Her Name In The Sky
Chapter 23 : She never receives an answer.It feels like her sadness will stay with her forever. The

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 s.e.x and make babies. Give them a mother and a father, that they may have ca.s.serole on the table and baseball in the yard. Go to the office holiday parties, hold onto Wally's arm, wear a black c.o.c.ktail 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 f.u.c.k 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 relations.h.i.+p 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 cla.s.s. Stops trying to catch her eye at lunch. Surrenders herself to this new reality in which she and Baker have no relations.h.i.+p 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 relations.h.i.+ps with Clay and Wally. But other times she wonders if Baker has it wrong-if the world has it wrong.

She tries to ask G.o.d, but she can't seem to find G.o.d anywhere.

She doesn't know what's right or wrong anymore; all she knows is this vast hollowness inside of herself-this place where G.o.d 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 Ma.s.s 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d wouldn't love. Your deepest nature-whatever it is-is who you are, and G.o.d 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."

"Sure thing, Hannah," Ms. Carpenter says, her voice gentle. "Stop by anytime if you need to talk through it again."

"Why do you look so depressed?" Joanie asks as they walk to the car.

"I'm just tired."

"What were you talking to Ms. Carpenter about?"

"Are you speaking to me again?" Hannah snaps.

Joanie shuts up, but on the drive home, Hannah feels her watching her.

"First day of May," Wally says at lunch on Tuesday. "It's officially graduation month."

"G.o.d, I can't even process that," Hannah says.

"That means finals and AP exams start next week."

"Well, f.u.c.k me."

Wally stifles his smile. "Want to meet me after practice today and we can study?"

"Sure."

"Great. I need your help on some AP Gov stuff."

"Cool."

Then they run out of things to say. Hannah doesn't mind: she lets herself be absorbed by the lunchtime chatter, her mind drifting back to Ms. Carpenter's words yesterday. But she's distracted when Father Simon walks into the senior courtyard with a proud smile on his face: she recognizes it as the one he wears when he thinks he's going to win students over.

He takes a red sharpie and writes something on the outdoor poster that Baker and Michele hung to track the rankings for the Diocesan Cup. The seniors in the courtyard slip into silence, waiting to see what he wrote. After a minute, he steps back from the poster, caps the sharpie, and smiles his proud close-lipped smile again.

"Our service hours log just pushed us a mile ahead of Mount Sinai," he says.

The courtyard breaks into applause. Michele looks smug where she sits with her friends. Clay wraps his arm around Baker, and Hannah knows he's thinking of the service projects she organized in the fall.

Wally doesn't clap much.

"Not excited about the Cup?" Hannah asks him.

"It's like you said months ago," he says. "The whole thing is kind of weird."

Hannah shrugs. "Whatever gets people excited."

Wally frowns. He rustles his hand around a bag of Cheetos, lost in thought.

"Hey," he says after a moment, "I've been meaning to ask you...have you talked to Baker at all?"

"You know I haven't. Why?"

Wally hesitates. "Clay's really worried about her."

"What? Why?"

"We went for a run yesterday and he was telling me that she hasn't really been eating."

Hannah's chest constricts. "She's not eating?"

"No, no, I mean, she is, I think she's just not eating as much as she used to, you know? She told Clay she hasn't really had an appet.i.te."

Hannah s.h.i.+fts on the bench to get a good look at Baker. She sits in the middle of her crowded, lively table, smiling and talking to the people all around her. But there's something different about her, and Hannah can see it now that she's truly looking for the first time in days. Baker is skinnier. Paler. Her smile less bright.

"She's probably missing you, Han," Wally says.

Hannah says nothing.

As they s.h.i.+ft into May, the days grow longer and the earth grows greener. Hannah hears the birds when she wakes and the crickets when she falls to sleep. The whole world holds a feeling of balance, like a tightrope walker poised on a wire, waiting for something, restless in the heat.

The ache in Hannah's heart starts to scar over, so that it no longer feels fresh, but more like a routine part of her. She sits on the back porch at night and wonders how long she will carry it within her. She breathes slowly, asking air into her lungs, and feels the air shape around the outline of the ache, as if too frightened to go near it.

On the first Sat.u.r.day of May, Hannah rearranges the jewelry on her sink while Joanie gets ready to go out to a party. "Turn off that stupid emo music," Joanie says when she comes into the bathroom to grab her makeup bag. "You're making me depressed."

Hannah hangs out with her parents after Joanie leaves. She helps her mom cook baked ziti while her dad plays Fleetwood Mac songs through his laptop speakers, and then she and her parents fall into the big couch in the family room and watch One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest on AMC.

Joanie calls her sometime after midnight, an hour after their parents have gone up to bed. Hannah ignores it. Joanie calls again.

"What?" Hannah answers. "I don't want to pick you up, Joanie, I thought you were staying the night there."

"You need to come over here," Joanie says urgently.

"What?"

"It's Baker. She's really sick."

"What happened?"

"She drank too much. She won't let me help her. Please just come over."

"I'll be right there," Hannah breathes, rus.h.i.+ng to grab her keys. "Just stay with her. I'll be right there."

She speeds out of the Garden District, across South Acadian, down into Liz Freeman's neighborhood. She squints through the darkness and sees Liz's house on the corner, a whole gaggle of cars parked outside of it. She parks on a median and sprints up to the house with one of her shoes halfway off.

She can't find Joanie anywhere on the first floor of the house. Several of her confused cla.s.smates call out to her, drunkenly teasing her about her messy hair and her panicked face. "Where's the fire, Hannah?" someone laughs, but Hannah pushes past him and rushes up the stairs.

With a swell of relief, she finds Joanie in one of the upstairs bedrooms, crouched against a door.

"Where is she?" Hannah asks, her heart racing with fear and adrenaline. "What's going on?"

"She's in here," Joanie says, spreading her fingers over the bathroom door. "She won't let me in."

Hannah tries the door handle. It's locked. She drops to her knees in front of the door. "Baker?" she calls. "Bake? Can you hear me?"

She listens through the wood of the door, but Baker doesn't respond. Hannah taps on the door, calls Baker's name again, and then hears a retching sound coming from the bathroom.

"How much did she have to drink?" she asks Joanie.

"I don't know, I wasn't with her for most of the night, but Liz said she was drinking straight vodka for the last hour."

"And no one stopped her?"

"I don't think they realized."

"Where the h.e.l.l is Clay?"