Chapter 12 Good Friday #2
“Why can’t we? Baker, I’m so tired. I don’t know what I believe anymore, or if it’s even worth it. The only thing I know is that I want to be with you.” She steels herself, gazing into Baker’s tortured face. “Don’t you want to be with me, too?”
Baker starts sobbing, rubbing her hands feverishly up and down her arms. “Hannah, please. There’s no alternative.
You heard what Father Simon said about people like us.
And everyone believes that, Han. Even if they say they don’t, deep down they really do.
We don’t have a choice. I mean, if we tried to—God, my parents would never look at me again—”
“Do you regret it? Please, can you tell me that?” Hannah steps closer to her, places her hand gingerly on Baker’s jaw. “I miss you.”
Baker squeezes her eyes shut, but the tears push through anyway. “It’s killing me not to talk to you.”
“I know,” Hannah whispers.
“But this is our whole lives. Our families, our friends, our home.” Her voice breaks. “Our faith.”
“I need you to know…” Hannah’s voice is ragged, coming from somewhere else, “that if God Himself gave me a choice between you and eternity, I would choose you.”
Baker searches her face with a look that is deep and long. “Please don’t say that.”
Hannah sniffles. “I have to.”
Baker leans into her, presses their foreheads together. “I need this to be the last time, Han. I need you to let me make this choice.”
Hannah twines a hand through her hair. “Even if it costs us everything?”
Baker takes a shallow breath. She answers through a sob. “Everything.”
And the moment is eternal, and the balance of life hangs on a thread, and Hannah can’t understand how the air is so warm and the breeze is so gentle, the trees so green and the insects so familiar. How can the earth be so beautiful when her heart is shattering into pieces?
And suddenly Hannah remembers another garden, a garden of agonizing tears, a garden where one human’s will was pitted against God’s. Is this what it means to die? To surrender and hope for a new beginning on the other side?
“I will let you go,” Hannah says, choking on her own sobs, “as long as you promise me something.”
Baker opens her eyes. The sorrow in them cleaves Hannah in half. “Anything.”
“Please don’t forget that I loved you,” Hannah chokes out. “I loved you with everything I have, and one day, someone else—some—some guy—will come along, and he’d better love you even half as much as I do.”
A pressure in Hannah’s hair. Baker’s hand searching for shore. “And the s-same for you, Han.”
And then her lips are on Hannah’s one last time, desperate and deliberate and lingering, like she wants to pack away this feeling for the rest of her life. Hannah barely has time to register her surprise before Baker pulls away.
“If any of this is real,” Baker sobs, already walking away from her, “God and heaven and prayer, all of it … I just … I hope it’s worth it.”
“It’d better be worth it,” Hannah says, fully sobbing now. “For you.”
Baker’s wet eyes hold the whole of the universe in one final, haunting look, and then she is gone.
Hannah drives to City Park. Though she would normally sit in her car, tonight she roams the golf course and lies on her back beneath the sky. She raises her hand into the humid air and imagines that she can stir it with her fingers, like a child discovering paint for the first time.
“I’m here to talk to You,” she tells the sky.
A breeze tickles the oak trees. The earth buzzes with insects and secrets, and Hannah listens carefully, wanting to know what they say.
“Tell me what to do,” she says. “Tell me what’s right. I can’t sort the bullshit from the truth.”
The stars twinkle in the overwhelming sky. Hannah narrows her eyes, trying to determine the colors she sees, but she can’t distinguish blue from black. The mass of the sky is impenetrable.
Father Simon’s words wrap themselves about her heart. She thinks about Christ, and how she’d like to lay everything down at His feet. “Here you go,” she’d say, dropping everything like a pile of wood. “You gave me this, and I have no idea what to do with it.”
Then she’d take out a key, a big, clunky, golden key, and she’d reach to unlock her heart with it.
Her heart would open up and all kinds of wondrous things would come spilling out—rushing forth like a powerful waterfall, or maybe fluttering out like a gentle butterfly.
“Here it is,” she’d tell Him. “Everything that’s in my heart, for you and me to see. ”
She’d ask Him to stand in her kitchen when Baker came over to hang out.
She’d have Him witness Baker’s laughter, her smile, her kind heart, her vulnerability.
Baker wouldn’t see Him, but he would see everything: the goodness of her heart and the light in her eyes.
And afterward, Hannah would ask Him, “How could I not love her?”
She’d ask Him about the other people. The ones like her, the ones unlike her. “There are so many people who make me hate myself,” she’d say. “Who make me feel ashamed. They claim to know what You want. They say I’m turning away from You if I fall in love with a girl. Is it true?”
He’d glide along, the giant of mankind who calmed the waves with His hand, the heart of humanity who loved the lepers and the prostitutes, the quiet lamb who went willingly to slaughter.
“Please,” she’d beg Him. “Please tell me.”
Maybe He still wouldn’t answer, and she’d tell Him this was all bullshit. Surely He should know why He made her the way she is. Surely He should know why her heart beats the way it does. If He knows every hair on her head, why can’t He recognize the truth of her heart?
“Please,” Hannah cries, getting to her knees and sobbing to the sky. She chokes, shudders, blinks away the tears. “Please, either help me or take this away from me. I don’t want this anymore.”
But her stormy heart does not settle. Her muscles do not relax.
She searches the stars and wonders why God made them so good, so brilliant, but made her so wrong and broken.
Her eyes spill over with tears and her throat burns.
She pounds her fists into the earth, into the grass and the soil, and emits an animallike cry from the depths of her body.
“Please,” she sobs, digging her hands into the soil. “Please.”
She wakes the next morning with a pit in her stomach. The only saving grace is that it’s Friday, and she needs to endure just a few short hours before she can burrow into her bed for the weekend.
During second block, in Ms. Carpenter’s class, they talk about how the AP Literature exam went for them, but no one dares to hint at Ms. Carpenter’s behavior during Mass the previous day.
Hannah turns her mind off and lapses into small talk with her classmates, for once not distracted by Baker’s presence, as Baker is sitting for her AP Biology exam in the gym.
Mr. Manceau interrupts with a knock on the door halfway through the class period. Ms. Carpenter steps into the hall and closes the door behind her, and Hannah’s classmates trade knowing looks with each other.
Mr. Manceau shuffles into the room a minute later.
He leans against the whiteboard and folds his arms over his protruding stomach.
“Ms. Carpenter has to go take care of something,” he says, breathing heavily beneath his black mustache.
“I’ll be here with you until the end of the period. So get on back to work now.”
“What does Ms. Carpenter have to take care of?”
“Don’t you be worrying about that, Collins, just get on back to work,” he answers, but Hannah can tell he is darkly satisfied by their curiosity. “Well? Why aren’t y’all pullin’ out your workbooks?”
“We don’t have any work to do,” Collins says. “We had our exam yesterday.”
Mr. Manceau huffs and swivels his eyes to the ceiling, as if begging for patience.
“Why am I not surprised,” he mutters under his breath.
Hannah and her classmates wait with bated breath for him to continue, but he merely claps his hands together and says, “Well, in that case, each one of y’all needs to write me an essay about the things you’ve learned in this class this year. ”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes, Davies, I’m serious. And watch your mouth.”
“How long does it have to be?”
“Are you kidding me right now? Have you not made it to the twelfth grade? It needs to be as long as it needs to be.”
Hannah and her classmates roll their eyes and begrudgingly pull out loose-leaf paper and pens.
“Are you going to read these?” someone asks.
Mr. Manceau widens his eyes to signal that she has asked a good question. “I don’t know if I will…,” he says slowly, “but there are certain people who might be interested in reading them, I would think.”
Hannah glares at him from her desk. Mr. Manceau pays no attention: He starts examining his nails, then chewing on them with short, aggressive bites.
Hannah puts pen to paper and titles the page: A Condensed Summary of the Material* I Have Learned from the Best Teacher in This School.
She then drops her pen to the bottom of the page and writes, *Note that I am limiting this summary to academic material.
I could never capture everything Ms. Carpenter has taught me about everything else.
Mr. Manceau stretches his neck against the whiteboard while the classroom of students writes in silence. Hannah’s hand races across her paper, writing Hurston’s dialect technique and the influence of colonization on “ethnic” literature and the importance of questioning the narrator.
Ms. Carpenter never returns.
The senior courtyard is buzzing with gossip when Hannah goes to lunch. Joanie intercepts her before she can sit down, pulling her behind a corner and turning to face her with a frantic expression.
“Han—”
“What’s wrong?” Hannah asks immediately.
“Do you—have you heard what people are saying?”
“No?”
Joanie turns her head this way and that, checking for prying eyes. In a hushed voice, she asks, “Did you know Ms. Carpenter is in the front office?”