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

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.
    Each one is also written in German. Lorelei can’t read a word.
    Language has always been a tricky thing in her life: her father teaches English as a second language classes at the local community college, and he spent most of the twins’ freshman year of high school trying to convince them to take Latin instead of Spanish, so that they would understand
the roots of their words,
he said. But all the adults in the house already have a second language—a first one, actually—and they’ve kept it carefully from their children. Zoe’s parents make her go to Farsi classes on Sunday mornings. Lorelei looks at what’s in her hand and recognizes the alphabet, and nothing else.
    It’s a treasure trove or a trash heap, and no way of knowing which. There are probably dozens of secrets hidden here, plenty that Lorelei wants to know and more she really doesn’t.
    Before she can stop herself, she lets one hand dart out to grab the earliest, thickest stack. Oma left too soon, and she left a million mysteries in her wake. Lorelei touches the paper reverently and imagines it’s full of answers, things that will make her miss Oma less somehow, and make her absence bearable. Things that will make her family work like a family should.
    She imagines that she is one of those TV detectives again, tough and untouchable, and she’ll have all the answers by the hour’s end. She just looks down at the paper as she walks out of the room, instead of around at all of the evidence of the life Oma lived, and then left, disappearing too fast to be pinned down and held in place.

    Friday is the funeral. Only the family comes.
    Later that day, Lorelei mails the last letter. It drops into a mailbox and disappears. Just like that: gone.

S ATURDAY IS THE LAST gasp of hot September. A lick of oven-warm wind rolls and gusts across the city. It makes the house seem unbearably small, so as soon as she’s done with her homework, Lorelei goes for a walk. She heads down to the beach and then up toward the Santa Monica Pier, where she can get lost in the crowd. She eats cotton candy, which sticks to the corners of her mouth and unspools from its paper cone in the breeze. The Ferris wheel is huge and hot, gleaming brightly under the relentless sun. Lorelei watches couples get on and go up, up, up, before they come back down again.
    The air is so clear and empty that she can see for miles, straight out to the humped backs of the mountains that cup the city from the south, the east, and the north. Los Angeles sits in a basin, at the bottom of a bowl, and the ocean stretches out sparkling in its belly.
    A song itches itself in the back of her throat, something high and sweet in counterpoint to the rustling breezes and the low ocean roar, but she doesn’t dare sing it. In the clear light of day it’s even harder to believe that there’s anything to Oma’s warning or Petra’s curse, but she doesn’t want to take her mother’s permission, or break her grandmother’s rule. Lorelei