The Opposite of Hallelujah
Read The Opposite of Hallelujah Online
Authors: Anna Jarzab
ALSO BY ANNA JARZAB
All Unquiet Things
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2012 by Anna Jarzab
Jacket photograph copyright © 2012 by Kelly Miller
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Service Publishing for permission to reprint lyrics from “The Opposite of Hallelujah” by Jens Lekman, copyright © 2005 by Jens Lekman. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Service Publishing.
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jarzab, Anna.
The opposite of hallelujah / Anna Jarzab. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: For eight of her sixteen years Carolina Mitchell’s older sister Hannah has been a nun in a convent, almost completely out of touch with her family—so when she suddenly abandons her vocation and comes home, nobody knows quite how to handle the situation, or guesses what explosive secrets she is hiding.
eISBN: 978-0-375-89408-4
1. Sisters—Juvenile fiction. 2. Ex-nuns—Juvenile fiction. 3. Guilt—Juvenile fiction. 4. Children’s secrets—Juvenile fiction. [1. Sisters—Fiction. 2. Nuns—Fiction. 3. Guilt—Fiction. 4. Secrets—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.J2968Opp 2012
813.6—dc23
2012010882
Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.
v3.1
This one’s for Alicia, of course, with love;
and in memory of Helena Bieniewski.
Contents
But sister, it’s the opposite of Hallelujah.
It’s the opposite of being you.
You don’t know ’cause it just passes right through you.
You don’t know what I’m going through.
—JENS LEKMAN
Provability is a weaker notion than truth.
—DOUGLAS R. HOFSTADTER,
Gödel, Escher, Bach:
An Eternal Golden Braid
1
When I was twelve, I started telling people at school that my older sister, Hannah, was dead. I didn’t put a lot of thought into it. I just figured it would be easier than explaining what had actually happened to her. You’d think the phrase “contemplative nun” would mean something to kids who’d been attending Catholic school their entire lives, but it really didn’t. To them, nuns were old women who wore nude panty hose to hide the varicose veins in their legs and seemed like they’d slap you with a ruler as soon as look at you. Nuns were practically prehistoric, and it didn’t make any sense for my then
twenty-three-year-old sister—tall, thin, blond as Barbie—to be working on her fourth year at the Sisters of Grace convent in Middleton, Indiana. But she was.
So I lied. I didn’t get what the big deal was. I hadn’t seen Hannah for longer than half an hour a year through an iron grille since I was eight, and those visits consisted mostly of my parents nervously babbling about work and how I was doing in school while Hannah sat with her hands folded in her lap, serene, listening but saying virtually nothing. She wasn’t dead, but she wasn’t part of my life anymore, so I simplified the story.
It wasn’t long before my teachers caught wind of the rumor. When Ms. Hopeshed, my music teacher, who was very sensitive, heard, she called our house to express her sincerest condolences over the loss of my sister. Mom and Dad were furious with me.
“How dare you tell people that Hannah is dead!” Mom screamed. I’d never seen her so angry, and she very rarely yelled at me. I was practically an only child, and my parents and I were close, or I thought we were. It didn’t occur to me that they might have other loyalties.
Stubborn and defiant as always, I refused to deny the pragmatism of my plan. “Well, it’s sort of
like
she’s dead,” I pointed out. It was, I thought, an unassailable argument. “We never see her. She never calls or comes home. What am I
supposed
to say?”
Mom took a deep breath and steadied herself before answering.
“If you talk like that in school, people are going to think you wish Hannah was dead,” she told me. “They’ll think you’re a liar who hates her sister. Is that what you want? Is that who you are?”
I stared at my shoes. “No, I guess not.” I knew a losing fight when I saw one, but I didn’t quite see where all this was coming from. It was a lie, yes, and lying was wrong; I’d been told that a million times over the course of my life. I knew it was possible I hadn’t done the
right
thing, or the
best
thing. But how was I supposed to explain my sister’s absence when nobody had ever given me the words? So I’d improvised. One look at my mother’s face and I knew I’d be better off keeping that justification to myself.
“Good.” She didn’t sound convinced, but I think she knew that was as much as she was going to get out of me. To my mom, this was a problem that couldn’t be solved with an apology, and even as we stood there not looking at each other, she was formulating a game plan. “I told Ms. Hopeshed the truth, and I expect you to do the same with everybody you told that horrible lie to. Do you understand me?”
“Yes,” I said.
She paused at the door and pointed at me. “You’d better fix this, Caro.”
“I will,” I promised.
I’d severely underestimated what this would mean for me at school. The next day, deathly afraid my mother
would have them make an announcement over the PA system if I disobeyed, I took back my lie and started telling people it
felt
like Hannah was dead, but that she was alive and (presumably) well at the Sisters of Grace convent in Middleton, Indiana. The kids in my class labeled me “Caroliar,” which became a popular playground taunt, and the reputation stuck with me until I went to high school and made new friends and everyone except them basically forgot I existed.
Hannah was a touchy subject in our house for years. We almost never talked about her, and after she’d been at the convent for two years, Mom packed up all her things, hid them in the garage, and let me move downstairs into her old room. There were only a few photos of her in the house, none of them taken when she was older than eighteen. “We’re going to Indiana” was the euphemism my parents used when we’d been scheduled for one of our annual visits to the convent, and apart from the traditional “she seems happy,” nobody ever said anything on the topic on the way there or the way back.
So it wasn’t like I was the only liar in the house. We all acted like Hannah was dead; all I did was take it one step further and bury her.
Telling the truth wasn’t my only punishment. My parents arranged for me to have three one-hour counseling
sessions with Father Bob, the pastor of our church. We weren’t what you would call devout Catholics, but we went to Sunday Mass every once in a while and never missed on holidays. I’d had all the appropriate sacraments and so had Hannah, even before she decided to marry Jesus.
Father Bob was very concerned about me, or so he said. My parents had asked him to explain the ins and outs of religious vocation to me, so that I might be a little more prepared the next time someone asked me what had happened to Hannah: why she had gone away, why she was never coming back. Father Bob was nice and patient, but I didn’t care to hear anything about Hannah’s chosen life.
“Carolina,” Father Bob said. “It was God’s will that Hannah go to the Sisters of Grace. It was God’s will that I become a priest. That’s how vocation works.”
The word “vocation” made me want to barf. To me it was a synonym for “prison,” for a particular kind of abandonment. I hadn’t seen much of the world at that point, but I knew it was full of things I wanted. I knew I would want a boyfriend, and eventually a husband, maybe a couple of kids. I knew I would want a house and a yard and a dog—I wanted the dog most of all at that age. I knew Hannah couldn’t have those things, and it was bizarre to me that she would give it all up. At one time, I believed that Hannah hadn’t chosen to leave, that
she’d been taken, but that was only when I was very young.