by Zan Romanoff
There it is again, the grown-up question she wanted to ask Oma, about the possibility of survival and transformation. Carina started to answer it, saying: You’ll survive it, but you have to want to. Now her dad is amending the answer: It’s not enough to want it. You have to go ahead and try.
It’s not much, but it’s something. Hope starts to glimmer at the horizon of Lorelei’s mind. Maybe she’s right about something, finally: that growing up leaves traces on you—a scar, a tear, a glue-mended crack—to mark the violence of the change that made it. You don’t get to become someone else without letting go of the person you used to be.
Lorelei isn’t certain she trusts him, but then, there’s no power in his voice, nothing that could pull her under or bend her will. He’s just her human father, sitting with his palms up in his lap, trying to convince her because he wants to fix some small part of things. She’s grateful for the animal comfort of his body next to hers: the pulse of his heart beating, the tidal hush of the blood in his veins. He reaches out and puts an arm around her shoulders.
Maybe whatever happens between her parents has nothing to do with her. Maybe she can tell her mother the truth, and let them figure it out. They have before. They might be able to again.
“Be brave,” he says against her hair. “Be brave, do better. That’s all anyone is asking of you, Lorelei.”
IT’S LIKE SHE RECOGNIZES the guitar, the first time she sees it: it’s small and sweet, honey-blond in the sunlight, worn in from years of being played. “This one,” Lorelei tells her father.
“Are you sure?” he asks. “We can look at the new ones. You can—”
“This one,” Lorelei says. “I’m sure.”
Lessons won’t start until break ends. Everything is on hold for the holidays. Lorelei teaches herself chords and songs in her room. Her fingers bruise. Her wrists hurt. She takes the guitar with her to the beach and sits and plays in the sand. Sometimes a tourist passing by will toss her a dollar, like a joke.
She’s out there, sitting on the low cement wall that marks the edge of the paved pedestrian path, when Chris materializes in the corner of one eye, at first just as a far-off blur. They haven’t spoken since that day at his house. He hasn’t called, and she hasn’t texted. Lorelei’s body knows him just before her brain does, her heartbeat ratcheting up an instant before she can explain why it’s pounding.
He’s walking alone, wearing a navy sweatshirt she doesn’t recognize. His curls have been trimmed short again. He moves to flick them away from his face, before remembering they aren’t there. Those funny, reflexive gestures that stay after the use for them is long gone.
He sees her too. She watches him startle, and freeze, and decide something. He keeps walking toward her. He stops when he gets there.
“Hey,” Lorelei says.
“Hey.” Chris rocks back on his heels and looks at her. “What’s all this? I thought you said you weren’t going to sing anymore.”
“I’m not!” Lorelei puts the guitar down on its soft case. “I’m not. I’m just trying to figure out if there’s another way for me to make music. You know.”
“You really love it, huh?”
Lorelei nods. “I really do,” she says. “I don’t think I could live without it.”
“Good. I mean. Good.”
“It is,” Lorelei says. “It seemed like—maybe if I had something for myself—I wouldn’t want to…” She can’t find a way to say what she means without bringing too much of it up. “Anyway. Um. How are you?”
“I’m okay. I’m actually fine, really.”
“Are things with your mom…How are they?”
“None of your business.” Chris sighs, and then relents. “Also fine, though.”
“I’m really—”
“I know you are. And it had to happen eventually. I just wish—”
“Yeah,” Lorelei says. “Me too.”
“So you’re teaching yourself?” he asks, looking down at the guitar.
“I’m trying. It’s hard.”
“Yeah, well,” Chris says. “Good luck, okay?”
He smiles at her. He’s still beautiful. Lorelei’s heart twists. Something dark stirs in her, that old blind longing. But he isn’t hers to want anymore.
She picks up the guitar and strums. It hums in her arms, low and sweet.
LORELEI KEEPS CLEANING OUT Oma’s room, one day at a time. She leaves boxes of giveaways in the front hall, and her brothers drive them out to Goodwill. Her progress is slow and steady. It’s the weekend again before it’s empty. On Sunday morning she starts to put it back together: sheets on the bed, a few books on the shelves.
Petra comes in to watch her work. She doesn’t say anything.
“I was thinking it could be a guest room,” Lorelei tells her. “It seemed like it was time.”
Petra stays silent. She walks across the room and trails her fingertips over every blank, shining surface, like she can’t decide whether the world is real or not.
At length, Lorelei asks, “Do you miss her?”
Petra looks up. “Why—” she starts, but her voice cracks and she has to start over again. “I guess I’ve missed her for a long time,” she says.
Lorelei puts the last pillow in its case on the bed. She says, “I was thinking of going for a walk. You, um. Do you want to come with me?”
She can’t tell which of them is more surprised when her mother says, “Yes.”
Petra blinks sharply at the daylight outside. She’s not one for walks: she goes to work at eight a.m. and returns each day at seven. She usually stays in on weekends.
“I’m glad I got to read the letter,” Petra says. “Did you— You wrote to her?”
“Yeah. I had been reading Oma’s old letters, trying to figure out what was going on, and it seemed like maybe Hannah was the one who would know.”
“Are you sorry you found out?”
“I don’t think so,” Lorelei says. “No, you know. I’m not.”
They arrive at the beach where Lorelei threw herself under, and found her way beneath the roll of the tide. Petra steps into the sand without hesitating. She kicks off her shoes, and picks up the long hem of her skirt to keep it from trailing while they walk. Lorelei stumbles as she bends down to untie her sneakers.
There’s nothing more to wait for. Lorelei has been resolved to tell her mother for days. The opportunity is handing itself to her.
“I think it’s different if you know how to use it,” she says. The sand is damp and gritty from the rain but the sky is lightening above them, a hundred different layers of white and pearl and gray.
“Use it?” Petra’s calm turns furious.
“You read the letter,” Lorelei says. She refuses to back down. She’s weathered enough of her mother’s storms to know what the dangerous ones look like. “It didn’t say not to sing. It said to be careful. It said—”
“Not to sing to anyone you needed anything from. But I didn’t think you would be stupid enough to test out a theory on some—on someone—”
“I was stupid enough to sing to people in the first place,” Lorelei says. “I had to see if I could undo it.”
“Undo it?”
“Yes.”
“You could?”
“I did.”
The words are small and stark against the world’s tuneless humming, the crash of water and the rush of wind. Petra’s body sags hard, like her strings have been cut. Her shoulders fall toward one another and her spine goes liquid. Her knees give up as she sinks to sit in the sand.
Lorelei sits next to her. “You could—with Dad,” she offers. “I think you could—” But she can’t say it, let him go.
Petra hears the unspoken words, and her chest heaves once as she sucks in a long, gasping breath, and then another.
“Do you want to?” Lorelei asks.
Petra puts her head down on her knees. Lorelei only barely hears her when she whispers, “No.”
Lorelei frowns down at her feet where they’
re burrowing into the wet sand. She’s always thought of her mother as hopelessly, hideously selfish. She’s wanted to revise her opinion, these last few weeks, at first because she thought Petra was spellbound, and now because she knows that the spell was only ever something Petra put on herself.
She can see now that Petra never trusted her own mother or her own desire, her marriage or her children: anyone or anything. She locked herself up in offices and spare rooms because she couldn’t stop herself from wanting things, but she could stop herself from getting them, at least.
Petra lifts her head. “I have to,” she says. She’s dry-eyed and sober. “I know I have to. I will. And he’ll leave me.”
“He might not.” Henry can tell her the rest of it himself. Lorelei offers what she can: the truth, some hope.
“How did you do it?” Petra asks. “Did you just sing?”
“That’s the trick, pretty much.”
“But how do you keep yourself from—from wanting—”
“I don’t think it’s possible not to want things,” Lorelei cuts in. “That’s not it, exactly. You just have to want for them to be themselves when it’s all over. You have to want to be yourself too. It isn’t easy. I screwed it up the first few times. Clearly.”
“What if I don’t love him?” Petra says. Her laugh is bitter and brittle. “What if he does, and it’s me who can’t?”
“Only one way to find out.”
The two of them sit for a little while longer.
“The letter said the women used to gather at the shore and sing sometimes,” Lorelei says. “After they stopped needing things. To keep in practice. It sounds like you have to use it, one way or the other.”
“Or it wears you out,” Petra says. “Dries you up. I know.”
“You know?”
“Every couple of years, I would get too tired. I would see myself in the mirror and I would be so hideous. I would sneak out and come here, where no one could hear me. Where it would be safe.”
Lorelei finds her mother’s hand and curls her fingers around it. They’re both white-knuckled with cold. “Now we can do that together,” she says.
“We don’t know any of the same songs.”
“Teach me yours,” Lorelei offers. “I can teach you mine.”
“I’ve heard what your brothers call music,” Petra sniffs. “I’m not sure that even counts.”
Lorelei laughs and tightens her grip on her mother’s hand. “Come on,” she says. “I’ve never heard your voice before.”
Petra gives her a long, thoughtful look, and stands up, pulling Lorelei with her. They walk until their toes are at the edge of the frigid, foaming sea, until it’s lapping at them, begging them to come back. Petra opens her mouth and lets out a long, wild wail.
The sound is raw and awful, like thunder ripping the sky open, like lightning hitting water. Lorelei’s voice buzzes against the back of her throat when she hears it. She opens her mouth and lets it out.
The song is about needing and wanting, about getting and having: giving back, giving up, and all the long days they’ve both lived.
Afterward Lorelei feels an emptiness that’s peaceful. Waves recede from the shore, leaving smooth sand in their wake. Her mother turns to her, smiling and radiant. Her lips are parted. Lorelei takes another deep breath, filling emptiness so sound can billow back out.
THANK YOU:
Logan Garrison, who plucked me from the slush pile.
Katherine Harrison, who saw this book in the draft we sent her.
For too many things over too many years to even begin to name: Abram, Alex, Alex, Alex, Amanda, Charlie, Chrissie, Emma, Gina, Henry, Julia, Logan, Lydia, Mia, Nozlee, Sparrow, Tori, Verity, Zoey.
Thank you especially to Gina Delvac, for naming this and every band, and to Andrea Schlosser, who translated all of the German so that I could get a feel for what Lorelei was reading in the letters.
Miranda: f’evz and always my first reader, my very favorite, and my best friend.
For being my extended family, to the communities of the chavurah and the Rosspack. (That’s Allison, Alysha, Annie, Becky, Jen, Kate, Raphaela, Sami, and Shira, plus Celo, Gregor, Jarren, Jay, Magpie, Rachel, Sam, Sharifa, Tallevi, Terk, Terri, Thom, Trower…and Al.)
For giving me all the time I needed, thank you so much, Ayana, and all of the East Side Jews.
To everyone who taught me how to write, but especially Temple Israel Day School, Jeremy Michaelson, Margaret Wappler, and Adam Cushman. (Extra thanks to the Thursday-night Writing Workshop Los Angeles crew, who read the first draft five messy pages at a time.)
To Rachel Fershleiser, who got excited about a Tumblr post about this book when it was still—and seemed like it might always be—just a Word document in search of an agent.
To my very tall family, for supporting me in my work, and working so deliberately on making your own. Everything I could possibly say about you sounds sentimental and stupid, which is to say: you are too good for words.
Finally, to everyone who ever read something I had written on the internet and asked if I was going to write a book someday—truly, this one is for you.
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