Chapter 4
It’s Monday again. I hesitate, standing on his stoop, about to knock. Like on our block, the houses here are small and evenly spaced, in tasteful shades of cream, yellow, and gray, with occasional green shutters or a daring orange front door. Joel’s door is forest green.
Don’t do this.
Ella looks at me. Her pink leggings are full of holes; she wears them almost every day because she likes their particular texture. She reaches out and knocks.
He opens the door, and I’m assaulted all over again by the sweetness of his face, the suggestive curl of his hair, the doctorly line of his glasses. I don’t know what to say, but he’s talking to Ella anyway, holding the door for us, ushering us inside like we’re friends.
He and Ella certainly are. Minutes later, she’s petting a very contented Mr. Button while chatting with Joel about her upcoming violin recital, which will be her second but is even scarier than the first because now she knows how scary recitals are.
They’re humming together; he knows the piece she’s working on.
Now he’s sitting down and lifting the cello to show her how the piece sounds on it.
Ella grins in surprise. “It’s like a violin in the dark.”
True. The silly minuet that even Mozart probably forgot immediately after writing thrums with husky, molten gold depth. I thrum, too. Ella is humming again with furrowbrowed concentration.
Mr. Button has fallen happily asleep, draped like a furry towel over an arm of the couch, and Ella is asking Joel, “Want to play a game that Titi and me made up?”
“Sure,” he agrees unwisely without any information. “If your aunt plays, too.” He glances at me, smiling. It’s such an easy smile, like his face wants to fall back into that expression when he relaxes. My lecherous gaze moves of its own accord to his crotch.
“I sing my song that I made up, about a heart-shaped rock that I really found, and you have to play along,” Ella explains. “If you want to. Titi plays along on piano. Or she sings along, but it has to be different notes from me.”
“Harmony,” I mumble automatically, as Ella adds, “Called harmony.”
I’ve ended up in one of the living room chairs, and it seems to cup itself around me, gathering me in, the fabric warm.
But I can’t relax because I’m forcing myself to remember Adam, and also because Ella is clutching my knee, whispering urgently, “I can’t do it.
I’m going to forget the part where the stone falls in the stream,” and now I have to sing, too.
I can feel Joel listening closely. “There’s this Adele song you should do,” he says, and I laugh. Adele is usually who people think of when I sing, but I didn’t expect Mr. Juilliard to spend much time on sad-mom ballads.
He grins. “I’m not ashamed. It’s great music.”
I say, “ ‘Someone Like You.’ ”
He looks politely confused.
“That’s the song.”
His expression clears. “No, another one. . . .”
I take a guess: “I let it fall, my heart . . . and as it fell, you rose to claim it.” The opening of Adele’s “Set Fire to the Rain.” A song I love.
Immediately, he’s playing under me, something yearning in the midnight sound of the long, low notes.
I try to remember if the original song has cello.
It should. I google the lyrics quickly on my phone.
Don’t show off, I warn myself. My singing voice is by far my best feature.
“It was dark. . . .” I keep singing. I am showing off.
“Yeah,” he says slowly, smiling right at me. “Exactly.”
Don’t look at him, I tell myself strictly. Don’t look while you’re singing.
You have a life now, I remind myself. You may not be able to have a relationship, but you have a business. You have friends.
Every Thursday, Alice, a lawyer turned stay-at-home mom, stops by for our standing coffee date and to tell me the plot of the latest thriller she’s reading. The last one was about a woman in a cabin by a lake who is actually dead for most of the book.
Yesterday I met with a prospective client—a woman named Tamar, all curly hair, linen shift dress, and double-dimple grin, described by her husband as “a birthing rock star.” She’s pregnant with her third.
“I set fire to the rain,” I sing. I look at Joel. He’s looking directly into my eyes. “Watched it pour as I touched your face.”
No no no. Damn you, Adele.
Where is Ella? It’s like she’s evaporated just when I need her to stop me from—whatever I’m doing right now.
Having some sort of ruinously romantic moment on a cat-related playdate.
Oh, she’s actually right there, picking up the trying-to-stay-asleep Mr. Button like a baby and rocking him to the beat.
“Do you sing professionally?” Joel asks when we stop.
“No.” I think of my father, of course. He sang professionally.
That’s an understatement.
I stand up but then am not sure where to go. I resist the urge to put my hands on my face, to try to blot the heat out of it.
“I could listen to you all day,” Joel says with an earnestness that seems to catch him slightly off guard. He pushes his hair back from his forehead, busies himself with setting the cello down. He stands with me, sudden and large, and he smells so good my eyelids grow heavy; it’s like a drug.
“Titi,” Ella whispers, flickering up beside me like a spirit I didn’t mean to summon, and I bend down so she can speak directly into my ear. “I have to pee. And I might also have to poop, I’m not sure yet. Is it okay if I go in the bathroom here?”
“Of course,” I whisper back.
She looks relieved. She’s always asking if things are okay.
“We should head out in a minute,” I say as we follow his directions to the bathroom. Joel calls after us, “You guys want to stay for lunch? I make a pretty good grilled cheese. It’s very cheesy.”
He has such a warm voice. It would say Hey, honey really well. It would say I love you really well.
Yes. I just thought that.
You know what else I thought? I’ll tell you. Maybe it will be different this time.
That’s the mentality of an unhinged woman. A woman who might kill again. Because sorry, Your Honor, the murder victim was just too sexy. His voice was too warm and nice.
“Anyone hungry?” Joel is asking.
I am. I am so hungry.
* * *
“Aw, fuck,” says Grub, his face big on my laptop screen. The eyeliner is heavy and smudged today. “You win.”
It’s movie night, and the theme of the month is sci-fi that takes place entirely on board a spaceship. I bet him that the captain would be the first to die. He said she’d last longer because she’s important, but I know short-haired women are rarely important in movies.
He’s lying on his back, holding his phone over his face while we video chat on our computers. He rolls toward the screen. “I ran into Nate.”
I mute the captain’s agonized screaming, which I would’ve muted anyway because I hate violence. “Oh yeah?”
I’m on alert. Nate was Grub’s closest friend before Grub figured out he couldn’t have any.
“Hang on, how did the spores get on the ship?” he deflects.
I wait.
“He wouldn’t even look at me. I’m like a fuckin’ piece of dirt to him now.”
“Grub, you know you chose that, you know you’re protecting him.”
“I know! I obviously know that.” He turns away, and there’s an undead clown face stenciled on the back of his black hoodie: tongue out, rotting holes where the eyes should be.
“I know I was a dick to him so he’d hate me.” His voice is muffled. “But I just wished for a second . . .” He doesn’t finish the thought.
I see his shoulders shudder. Crap.
“Like, what did I even think?” he mutters. “That he was gonna like me anyway? What a joke.”
“Grub,” I say. “Of course you want him to want to be your friend. You’re human.”
“Am I?” He snuffles, wipes his nose swiftly on his baggy sleeve, turns back toward me, blinking and raw. “Are we, Lorelei?”
“Yes,” I say with conviction. “Kid, I’m really sorry.” I flinch. He hates pity, but it just snuck out.
He scowls. “I don’t know. Maybe Dick Face and my dad were carriers of some alien virus.” Dick Face is the name Dee cleverly invented for my father when she was twelve. Grub’s biological father was a one-night stand his mom either can’t or won’t remember.
He rubs his eye with the same sleeve he wiped his nose on, exactly as I tell Ella not to. But no one is parenting Grub. I doubt he has any tissues nearby. “I still have some alerts for his band,” he mumbles. “Your dad’s. No one talks about them anymore.”
After Adam, I looked for my father again, trying to mine clues from the vastness of the internet before giving up. I wonder how many decades it will take Grub to give up, too. No, I want to believe in Grub’s persistence, in the possibility of answers floating somewhere in that colossal dark.
“Alien virus is a decent theory,” I say, glad to distract him from Nate. “Add it to the list.”
He gives a sloppy salute.
“What do we have now?” I start ticking them off: “Mutant baby, trauma, environmental contaminant— ”
“Higher purpose,” he adds.
“I thought that was the same as X-Men? We’ll save the world, if all the Dows work together on some master plan.”
“We need a leader,” he says.
“You!”
There’s that crooked smile. “I am the Lord of the Dow.” He does a Gandalfy voice and then: “Too skinny. Need to bulk up first.”
“Maybe just wash your hair.”
He shrugs, shoves it back from his forehead, revealing a constellation of pimples, and gets back on track: “What if it’s just, I don’t know, two abilities? Two basic types.”
“Good and evil,” I finish for him. I know which one we’re supposed to be. “We’re not bad, though, Grub. We’re just people.”
“When are you going to try to see the doctor?”
For a disoriented second, I think Grub is saying I look like I’m sick, my weakness is visible. But then I realize with a nauseous squeeze he means Joel.
“It’s worth looking into,” he continues. “What if he knows something? What if he’s the key?”
“Maybe he’s just good at his job.” My guilt throbs, almost obscene.
Ella and I have been to Joel’s house three times now.
The last time, he’d gotten gluten-free bread because of my anti-inflammatory diet (which is realistically no match for the effects of denying my curse) and her supposed sensitivity (which might in fact be anxiety-induced stomach pain).
She brought her violin; we chatted about gardening, and Ella promised in a fit of generosity to give Joel the leftover daffodil bulbs from our planting-for-spring project.
I say, “The angel thing is pretty weak.”
“Lorelei! What is your problem? Do I need to come out there and do this myself?” He glares at the screen.
“Yes, you do.” I smile at him, rebalancing.
I know he won’t. He rolls his eyes, grumbles, “After we get fixed.” It’s hard for Grub to believe that he might not accidentally harm someone he cares about. “First I gotta track your dumb dad down.”
“Okay, go for it.”
Grub relaxes a little. He likes to have a plan. “Wanna watch the rest?”
“Obviously not.” I put a kiss on my fingers, press them to the screen over his forehead. “Love you.”
I hang up and strip off my shirt and my sweat-stained tan sports bra, which is the only bra I currently own.
I stand in front of the closet door mirror tugging on a shapeless T-shirt that says EMPOWERED BIRTHING SUMMIT.
That was a good conference. I look at myself for a second.
There are two creases between my eyebrows, as though I’ve made a puzzled expression too many times and now it’s stuck.
A face that can’t seem to figure things out.
I pull my hair back and my scalp shows in ominous little strips.
I look faded. How much is natural aging and how much is the curse? Imagine asking a doctor that question.
I imagine the doctor instead. He’s unbuttoning his shirt.
Maybe I don’t actually feel okay about the way I look anymore. Suddenly I want to be better looking. To be beautiful. Suddenly I want too much, too many things I can’t have.