A Song to Take the World Apart

by Zan Romanoff

  He sighs and then smiles politely. “You’ll be asking about that ride now, I expect,” he says.

  Jackson doesn’t even try to make conversation while he drives. The silence in the car wouldn’t be so awful if Lorelei’s brain wasn’t chanting Late, late, you are so late at her as the tires turn. Guilt courses through her, keeping pace with her heartbeat. Her phone buzzes a few times from her backpack but she ignores it. It’s just going to be Nik or Jens giving her crap, and it’s not like she doesn’t know.

  Jackson keeps the radio on low, as if to make the quiet between them more pronounced. I get it, Lorelei wants to say. You don’t like me, you don’t approve of me, you wish I— But she doesn’t know what he wants, and maybe that’s the problem. She gets Chris not wanting to introduce her to his mom yet, but Jackson’s coldness seems almost theatrical.

  “Sorry about this,” she says eventually, just to fill up space. “I really didn’t—”

  Jackson keeps his eyes fixed on the road in front of them. “I know it’s not your fault,” he says. “This is what being friends with Chris is like. You’re not the first girl I’ve covered for him with his mom, and, like, no offense, but you probably won’t be the last.”

  Lorelei knows enough to say, “None taken.”

  “Because this is gonna be the deal for you,” Jackson goes on. “If you think he’s gonna, like, fall in love and get serious about you, you have another thing coming. He’s never going to break her heart like that.”

  “His…mom?”

  Jackson’s laugh is hollow. “You gonna answer that phone?”

  “It’s probably just Nik,” she says.

  “Nick Fitzwell?”

  “Nik Felson,” Lorelei says. “My brother.” She might be imagining the startled sharpness of Jackson’s blink, the way his hands grip suddenly white on the wheel. A half second later, whatever it was is gone and his expression is vacant again.

  “I know Nik,” he says casually. “There are two of them, right? The twins?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Does he know you’re hanging around Chris?”

  “Not exactly.”

  It occurs to her that she hasn’t given directions in a little while, but Jackson keeps making the right turns anyway, like he knows where he’s going. Maybe he knows Nik better than he’s letting on.

  She changes the subject. “Do you think I’m making a mistake?”

  “Chris is probably worth it,” Jackson tells her. “Or he’s worth a lot, anyway. He’s one of the best dudes I know. But you shouldn’t get hung up on him. He’s not— He never lets anything last.”

  “I might be different, though,” Lorelei says. She feels bold with the memory of his mouth still warm against her lips.

  “You might be. You never know,” Jackson says. “But I’m not trying to be mean when I say: I doubt it.”

  They pull up in front of her house. Nik opens the front door and steps onto the porch, like he’s been waiting for her to arrive. Lorelei is too far away to tell, really, but she thinks he looks a little off, unsteady on his feet.

  “Where have you been?” he asks, calling out into the darkness.

  Jackson rolls down her window and leans across her body. “Don’t be so hard on her,” he calls back.

  Lorelei definitely sees something, this time. A change comes over Nik when he hears Jackson’s voice, a tightening. The porch light is stark overhead, so the planes of his face are sharp.

  He says, “Lorelei, you need to get in here.” There’s a pause. “And don’t tell me what to do, Jackson.” A funny undertone laps at the edge of Nik’s words. Jackson leans a little farther and opens Lorelei’s door for her.

  She tumbles out into the night, through their front gate and onto the lawn. Nik waits for her on the front porch, silent and stern. Jackson’s car is still idling at the curb.

  “Don’t lie to me,” Nik says when she reaches him. “Don’t—don’t do that shit, Lorelei. You don’t even— Where the fuck have you been?”

  “Band practice. Jesus. I went to see them play for a minute.” Nik takes this in and doesn’t say anything. “Would you have let me go?” she asks.

  He doesn’t respond.

  “Are you going to rat me out?” she asks, then, instead. He shakes his head slowly. “I won’t do it again,” she promises.

  “Okay.”

  “So come inside with me. Is there any schnitzel left?”

  “Some. But listen, there’s— Something happened. With Oma.”

  “What kind of something?”

  “We don’t really know yet. But Mom and Dad are at the hospital. Jens and I were waiting for you before we left.”

  The world drains itself of noise, of color. Panic sets a fire in Lorelei’s stomach. Her knees buckle and she reaches out blindly, clutching at Nik’s sleeve, his shoulder. He curls an arm around her and draws her all the way in, holding her against him. Lorelei doesn’t mean to start crying; the tears don’t gather or threaten, they’re just there, streaming down her face, hot and miserable.

  “It’s okay,” Nik murmurs. “It’s okay, she might be okay.”

  But I was gone, Lorelei thinks. I was off thinking about singing, kissing boys, I was gone, I was gone. Jens appears over Nik’s shoulder and they hand her off one to the other, working in their usual silent tandem.

  “I’m just gonna go say thank you to Jackson,” Nik says. “We’ll go in ten?”

  “Sure thing,” Jens says, pulling Lorelei over the threshold, into the house. “Hey there, little L,” he says. “Let’s get some dinner in you before we leave?”

  OMA IS NOT OKAY. She’s alive, but barely, and sunk deep into a coma by the time they arrive. It was a massive stroke, the doctors explain. It’s unlikely that she’ll wake up on her own, and even if she does, she’ll be damaged. Lorelei swims through the words the doctors keep saying: significant loss of gross motor function, linguistic impairment, looking into long-term-care facilities. What they mean is: one way or another, your grandmother is not coming home again.

  “Let her go,” Petra says when the doctors try to discuss treatment options. “Just let her go already.”

  “You sure, Mom?” Jens asks. He’s stationed himself by her side, along with Henry, who clings to her, useless, undone. Lorelei and Nik are set up on some chairs nearby, where they have a pile of vending machine snacks they aren’t eating and an Us Weekly crossword they can’t concentrate on enough to do. “We can sleep on it. She’s not going anywhere. We don’t need to decide right away.”

  “I’ve made my decision,” Petra says coolly. “And you know her. She certainly wouldn’t want this.”

  Papers are shuffled and passed around. The doctors confer. They try to talk to Henry, but he can’t stop crying. He’s clutching desperately at his wife’s thin wrist, like she’s the one who’s dying. He hugged them all too tightly when they arrived, and Lorelei was disgusted with herself for being relieved: at least for a minute he’d forgotten to be scared of her.

  Jens isn’t eighteen, but he looks it, so he takes over.

  We’re a mess without her, Lorelei thinks. Oma has always been in charge of the whole family. Always.

  It takes hours for nothing to happen. Lorelei goes in to sit at Oma’s bedside while everyone else argues in the hall. Oma is one of three patients in the room, and Lorelei catches glimpses of the rest of them through fluttering curtains: other still, silent bodies, and crying relatives. The curtains pretend to keep their grief private but there’s nothing they can do about the sounds, the gasp of respirators and the beep of heart monitors, the stifled sobs that issue softly from the living.

  Oma seems peaceful, at least until you look too closely. Her face is serene, but there are IVs in each of her forearms, and bruises spreading purple under her papery skin. Her long braid is coming loose, and tangling.

  If Lorelei looks long enough, Oma’s slack face takes on a kind of violence. There’s no one home, certainly not Oma, who was always vital, always moving. Her body
without her spirit is empty, and the emptiness is awful, and wrong. Lorelei thinks she knows what her mother means when she says, Let her go already. Oma wouldn’t allow herself to lie in bed with messy hair and a machine pushing air into her lungs. Oma—the real Oma—is already gone.

  It’s one o’clock in the morning when Jens finally comes in. “Oh, L,” he says. “I didn’t know you were here.”

  She stands up automatically. Like there’s something to do now that he’s here. He doesn’t say anything, though. Jens just gathers her against him in a hug.

  It’s nice to be sheltered in the cove of her brother’s arms. It’s not like hugging Oma again would be—Jens is bone and sinew, still teenage lanky, but he’s warm, and he’s hers.

  “I’ve convinced Mom to give her another day, at least,” he says. “C’mon. There’s nothing more we can do here.”

  Lorelei pulls away to say goodbye to Oma, and it hits her that this parting might be for good. I said goodbye to her this morning, she thinks. I say goodbye to her every morning.

  She wants to leave Oma looking comfortable, at least. A little bit like herself. She reaches out to straighten the bedclothes, but her grandmother’s body is heavy against them and they won’t be stirred. Silver hair is escaping wildly from its pins, curling softly around her face, and she looks young in a way Lorelei doesn’t recognize, which seems unfair; Oma should look like she always does, if this is going to be the last time, if this is—

  She decides that she has to redo it: the whole long plait. Lorelei pulls out the bobby pins she can reach and the thin elastic at the braid’s end. She runs her fingers through Oma’s hair and then realizes she’ll have to move her head, just a little. She might get in trouble, but—

  “Hey,” Jens says. His hand comes to her shoulder again, but this time his grip is firm. He isn’t forceful with her, but there’s no escaping him without a fight. “We’ve gotta go, Lorelei. You can do this in the morning.”

  Lorelei looks back as the door swings closed behind them: Oma’s hair is messier than ever, streaming silver over the pillows, waves and waves of it looser than it ever was in life.

  That night Lorelei can’t sleep. She comes downstairs for water and finds Nik bent over a textbook at the dining room table. She flinches against the harsh overhead light he’s got on, just more evidence of how frazzled everyone is: it’s three a.m., and no one has bothered to remind him to go to bed.

  “What are you doing up?” he asks.

  “I wanted water,” Lorelei says. “My throat hurts.”

  “It’s late.”

  “Yeah.”

  Lorelei goes into the kitchen and doesn’t bother flipping on the light. Nik closes his book and comes in behind her. He goes to the refrigerator and opens the door while Lorelei pulls two glasses from the cupboard. Her brother is illuminated by the fridge’s white glow on one side and the spill of yellow light from the dining room on the other, his body turned abstract and incoherent between them, just shape and shadow. Maybe that’s why she’s bold enough to ask the question that’s been niggling at her, quiet, since she got home.

  “So you and Jackson know each other,” she says. Nik pulls out the Brita, closes the fridge, and blinks as his eyes adjust to the deeper darkness.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “I guess not. But I didn’t know you guys were friends, either.”

  “We aren’t, really.”

  “Good.”

  Lorelei doesn’t like his tone. “Why good?”

  “I don’t know.” He pours them each a glass and puts the Brita back in the fridge. “So how did he end up giving you a ride home from band practice?”

  “Chris Paulson invited me,” she says.

  “Oh.”

  “This is so not fair!” For a split second the day falls away from her, and she’s just arguing with Nik in the kitchen, playing her little-sister role, hunting for information. “You totally know them, and you totally have an opinion on them, and you should tell me what it is.”

  “I don’t know, Lorelei.” Nik moves as if to leave. “It’s late.”

  “You really aren’t going to warn your baby sister?” she asks. She does remember, then, about Oma, and the things that he can’t protect her from.

  “It’s not anything, really,” Nik says. “I knew Chris a little bit when he was dating this girl Lisa, I guess. We used to play pickup soccer after school sometimes, before he joined that dumb band, winter of junior year. Jens was doing the play then, so I had a lot of time to myself.”

  Nik pauses, and seems to decide something. When he speaks again, the words come more easily, like the story wants to be told. “His dad wasn’t sick yet.”

  This part of the legend Lorelei has heard: that his dad passed away last year, and left Chris the old silvery Mercedes he drives when it’s running. She knew the car in the parking lot long before she knew who it belonged to.

  “Or I guess he was, but we didn’t know it, and we’d spend—Jesus, hours, just running around, playing. Getting high sometimes, watching the sunset, whatever. He’s—I mean, you’ve talked to him. He’s a nice guy, right? Like, he’d always been popular—since seventh grade, basically—so I assumed he was a dickhead athlete like the rest of them, but he was funny. He surprised me. He and Lisa were always fighting over shit, but they were happy about it. They both kind of liked it, I think, the fighting.

  “Until his dad— His dad got really sick, really suddenly, you know? Like, one minute he was fine and then he went to the hospital for something and they were, like, You have three months, tops, and that messed Chris up. Obviously, I guess.”

  Lorelei deliberately doesn’t think about Oma’s pale face and silver braid in that stark white unfamiliar bed.

  “So you guys stopped hanging out?”

  “It wasn’t that simple,” Nik says. “Because at first he just slipped away. He was at the hospital, like, all the time. Which I thought was funny because they weren’t that close before, him and his dad. But I still saw him at school and stuff. And then all of a sudden he was gone.”

  “I’m sure Lisa loved that.” Lorelei only knows Lisa a tiny bit, from seeing her around on campus. She’s tall and very pretty, with black hair and big green eyes, and she’s almost always got someone hanging around her, boys trying to touch her and girls trying to talk to her. She doesn’t seem like a person who you could keep waiting.

  “She was okay,” Nik says. “She was actually great about it. They’d been together on and off for a while, at that point, so she had met his family. I think she went to be with them sometimes, at first.”

  “But then?”

  “They broke up after he died,” he says. “That’s really what happened, his dad died and his mom just got, like, crazy possessive and jealous. She told Chris he had to be home right after school, and he was like, okay, you know, it’s been a rough couple of months, I can do that, and then she told him he had to stop bringing Lisa around and he didn’t love that but he did, and then—” Here he pauses to find the exact right words.

  “She caught them,” Nik says. It’s sweet that he’s being careful with her, Lorelei thinks. Like she won’t know what it means, or can’t imagine. “In his car, up on one of the bluffs, I guess. He said he had to be somewhere after school and his mom followed him, saw them. Naked. In the backseat of his Mercedes.” His dad’s car. “Chris missed, like, a week of school, after. I never found out exactly why. That’s when they broke up.”

  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 h
im 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.”

  “YOU’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.