A Song to Take the World Apart (7 page)

He leans back in his chair and meets her gaze. “Chris is a good guy,” he says. “He's been through a lot, and that's—what it is. But I know something about his family, Lorelei, and I don't want you getting mixed up in any of it. He's not worth it.”

He's worth a lot,
Jackson said in the car. Lorelei is sick of other people telling her what she deserves, when she's only just starting to figure out what she wants. “Don't you think he needs someone?” she asks. “To help him, to care about him? To get him
away
from her?”

“He could get himself away if he wanted to,” Nik says. “It's— Love is like one of those Chinese finger traps, L. Remember those? How the harder you pull, the tighter it snares you? And it's hard to know that until it happens to you, until it's way too late. I don't want you to get caught up with him. Or anyone else.”

“You sound pretty sure about that,” she says.

“Trust me,” Nik says. “Please just—trust me on this one.”

“Love is like a trap,” she repeats.

“Love is like a spider's web,” Nik says. “It doesn't look all that dangerous when you're on the outside, but once you're in it—good luck ever trying to get yourself unstuck.”

“
Y
OU'RE GOING TO NEED
a dress for the funeral,” Petra says.

Lorelei looks at her mother. Her hand tightens compulsively around the banister. Her response is instinctive and absurd:
I want breakfast first.

She slept later than she meant to after the long, strange night, and woke up to the sun at an unfamiliar angle. She got three, maybe four minutes of peaceful confusion in before she remembered, and her stomach and her throat iced over with sharp-edged dread.

Her mother's words shatter through that.

“Oh, she's still alive,” Petra corrects. “But she won't be for long, and you don't have anything to wear.”

“I don't want anything to wear,” Lorelei says.

“You need something whether you want it or not.”

Lorelei's eyes are open enough now to see that her mother is freshly showered. She's dressed in a soft blue shift instead of her usual dark, severe work clothes. The color catches a feverish brightness in her eyes.

It's a practical thing to think of, and Oma has always been nothing if not practical. Lorelei can't imagine it, though: spending Oma's last hours or days looking for something appropriately somber. Nothing she feels is appropriate.

“I have to go to school,” she says, though she's seen the clock and they probably aren't expecting her by now. It's already hours too late. She must have forgotten to set her alarm last night. Nik stayed up after she went to bed; he's probably still sleeping too. Maybe he could come with them. “What about the twins?” she asks.

“What about them?”

Petra has looked past Lorelei almost every day of her life, her gaze focused on horizons seen and unseen, sliding around her daughter's body like it isn't even there. Now she confronts her head on, and Lorelei is surprised by her mother's intensity.

“You're a very pretty girl,” she says when Lorelei doesn't answer. “You should have a dress to wear. Something new. Something nice.”

They go to the Third Street Promenade, which is choked with tourists even though it's midday on a Tuesday. It's surreal to walk through the crowds together, the two of them side by side like nothing's going on. It's a mother-daughter shopping trip. On another day, in another family, this would have been offered as a treat.

Lorelei has always hated shopping with her mother, though, and when they enter a store, she remembers why. Petra's work is all about how much nice things are worth. She goes through racks methodically and hands Lorelei things to try on. She touches everything, assessing each piece evenly, but the fever Lorelei saw in her eyes earlier is still burning, glowing steadily under her skin.

“Pity you'll look so sallow in black,” she observes at one point.

Lorelei doesn't recognize her own reflection when it passes in mirrors and plate glass windows: she's just some anonymous teenage daughter, trying to pick out a dress for an occasion. Shopgirls ignore her surly indifference as a symptom of her age. She feels blank, and numb.

The dress she ends up in fits beautifully. There's a loose thread in the skirt's hem. Lorelei picks at it while Petra watches.

“Don't sulk,” her mother instructs.

Something rude and ugly flares up in Lorelei. “Don't tell me what to do,” she says.

Her mother pays for the dress without looking to see how much it costs. Is this mania? Lorelei wonders. Is this her mother's way of losing her mind? But it doesn't seem like that, not exactly. Petra has always been distant and quiet, like bare, dry earth. Now she's swelling up and filling out, like she had to wait for Oma to wither and fade before she could blossom.

The sadness that's been sitting heavily over everything else Lorelei feels heats up with the flare of her anger until it's boiled away, and she's left with nothing more than slow-simmering rage. She saves it until they've left the store. She's still her grandmother's girl. She isn't going to make a scene.

“Don't you care?” Lorelei asks. “This is sick, Mom, to be
shopping,
at a time like this.”

“I shouldn't have let her raise you,” Petra says, instead of answering. “You're so serious all the time, Lorelei.”

“I'm not being serious! You're being crazy!”

“What, because she was my mother?” Petra flips up her sunglasses and steps close enough that Lorelei can see the way that the light makes her thin skin translucent, illuminating the tiny cracks and folds around her eyes. The feverish intensity pinking her cheeks has turned her mouth red and chapped. “No one is obligated to love her own mother,” she says. “You know that.”

Lorelei is stunned into tears. No one has ever come at her like this, nakedly furious, needling sharp. The suddenness is like a kick to the stomach. “I love you,” she says. “Of course I love you, you're the one who—”

“People are looking,” Petra says. Lorelei's outburst has calmed her. The hectic light in her eyes dies down, and she seems sober and human again. “Oma and I had a complicated relationship. Thinking about losing her reminds me that you won't have me forever, either. I thought this would be a nice thing for us to do together.” She drops Lorelei's gaze just as suddenly as she held it. “There's a Starbucks over there,” she says. She sounds stiff and uncomfortable again, like the mother Lorelei recognizes. “We could get a coffee before we go.”

“Okay,” Lorelei says. The rest of her sentence, left unsaid, keeps ringing in her ears:
You're the one who never loved me. You're the one who never wanted me in the first place.

Petra chooses a table in a corner, where sunlight is streaming in through the floor-to-ceiling windows, so that she can keep her sunglasses on. She gets a decaf for herself and a chai for Lorelei. The steam keeps fogging up her lenses and making her face strange, like an alien with enormous, opaque dark eyes. Lorelei doesn't know whether to feel like she's being seen or just examined.

“How's school going?” Petra asks.

Lorelei tries not to laugh. This is what her mother wants to have a heart-to-heart about. “Fine,” she says.

“Nik had a hard time at the beginning of his sophomore year,” Petra says. “I was wondering if—”

“I'm not Nik.”

“I know.”

Does she, though? Lorelei has never been sure how much attention Petra really pays to her. She was an accident, after all, or that's what she's been assuming since she learned what that kind of accident was. The twins were a different kind. It's not the type of thing she can ask her mother—how she ended up with three kids when she's never seemed to want one of them—but she wishes she could.

“How's…um. Work?”

Petra shrugs and looks away. “I'm sorry,” she says. “We don't have to do this.”

“It was your idea!”

There's a silence. Petra picks up her bag, and then puts it back down again. Lorelei wonders how many missed calls she has, how many emails have piled up on her phone. This is the first time she's ever seen her mother take a voluntary day off. She wishes she felt flattered instead of tricked and trapped.

“Will you miss her?” Petra asks.

Lorelei is so stunned she can't answer.

“Of course you will,” Petra says, almost to herself.

Lorelei can't bring herself to say,
And you won't.

Petra says, “I didn't make her stay, you know.”

“I don't know what you mean.”

“In the house,” she clarifies. “As soon as we were settled, I told her she could get a place of her own, or go back, if she wanted to. She helped arrange the move for us, but she didn't have to come too.”

“You didn't want her to stay?”

Petra's shoulders twitch into a reluctant shrug. She considers her answer and sips her coffee. “I knew I would be a bad mother,” she says. “That I would make a mess of it. But it wasn't her responsibility to clean up my messes.”