A Song to Take the World Apart

by Zan Romanoff

  Each one is also written in German. Lorelei can’t read a word.

  Language has always been a tricky thing in her life: her father teaches English as a second language classes at the local community college, and he spent most of the twins’ freshman year of high school trying to convince them to take Latin instead of Spanish, so that they would understand the roots of their words, he said. But all the adults in the house already have a second language—a first one, actually—and they’ve kept it carefully from their children. Zoe’s parents make her go to Farsi classes on Sunday mornings. Lorelei looks at what’s in her hand and recognizes the alphabet, and nothing else.

  It’s a treasure trove or a trash heap, and no way of knowing which. There are probably dozens of secrets hidden here, plenty that Lorelei wants to know and more she really doesn’t.

  Before she can stop herself, she lets one hand dart out to grab the earliest, thickest stack. Oma left too soon, and she left a million mysteries in her wake. Lorelei touches the paper reverently and imagines it’s full of answers, things that will make her miss Oma less somehow, and make her absence bearable. Things that will make her family work like a family should.

  She imagines that she is one of those TV detectives again, tough and untouchable, and she’ll have all the answers by the hour’s end. She just looks down at the paper as she walks out of the room, instead of around at all of the evidence of the life Oma lived, and then left, disappearing too fast to be pinned down and held in place.

  Friday is the funeral. Only the family comes.

  Later that day, Lorelei mails the last letter. It drops into a mailbox and disappears. Just like that: gone.

  SATURDAY IS THE LAST gasp of hot September. A lick of oven-warm wind rolls and gusts across the city. It makes the house seem unbearably small, so as soon as she’s done with her homework, Lorelei goes for a walk. She heads down to the beach and then up toward the Santa Monica Pier, where she can get lost in the crowd. She eats cotton candy, which sticks to the corners of her mouth and unspools from its paper cone in the breeze. The Ferris wheel is huge and hot, gleaming brightly under the relentless sun. Lorelei watches couples get on and go up, up, up, before they come back down again.

  The air is so clear and empty that she can see for miles, straight out to the humped backs of the mountains that cup the city from the south, the east, and the north. Los Angeles sits in a basin, at the bottom of a bowl, and the ocean stretches out sparkling in its belly.

  A song itches itself in the back of her throat, something high and sweet in counterpoint to the rustling breezes and the low ocean roar, but she doesn’t dare sing it. In the clear light of day it’s even harder to believe that there’s anything to Oma’s warning or Petra’s curse, but she doesn’t want to take her mother’s permission, or break her grandmother’s rule. Lorelei knows who really raised her, and who she’s loyal to.

  When she gets back to the house after her walk, the twins are wrapped up in last week’s homework, Jens quizzing Nik for a history test in the living room. Her mother is in the kitchen, and her father is sorting through work sheets at the dining room table.

  Lorelei hovers in the front hall for a moment, not wanting to disturb the house’s peaceful equilibrium with her presence. The usual silence is softened by small human noises, the twins’ voices and her father’s papers rustling, her mother opening and closing cabinets, looking for something she can’t find.

  There’s a stack of mail on the hall table, and Lorelei notices a letter from school poking out of it. It’s probably nothing to worry about—some minor administrative update—but she wants to open it first just in case.

  When she tugs the envelope free, the rest of them come with it. Lorelei moves to grab them out of the air and knocks over the metal tray they’ve been sitting on. It hits the ground with a crash. So much for peace. She kneels and sweeps the mail back into a pile.

  “Lorelei?” her dad calls from the dining room.

  “Yeah, Dad,” she calls back. “Sorry, I just knocked something over.”

  The top letter in the rearranged stack catches her eye as she lifts it back up. She recognizes the writing. Hannah, the return address says. She tears it open without thinking—it has to mean something, it has to—but of course it’s written in German, just like the rest of them.

  “Oh, you’re okay.” Her father hovers over her shoulder. Lorelei didn’t hear him coming. “What have you got there?”

  “A letter. To Oma.”

  Henry frowns and tugs the sheaf of paper out of her hands. Lorelei doesn’t know how to say No, stop, I need that. When he scans it over, something in the contents makes him smile sadly.

  “From family, at home,” he says. Oma never called it home. She said back there, mostly, like her life in Germany was far behind her. “I don’t think you knew—Hannah is your grandmother’s sister.”

  “I didn’t.” Lorelei knew Oma had sisters. She never learned their names.

  “I guess we don’t talk about that much,” Henry says. “Maybe we’ll visit someday. Your grandmother never wanted to, but—” He cuts off his sentence as soon as he realizes what the rest of it will be: now that she’s dead, we can.

  Lorelei can’t help loving the idea of meeting great-aunts and cousins, and discovering the scattered constellation of her own family: more girls and women with her grandmother’s stern, beautiful face. Maybe they were raised in quiet houses too. Maybe they’re people who would understand.

  But her father’s silence guilts her: Who is she to be happy now that Oma’s gone? How can it feel like freedom to lose someone you love?

  “Are you talking about Mama?”

  Lorelei’s head snaps up, but it’s too late: Petra snuck up on them both. She tugs the letter out of Henry’s hands and doesn’t look at it.

  “A letter came from Hannah,” Henry says.

  “Oh.” Petra’s hand tightens and the paper crumples in it.

  “Can I have it?” Lorelei doesn’t mean to ask. The words just come.

  “For what?” Petra asks. Her eyes narrow. Lorelei doesn’t know how to explain. “You can’t read it, anyway,” she reminds her. She turns and heads back to the kitchen with the letter still wilting in her hand.

  Henry follows her. Lorelei watches him go and realizes that’s the most she and Petra have said to each other since Oma died. Since long before that, probably, too, not counting the coffee shop the other day. Which she would rather not.

  Just like that, her good mood evaporates. She can’t bear to stay in the house with her silent, greedy mother or her pliant, self-involved father, or her brothers, who are always conveniently keeping out of the way. The tightness she felt in the air this morning closes in on her again. “I’m going back out,” she yells, and slams the door behind her before anyone can tell her not to.

  By the time she makes it back to the Pier, the afternoon is tumbling into evening. She walks fast to the far end, where it’s marginally less busy and she can stare out past everything at the day’s last brightness. Behind her a crush of late-season tourists crowds the neon-lit amusement park. The air is heavy with their scent: human bodies and stale fry grease and sugar and salt and sweat. Before her is open water, endless, unsettled.

  She leans against a railing and her fury boils over into air. The song just flies out of her, as high and clear as she’s been imagining. It feels soothing in her throat, to her skin and eyes and mouth. It’s physical, the way singing empties her out: like everything she’s been clutching too close can finally, finally be set down.

  She’s so distracted by relief that at first she doesn’t notice the way people have drawn closer to her, clustered in a loose group of fifteen or twenty. Every one of them is listening intently, rapt in the sound.

  When she does notice, what she sees is that every face is slack with wonder and wracked by grief, tears falling silently out of bright, unfocused eyes. It seems natural, for just a moment, that everyone is as stricken as she is, bone-weary, like sadness is the t
hing that threads the world together.

  Around them the Pier bustles on about its business, but Lorelei is enclosed in a circle of her own making, the quiet center of the lonely, left-behind universe. A woman reaches out to touch her: the hem of her T-shirt, the ragged threads of her cutoff shorts. The bodies around her stir and shuffle in closer. Too close.

  As Lorelei shakes herself out of the song, she starts to see the wrongness: these people are enchanted, fevery like her father was the last time she sang. Like her father, they’re sick with something she gave them. The light behind their eyes doesn’t belong to them at all.

  “No,” she whispers, but no one moves. “Stop,” she says, louder. They’re not doing anything aside from crying, a steady stream of tears dripping from chins and cheeks. She half expects when she turns to run that someone will stop her, but they let her leave, parting gently around her body and staying still, stunned silent in her wake.

  The idea that there might be something to Petra’s curse after all is too exhausting to take seriously. That night Lorelei looks at herself in the bathroom mirror. She wishes Zoe was here to make her over with the mask she wore at the Roxy: the face of someone older and prettier, just someone else. She hums tunelessly while she brushes her teeth.

  “I’m cursed,” she whispers at her reflection, but the lights in the fixture overhead burn on merrily, unblinking, and her mouth tastes of mint and she feels nothing more than tired and sad, achy, like usual. “I’m cursed,” she insists to herself, tracing the lines of her face on the mirror’s cold glass.

  She looks just like she always does. She shouldn’t be surprised. She’s always had Oma’s curse in her, or whatever it is, just like she’s always had her mother’s fury and her father’s absence. If Petra was cursed before Lorelei was born, she’s never lived without it.

  I’m the same as I always was, Lorelei thinks, and flicks off the light on her way out.

  IN THE MORNING, before she’s awake enough to think better of it, Lorelei picks up the oldest letter. She types the words into a Google translate box, one sentence at a time. She has to find keyboard shortcuts for unfamliar characters. It seems to take forever. Ich würde gerne fragen, wie es dir geht, aber ich bin mir nicht sicher, ob das eine Frage ist, die du jetzt beantworten wolltest. I would like to ask how you’re doing, but I’m not sure if that is a question that you wanted to answer now. Ich weiss, dass die letzte Zeit schwierig war. I know that the last time was difficult. Jetzt, da du da bist, muss ich einfach daran glauben, dass alles wieder gut wird. Now that you’re there, I just have to believe that everything will be fine again. Ich bin wenigstens froh darüber, dass du gehen konntest, weil du es wolltest. I’m at least glad that you could go, since you wanted to.

  It was Henry’s side of the family who arranged the actual emigration; they were government people and diplomats going back generations. He grew up traveling, learning languages in first one city, and then another, and then another. He was the one who chose Los Angeles for them; at least, that’s the way Lorelei has always heard the story. Your mom knew she was going to have two babies, and she wanted to raise them somewhere warm and sunny, where they could play outside all day. I told her: I know just the place.

  That story left a thousand details unspoken. Some of them Lorelei has filled in over time: that Henry had always loved Los Angeles, but also that they were running from something they were too ashamed to discuss in their native language when they came here. Then there are the things she’s only learning now: that the pregnancy might not have been the only source of worry, or shame. That her grandmother might have done something she was ashamed of too.

  The letter is not a revelation. It’s chatty and full of news of people whose names she doesn’t recognize, domestic details from homes she’s never seen. Halfway through she gets bored with the laborious process of typing and reading, and trying to piece together what the computer can’t translate or conjugate. It all feels broken and impossible, like a nest of words so tangled that she can’t find the first thread to pull.

  She takes sentences at random from the letter, and then from the next and the next one. Today, we found some of your old school papers. Should we forward them to you, or throw away? When it rained the other day, I wanted to make the chicken soup from your recipe, but we didn’t have any garlic and it seemed impossible for me to go out in the rain. Of course I miss you all. I miss Petra’s singing in the house.

  Lorelei has to read it again. I miss Petra’s singing in the house.

  Of course she must have sung, to know there was a curse on her, or—whatever it is. Lorelei just can’t imagine Petra singing, is all. She tries to picture her mother young and happy and carefree, sitting in her mother’s home, surrounded by their family, humming while they talked and washed dishes or made tea. What she comes up with is like a holiday commercial; it has nothing to do with the mother she knows.

  She can’t imagine her mother happy, or the days when her parents were just starting to fall in love.

  Lorelei types in the next sentence, and the next. I know you won’t want me to say it, Silke, but I think there has to be another way for her, and for you.

  Her hands are shaking now.

  You treat it like a curse, and so she will too.

  You’ve probably stopped reading this letter already, or if you haven’t, I will get some blistering reply. It will come all the way across the ocean and still it will burn me when I open it. There’s so much space between us, now, and you probably still don’t think it’s enough.

  I’m sorry to make you angry, and remind you of the things you don’t like to think about. But if I don’t, who will?

  Love always,

  Your sister

  Lorelei smooths the paper in front of her. She was hoping that Hannah’s letter would explain it all away, and give this thing a name that was normal rather than magical. But instead it’s the final click of a lock coming closed. You treat it like a curse. Whatever it is, Hannah knew about it. They both did. The blank faces of all those people on the Pier flash in front of Lorelei, and she shivers.

  On the other hand, if Oma only treats it like a curse, that means it isn’t one. There has to be another way, Hannah says in the letter. Yesterday Lorelei sang from the bottom of her own grief, but maybe if she was feeling different—if she was different—she could give people happiness instead, or wonder, or love. Maybe she could use the obscure power she holds in her throat for something beautiful.

  She shivers again, and this time it feels heady and lovely, like something she wants to feel again.

  ZOE COMES TO VISIT that afternoon, and brings all the normalcy of the real world rushing back in with her. She also brings a satchel of missed homework from the teachers and a card signed by their friends. “Chris asked about you on Friday,” she says, huddling up with Lorelei on her bed.

  “Oh!” Lorelei is thrilled, and then upset with herself for being thrilled.

  “I told him,” Zoe says. “I hope that’s okay.”

  Lorelei nods. She’s glad to have been spared the awkwardness. It’s a big thing to say, and she’s already learned that no one really knows how to respond.

  Zoe doesn’t say anything for a while. She strokes Lorelei’s hair at her temples, soothing and sweet.

  There’s a particular quality to the quiet between them, something different from the oppressive silence that usually fills the rest of the house. They could be talking. Zoe could be trying to fill up space with words and Lorelei would let her. Instead, they both allow the absence. They choose it together.

  When Lorelei starts to cry, it happens in her chest, like something ripping open, sobs tearing through her over and over. Zoe holds on to her, an anchor so steady Lorelei can finally let herself drift. She cries until she’s ready to be quiet again.

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she says at last. What she means is: I don’t know what my family is going to do. She’s been so busy thinking about singing, and the letters, and the idea of bi
g, powerful mysteries, that she hasn’t let herself look too closely at the truth: every day from now on, she’ll wake up and Oma will still be gone. Who will run the house in her absence?

  “Oma took good care of you,” Zoe says. “She always— She kind of raised you, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “When my mom’s mother died, she totally lost it,” Zoe says.

  Lorelei can’t imagine it. Zoe’s mother seems so assured and controlled.

  “She didn’t get out of bed for a week. And at the gravesite—I mean, she screamed. She and her mother had such a complicated relationship, though. I think she didn’t know how to mourn her, really. Because they fought so much when she was alive.”

  “It’s not like that with Oma.”

  Or is it? Lorelei doesn’t even know how to feel about her grandmother right now.

  “Of course it isn’t. I just— If it was like that for her, when it had been so complicated, I can’t imagine what it’s like for you, if, you know, it wasn’t. I remember Dad telling Carina that it’s okay if grief is ugly. That you just have to get through it, however you need to.”

  Oma’s absence is like a huge, aching hollow: it’s not ugly, it’s gutting. Lorelei has a new dress in her closet and she messed up Oma’s braid and she made all of those people cry. She took the letters and no one stopped her. There’s no fixing it now. There is no going back.

  What’s ugly is how she feels about the living: Petra’s bright eyes, and her mistrust, and the way she’s made Lorelei start to ask questions that Oma can never answer.

  It shouldn’t be this hard, Lorelei tells herself. To Zoe, she says: “I feel like an orphan. Which is crazy, because—”

  “Oma raised you,” Zoe says again. “And anyway, I’m pretty sure that you’re allowed to feel whatever the fuck you want.”

  It’s dark out by the time they go downstairs to say goodbye.