A Song to Take the World Apart (13 page)

“We'll practice,” he says, kissing her again.

Lorelei thinks about telling him:
It's a little complicated, because there's—a thing, with my voice, and my family. My grandmother wouldn't talk about it. My mother thinks it's a curse. And I want so badly to believe that they're both wrong, and it's safe. That I'm safe.

Her train of thought drifts off the track as he kisses her again. And he keeps kissing her until Bean bangs into the hallway. Chris says Bean is basically married to his drums. He has no time for women, and even less patience for his bandmates' needy girlfriends.

“You seen Jackson?” he asks. “We need him to pull the car around.”

Chris sighs and peels himself away from Lorelei. “Probably making out with Angela in a corner,” he says. “I'll take a look.”

“Thanks, man,” Bean says. He's already jumping up the steps to start pulling the last of their equipment down.

Lorelei drifts out the back door and breathes in the cold, clean air of the night. She leans against the building's exterior wall, stucco prickling the backs of her bare arms. She looks up to the cloud-covered sky and tries to shake the excess energy out of herself. She almost misses the tentative sounds of scuffle at the narrow end of the alley.

There are two bodies there, one shoved up against a wall, the other curving over it. As her eyes adjust, she can see that there's no threat to the way they're touching, even if it looks like a struggle.

It dawns on her slowly, unwillingly: One shape resolves into the outline of Nik's familiar silhouette, his rabbit ears knocked askew above him. The other one is so unlikely that it takes a minute before she can put a name to it. Jackson isn't inside. He's here, leaning against the wall and tilting his throat up to be kissed. That's Jackson in her brother's arms.

Lorelei is frozen to the spot. Jackson turns his head and sees her. His open mouth turns into a snarl. Nik doesn't seem to notice. Lorelei shakes her head frantically, silently. She whirls and darts inside without looking to see if he's following.

Carina is still by the bar, flirting with someone new. Daniel has one of Zoe's hands in his; she's got a third beer in the other. Chris is all the way in the back, talking to his mother, whispering in her ear. Lorelei pulls out her phone and texts with shaking fingers.

Where are you?
she sends to Nik.
Let's get out of here. I'm tired. I want to go home.

L
ORELEI DECIDES NOT TO
tell Nik she knows. She worries that Jackson might do it for her, but days go by without him mentioning it, so Jackson must want to keep it quiet too.

She'd like to support Nik, but she can't figure out how, when he hasn't asked for any support. She thinks about asking Jens but can't bear the idea that he doesn't know, either: that Nik doesn't trust anyone but
Jackson,
of all people. She understands why it isn't public, pretty much—it's easier not to talk about that kind of thing if you don't have to, and Nik was raised by Oma just like she was. It's not in any of them to make a fuss.

It should have been his to decide what to do with, is the thing.

Lorelei wishes she could give them both the moment back.

Because it's one thing to know that everyone has interior layers and private worlds. It's another thing to find herself with unasked-for access to some of them. Who knows what other secrets Nik is keeping? It gives her a queasy sense of vertigo to think about it, the hollow-belly sensation of falling without quite knowing when or if she'll hit the ground.

Lorelei is consumed by restlessness. She tries to pretend that other people are the reason for it: Chris asks her to sing with him again, and Jackson keeps kissing Angela like nothing has changed, and she can't ever seem to find Zoe, or catch up to her for more than five minutes at a time.

But it gets worse when she's alone. Eventually there's no escaping the knowledge that there's a song that's haunting her, melody like a ghost making its home under her skin. Desire sears her veins and turns her insides to dust. Her eyes itch. Her throat burns.

She gets distantly curious about how long she can stand it. Oma taught her discipline, and she learned her lesson well. Her mother hasn't sung for years now, and Lorelei is certainly as tough as Petra.

She bears it until she can't.

It's an ordinary kind of Thursday when she puts down her homework and slips out the front door. The sky is settled low and heavy, mist drifting through the air as she heads toward the beach. The surf is quiet, and the shore is almost deserted.

Lorelei walks down to the water—as far from people as she can get—before she gives in. The sound that emerges from her mouth is so huge that even she is stunned by it. Her wail arcs up into the soft, still air. That night, for the first time since Oma died, she sleeps deeply and well.

In the morning she starts going through the letters again with a renewed sense of purpose.

The first time Lorelei sang, she felt awful, after, and haunted by the people she'd taken with her. This time she feels so good she can't imagine what could be wrong with doing it again. Its effect on other people is chilling, but singing by herself, to herself—that's fine. Whatever Oma's curse/not-curse was, or is, it's worth investigating until she understands what she can do, and what she can't. She won't let herself be silenced forever.

Lorelei starts looking for letters from the year she was born. Hannah is thrilled about the pregnancy—she sends short notes that clearly accompanied packages, funny little gifts for the new baby, as soon as Oma tells her that Petra is pregnant again.

Lorelei wishes keenly that she had Oma's side of the correspondence in hand too. Was she excited? Or was she already exhausted by the twins, tired of living in a foreign country, resentful of the way her daughter just kept making inexplicable decisions and then forcing everyone else to live with them?

The only real clue comes from a letter Hannah wrote in March, a few months before Lorelei was born.

I know pregnancy was hard on Petra the first time. And this one you've been so quiet about, which means either it's much better or much worse. Of course I hope she's feeling better, but if she isn't, you know I'm happy to come visit if you just tell me when. I think it would be good for both of you to have some community again—and don't tell me you have your little circle of friends there, Silke, because you know it's not the same. Friends are not the same thing as family—and our family, in particular.

Hannah has a habit of doing this, Lorelei has discovered: feinting at something that she and Oma clearly understood, and disagreed on, before darting away again like she never meant to touch the topic. It reminds her a little bit of the way the twins handle their parents, one of them planting seeds while the other makes sure they never notice what's being encouraged to take root. It swells something in her to think that her brothers' mischievousness is inherited: that there is a family legacy other than silence and anger, fear and guilt.

On the other hand, it means that Silke and Hannah had their own kind of silence between them, something they could interpret and decode. Now Lorelei is left with the letters she can only barely translate—often literally. She's gotten better, but her notes are full of scratches and question marks and keyboard shortcuts for foreign symbols she can't name.

She's learned enough vocabulary that sometimes she thinks she's catching the drift of a sentence, only to plug it in and find out that she had wisps of the content but no idea of the context. German grammar is a nightmare, loosely organized and barely structured. Lorelei wants to find an index, a Rosetta stone, but every day that she sifts through the piles of correspondence, that seems less and less likely.

And maybe there isn't an explanation, really. Maybe there's just something in her voice, and her mother's voice, and her grandmother's voice, and no one knows what it is. Helen of Troy had a face that launched a thousand ships and started a war. Some women are just that beautiful. Would the story be so different if she had sung them out into the ocean, to battle?

Beauty in any form can bend the world to its will, and its shining surface can work dark magic. Lorelei thinks of the way the ocean glints and calls, and of poisonous snakes and frogs in the rain forest, painted with neon caution signs on their backs. Their beauty is an invitation and a warning. Her voice might serve the same kind of purpose.

Lorelei carefully puts down the letter that she's holding and lets herself stare into space. She's sitting cross-legged on her bed, wearing the sweats and T-shirt she changed into after school ended. Her phone is at her side, waiting for a text from Zoe—she sent something a couple of hours ago, just a
hey what's up,
and has been waiting for a response ever since. She made a deal with herself that she could read letters until it comes, but that's starting to seem foolish the longer Zoe stays quiet.

Hoping to hurry the process, she skips through the letters from the intervening months and finds the one that must have come just after her birth announcement reached Hannah in Hamburg.
A girl!
her letter says. The writing is round and sloppy with excitement that warms Lorelei. Someone, at least, was uncomplicatedly thrilled when she was born.
And such a lovely name. Did Petra let you choose, or have things really unthawed so completely?
Lorelei doesn't know what to make of that.

Her phone throbs against her knee, lighting up with a text. It's not from Zoe, but Chris is just as good. It says,
You coming to practice tomorrow?

Lorelei wants to—she always wants to. She turns back to her laptop and clicks away from the translation site she's on to her calendar, to skim through and see if there's any reason to say no. But the week is mostly free of tests and essays, and Nik will still cover for her. Jackson will be there, and maybe she can get him alone long enough to clear things up with him too.

Yeah,
she texts back. Between the phone and the computer she can't keep from noticing what time it is: past the hour for putting this down and picking something practical up. Lorelei folds the letter onto her pile of already-read, stacks the to-read on her bedside table, and opens her backpack.

She'll return to all of it again, tomorrow, and the next day, until somehow it actually gets done.