stairs. There was a young blond boy waiting at the door with my coat. Pawel took it and handed it to me, and I put it on.

  “Thanks, Jake,” he said, ruffling the boy’s hair. “See you later.”

  “See you,” the boy said, gawking at me. I must’ve looked a mess, but under the circumstances it was hard to care.

  26

  At the hospital, it took a while to find my parents. Hannah had been admitted and given a room, where she was sedated and sleeping. As soon as I arrived, my mother rushed to me and put her arms around my shoulders. She held me for a long time, and when she finally released me, my father did the same. It was a while before they noticed Pawel.

  “Hi, Mr. and Mrs. Mitchell,” he said politely, offering his hand to my father, who shook it. “Can I get you something? I could go to the cafeteria and bring back some coffee.”

  They both nodded.

  “I’ll be right back,” he said, looking at me. Thank you, I mouthed.

  When he disappeared around the corner, I sat down next to my parents in a plastic chair and listened patiently while they explained what they knew.

  “The doctor said that Hannah is dangerously thin,” Mom said. “She weighs ninety-seven pounds.”

  Dangerously thin. When I first saw her in the train station, she looked thin, and she hadn’t been eating steadily since she’d gotten home, but I would never have suspected she weighed less than one hundred pounds. As I thought back, I considered the things she wore—bulky sweaters and loose-fitting shirts, nothing tight that would’ve shown her body for what it really was. We saw her every day, so while we noticed the change, it never struck me how dramatic it had been. She had always been thin, but it had never been as scary as it was in that moment. I felt sick.

  “The reason she passed out was that she hasn’t eaten anything substantial in a couple of days,” Dad explained. “She’s undernourished and very weak. They’ve hooked her up to an IV and inserted a feeding tube to start getting her some nutrients.”

  “Can she talk?” I asked.

  “She’ll wake up sometime tomorrow morning,” Dad said. “We can talk to her then.”

  “Is she going to—um, is she going to live?” I asked. I hated the question, but I had to know the answer.

  “We think so,” Mom said. I let out the breath I was holding. “But we don’t know for sure.”

  Every time I closed my eyes, I saw myself snapping at her, freezing her out, saying horrible things to and about her. The memories flooded into my mind, overlapping and intensifying to a horrific crescendo of unwarranted cruelty. The fight we’d had about Sabra, how insensitive I’d been. How could I have been so blind to my own sister’s pain? For so long, I’d let myself believe that Hannah was fine, that she could handle whatever she was going through alone. I’d wanted it to be true; I hadn’t wanted to have to be kind to her, because I resented her so much, and it was my fault we were sitting here now, talking about how likely it was that Hannah would live. Even when I’d finally decided I wanted to help, I’d been too late. People couldn’t be saved on our schedules. And anyway, I doubted that I was capable of very much saving.

  I tried to send Pawel home. There was nothing he could do; all we could do was wait, and there was no reason he should spend all evening in the hospital, keeping vigil over someone else’s sister.

  “Are you sure you don’t want me to stay?” he asked, concern written all over his face. I felt a pang of guilt; he really meant it when he said we were friends. He did care what happened to me, and this whole time I’d been shoving him off because of what? My pride? My inability to accept something good and real just because I wasn’t getting exactly what I thought I wanted? Hannah was right: I was selfish.

  “I appreciate everything you’ve done for me tonight,” I told him. “But it’s getting late and I think we’re just going to stay here. You should go home. You must be tired.”

  He definitely was; I could see it in his drooping eyelids and glassy expression. We’d been sitting in the hospital waiting room for hours and hours with very few updates on Hannah’s condition. I was exhausted from the crying and felt strangely blank inside. It was like I didn’t have the energy to be sad anymore.

  “I don’t have to go,” he offered. “Your parents are a wreck. You need somebody to keep you company.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I think I’m just going to sleep.”

  “Here?” he asked. “In a chair?”

  I nodded.

  “Caro,” Mom called from across the room. “Can you come here for a second?”

  “Sure,” I said. I sat down next to her and put my head on her shoulder. She ran her hand over my cheek and kissed my forehead.

  “Honey, I think you should let Pawel drive you home,” she said. “There’s going to be no news until the morning, and you should try to sleep.”

  “I want to stay here with you,” I protested.

  “I know, but there’s no point. You go home for a couple of hours and get some rest—I’ll call you as soon as the doctors tell us anything, or Hannah wakes up. Okay?”

  “But—”

  “No arguments.” Dad broke in. “You need to go home. You can come back in the morning.”

  “Fine,” I said. “But I’m not going to school tomorrow. I’m coming right back here, okay?”

  “Okay,” they said.

  I gathered up my coat and bag and followed Pawel out of the waiting room. We walked through the hospital corridors side by side. We didn’t touch or talk, but I was aware of his presence, all my senses sharply attuned to his every movement. A sort of strange calm drifted over me like a light blanket. It was comforting to know he was there, and that he was trying so hard to help. Despite the circumstances that had brought us there, I’d never felt so grateful for anything in my life.

  When we reached the car, I went to the driver’s side and held my hands out for the keys.

  “I thought I was driving you home,” he said.

  “It’s my car,” I reminded him. “And if you drive me home, how will you get home?”

  “I’ll have one of my sisters come get me,” he said. “I’ll stay with you until they come.”

  “You don’t have to stay with me,” I said. “I’m just going to go right to bed.”

  “Caro, can you just let me do this? I’d like to drive you home. Put your practical side in storage for fifteen minutes and just inconvenience me for once,” he said.

  “What does that mean?” I asked sharply. There was all this anger seething under the surface of my fatigue—anger at myself, of course, so much that I could feel it dissolving me into a froth from the inside, but also anger at Hannah for slowly starving herself with no regard for her own life, anger at my parents for not recognizing it for what it was sooner or doing enough to help, and, sort of inexplicably, anger at Father Bob. Where was his God in all this? I tried to clamp down on it, but I’d already said what I’d said the way I’d said it.

  “It means that your default is to try to impose order on everything,” he said. “You want it all to be just so—efficient and timely and perfect. You think, ‘This is my car and if Pawel drives me home, how will he get back to his house?’ So even though you’re tired out of your mind, you would drive me instead of letting me drive you and find my own way. You don’t always have to do that. Sometimes it’s okay to let someone else take on a little bit of the burden. You don’t have to spare me.”

  “When have I ever done that?” I asked incredulously. I felt naked, like I was being read like a page. Sure, I liked order and efficiency—who likes chaos? It seemed pretty reasonable to me.

  “How about when you didn’t want my help with the science fair project because you thought it would make me uncomfortable to work with you?” he reminded me.


  “One time,” I muttered, but I walked over to the passenger side and got in.

  “It’s not a bad thing,” he said, laughing a little. He got behind the wheel and turned the car on. I cranked the heat up full blast, shivering despite my heavy winter coat. “It’s a sign of compassion, you know? That you put other people before yourself.”

  “I’m not compassionate.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “If I was compassionate, I would’ve been good to Hannah right from the beginning,” I told him. “She came home looking like this sad, starved little puppy and I kicked her—I kicked her over and over again. I never listened. I never stopped to consider how she might be feeling. All I did was think about myself. I wasn’t used to having her around, and I tried to push her out. My sister! What kind of a horrible creature does that to a person? To a person, by the way, who loves them anyway, even when they’re acting like a heinous bitch?”

  Pawel shook his head. We were on the road now. I put my forehead against the window and let the streetlamps blur together into a steady stream of light. “I understand why you feel guilty. But you can’t put it all on yourself. You didn’t make her sick. It’s probably why she came home, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know,” I said in a small voice.

  “You’re a good person, Caro,” he told me. “I’ve always thought so. We haven’t known each other that long, but I can tell that you try really hard to do the right thing. That’s rarer than you think, believe me.”

  We sat in silence for a few minutes before Pawel spoke again.

  “Jake was sick,” he said.

  “What?” I asked.

  “He was born premature, and he had lung scarring because of it,” Pawel told me. “I was only three at the time, but he was sick forever, and when he was eleven, he came down with a severe respiratory infection that almost killed him. He was in the hospital for weeks, so even though I don’t know exactly what you’re going through, I can imagine.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, knowing just how useless those words really were.