A Song to Take the World Apart (22 page)

“Well, hopefully this will get me started,” Lorelei says. She puts the coral into her bag and heads out again, onto the empty street. So she wasted fifteen minutes, and probably three dollars. So what?

Walking back toward the school to meet Nik, Lorelei pulls the Wikipedia page for red coral up on her phone. It's mostly boring and technical—information on habitats, and a history of how it was used in trade, and for gifts.

The Coral in Culture tab is the only part she ends up caring about: It says that in Greek myth, Perseus slew Medusa, with her hair of spitting snakes, and then put her head on the riverbank while he washed his hands of her blood. The blood in the river petrified its seaweed and turned it into hard red coral.

Lorelei loved myths when she was younger: the way ancient people had made the entire world into a series of metaphors, giving each natural phenomenon a narrative to make sense of it. They saw seaweed waving green and soft underwater, and coral that looked almost the same except that it was crimson and still. They imagined what could have turned the living into stone, and came up with a woman's face and a woman's blood. You couldn't even look at Medusa, so of course she had to die. Even in dying, she cursed everything around her with her fury and rage.

And maybe that's what Hannah's email will say, if or when she writes back: that the women in Lorelei's family are just women, singing. A fact of the natural world.
Maybe we're just what we are,
Lorelei thinks,
like coral, or selenite, or window glass with light passing through it.
Maybe they're like the women in
The Odyssey:
just because they're part of one story doesn't mean they have a narrative of their own.

She arrives back at school a few minutes early, so instead of heading for their appointed meeting spot out front, she goes straight to the soccer field to see if she can catch Nik's last few minutes of practice. The boys are already rounding up stray balls, though, and shoving their things into sports bags. Nik is nowhere in sight.

“Never showed up,” one of the boys says when she asks. “I don't know, I haven't seen him.”

Lorelei does a slow turn, taking in the empty field and the deepening dusk in the sky above her. The air is too cold for her thin jacket.

She walks toward the school building, which is unevenly lit from inside. The windows where students are still sitting, singing, or rehearsing for plays—or where teachers are finishing up grading before they head out for the day—are bright against the oncoming night. Everything else is blank, and dark.

Lorelei settles on the school's front steps, shivering at the cold concrete under her butt, and fishes out her phone. She's just thumbing through for Nik's number when he appears, flushed and grinning. He's wearing loose shorts and a hoodie, cleats slung over one shoulder. For a second her mind reels, trying to make sense of the image in front of her, and what the boys told her when she went looking for him. Then she notices how the flush is low on his cheeks, at his neck, and how swollen his mouth is, and she understands where he was, and why he isn't saying anything.

“You ready?” Nik asks.

Lorelei nods, and follows him to the car.

She wonders what stories he tells himself to make sense of what's happening to him. If he has words for it, yet, or if he just lets his body take over and doesn't worry about it too much until he has to. She wonders when he'll have to worry about it, and how bad it will be when he does.

H
ANNAH'S REPLY IS IN
her inbox when she checks her email at home. No magic, no fireworks, no thunder to herald its arrival. Just Inbox (1). Oh.

Thankfully, it's in English.

Dear Lorelei,

I'm so glad to hear from you! And I am sorry I haven't written to you before. Your grandmother made a rule about it: no letters, no contact, no word from the homeland. I think she would have been that strict with herself if she could have borne it, but even Silke missed her sister.

I don't know if you were old enough to have figured it out, but even she was human after all. And I suppose if you hadn't yet you will have, now. There's nothing like when someone we think of as being a constant up and disappears on us.

But I'm sure you have enough grief of your own to keep you busy. I'm not writing to share mine. You asked questions; I believe you deserve answers. So. Here they are.

No one remembers when it was that our ancestors first found their way out of the sea. It seems now that all human life might have begun there, and that makes sense to me: that the womb of the world is water and salt. But I am speaking more specifically about a kind of ancestor that not everyone on this earth shares. And of course that makes sense to me too. How could a world so vast produce only one kind of human being?

They used to call us sirens.

Lorelei's front teeth close over her bottom lip. She sucks in a long breath.

So this is the truth. Not a myth. Reality.

We have become storybook creatures over the years, villainesses who lure men to certain death. And I am not saying there has not been death—very real death. The ocean has its own call, and sometimes men's bodies hear it and respond. So it happened. Sometimes, it had nothing to do with us.

Sometimes, of course, it did.

This is the story that Silke and I were told as children:

At some point a creature crawled out of the sea and onto an island in the Mediterranean.

She was hungry and she was lonely.

She learned to call out to the birds.

She learned to make them come to her.

In time she taught herself all of her world's sounds: how to mimic them, and how to use them to entice.

She didn't know how to escape her island.

She knew only how to bring the world to her while she was stranded there.

Her voice became her tool, her weapon, her companion and friend.

Still, like all of us, she wanted more than that.

So she learned how to tempt sailors off their ships by throwing her voice into the wind, and then how to swim out and save them from rocky shoals and narrow channels. The boats were lost but the men survived. Some of their sons would be born with powerful voices, but their daughters always, always were.

You are one of us, Lorelei. You are my sister's daughter's daughter, and the same strong blood is in all of our veins.

I can trace our family's line back three generations, though why we chose as cold a place as Germany to settle in I will never understand. Silke and I grew up on the North Sea coast, near the water, near others just like us. It was many things, but it was never lonely.

Or it wasn't lonely for me, anyway. It was easy for me to fit in there: to gossip with the women, to cook and clean, to live in warm houses at the edge of a cold shore. Silke wanted the city as soon as she learned what a city was, and how many more people there were in the world.

She wanted to sing not just in private, with our community, but for everyone. She wanted to use her voice to make art, and share it. She loved music in a way none of the rest of us did—not because it was necessary, but because it was beautiful. Losing it broke her heart.

I'm not sure she ever recovered from that heartbreak.

She wanted to keep Petra, and then you, from ever having your heart broken like that. She thought if you never fell in love with your voice, and its power, and its beauty, it would never hurt you. I don't think she considered that there's more to it than that. That your voice might find you even if you didn't know how to look for it.

Our ancestors didn't have many choices—women rarely do. Working on human will is a dark kind of magic, but it was what they had.

Lorelei stops reading. There are a scant few lines left, and she almost can't bear to know what they have to say. It seems bleaker than she could have imagined. It's just—in her, whatever this power is. She can't cut it out or burn it up. She's stuck inside herself, with this voice she's not supposed to use—a voice that will hurt people if she lets it out. It broke her grandmother's heart, and her mother's, and her father's, and now, slowly, surely, certainly, it is breaking hers.

She hurries through the last few sentences.

You do have choices, though. You know the truth: what you are, and what you can do. If you use your voice, use it carefully: never sing for anyone you need something from, someone you want to summon or bend or change. Sing for yourself, Lorelei, and you will always find happiness in it. I hope this letter gives you answers, and maybe comfort; I hope it gives you a path to find joy.

It goes on just a little while longer, Hannah saying that Lorelei should write or visit. Lorelei closes the email and archives it, as if by hiding it she can unread it. If her brain was overfull before, beset by fantastic creatures and impossible ideas, now it's just the ocean crashing, and the same word whispering at her every time.

Siren.

Siren.

Creature, myth, temptress, killer: that warning sound cutting hard through quiet nights. Lorelei is a siren.

At least. At last.

L
ORELEI DOESN'T COME DOWNSTAIRS
for dinner. Evening has arrived and brought a storm with it. Black clouds crowd the sky and make the air electric with tension. She sits and watches it happen distantly from her perch on her bed.

She used to think that she could hear the ocean calling to her when she was younger. That was when she made up her first songs. Now all of the melody inside her is too loud. It's too huge to contain in the quiet of her room and too dangerous to unleash anywhere else.

Hannah's letter doesn't change anything, not really. Her voice is still her voice. But it feels different to know that her kind has a name and a history. She thinks about what the girl at the shop said earlier, about energy and the way molecules keep vibrating as they move from body to body. Something that's been moving in women's throats for thousands of years is still moving in hers.

The ocean is still calling, and Lorelei knows it's time for her to go.

She gets up and gets dressed. She can slip out the back door. The shore is less than half a mile away.
I'll just put my toes in,
she thinks.

When she gets to the beach, she slips off her shoes. The sand is cold and rough against the soles of her feet as she makes her way.

The world looks like it's been turned upside down: the sea is inky dark, and the sky is so light with clouds that she can see where it dips down toward the horizon. Stiff breezes whip through her hair and tangle it up, knotting the loose ends.

Lorelei opens her mouth, but she can't seem to find the song, or her song, or any song. Whatever it is that makes her voice powerful has such a long, dark history. She was born to two people still in the grip of its magic, and she's lived all of her life in the cool black of its shadow. Maybe she shouldn't. Too bad she already has.

Her voice is trapped in her throat.

A wild panic rises. This is fear with teeth and claws: rank, animal, and instinctive. She can't keep all of this inside her. She has to be able to sing.

Lightning flashes out over the ocean.

The sea rushes to her, waves breaking hard and then murmuring forward. Lorelei can't resist its pull. She walks across the first damp patches of sand, eyes fixed on the horizon. She doesn't know where she's going, but she doesn't know how to stop. When the water touches her toes, it's so cold she screams.

The sound is nothing like singing, but it comes from the same high, pure place. She uses the feel of it to find a longer note, and then a lower one, coming down like descending the rungs of a rickety ladder. The notes blend into melodies. It's so consuming that the rest of her body holds itself still while she does it. Her feet get numb and her fingers clench into fists. Lorelei is so cold she's shaking. She doesn't care as long as it's working.

Lorelei lets herself be like the storm, gathering slowly, wind and air pulling water and electricity from all around her. She thinks about Chris's hands, and Oma's, her mother's soft touch and angry mouth. She thinks about Zoe's sweet, serious eyes, and all of the things she wants. All of them. The crackle that she felt in her chest in Chris's sunroom, weeks ago, now, has nothing on this sensation, which threatens to overwhelm her. It will not be quieted.

She sings the thing that's been haunting her all the time in between, the song she started and never finished. The song they were supposed to sing together.

The first notes, furious with tenderness and ache, collide with the boom of a thunderclap. The sky sets a slow, rolling beat. Lightning comes across the water, closer and closer. When she finishes, she's so empty that she just wants to lie down and sleep in the sand until morning.

She doesn't, though. At the end of her songs, she's just a body again, and her body knows the way back home.