“About half,” she said, lowering her voice. “Of course, we’ll get more girls, but not of the same sort.”
“Albie’s been pulled out?” I asked in a low voice even though the girl couldn’t possibly hear us from across the track.
“I’m afraid Albie’s been kicked out,” Miss Buehl said in a quaking whisper, leaning her head close to mine. I thought I smelled liquor on her breath and I noticed for the first time how haggard she looked. “We discovered it was she who broke the fanlight over the doors to the mansion. She threw half a dozen rocks through it.”
“Really? Albie did that?” It was hard for me to imagine frail little Albie having the strength to throw even one rock that high.
“Yes, I tried to argue on her behalf, but then there were other infractions, curfew breaking, erratic behavior…”
“Where is she going?” I asked, trying to keep from stealing a look across the tracks. I felt sure she was watching us and that she guessed she was the topic of our whispered conversation.
“St. Eustace,” Miss Buehl answered.
“Oh.” St. Useless. The school Deirdre’d been so afraid she’d end up at. I did look at Albie then, but she had turned away from us and set her small, pinched face into an expression of bland indifference, as if she were on her way to a tedious but necessary luncheon, and not to the Siberia of girls’ boarding schools. Then the northbound train pulled in and blocked my view of her.
“So you see how lucky you are, Jane,” Miss Buehl had said to me. “You can put this whole thing behind you and take some time to think about what you really want to do. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you.” She said it like she almost envied me. That she wished she were getting out, too. But then I might have imagined that. After all, Heart Lake was her whole life.
THIS TIME SHE DIDN’T TELL ME I HAD MY WHOLE LIFE ahead of me. We both knew my options were limited, they had narrowed to… what? Did I even have more than one option? “Maybe it’s not too late to work things out with your husband,” she had added instead.
I suppose she would feel better firing me if she knew I had somewhere to go.
The idea of working things out with Mitch was the furthest thing from my mind when I came here, but he has been unexpectedly kind.
He joins us for dinner almost every night and has even offered to pay part of my hotel bill. When I told him, on the first day while we both watched Olivia swimming in the pool, about what the police had found in the lake along with Aphrodite’s body, he thought I meant, at first, that the baby in the tea tin had been Aphrodite’s. I had to explain, for what seemed like the hundredth time since the diver had emerged from the lake with that tin, that the baby belonged to my old roommate Deirdre Hall. I told him, as I told the police and Dean Buehl, that Lucy and I had helped her by sinking the tin in the lake.
“Are they charging you with anything?” he asked.
“Not that I know of.”
“Good,” he said. “You were a minor and you were only an accomplice in disposing of the body. The baby was dead at birth, right?”
I nodded. “That’s what Lucy told me.”
He paused for a moment, perhaps seeing my uncertainty. Even as I assured him, I realized I was no longer so sure. Maybe it’s being in this place—the warm humid air and the way voices echo under the dome. Since I’ve been here I’ve remembered standing in that damp, overheated dorm corridor listening to a thin wail of crying. “Well, if it was a lie, it was Lucy’s lie. You should be OK. I’ll call Herb Stanley in the morning.” Herb Stanley was Mitch’s lawyer. He’d drawn up our separation agreement. “Don’t talk to anyone without consulting him first. You say you knew this police officer back in school?”
“He was Matt and Lucy’s cousin. I met him once or twice.”
Mitchell smiled at me. “An old boyfriend?”
I was surprised to detect a note of jealousy in his tone.
I shrugged my shoulders. I remembered holding hands with Roy Corey on the swimming beach, stroking my hand along his face. “Not exactly,” I said.
“Not exactly no either. Maybe he still likes you.” I thought of the way Roy Corey flinched when I touched his arm. No, I didn’t think he liked me, but I wasn’t obliged to tell Mitchell that.
“You’re looking good by the way. That north country air must agree with you.”
I saw his eyes moving up and down my body and I felt, suddenly, self-conscious in my bathing suit. It was true I had lost weight over the fall semester, finally shedding the pounds I’d gained having Olivia. I knew Mitch had minded how I’d changed after Olivia was born. And I had minded how he minded.
“I’m sure Roy Corey is busy with his job right now. Aphrodite’s… I mean Melissa’s death will probably be declared a suicide, but now he’s got this other body…”
I stopped myself, appalled at how the word “body” echoed in the watery air. I lowered my voice and went on. “They’re going to exhume Deirdre Hall’s body—she was buried in Philadelphia—and Matt Toller’s body.”
I stopped again, remembering the day they found Matt and Lucy. Although it had felt like spring the night I went to meet Matt at the icehouse, it had been a false spring. One of those premature February thaws we get in the Adirondacks. Overnight the temperature had plunged and the lake froze over again. They tried sawing holes in the ice the way they used to for the ice harvest. It turned out that the extension agent had all the equipment and had been thinking of doing an ice harvest for a history demonstration. When they couldn’t find the bodies, though, they brought in a small ice cutter from the Hudson and tore the whole lake apart.
I was in the woods behind the icehouse on the day they found them. The divers carried the bodies into the icehouse while they sent for the family to identify them. It must have been hard on the divers, pulling that tangle of limbs up from the lake bottom. They stood on the shore afterward, smoking cigarettes, their backs to the icehouse. One skipped a stone over the water, but stopped because there was too much broken ice. They didn’t notice me when I came down from the woods and stood in the doorway.
They had laid the bodies on one of the ledges where they used to store the slabs of ice. At first I thought they’d only found Matt, but then I saw, tangled in his hair, the small hand and, nestled below his ribs on the side farthest from me, in the shadow of the ledge, her face, pressed against his chest.
They had been bleached clean by the lake, their flesh the same marble white. It was hard to tell where his body stopped and hers began.
“I THOUGHT YOU SAID IT COULDN’T BE MATT’S BABY.” Mitchell’s voice broke into the memory of those twisted limbs.
I took a deep breath of the warm chlorinated air.
“I may have gotten it wrong,” I told Mitchell. “Roy Corey seems to have some other idea.”
When I told Roy Corey what had happened—from the day I came back to the school early to the last argument between Matt and Lucy—he didn’t seem completely surprised. “I thought something was wrong that night Matt left to hitch back to Corinth. He said he’d gotten a letter from Lucy and he was afraid he’d ‘really messed something up.’ He wouldn’t tell me what. I was afraid… well, never mind what I was afraid of. We’ll have our answers in two weeks.”
That’s how long it would take to get the results of the DNA tests. They’d found an aunt of Deirdre’s who agreed to the exhumation. As for Matt, Cliff and Hannah Toller had both died in a car accident four years after their children’s deaths. Ironically, Matt’s next of kin was now Roy Corey. I asked if he’d call me when he got the results.
“Oh, you’ll be hearing from me, Jane,” he said.
“AT LEAST HE DIDN’T TELL YOU TO STAY IN CORINTH,” Mitchell said. “That’s a good sign.”
“Yeah, but he told me not to leave this hotel without telling him where I could be reached.”
Mitchell nodded. “Why don’t you call and say you’re staying at the house.”
I thought I had misheard him in the weird acoustics of t
he Aquadome, but when I looked at him I thought I saw tears in his eyes. But then it might have been the way the air here stings your eyes.
“What are you saying, Mitch?”
He shrugged. “I never understood what went wrong, Janie. I never understood why you left. Was it that bad… living with me? I know I could be preoccupied.”
I looked down at Olivia paddling in the pale green water. With her purple and pink bathing suit and orange water wings she looks like one of those paper flowers they float in exotic cocktails. The truth was I didn’t understand completely why I left either.
“It wasn’t your fault, Mitch,” I said. Yes, he had been preoccupied, but hadn’t that been what I was looking for—someone who wouldn’t pay too much attention, someone who wouldn’t look at me too closely?
“Maybe it’s not too late for us.” He reached out across the space between us and laid a damp hand on my bare knee.
I felt an odd mixture of hope and nausea. I hoped that any look of queasiness was covered by the green tint that lay on everything around us, because it had occurred to me that I shouldn’t be too quick to turn down Mitch’s offer.
“I have to think it over, Mitch.”
“Of course, Janie, take all the time you need.”
TIME IS SOMETHING I HAVE AN ABUNDANCE OF HERE AT THE Aquadome, but when I try to attend to the question at hand my thoughts slither around like slippery fish in the green air. I try to go back, in my mind, to when I met Mitch and decided to marry him. I think that if I can remember loving him I can salvage some of that feeling now and it will be enough to build a new future on, the way a seed crystal teaches the other molecules to make ice. All I need is a seed, but I can’t really remember ever deciding anything. When I met Mitchell, a few years out of college working in the city, I was nearly drowning.
Take some time to think about what you really want to do. That’s what Miss Buehl had told me that day at the train station. But I didn’t have to think about it. My path had already been laid out for me the day I listened to Helen Chambers’s plan for Lucy. I see her as a Vassar girl and then she’ll go to the city and work in some arts-related field—publishing, I think. I had rejected, that day, Helen Chambers’s plan for me to go to the State Teacher’s College and teach Latin, and decided instead to do what she meant for Lucy.
I worked hard at Vassar and got reasonably good grades. My Latin professor urged me to apply to graduate school, but I was tired of treading the same pattern of paths that meandered around the pretty campus. Wouldn’t graduate school just be another set of paths around another campus? I felt something like Lucy’s impatience with the snowbound paths of Heart Lake and decided to do what I thought she would have done.
After graduation I moved to New York City and got a job as an editorial assistant at a publishing house. I shared an apartment with two other girls—both from good colleges—who worked at the same company. I wore the same kind of clothes as they did: short black skirts and silk blouses, a simple strand of graduated pearls. So what if my blouses were polyester instead of silk, my pearls paste instead of real? I stayed up late reading the manuscripts the company asked us to read on our own time. I packed my own lunch and walked to work because it was hard to make my share of the rent on the little money I made.
I turned down invitations to drinks and dinners after work because I couldn’t pay my way. Besides, I told myself, it was better to spend the evenings reading manuscripts while my roommates went out. Sometimes one of the boys—they still seemed like boys to me, in their sloppily ironed Oxford shirts and slim khaki pants—would ask me out, but I always declined. I told myself it was better not to get involved with anyone just yet. But really, it was the way they all reminded me of Matt, of what Matt might have become. I’d look at one of these nice, clean-cut boys in his prep-school tie and button-down shirt and think: Matt would be his age now, twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four.
One day, when I was twenty-five, I was sitting in an editorial board meeting looking at a young man who worked in copy editing and always passed my desk on his way to the Xerox machine even though it wasn’t really on his way. As I looked at him a shaft of weak sunlight came in through the dirty, sixteenth-floor windows and touched his mousy brown hair, turning it a bright and shining red. I felt a chill move through me as if I had just swum through a cold current and the air around me seemed to shimmer. I was seized with an unreasoning panic that the next breath I took would choke me. I left the meeting and told my boss that I’d suddenly felt ill.
“A late night?” she asked, nodding with complicity. She, I knew, stayed out to all hours in the clubs and spent the morning hours nursing hangovers with V8 juice and Tylenol. I hated to think she attributed my illness to the same cause, but it was easier to nod and agree to her sympathetic smile.
When it happened again, that same rush of cold followed by a fear that I couldn’t breathe—this time in a conference with an author and his agent, she was less sympathetic. When I emerged from the ladies’ room, still trembling and sweating, she asked if there was anything I wanted to tell her. What could I tell her? That I had begun to be afraid of drowning on dry land? That I could no longer go to movie theaters, supermarkets, subway stations, or any other place where I had once had that sensation of drowning for fear of it happening there again?
I quit the job. I took another job as a secretary at a temp agency. That way, I reasoned, if I had an attack in a particular setting I wouldn’t have to go back. My roommates had decided to move to a bigger apartment in Brooklyn. Since the subway was on my list of places I couldn’t go anymore, I moved into a women’s hotel near Gramercy Park. I could walk to most of the places the temp agency sent me. It was on one of those jobs, filling in for the receptionist at a building contractor’s office, that I met Mitchell. He was older than I, his hair already thinning, his build a little thicker than a boy’s. When he asked me to lunch, I accepted. When I told him I liked to take the stairs instead of the elevator for the exercise he not only believed me, but he approved. He told me he admired what good shape I was in. It was true that I had gotten very thin, mostly because I had so little money to spend on food and I walked everywhere.
He was impressed that I had gone to a private girls’ school and Vassar, but he didn’t ask me many questions about either place. We mostly talked, on our dates, about his job and his plans for the future. He wanted to go out on his own—build houses in the suburbs. He said the city wasn’t a good place to raise children. He seemed to me, above all else, cautious and polite. When he asked me to marry him I didn’t ask myself if I loved him. I had assumed that my chances of loving anyone had vanished into the black water of Heart Lake the night Matt and Lucy drowned below the ice.
Those first years of my marriage to Mitchell were peaceful. He built us a house north of the city and I helped out in the office. Mitch did seem disappointed that I didn’t get pregnant right away, but when I did conceive I thought everything would be all right.
What I hadn’t counted on was how much I would love Olivia. When I first saw her, her body glistening with blood, I was overcome by violent shivering. The labor nurse explained that the convulsions were caused by my body’s inability to adjust to the change in mass. But to me it felt like something was breaking up inside of me, setting something free that had been frozen all these years. I wanted to hold her, but Mitch said I was shaking too hard to be trusted with her.
In an unguarded moment I had told Mitchell about my panic attacks. He had seemed, at first, unconcerned, but after Olivia was born he wanted me to see a psychiatrist to make sure I wouldn’t have an attack while I was watching Olivia. “You might drop her,” he said, “or hurt her during an episode.” He spoke as if I had epilepsy. The psychiatrist prescribed an antianxiety drug that made my mouth dry and prevented me from breast-feeding Olivia. Still, Mitchell worried. He made me promise not to drive with Olivia. Our new house was in a housing development far from anything. I spent my days wheeling Olivia in her carriage around th
e winding streets that always seemed to dead-end in a cul-de-sac.
I thought, because he was so worried about me watching Olivia, he would come home right after work, but instead he stayed at the office later and later. After I got Olivia fed and bathed and put to bed I would go through my old books, which were stored in boxes in the basement. One night I took out my Wheelock’s Latin grammar and started at the beginning, memorizing the declensions and conjugations all over again. I was reciting the third declension to Olivia in her high chair one night when Mitchell came home unexpectedly early.
“What the hell are you teaching her, Jane, that mumbo-jumbo witchcraft you practiced in high school?”
I stared at him, pureed yellow squash dripping from the spoon I held out to Olivia. My journals, all of them except the fourth one which had disappeared, were in the same box in which I had found my Wheelock. I’d left the box, opened, in the basement.
Olivia, impatient for the proffered spoon, slammed her small fist on the high-chair tray. Startled, I dropped the spoon and Olivia began to cry.
Mitchell pulled her out of the high chair. “That’s OK, Livvie, Daddy’ll take care of you.”
I knew that in five minutes Mitchell would give her back to me to do the bath and bedtime, but in that instant I felt, as he intended, his power to take her from me. There were things in those journals that made me sound like an unfit mother. There were things in the psychiatrist’s files that made me sound insane. I didn’t know when Mitchell had started to hate me, but I suspected it was when he discovered I had never loved him. And in a way, I couldn’t blame him. I had thought it was all right to marry someone I didn’t love, but what I hadn’t counted on was how it felt to share someone I loved with someone I didn’t.
And so I decided to make the first move. For the next few weeks, while I wheeled Olivia around the endless maze of suburban streets, my mind moved around in the same dead-end circles, trying to find a way out. When I told Mitch I wanted a divorce he laughed at me. “Where will you go? How will you live? When I met you, you couldn’t even hold a secretarial job for more than a week.”