The Opposite of Hallelujah (37 page)

“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 what?” 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.”

He shrugged. “Well, that’s science.”

“Actually,” I said, “didn’t someone once say that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results?”

He smiled. Now that I’d gathered all my fallen things back into my bag, I’d started walking down the hall toward the doors, and Father Bob had fallen comfortably into step beside me.

“That was Einstein,” Father Bob said. “But that only really counts when you’re actually running the same experiment over and over again. Eventually, you did something different—you did something right—and you succeeded. Do you feel insane?”

“All the time,” I sighed, glancing back toward my sister’s room.

“I’m sorry about Hannah,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said. “Me too.”

“Have you gotten a chance to speak to her?” Father Bob asked.

I nodded. “We had a long talk. She told me all about Sabra.”

“That’s good,” he said. “It appears she’s been carrying the weight of that tragedy around for a long time. People who are grieving become like whirlpools, Caro. Everything becomes dissolved into ceaseless orbit around them, sucked in and destroyed by the pain they’re experiencing. Do you remember what I told you about how being a contemplative nun requires a complete obliteration of the ego?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Hanging on to that sort of guilt and ceaselessly punishing yourself for it is an act of ego,” Father Bob said. “It requires an extreme amount of focus on the self. If it can’t be overcome, if a person can’t forgive herself, it can stop her from really opening herself up to God. At the end of the day, Hannah was probably too young still to enter the convent when she did. She needed more time to come to terms with her loss.”

“She was twelve,” I said. I sounded pathetic, whiney, but I felt like a hurricane was raging inside me, ripping up trees and houses and playground equipment and tossing them up into a roaring maelstrom of sorrow. “She watched her friend die. I don’t understand how your God could let such a thing happen. How
could
he?”

Father Bob took my arm and steered me into a less
public corner. “It doesn’t really work like that,” he said softly. “If he reached down and plucked every human from the brink of death, the universe would collapse. It’s built this way for a reason.”

“Don’t you dare try to bulldoze me again with that ‘perfect system’ crap,” I cried. “Fuck duality. Do you know how much it hurts to see her wasting away in this horrible place? It
hurts
. What sort of a loving God would create a world where children fall into wells and freeze to death? What sort of a loving God would create a world where the one person who desperately needs comfort is shut out completely?”

“Listen to me,” he said sternly. “God never left Hannah. It was
she
who shut
him
out. She looked for him in a physical place and neglected her spirit because she was so afraid of what she might find if she searched for him there. She was so terrified that he had left her, or that he had never existed at all, that she closed her eyes and hid from the world he created for all of us. That is not a way to seek God.”

“She worked so hard for all those years, praying and sacrificing so that he would comfort her and he did
nothing
!” I insisted.

“She prayed, yes. She worked, yes. But she wasn’t open. She took all of her pain and stuffed it inside of her as a punishment for Sabra’s death. That is not a path to God. Forgiveness must be asked for by someone who
believes they deserve it. Hannah didn’t believe that—I suspect she still doesn’t. No amount of prayer can remove the guilt she burdens herself with,” he said. “Your great strength is your openness. You
listen
. You believe. Maybe you didn’t believe in God before, and maybe now you’re angry with him. But that doesn’t change the fact that you can
see
. Hannah can’t. You have to be her eyes.”

“But I don’t want to be her eyes,” I protested. “I want him to give her sight.”

Father Bob shook his head. “I wish you knew how important it is for you to comfort her, to relieve her pain just by listening to her story and assuring her she’s not at fault. You don’t understand yet how things that seem so small and insignificant to you can change everything.”

“I can’t help her,” I said. “That’s the worst part.”

“You
are
helping her. You are, I promise you that. But Hannah needs more help than just you can provide. Her darkness is so strong and so vast. She needs more light.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

Father Bob shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s your job to figure it out.”

I sighed. “She really never told anyone, I don’t think,” I said. “And never talked about it with anybody who already knew. I really can’t imagine that. I can hardly keep my mouth shut most of the time.”

“Well, you don’t know how you’d react if this had
happened to you,” Father Bob said, holding the door open for me.

“True,” I said. “Hannah says that when Sabra died, she lost her connection to God. Why do you think that is?”

“It’s impossible to know,” Father Bob said. “Hannah’s faith and her connection to God are extremely personal.”

“Have you ever lost your faith?”

Father Bob took a deep breath and stared down the hallway, linking his hands together behind his back as we continued to walk. “More than once,” he admitted after a short pause.

“Really?” I couldn’t hide my surprise.

“It’s the risk you run when you think about God, or spirituality, or the self, or the universe, in a serious way,” Father Bob told me. “No one who is deeply considering every angle and facet of their faith has complete conviction in their beliefs. But doubt can also take over in times of despair or confusion, and that’s what happened to me. We call it the dark night of the soul, although, for me, it was many nights.”