A Song to Take the World Apart (17 page)

I
T'S DARK BY THE
time they stumble downstairs. Lorelei's clothes feel like they've been put on wrong; they don't quite sit right on her body now. Or maybe it's her skin that feels different: lit up and glowing, too warm, too soft, too tender. She wants to strip down and run straight into the ocean, and feel the water cold and stark against her skin. She wants to lie down in the sand and trace every place Chris touched on her body, the paths he made from her head to the soles of her feet.

She finds her backpack in the sunroom, dropped beside the piano.

“C'mon,” Chris says. “We've gotta get out of here. Mom texted a minute ago. She's on her way back already.”

“Yeah,” Lorelei says. She's distracted by fishing out her own phone. She has three missed texts. One, from Nik, just says,
You owe me, L.
The next two are from Zoe.
Having dinner w Daniel he says he's having a birthday party in like 2 wks maybe The Trouble could PLAY IT.
And then
he thinks you singing sounds super cute. I say go for it :)

The song Chris was singing echoes in her head again:
same old sad songs, same old story.
Her father, enchanted; those people on the Pier, crying; Jackson desperate for the sound of her voice.

Isn't it time for a new story? Lorelei wonders. If Hannah said it wasn't a curse, maybe it's time to prove her right. And singing with Chris couldn't possibly be sad, or awful. They would stand together in the spotlight's hot circle, and he would put his arm around her, and their voices would move together. It would be beautiful. She wouldn't be dark or tempting or angry or sad: she would make everyone in that room feel like she feels about Chris right now.

“Hey, hold on,” she says, pulling him back into the room. “You might have convinced me after all.”

“What does that mean?”

“Zoe wants you to play at her boyfriend's birthday party,” Lorelei says. “She wants us to sing.”

“Would you do that for her?”

Lorelei expects the question to have a little heat behind it. He's asked her so many times. She's always said no. “I would,” she says. She holds his gaze when she says, “The thing is, I want to.”

She expects Chris to kiss her, but instead he moves past her to pull one of the guitars from its stand. He sits on the couch with it, and she joins him. She loves him in this moment: she loves that he loves to share his music with her just as much as he loves to kiss her.

Chris strums the opening notes to the song that made her cry on that first afternoon at band practice. With the whole band behind it, it sounded dark and driving, but when it's just him, it opens up into something earnest and almost pretty. The coaxing turns to longing. Lorelei gets ready to join him on the chorus.

She's so relaxed, so deeply in her own skin, that she forgets to be careful: the highest, purest part of her voice is gathering itself up when she opens her mouth. There are clouds of sound in the air in her lungs. Lightning crackles behind her eyes.

She catches Chris's gaze and gets overwhelmed by how well she knows him, now, and how much she feels for him.
You should tell him,
her heart says, beating hard against her rib cage, hammering at the pulse points in her wrists and neck.
Sing him how you feel.

I will,
she thinks, and she opens her mouth to do it.

She only gets the first two words out before the front door swings open and they both go silent.

“Chris?” Mrs. Paulson calls. “Chris, who's singing?”

Mrs. Paulson insists on driving her home.

Lorelei sits in the front seat of the car rigid with misery and fear. She wants to text Chris but she's afraid Mrs. Paulson will see, that she'll yell, or that she'll do anything, really.

The woman is mostly a character from stories, as far as Lorelei is concerned. She's the gargoyle hovering over her boyfriend's shoulder and keeping them apart. She thinks about the story that Nik told her, and thanks god she wasn't naked in the back of Chris's car, or naked anywhere at all. It was bad enough to be caught out with her guard down, when she was happy and relaxed, and thinking nothing in the world could touch her. She thought she was too safe to be found out.

Lorelei gives halting directions to her house. Mrs. Paulson doesn't respond, but she follows them. Outside, the sky is strangely pale, a thick cloud cover reflecting the city's neon lights. Lorelei wonders if she's imagining the feeling of something wild massing in the air, the ocean blowing inland, making waves. Mrs. Paulson doesn't say anything until they've pulled up in front of Lorelei's house and she's parked and turned off the engine.

It's only then that Lorelei turns to look at her, Chris's demon mother up close at last. It's dim in the car, illuminated mostly by a nearby streetlamp, so that Mrs. Paulson's features are rendered in shadow and sodium yellow. She looks like she might have been pretty once. Lorelei wonders how long she would have to look at that face before she saw Chris's in it.

Mrs. Paulson surprises her when she speaks. “I'm not a monster,” she says. “I don't want him to be alone.”

Lorelei doesn't know how to respond to this. She was expecting a lecture or a threat. Instead, what she sees is a woman at the edge of herself. Mrs. Paulson's breathing gets ragged, like she might— But she can't be about to cry. Lorelei wonders where she keeps her rage.

“I just miss him,” Mrs. Paulson goes on. The raggedness is still there but not breaking, not yet. “I miss him so much.”

Lorelei wants to reach out and touch her, to offer some grounding human contact, but she doesn't dare. “Chris?”

“Jacob,”
Mrs. Paulson says, her voice cracking at last.
His father,
Lorelei thinks. She never knew loss, not really, before Oma, but she knows it now. It's breathtaking, still, sometimes, the moments in which Oma's absence brings her up short.

“I miss him so much,” Mrs. Paulson says for the third time. “And I hate that Chris knows it. I don't want to ruin him. I don't want to ruin anything. I didn't mean it, that time. It was so soon after. I was so sad.”

Lorelei thinks of Lisa, and shivers in spite of herself. “Why are you telling me this?” she asks.

Mrs. Paulson turns in her seat and regards Lorelei for the first time head-on. She looks at her strangely, as if searching out something she can't quite remember. “Something—” she says, a little faint. “You were singing. When I came in.”

Fear rises cold and metallic in the back of Lorelei's throat. If Mrs. Paulson caught anything, it should have been love and affection, desire, want. Or maybe Lorelei colored the song with something else and didn't realize it? It hits her all at once how incredibly stupid it is, to keep playing with a force she doesn't understand just because she wants to. Just because she wants to believe she can.

Mrs. Paulson isn't blank or insistent, though. She's not like Jackson was. Lorelei doesn't know what to make of her. “I don't know,” Mrs. Paulson says. “I don't know. God, I never want to see you again. Get out of my car. Go home. Just—go home.”

Lorelei bolts out the door and stumbles over her feet. She drops her keys in her hurry to get them into the front door's lock. It doesn't matter. Mrs. Paulson's car peels away from the curb. For a few long, silent moments it's just Lorelei on the porch in the darkness, trembling and small against the hugeness of the night.

T
HE FAMILY IS GATHERING
for dinner when Lorelei walks in. Her mother has taken Oma's old spot, so she's seated silently at the head of the table while Henry and the twins carry out plates of food. Lorelei drops her backpack and leans against the door for a long moment, catching her breath.
I'm safe,
she tells herself.
It's okay, I'm here, I'm safe.

She digs her phone out of her pocket and tries to text Chris, but what? What is there to say? Mrs. Paulson will make it home soon enough. She's seen Lorelei now, and knows her face. She knows who's been taking up so much of Chris's time. Lorelei hates to think about that awful woman tightening the reins and pulling Chris in.

She can't bear the thought that he'll let her.

All the high energy from earlier, the willingness to sing, is still gathered up in her chest. The contained electricity crackles against her bones before settling slowly into something bigger and darker and angrier, thunderheads booming misery through and through her.

“Stop being lazy, Lorelei, and come help,” Nik calls to her from the kitchen. “We all heard you come in. You can't hide out and wait for dinner to be served.”

“Sorry,” she says. She drops the phone on top of her backpack.
Just get through dinner,
she tells herself, trying to quell the storm rising in her veins.
Just get through dinner, and you'll figure the rest of it out.

Henry and Jens are sitting down in the dining room, so when she walks into the kitchen, it's just her and Nik. They're supposed to set the table together. Usually they do, but tonight it's already done.

“I would have helped,” she says.

“Didn't know when you'd be home. If you'd be home.”

He tries to turn to leave the room, but Lorelei is faster. She grabs his elbow. “I'm really sorry,” she says. “We can talk about it, or—”

“We're not talking about it,” Nik says.

The dinner table is always quiet, but somehow tonight Lorelei can tell that she's being given a deliberate silent treatment. Nik doesn't even ask her to pass things; he just points.

It gets so uncomfortable that Henry takes it on himself to make conversation, which he almost never does.

“Did you have fun at Zoe's?” he asks Lorelei.

At least Nik wasn't so mad that he wouldn't lie for her.

“Yep,” she says. “Lots of fun.”

“You've been over there a lot recently,” Henry says. “You sure her parents don't mind?”

“We just do homework,” Lorelei says. Her stomach gets tight. She swirls her fork through the soggy lettuce on her plate, dragging the tines in a slow, tight spiral. “It's not a big deal.”

“Still.” Henry turns his head and then turns it back: it's an old, instinctive gesture, of looking to Oma for support. “I was thinking that it would be nice to have you around the house more,” he says. “You have been gone a lot.”

Lorelei feels a flash of burning guilt. It's unfamiliar: she didn't think she felt like she owed her parents anything. But then, she didn't think they cared—she especially didn't think her dad cared. She's never tried to pull away from them before. She's run out all of the slack in the line, and now she feels them tugging her back from the other end.

She's stubborn, though, and exhausted. She's been pulled in enough directions in the last few hours and over the course of the last few days. The words come out of her mouth before she can think better of them. “Tell it to the twins,” she says. “They're home way less often than I am, and they never get shit about it.”

Before anyone can respond, Petra speaks. “Oh, leave her alone,” she says from the head of the table.

Every face turns to look at her. Lorelei grips her fork so tightly that her fingers start to cramp. Since Oma's death, Petra has transformed herself in a dozen tiny ways: tonight she's wearing a pale pink sweater, a spring blush color that makes her look lovely and young. She's still removed but seems less isolated, somehow. Like she won't come to them, but if they wanted to, they could find a way to come to her.

“Petra,” Henry says. The frustration drops out of his voice. Her mother is her father's soft spot, always.

“She's young,” Petra says. “Let her explore the world a bit.”

The corners of Henry's eyes wrinkle with confusion. “If that's what you—”

“It is,” Petra says.

He's too surprised by her expressing an opinion about the kids' lives to argue.

“I'm sorry about the cursing,” Lorelei says. She almost wants them to be mad at her, to keep disagreeing the way normal parents would. “It just—”

“If that's what they're teaching you at Zoe's,” Jens says, “then you might want to take a look at your choices, young lady.”

“The company you keep reflects back on you,” Nik says, picking up Jens's thread. They continue the joke for a while, until Henry asks about their after-school activities, their classes. The conversation moves away from her, and Lorelei focuses on her food. She just wants to go up to her room to sleep, to get away from everyone and everything for a little while.

“Your hair is getting long,” Petra says quietly. She reaches out and touches the frizzed edge of one of Lorelei's curls. The air outside is damp, and over the course of the day, it's started to lift and kink wildly. This morning's neat ponytail is tangled in knots. “Come up after dinner and I'll give you a trim.”

Lorelei has never had her hair cut anywhere but at home. There are pictures of her sitting in the kitchen sink as a baby, Petra smiling guardedly over her, and a few similar images from her early toddler years. In the last one she's three, standing on a step stool with her hair streaming like dark honey over her shoulders, already wet. Petra is staring at the camera with a blank, fathomless look. Soon after that, Oma took over.

As a baby, Lorelei hadn't required quite so much raising. Petra took care of her before she really learned how to talk. But Oma did all the heavy lifting in the years that came after, when there was heaviness that needed to be carried. She told Lorelei not to sing, and for a long time made sure she didn't. She was the one who combed through the tangles and cut away the split ends.

Lorelei is a little anxious about putting herself in her mother's hands again. Part of it is vanity, pure and simple, but it's also more complicated than that. She knows her mother too well to trust her with sharp scissors, and her bared throat. Lorelei doesn't think that Petra wants to hurt her; it just seems like Petra doesn't know how to avoid it.

On the other hand it's a chance to talk to her mother, which she hasn't done, really, since that strange, heated confession. Lorelei knows more, now. She has questions Petra might be able to answer.

Petra has Lorelei sit on a low stool next to the edge of their old-fashioned bathtub. She cushions the back of her neck with a towel and brings her head to lean over the rim, tilting it back. The faucet is slightly too far away to duck under, so she fills a bowl with warm water and pours it over Lorelei's hair. She hasn't forgotten how. She just didn't want to do it. Her hands are gentle and sure.

“Mom used to do this for me too, you know,” Petra says as she scrubs through the tangles. “When I was growing up. She always cut my hair.”

This is the second time since Oma died that she's tried to talk like this—to have a conversation. Lorelei doesn't even know how to respond to the idea that her mother seems lonely. Instead, she nods and closes her eyes, and tries to let the tension that's been simmering under her skin drift out the ends of her hair. She imagines it washing down the drain as Petra fills the bowl and rinses her, fills it and rinses again.

When she's been rinsed a final time, Petra wraps Lorelei's hair in a threadbare white towel and sits her up in front of a mirror. “Just a trim, yes?” she asks.

Lorelei has worn her hair long since she was old enough to choose how she wanted it cut. She likes the loose weight, and that she can pin it up or pull it down. She uses it to hide her face or the burning tips of her ears when she's blushing. It's strange to see her face unframed, decontextualized. She looks rounder and less pretty, she thinks. Too pale.

“Just a trim,” Lorelei agrees.

Petra unwraps the towel turban and her hair falls down in a heap. The water has turned it from pale gold to a dim, wheaty shade, underscoring the purple-black smudges dark under her eyes.

Petra readies her scissors and makes the first cuts. She works in silence for a while, turning Lorelei's head with her fingertips, considering her from every angle. Lorelei wonders at the instinctive, physical thing she feels for her mother. It has nothing to do with reason, or even really with feeling. It overrides her wariness from earlier easily, like it's just an animal thing, bred in the bone.

“Thank you for doing this for me,” she says eventually. “I'm glad that you want to.”

Petra smiles at her in the mirror. Lorelei can see it, then: how beautiful her mother must have been when she was happy, when she was young. The sight makes her bold.

“Mama,” she says. “Can you tell me more about what happened with you and Oma? With the singing?”

Her mother's face shuts down again, whip-fast. “Why do you want to hear about ugliness?” she asks. “Why does it even matter?”

“Because she was my grandmother,” Lorelei says. “Because I don't think it was a curse, and because she—I—I have it. I am it. Whatever you are. I am too.”

“Who did you sing to?” Petra puts the scissors down and pulls Lorelei to her violently, fingertips digging painfully into her upper arms. “Jesus, Lorelei, what did you
do
?”

“I didn't say I sang to anyone!”

“You did, though,” Petra says. “You wouldn't know unless you had.” She lets go of Lorelei to pause and consider it. “But then, if you really knew, you wouldn't ask. You wouldn't want to talk about it at all.”