by Zan Romanoff
In Zoe’s room they take their usual spots on the bed. Lorelei has her head on the pillows, and Zoe props herself up against the footboard, so they can face each other. Their feet meet in the middle.
“So we went back to the party after we dropped you off,” Zoe starts.
“Oh. Good.” Lorelei doesn’t really want to hear about what the party became in her wake. “Was it fun?”
“Yeah. Because. I, um. I totally did it with him. With Daniel. That night.”
“Holy shit.” Lorelei sits straight up, all of her misery knocked right out of her head. “Whoa, Zoe, that’s, like, huge.”
“I know!” Zoe wails. She hides her face in the covers. “I had thought about it before, and we’d kind of talked about it, and I just felt like, I don’t know, there he was, there the house was. Why not, you know?”
An awful thought occurs to Lorelei. “Did you decide after you dropped me off?” she asks carefully. “Did you— Did it have anything to do with my singing?”
“No,” Zoe says. She laughs. “Don’t get me wrong, L, you were good, and we were excited, but, uh, not that kind of excited.”
“Okay. Yeah. That probably sounds crazy. I’m about to sound crazy. I have to tell you something,” Lorelei says. She’s lost Chris, and if she’s going to lose Zoe—better to get it over with. In a second more she’ll lose her nerve. “I sort of accidentally influenced you. And everyone there.”
Zoe gives her the look everybody gives her at first: like she’s crazy.
Lorelei tells it as quickly as she can: Oma’s rule against singing, and her mother’s idea that it was a curse, and Hannah’s email, which gave it a name. She tells Zoe about her single-minded desire to win Chris back, even if it was risky to try. And about Chris showing up at the house, and singing to him on Sunday. She leaves out the parts with Carina and Jackson.
When she’s done, Zoe says, “That’s really a lot. Are you— You said your mother believes all of this too? And Nik and Chris?”
“They know it.”
“You understand why I’m having trouble swallowing it, though, right?”
Lorelei doesn’t know what to say. She doesn’t want Zoe to believe her. She doesn’t want it to be true. But offering proof means singing, and she’s done with doing that, now that there’s no more to undo.
“I know you were good,” Zoe says again. “But. Lorelei. Magic? Sirens?”
“Why would I make this up?”
“I don’t know!” Zoe throws her hands in the air. “Are you— Could it be a sad-about-Chris thing? Are you mad at me for losing my virginity first? I just don’t—”
“It’s not about anyone else. It’s about me,” Lorelei says.
Zoe relents. “Okay. Sorry.”
They fall into silence, and even though they’re in Zoe’s familiar bed in her warm house, it’s uncomfortable between them all over again.
“Can you sing to me?” Zoe asks. “If you can influence people with your voice—I don’t know, if you could just show me.”
“It’s unpredictable,” Lorelei says. “I’m not really sure I have enough of a handle on it.”
“You did it with Chris, though, and it kind of worked. Right? You cured him, or whatever.”
“I think so. But I had to. Leaving him that way was worse. If you’re okay, I just—I don’t want to. Don’t ask me to.”
“It seems like it matters,” Zoe says curiously after a while. “Who you sing to. What you want. What you’re thinking about.”
“Yeah,” Lorelei says. “Exactly. The letter said never to sing to anyone I needed anything from.”
“Do you need anything from me?” Zoe asks.
“I don’t want to lose you.”
“Oh, Lorelei.” Zoe crawls over so they’re facing the same direction, and butts herself up against Lorelei’s side like a cat. “I don’t want to lose you, either.”
“Some things we just can’t share, though. You and Daniel. Me and this.”
“I trust you,” Zoe says. “I do.”
“I don’t trust me.”
Lorelei decides to change the subject.
“Did you know?” she asks. “That you were ready?”
Zoe laughs. “I thought so, I guess,” she says. “Enough so that I did it, anyway.”
“Have you changed your mind since you did?”
“I just didn’t know what it was,” Zoe says. “I thought I did, and so I thought I was ready, and it wasn’t— I wasn’t wrong, exactly. It’s just different. I couldn’t have known until I did it. What it would be like. I’m not sure there is such a thing as ready, when it’s that big. When it’s a before-and-after question. When you can’t know what you’re trying to be ready for until you’ve already done it.” She rolls onto her back and stares up at the ceiling. “It’s funny. I think I was more scared after, actually.”
The last light of day is coming in through the windows, heavy all around them, making the room glow gold. Days of rain have cleared the air so that it’s desert-bright, fine and clean. The sunset will be neon clouds and a pastel sky. In the morning Lorelei will be able to see the mountains again.
“I didn’t know what I was doing,” Lorelei says. “I’m not sure I ever will.”
“Who does?” Zoe says. “I mean, seriously, I don’t. Carina sure as shit doesn’t.”
“That’s awful.”
“Yeah.” Zoe sits up so that the sunlight silhouettes her, black against the gold.
Lorelei closes her eyes and opens them again. “Okay,” she says.
“Okay?”
“Sure.”
Lorelei waits for a melody to come to her. It arrives from somewhere deep in the back of her brain, something she thinks she might remember from a long time ago. She hums it until the words come to join in. They aren’t English. They’re sounds she must have picked up in childhood, her mother or grandmother bending over her crib to whisper her a song. She tries to remember which it was, but their faces blend together and it’s impossible to know what she actually remembers and what she’s just inventing.
It would be too easy to sing Zoe to her. She could reinforce their friendship into something steel-boned and enduring. Lorelei knows how to do that. She’s familiar now with the seeking tendrils of her own desire, and the way they can warp when they tangle up with somebody else’s. But that’s not what she wants, actually. She wants Zoe to be able to keep choosing her because that’s what she wants too.
So instead, for the first time, Lorelei sings about herself.
She sings out the quiet years, and the recent months, the things she never said to Oma and can’t say to her mother and won’t get to say to Chris. She sings about the cold silence she spent so much time cultivating, and how good it felt to abandon it, and how scary it is to feel it growing inside her again. Lorelei sings about Chris’s hands on her skin, and the ocean all around her, and the fear that she’s too much, and not enough, and that nobody will ever love her, or that someone will, and that will be worse.
“Oh,” Zoe says when she’s finished. “Oh, Lorelei.” She wraps her up in her arms and holds her there. “I’m sorry,” she says against the cotton of Lorelei’s T-shirt. “I’m so sorry. You’re right. I didn’t know.”
Lorelei stays at the Soroushes’ for dinner. Zoe insists that she sleep over, even though it’s a school night. It’s a relief to be at their dinner table, among a close, chattering family. After dinner they watch television, a luxury Mrs. Soroush allows only because Zoe tells her Lorelei got dumped. (“Thanks,” Lorelei says. Zoe gives her a pointed look and says, “Hey, it worked, right?”) They don’t talk about it again until they’re tucked up in bed together, each of them cocooned in her covers.
“I think the last time I slept over was the first night we went to one of Chris’s shows,” Lorelei says. “When we snuck out to go to the Roxy.”
“That feels like a million billion years ago,” Zoe says. “I was right, though. He did totally fall in love with you.”
“Kind of.”
“What do you mean, kind of? You said you only sang to him that one time, at the party.”
“I sang him a line outside the Roxy that night,” Lorelei reminds her. “And again the night his mom caught us in their house. It was only a little bit, but he said— Anyway. I think it was enough to make a difference.”
“Isn’t that kind of like falling in love with you, though?” Zoe muses. “Like, I’ve been thinking about it, and I had talked to Daniel about—you know, doing it, that night. And your singing probably pushed me further in that direction, but so did the drinks I had, and, like, I don’t know, the stupid text messages he sent me earlier in the day, and pheromones or something. It’s not like falling in love is a streamlined process, you know? People fall in love for all kinds of dumb reasons.”
“But this is magic,” Lorelei protests. “This was against his will.”
“You sang to him, what, three times? Over the course of two months? And you didn’t know what you were doing.”
“I knew it wasn’t right to do it.”
“And the first time you really talked, you were wearing lipstick and a cute dress, and when I went out with Daniel, I put on high heels and talked about stuff he would think was funny. We’re always trying to show our best sides to people. You’re not the first wily seductress in the world, Lorelei.”
“It’s an unfair advantage.”
“And you won’t ever do it again,” Zoe says. “But I’m not sure it invalidates your entire relationship with Chris. It makes it complicated, for sure. But it doesn’t ruin it. And it doesn’t mean you’ll ruin the next one. Your life isn’t over yet, you know.”
“Not ’til the fat lady sings,” Lorelei mumbles nonsensically. It’s late and she’s so, so tired.
“Pork up, buddy,” Zoe says. She pokes Lorelei in the ribs and then rolls over to wrap her in a lazy embrace. “I love you no matter what, though, right? Okay?”
“Okay,” Lorelei says. It’s a relief to find, finally, that one thing can be simple and true.
LORELEI’S INSTINCT IS TO be alone, still, but she fights it: no more quiet. On Thursday she actually convinces Jens to let her help in the kitchen a little bit, and then she does homework with Nik. She finishes before he does, and curls herself up on his bed. He lets her.
He opens up a math book and turns on music, low in the background. It’s the first time Lorelei has heard music in her own house, a song played casually, just to keep time. The sound is sort of crappy, actually, coming from his laptop’s tinny speakers.
“You need anything?” Nik asks her.
“Nah,” she says. “Just company.”
Nik finishes up and goes to bed around eleven, or he shoos her out of the room, anyway, and Lorelei doesn’t ask why. He deserves some of his own secrets, though she’s hoping he and Jackson are really done. Angela doesn’t deserve it, but neither does Jackson, and neither does Nik.
She passes Petra’s office on her way down the hall. Her mother has been there or at work every minute since Lorelei sent her the email. There’s more to tell her—more, still, always more—but she seems too dazed to take anything else in yet. Lorelei trails her fingertips against Petra’s doorjamb as she walks by, and then along the walls past her own room, to Oma’s.
She sits on the bed. She’s excruciatingly aware of her weight wrinkling the comforter. Oma made this bed every morning: she pulled the sheets tight and made sure her corners were neat. It’s been waiting for her return for months now, and even if Lorelei gets up and strips it herself and remakes it, even if the bed looks correct again, it won’t be the one Oma made. It won’t ever be Oma’s room again, either.
There’s no good reason for the family to keep waiting to turn it into something else.
On the other hand, it’s not like they need another room in the house. The family as it is won’t last that long, anyway: the twins will leave for college, and then Lorelei, and when Lorelei tells Petra what she’s learned…Lorelei tries not to think about it. As soon as she tells her mother, Petra will have to try to free her father. And the great relief of Lorelei’s life might end up being the undoing of her parents’.
But maybe that won’t be the end. Maybe her parents will move out and find somewhere smaller and more suited to them. They’ll have to figure out how to be happy together, then, and how to fill a different kind of silence.
It should make Lorelei sad to imagine all of this, but the image lightens her: The rugs on every floor being lifted, dusted and beaten, and rolled up and sold or put into storage. Her parents finding a place just for the two of them, and some young family filling this space up with laughter and sound.
Lorelei flops onto her belly. The sheets twist underneath her when she does. It’s a deliberate action. Then she jumps up and starts pulling books from the shelves.
There are no boxes, but she makes piles: to keep, to ask someone else in the family about, to give away. She does the same with her grandmother’s clothes, which are mostly sensible polyester things, cheap and well cared for. She saves the few funny little luxuries, mothballed furs left over from Germany’s frigid winters and a few favorite pieces of Oma’s knit wool. She sorts knickknacks and tchotchkes, rearranging the space so that it’s very clear that no one lives here anymore.
Only then does she turn off the lights and take off her clothes and lie naked between Oma’s crisp, cool sheets. Sometimes when she was little and sick, Oma would put out a cot for Lorelei at the foot of her bed, but she’s never actually slept here before. It doesn’t feel magical, particularly. It just feels like a bed. Lorelei lies still and watches the darkness. When she wakes up, it’s morning.
ON FRIDAY LORELEI COMES home from school with the afternoon stretching out emptily. It’s the first day of winter break. She’s too exhausted to believe it yet.
Her father is there when she arrives, sitting on the living room couch.
“There you are,” he says, and closes his laptop with a click.
“Yeah.” Lorelei shifts from foot to foot and considers the likelihood that he’ll let her escape this conversation twice.
“I noticed Chris hasn’t been back here since the weekend,” Henry says.
Lorelei winces. “No.”
“He seems nice.”
“He is.”
“I wish you had told us you were dating someone.” Henry nods his head to the space next to him on the couch.
“Dad, I’ve really got to—”
“Come sit,” he says, and it’s not a question.
Lorelei does.
“I’m not dating him anymore,” she says. She crosses her arms and pulls her knees to her chest. “Anyway, what, am I not allowed?”
“No, no, you’re allowed. I just…We do need to talk about this, Lorelei. Because I could have told you more about your voice.”
“I asked,” Lorelei says. “I asked Oma, and she told me not to sing and not to worry about why. And then Mom told me your whole messed-up story, okay, so— I just wanted one thing to be normal for a little while. One thing. Which obviously didn’t really work out for me, so.”
“I’m sorry.” Her father scrubs the heels of his hands against his eyes and runs his fingers through his thick gray hair. Lorelei bites down on the tenderness that rises in her. “I didn’t think it would end up like this.”
“How did you think it would end up, then? You heard me, that afternoon. You knew.”
“I thought Oma told you. I should have known she wouldn’t.”
“Because she didn’t trust me.”
“Your grandmother was very proud,” he says. “She believed in keeping up appearances. She wanted things to be normal too, after her fashion. I don’t think she realized this wasn’t going to go away.”
“And then Mom told me I was cursed.”
“Your mother has her own way of taking things.”
“So what would you have told me, if I had asked? That the women in my family enchant people by singing to them? That you’ve b
een under a spell my whole life?”
“Is that— Is that what she told you? Oh, Lorelei. That’s not true.”
“Please. I’ve seen how you look at her. She told me what happened.” Lorelei’s stomach tightens and twists sharply when she thinks of how he’ll look if he loses Petra, or loses the part of him that loves her.
“It was bad for a few years,” Henry says. “And it’s— I don’t know. I’m inside of it. I don’t know what it would be like without it. You’re right that I probably wouldn’t have stayed with your mother for long enough to find out.
“But it’s been— We’ve been together for a lot of years now. It’s kind of impossible to know how much of it was mine to begin with.” Henry scoots in a little bit closer. He doesn’t touch her but he’s close enough that she can reach out, if she wants. “You and your brothers, though,” he says. “That’s not complicated. I love you because I love you. I always have and I always will.”
“Would you leave her?” Lorelei asks. “If you could.”
Henry heaves a huge sigh. “It would depend,” he says. “I was very angry for a long time. As angry as I could be, under the circumstances. That might come back. And you know, she might want me to leave. We both remind each other of a lot of tough stuff. But grown-up relationships are always full of tough stuff. That doesn’t make them broken. And I promise you, it doesn’t have anything to do with you.”
“I’m just like her,” Lorelei spits out. “I did exactly the same thing.”
“No one ever told her, either, what the consequences were,” Henry says. “And she was so sad, and so lonely. You know why I forgave her?”
“Why?”
“After Oma told her, she never sang to me again. I begged her. For years. I still—” He doesn’t have to tell her. Lorelei remembers his face when he thought the song might be for him. “But she never would, once she knew for sure. That’s how I’ve been able to stay with her, and to trust her. Everyone screws up. The question is only really what you do afterward. Whether you’re brave enough to face up to what you’ve done.”