The Opposite of Hallelujah

by Anna Jarzab

  He shook his head. “I’m not telling you this because I want sympathy, I’m telling you because … my family means a lot to me. Like, the world. More than anything, probably.”

  I nodded.

  “And I wanted to explain—I feel like I overreacted that day at your house, when I found out you lied about Hannah.”

  “It’s okay,” I rushed to tell him. “We don’t need to talk about it.”

  “Hang on,” he requested. “I’ve looked back on that day a few times and tried to puzzle out just what was bothering me, why I broke up with you, like you’d done something to me even though you hadn’t really. People lie, all the time, for dumb reasons, I know that. I should’ve given you the benefit of the doubt.”

  “Seriously, it’s fine.” I couldn’t have this conversation. My sister was in a hospital bed, being fed through a tube. I had enough guilt swirling around inside me already. I couldn’t stand being reminded of the way I had behaved. “I understand why it bothered you.”

  “This isn’t coming out right.” He ran his fingers through his hair, tugging hard at the roots as if to anchor himself somehow. “I’m trying to explain—I guess I got upset because I looked at your sister and how sick she was and I saw Jake and I thought, ‘What kind of a person could turn her back on her family like that?’ ”

  “Okay, enough!” I cried. “Please, don’t.”

  But he barreled on. “Caro, I’m trying to tell you that I was an ass. I just figured, because we had such a great connection right from the jump, that I knew everything there was to know about you. But of course I didn’t. I still don’t. But I think you’re wonderful, and I should’ve known better than to assume anything about you. I should’ve listened when you asked me to. I’m sorry.”

  I let out a deep breath. “Thanks,” I said. “Just so you know, I don’t normally do that sort of thing. It had nothing to do with you, it was all part of my insecurity about Hannah.”

  “I get that,” he said. “I totally get it.”

  We arrived at my house a few minutes later. Pawel got out and walked me inside. I was glad he’d come with me. It would’ve been so depressing to walk into that dark, empty house all alone. He followed me to my room and stood in the doorway as I switched on the light and let my coat drop to the floor.

  “Do you want me to stay here with you?” Pawel asked. “I don’t mind.”

  “No, thanks,” I said. “Thank you, though. For everything.”

  “Anytime,” he said. He held out his arms and I fell into them, pressing my cheek against his shirt and breathing him in. I didn’t want to let go, so I stood there for what seemed like forever, clutching him and burying my face in his neck. Our chests rose and fell in sync. Finally, using all my strength, I pulled away.

  “Good night,” I said.

  “Good night,” he said back.

  After Pawel left, I lay down on the bed, still in my clothes, and pulled a blanket over me. As tired as I was, I couldn’t manage to fall asleep. I stared at the ceiling in the dark, missing the sound of Hannah’s footsteps above my head. Slow, steady tears slipped down my cheeks, staining the pillowcase, and when I had exhausted every other option, I stopped struggling against the impulse and did the one thing I never thought I would do: I prayed.

  Not knowing how to do it the proper way, or even if there was a proper way, I inhaled deeply until it felt as though my chest had cracked open; the dark stillness of the night rushed in to fill up the space. I could hear the beating of my heart in my ears, and in my head I spoke the words. Please don’t let her die, I said. Please don’t let her die. Please help her. Help me. Help us all. Help us help us help us. Please, oh please, don’t let her die.

  I didn’t stop praying until, without noticing, I fell asleep.

  I awoke at noon to the sound of my phone ringing. I couldn’t believe I’d slept that long, but I still felt tired. I scrambled to answer the call, knowing instinctively it had something to do with Hannah. “Mom?”

  “Hi, honey.” She sounded tired. “So Hannah’s awake now. She’s still a bit groggy from the medication, but if you head over now, she should be ready for visitors by the time you get here. Can you drive?”

  “Yes, of course,” I said, jumping out of bed and grabbing my coat. “I’ll be right there.”

  I burst into the waiting room twenty minutes later. “Can we go see Hannah now?”

  “Hold your horses,” Dad said, putting a hand on my shoulder. “She’s not feeling very well. She’s been throwing up all morning, except there’s no food in her stomach, so it’s mostly bile. The sedatives didn’t sit very well with her.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “And she’s very thin,” he continued. “It was hard to tell with the clothes she wore, but when you look at her, it might come as a shock.” It hadn’t been hard to tell. We just hadn’t wanted to look.

  “We want you to be prepared,” Mom said.

  I nodded. “I’m prepared. Can we see Hannah now?”

  “Sure,” Mom said.

  I held my mom’s hand as we walked down the hallway to Hannah’s room. Dad pushed the door open and I caught my first glimpse of my sister. She looked ravaged. Her skin was pale and her hair was all greasy and matted against her head. Her hospital gown was so huge on her she looked like she was drowning in it. I thought of the matchstick girl, how Hannah had become her, or maybe she had been her all along. It was all I could do not to cry again. I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I’d never cried as much in my whole life before Hannah came home. But for the first time in the past twelve hours, I bit my cheek and held the tears back. I knew they would just upset Hannah.

  “Hi,” she said as we filed into the room.

  “How are you feeling?” Mom asked, sitting on the edge of her bed and taking her hand.

  “Okay,” she said. “Tired.”

  “I bet,” Mom said. “Are you thirsty?” Hannah nodded. “Caro, pour Hannah some water, please.”

  “No, that’s all right,” Hannah said, but I was already doing it.

  “Here you go,” I said, handing it to her.

  “Thanks.” She smiled. “Shouldn’t you be in school?”

  “Yeah right,” I said.

  “Did you get any work done on your project?” she asked.

  “Pawel and I ran the experiment, and it worked,” I said, feigning excitement for her benefit. I was just happy that she didn’t seem angry with me anymore. “It was totally cool, Hannah, you should’ve seen it—we created light. For a split second, anyway.”

  “That sounds great,” she said. “I can’t wait to see your presentation at the science fair.”

  “Hannah,” Mom said, stroking her arm gently. “You’re going to be in here for a while, you know that.”

  She sighed. “I know. I just don’t want to miss it.”

  “Well, don’t worry,” I told her. “We have the experiment on DVD, so I can bring it in and show it to you.”

  “Good,” she said.

  There was a knock at the door and a nurse with long black curls poked her head in. “Mr. and Mrs. Mitchell? The doctor would like to speak to you outside for a moment.”

  “Okay,” Mom said. She got up off the bed. “Caro, you stay here.”

  “Sure,” I said, flopping down into a chair. Mom and Dad left the room and I smiled at Hannah. “What do you want to do? I brought cards.”

  “Actually,” she began, “can we talk?”

  “Yeah, sure. What about?”

  “They’re going to make me see a psychiatrist,” Hannah told me. “The doctor thinks that part of my problem is emotional and they want me to get treatment.”

  “I’m not surprised,” I said.

  “Me neither. But I know that when I see the psychiatrist, she’s going to ask me if I’ve experienced any traumatic events in my life.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “And I think that before I tell her about it, I should probably tell you.” Hannah gave me a small smile, but she wouldn
’t look at me. She wasn’t used to talking to people about her feelings, and now she was going to be expected to pour them out to a stranger. “Even though you already know some of it, I guess.”

  I nodded. “I’m listening.”

  “It’s really hard to talk about it—I never talk about it—so this is going to be difficult.” She stared at her lap. “It’s just really hard,” she repeated.

  I didn’t say anything. I just waited for her to get to the place where she could form the words. I listened to her breathe—deep, ragged ins and outs that seemed to shake the room. I watched her closely the whole time, studying her, the little movements she was making in preparation to say something. She’d taken hold of a piece of her hair and was absentmindedly stroking the end of it, like a baby with a security blanket. The things that comfort us.

  “I’m sorry,” Hannah said. Her eyes were wet and she was struggling hard to keep it together. She twisted the sheets into knots in her hands. I put my hand on her arm.

  “It’s okay. Take your time.”

  After a few minutes, she opened her mouth to begin again. “When I was in middle school, I had this friend. This was when you were really little, almost just born. You were only a baby, so you won’t remember her, but she was over a lot. We used to play with you on the floor of your bedroom. She used to make your dolls talk. You loved that, she would do these voices …” She stopped and swallowed hard. “Her name was Sabra.”

  I nodded. This I knew. I didn’t remember the part about the dolls, but that wasn’t really surprising; I had to have been pretty tiny for Sabra to be alive. Still, I felt like I could see it. It was funny the way other people’s stories could spring to life in wisps of smoke in your head and slowly congeal into something resembling a memory.

  Hannah continued. “Actually, that wasn’t really her name. Her name was Sarah, but she had a brother, he was two years younger—Byrne. And when she and Byrne were small, he couldn’t say ‘Sarah’ right, he used to call her Sabra instead of Sarah and the nickname stuck. Her family had been calling her Sabra forever by the time we became friends, so that’s what I called her, too. Everyone did. Sabra and I went to school together for years before we became friends. Everyone used to, you know, make fun of me, because I was a little strange. But Sabra and I sat next to each other in homeroom and she was nice to me. She just … liked me, for some reason, I guess.”

  “You’re a likable person,” I told her.

  She looked unconvinced. “Anyway, Sabra and I became best friends. We were together all the time. When we were in sixth grade, she died.”

  “But how?” I asked, even though Father Bob had given me some of the details. I wanted Hannah to explain it to me.

  “She fell into a well,” Hannah said. “We were sledding and one of the wells was open, but we couldn’t see it because of the snow. The water was freezing, and it was so dark in the well I couldn’t see her. I should have gone for help, but she kept begging me not to leave her alone. She was so scared.”

  I could only imagine. Being alone at the bottom of a black hole would be terrifying for anyone, let alone a twelve-year-old girl.

  “She made me promise to stay with her, and I did. I kept telling her that everything was going to be all right, but it started to snow and I was afraid it wouldn’t be all right. Eventually, she stopped answering when I called her name. That’s when I went for help.” Tears were rolling down Hannah’s cheeks, but she wasn’t heaving or crumpling—she just had giant stately tears running down her perfect face. She closed her eyes and they poured like rain.

  “Oh, Hannah,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

  She hung her head and wouldn’t open her eyes. She just sat there, propped up by her pillows, twisting the blanket in her pale hands. “I let her die, Caro. I let her freeze to death in that well, all alone.”

  “She wasn’t alone,” I said. “She knew you were there with her.” And if Father Bob was right, so was God. But in the face of what Hannah was feeling and what Sabra had been through, Father Bob’s scientific spirituality felt small and insignificant.

  “But what good did that do her?” Hannah cried. “It’s my fault she died.”

  “It isn’t,” I insisted. “Hannah, listen to me. You were just a kid. How could you know? Your friend begged you to stay with her and you did. No one can blame you for that.”

  “I blame me,” she said.

  “Is that why you went to the convent?” I asked. “To escape? Or to punish yourself?” Both of those explanations seemed reductive. I was starting to see how unbelievably complex Hannah’s situation was.

  “No, no …” She trailed off.

  “Hannah, please listen to me,” I begged. “It’s not your fault. You didn’t do anything wrong. She asked you to stay. I would’ve done the same thing.”

  “As for becoming a nun, you know,” she said. “It wasn’t that I wanted to run away from it, although probably I did in some way. But after Sabra … I started to feel so ruined. Like there was this dark spot on my soul, and it made me feel so worthless, so helpless. I knew nothing but grace could wash it away, so I threw myself into prayer, I became even more rigorously religious than I had ever been. I wanted purification, and relief, but it never came, for years and years. I just wanted to find the God that I had lost, and I thought I would find him in the convent.”

  The cosmic unfairness of losing your life before you’d gotten the opportunity to make something of it or enjoy it was enraging. I thought of Father Bob, and the God he believed was beside us in every moment of our lives. If he really wanted us to be happy, why all the tragedy in the world? Father Bob would say something sensible about duality, about joy not existing without pain to illuminate it.

  “Think about light,” he had said once. “White light is pure and beautiful, but a world full of it would make us all blind—not just blind, but also invisible. It’s when you subtract that you see all the colors of the rainbow. Subtraction shows us what’s there, and what’s there is beautiful, too. Pain is like subtraction. Suffering teaches us how to experience and appreciate joy.” It struck me now as total bullshit, and also as the truest thing in the world.

  Hannah couldn’t speak anymore. I got up out of my chair and crawled into the bed with my devastated sister. I put my arms around her and let her rest her head on my shoulder. We lay there long enough for both of us to fall asleep.

  27

  I woke up several hours later feeling like I was encased in a mist. My contacts were blurry and my brain was stuffed with cotton. Beside me, Hannah was fast asleep, and the world was dark outside her windows. My mother was sitting in the chair across from the bed, reading. She looked up at me with a sad smile.

  “Hi, honey,” she whispered. “Are you all right?”

  I rubbed my eyes. “I think so.”

  “You and Hannah talked?” she guessed.

  I nodded. “She told me about Sabra.”

  “I knew she would. I’m sorry I wouldn’t tell you before—I just thought it was Hannah’s place, not mine.”

  “I understand,” I said. I stretched as much as I could without disturbing Hannah. “I’m really wiped.”

  “You should go home now, maybe do some homework. I want you to go to school tomorrow.”

  “What?” I cried.

  “Shhh,” Mom said. “Don’t wake her. You’re going to school because there’s nothing you can do here, and I’d like you to graduate. No arguments. Just get up, go home, eat something, and get a good night’s sleep. You can come back tomorrow afternoon if you want.”

  I was too tired to protest. “Okay.”

  I climbed out of the bed carefully and headed for the door. Just as I reached it, Mom grabbed my hand.

  “I love you, Caro,” she said in the most solemn tone I had ever heard.

  “I love you, too,” I told her. I kissed her on the cheek.

  “I’m so sorry.” Her eyes were shining and wet in the light of the one small reading lamp.

  “For w
hat?” I asked.

  “For letting you both down,” she said. “I know it’s been hard since Hannah came home. I just didn’t know what to do. She was so sad, and you were so angry. I didn’t want to get between you, but if I’d just told you the truth, maybe we wouldn’t be here right now. If I’d just opened my eyes …”

  “You don’t know that,” I insisted. “Hannah’s been sick for a very long time.”

  “I’m her mother,” Mom said, choking on the words. “How could I not have done more?”

  “We all let it go on longer than it should have,” I told her. “It wasn’t just you. You’re a wonderful mother. You just didn’t want to see your kid in any pain. It’s understandable.”

  “It’s unforgivable,” she said.

  “No,” I said, as firmly as she had ever told me no. “Nothing is.”

  I slipped out of Hannah’s room with my coat over one arm and my bag slung on my shoulder. I walked slowly, shuffling along the linoleum like someone hopped up on cold medication. I wasn’t even paying attention to where I was going, and as I rounded the corner near the nurses’ station, I collided with someone going the opposite way.

  “Damn it!” I cried as my bag fell to the floor and spilled papers and pens all over the place. I bent down to scoop everything up; the man I’d bumped into did the same.

  “Here you go,” he said, handing me a bunch of flash cards I’d made for French class.

  I took them, standing up and lifting my eyes. When I saw who I’d hit, a fuse blew in the back of my brain.

  “What are you doing here?” I demanded, my tone as sharp as a machete.

  “Your father called me,” Father Bob said, not reacting at all to the way I was speaking to him. “He said he knew that you’d been meeting with me, and that I might be able to help you—and Hannah, if she’ll see me—during this difficult time.”

  “I ran my experiment,” I told him.

  He perked up. If there was one thing I believed about Father Bob, it was that he was, at heart, a science nerd of the highest order.

  “I got it to work,” I said. “After about five dozen failed attempts.”