The Opposite of Hallelujah (29 page)

“Is this your sister? Of course she is, you can see it in her face. Amanda,” she said, offering her hand for me to shake. I took it because I didn’t know what else to do, but something inside me rankled as she said her name again, and when our palms touched, I knew why—
Amanda Brenner
. Hannah’s middle school torturer, from the letters to St. Catherine I had read not long before. It was hard to imagine this woman, a bit harried but obviously wealthy and well put together, as a child of twelve, but it was completely believable that she had been a mean one.

“Caro,” I said.

“And you’re what? Eighteen?” Amanda asked.

“Sixteen,” I said.

“Oh, God, sixteen!” Amanda laughed again. There was a manic edge to it, probably the result of being a young mother with two children, one of whom was still squalling intermittently from the carrier while the other
was doggedly attempting to put every single block in the little toy chest into his mouth. Not that Amanda seemed to notice either of these things, but maybe it was like ambient noise to her by now. “Is it possible we were ever that young, Hannah? It seems like a lifetime ago.”

“Amanda, I’m sorry—”

“I just can’t believe I’m running into you here of all places. Are you a patient of Dr. Willett’s?” She didn’t wait for Hannah to respond before barreling forward with her relentless questioning. “Isn’t she the best? I’ve been working with her to lose some of this baby weight. It’s totally true what they say, it just falls off with the first one and after the second one it sticks to you like glue!”

“I’m a patient of Dr. Adrian’s,” Hannah said. Amanda didn’t react to that; I highly doubted she was even listening.

“So
what
have you been
up
to these days?” Amanda asked, tilting her head like a cocker spaniel. “Are you married? Kids?”

“No, I—” Hannah didn’t want to explain it, and I wanted to help her, to save her from having to give this woman access to any part of her life at all, but I didn’t know what to say to stop it.

“Oh, wait, I think I heard something about …” Hannah stiffened as Amanda searched for the most diplomatic way to put it. “A convent? Is that right?” She said the word “convent” in a hushed tone, as if it was a dirty word she was hoping her little ones wouldn’t pick up.

Hannah nodded.

“So you were a nun?” Amanda pressed. I started to see the meanness in her. She wasn’t stupid; she saw Hannah’s reaction to her for what it was. She looked frivolous, but I could tell that she was shrewd and her questions weren’t as innocent as they appeared. “Are you out now? What was that like?”

“I—” She was trying her hardest, but Hannah couldn’t grab on to the magic words, the ones that would make Amanda disappear.

I dug into my pocket and brought out my cell phone, pressing it hard against my ear. “You’re outside, Mom? Okay,
okay
. We’re coming! Sorry.” I turned to Hannah. “That was Mom, she’s been waiting at the curb for ten minutes and she’s really annoyed.” I flashed a cold smile at Amanda. “God, you’d think it was some big emergency or something.”

“I didn’t hear a phone ring,” Amanda said, reaching down to pat her son’s head as he slammed his little fists into her kneecap.

“It was on vibrate. Nice to meet you, Amanda. Good luck with that baby weight,” I said spitefully. I took Hannah’s hand and dragged her past Amanda to the door. “Oh, and I think your kid just spit something up. Take care!”

Hannah didn’t speak until we were in the elevator on the way to the building’s main lobby. She released a long breath and smiled at me gratefully.

“Thanks, Caro,” she said. “I just—I
hate
that girl.”

“Yeah, she’s totally awful,” I said.

“She was really mean to me when we were kids, and then she acts like—Well, it’s fine. It’s over. I just wish I’d said something better than ‘um’ and ‘I’m sorry’ over and over again,” Hannah said, closing her eyes and leaning her head against the wall. “But when I saw her, it was like I was twelve, you know?”

I nodded. “What I find particularly disconcerting is the fact that she’s breeding.”

Hannah smiled. “I appreciate you getting me out of there. I was practically rooted to the floor.”

“It’s all right,” I said. “I’ve got your back.”

“I know you do.”

When we got home, Hannah told Mom that she wasn’t going to see Dr. Adrian anymore.

“Why not?” Mom asked. “I thought you liked her.”

“She was fine,” Hannah said. “But I’m not going back.”

“You can’t just not go back! You haven’t even
done
anything yet,” Mom said. “How do you expect to get better if you won’t work at it?”

“I’m
fine
,” Hannah insisted. “I only went because you wanted me to. I don’t need help and I don’t need to work on anything.”

“That’s just not true,” Mom said. She darted her eyes at me, as if she was considering asking me to leave the
room, but then she sighed in resignation and said nothing. “You’re—you need help, Hannah. You’re not well.”

“I’m not sick,” Hannah shot back.

“I know you saw that girl in the office today,” Mom said. “And I know she rattled you, but if you don’t stop, you’re going to become like her and I—we can’t bear to see that happen to you, Hannah, we just can’t.”

“I am not that girl!” Hannah shouted. It was almost too much to believe, the way nervousness and fear had transformed Hannah. I felt as though I was watching a movie, actors who looked a lot like my family playing out an impossible scene. It was almost Escheresque, with how familiar and yet completely unreal it felt.

“You’re right, Hannah,” Mom said bitterly. “You’re not that girl. Because
that girl
is trying to get some kind of help, and you refuse to even acknowledge that you have a problem. And that’s what scares me. I feel as though you’re slipping through our fingers, sweetheart.” Her voice trembled, and it occurred to me that I might, for the third time in my life, see my mother cry. I considered leaving immediately; that was something I didn’t want to see, as if it might break some sort of spell or truce and bring the whole world tumbling down.

“I couldn’t bear to lose you,” Mom told Hannah, who refused now even to look at her. “Not again.”

Hannah stood abruptly. “I’m going for a walk,” she said, although I’m not sure who she was telling, since she
seemed to be speaking not to either of us but at some phantom in the distance. “I don’t want anybody to follow me.” She whisked her jacket off the back of her chair and stormed into the hallway, where she startled Dad, who was coming in to see what all the commotion was about.

“Hannah, how was—” he said after her, but I cut him off. Hannah disappeared into the garage and, I assume, out into the neighborhood, though by then dark had already fallen.

“Not now, Dad.”

“What’s going on?” he asked Mom, who just shook her head and took off in the other direction, toward the stairs and her bedroom. A moment later we heard a door slam upstairs. Dad turned to me with an expression of utter confusion. “What did I say?”

“Nothing,” I told him. He sat down at the table across from me and I reached over to pat his hand. He slipped his fingers through mine and squeezed.

“You know, Caro,” Dad said, “sometimes I think that loving you and your sister is the only thing I’ve ever really known how to do. But there’s always that question—is it enough? I used to think it was, but I’m not so sure anymore.”

I smiled at him and squeezed his hand back. “I’m going to get a glass of lemonade,” I told him. “You want one?”

“You bet, kiddo,” he said. “Thanks a million.”

“You’re welcome,” I said.

Dad went upstairs to try to talk to Mom, and I waited for Hannah in the family room, but she didn’t come back for a while and I was starting to worry. When she had been gone over an hour, I crept upstairs to see if my parents thought I should take the car and go looking for her. I was about to knock, but the sound of my mother’s sobbing made me freeze.

“This is our fault, Evan,” she cried. I could hear my father making soft
shhh
sounds, probably rubbing her back.

“Don’t say that,” he replied calmly as she hitched in a breath. “We did what we thought was best for Hannah given what we knew at the time. What other choice did we have?”

“We should have gotten her some real help,” Mom said.

“We did get her help,” he told her.

“No. That grief counselor the church sent us to said she was processing everything well, but she wasn’t,” Mom insisted. “We saw it, but we didn’t want to believe it, so we let her just carry on like that for
years
.”

“She was already religious before,” Dad reminded Mom.
Before what?
I thought, then I flashed back to the
letters—Sabra. Was that really what all this was about? Mom and Dad seemed to think so. But what had happened to Sabra? And how had my sister been involved? I felt guilty for eavesdropping, especially since I knew without a doubt that if my parents knew I was hearing their conversation, they would not be having it, but I couldn’t tear myself away. Here was my chance to get some real, albeit cryptic, information about Hannah and I wasn’t just going to give that up because of a little moral ambiguity.

“She might have gone into the convent anyway,” Dad said. Mom’s crying had abated a little; all I was hearing from her now were sniffles. She seemed to have cried herself out. “You don’t know it’s because of Sabra.”

“I know,” she said. “A mother knows. Look what she did to herself in there. Our baby, Evan. Every time I look at her I just want to burst into tears.”

“Me too,” he said. “Me too.”

“And Caro!” I jumped at my name, thinking for a split second that Mom knew, in the way she knew all sorts of things it made no sense for her to know, that I was behind the door. “Caro is so confused. That’s why she’s acting out. She deserves to know the truth. We shouldn’t be keeping secrets from each other.”

“But Hannah doesn’t want to talk about it,” Dad pointed out. “And it’s Hannah’s decision. You said so yourself. It’s her life.”

“We’re a family,” Mom said. “We shouldn’t be lying to each other, we should be taking care of each other.”

“That’s what we’re doing,” Dad told her gently. “It’s just not as easy as it was when they were babies.”

It was as if someone had put a hook through my chest. I’d had no idea how hard everything was on my parents. I guessed when you were someone’s kid, you liked to believe that they had all the answers to all the problems in the world. To hear them casting about for some sort of absolution, some sort of comfort, in the face of all the obstacles they were dealing with gave me a sense of alarming insecurity.

I heard the mechanical growl of the garage door as it opened and shut, and the sounds of my parents shuffling around in their room, probably preparing to come out of it. I sprinted down the stairs and threw myself onto the couch, spreading the pages of
The Crucible
and pretending to read it as Hannah walked into the family room and so did my parents. Mom had cleaned herself up; she and Dad were wearing identical tight smiles. Hannah’s face was all splotchy and red; it was cold at night now, and the wind was blowing madly through the trees.

Mom glanced at the clock. “You’ve been gone for a long time, Hannah. Weren’t you freezing?”

Hannah shrugged. “It’s not that bad.”

“How about we order pizza for dinner?” Mom suggested. “I don’t feel like cooking.”

“Sounds good to me,” I said. The events of the afternoon had wound me up so much I hadn’t realized until Mom said the word “pizza” that I was starving. My stomach growled to second the motion.

“Hannah?” Mom said it like a challenge, but Hannah didn’t rise to it. She just shrugged again.

“That’s fine,” she said, turning to leave. “I’ll be up in my room.”

“How’s the homework coming along, Caro?” Dad asked, putting a hand on Mom’s shoulder.

“Good,” I told him. “You don’t have to worry about me, Dad.”

“Happy to hear it, kiddo,” he said. “Happy to hear it.”

20

The cold war between Mom and Hannah continued unabated for days. Hannah wouldn’t agree to go back to the nutritionist, but I casually suggested to Mom that maybe it wasn’t about not wanting to work on her health, but instead about that particular nutritionist (
or
, I added silently to myself,
her other patients, one mean-girl blast from the past in particular
), and she agreed to look into other options.

On Friday right after last period, I heard a familiar voice shout my name from across the crowded hallway. I turned and saw Derek striding toward me.

“Oh, hey,” I said. We hadn’t talked much since school started; he’d sort of faded into the periphery when Pawel and I started hanging out, and since we didn’t share any classes, it was easy to lose track of him. “What’s up?”

“Nothing,” he said, shrugging. “Are you coming to my party tomorrow night?”

To my relief, Derek’s party, the one I had agonized about going to and then decided not to attend after I found out Pawel was going with Briana, had been canceled because his parents had decided not to go out of town. I figured it was the universe’s way of rewarding me for taking the high road, but apparently it was just the universe’s way of playing a nasty practical joke. I was not amused.