The Opposite of Hallelujah

A riveting depiction of sisterhood, as one sibling's return home unleashes lies, a secret long buried, and emotional upheaval.

Caro Mitchell considers herself an only child--and she likes it that way. After all, her much older sister, Hannah, left home eight years ago, and Caro barely remembers her. So when Caro's parents drop the bombshell news that Hannah is returning to live with them, Caro feels as if an interloper is crashing her family. To her, Hannah's a total stranger, someone who haunts their home with her meek and withdrawn presence, and who refuses to talk about her life and why she went away. Caro can't understand why her parents cut Hannah so much slack, and why they're not pushing for answers.

Unable to understand Hannah, Caro resorts to telling lies about her mysterious reappearance. But when those lies alienate her new boyfriend, friends, and put her on the outs with her parents, Caro seeks solace from an unexpected source. And as she unearths a clue from Hannah's past--one that could save Hannah from the dark secret that possesses her--Caro begins to see her sister in a whole new light.

"Jarzab packs a lot into this story, questions of faith and forgiveness, science and religion, mental illness, guilt and possible redemption, as well as simple high school drama. But at its heart, this is a story about sisters."--Booklist, starred

"A layered meditation on family and belief that will ring true for faith-questing teens."--Kirkus Reviews

1
When I was twelve, I started telling people at school that my older sister, Hannah, was dead. I didn’t put a lot of thought into it. I just figured it would be easier than explaining what had actually happened to her. You’d think the phrase “contemplative nun” would mean something to kids who’d been attending Catholic school their entire lives, but it really didn’t. To them, nuns were old women who wore nude panty hose to hide the varicose veins in their legs and seemed like they’d slap you with a ruler as soon as look at you. Nuns were practically pre‑historic, and it didn’t make any sense for my then twenty-three-year-old sister--tall, thin, blond as Barbie--to be working on her fourth year at the Sisters of Grace convent in Middleton, Indiana. But she was.
So I lied. I didn’t get what the big deal was. I hadn’t seen Hannah for longer than half an hour a year through an iron grille since I was eight, and those visits consisted mostly of my parents nervously babbling about work and how I was doing in school while Hannah sat with her hands folded in her lap, serene, listening but saying virtually nothing. She wasn’t dead, but she wasn’t part of my life anymore, so I simplified the story.
It wasn’t long before my teachers caught wind of the rumor. When Ms. Hopeshed, my music teacher, who was very sensitive, heard, she called our house to express her sincerest condolences over the loss of my sister. Mom and Dad were furious with me.
“How dare you tell people that Hannah is dead!” Mom screamed. I’d never seen her so angry, and she very rarely yelled at me. I was practically an only child, and my parents and I were close, or I thought we were. It didn’t occur to me that they might have other loyalties.
Stubborn and defiant as always, I refused to deny the pragmatism of my plan. “Well, it’s sort of like she’s dead,” I pointed out. It was, I thought, an unassailable argument. “We never see her. She never calls or comes home. What am I supposed to say?”
Mom took a deep breath and steadied herself before answering.
“If you talk like that in school, people are going to think you wish Hannah was dead,” she told me. “They’ll think you’re a liar who hates her sister. Is that what you want? Is that who you are?”
I stared at my shoes. “No, I guess not.” I knew a losing fight when I saw one, but I didn’t quite see where all this was coming from. It was a lie, yes, and lying was wrong; I’d been told that a million times over the course of my life. I knew it was possible I hadn’t done the right thing, or the best thing. But how was I supposed to explain my sister’s absence when nobody had ever given me the words? So I’d improvised. One look at my mother’s face and I knew I’d be better off keeping that justification to myself.
“Good.” She didn’t sound convinced, but I think she knew that was as much as she was going to get out of me. To my mom, this was a problem that couldn’t be solved with an apology, and even as we stood there not looking at each other, she was formulating a game plan. “I told Ms. Hopeshed the truth, and I expect you to do the same with everybody you told that horrible lie to. Do you understand me?”
“Yes,” I said.
She paused at the door and pointed at me. “You’d better fix this, Caro.”
“I will,” I promised.
I’d severely underestimated what this would mean for me at school. The next day, deathly afraid my mother would have them make an announcement over the PA system if I disobeyed, I took back my lie and started telling people it felt like Hannah was dead, but that she was alive and (presumably) well at the Sisters of Grace convent in Middleton, Indiana. The kids in my class labeled me “Caroliar,” which became a popular playground taunt, and the reputation stuck with me until I went to high school and made new friends and everyone except them basically forgot I existed.
Hannah was a touchy subject in our house for years. We almost never talked about her, and after she’d been at the convent for two years, Mom packed up all her things, hid them in the garage, and let me move downstairs into her old room. There were only a few photos of her in the house, none of them taken when she was older than eighteen. “We’re going to Indiana” was the euphemism my parents used when we’d been scheduled for one of our annual visits to the convent, and apart from the traditional “she seems happy,” nobody ever said anything on the topic on the way there or the way back.
So it wasn’t like I was the only liar in the house. We all acted like Hannah was dead; all I did was take it one step further and bury her.

Telling the truth wasn’t my only punishment. My parents arranged for me to have three one-hour counseling sessions with Father Bob, the pastor of our church. We weren’t what you would call devout Catholics, but we went to Sunday Mass every once in a while and never missed on holidays. I’d had all the appropriate sacraments and so had Hannah, even before she decided to marry Jesus.
Father Bob was very concerned about me, or so he said. My parents had asked him to explain the ins and outs of religious vocation to me, so that I might be a little more prepared the next time someone asked me what had happened to Hannah: why she had gone away, why she was never coming back. Father Bob was nice and patient, but I didn’t care to hear anything about Hannah’s chosen life.
“Carolina,” Father Bob said. “It was God’s will that Hannah go to the Sisters of Grace. It was God’s will that I become a priest. That’s how vocation works.”
The word “vocation” made me want to barf. To me it was a synonym for “prison,” for a particular kind of abandonment. I hadn’t seen much of the world at that point, but I knew it was full of things I wanted. I knew I would want a boyfriend, and eventually a husband, maybe a couple of kids. I knew I would want a house and a yard and a dog--I wanted the dog most of all at that age. I knew Hannah couldn’t have those things, and it was bizarre to me that she would give it all up. At one time, I believed that Hannah hadn’t chosen to leave, that she’d been taken, but that was only when I was very young.
“Do you mean she had to be a nun? That she didn’t have the option not to be?” I asked. I knew what it was like to be told where to be, what to do, how to act, and what to say every moment of your life, but I’d always believed that once you were grown up you got away from all that--you got to be your own person. I didn’t know what to think about Hannah’s “vocation.” Did she have the choice to go away, or didn’t she?
“No, not exactly. God doesn’t force us to do anything, even his will. He only calls us to be our best selves, to serve our natural purpose as his creation. For Hannah, that purpose is sisterhood. For me, it’s priesthood. For you, who knows? You’re still young. Maybe God will give you a vocation, too.”
“No way!” I cried out. “I’m never going to be a nun. I don’t even like church.”
“Okay then,” Father Bob agreed. “Maybe not.”

In the last week of August before my junior year of high school, something unexpected happened. I was still on summer vacation, slowly finishing up the summer assignments I’d been carefully avoiding since June. I talked to my best friend Erin on the phone for a couple of hours (she was at her grandmother’s house outside Minneapolis, dying of boredom), swam in the pool in the backyard of my other best friend, Reb, and put in some quality time in front of the TV. Mom called me in to dinner at seven; when we were all seated, I noticed that they weren’t eating, and I asked what was wrong.
Dad explained; Mom didn’t seem to have the words. They had gotten a phone call earlier that afternoon from Mother Regina, the superior at Hannah’s convent, saying that Hannah had decided to renounce her vows and leave the Sisters of Grace permanently. They were taking the news exactly as I would’ve expected them to--with shock and disbelief. I asked if they’d spoken to Hannah, but evidently she was too upset to talk to anyone just yet. I wondered whose choice it was for her to leave--hers, or Mother Regina’s.
“And she’s going to come and live here?” It was a stupid question, really. Where else would she go? She’d entered the convent when she was nineteen and she’d been gone eight years. There was no way she had any friends left after such a long absence; I didn’t get the impression that she’d ever had friends to begin with. Hannah had never been on her own before. It seemed impossible that she could make it alone.
“Of course!” Mom snapped. Whenever Hannah came up in conversation, Mom got sharp with me.
Then it occurred to me to ask the question that probably should’ve been my first. “Why?”
“Why what?” Dad poked at the chicken on his plate. There wasn’t an appetite left at the table.
“Why is she leaving the convent? I thought she loved it there.” My parents had stopped dragging me to their yearly visitation with Hannah when I was thirteen. I’d never hated anything more in my life than going to that convent; it was too unnervingly quiet, too sterile, too cold, not to mention totally boring. Not long after the whole “my sister’s dead” fiasco, I wasn’t having any of it. The fit I threw when they tried to cart me down to Indiana to talk to a virtual stranger through iron bars was epic. I screamed and pouted and threw things and made myself sick rather than go.
Mom and Dad made a valiant effort at forcing me; they shouted back, threatening me with unprecedented restriction and even, in a moment of desperation, resorting to bribery. Eventually they gave up.
They always came back from Indiana saying that Hannah looked happy, in a way. Always “in a way,” later clarified by the word “serene.” She was calm and quiet, neither excited to see them nor bothered by their presence. She never fully engaged, just listened patiently to their stories (mostly about me, Mom admitted) and responded carefully and clearly to their questions. She never revealed too much, she never gossiped or chatted, and she never seemed happier to see them than she did to see anyone else. I once overheard Mom crying to Dad that Hannah didn’t care about them or seem to recognize them as her parents. Mom almost never cried, and the sound of it broke my heart. Vocation or no vocation, retreating like that was Hannah’s choice alone.
“Apparently she’s not happy there anymore,” Mom said. She was tense and upset, I could tell, but I didn’t understand why. Wasn’t this what she had wanted since Hannah went away? They’d desperately wanted her to fail as a nun; maybe they’d even prayed for it, although everybody’s faith in God had taken a hit when he stole my sister away. They’d wanted her vocation to be false, for her to despise the convent and come back home, even if it meant she had to be kicked out. I think they’d wanted it so much because they were afraid it wouldn’t happen. From the moment she hit puberty, Hannah and the habit seemed destined to collide.
I didn’t remember much about Hannah, and I wasn’t even sure if the memories I did have were true or just cobbled together from photographs and other people’s stories. One of the things I did recall was that Hannah always wore her school uniform, even when she was at home or in public. She wore pajamas to bed, but that was it. Mom bought her tons of clothes that ended up stacked neatly on her shelves and in her drawers with the tags still on; she wouldn’t back down, despite Mom’s begging.
“She could be just as stubborn as you when she wanted to be,” Mom said after I found a photograph of Hannah wearing her uniform at the Saint Louis arch, a vacation I didn’t even remember, although I was definitely there for it, age two, sitting atop Dad’s shoulders, wearing a pair of plastic yellow sunglasses with lenses shaped like stars. My poor mother. She wanted Hannah to be happy, but she would’ve settled for normal. Hannah didn’t stop wearing that uniform until she graduated from high school, when she started attending Loyola University, but even then she was nothing but the picture of modesty.
“When?” I asked.
“Next week,” Mom said, searching my face for something, though I wasn’t sure what. “Saturday.”
“Fine,” I said, shoveling a spoonful of peas, now cold, into my mouth to keep from having to say anything else.
“Fine? That’s it?” Dad asked, a little anger creeping into his voice now, too. They were both furious, my parents, but they didn’t appear to know why or at whom. They had never understood Hannah’s decision to go into the convent, which I guess was why they were never able to explain it to me, and also why I never really tried to talk to them about it. Now that she was coming back, we were all more confused than ever.
“What do you want me to say?”
“Aren’t you happy your sister’s coming home?” Mom was practically pleading with me to say, yes, I was totally stoked about Hannah’s leaving the convent.
I couldn’t say it, though. I couldn’t think of anything to say, which was unusual for me. I just shrugged.
“How can you not care?” They stared at me, like I was some kind of unfeeling monster, which was unfair. I didn’t care because there was nothing to care about. Who was Hannah to me? A few albums full of pictures tucked away in a drawer and a handful of letters and Christmas cards full of distant religious platitudes. There had been a point in my life when I wished there had been more, but that was over now.
“I barely know her!” I reminded them. “She left when I was eight and I haven’t seen her in four years--”
“By choice,” Mom said.