A Song to Take the World Apart (32 page)

It would be too easy to sing Zoe to her. She could reinforce their friendship into something steel-boned and enduring. Lorelei knows how to do that. She's familiar now with the seeking tendrils of her own desire, and the way they can warp when they tangle up with somebody else's. But that's not what she wants, actually. She wants Zoe to be able to keep choosing her because that's what she wants too.

So instead, for the first time, Lorelei sings about herself.

She sings out the quiet years, and the recent months, the things she never said to Oma and can't say to her mother and won't get to say to Chris. She sings about the cold silence she spent so much time cultivating, and how good it felt to abandon it, and how scary it is to feel it growing inside her again. Lorelei sings about Chris's hands on her skin, and the ocean all around her, and the fear that she's too much, and not enough, and that nobody will ever love her, or that someone will, and that will be worse.

“Oh,” Zoe says when she's finished. “Oh, Lorelei.” She wraps her up in her arms and holds her there. “I'm sorry,” she says against the cotton of Lorelei's T-shirt. “I'm so sorry. You're right. I didn't know.”

Lorelei stays at the Soroushes' for dinner. Zoe insists that she sleep over, even though it's a school night. It's a relief to be at their dinner table, among a close, chattering family. After dinner they watch television, a luxury Mrs. Soroush allows only because Zoe tells her Lorelei got dumped. (“Thanks,” Lorelei says. Zoe gives her a pointed look and says, “Hey, it worked, right?”) They don't talk about it again until they're tucked up in bed together, each of them cocooned in her covers.

“I think the last time I slept over was the first night we went to one of Chris's shows,” Lorelei says. “When we snuck out to go to the Roxy.”

“That feels like a million billion years ago,” Zoe says. “I was right, though. He did totally fall in love with you.”

“Kind of.”

“What do you mean, kind of? You said you only sang to him that one time, at the party.”

“I sang him a line outside the Roxy that night,” Lorelei reminds her. “And again the night his mom caught us in their house. It was only a little bit, but he said— Anyway. I think it was enough to make a difference.”

“Isn't that kind of like falling in love with you, though?” Zoe muses. “Like, I've been thinking about it, and I had talked to Daniel about—you know, doing it, that night. And your singing probably pushed me further in that direction, but so did the drinks I had, and, like, I don't know, the stupid text messages he sent me earlier in the day, and pheromones or something. It's not like falling in love is a streamlined process, you know? People fall in love for all kinds of dumb reasons.”

“But this is
magic,
” Lorelei protests. “This was against his will.”

“You sang to him, what, three times? Over the course of two months? And you didn't know what you were doing.”

“I knew it wasn't right to do it.”

“And the first time you really talked, you were wearing lipstick and a cute dress, and when I went out with Daniel, I put on high heels and talked about stuff he would think was funny. We're always trying to show our best sides to people. You're not the first wily seductress in the world, Lorelei.”

“It's an unfair advantage.”

“And you won't ever do it again,” Zoe says. “But I'm not sure it invalidates your entire relationship with Chris. It makes it complicated, for sure. But it doesn't ruin it. And it doesn't mean you'll ruin the next one. Your life isn't over yet, you know.”

“Not 'til the fat lady sings,” Lorelei mumbles nonsensically. It's late and she's so, so tired.

“Pork up, buddy,” Zoe says. She pokes Lorelei in the ribs and then rolls over to wrap her in a lazy embrace. “I love you no matter what, though, right? Okay?”

“Okay,” Lorelei says. It's a relief to find, finally, that one thing can be simple and true.

L
ORELEI'S INSTINCT IS TO
be alone, still, but she fights it: no more quiet. On Thursday she actually convinces Jens to let her help in the kitchen a little bit, and then she does homework with Nik. She finishes before he does, and curls herself up on his bed. He lets her.

He opens up a math book and turns on music, low in the background. It's the first time Lorelei has heard music in her own house, a song played casually, just to keep time. The sound is sort of crappy, actually, coming from his laptop's tinny speakers.

“You need anything?” Nik asks her.

“Nah,” she says. “Just company.”

Nik finishes up and goes to bed around eleven, or he shoos her out of the room, anyway, and Lorelei doesn't ask why. He deserves some of his own secrets, though she's hoping he and Jackson are really done. Angela doesn't deserve it, but neither does Jackson, and neither does Nik.

She passes Petra's office on her way down the hall. Her mother has been there or at work every minute since Lorelei sent her the email. There's more to tell her—more, still, always more—but she seems too dazed to take anything else in yet. Lorelei trails her fingertips against Petra's doorjamb as she walks by, and then along the walls past her own room, to Oma's.

She sits on the bed. She's excruciatingly aware of her weight wrinkling the comforter. Oma made this bed every morning: she pulled the sheets tight and made sure her corners were neat. It's been waiting for her return for months now, and even if Lorelei gets up and strips it herself and remakes it, even if the bed looks correct again, it won't be the one Oma made. It won't ever be Oma's room again, either.

There's no good reason for the family to keep waiting to turn it into something else.

On the other hand, it's not like they need another room in the house. The family as it is won't last that long, anyway: the twins will leave for college, and then Lorelei, and when Lorelei tells Petra what she's learned…Lorelei tries not to think about it. As soon as she tells her mother, Petra will have to try to free her father. And the great relief of Lorelei's life might end up being the undoing of her parents'.

But maybe that won't be the end. Maybe her parents will move out and find somewhere smaller and more suited to them. They'll have to figure out how to be happy together, then, and how to fill a different kind of silence.

It should make Lorelei sad to imagine all of this, but the image lightens her: The rugs on every floor being lifted, dusted and beaten, and rolled up and sold or put into storage. Her parents finding a place just for the two of them, and some young family filling this space up with laughter and sound.

Lorelei flops onto her belly. The sheets twist underneath her when she does. It's a deliberate action. Then she jumps up and starts pulling books from the shelves.

There are no boxes, but she makes piles: to keep, to ask someone else in the family about, to give away. She does the same with her grandmother's clothes, which are mostly sensible polyester things, cheap and well cared for. She saves the few funny little luxuries, mothballed furs left over from Germany's frigid winters and a few favorite pieces of Oma's knit wool. She sorts knickknacks and tchotchkes, rearranging the space so that it's very clear that no one lives here anymore.

Only then does she turn off the lights and take off her clothes and lie naked between Oma's crisp, cool sheets. Sometimes when she was little and sick, Oma would put out a cot for Lorelei at the foot of her bed, but she's never actually slept here before. It doesn't feel magical, particularly. It just feels like a bed. Lorelei lies still and watches the darkness. When she wakes up, it's morning.

O
N
F
RIDAY
L
ORELEI COMES
home from school with the afternoon stretching out emptily. It's the first day of winter break. She's too exhausted to believe it yet.

Her father is there when she arrives, sitting on the living room couch.

“There you are,” he says, and closes his laptop with a click.

“Yeah.” Lorelei shifts from foot to foot and considers the likelihood that he'll let her escape this conversation twice.

“I noticed Chris hasn't been back here since the weekend,” Henry says.

Lorelei winces. “No.”

“He seems nice.”

“He is.”

“I wish you had told us you were dating someone.” Henry nods his head to the space next to him on the couch.

“Dad, I've really got to—”

“Come sit,” he says, and it's not a question.

Lorelei does.

“I'm not dating him anymore,” she says. She crosses her arms and pulls her knees to her chest. “Anyway, what, am I not allowed?”

“No, no, you're allowed. I just…We do need to talk about this, Lorelei. Because I could have told you more about your voice.”

“I
asked,
” Lorelei says. “I asked Oma, and she told me not to sing and not to worry about why. And then Mom told me your whole messed-up story, okay, so— I just wanted one thing to be normal for a little while. One thing. Which obviously didn't really work out for me, so.”

“I'm sorry.” Her father scrubs the heels of his hands against his eyes and runs his fingers through his thick gray hair. Lorelei bites down on the tenderness that rises in her. “I didn't think it would end up like this.”

“How did you think it would end up, then? You heard me, that afternoon. You knew.”

“I thought Oma told you. I should have known she wouldn't.”

“Because she didn't
trust
me.”

“Your grandmother was very proud,” he says. “She believed in keeping up appearances. She wanted things to be normal too, after her fashion. I don't think she realized this wasn't going to go away.”

“And then Mom told me I was cursed.”

“Your mother has her own way of taking things.”

“So what would you have told me, if I had asked? That the women in my family enchant people by singing to them? That you've been under a spell my whole life?”

“Is that— Is that what she told you? Oh, Lorelei. That's not true.”

“Please. I've seen how you look at her. She told me what happened.” Lorelei's stomach tightens and twists sharply when she thinks of how he'll look if he loses Petra, or loses the part of him that loves her.

“It was bad for a few years,” Henry says. “And it's— I don't know. I'm inside of it. I don't know what it would be like without it. You're right that I probably wouldn't have stayed with your mother for long enough to find out.

“But it's been— We've been together for a lot of years now. It's kind of impossible to know how much of it was mine to begin with.” Henry scoots in a little bit closer. He doesn't touch her but he's close enough that she can reach out, if she wants. “You and your brothers, though,” he says. “That's not complicated. I love you because I love you. I always have and I always will.”

“Would you leave her?” Lorelei asks. “If you could.”

Henry heaves a huge sigh. “It would depend,” he says. “I was very angry for a long time. As angry as I could be, under the circumstances. That might come back. And you know, she might want me to leave. We both remind each other of a lot of tough stuff. But grown-up relationships are always full of tough stuff. That doesn't make them broken. And I promise you, it doesn't have anything to do with you.”

“I'm
just like her,
” Lorelei spits out. “I did exactly the same thing.”

“No one ever told her, either, what the consequences were,” Henry says. “And she was so sad, and so lonely. You know why I forgave her?”

“Why?”

“After Oma told her, she never sang to me again. I begged her. For years. I still—” He doesn't have to tell her. Lorelei remembers his face when he thought the song might be for him. “But she never would, once she knew for sure. That's how I've been able to stay with her, and to trust her. Everyone screws up. The question is only really what you do afterward. Whether you're brave enough to face up to what you've done.”

There it is again, the grown-up question she wanted to ask Oma, about the possibility of survival and transformation. Carina started to answer it, saying:
You'll survive it, but you have to want to.
Now her dad is amending the answer:
It's not enough to want it. You have to go ahead and try.

It's not much, but it's something. Hope starts to glimmer at the horizon of Lorelei's mind. Maybe she's right about something, finally: that growing up leaves traces on you—a scar, a tear, a glue-mended crack—to mark the violence of the change that made it. You don't get to become someone else without letting go of the person you used to be.

Lorelei isn't certain she trusts him, but then, there's no power in his voice, nothing that could pull her under or bend her will. He's just her human father, sitting with his palms up in his lap, trying to convince her because he wants to fix some small part of things. She's grateful for the animal comfort of his body next to hers: the pulse of his heart beating, the tidal hush of the blood in his veins. He reaches out and puts an arm around her shoulders.

Maybe whatever happens between her parents has nothing to do with her. Maybe she can tell her mother the truth, and let them figure it out. They have before. They might be able to again.

“Be brave,” he says against her hair. “Be brave, do better. That's all anyone is asking of you, Lorelei.”