The Opposite of Hallelujah (4 page)

“Well, yeah,” she said, as if it was obvious. “Nobody talks about that stuff, really.”

“True,” I said. Now that I thought about it, I realized I had no idea if Erin believed in God, or Derek, either.

“Do you believe in God?” she asked, as I knew she would.

I sighed. “Jury’s out,” I said. “Empirically, there’s no evidence. You can’t prove it—scientifically, I mean.”

Reb laughed. “Oh, Caro,” she said, putting a hand on my shoulder. “You’re such a nerd.”

“Thanks.”

“What I mean is you’re so up here all the time,” she said, jabbing a finger at her temple. “I’m pretty sure most people who believe in God don’t think about him
scientifically
.”

“Yeah, well, maybe they should,” I said.

“Maybe,” Reb allowed.

The truth was that I had never given God much consideration, and I guess when I had, I’d mostly thought about him as some kind of robber bridegroom straight out of
Grimm’s Fairy Tales
who stole young women away from their homes. My religious upbringing, for all its bells and whistles—the Catholic school education of my childhood, the floofy white dress I’d worn to my
First Communion, the five rosaries I’d gotten from my grandmother over the years, all hidden away in the bottom of my jewelry box—wasn’t very deep or particularly insightful. My parents (well, my mother—my father was always curiously evasive of the subject) mostly spoke of God when they were angry with me. “God can hear you,” when my mouth was especially sharp or filthy, or “God says, ‘Honor thy father and thy mother,’ ” when I was being disobedient. And of course there was Christmas, with the blown-glass nativity scene my mother treasured, despite Joseph’s having long since lost one of his hands and our often misplacing the baby Jesus. But other than that, after Hannah left, God stayed up in the attic, like the toys and old clothes I’d outgrown that my mother couldn’t bring herself to part with.

I crept quietly into the house the same way I’d gone out. It was around four o’clock, and I was sure I’d gotten away with it, but when I turned on the light in my room, my dad was sitting in my tufted armchair, dozing lightly. I yelped when I noticed him. He opened his eyes and lifted his head slowly, a deep frown on his face.

“Where were you?” he asked. He was weirdly calm, and he looked tired. Was he up because he was waiting for me, or because he couldn’t sleep?

“Erin’s,” I said. “Like I told you.”

“Did you forget the part where your mother and I said you couldn’t go? I thought you said you had homework to do.”

“I worked on it for a while,” I said. It wasn’t untrue; between dinner and saying good night, I’d gotten fifty pages of
Beloved
read for AP English. “I’m almost done.”

“I see.” He narrowed his eyes at me. “Are you drunk?”

I’d sobered up a little on the way home, so I wasn’t totally hammered or anything, but even when I was tipsy, it was hard to stop myself from swaying. “No.”

“You’re lying.”

There wasn’t much I could say to that. “I’m sorry,” I told him.

“No, you’re not,” he said with a sigh.

I stared at the floor. “Are you going to tell Mom?”

“Not this time.” He got up and walked over to me. “Look at me, Carolina.”

I met his eyes and saw the disappointment in them. It never failed to make me feel small. I bet he never looked at Hannah that way. Hannah was perfect. It was a lot to live up to, and I didn’t even want to
be
perfect; I
wanted
to be
me
. But somehow, with St. Hannah always hanging over my head, that didn’t seem like enough.

“Your mom’s very stressed out about Hannah,” he said. “The last thing I’m going to do is give her an ulcer by telling her about this. But I’m watching you, kid. No more sneaking out, no more talking back to us, no
more being mean about Hannah. You’re going to treat everybody in this house with the love and respect they deserve, or so help me, you will regret it.”

“Fine,” I said, turning away. “Threatening your daughter. Super-great parenting, Dad.” I gave him a very sarcastic thumbs-up.

“It’s not a threat, Caro,” Dad said. “It’s a promise.”

3

Dad knocked on my door early the next morning.

“Get up,” he commanded, poking his head in.

I hid under the covers and groaned. It was only eight, on a weekend,
in the summer
. I refused on principle to rise before ten.

Dad yanked the covers all the way off. “Get up,” he repeated. “Your mom’s making breakfast.”

“Hannah’s not even here yet,” I whined, burying my face in a pillow.

“This is a special day. Mom feels like making breakfast. Remember what I said last night—or were you too drunk?”

“Fine!” I shouted. “I’ll be out in a second.”

He came back fifteen minutes later to find me curled up, clutching one of my pillows and snoring lightly.

“Caro, I swear, if you’re not up and out of that bed in two seconds flat—”

“Okay!”

“I’m not leaving until I see you walk out this door,” Dad said, standing aside so that I could pass. I rolled out of bed and got to my feet, glaring at him as I stepped into the hallway and trudged to the kitchen.

“Good morning, sunshine,” Mom said, abnormally chipper.

“Morning,” I grumbled. “Pancakes?”

“Or French toast—what would you like?”

“Um …” I weighed my options carefully. “French toast.”

Mom slid two slices onto a plate and put it down in front of me. “When does Derek come home?” she asked, like she had any interest in the answer to that question. Sweet of her to try, though.

“Today,” I said glumly. I didn’t know what I was more apprehensive about—Hannah’s arrival, or Derek’s. I just had this feeling that something was about to go horribly awry, but I couldn’t decide which was the doomed homecoming. The uncertainty sat in my stomach like a brick and refused to move, no matter how much French toast I consumed.

“Oh, bad timing,” she said. “But you can see him tomorrow.”

“Thanks for the permission,” I snapped. I could feel my parents’ glares at my back, but I didn’t care. They were used to this. It was how we interacted. They built the walls; I pushed against them; they pushed back. It was our family dynamic. We loved each other, the three of us, and I never said anything that was too bad to be instantaneously forgiven (aside from that one time). But now that Hannah was coming home, they were suddenly sensitive.

“Don’t talk to your mother like that,” Dad said from the other side of the
Trib
.

“Like what?” I slammed my fork down on the table and pushed my plate away. “Like she’s
ruining
my
life
?” I knew how melodramatic it sounded, what a ridiculous thing it was to say, but that ugly, gnawing fear was working away at my insides. All this sudden change was giving me emotional whiplash.

“Are you crazy?” Dad tossed the paper to the side and leaned in at me on his elbows. “Do you hear yourself?”

I took in a deep, agitated breath. My parents were both staring at me, probably wondering what mouth of hell this demon they called their daughter had risen from. I knew I was being selfish, but I was
feeling
selfish. I didn’t want to go pick Hannah up in Chicago that afternoon; I wanted to see my boyfriend, who I’d talked to only through pen and paper and a few rushed pay phone calls for three months. At least Derek wrote me. I hadn’t gotten
a personal letter from Hannah, like, ever. She wrote one to all three of us every Christmas, and they weren’t very interesting, anyway, just a few paragraphs about how she was full of the Spirit and happy in the Lord. Barf. I wrote her every month for two years, told her about my mean fourth-grade teacher and my first crush and getting my ears pierced, before I stopped bothering.

“Have it your way. But just because you’re forcing me to go with you doesn’t mean I’m going to be happy to see her, so you can take your complete, perfect family fantasy and shove it.” I got up from the table so fast my chair screeched across the tile, and ran off to my room.

I flopped onto my bed and began to sob. Hot tears spilled down my cheeks and my head began to throb. It wasn’t fair; it wasn’t right. Why couldn’t she do this two years from now, when I would be in college and wouldn’t have to take orders from anybody?

Eventually I stopped crying and went to the bathroom to attend to the aftermath. I rinsed my red, splotchy face off with cold water and patted it dry with one of my mother’s soft cotton towels. I took a couple of aspirin for my headache, massaged my temples, brushed my hair. I got dressed and took a few deep, cleansing breaths. Reb was really into yoga, and she was always babbling about how breathing long and slow, focusing on nothing but emptiness and clarity, released tension and quieted the mind. It didn’t totally work, but it did calm me down a
little bit, enough to make me feel that I could go back into the kitchen, face my parents, and submit to my punishment.

“Are you done?” Mom asked as I wobbled into the room. Dad just lifted his eyebrows expectantly.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Tantrum’s over?” Dad confirmed.

“Pretty much,” I told him, slumping back in my seat. The kitchen table sat four—six with the extension, which Dad had put in the night before. “Who’s coming to dinner?”

“Nobody,” Mom said. “I just thought it’d be nice, now that Hannah’s going to be home, if we had a little bit of elbow room.”

“We’re leaving at one,” Dad said. “Be ready by then. Are you finished with your summer work?” He gazed at me meaningfully.

“No,” I said, avoiding his eyes.

“Well, you’d better keep going,” Mom warned, as if I didn’t always complete my schoolwork, in full and on time. As if it wasn’t the only way in which I was perfect. “I thought you were going to have it done last night.”

“I didn’t get to all of it,” I said, avoiding Dad’s stern gaze.

“Get cracking,” she said, motioning vaguely in the direction of my room.

“Can I at least finish my breakfast?”

Dad reached into the pantry and tossed me a granola bar. “Here. I’ll let you know when it’s time to leave.”

Three hours later, I was buckled into the backseat of my parents’ Acura. My stomach was wriggling; I was nervous. I’d texted Derek a little while before to see how far away from home he was, and finally got an answer—“Just got reception. Two hours away. Talk to you tonight?” I answered, “Yes! Can’t wait,” and put the phone away after Dad caught me looking at it.

“No texts today, kiddo,” he said. “No calls. Today is about family.” My parents hated cell phones. They shared one between the two of them, “for emergencies,” and I had to really fight to get my own. My cell phone was the centerpiece of Dad’s Kids Today rant, something he liked to pull out at parties after a beer or two; he had this theory that the more we were connected, the more we separated ourselves from each other. He called it false closeness. Dad was something of an armchair philosopher.

“I can’t even go out later tonight to see Derek?” I asked. “It’s his first night home from camp!”

“Tomorrow,” Mom said. “That’s what I told you.”

“Promise?”

“No,” she told me. “I’m not promising you that. But probably,
if you behave
.”

I buried my back into the seat. “All right. I’ll be good.”

“Don’t just be good,” Dad said. “Be
happy
.”

“Don’t get your hopes up.”

“Then don’t even think about leaving the house tomorrow,” Mom said.

“Fine. I’ll be happy.” I pasted a fake smile on my face. “See? Happy.”

“Better be,” Dad muttered, pulling out of the drive and heading toward the expressway.