A Song to Take the World Apart

by Zan Romanoff

  “That’s it?”

  “There’s another one,” Nik admits. He frowns down at the phone. “It just says your name, Lorelei. He just, uh, he just sent me your name. A couple of times. Um.”

  “I can go get mine,” Lorelei says. “I’m sure I’ve got weirder stuff than that.”

  “What, so you put some kind of whammy on everyone at this weird birthday party by singing to them?”

  “Everyone.”

  “And now they’re all in love with you? Are Chris and Jackson gonna come beat down our doors and fight each other to the death if they can’t have you?”

  “It’s not like that,” Lorelei says.

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I won’t make fun.”

  “I thought I could focus on him,” Lorelei explains. “On Chris. And just let him know how I felt. That’s all I was trying to do: to make sure he knew that I wanted to be with him. And then it got away from me. I wanted it to go on all night. I was having so much fun.”

  “And then they wanted it to go on all night too.” Nik sighs and rubs his hands together. “I mean, you have to admit, L, it sounds kind of crazy. It’s hard to believe.”

  “You think I want to believe it?”

  “I see you’ve got yourself tied up in knots about it, that’s for sure,” Nik says.

  Lorelei’s voice sounds so small when she says, “I wish Oma was here.”

  “Even though she was a siren, and she never told you?”

  “Yeah. I mean, maybe she could—I don’t know, maybe she would have been able to tell me how to undo it, or fix it. Or something.”

  Nik stands, and Lorelei stands too. He wraps her up in a hug, fitting his arms tightly across her back. Her head rests in the hollow of his shoulder, and his chin butts gently against the top of her head. The last time she hugged one of her brothers it was Jens in Oma’s hospital room. Nik is just as tall. “I miss her too, you know,” he says. “I miss her cooking like crazy.”

  “I wanted her soup this morning,” Lorelei admits. “And I miss her knitting me terrible hats to wear to school too.”

  Nik laughs. “I know, right? It’s LA, it’s sixty-five in the depths of December, and we have wool caps coming out of our ears.”

  Lorelei lets herself laugh too. “I miss thinking someone else was in charge,” she says. Nik pulls her in tighter, closer. “I really fucked up, Nik,” she says. “Whatever else you believe, trust me on that, okay.”

  “Oh, baby.” Nik squeezes her once, hard, and then lets her go. “I can’t do anything about that,” he says. “But let’s get some breakfast in you before we try to take anything else on, okay? I don’t know what I can do about sirens, but I feel like between the two of us we can figure out how to make some chicken soup.”

  WHEN THEY OPEN THE front door to leave, Chris is sitting on the porch. He hasn’t changed his clothes since last night. He’s blank-eyed and exhausted. His gaze is unfocused until Nik moves aside and Lorelei steps into view. Then he snaps to attention.

  “I’m here,” he says. “I didn’t know if you would want me to come in, but I thought I should be close by.”

  I need you I need you I need you I need you.

  He moves to stand and come toward her. Nik shifts himself between them again. “What are you doing here?” he asks.

  “Lorelei, please,” Chris says. “Tell him. We love each other. You need me. I have to keep you safe.”

  Nik turns around to look at Lorelei. It’s awful to watch his face change as he begins to believe—really believe—in what she’s done. “This is what you were talking about,” he says. “But they’re not all like this, right?”

  “No one else is on the porch, anyway,” Lorelei says. “I got Chris worst of all.”

  “You’ve got me, baby,” Chris says. He moves toward her like a puppet on strings. She wanted Chris to choose her; instead, she made him need her. She got love and desire mixed up. His body has become the staging ground for her battle against herself. “You got me, I promise. I’m here. We’ll never be apart again.”

  “That’s not what she wants,” Nik says.

  “Hey,” Lorelei tells him. She touches the back of his shoulder. She can’t fix it, but she can at least offer Chris a little temporary relief. “He won’t hurt me, okay, Nik. Just give us a minute, yeah?”

  Nik steps aside. Chris’s face lights up. He rushes into her arms and sags against her, melting with relief. Lorelei holds herself rigid so she won’t shiver at the wrongness of his touch.

  After a minute, though, her body adjusts. Having Chris in her arms is still familiar, even after everything. She brings one hand up to stroke his hair. “Have you tried thinking about other things?” she asks gently.

  Chris shakes his head. “My whole brain is you,” he says. “It was never like this before. I don’t understand how I thought about anything else.”

  “It was different before,” she says.

  He nods happily.

  “No, I mean I did something to you, Chris, something not good.”

  “I’m sure you had a reason.”

  Yeah, she had a reason. Everyone has a reason. Except now all of his reasons are hers.

  “Never mind,” she says. “Nik and I are going to the store, okay? You want to come with us?”

  Of course Chris says yes.

  At the grocery store, Chris hovers at Lorelei’s back, glaring protectively over her shoulder when anyone looks at her. He keeps touching the knobs of her spine where they rise above the neck of her sweater, as if to make sure that she’s really there. His spell-struck eyes under the store’s fluorescent lights are bright and empty.

  Before all of this, Lorelei always thought that magic was real or it wasn’t. If she was a creature or a witch, she would get swept up into some parallel universe, to ride dragons and conquer evil sorcerers. She’s never read a story about someone being enchanted into going to the produce aisle to pick up onions, garlic, and potatoes for soup.

  When they get home, they convince Chris to watch some television, at least, to keep him out of Lorelei’s hair. “I’ll be right here,” she tells him. He nods. He doesn’t seem to care what they pick out for him to watch.

  “You weren’t kidding,” Nik says under his breath when they’re finally alone. “Jesus, Lorelei, what did you do?”

  “I didn’t know,” she says. “Or I thought I did, but I told you, okay, I fucked up.”

  “It’s gonna take a lot more than chicken soup to fix this.” Nik’s mouth is set and grim. He chops vegetables fiercely.

  “Do you think you would have done it, if you could, though? To Jackson?”

  “Jesus, Lorelei!”

  “Sorry.”

  “That’s a really messed-up question.”

  “It is. I’m so sorry. You don’t have to—”

  “I wouldn’t do it now,” Nik says. “Like, having seen Chris. Obviously I wouldn’t do that. And it’s not like I want to— I don’t know. He’s not right for me. We’re not good for each other. I want it to be over.”

  “So no.”

  “I’ve done a lot of dumb things to make it stop hurting,” Nik says. “There are times when I would have done it. Absolutely. Anything. I would have done anything.” He finishes chopping his onion with a flourish and sweeps the pieces into a pile. “Okay?”

  “I wasn’t trying to prove a point.” Lorelei doesn’t know whether she has to tell Nik about what she did to Jackson. Probably. Probably she should. Everyone tried to warn her, and she had to make her own mistakes. Nik deserves the same. But she can’t do it yet—not with Chris still broken in the next room. One problem at a time.

  The front door opens and then slams shut again. Lorelei and Nik exchange a guilty look. Chris is in the den with the TV on; as long as he doesn’t move, and her parents go straight upstairs, they might get away with it.

  Lorelei listens to her mother’s footsteps tap-tap-tapping up the stairs; her father finishes a conversation with Jens and then follows. She exhales most of the
breath she’s been holding. Then she hears Jens coming toward the kitchen.

  “Did you think we’d abandoned you?” he asks. “Did you go into survival mode in the four hours you were left to your own devices?”

  “Just making soup,” Nik says. “There’s gonna be plenty when we’re done.” His voice is deliberately mild. Lorelei has never seen one twin try to fool the other. She’s never had a secret with either of her brothers before. Somehow it seems like the first time she’s earned her own little place in the family.

  Jens says, “I’m not sure I trust either of you in the kitchen.”

  “Does that mean you’re going to help?”

  “That means I’m going to supervise,” Jens says. “First of all, Lorelei, stop hacking at the garlic, you don’t need it that small.”

  “The recipe said minced.”

  “What recipe?”

  Nik points to his phone where it’s propped between the counter and the wall.

  Jens laughs. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you not to trust what you read on the internet?”

  “You have a better idea?”

  Jens answers by pulling one of Oma’s binders off the shelf where they’ve been sitting, mostly untouched, for as long as Lorelei can remember. There are three of them, thick and inelegant, stuffed with handwritten notations and pieces cut from newspapers and index cards brought over from the old country. Oma only ever referred to the recipes in passing—they were mostly there to jog her memory, as part of an ongoing conversation with herself.

  “You read German now?” Nik asks.

  “I’ve been teaching myself,” Jens says easily. “Kitchen vocabulary, anyway. Seemed like a shame to just let her work all disappear.”

  He sounds dispassionate, like he’s talking about studying for a test or writing a paper: might as well, really. But Lorelei knows what it means to sit and struggle with a language that won’t unfurl itself for you, and to reckon with the memories and the headaches that it stirs up when you start making your own work from a dead woman’s papers. She’s been tugging on the knots of one kind of family legacy while Jens untangled another downstairs. Only one of them has been keeping the family fed with his work.

  “That’s really cool,” she says.

  “I haven’t gotten to the chicken soup one yet,” Jens tells her. “But I can rough it out for you right now if you want.”

  “Please,” Lorelei says.

  “Put that garlic in a Tupperware; I’ll use it for something later.”

  Lorelei doesn’t know what passes between her brothers while she’s finding the container and making space in the fridge, but when she’s done, Jens is looking at her softly, like he knows just how badly she needs the distraction of something to do right now.

  “If I translate, can you take notes?” he asks.

  Lorelei says, “Yes.”

  LORELEI CAN’T BEAR TO make Chris leave. Every time she brings it up he just looks at her and she finds herself saying, “Later, then, I guess, that’s fine.” He can stay for dinner, she tells herself. Her dad might not even notice that he’s been enchanted. Her mom probably won’t come down at all.

  She’s not that lucky, though, and she hasn’t been in a while. She and Nik are setting the table when Petra walks into the dining room.

  “You really cooked,” she says.

  “Soup is easy,” Nik says.

  “And who did you invite over?”

  “I’m Chris,” Chris says. “Lorelei’s boyfriend.”

  Lorelei is watching Petra, so she sees her mother see Chris’s spell-blank eyes. She sees Petra’s face go slack with disbelief, and then pull up and in, again, tight tight tight, to protect herself.

  Petra leaves the room without another word.

  Henry was behind her. He sees the same thing: Chris smiling and nodding, Lorelei wretched, Nik looking around at all of them, trying to figure out what to say.

  “Oh,” Henry says. “Did you make enough for all of us?”

  “Of course.” Jens brings the last bowl in from the kitchen and sets it in front of Henry’s place.

  “I’m Lorelei’s boyfriend,” Chris repeats.

  Jens does his best to make dinner bearable. He talks to Chris about the precalc class they’re both taking. He nudges Nik into saying some things about soccer. This kind of exchange used to drive her crazy when he and Oma did it, but now Lorelei appreciates Jens’s commitment to normalcy at all costs. He fills up the silence so she won’t have to, so she won’t just start spilling out apologies.

  Nik even rallies after a little while, and the two of them do the same dance they perfected years ago at this same silent table. The twins’ banter doesn’t need anything to sustain it except the threat of awkward silence. Nik barely breaks stride when he turns to Lorelei and says, “You should go see if Mom is hungry. We can get the dishes.”

  Chris takes the hand that’s been resting heavily on Lorelei’s thigh and cradles it against his chest. He watches her climb the stairs, and settles himself at the bottom to wait.

  Lorelei gets to the top, turns a corner, and leans against the wall to breathe a long sigh of relief. She hadn’t really understood what it meant to have Chris watching her until she escaped his gaze. Now she’s impossibly loose and light: just herself again. She wishes she could keep that feeling.

  Instead, she goes to her mother’s study.

  This is where Petra told her version of their family’s story: the tale of an evil mother who silenced her daughter, and how the daughter, in turn, cursed her own daughter and granddaughter, out of spite or maybe because she thought she knew what was best.

  Petra was wrong, though. Their legacy isn’t a fairy tale, in which true love or a witch’s death can break a spell; it’s myth, full of shape-shifters and dark corners, bad middles, messy endings. No moral.

  Lorelei hasn’t had the courage or energy to tell her mother that she knows the truth, now, and that it’s better and worse than either of them could have imagined.

  “Don’t,” Petra says when Lorelei pushes her closed door open. “Leave me alone, please.”

  “Mom. I need to talk to you.”

  “Don’t you think you’ve done enough?” Petra’s eyes are dry now, but her face shows the signs of recent tears.

  “You don’t understand.”

  “What am I not understanding? Oma told you not to sing. I told you not to sing. I told you what happened when I tried it with your father. And still you went ahead and—”

  “I got in touch with Oma’s sister, Hannah, a few weeks ago.”

  “And she told you to ignore us?”

  “She told me what I was,” Lorelei says defiantly. “What we are.”

  “Cursed? Miserable?”

  “Sirens,” Lorelei says.

  Petra’s laugh is almost hysterical.

  “Oh, sweetheart,” she says. “I wish it was that simple.”

  “It is,” Lorelei says. “Or, it’s not simple, but it’s— That’s what Hannah said. Why would she lie?”

  “How could that possibly be true?”

  Lorelei lifts her empty hands and spreads them out wide in front of her. “How could any of it be true?” she asks. “But you know it is.”

  “Whatever we are, you still broke that boy,” Petra says. “I hope you’re ready to live with that.”

  “I didn’t—break him. I didn’t mean to.”

  Petra doesn’t say anything.

  “I’m sorry,” Lorelei says. “I thought I was doing it differently.”

  “Everyone always does,” Petra says.

  IN THE MORNING SHE wakes early. She forwards the email from Hannah to Petra, typing at the top: See? I’m not making this up.

  Downstairs, Chris is asleep on the couch, tucked under one of Oma’s knitted blankets and snoring softly. So Nik couldn’t get him to leave last night. She wonders what Jens thinks, and how her father feels, before she shuts off that train of thought. It’s too murky and painful, and she has to keep moving forward.
r />   Outside, the usual marine layer is thick and cold, piled underneath something darker, something that looks like it won’t burn off by noon. She shivers in her sweatshirt but doesn’t turn back. Her feet keep her moving forward. Her body is finally giving in to instinct, and going home.

  When she arrives, the beach is deserted, just blank sand and rolling spume as far as the eye can see. The waves move back and forth. Their rhythm is the same as the rush of blood in her veins.

  The gulls cry out from their throats.

  It isn’t like she decides to go in, exactly, but she’s already cold and shaking.

  Lorelei pulls off her sweatshirt and her jeans, her underwear. She kicks off her shoes. She leaves them in a pile in the sand. Her body is naked against the air that’s full of seawater, salty on her skin and her tongue. It feels good and right and not enough, not yet. She walks into the water slowly and deliberately.

  The first wave laps up against her ankles and calves, stinging and then numbing. She closes her eyes and keeps her arms at her sides as she advances, her body going quiet at the knees, the waist. An electric shock trembles through her when the water reaches her lungs. By the time she ducks her head under, she’s burning up with the cold.

  Lorelei tries to swim out but her arms are weak and tired. The tide has its own ideas. It keeps tangling her up and spitting her back toward the land. Still, she presses forward, toward the horizon and the deepness she’s never allowed herself to know before.

  Waves crest up and up, over and over. Every time she emerges, gasping, there’s another one curving over her head. She struggles helplessly, spitting and coughing, her hair knotting itself around her neck and in her eyes. She loses her way.

  Finally she comes up to a moment of relative calm. The waves have turned into swells, rolling without breaking. The adrenaline that’s been protecting her is starting to wear off, and she’s shaking so hard it feels like her bones are rattling. Her lips and the tips of her fingers are blue. A huge wave is gathering itself off in the distance. I should go back in, she thinks.