Free A Song to Take the World Apart by Zan Romanoff Page A

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 missives 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