A Song to Take the World Apart

by Zan Romanoff

  “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.”

  There it is, the admission: not just an accident but a mess.

  “She was trying to take care of things,” Lorelei says. Defending Oma feels useless, but she can’t not do it.

  “That was what she did,” Petra says. “Taking care of everyone and everything. It would have been— I would have been bad at it—like I said. But it would have been all right. Not having a perfect mother doesn’t ruin a person. Necessarily.” She looks out the window. Her phone vibrates steadily in her bag.

  “Do you need to get that?” Lorelei asks.

  “Sure,” Petra says. “We should probably go, anyway.”

  They’re quiet in the car on the way back, and the space of their silence gives Lorelei time to think. Oma is—was—always a presence when she entered the room. She was used to being in charge, and she didn’t take suggestions or criticism. Lorelei was always grateful for her grandmother’s harsh edges; Petra is unpredictable, but Oma, even when she was difficult, was sure and certain.

  Her mother was young when she had the twins. She’s young now, still. She’s never lived in a house without her mother before.

  Lorelei feels something inside her soften toward Petra, and it scares her almost as badly as anything else that’s happened in the space of the last day. Petra is unpredictable, and loving someo
ne who changes like that is dangerous. That’s something she’s known since she was a much littler girl.

  That night her mother and father leave after dinner to go to the hospital. Lorelei is still unsettled by the conversation she and Petra had: she feels like she’s adrift in open water, like a boat that’s tugged free from its moorings.

  They don’t tell her why they’re going, but when they come back, Oma is dead.

  Her mother comes in while she’s getting ready for bed. The morning’s fever is burning hot now, scalding, and her eyes are molten with fury. “She told you, right, Lorelei?” she says, without preamble. “She must have told you too what you could and couldn’t do.”

  Lorelei assumes she means the singing. She had planned to ask more from Oma, to find out the whole story, but she can’t do that anymore. The distance between her last conversation with Oma and the present seems impossible, a blur of static, all snow on the screen. “Sure,” she says. “Yeah, she told me.”

  “She told me too,” Petra says. She grabs Lorelei by the wrists. “She was always telling me how to live my life. She put a spell on me. She cursed me, you know. She probably cursed you too.”

  Lorelei tries to twist away from her mother and can’t. Her grip is too strong. She looks possessed. Not the way her father did when he heard her singing, which was a distant thing, like he’d become a vacant body, a zombie. Petra looks like there’s a spirit inside her, making her mouth move too quickly and giving it strange shapes.

  Lorelei says, “She just told me—”

  “Not to sing, never to sing. She told me the same thing, baby, but now I think we might be free.”

  “You can’t possibly think Oma was, like,…a witch.”

  If anything, it’s her mother who’s the witch, always shut away from the rest of the world, bound up by a tight smile and this angry suspicion. She looks like she could do magic right now if she could channel the energy sparking behind her eyes into her fingers and her mouth.

  “I know what I know,” Petra says, but she loosens her grip a little. “Trust me. What she did to me—I hope she didn’t do it to you. I hope it all goes away now that she’s dead and gone. Maybe now it will all be over.”

  At this point, Lorelei is sick to death of crying, but she feels tears gathering behind her eyes, anyway. Her body stopped obeying her the minute Nik said, “Something’s happened. With Oma,” the minute she looked close enough to see the resignation written across his face, and the dark soft sadness welled up in his eyes.

  Because she’s starting to understand, and wishes she wasn’t. From a certain angle—at seventeen, say, and terrified—bad luck can look a lot like something worse. What her mother must mean is: Oma cursed her, and she ended up pregnant. Petra sang for Henry, and slept with him, and somehow her babies are Oma’s fault. The morning’s conversation, and the air it seemed to breathe into her mother’s life, crumbles in on itself. Petra doesn’t want to take responsibility for anything. She wants to blame Oma for everything that’s gone wrong so far, and start over again like Oma never existed.

  She believes their family is her curse.

  “How can you say that?” Lorelei asks.

  “You don’t know her like I did,” Petra says. “And you weren’t there when—”

  But Lorelei can’t bear to hear any more. “You said this morning that you loved us,” she starts. “That you wanted to take care of us, that you were scared, and now you’re saying—that having Nik, and Jens, that was a curse? Thank god you didn’t raise us, if that’s how you feel.”

  This, finally, stills Petra. Her face goes blank and white. “That’s not what I meant,” she says, but it comes out mechanical. She must not have realized what she was really saying. What she was confessing to her daughter, who’s part curse too, or cursed, or who knows.

  “Sure.” Lorelei is a minute, maybe less, from crying. She thinks that if her mother doesn’t get out of the room before it starts, she’s going to scream, or die, or just explode. “Okay. You told me. Please leave now.”

  “I’m sorry,” Petra says. She slips out the door with her shoulders hunched.

  Lorelei refuses to feel sorry for her.

  She falls asleep on top of the covers in her clothes, and wakes up to a face that’s stiff with tear tracks. She stares up at the ceiling and licks delicately at the salt crusted against the upper corner of her lip. There’s an ocean’s worth of sadness inside her that’s just started spilling out. It’s briny and sharp against her tongue.

  EVERYTHING IS COMPLICATED IN the days that follow Oma’s death. Grief is not straightforward, and Lorelei’s is full of twists and turns: sadness followed by anger, and then whole minutes where she forgets, and then has to remember again.

  Oma died on Tuesday night. Wednesday is lost in a blur of sleeping, or trying to, or staring at walls. She calls Zoe when she knows she’ll be in class so that she can just leave a voice mail explaining where she’s been. Jens tells her when to come down for meals and reminds her to eat while she sits at the table, lost. Everything tastes like sand and feels just as heavy in her stomach.

  On Thursday, she’s vaguely aware of the planning going on downstairs. Henry’s taken the week off from his teaching, so between grading papers he calls crematoriums and funeral homes and relatives on the other side of the ocean. She hears German coming up through the floorboards and it sounds completely foreign and somehow familiar, a language she’s learned to recognize but has no idea how to speak.

  Petra avoids her. After that feverish confession, she seems to have run out of words. She keeps watching Lorelei, though, her eyes hawk-bright and sharp. Lorelei watches her back. She almost wants to look at her mother’s wrists to see if the blood that flows there is actually black, sludgy and mean, instead of bright red and human with pain. They’re all devastated by Oma’s death, of course, but to basically call her a witch, and act like asking them not to sing was some kind of curse—

  Lorelei’s fury with her mother hones itself into something so sharp and shining that it resembles a knife’s blade inside her, always testing its edges on her fingertips and toes. It needles her with questions: How dare Petra? What in the world could she have been thinking?

  What tore her mother and grandmother apart, all those years ago?

  Lorelei doesn’t mean to go looking, exactly. She just doesn’t know how to stop herself.

  Oma’s room is still the way she left it: the bed is neatly made, and the blanket she was knitting is half finished on her bedside table. There are clothes in the hamper and lipstick-kissed tissues in the trash can. Lorelei closes her eyes against the feeling of seeing it, and takes her first few steps that way, arms outstretched, fingertips seeking blindly.

  Don’t be silly, she tells herself. Pretend it’s a mission. Pretend it’s a game. All she’s doing is playing detective and looking for evidence—of what, she doesn’t really know. Something awful that one of them did or said twenty years ago. The roots of a tree that’s grown up twisted, and snared her in its branches. She’s just like a cop on television, coming in to untangle what happened before she showed up. She can investigate Oma’s room if she pretends it was someone else’s, moving through beats she learned on the screen.

  So Lorelei opens her eyes and walks a short circuit around the room. She taps her knuckles against the walls, but they all sound the same. The floorboards don’t yield any secret compartments or unusual cracks. Where would Oma hide something? she asks herself. How would Oma hide something? She hates the idea that Oma hid anything. It isn’t like her. Wasn’t like her.

  The only off-limits piece of furniture (aside from the closet in the weeks before Christmas) was Oma’s writing desk, a heavy, solid old-fashioned thing, with dozens of cubbyholes and small, specific drawers. Her laptop is sitting at the center of it, an incongruous modern detail in the room.

  Oma wasn’t opposed to the digital age. She didn’t Skype, but she emailed regularly, sitting here or at the dining room table downstairs, tapping out missiv
es to everyone she’d left behind in Germany. Lorelei watched her open it enough times to know that it’s password-protected—and she has no guesses as to what the password might be.

  There are a few physical letters on the desk too: a bill half out of its envelope, waiting to be paid, a notice about health insurance, an offer from the Humane Society she hadn’t gotten around to throwing out yet. On the right-hand side, carefully stacked and squared, are two envelopes addressed and stamped, ready to go.

  Lorelei takes the pair of them and puts them on the bed. One is another bill. The other is personal, addressed to an apartment in Hamburg. It’s for Hannah, a name Lorelei doesn’t recognize. The envelope is standard-sized and it feels light, almost weightless.

  The bill should get sent, obviously. Probably they both should. Lorelei tries to imagine what her grandmother would have needed to commit to paper, and pay all that postage on. Something important, maybe, something someone is waiting on thousands of miles away. Or maybe they’ve heard the news already, and have stopped expecting the letter. Maybe if she puts it in the mail, a few weeks from now Hannah will see an envelope with that curved, familiar handwriting on it and catch her breath, go white and then blue with shock.

  Lorelei turns back to the desk, like it will help her make her decision, and sees what she missed before: the little pull that was hidden underneath those envelopes. When she tugs on it, it lifts up a panel of the desk’s wood to reveal the space below it, which is filled with stacks of more letters, each one labeled with a year. 1998 through 2016: one for every year of Oma’s self-imposed exile. Some stacks are much thicker than others, like there were years when the talk ran dry for a while before it swelled up again. When she rifles through them, each one is signed by the same Hannah.