A Song to Take the World Apart

by Zan Romanoff

  “You think it’s under control.” Petra picks up the scissors again. Lorelei tries to shy away but her mother holds her firmly in place and begins to cut again, focused, almost vicious. “I thought so too, and I was fooling myself just like you are. There is no under control with this. Either you do it or you don’t, and you can’t.”

  “Okay!” Lorelei reaches up and brushes fine bits of hair from her nose and cheeks. “But I’m just saying, it would be a lot easier to not do it if I understood what I was not doing, and why.”

  Petra puts the shears back in their drawer and pulls the towel from around Lorelei’s shoulders. “Go downstairs and make us some tea,” she instructs. “Come to my room. I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you all about what happened to me.”

  IN THE KITCHEN, Lorelei makes mint tea in mismatched mugs. Her father and brothers are clearing up the last traces of dinner, clattering plates into cabinets and silverware into drawers. As she goes up the stairs again, quiet closes itself in around her.

  Petra didn’t specify, but Lorelei knows that “my room” means her little office rather than the bedroom her parents share. Her mother is always there when she’s awake; sometimes she even sleeps in the workroom, on the futon. The door is half open, light spilling out into the dark hallway. Lorelei thinks she remembers doing this when she was younger: standing outside her mother’s door, wondering if she was allowed to come in.

  Petra is sitting in front of her laptop, which is open to her email, glowing white. Lorelei puts the tea down and settles herself on the futon. Petra doesn’t turn around when she starts speaking. Her voice is low and rough.

  “You never knew your grandfather,” she says. “But he was a good man. He loved Oma beyond all measure—the way I remember it, anyway. And the way people talked about him.” He died when Petra was a teenager. Oma was a widow for so much of her life. “When he—after—I was wild,” Petra says. “Reckless. I skipped school, you know, ran around town with boys. The way girls do.” She shuts the laptop but doesn’t turn around.

  “I met your father just after I turned seventeen,” Petra goes on. “I was too wild to keep, he said, like an animal, all eyes and teeth. He wanted someone steady and stable. But I was in love with him.” She turns, finally, and looks at Lorelei with a gimlet gaze. “You know how it is, I’m sure.”

  Lorelei thinks of Chris’s hands on her all afternoon long: the way he touched her chin, and her breasts, and the insides of her thighs. The way he picked up his guitar and offered her his song. She nods in agreement.

  “And I wanted him to love me back.” Petra bites down hard on her lip. Her mouth takes on the familiar sour shape it’s held for so much of Lorelei’s life. “So I sang to him over and over again.

  “Oma had told me not to, of course. The same way she told you, I imagine. I had forgotten it by the time I started wanting to. And anyway, your father was slipping away from me. I didn’t care what I had to do to keep him.”

  Lorelei wants to stop her to ask more about this—whether Oma explained why, or if Petra ever asked. But her mother is far away, lost in the story.

  “Oma was so wrapped up in her own grief that she never noticed,” she says. “Never noticed how often he was around, or that he would stop by the house when I wasn’t there and just wait for me, for hours, sometimes. And I thought— I don’t know what I thought.” She smiles a dark, secret smile. “All I thought was that it was working.”

  Lorelei can’t help herself. “When did you decide it was a curse?”

  “When she found out,” Petra says heavily. There’s a long pause. “She just kept saying Petra, Petra, what have you done? But when she found out I was pregnant, she would just say instead: What have I done?”

  “With the twins?”

  “With the twins.”

  “And you think just because she said—”

  “She’s the one who warned me,” Petra says. “No one else knew about it. No one else would have cared! Whether I sometimes sang a song or not. But she was always twisted about music, after the way her mother destroyed her career onstage. She couldn’t bear it if I had something she didn’t have. Or if I left her behind. If she had to be alone again, in her own miserable quiet house.”

  “You don’t think her mother asked her not to because her voice was just like yours? Because it could— It was, you know, powerful?”

  “I always thought that she must have brought it on herself,” Petra says. She sounds almost shy, admitting it. “She asked for too much, and we all ended up cursed.”

  Lorelei wants to argue with her mother’s version of events, her carefully constructed personal mythology, but it’s not like she has any evidence to support her own theory. The difference is that she doesn’t want to believe that this is Oma’s fault, and her mother does.

  And anyway, something else is dawning on Lorelei, so slowly that she doesn’t realize how massive it is until it’s too late. “But. I mean. So let’s say she did it on purpose, or by accident, either way, that she did it. Since you got Dad—since you got what you wanted—why is it a curse?”

  But she already knows the answer to this question. She just needs someone else to say it, so she doesn’t have to.

  “All love spells are curses,” Petra says. “To make someone feel what they don’t, and do things they wouldn’t. To take a person’s body, his mind. What else could you call it? Of course it was a curse.”

  “So Dad is the one who the curse is really on,” Lorelei says. “I mean. It’s on you, still, but you don’t have to sing anymore. He can’t stop being in love with you.”

  “I tried to get him to leave when I figured it out. I told him what I’d done, and it didn’t make any difference. Eventually, it seemed like it might be kinder to bring him with us. To give him what he thought he wanted.”

  Lorelei feels seasick. The world keeps shifting itself underneath her. Their family is her father’s blessing and his curse: it’s the only thing he’s ever wanted, and having it is the reason he can’t want anything else.

  “So you see why I had to let your grandmother raise you, when she offered. I had tried to love someone once, and I ruined his life,” Petra says. “Oma was difficult, but I thought: at least she’ll teach them control.” She shrugs her shoulders up by her ears and wraps her long, thin arms tightly around herself. “Everyone in our family is hungry for something. The women, as long as I’ve known them, they’ve been starving. There’s only one way to survive that kind of hunger. You have to learn discipline. You have to learn it from the very first day.”

  Lorelei gets up to leave.

  “I’m sorry,” Petra says. “You were the most selfish thing I ever did, you know. Having a daughter—giving Henry another baby—and Oma another one to take care of— It’s not your fault you were born into all this mess, Lorelei. I would take it back if I could.”

  “You wish I’d never been born.”

  “No!” Petra stands and grabs Lorelei’s wrist. For once her grip isn’t menacing; it’s tight with desperation that tugs on Lorelei like the tide. “I wish you had been born into a better family. None of this is your fault.”

  “It wasn’t until I started singing,” Lorelei says. The family legacy is hers, now, and it doesn’t matter where it comes from or what anyone calls it. It’s been tainting her blood since the day she was born, but she chose to open her mouth.

  Petra’s hand on hers slackens.

  Lorelei leaves before either of them can say anything else.

  LORELEI WAKES WITH THE echo of a song in her head: the one Chris sang yesterday. The one with her name in it. Usually she translates a letter first thing, while she’s still fresh, but today she’s too anxious to focus. Instead, she pulls up the Pogues playing “Lorelei” on YouTube. Sirens. She takes her copy of The Odyssey off the shelf. They read it in English last year; she’s pretty sure it has sirens in it.

  It does, but barely. Odysseus is warned against them, and then he figures out a way to hear them without succumbing to their s
ong. So he sails right on by without actually seeing them. And that’s it. Lorelei does remember, now, because she asked a question about it in class: Why did he risk it? What was the point?

  Her teacher had an answer ready, something about how narratives need detours, and heroes need challenges to prove that they’re heroes. She didn’t press the point, then, and wishes now that she had. Though Mr. Colombo probably wouldn’t have had answers to the kinds of questions she has now, either.

  Like, did Odysseus spend the rest of his life dreaming about that song?

  Her father’s abstraction from their lives makes so much more sense now that she understands what he’s been listening for all these years.

  And then, beyond that—what was it like for the women on that island, who reached out with their voices, and watched the hero and his story leave them behind? Because The Odyssey is about a man coming home to his human wife. The temptations that other women—even magical women—offer are just detours. The sirens are a chorus of faceless voices on an island. They live forever, but they do it in history’s margins.

  Even in ancient myth, their lives escape off the page.

  No wonder Lorelei doesn’t understand what the hell she is.

  The internet doesn’t have much to add to this. Lots of cultures have siren stories, but they’re all pretty similar. Sometimes the women have bird’s heads or bodies, in addition to their bewitching voices. They all promise wrack and ruin: a seduction that invites you to betrayal.

  Lorelei’s own name is a reminder of all that. It’s taken from a tall rock in a narrow river, a place where men die so often it seems like there must be something unnatural at work. Lorelei thinks of her mother’s desperation last night, and looks down at her ribs, and the hollow between her legs. She wonders how many men will shipwreck against her before she learns how to keep them—and herself—safe from the dark pull at work in her and her voice.

  AT SCHOOL THAT DAY, Lorelei is listless. She and Zoe take their lunches out and eat on the bleachers overlooking the basketball courts.

  “I don’t understand why you’re not more excited about singing with him,” Zoe says through a mouthful of grilled cheese. She wants to talk about The Trouble playing Daniel’s party, and Lorelei keeps trying to avoid the subject. “This is a good opportunity for all of you, actually. Some of Daniel’s friends know, like, producers and stuff. It could be their big break or something.”

  It’s so impossible: sitting in back of her normal high school with her normal best friend, talking about boys and dates and bands, and thinking about the mess she was born into, and how to keep herself from getting any further into it.

  Zoe gets tired of saying things Lorelei won’t respond to. She lets it get quiet, picks at a loose thread at the hem of her sweater, nibbles cheese from the edge of her sandwich.

  Her strategy works. Lorelei says, “I don’t really know what’s going on with me and Chris after yesterday.”

  “Whatever, he’s totally obsessed with you,” Zoe says. “And if he lets his mom boss him around— I mean, do you really want to be with a guy who’s so whipped?”

  “It’s more complicated than that.” Lorelei tilts her head back and looks up at the powdery sky, thin clouds scattering light so that it’s even and flat and surprisingly bright. “He doesn’t want to hurt her. I get that, you know? Like, it’s actually kind of—”

  “If you say sweet, so help me, Lorelei, seriously? That’s creepy. It’s super not okay.”

  “Ugh. I mean. I know. But it’s also— They’ve both been through a lot. I think maybe they don’t really know how to be good to each other anymore. In a less codependent way.”

  “Have you talked to him about it?”

  Lorelei shakes her head. “He didn’t call after I left, and I haven’t seen him yet today.”

  “Oh my god, you are ridiculous. You’re actually pining over someone who hasn’t even dumped you yet?”

  “Yeah, exactly: yet.” Lorelei told Zoe the story about Lisa and the backseat of the Mercedes at some point. She doesn’t need to repeat it. “Anyway, I’m just being realistic.”

  “You’re just being defeatist.” Zoe finishes her sandwich in one enormous bite. She takes her time chewing and swallowing, watching Lorelei contemplatively while she does. “Do you care about him?”

  “Yeah,” Lorelei says. “Yeah, of course.”

  “And he cares about you.”

  “It’s different. It’s his family.”

  “You could be his family,” Zoe says. “And, look, the point is: what’s so wrong with getting what you want?”

  That’s exactly what’s wrong, Lorelei thinks. What she wants is too much of everything. Her father is her mother’s curse. She is too.

  She doesn’t say that. Instead, she says, “I don’t know. I’ll think about it, I guess.”

  “That’s almost the spirit,” Zoe says.

  Lorelei smiles at her. It’s so nice having Zoe on her side. Zoe can believe in her enough for both of them. “I’m working on it,” she says.

  “Good.”

  She finds Chris after school, mostly just out of habit. He’s managed to shake Jackson and Angela, so it’s only the two of them. He says, “I’m sorry about all of that yesterday. With my mom and everything.”

  “It’s my fault,” Lorelei says. “You said we should leave, and I—”

  “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  Lorelei stifles a snort. People keep telling her that. “Anyway.”

  “You know how she is about me,” Chris says. “And I—”

  “Don’t want to hurt her. I know.”

  “I don’t want to hurt you, either.” He turns to her and takes her hands into his. It’s a simple gesture, almost casual. Lorelei remembers the first time he found her deliberately at school, how he walked her to class and his knuckles brushed the backs of her hands and wrists, and she felt that little touch light her up all over. His body was unfamiliar then, so much strange territory. He himself was a stranger.

  He’s restless too. He asks, “Can we— I don’t know, you want to get out of here?”

  “Sure.”

  They drive aimlessly for a while. Lorelei suggests stopping for coffee, for sandwiches, and Chris says, Yeah, maybe, and doesn’t slow down. She decides to leave it alone. They end up on the Pacific Coast Highway, crawling up the California coastline in a snarl of slow-moving traffic. Chris keeps one hand on the steering wheel and the other threaded tightly through one of Lorelei’s. He hums along to the radio and doesn’t say much of anything. When he glances over at her, his face is soft.

  They make their way toward Malibu, where bougainvillea vines spill purple over the white walls of houses. The hills are wild with fall rain, and the ground is loose and heavy and wet. There are mudslides to the north of them, and blinking orange signs warning of road closures ahead.

  When Chris pulls over into a parking lot, it isn’t anywhere Lorelei recognizes. They’re at the top of a high, rocky cliff, with wooden stairs winding to the shore below. He pulls a dusty blanket from his trunk and throws a spare jacket at Lorelei. The wind is bitterly cold, so biting that she almost wants to ask if they can just stay in the car. Instead, they sit on the hood together, wrap the blanket around their legs, and stare out toward the setting sun.

  “What did she say to you?” Chris asks. “My mom.”

  “She just said she didn’t want us hanging out anymore.” That was part of it, anyway. “She talked about your dad a little, I guess. She said she missed him.”

  “She talked about him with me too,” Chris says. “After she came home. She never does that. It was like you had knocked something loose in her. I thought maybe you’d be different.” He sighs, blows out a breath that gets lost in the wind.

  You were singing, Mrs. Paulson said. When I came in.

  All love spells are curses, Petra told her last night. But it isn’t just a love spell: it’s something stranger and more powerful than that. Either way Chris seems fine, sti
ll, mostly.

  But if she tries too hard to keep him, he won’t be.

  Chris’s hand finds Lorelei’s under the blanket. “I thought maybe I could find a way to make it different, with you.”

  She means something different than he does when she says, “That’s what I was hoping too.”

  “Did anyone, you know, warn you?”

  “Everyone. Or Nik, anyway, and then Jackson.”

  “And you still stuck around.”

  “Where else was I going to go?”

  Chris shakes his head, his gaze still turned outward. “I should have warned you,” he says. And then: “She met my dad when she was in high school. That’s one of the things she was talking about last night.”

  “Huh.”

  “They were together for almost thirty years before he died.”

  “She doesn’t— I mean, that’s not what she’s worried about, right? That I’m going to, like, steal you away and marry you? I was planning on at least getting my driver’s license first.”

  Chris laughs. For a moment it all seems possible again, but then his face darkens and closes, and his shoulders draw toward one another in a protective hunch. “She wants me to be happy,” he says. “She really does. I think she just knows that I have no idea how to take care of two people. How to have that much time, I guess. How to love you, and to love her, and not hurt either of you.”

  Lorelei lets the weight of his words settle. “Do you love me?” she says, then, because she can’t form the other sentence just yet.

  “Yeah,” he says, looking at her, finally. Finally. His voice is thick, but he looks at her steady and certain: sure. “Yeah, I think I do.”

  “I think I—” Lorelei says. “Okay. Yeah. Me too.”

  “Me too?” He leans his forehead against hers. “That’s all you’ve got?”