by Zan Romanoff
“I love you,” she says before she can psych herself out of it. The words bubble up and spill over. For just a minute, she suspends herself in a world without consequence.
Chris kisses her with his eyes closed so tightly that it looks like he’s in pain, but his mouth on hers is slow and sweet. Soon the kiss gets faster, frantic. He loosens his hand from hers and puts it around her waist. Their cheeks are burning with cold but they’re warm under their clothes. Chris keeps trying to haul her in closer. Lorelei thinks: This is where I belong.
When he pulls away, he’s gasping. Lorelei doesn’t understand. What could he be thinking of in this moment? What else could there possibly be? He digs a hand into one pocket and comes up with his buzzing cell phone.
She doesn’t have to look to know that it’s his mother calling to reel him back home. The urge to do something—to toss his phone into the ocean, to open her dangerous mouth all the way—rises so wildly and sharply that she can barely swallow it in time. Immediately after, she’s disgusted with herself, and terrified. How could she even think about singing again, after what Petra said last night?
He silences the call and says, “Oh, Lorelei.” He reaches for her again but she resists, and starts to unwind the blanket from around her legs. “I mean, we could—”
But they can’t. She knows they can’t. He’ll keep trying to split the difference between her and his mother, and she’ll let him until she can’t bear it anymore. And then she’ll curse him, and they’ll end up just like her parents. She can’t protect herself from heartbreak, but she can protect him from her love.
“I can’t keep doing this,” she says. “I love you—I love you—but I can’t be your secret. I can’t have any more secrets, Chris.”
He holds his hands out, empty and open. She always knew who he was, and what he could offer. That hasn’t changed.
“I want to keep you,” he says.
Lorelei doesn’t let herself think about what she wants, or what she’d do to get it if she gave herself the chance. “Take me home. I just want to go home now, please.”
Home, where everything will be quiet and still. She hops off the hood and lands too hard on the parking lot asphalt.
The ocean calls to her but she doesn’t turn and run down the rickety stairs. She doesn’t think about throwing herself into the cold, stark water, or even just putting her toes in. She gets in the car and slams the door. The silence, after so much wind and so many words, is deafening, and comforting.
THE DAYS PASS QUIETLY for a while. Lorelei sets her sights on Thanksgiving: a break from seeing Chris in the halls and avoiding him. Jackson tries to talk to her once or twice, but even he gives up eventually. Angela, of all people, is nice to her about the breakup. Their lockers are near each other; sometimes the two of them walk to class together, making small talk about nothing in particular.
And it’s not all that bad, even. She comforts herself with the thought that she did what Oma would have wanted her to do: she behaved. She saved Chris instead of herself. And now she has more time for homework and studying, and her own little family research project, which seems even sillier now that she knows more. How could she have thought she’d find the answer to her mother’s loneliness and her grandmother’s magic in a few bundles of old letters?
Instead, she learns dozens of useless facts from Oma’s domestic life: the names of old friends in the old country and the recipes she missed and wanted to re-create in her new kitchen. The more Lorelei reads, the more she thinks she didn’t know her grandmother very well at all.
It makes her conscious of her own family, and how little she knows about the lives going on all around her. She stops using the drive to school to catch up on English reading so that she can talk to Jens while Nik naps; instead of asking Nik for rides from the studio space after school, she sits on the sidelines and watches his soccer practice. Lorelei even starts taking her math homework to her mother, whose work as an accountant has made her exceptionally good at word problems. They don’t talk about anything else during these sessions. Lorelei still can’t figure out how to talk to her father at all.
From the outside, at least, she looks as normal as she ever has. Her family looks normal too. It’s just that she feels like there’s a limb that’s gone to sleep somewhere, except it’s not an arm or a leg that’s fuzzy, it’s something much deeper down.
Lorelei describes it to Nik and he laughs and says it’s just normal breakup stuff. She believes it, mostly, but she also can’t help noticing the way her reflection in the mirror each morning keeps dimming. Her hair is always tangled. Her skin gets patchy and dry. She wears her mother’s makeup, but it just makes her look worse: big, empty eyes over hollow, too-pink cheeks.
After a while she has to wonder if it isn’t just heartbreak. The thing within her starts to feel genuinely corrosive, like it’s eating her up from the inside out. She looks more like her mother every day, and it’s not just the makeup. Petra’s skin is thin too, pulled tight by the rictus of her smile. It’s like Oma’s skin was, translucent and papery.
Mostly what she feels is heavy, and tired. Her body moves through the world like there’s something pushing back on her with every step.
When the break from school for Thanksgiving finally comes, Lorelei switches her focus and spends days buried in family photo albums, looking for more of these family resemblances, hoping they’ll tell her some secret that the letters can’t. They’re just as cryptic in their own way, though, mute images instead of untranslatable words.
She brings them to Petra and asks her to identify the photos’ subjects. Maybe her mother will want to talk again. She doesn’t, though. Instead, she squints at the pages like they hurt her eyes, and points listlessly to one or two faces. “I think that’s Pietr,” she says. “He was my—second cousin? One of Oma’s cousins’ kids, I think.”
Her fingers slide over the page, leaping up as they pass over a few of the faces.
“What about them?” Lorelei prompts. Oma’s in this one, in the center, with her arms around two women about her age. They’re all smiling the static smiles of people in old photographs; it’s impossible to tell if they’re happy or not.
“Hannah,” Petra says. “That’s Hannah, and your Oma, and Eva.”
“Her sisters,” Lorelei says.
Petra looks at her daughter, startled. “Yes,” she says. “Her sisters.”
Petra stands to leave, then, and Lorelei lets her. She’s too busy staring down at Hannah, who she’s only known in letters up until now. She’s not as pretty as Oma was: her face is broader, and she’s got a way of looking at the camera that’s so frank it’s almost off-putting. But the longer Lorelei looks, the more Hannah’s face seems to come alive.
“Here,” Petra says. Lorelei didn’t hear her coming. Petra shoves another photo album into her lap and turns like she’s going to leave.
“What is this, Mom?”
“It’s mine,” Petra says. She’s holding herself perfectly straight and stiff. “I thought you might like it.”
“Okay,” Lorelei says. “Thanks.”
“You can look at it downstairs. I have to concentrate up here.”
It’s the Saturday after Thanksgiving—what work could she possibly have to do? But Lorelei doesn’t want to argue, so she takes the album downstairs to the living room.
Petra must have made the album when she was still a teenager: it’s full of crappy shots from disposable cameras, all of the background cut away so that she could cram as many versions of her friends’ smiling faces onto the page as possible. There are a few captions written out in her familiar scrawl, and Lorelei knows enough German now that she can read some of them: me and Anna at the beach last weekend, Steph and Frank at “our” table at the café. Everyone looks impossibly happy, and young, and terribly dressed.
Lorelei doesn’t recognize anyone other than her mother until she gets to the last page Petra used, about halfway through the album. Then, suddenly, her father’s face is g
rinning at her, unfamiliar and unmistakable at the same time.
He’s sitting on a park bench in the middle of winter, bundled in an enormous down coat. He has the hood drawn over his head but he’s tilting his face toward the sunlight, smiling up at the camera. Lorelei doesn’t know what he looked like before her mother cast her spell on him, but surely she’d done it by the time this was taken: his gaze is so open and kind that she has trouble tearing her eyes away from it.
The caption says, Henry, the day we met.
Lorelei traces her father’s face with her fingertips. She looks like him too: she has his high forehead, and the curl in her hair is just like his, rough and wavy.
She knows all about her mother’s legacy to her, but what is her father’s? What does it mean to have been born to a man who could love so thoroughly and openly, and who could let himself be taken in by magic, and who, even when he knew what had been done to him, refused to leave the person who had done it behind?
Lorelei closes the album and stares down at the cover, like it will have answers written for her there.
“Lorelei?” She turns to find her father hovering over her shoulder. Even though she’s known him this way her whole life, it’s shocking to see his adult face so soon after the younger one on the page.
“Mom just gave me this,” she says. “I was looking at the old ones.”
“Wow,” Henry says. “Can I?”
He takes a ginger seat next to her on the couch. Lorelei almost wishes he would stop being so careful around her—it just reminds her of that awful afternoon, Oma trying to warn her, and all the things she didn’t know, and thought couldn’t possibly matter.
Henry smiles while he leafs through the pages. “Steph introduced us,” he says, pausing on the picture of her. “Me and your mother.”
“I didn’t know that.” There are so many questions that just never occurred to her, before. Her family seemed like a fact—or maybe a force—of nature. Not something people had stories about.
“Sure. Steph and I had grown up together. She met your mother at school. She thought we might get along.”
“So it was a setup?”
“Yeah.” Henry flips another few pages and finds his own face staring up at him. Gently, he closes the book on it. “But even if it hadn’t been—god, she was beautiful.”
“Love at first sight, huh?” Lorelei asks.
“I don’t believe in that,” Henry says. “Not really. It’s more complicated.” He squints a little at Lorelei, like he’s trying to size up what she knows. She can’t bring herself to tell him. It’s nice, for a minute, to pretend she’s still his small thing, his uncomplicated, unruined daughter.
“But I wanted to love her,” he says. “From the moment I met her.”
“Do you love her now?”
“What a question! I love all of you.” For just a minute, she wants to believe him more than she wants the real answer. Henry reaches out an arm to her: an offering. Lorelei lets herself fall sideways into a hug. It wasn’t a yes, but it wasn’t a no, either.
It isn’t a curse.
It’s so much more complicated than that.
HENRY’S REASSURANCE DOESN’T LAST, and when it wears off, Lorelei feels worse than ever. Does anyone love her? Has anyone, ever? Pushing Chris away starts to seem crazy, and she can’t let herself think that way.
Lorelei doesn’t have Oma’s patience for letter writing. She and Hannah seem to have used longhand to enforce cooling-off periods, but Lorelei’s had plenty of time to think this over. And anyway, enough already with old-fashioned letters, and half answers, and family myths and legends. She just wants something simple, and solid, and certain. For once.
She finds her great-aunt on Facebook. She has to pull Hannah’s married name from the return address on her letters; there are fifteen results when she searches. Five of them live in Hamburg. Only one looks to be the right age. She’s old enough that her profile isn’t locked up tightly. Lorelei copies and pastes her email address into a blank window and stares at it, the plain black letters of it, for a long time.
If her translations make sense, Lorelei’s letter says:
Dear Hannah,
I am your grandniece. I’ve been reading the letters between you and my grandmother, Silke. I think there’s something you could tell me that I need to know. What am I? What does it mean that she told me never to sing?
Thank you.
Lorelei
LORELEI DOESN’T RECOGNIZE EITHER of the boys at first. She and Zoe are sitting at Coffee Bean after school, plodding through homework, and when someone taps on Zoe’s shoulder, Lorelei thinks he’s going to ask them for the wi-fi password or something. Then Zoe gets up and throws her arms around him.
Right, Daniel. She said he might stop by.
She didn’t say he was bringing a friend too.
“You remember Paul, right?” Daniel says. Lorelei doesn’t. She tries to make her shrug look neutral. “From that show—The Trouble?”
“Oh,” Lorelei says. The blond one who wasn’t Daniel. “Right, sure. Good to see you.”
“We’re getting drinks,” Paul says. “You want anything?”
Lorelei says, “Tea, please. Chamomile.” She’s already drained her chai, and she’s buzzing with caffeine and sugar. She was counting on it to keep her awake through the long afternoon of doing boring work, but with Paul and Daniel here she’s starting to feel a little twitchy.
She tries to hand Paul a couple of dollars, but he waves them away. “I’ve got it,” he says. Lorelei looks to Zoe to see if she should argue, but Zoe’s face is turned against Daniel’s shoulder. It makes her miss Chris so much she can barely stand it.
She nods at Paul. “Thanks.”
Lorelei opens her book again, but she keeps getting distracted by Zoe and Daniel talking, and the song playing over the speakers, and her pulse thumping in her ears. Of course this is Zoe’s idea of how to fix things.
Paul is cute. He’s got wide-set blue eyes and thick, sandy hair, broad shoulders, long arms. He’s probably a nice boy, or nice enough.
Lorelei goes over to stand with him and wait. “I thought I could help you carry, at least,” she says.
“Oh yeah.” Paul nods. “Thanks.”
He doesn’t say anything else.
“So you and Daniel go to school together?” Lorelei tries.
“Yeah,” he says. “And you and Zoe?”
“Yeah.”
What did she and Chris talk about, that first night? Nothing special. Lorelei remembers, distantly, that it seemed awkward, then, but it’s hard to believe it was ever this awkward.
“Cool.”
Another agonizing minute of silence passes. Lorelei looks at the Polaroids of the store’s regulars pinned to a bulletin board, at the floor, the girl making their drinks, the backs of her hands.
“What are you, uh, what were you working on?” Paul asks.
“English,” Lorelei says. “Doing some reading.”
“Chamomile tea and an iced coffee, for Paul,” the countergirl says.
Zoe comes up behind them. Daniel’s next to her now, one arm still slung around her shoulders. “You want to get out of here?” she asks. “We were thinking about taking a walk.”
At least it will give Lorelei and Paul something to do while they try to talk. “Sure,” she says.
In the shuffle of leaving, the boys pull ahead and Zoe drops back while the two of them shove books into their backpacks. “You don’t have to fall in love with him, or anything,” she says. “I just wanted you to remember that there are other guys out there. I probably should have warned you.”
“It’s whatever,” Lorelei says. “He’s nice.”
“He’s one of Daniel’s best friends.” Zoe worries at the zipper on her backpack. “I don’t know. You’ve been so sad, lately, and distracted. I wanted— I’m sorry if this wasn’t right.”
“I just feel like such a weirdo,” Lorelei says. “Like, I have no idea what I’m doing. I do
n’t want to make you look bad, or make things awkward. That’s all.”
“Don’t worry about me, man. And seriously, you don’t have to fall in love with Paul. We’re just going to go up to Wolves in Winter,” she says. “Daniel wants to buy something to wear to his birthday party.”
Lorelei knows the store; it’s teensy and fancy and expensive, with bare wooden floors and five identical white shirts hung from antlers on the walls.
“You can stay if you’d rather. I can say you’re getting work done.”
“Nah,” Lorelei says. “It’s cool. I’m cool.”
“Cool.” Zoe grins and throws her backpack over her shoulder. She practically skips out the door to Daniel’s side, and Lorelei goes up to meet Paul.
The walk is a little better, a little easier. He’s trying, and she’s trying. They discuss her English reading, and then whether they like to read. Paul plays water polo; he gets carsick on the buses to and from meets, and then he gets home exhausted, and his grades are shitty but polo is going to get him into college, probably, so whatever. He’s just as nice as he looks. Lorelei can’t help liking him a little bit.
He doesn’t compare to Chris, though.
After a couple of blocks their conversation hits a lull. Paul takes advantage of it, and changes the subject.
“I don’t know if this is weird to say. Daniel mentioned that you’d just broken up with someone.”
“Oh,” Lorelei says. “Yeah.”
“Me too. I think they thought they were doing both of us a favor.”
“Yeah.”
“I just wanted to say— I don’t know. I just wanted to get it out there. That that’s, like, the situation.”
Lorelei has been glancing at shops as they pass by: fancy thrift stores, little boutiques, a juice place, another coffee place, a café. She sees an awning up the block that she recognizes but can’t place. It looks familiar, and inviting, fabric glowing crimson in the afternoon sun.
“I appreciate that,” Lorelei says. “I feel like—maybe it makes things less awkward?”
