The Opposite of Hallelujah (43 page)

“You have a ton on your mind, with Hannah and school and everything,” Pawel said. “I don’t want to make things harder for you. But I want you to know that if you have any feelings for me at all, I’m right here. I’ve never liked someone so much before.”

“Me neither,” I admitted.

He sighed. “That’s a relief. I was half afraid that you were going to tell me you were back together with Derek.”

“You were not,” I said.

“Well, no, not really,” Pawel said. “But, ugh, running into you guys at his party was my least favorite moment in recent memory. I just wanted to be sure.…”

I kissed him lightly. “You can be sure. Derek and I are—”

“Just friends?” Pawel supplied hesitantly.

“Less than,” I assured him. “Reasonably polite acquaintances.”

“I can live with that,” he said, kissing me back. We kissed each other for a long time, giving in to the
headiness of being able to touch each other without apologizing, or feeling awkward, or trying too hard to be casual. I loved the sensation of his skin under mine, the downy soft hairs on his arm standing up as I ran my fingers over it, causing a ripple of goose bumps. It was the best feeling in the world, the feeling of finally starting to understand what sharing pieces of yourself was all about.

“I promise,” I said. “I’ll never lie to you again.”

“I know,” he murmured, covering my mouth with another kiss.

31

Hannah left for Colorado the next morning. She called me for one last short chat before I went to school.

“I’m scared,” she told me, a tremor rippling through her voice.

“Me too,” I said. “But you’re going to be okay. Everything’s going to be okay.”

“Karolcia,” he whispered in my ear. “Are you all right?”

“What?” We were in French class, but Madame was
out sick, so we had a sub who smelled like onion dip and spoke no French—therefore, it was silent work time. We were supposed to be writing our next essay, or reading Camus’s
L’etranger
, or studying for our final, but I was too busy staring into space. After school, my parents were picking me up and we were going to the airport together to meet Hannah. She’d been at the rehab facility for three months, and my thoughts were consumed by what she might look like, what she might
be
like. I might have found out Hannah’s secret, but I still didn’t know her very well, and after ninety days’ separation, I was starting to fear that I’d hallucinated any feeling of closeness I might’ve shared with her in those last weeks before she left.

Really, it’d been like she’d gone back to the convent. We only got occasional letters from her, since she was forbidden contact with us for the first month, and then allowed only sporadic correspondence and even rarer phone calls. The point was to separate her from all her “triggers,” which I guess meant us, our house, our life, and any reminders of who she’d been or what she’d been through. I got clearance to send the Escher book I’d given Hannah for Christmas, though, which made me feel a little less helpless.

Pawel knew all this, of course. He’d even offered to come with me that afternoon, but I’d said no. It was a family thing. Part of me was looking at this as an opportunity
to start fresh with my sister again; I’d been detached and disinterested at the train station nine months earlier, but this time I was going to be positive and upbeat and thrilled to see her. This I vowed.

Since Hannah had gone to the rehab facility, I’d stepped up my visits to Father Bob. I was going to see him at least once a week now, sometimes more. I’d always meet him at his office, but most of the time we walked two blocks to a Starbucks that’d just opened, and every once in a while on a Sunday, we’d have brunch at a diner just up the road after Mass. One time, I even went to Mass, but only because I knew Pawel was going. I sat with his family and we held hands and I thought of Hannah and Sabra and actually found it in me to pray for both of them, in my way—even though “my way” consisted of talking to God like I would talk to Reb on the phone.

I turned around now to see Pawel twirling a pencil between his fingers. I could tell from his expression that he was mildly concerned.

“I’m fine,” I told him. He raised his eyebrows. “I
am
. I’m just thinking about Hannah. I’m worried.”

“I can tell,” he said. “It’s going to be okay, though. Everything’s going to be okay.”

Those were practically the exact words I’d said before Hannah had left, and for some reason that made me feel calmer. Sometimes, Pawel would say things that made
me think that the universe was speaking through him or something, but then I would realize that he was just
listening
to me, filing away the things that interested me or made me feel better, and then reminding me of them when I seemed uneasy. I couldn’t imagine what the past three months would’ve been like without him. Reb and Erin were great friends to me, but I felt weird about putting all this Hannah stuff on them. But Pawel, he’d been there, had taken me to the hospital the night Hannah collapsed and had comforted me when I was scared, and it’d tied us together. It was such a great connection that I was terrified I was going to blow it, but so far, so good.

“What if she’s still sick?” I asked him. The sub cleared her throat and threw us a nasty look, but I ignored her.

“You can’t expect miracles,” Pawel said. “There are going to be things she needs to work through long term. You’ve been saying that yourself for months.”

“I know,” I said. “I wish she had talked to Father Bob before she left.”

“Maybe she will one day,” Pawel said. “The cool thing about not knowing who’s going to walk off that plane is that there’s a pretty good possibility it’s going to be a healthier, happier Hannah than the one who got on it, Father Bob or no Father Bob.”

“Yeah,” I said. “You’re right.”

“No,
you’re
right,” he said, smiling. “These are all things you’ve said before. Just try not to forget them when you’re wigging out in the car later.”

“I’m not going to wig out,” I protested.

“Definitely, you definitely are,” he said, lifting a piece of hair out of my eyes with the eraser end of his pencil. “And when you do, just text me, and I’ll remind you. Deal?” He stuck out his hand.

“Deal,” I said, taking it and giving it a nice, firm shake.

I ended up ducking out of my last class early. I just couldn’t sit there any longer, being lectured at about Pearl Harbor ad nauseam. I found World War II to be an exhausting topic, even on days when I wasn’t nervous about something. I wasn’t paying attention on my way through the main corridor, and I ran smack into this girl I vaguely knew from some swim team parties Reb had invited me to. Her name was Paris, or Perrier, or something.

“Sorry,” I said. I looked to my right and saw that we were standing directly beneath
Waste
, the hideous painting Pawel and I had discussed when we’d first started getting to know each other. The memory of it made me smile.

“It’s no problem,” Paris or Perrier chirped. She bent down and I realized I’d made her drop whatever she’d been holding. The floor was covered with custom-printed postcards advertising some big end-of-the-year art show. I bent down to help her pick them up.

“You coming to the exhibition?” she asked.

“Oh, I, um—” I turned one of the cards over and saw what was on the front—Escher’s
Waterfall
. Or, well, it was sort of Escher’s
Waterfall
. It was the same image, but instead of a drawing, it was a photo of the lithograph built entirely of Lego.

Which, as you might imagine, is physically impossible.

“What’s this?” I asked Perrie. (Seeing
Waterfall
had sent a jolt through my brain that had released her name from it like a marble in one of Pawel’s Rube Goldberg machines.)

“Isn’t it cool?” She grinned. “It’s from this series called
Almost Impossible
. This guy brought all of these Escher drawings into 3-D using Legos and took pictures of them. Do you know M. C. Escher?”

“A little, yeah,” I said. I really couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I kept looking at the picture and it would seem perfectly normal, and then my mind would scream,
But it’s impossible! It can’t exist in real life
! “Is this Photo-shopped?”

Perrie nodded. “I guess it would have to be, wouldn’t it? I think that’s why it’s the pictures that are being displayed, not the sculptures. Some of them require very precise perspectives to work, or I guess Photoshop in this case.”

“Makes sense,” I said.

“Still,” Perrie said. “It’s pretty cool.”

“Totally,” I said.

“So … are you going to come to the show?” Perrie asked. She looked a little desperate, in the eyes. “I’m sort of the PR person, even though I don’t have any pieces in the show. I hate to see the artists do all this work and then have nobody turn up to look at it, you know?”

“When is it?” I asked.

“Tomorrow night at seven,” she told me, relaxing a little. She must’ve thought she had me on the hook.

“I think I’ll be there,” I said. I waved the postcard at her. “Can I keep this?”

“Yes! Take as many as you want,” she said, shoving a small stack in my general direction. “I have tons.”

“I’ll take one more, then,” I told her, smiling. “Good luck spreading the word.”

“Thanks.”

When Perrie was gone, I pulled out my cell phone, dialed the St. Robert’s rectory, and asked for Father Bob.

“Hi, Caro,” he said. “What’s going on? Aren’t you supposed to be in school?”

“Mom and Dad are picking me up to go get Hannah in a few minutes, so I cut out early,” I told him. I knew he probably didn’t approve of skiving off class, but he didn’t lecture me.

“Is everything okay?” he asked.

“Everything’s fine,” I said. “Father Bob, do you believe in signs?”

“Be more specific.”

“Like, signs. From You-Know-Who.”

“You mean signs from God?” Father Bob sighed. He didn’t like it when I talked about God like he was Lord Voldemort, which I guess is understandable.

“Yeah.”

“Sure, why not?” Father Bob said. “I think that the universe”—he knew I was more receptive when he said “the universe” instead of the G word, but we had a tacit agreement that the terms were interchangeable, at least as far as our powwows went—“has many ways of speaking to us, and we need to be open to all of them. That said, don’t go looking for signs as a way of avoiding having to make your own choices. That’s just a cop-out.”

“Noted,” I said, slipping the postcards into my bag. Maybe, if she was up to it, Hannah would want to go with me to see
Almost Impossible
. She more than anyone else I knew would get a real thrill out of seeing such strange worlds brought into the real world—even if it was just in Lego, and even if there was some shady photo manipulation involved. I also had a feeling that Escher would approve. Several of his drawings were of art coming to life.

There’s this Escher called
Reptiles
that I have always loved. In it is another drawing, a tessellation of alligators, and at the edge of the paper one of these creatures crawls out, becomes three-dimensional, and climbs over several
random objects before settling down again into the flat mosaic. I hadn’t known it then, but before Hannah, before Pawel, before Father Bob and Rube Goldberg machines and single-bubble sonoluminescence, my life had been like that tessellation—technically proficient, but flat and lifeless. I didn’t think about my place in the world, I wasn’t brave or creative, and I’m not sure, looking back, if I really believed in anything. I still wasn’t sure
what
, exactly, I believed, but ever since Hannah’s first night in the hospital, when I’d prayed for her and me and us all, I’d been feeling this stirring in my heart that told me that I wasn’t alone, even when I was by myself. That something
—someone
—was there, if only to listen. And in return, I was trying my best to listen, too.

I saw Dad’s car swing around the little roundabout where I was waiting. “Gotta go, Father Bob,” I said.

“You take care,” he said. “See you Sunday?”