Her Name in the Sky (38 page)

She brings a trash bin, too, and the two of them sit on the bed, Baker under the blankets and Hannah next to her feet, both of them blowing their noses and wiping their eyes, until, after each of them has gone through five tissues, they both start to laugh.

“
Now
you don’t look like a prom queen,” Hannah says.

Baker smiles like Hannah is the greatest person in the world.

“What do we do now?” Hannah asks.

Baker casts her red, puffy eyes to the hospital blanket. Her left eyebrow creases downward, and Hannah knows she is thinking.

“We need some time,” she says.

“Time?”

Baker picks at a snag on the blanket. Her eyebrow is still creased in thought. “There’s a lot I need to think about. A lot I need to figure out about myself.”

Hannah’s heart sinks. “I thought—I thought everything that happened—”

Baker pulls Hannah’s fingers into her hand. “I’m not trying to run away again,” she says, her eyes unblinking. “I’m not trying to hide. I’m trying to make sure that—that I’m ready. Completely ready. That I’m not scared anymore. If I’m going to be with you, I want to do it right.”

Hannah looks down to their intertwined fingers. She thinks of her shame, of her anger, of her broken friendships.

“I probably need that time, too,” she says.

They rest in silence for a while, just looking at each other. And then Hannah knows it’s time for her to go.

She kisses Baker’s forehead with a lingering, tender kiss. Baker closes her eyes and her face assumes an expression of peace.

“Don’t take too long,” Hannah says.

Baker kisses the back of Hannah’s hand. “I won’t,” she promises.

Hannah’s parents send Joanie to bed when they walk into their silent, unlit house. “We need to speak to Hannah alone,” Hannah’s mom says.

Joanie trudges up the stairs without a word.

“Hannah,” her mom says, gathering her into her arms, “Hannah, my sweet girl—”

Hannah’s tears come in full again. They rush up from her insides with unexpected force, flooding out from her eyes and her mouth before she can stop them. Her dad wraps his arms around her, too, and she closes her eyes and nestles further into her parents’ embrace.

“We’re sorry,” her mom whispers.

“We are,” her dad says.

“I’m sorry,” Hannah says. “I’m sorry for putting you through this—I’m sorry for not telling you—I’m sorry for being the way I am—”

“Don’t you say that,” her mom says, jerking back from her and shaking her shoulders.

“Don’t you ever say that,” her dad says, tears spilling forth from his eyes.

Her mom looks at her straight on, and her expression is resolute. “God knew exactly what He was doing when He created you, Hannah.”

Hannah sobs into her mom’s shoulder, and her dad presses his arms around her again, and as she draws in great, gulping breaths, she wishes desperately that she held the same conviction.

She can’t fall asleep. She turns back and forth beneath her sheets, her mind buzzing with agitation, until she finally climbs out of bed with a yearning to be somewhere else. She dresses in the early morning darkness, tugging an old St. Mary’s pullover over her head.

And just as the sun’s coming up, while the whole world around her is still sleeping through the earliest hours of the morning, she drives to the St. Mary’s chapel. The air is already heavy with heat. The birds are already singing.

She finds a single unlocked door at the back of the chapel. The air inside is stuffy the way it always is in churches: it smells of incense and old ladies’ perfume and long-forgotten books.

She walks behind the half-dozen pews, trailing her hand along the smooth wooden surface where the faithful rest their backs. The chapel is dark, but the early morning sun brings a faint glow to the stained glass windows that decorate the walls.

She chooses a pew near the back. She kneels on the floor the same way she did in the hospital chapel. Words and ideas and questions wrestle with each other in the deepest recesses of her mind.

And then she whispers a word without meaning to.

“Gay.”

She opens her eyes in surprise. She tastes the echo of the word on her tongue, raises her head to the statues of Mary and Joseph to see if they heard. They stare back at her serenely.

“Gay,” she says again, louder this time.

The life-size statue of Mary Magdalene, the one that stands in the corner of the chapel, shimmers with morning sunlight.

“Gay,” Hannah says, her voice at its normal volume now. “Gay.”

The chapel stays silent. The statues do not reprimand her. She raises her eyes to the Crucifix that hangs above the altar and stares beseechingly at it.

“Gay,” she says, her voice swelling in her throat. “Gay! I’m gay!”

The Jesus on the Crucifix stays motionless. His face stays anguished.

“Did you hear me?!” Hannah says, shouting now. “I’m gay! I’m gay!”

A door shuts behind her, and Hannah spins around in her pew, terrified.

Ms. Carpenter stands frozen just inside the chapel door, her eyebrows pulled high in surprise. She drops her hand from the door and the hint of a smile shows on her face. “Hi, Hannah,” she says.

Hannah grips the top of her pew, her muscles rigid with astonishment. “Hi,” she says. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m here to pray. There’s usually no one else here this early.” She steps into the heart of the chapel and scrutinizes Hannah. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” Hannah says, nodding her head fast.

Ms. Carpenter smiles in a way that means she doesn’t believe her. She genuflects on the stone floor and slides into the pew behind Hannah. Hannah sits breathlessly, still stunned at the sight of her teacher.

“Everyone missed you after you left,” Hannah says, the words tumbling out of her mouth.

Ms. Carpenter smiles sadly. “I missed all of you, too. It was really hard to leave.”

“I’m sorry I lost you your job.”

“You didn’t lose me my job.”

“But if…if it hadn’t been for that e-mail, they wouldn’t have been able to fire you.”

“They would have found a way sooner or later. I knew as soon as I read the e-mail that something like this would probably happen, but what was there to do? There is no way in the world I could not have responded to that e-mail. Or that I could not have done something during Father Simon’s homily that day.”

“But you loved it here.”

“I did,” Ms. Carpenter says, nodding. She clears her throat. “But I’ll love it somewhere else, too. And this isn’t about me. This is about something much bigger. You know what I mean?”

“Yeah.”

“How are things with you, Hannah?”

Hannah shifts her eyes away. She prepares to tell Ms. Carpenter that things are fine, that she’s getting along okay, but a different answer comes out instead.

“Things have been pretty bad,” she says. The words taste honest, but she’s surprised to find there’s nothing frightening about them.

Ms. Carpenter stares intently at her. “So I heard. Mrs. Shackleford called me.”

“She called you?”

“Late last night, when she was on her way to the hospital.”

“Why didn’t you come?”

“You were in good hands, and I didn’t want to make the situation any worse. I figured I’d come here instead.”

“Did you come to pray for us?”

“I’m always praying for you all.” She pauses. “Hannah. Are you okay?”

Hannah’s throat starts to swell, but she takes a long breath and invites the calm of the chapel to wash over her. Ms. Carpenter waits patiently, and when Hannah turns in the pew to face her, she finds a compassionate expression on her teacher’s face.

“Can I tell you the story?” Hannah asks.

“Of course,” Ms. Carpenter says, more breath than voice.

Hannah tells the story haphazardly, parenthesizing her feelings and speaking quickly through the parts where Michele hit her and threw the beer. The whole while, she feels her emotions building in her chest, staying with her until she reaches the part where Baker joined her at the edge of the yard. Then her words start to feel insufficient and she wishes there was a way she could color the feelings inside of her, outlining them so they’re easier to see, highlighting details like Baker’s scared eyes and the texture of the dirt under her hands while she crawled down to her.

Ms. Carpenter’s expression does not change the whole time. She sits absolutely still, her eyebrows turned down and her hands folded in her lap. When Hannah finishes talking, Ms. Carpenter bows her head and closes her eyes for a long moment.

“Ms. Carpenter?”

Ms. Carpenter’s shoulders rise with a breath. Behind her, the sunlight grows stronger in the windows. “The unnecessary pain of this whole thing,” she says finally. “It kills me.”

Hannah waits for her to elaborate. She doesn’t.

“I’ve been wondering,” Hannah says, “if the pain—if the pain
is
necessary.”

Ms. Carpenter blinks as if coming out of a daydream. “Hm?”

“I just—I just keep coming back to this same question—I just keep worrying—What if I
am
wrong? What if there
is
something wrong with me? I mean, look at everything that’s happened. Look at what happened to you. Look at—look at what happened to Baker.”

“Pain isn’t always a reflection of what’s right or wrong, Hannah.”

“But if things were different, if I was
straight
, then there wouldn’t be any of this pain. You’d be okay, Baker would be okay, I would be okay. Ms. Carpenter, I just feel—I feel so lost. I can’t tell what’s right or wrong anymore. I can’t figure out the truth. I wish so badly that I could find Jesus, or God, or whatever—I just wish I could find him in the park or something, and sit down with him on the grass and
ask
him what I’m supposed to do. Or why any of this happened. I wish I could look into his face and say, ‘Why do I have these feelings in my heart? Are they bad? Why does everyone say they’re bad? And if they are bad, why did you make me like this?’”

Ms. Carpenter swallows. She clears her throat. “And what do you think he would say?”

“I don’t
know
,” Hannah says. She can feel the telltale signs that she is about to cry. “Everything Father Simon said at Mass—everything people say about Adam and Eve and what God intended for our relationships—how do I know what to believe?”

She takes a rattling breath, but it’s not enough to stop her from crying. Ms. Carpenter brings her a box of tissues from the back of the chapel, and Hannah dabs at her eyes and nose until she gets her breathing under control. “I’m sorry,” she says awkwardly.

“Don’t be,” Ms. Carpenter says, taking the box back from her, sniffling and using a tissue herself. “Someone needs to use these old tissues.”

Hannah laughs gratefully.

“Hannah,” Ms. Carpenter says, peering curiously at her, “why did you take the blame for that e-mail?”

Hannah crumples a tissue between her fingers. “Because I wrote it.”

“We both know that’s not true.”

A beat of silence passes, and Hannah looks away.

“I was trying to—to protect—”

“Protect Baker?”

“I—well—”

“It’s okay,” Ms. Carpenter says kindly. “I know she wrote it. She came and talked to me about it, as I’m sure you no doubt heard from Michele.” 

“What did you say to her?”

Ms. Carpenter’s face lifts with a small smile. “That’s between us. I’m sure Baker will tell you when she’s ready. But you wanted to protect her? Why?”

“Because—well, because I didn’t want her to get hurt. Because I could tell how scared she was.”

“And you weren’t scared?”

“No, I was, but I wasn’t really thinking about it. All I could think about was her.”

“Why?”

“Because,” Hannah says, her heart pounding with the answer, “I love her.”

Sunlight illuminates the smile on Ms. Carpenter’s face. “It’s amazing,” she says, folding her tissue over in her palm, “the things we’ll do when we love another person.”

Hannah swallows. “But I still don’t know whether that love is good or bad.”

Ms. Carpenter turns her head and squints at the altar. Her sharp, dark eyebrows draw together the way they do when she’s unearthing the heart of a novel. “You mentioned Adam and Eve,” she says, her eyes narrowing further and further. “Which is pretty perfect for this conversation, since they represent both love and sin.”

Hannah follows Ms. Carpenter’s line of sight toward the altar, but she finds she can’t look steadily at it. “And how do I—how do I know which one I’m playing into?”

“Oh, I think we’re always playing into both,” Ms. Carpenter says easily. “That’s what makes us human, right? Now look—I’m not a Creationist, Hannah. I don’t believe the story of Genesis is supposed to be taken literally at all. I think humanity, at the moment—I think we’re trapping ourselves in the story of Adam and Eve. That we’re getting too caught up in the specifics and forgetting the larger meaning of the story.”