The Opposite of Hallelujah (40 page)

I had felt closed before, hunkered down with my familiar friendships and rigid schedule, but I felt it now, the widening of a space I hadn’t even known was there. I’d been split open like a log. It was uncomfortable and scary, but painless. The best part was that now that I knew the space was there, I realized how very much there was to fill it with, and how much room there was left over for new and beautiful things still to come.

I asked Reb to drop me off at the hospital on the way home. All three of them offered to come in with me, but I politely declined.

I found Hannah awake in her room, reading a book my mother had brought her from the hospital gift shop.

“Is it any good?” I asked, setting my bag down by her bed and dropping into the chair.

“Oh, not at all,” she sighed. Her eyes were tired but her smile was genuine. I felt a small hope flicker to life. “How was school?”

“Good. Boring. You know, the same. How’re you feeling?”

“Better,” she said, emphasizing the word, as if saying it with enough confidence could make it true. But I could see a bit of a change. She looked better. Already
she was less pale and sallow, the dark circles under her eyes lighter, the bones jutting out beneath her skin a little less pronounced. “They’ve been feeding me through a tube,” she said.

“Yeah, I know.”

“It’s humiliating. I feel like an invalid,” she complained. The hope gobbled the words like oxygen. She was whining instead of languishing in a deep, inexpressible sadness. That had to be a positive development.

“Well, if you’ll just agree to eat something, they’ll take you off the tubes,” I said, although I didn’t know if that was true. It sounded right. But maybe I was pressing too hard on a tender spot. I glanced up at her face, but her expression hadn’t changed. She didn’t respond, and I fished around in my brain for something else to say, something apart from her illness and her darkness.

“I’ve tried. I can’t keep much down. They’re going to send me to a rehab clinic when I’m strong enough,” Hannah said, doing her best to avoid looking at me. “They don’t think I can go home without treatment.”

“Oh.” I couldn’t tell from the tone of her voice how she felt about it, but knowing her, I figured she probably wasn’t thrilled. Hannah wanted nothing more than to shove her issues into a dark corner. Just telling me about the clinic had to have been hard for her; she must’ve thought I’d find out anyway.

“I don’t want to go,” she said, tears springing to her
eyes. “The doctor was telling me about it. He said it was ‘secure,’ but what that means is that they lock you in and don’t let you talk to anybody except the staff.” She glanced down at her hands, which were folded neatly in her lap. “Reminds me of another place I don’t want to be.”

Knowing that there was nothing I could say to make it better, I fished around in my brain for another subject, something to distract her. “I’m building something for Pawel,” I told her finally.

For the first time since she’d entered the hospital, she visibly perked up. “What are you building?” she asked.

“A Rube Goldberg machine,” I said. “Out of K’nex.”

“What?”

“K’nex. Do you know what an Erector set is?”

“Yes.” She said it like,
Duh, of course
. But she knew better than anybody that recognizing such a pop culture reference was not a given for her.

“Like that, but plastic,” I said. “Anyway, a Rube Goldberg machine is a complicated motion apparatus that performs a simple task in a convoluted way. Pawel wanted to do one for the science fair, but I made him do single-bubble sonoluminescence, so to thank him I’m making it to serve as a part of our display at the exposition.”

“What does a Rube Goldberg machine have to do with single-bubble whatever?” Hannah asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Nothing, I guess. I just want it to be there. And I want to make it for him.”

“What does your machine do?”

I shrugged. “No idea yet. I have to go to the toy store after school tomorrow and buy all the pieces. You should see his room, Hannah—it’s filled with these things. They’re completely amazing, so complex and fascinating. I totally get why he’s obsessed with them.”

“Intricate causality,” Hannah murmured. “Like little worlds unto themselves.”

“Yeah, sort of.” I put my feet up on the edge of her bed and leaned back in the chair.

“That’s really nice of you, Caro,” she said.

“You say that like you’re shocked,” I teased. “Like I never do anything nice.”

“You know I don’t mean it like that,” Hannah scolded gently.

“Can I ask you a serious question?” I looked toward the window. Someone—a nurse; my mother, maybe—had drawn the curtains back and the shades up. I could see a pair of birds tussling on the sill. Not everything left in search of warmth at the onset of a barren winter. For some reason that was a comforting thought.

“I guess.”

“Have you ever been to Sabra’s grave?” I didn’t want to look at her face, but I could see her stiffen on the very periphery of my vision.

“I don’t want to talk about that,” she said, straightening her bedding, creasing it again and again into meticulous lines.

“Hannah, I really think—”

“I mean it. I’m not ready.”

“Okay,” I said after a long pause. “But whenever you are—”

“I know.”

29

I spent all weekend working on the Rube Goldberg machine. It wasn’t nearly as easy as it looked, and I wasn’t creative enough to completely invent it end to end like Pawel did. I cheated by looking up some machines online and incorporating bits and pieces of them into my design. That was another thing—the design. I was sure, with my knack for physics—I’d turned sound into light, for heaven’s sake!—that I could build one pretty easily on the fly, but it was soon cripplingly obvious that it wasn’t going to be that simple. I stood in my room for a long time, surveying the large mass of children’s toys scattered on the floor, incapable of piecing even two of
them together without second-guessing myself and ripping them apart again.

Then I remembered Pawel’s doodles and realized that he
always
planned his machines out beforehand. It was probably the most meticulous side of him: the side that produced those insane works of art. Because it
was
art. They were beautiful. I wanted to go over to his house again just to see them whir to life. I grabbed some loose-leaf binder paper from my bag and a pencil and started sketching out the mechanism, including a list of objects—marbles, rubber bands, coins—that I wanted to incorporate.

I was almost done with the drawing when I looked up to find Dad standing in the doorway.

“How long have you been there?” I asked.

“Just a while,” he told me. “It’s coming along nicely.”

“I haven’t even started,” I pointed out.

He nodded at my blueprint. “Sure you have.”

I let a long stream of air through my lips. “I’ve been working on this plan for about three hours now. I was crazy to think I could build the whole thing in a few days.”

“Not crazy,” he said. “Just optimistic.”

“I don’t even know why I’m doing it,” I said. I tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. “It’s going to look so out of place with the rest of our experiment. The judges are going to think we’re bonkers.”

“So? I thought you didn’t care about winning the
science fair,” Dad said, sitting down on the edge of my bed.

“I don’t,” I told him. “Do you think Pawel will like it?”

“Well, to be fair, I don’t know him very well,” Dad reminded me. “But I think he’ll feel flattered when he sees all the work you put into it.”

“I hope so,” I muttered, running my fingers over the plans.

“Do you want some help?”

“Are you sure you have time?” He probably needed to go to the hospital. Mom had been there all day.

“For you, Caro? Always,” Dad said with a smile. He grabbed the blueprint from me, and we got to work.

The day of the science fair crept up on me. Between school and the machine and finishing the presentation board for our project and visiting Hannah in the hospital, I didn’t realize the fair was Thursday until it was Wednesday. Pawel called me that night to make sure everything was ready for the expo the following afternoon.

“I’m sorry for doubting you before,” Pawel said after we finished discussing the particulars.

“When did you doubt me?” I asked, mock-appalled.

“When you said you wanted to do single-bubble sonoluminescence
and I told you it was too difficult,” he said. “I was totally wrong. You really pulled it off.”

“
We
did,” I insisted. “You helped a lot.”

“A lot more than you thought I would, maybe,” Pawel grumbled.

“Hey! You told me off and I reined it in,” I reminded him.

“Anyway, I just wanted to say that. You were right, I was wrong. It was a kick-ass project. Thanks for letting me be a part of it.”

“Can you repeat that?”

“Thanks for—”

“No, before that.”

“You were right, I was wrong?”

“Yeah. It’s my favorite phrase. To hear, of course. Not to say.”

He laughed. “Of course.”

“I’m really looking forward to tomorrow,” I told him, lying down on my bed and staring at the ceiling. I crossed my eyes to make the minuscule paint bubbles match up, but they wouldn’t; they were all too different.

“You are?”

“Not the presentation part—I hate that stuff, talking in public and putting on a show. So much smiling and nodding. But I like seeing what other people have done, and having people look at what we’ve done and say how cool it is.”

“You sound like you’ve done this before.”

“Once or twice. Science is kind of my subject.”

“And thank God for that.”

I was over-the-moon happy talking to him like this—a calm, casual, friendly conversation—but it was time to hang up before it went on too long and lost its luster. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Pawel.”

“Good night.”

“Good night.”

“This is quite the production,” Reb said, strolling into the auditorium behind me, carrying my presentation board and chewing a piece of spearmint gum, the tang of which floated over to me and made me think of Christmas. “Who knew people got so worked up over science?”

It was indeed a circus. There were people
everywhere
—students (some of whom I recognized; most of whom could have been space aliens for how unfamiliar they looked to me), teachers, parents, judges, little siblings who’d been snatched out of day care to see their older brothers or sisters in action. The craziest thing of all was that it wasn’t a county or regional or state fair—it was just our district, the high school and middle school. I pressed my fingers against my forehead, kneading and rubbing to try to relieve
the tension. Crowds and loud noises always gave me a headache.

And the nerves, oh, the nerves. I wasn’t even trying to win anything and I was a roiling, sparking mess on the inside. It was really the machine I was worried about. I’d finished it in the wee hours of the morning, but after the foggy stupor of near sleep had been replaced by the stark glare of early morning, I was beginning to think it wasn’t the best idea I’d ever had, no matter what Dad had said. It was certainly incongruous with our project, and what if Pawel thought I was making fun of him? Or worse, what if he didn’t care at all? It was also possible that Mr. Tripp would think we were just goofing off and fail us right there in front of everyone. I didn’t think any of those things would happen, exactly, but the fear was there all the same, lurking around in the dusty corners of my K’nex-addled brain.