The Opposite of Hallelujah (16 page)

My mother’s “project” for me was to clean out my bedroom closet. I complained about it for a while, which got me nowhere, then avoided the chore for a bit longer, until Mom threatened to stand in the doorway and watch until I was completely finished. My closet was a total disaster, and I didn’t relish having to sort through several years’ worth of old clothes, school notebooks, and the other flotsam and jetsam that had built up over the years.

The job was dismal until I found where Mom had put Hannah’s things after the great purge. Lots of that stuff got packed up and shoved into various nooks and crannies in the garage, and I unexpectedly unearthed it when I was looking for a place to put my own boxes.

Hannah’s possessions were way more interesting to me than anything I’d ever owned. It was like looking at relics from somebody’s past life. First of all, Hannah was spot-on when she said she’d never failed a test; there was an entire Rubbermaid container full of old homework assignments, pop quizzes, exams, and essays, all with bright red As and sometimes happy faces. There was a whole other box filled with swimming awards, medals and trophies, won in the club team she’d competed on in junior high and her first year of high school.

It was funny to imagine Hannah as part of a team. It made sense that she’d chosen an individual sport, but I knew swimmers: those girls were tight. Reb was one. Maybe she’d never had any friends on the team; maybe that was why she’d quit. Most of the hardware had been awarded for participation or personal bests; she was good, but not a star, especially after she got to high school, which was another possible reason. From the looks of it, Hannah never wanted to be less than perfect at anything. My English teacher would call that her tragic flaw.

Without really understanding why, I felt compelled to go through Hannah’s boxes. I was sure she wouldn’t want me to; maybe that was part of the allure: the idea that if she found out, she would be angry. But I was curious, even if I would never tell anyone that I wanted to know my sister better.

All we had ever wanted was an explanation. When Hannah left, she said that God was calling to her, that she felt it deep in the recesses of her heart, but it never seemed like enough. My mother sobbed on Hannah’s last day at home. I’d never seen my mother cry, never in my whole life. But she cried that day. It was as if Hannah was going to her execution.

There were other things in the cabinet where Hannah’s boxes were stored, including a few old photo albums. I opened the nearest one and started flipping through it, looking for pictures of myself. There was a
whole series of photos I didn’t remember having seen before, images of my parents and me at the Grand Canyon. I couldn’t have been older than three, but I knew it was me, because I was wearing the same outfit as I was in one of the framed pictures Mom had on the mantel in the family room, so Hannah must’ve taken it. I didn’t think we’d ever gone to the Grand Canyon, though.

Mom burst through the door and grabbed a bottle of sparkling water out of the mini-fridge we kept in the garage.

“How’s it going with your closet, Caro?” she asked, narrowing her eyes at me as if she already knew the answer.

“Hey, Mom, when did we go to the Grand Canyon?” I asked her.

She looked confused for a second. “I don’t think we’ve ever taken you there. Dad and I and Hannah went once, when she was little.”

“But look at this picture,” I said, handing it to her. I pointed to myself. “That’s me. That’s my dress.”

She shook her head, handing the picture back. The bottle made a soft
psst
noise as she cracked it open. “That’s Hannah, sweetheart,” she said. “It was her dress first; we kept all her clothes in case we had another girl, and wouldn’t you know it?”

“Mom, that’s me,” I insisted. “I’ve seen pictures of myself at this age before, it looks exactly like me.”

“I know,” she said, patting my head gently. “Keep working; I expect you to be finished by dinner.” She walked into the house, and I replaced the photo album in the cabinet, unsettled by it. I’d never liked being reminded that my family had once existed quite happily without me in it.

I was about to put Hannah’s boxes where I’d found them—after all, it wasn’t
my
responsibility to organize
Hannah’s
things—when I spied a large square shoe box shoved into the back of the cabinet on its side. It was old and battered, not like the labeled Rubbermaid containers the rest of the stuff was stored in, and my interest was piqued. I tugged on it hard and fell back a little on my heels as it came free and landed in my lap.

The box was soft and worn, as if it had been used over and over again for years, and fastened shut with two oversized rubber bands, which broke when I tried to remove them. The top of the box had been elaborately doodled on with Magic Markers; it was mostly just swirls and curlicues, but in one corner there was a beach flanked by two palm trees, with a sun shining brightly above, and in another, in Hannah’s perfect but still somehow childlike penmanship, this quotation:
You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body. —C. S. Lewis
.

I lifted the top of the box and set it down gingerly on an old coffee table that had escaped being sent off to Goodwill during Mom’s last flurry of redecorating. It
was like some kind of time capsule, what Mom called a keepsake box. I had one, too, a plastic container filled with pictures of me and my friends at various points in my life, old assignments from elementary school that Mom deemed “too cute” to throw out, bad kindergarten art projects, and some random postcards I’d accumulated over the years.

For a long time—it seemed like eons—I just sat there, staring but not touching. I’d poked around through Hannah’s other stuff, but there was something about this box, a weird feeling I got while holding it, that told me looking through it would be a violation, like walking through her dreams. But eventually my curiosity won out; I had to see what Hannah thought was worth keeping.

The box was mostly a jumble of old Christmas and birthday cards, most of them from our grandparents or other relatives, aside from one jarring handmade card from me. It was on a piece of white printer paper, folded in half, with a red-and-blue scribble on the front and a green-and-yellow scribble on the inside, underneath which my mother had neatly printed
Happy thirteenth birthday, Hannah. Love, Caro
. There were also a headband with fake pink roses and ribbons glued onto it from when Hannah was a flower girl in someone’s wedding; three rosaries, two plastic ones in blue and pink and a nicer one with wooden beads; a handful of small buttons with smiley faces on them; a Christmas ornament
shaped like a teapot; a Russian nesting doll the size of my thumb; a well-loved pink elephant eraser; three blue ribbons, all with the word
EXCELLENT
! printed on them, which were either too special to go in the box with the rest of the awards or not special enough; a tiny blue origami wishing star; a key chain from Miami, Florida; and a jumble of small notebooks, postcards, and loose sheets of paper taken from what looked like several different notepads and stationery sets.

Okay. That was far enough. I’d seen what sort of things Hannah wanted to keep forever, and as such things normally were, they were entirely sentimental. It was time to put them all back in the box nicely and start working on my closet before Mom caught me avoiding the task and had some kind of stress-induced aneurism.

Except: the papers. More specifically, the notebooks. Like, for example, the top one with the pink plastic cover on which someone had written
HANNAH
with a gold paint pen, embellishing the tips of each letter with little dots. Otherwise it looked like a regular academic notebook, but then why wasn’t it in the box with all Hannah’s old school papers? Was it a diary? A dream journal? Or was it where Hannah kept all her old games of M-A-S-H (not that she seemed the type to play M-A-S-H)? I flipped it open before I could stop myself; the first few pages were blank, but then I found something. A letter. The strangest letter I had ever seen. It was written in a loopy, girlish script.

Dear St. Catherine
,

This morning I went to Mass by myself. Mom and Dad slept in, and Caro’s too young to go without them. So I got a ride with the Dyers from next door. I was afraid they would expect me to sit with them in church, so I pointed to a couple of girls from school sitting in a pew by themselves—they’re sisters, and their parents were in the vestibule talking to Father Greg, who had stuck around from the Mass before, which he had celebrated (I memorized the schedule)—and told Mrs. Dyer that they were my friends and I was going to sit with them. When I was sure the Dyers were settled in one of the front pews, I went to the back corner of the church, the last row, where the stained glass makes a puddle of multicolored light on the floor. I like to be alone at Mass. It helps me drown out everything else and remain attentive to the voice of God
.

I closed the book and scrunched up my face. The book confused me.
Was
it a diary? It read like one, except all she wrote about was Mass. And it was addressed to St. Catherine. When had she even written it? From the handwriting I would have said maybe middle school. Hannah and I had both attended St. Robert’s School, and we as a family belonged to St. Robert’s parish—not St. Catherine’s.

The first entry ended on the observation about Mass.
I turned the page to the next one, hoping to find something a little juicier. It began the same way.

Dear St. Catherine
,

Amanda Brenner told another lie about me today. She told everyone in homeroom that I’m retarded, because I spend so much time with Sister Ruth in the special-needs classroom. She asked me in front of everyone if I was born stupid, or if I had knocked my brains out when I fainted in assembly last year. I tried to explain that I like to help Sister Ruth prepare for her classes, because she’s old and her arthritis hurts her, but everyone just laughed at me. Just because I’m quiet doesn’t mean I’m not smart. But even Ms. Turner treated me like I was dumb until I got a 100 on our first history test, and to make up for it she always says nice things about me to the class when I do well. It sounds like she’s babying me. Amanda Brenner makes fun of me for that, too
.

I could just picture Hannah at twelve, all prepubescent gangly limbs and yellow hair pulled back tightly in a ponytail, sitting alone and silent in a classroom while the mean girls took swings at her. My heart swelled with tenderness and empathy for that young version of my sister as I remembered my own uncomfortable middle school years.

I went through the whole notebook, looking for more letters, but there weren’t any; the rest of it was full of math problems, what looked like scrap paper where she’d worked out her answers, meticulous nonetheless. But I had a strong feeling that wasn’t the last letter, although I couldn’t imagine why she would’ve written them. Keeping a diary was one thing, but correspondence with a saint? That was considerably weirder, though it did seem like something Hannah might do.

I sifted slowly through some of the other papers. There were several of those little Valentine’s Day cards your parents made you write out to everybody, a bookmark with sleeping cats on it and a bead shaped like a ball of yarn fastened to the end of a tassel, old Metra tickets from trips into the city, American Red Cross first aid and CPR certification cards, assorted movie tickets, and two pages torn from a “Psalm a Day” desk calendar. On the back of May 17, 1997, Psalm 4, there was another letter:

Dear St. Catherine
,

Today I told Sister Ruth that I was thinking about becoming a nun. I thought she would be happy, but she got very quiet and said, “Why?” What I wanted to say was, “Why not?” but you don’t talk to a nun like that. Instead, I said, “Because I think it would be nice to live in a place where God was always present, and also I think I would probably make some friends.” Sister Ruth was quiet again for a few seconds, then she said, “That’s a very nice thought, Hannah, but you’re too young yet to make a decision like that. Maybe when you’re older, you’ll find that you have a vocation. Right now, though, you should concentrate on being a little girl.”

I didn’t want her to think I was talking back, so I just nodded and finished arranging the books on the shelf before going to homeroom. If I could have said something, though, I would have said, “I don’t want to be a little girl anymore.”

“Caro?” Mom poked her head in. “How’s it going out here?”

“Fine,” I said, stuffing everything back into the shoe box and shoving it under the coffee table. I gestured to the rest of the containers. “These are Hannah’s, what do you want me to do with them?”