Her Name in the Sky (26 page)

None of it matters. She knows, instinctively, which one she’s going to choose anyway.

Her mom lifts her eyebrows in surprise when Hannah treads downstairs with the college letters in her hand. “Did you decide?” she asks, setting her reading glasses over her nightgown. Hannah’s dad, sitting in his beaten up old armchair, lifts his eyes from his book.

“Yeah,” Hannah breathes.

Her mom’s mouth lifts as she prepares to smile. “What’s it going to be, honey?”

Hannah bites her lip. “What do you think I chose?”

Her parents study her for a moment. Her mom tilts her head with her mouth upturned in a thoughtful smile. Her dad sits very still, his gray eyes unblinking as he reads her with his engineer’s mind.

“Emory,” her dad says.

Hannah smiles. “Yeah.”

They stand up to hug her, and she holds her Emory letter tight to her chest as they wrap their arms around her.

“So have you heard the news about your
best
friend?” Joanie says after school on Wednesday. She struts up to the car, her hands tucked under her booksack straps, and waits for Hannah and Wally to break off their conversation. 

Hannah squints in the sunlight, shocked that Joanie is willingly speaking to her. “What news?”

“The news about Clay and Baker and their little four a.m.
tryst
.”

Hannah’s stomach turns over. “What?”

“Joanie—” Wally says warningly.

“Yep,” Joanie says cockily, flinging her bag onto the pavement. “They done the deed, condoms and all. Kind of clichéd in my opinion, having sex on prom night, but whatever gets them off, I guess.”

“What are you talking about?” Hannah says desperately.

“Emily Zydeig just told me. Apparently Clay had to ask Walker for some condoms. Clay was trying to keep it quiet because Baker didn’t want anyone to know, but it sounds like everybody’s hearing about it anyway.”

Hannah looks desperately at Wally. He doesn’t meet her eyes. “Did you know about this?” she asks him.

Wally’s jaw clenches. Hannah can’t look away from him, not until he refutes what Joanie said, not until he gives her a sign that this whole conversation is an elaborate joke.

He doesn’t look at her, though.

“Oh god, Hannah,” Joanie says disdainfully. “Stop being so goddamn dramatic. It’s just sex. Lots of people are doing it. Except you, apparently.” 

“Stop talking, Joanie,” Wally says harshly.

Joanie falters under Wally’s glare. Hannah feels dizzy in the silence, her stomach quaking with that sick feeling. “How did you know?” Hannah asks finally.

Wally meets her eyes. “Clay talked to me about it. He asked me to keep it in confidence.”

“So you kept it from me, too?”

“It wasn’t mine to tell.” Wally looks pointedly at Joanie. “It wasn’t anyone’s to tell.”

The three of them wither in the silence. The sun beats down on the crown of Hannah’s head, burning through her hair. She’s not sure what to do, where to look, so she stares at the black asphalt of the parking lot, her thoughts and emotions rocking around her body like a ship tossed about in a storm.

“That’s pretty crazy,” Hannah says at last. She swallows and forces herself to smile at Wally. “I feel pretty dumb, not knowing about it—”

Wally opens his mouth uncertainly.

“I’ve gotta go,” Hannah says, backing away toward the car, aware of a spreading hollowness inside of her. “Big paper due tomorrow. Come on, Joanie.”

“Han—” Wally says.

“See you tomorrow,” she says, her voice catching in her throat. She shuts herself in the car, waits for Joanie to do the same, and then drives away from the St. Mary’s parking lot.

Joanie narrows her eyes at Hannah on the drive home. “What’s wrong with you?” she asks, her voice coming out aggressively, and yet tinged with a small trace of doubt.

“Nothing,” Hannah says, punching the radio dial.

She drops her booksack on her bedroom floor. She locks the door. She leans her head into the wall.

Clay and Baker and their little four a.m. tryst.

She mouths the words to life again. She mouths them a second time. She mouths them over and over and over until the badness inside of her finally leaks out.

She cries against her bedroom wall. She cries out in broken breaths. They are half-formed cries, not fully imbued with the magnitude of the suffering she feels. They are all air—broken, disrupted air—and no voice. But she cannot lend her voice to her suffering. Joanie might hear. 

She touches her palms to the wallpaper. She brushes her cheek against the filmy surface. Her tears bleed into the paper. Her tears. These offerings from her body. She can smell them and taste them.

Chapter Ten: Shards of Glass

If Hannah thought she knew what pain was before, she was wrong. Every part of her—her body, her heart, her soul—aches with suffering. She has the sensation of being crushed in on all sides, compressed until she can hardly breathe, until she wants to do nothing more than run away as far as she can go.

She wonders about this suffering. Was it designed by God, a lesson to turn her away from her sin? Is it absolute proof that she can never be with Baker, and she should just stop trying?

Wally wants to understand. She can tell by the way he looks at her with those open, concerned eyes. They talk at her locker and he silently implores her to tell him what’s going on, but she can’t.

Ms. Carpenter wants to understand, too. Hannah knows by the way Ms. Carpenter watches her pack up her things at the end of class. “Everything good with you, Hannah?” she asks, her angular eyebrows drawn together in concern, but Hannah just half-smiles and insists that she’s fine, she’s fine.  

Late at night, after her parents and Joanie have already gone to sleep, she drives to City Park and sits in her car beneath the canopy of trees. She looks up at these trees and marvels at their existence, at how they just are what they were created to be, how they tower proudly on their wooden trunks, how they sway in the breeze and move their leaves like piano keys, and she prays that she can be like them, that she can innately grasp her existence and live it out without questioning.

Am I wrong?
she asks.
Just tell me if I am.

She never receives an answer.

It feels like her sadness will stay with her forever. The future, a vague notion that at one time felt very exciting to her because it contained only possibilities, now seems like a prison sentence, a condemnation. For now that she understands the yearnings of her heart, what is she supposed to do?

Lose-lose situation.

Marry Wally. Marry a boy. Have the beautiful wedding in early autumn, when the air is warm and football season is in full swing. Have sex and make babies. Give them a mother and a father, that they may have casserole on the table and baseball in the yard. Go to the office holiday parties, hold onto Wally’s arm, wear a black cocktail dress and the necklace he bought her for Christmas. Grow old together. Watch him lose his hair only to grow a paunch on his waistline. Babysit the grandkids on the weekends.

All the while, ignore the hole, the falsehood, in her heart. Discipline herself not to look over at her bridesmaids—at Baker—when she stands on the altar. Never allow herself to pretend that it’s Baker’s arms wrapped around her in bed at night.

Or fuck it all and fight to be with her. Take her to the movies and buy her her favorite candy when she goes to the restroom before the show. Find a house with her in a safe part of town and fill it with animals and books. Stay in on Friday nights and fall asleep on the couch watching Netflix with their bodies lined up next to each other under the blanket. Learn each other’s secrets. Love each other’s faults. Promise her the world.

But give up the traditional church wedding. Give up the possibility of children who are a perfect half of each of them. Find a different church, or sit in the very back pew where fewer people will see the electricity between them when they hold hands during the “Our Father,” or forgo church all together. Resign themselves to the lifelong burden of explaining their relationship to every new person they meet.

How can her feelings be right? How can they, when no matter what she chooses, she will never be whole? Somewhere, somehow, something must have gone wrong when she was born. Something got switched in the wiring. Something in her brain, or in her body, or in her blood. Everything she’s learned about union with another person, about her body’s purpose—none of that can transfer to a girl, to Baker.

Disordered. She is disordered.

She stops texting Baker. Stops trying to talk to her in English class. Stops trying to catch her eye at lunch. Surrenders herself to this new reality in which she and Baker have no relationship at all, and in which the only person who will talk to her is Wally.

But it doesn’t stop her heart from longing. It doesn’t stop her from thinking about Baker with every song she hears and every beautiful sky she sees. It doesn’t stop her from dreaming about hugging Baker, holding her close, promising her that everything is okay.

She knows they are trapped. She wonders if Baker is trying to show her the way—show her the way they are supposed to live and the way they are supposed to love. Sometimes she is absolutely convinced that Baker is right: that it’s better for them to forget their sin, and to focus instead on their relationships with Clay and Wally. But other times she wonders if Baker has it wrong—if the world has it wrong.

She tries to ask God, but she can’t seem to find God anywhere. 

She doesn’t know what’s right or wrong anymore; all she knows is this vast hollowness inside of herself—this place where God used to be, where the church used to be, where her parents used to be, where she used to be. Now there’s a heaviness inside her esophagus; a lodged stone that refuses to move, that she would like to vomit up if she could, that she could coax out with tears if only she was free enough to cry.

She goes to Mass on Sunday and Father Simon speaks about Truth, about how many people in the world don’t want to hear the Truth. “Our Church, the bride of Christ, is persecuted every day,” he says, and Hannah thinks on that and cannot understand how it is true.

She goes to Ms. Carpenter.

“What’s up, Hannah?” Ms. Carpenter says, glancing up from her computer when Hannah hovers in her doorway after school.

“Can I talk to you?”

Ms. Carpenter trains her eyes on her, searching her. “Of course,” she says. “Come on in.”

Hannah shuts the door against the sounds from the hallway: people talking, lockers slamming, clothing and booksacks rustling as students leave the building.

“What’s going on?” Ms. Carpenter asks. “Everything okay?”

Hannah stops in front of her desk. She taps her knuckles on the wood. “No.”

“No?”

“No.”

Ms. Carpenter nods. “You want to sit down and tell me about it?”

Hannah accepts the chair Ms. Carpenter pulls over for her. She folds her hands together on her skirt and bounces her right leg off the floor. Ms. Carpenter sits silently at her desk, waiting.

“I feel…alone,” Hannah says. “I feel lost.”

Ms. Carpenter blinks, but her expression betrays no judgment.

“There’s something going on with me,” Hannah continues, “that doesn’t fit with my conception of who I am. Or what I want my life to be. It doesn’t…it doesn’t fit the paradigm of what other people want my life to be.”

“Okay,” Ms. Carpenter nods.

“I just…” She inhales; she twists her tongue around the words. “I don’t know how to say it.”

Ms. Carpenter waits.

“I…it’s like…it’s like my deepest nature isn’t what it’s supposed to be. It’s different from what everyone says God wants it to be.”

“And what’s that?”

“I…remember my comment about Father Simon? I think maybe I said that out of anger…out of anger because…because I….”

Ms. Carpenter swallows. “Hannah,” she says, her voice weaker than it normally is. “There is nothing you could be that God wouldn’t love. Your deepest nature—whatever it is—is who you are, and God loves you for it. You are good. And no matter what people might say, you need to believe that.”

“Yeah,” Hannah breathes, tears springing into her eyes. “It’s just—”

There’s a knock on the door, and Hannah whips her head up. Joanie’s face peers through the rectangular window, her expression annoyed.

Ms. Carpenter’s angular eyebrows pull tight together. She clears her throat and walks to open the door.

“Hi, Joanie.”

“Hi. Sorry to bother you. I was just looking for Hannah.”

Ms. Carpenter looks back to Hannah. Her eyes are pained. Hannah stands up and swings her booksack over her shoulder.

“Thanks, Ms. C,” Hannah says, not looking at her. “I’ll get that revised essay to you tomorrow.”