The Opposite of Hallelujah (32 page)

“Come on, Caro, get in here!” Mom called.

“Just a second.” I was putting the finishing touches on my gift for Hannah. I’d figured out what to get her only at the last second, after weeks of surfing the Internet and prowling through the aisles at every store in town. Hannah didn’t seem to need or want anything, and every time I tried to get her to give me a hint, she shrugged off the subject. It was clear that the whole concept of gift giving made Hannah a little uneasy. Father Bob told me that in the convent, she wouldn’t have gotten
any Christmas presents. “They celebrate Christmas in a far less traditional way than most,” he’d told me. “Or, I should say, more traditional. It’s less about gifts, and more about thanks and celebration.”

I really wanted to get her something that she would like and appreciate, but like I said, perfect gifts for Hannah were thin on the ground. But as I was thinking about Father Bob, and what he’d said about Hannah and Christmas, I started to get an idea. I found what I was looking for online and had it overnighted so it would get to our house on time for us to open presents, post-Mass and post-brunch.

“Okay, okay, I’m ready,” I said, rushing into the family room, my gift for Hannah tucked underneath my arm. I set it down under the tree and flopped down on the couch next to my mother, who curled her arm around my shoulder.

“First, pictures,” Mom said.

I groaned. “I hate taking pictures,” I said. I was the least photogenic person on the planet. There was literally only one good picture ever taken of me, and it was my fourth-grade school photo. My parents had it blown up and framed, they loved it so much. As no other picture of me had ever gotten such treatment, I couldn’t look at that one, propped on the mantel with Hannah’s far-superior high school graduation photo, without feeling insulted.

“Too bad,” Mom sang. “Evan, can you set the timer on the camera?”

It took Dad almost fifteen minutes to figure out how to do that, and by then I was getting squirmy and annoyed. I was worried about how Hannah would like my gift, and I wanted her to open it
right then
so I could see her reaction. I wasn’t very good about being patient, and I loved giving presents. Something about watching someone’s face light up when they opened the absolute best gift they’d ever gotten made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

Finally, Dad came and squeezed in between me and the arm of the sofa. Hannah was on Mom’s other side, sporting her traditional blank expression. It was going to take the most amazing surprise ever to get that mountain to move, and I began to suspect my present wasn’t going to get more than the briefest smile out of her.

Five flashes later, I was sitting under the tree, passing out perfectly wrapped presents. That was my job, every year. When I was nine, the year after Hannah left, my mother made me a little felt cap that said “Santa’s Little Helper” on it in gold glitter paint. I wore it every year, way after I was old enough to know how dorky it made me look. It was just me and my family, after all. But when we were unpacking boxes of decorations that year, I left it tucked away under a pile of ornaments. For some reason, wearing it seemed like too much of an inside joke, one that Hannah wasn’t going to get.

I left my present for Hannah for last. By the time I handed it to her, we were all surrounded by torn wrapping paper, multicolored tissue, and other holiday flotsam and jetsam, as well as new perfume, books, DVDs, various electronic gadgets, and sweaters with the tags on. She accepted it gratefully, if a bit nervously. She carefully peeled the bright red wrapping paper off a large black-and-white coffee table book with Escher’s
Waterfall
printed on the jacket.

Hannah looked at me with slight confusion. “Caro, what …?”

“It’s a book of Escher prints,” I told her. “You know Escher.”

She shook her head.

“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. For 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?”