A Song to Take the World Apart (9 page)

S
ATURDAY IS THE LAST
gasp of hot September. A lick of oven-warm wind rolls and gusts across the city. It makes the house seem unbearably small, so as soon as she's done with her homework, Lorelei goes for a walk. She heads down to the beach and then up toward the Santa Monica Pier, where she can get lost in the crowd. She eats cotton candy, which sticks to the corners of her mouth and unspools from its paper cone in the breeze. The Ferris wheel is huge and hot, gleaming brightly under the relentless sun. Lorelei watches couples get on and go up, up, up, before they come back down again.

The air is so clear and empty that she can see for miles, straight out to the humped backs of the mountains that cup the city from the south, the east, and the north. Los Angeles sits in a basin, at the bottom of a bowl, and the ocean stretches out sparkling in its belly.

A song itches itself in the back of her throat, something high and sweet in counterpoint to the rustling breezes and the low ocean roar, but she doesn't dare sing it. In the clear light of day it's even harder to believe that there's anything to Oma's warning or Petra's curse, but she doesn't want to take her mother's permission, or break her grandmother's rule. Lorelei knows who really raised her, and who she's loyal to.

When she gets back to the house after her walk, the twins are wrapped up in last week's homework, Jens quizzing Nik for a history test in the living room. Her mother is in the kitchen, and her father is sorting through work sheets at the dining room table.

Lorelei hovers in the front hall for a moment, not wanting to disturb the house's peaceful equilibrium with her presence. The usual silence is softened by small human noises, the twins' voices and her father's papers rustling, her mother opening and closing cabinets, looking for something she can't find.

There's a stack of mail on the hall table, and Lorelei notices a letter from school poking out of it. It's probably nothing to worry about—some minor administrative update—but she wants to open it first just in case.

When she tugs the envelope free, the rest of them come with it. Lorelei moves to grab them out of the air and knocks over the metal tray they've been sitting on. It hits the ground with a crash. So much for peace. She kneels and sweeps the mail back into a pile.

“Lorelei?” her dad calls from the dining room.

“Yeah, Dad,” she calls back. “Sorry, I just knocked something over.”

The top letter in the rearranged stack catches her eye as she lifts it back up. She recognizes the writing.
Hannah,
the return address says. She tears it open without thinking—it has to mean something, it has to—but of course it's written in German, just like the rest of them.

“Oh, you're okay.” Her father hovers over her shoulder. Lorelei didn't hear him coming. “What have you got there?”

“A letter. To Oma.”

Henry frowns and tugs the sheaf of paper out of her hands. Lorelei doesn't know how to say
No, stop, I need that.
When he scans it over, something in the contents makes him smile sadly.

“From family, at home,” he says. Oma never called it
home.
She said
back there,
mostly, like her life in Germany was far behind her. “I don't think you knew—Hannah is your grandmother's sister.”

“I didn't.” Lorelei knew Oma had sisters. She never learned their names.

“I guess we don't talk about that much,” Henry says. “Maybe we'll visit someday. Your grandmother never wanted to, but—” He cuts off his sentence as soon as he realizes what the rest of it will be:
now that she's dead, we can.

Lorelei can't help loving the idea of meeting great-aunts and cousins, and discovering the scattered constellation of her own family: more girls and women with her grandmother's stern, beautiful face. Maybe they were raised in quiet houses too. Maybe they're people who would understand.

But her father's silence guilts her: Who is she to be happy now that Oma's gone? How can it feel like freedom to lose someone you love?

“Are you talking about Mama?”

Lorelei's head snaps up, but it's too late: Petra snuck up on them both. She tugs the letter out of Henry's hands and doesn't look at it.

“A letter came from Hannah,” Henry says.

“Oh.” Petra's hand tightens and the paper crumples in it.

“Can I have it?” Lorelei doesn't mean to ask. The words just come.

“For what?” Petra asks. Her eyes narrow. Lorelei doesn't know how to explain. “You can't read it, anyway,” she reminds her. She turns and heads back to the kitchen with the letter still wilting in her hand.

Henry follows her. Lorelei watches him go and realizes that's the most she and Petra have said to each other since Oma died. Since long before that, probably, too, not counting the coffee shop the other day. Which she would rather not.

Just like that, her good mood evaporates. She can't bear to stay in the house with her silent, greedy mother or her pliant, self-involved father, or her brothers, who are always conveniently keeping out of the way. The tightness she felt in the air this morning closes in on her again. “I'm going back out,” she yells, and slams the door behind her before anyone can tell her not to.

By the time she makes it back to the Pier, the afternoon is tumbling into evening. She walks fast to the far end, where it's marginally less busy and she can stare out past everything at the day's last brightness. Behind her a crush of late-season tourists crowds the neon-lit amusement park. The air is heavy with their scent: human bodies and stale fry grease and sugar and salt and sweat. Before her is open water, endless, unsettled.

She leans against a railing and her fury boils over into air. The song just flies out of her, as high and clear as she's been imagining. It feels soothing in her throat, to her skin and eyes and mouth. It's physical, the way singing empties her out: like everything she's been clutching too close can finally, finally be set down.

She's so distracted by relief that at first she doesn't notice the way people have drawn closer to her, clustered in a loose group of fifteen or twenty. Every one of them is listening intently, rapt in the sound.

When she does notice, what she sees is that every face is slack with wonder and wracked by grief, tears falling silently out of bright, unfocused eyes. It seems natural, for just a moment, that everyone is as stricken as she is, bone-weary, like sadness is the thing that threads the world together.

Around them the Pier bustles on about its business, but Lorelei is enclosed in a circle of her own making, the quiet center of the lonely, left-behind universe. A woman reaches out to touch her: the hem of her T-shirt, the ragged threads of her cutoff shorts. The bodies around her stir and shuffle in closer. Too close.

As Lorelei shakes herself out of the song, she starts to see the wrongness: these people are enchanted, fevery like her father was the last time she sang. Like her father, they're sick with something she gave them. The light behind their eyes doesn't belong to them at all.

“No,” she whispers, but no one moves. “Stop,” she says, louder. They're not doing anything aside from crying, a steady stream of tears dripping from chins and cheeks. She half expects when she turns to run that someone will stop her, but they let her leave, parting gently around her body and staying still, stunned silent in her wake.