The Lake of Dead Languages

  I went back into the room I shared with Lucy and noticed that my suitcase had been stored underneath my bed. I pulled it out and opened it. It was empty. I opened my bureau drawers and found my clothes neatly folded (more neatly than I remembered packing them that last morning in Albany) and put away. Under one stack of clothes I found my journal. I leafed through it, wondering if Lucy had read my journal, too, and what she’d have made of what I’d written. There was nothing bad about her in it, but there were embarrassing things, like how jealous I’d felt of Deirdre and Lucy’s friendship and how much I missed Matt. As I read through it I was startled by how much of what I had written could be misinterpreted. So many of the things I had written could mean so many different things, depending on who the reader was. I read through parts pretending I was Lucy or Deirdre or Domina Chambers or Miss Buehl—or even myself when older—and with each new “reader” what I had written shifted in meaning as if it had been translated into another language.

  I’d better put it back under the floorboards, I thought. But first I wrote about what happened the night I came back from Albany. It felt risky committing to paper that awful moment when I watched the tea tin sink into the lake, but there was something in me that needed to get it out, if only to my journal. “You’re the only one I can ever tell,” I wrote. And then I hid the journal under the loose floorboards beneath my desk.

  I tried to do a little Latin translation, but the words swam in front of my eyes and I started seeing spots. At first they were only small glints of light, like gnats flying in front of my eyes, and then they merged into one large sun spot that spread across my vision like a hole burning through a home movie. I closed my eyes and lay down on my bed, but I could still see the burning spot on the inside of my eyelids. Even when I fell asleep I saw the light. I dreamed it was Miss Buehl’s porch light and I was crossing the woods to reach it, only I went the wrong way and ended up back at the Point. I slipped on the icy rock and fell into black space flecked with white sparks. Snow, I thought in my dream, but then the darkness turned green and the flecks of light were golden silt drifting down to the bottom of the lake. I looked up at a pattern of white shards on black; I was under the broken ice, which, even as I watched, knit back together, sealing me beneath it. Drifting down beside me was a tea tin painted with golden mountains and blue skies. It turned as it sank, spinning like a leaf, and then, when it reached the bottom, its lid slowly opened.

  IT’S THAT SAME FEELING—OF LYING AT THE BOTTOM OF THE lake looking up at the underside of the ice—I have lying in my room, my vision blurred, the snowscapes on the window screens like distant mountains. I think of Deirdre, of how the ice must have looked to her as she sank into the lake. In my dreams I try to tell her that I know now that the baby wasn’t hers, but when I reach for her she turns away from me, just as Dido turns away from Aeneas when he meets her in the underworld. The dead sure are a whiny lot, Vesta had said. But she was wrong. The dead are silent.

  When my vision clears, I feel curiously energized. I decide to go skating. I had been afraid that part of Dean Buehl’s “forget the past” campaign might include banishing ice skating, but I had forgotten how much she liked to skate.

  “Best thing for these girls,” she says on an unusually mild day in late January. “Exercise. Fresh air. And just look at this ice! Best ice we’ve had in twenty years.”

  “Coldest January in twenty years,” Simon Ross, the math teacher, says gliding by on hockey skates, “until today, that is. A few days like this and that’ll be it for the skating season.”

  “It’s supposed to get cold again tonight,” Gwen Marsh says, backskating a circle around me.

  “But first we’re going to get some sleet and icy rain,” Meryl North, who is skating with Tacy Beade, says. “We might have a real ice storm on our hands.”

  I turn to say something else to Gwen, but she’s gone. I wonder if I’ve offended her in some way. Since I’ve been back she’s been distant. I had thought at the beginning of the school year that we might be friends, but I realize now that I’ve done very little to build on the promise of that friendship. As I watch my fellow teachers skating together in pairs and small groups I realize how little I’ve connected to anyone here at Heart Lake. It’s the same feeling I had walking back from the infirmary senior year, that I hadn’t bothered making other friends because Lucy had always been enough. And, in a way, she’s kept me from making friends all these years. At first, I told myself, because I was afraid of being hurt again. But later it was because when I did come close to someone I would hear Lucy’s cool assessing voice, criticizing something about my new acquaintance. This one was too fat, that one was too earnest, this one a little loud, that one just plain dumb.

  I tried to ignore the voice, but it put a distance between me and the girls I might have befriended. Who might have befriended me. It wasn’t as if there were that many candidates.

  I make an effort today to talk to everyone. I skate with Myra Todd and listen to a long drawn-out tirade against animal rights activists. I discuss a plan for a reenactment of an old-fashioned ice harvest with Dean Buehl. I catch up to Gwen, who’s skating now with Dr. Lockhart, and offer to help with the literary magazine. I join Tacy Beade and Meryl North and ask Miss Beade if she’d come give a lecture on classical art to my juniors. She says she’s busy right now with plans for ice sculptures to accompany the ice harvest, but will be happy to come later in the year.

  “It’s time to turn back, Tacy,” Meryl North says. “See, we’re at the Point.”

  “Oh,” my old art teacher says, “yes, of course.” That’s when I realize, watching Meryl North steer Tacy Beade along the ice, that Beady can hardly see. I remember watching her set up her art room, everything in its place, and wonder how long she’s been losing her sight and how long she would keep her job if the board knew. Meryl North must realize I suspect something because, as we skate back toward the mansion, she chatters enthusiastically about the coming ice harvest. I notice, though, that she keeps confusing the dates and at one point I realize she thinks it’s 1977 and I’m still a student here. When Dr. Lockhart and Gwen Marsh skate by, Meryl North says, “There goes your little friend.” It’s sad, I think, that my two old teachers have lost the aptitudes most important to their fields: the art teacher, her sight; the history teacher, her sense of time.

  My ankles have begun to hurt, but when I see Athena and Vesta I skate toward them. Vesta is wearing a fleece headband that makes her lavender-red Little Mermaid hair stick up in spiky points. Athena is wearing a Yale sweatshirt over red plaid pajama pants. Her mottled hair, which is now about half brown and half black, makes her look like an Australian sheep dog. I realize, skating toward them, that I’d far rather talk to them than to any of my colleagues.

  As I skate closer, I notice someone else approaching the two girls and it gives me pause. I try to slow my forward progress by digging the serrated tips of my skate blades into the ice, but instead of slowing down I trip and sail headlong into Roy Corey, who has reached the girls just as I do. I slam hard into his chest and I’m sure we’re both going down, but instead I feel his arm curve around my waist as we spin across the ice.

  “All right, Magistra!” I hear the girls cheering me on, as if I had just completed a double axle instead of nearly crashing to the ice. And I do feel suddenly graceful, with Roy’s arm around my waist, but then he takes away his arm and crosses his arms behind his back. We skate side by side, but not touching, around the western edge of the lake. I’m impressed with how well he skates and then I remember him telling me, all those years ago, that he’d grown up skating on these ponds. Just like Matt. At the thought of Matt I catch the tip of my blade on the ice and pitch forward. I see the hard white ice speeding up to my face but he catches me just in time.

  “Whoa,” he says, “are you OK?”

  “Sorry,” I say, “my eyes still aren’t so good. I had a little accident with some de-icer.”

  “Yeah, Dean Buehl told me. I called las
t week to ask you a few questions.” I remember suddenly that he is a police officer and that he probably isn’t here just for the ice skating.

  “A few questions?” I ask. “What about?”

  Before answering I see him look quickly around us. We’ve stopped just where the Point juts into the lake, not far from where the third sister rock curves out of the ice like the back of a whale arrested mid-dive. The rest of the skaters are in the west cove. They’re too far away to overhear us, but I see he still looks nervous.

  “Wasn’t there a cave around here,” he asks, turning to face me. “You took me to a cave that morning.”

  It’s the first reference he’s made to that night we spent together and it makes me blush. But why? Nothing happened. He was asleep when I touched his face. I notice that he’s blushing, too. Was he asleep?

  “There are a bunch of caves in the Point,” I say, “but I think the one you’re talking about is over here.”

  I lead him to a shallow opening in the cliff wall just where the ice meets the shore. It’s not even really a cave, just an indentation in the rock covered by an overhanging ledge and partially blocked by the second sister stone.

  He wedges himself into the tight space and pats the rock by his side. Embarrassed, I squeeze in next to him. He takes up quite a lot more space than he did when he was boy. But then, so do I. Only the view from the cave hasn’t changed. I can see the tall stone casting a long shadow on the ice, which the setting sun has turned a creamy orange. The cave itself is full of this orange light, reflecting off the ice and onto the limestone walls.

  Roy is also looking at the view from the cave. When he looks back at me I guess I’m not the only one who’s been thinking about the last time we were here.

  “So what did you want to ask me?” I ask. I wonder if I should have asked to have a lawyer present. I almost laugh out loud imagining a lawyer crammed into this narrow space.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. I was just thinking this isn’t your typical interrogation room. Can I assume this won’t be a typical interrogation?”

  He doesn’t smile, neither does he confirm or deny what I’ve said. “I’m just trying to get a few things straight in my head,” he says, “about Deirdre Hall’s death.”

  “Oh,” I say.

  “I’ve been going over your journal…”

  “I thought you said there was nothing to incriminate me in there. I believe your exact words were ‘You had no idea what was really going on.’ ”

  “Well, maybe I didn’t give you enough credit. I read over the part about Deirdre’s death and I think there was something you felt uncomfortable about. I want you to tell me what happened that night.”

  “But why? What’s the point? Are you investigating Deirdre Hall’s death now?”

  He shrugs. “Humor me, Jane.” He grins at me then with the kind of boyish grin that Matt might have given me to coax me into another fifteen minutes of Latin study. So I do what he wants. I tell him everything I remember about that night.

  I HAD BEEN ASLEEP, DREAMING THAT AWFUL DREAM ABOUT sinking under the ice, the tea tin drifting down through the water beside me, when their voices woke me. They were in the single, arguing.

  “I’m going to tell.”

  “You can’t.”

  “There’s nothing you can do to stop me. I’ve had enough.”

  Someone rushed through the room I was in. The door to the hall opened, letting in a slice of light, and then slammed shut. Someone else followed from the single and opened the door. I could see in the light that it was Lucy and I called to her.

  Lucy spun around and then closed the door. She came over and sat on the bed next to me. “I didn’t know you were awake,” she said. There was a little light coming from the single, but I couldn’t make out Lucy’s face in the shadows. “Did you hear?”

  “I heard you arguing with Deirdre. Where’s she gone?”

  “She’s going to Miss Buehl. To tell.”

  “Tell what?”

  Lucy paused before she answered. “About the baby,” she said.

  “Why would she tell Miss Buehl she had a baby?”

  Lucy sighed. “I guess she wants to get it off her chest,” she said. “Confession’s good for the soul, and all that junk.” I thought about my journal writing guiltily, but at least that wouldn’t get anyone in trouble.

  “But then everybody will know we helped get rid of it.”

  Lucy nodded. “She doesn’t care,” Lucy said. “She doesn’t care about anyone but herself.”

  I sat up in bed. “Can we stop her?” I asked.

  Lucy took my hand and squeezed it. “Good old Jane,” she said, “that’s an excellent idea. Come on. Maybe we can catch up with her.”

  We didn’t bother going down the drainpipe. The dorm matron was asleep at her desk, so we just tiptoed by. Once outside I started running down the path, but Lucy stopped me. “I’ve got a shortcut through the woods,” she said. “We might be able to catch up with her before she gets to Miss Buehl.”

  We followed the narrow trail that Lucy had carved out of the snow. I noticed that it was freshly trodden and was surprised that she had obviously used her trails after the last snow. The trail led directly to the Point. When I saw where we were I stopped at the edge of the woods, thinking of my dream. I didn’t want to go out onto the rock.

  “I think I see her,” Lucy hissed, “get back.”

  Lucy motioned me back until we were hidden by the shadows. Only when Deirdre was directly in front of us on the path did Lucy step out from the shadows, blocking her way. Deirdre was startled when she saw Lucy and moved toward the trees, but then she must have seen me, because she moved off the path in the other direction, toward the Point. When she was on the rock Lucy started walking toward her, but not on the curved surface on top of the Point. She took a step down to the ledge on the east side of the Point and approached Deirdre slowly but steadily.

  “I think we should talk this over, Deir,” I heard Lucy say. Her voice sounded calm and reasonable.

  “I don’t want to talk about it, Lucy, just get away from me.” I heard the fear in Deirdre’s voice and it surprised me; Lucy was so much smaller than Deirdre. What did Deirdre have to be afraid of? It made me, suddenly, angry. I stepped out of the woods and walked carefully onto the icy rock. My anger quickly turned to fear, though, when I saw how close Deirdre and Lucy had gotten to the edge.

  “Hey,” I called. My voice sounded feeble. “Let’s go back to the dorm and talk this over.”

  Deirdre snorted. “Yes, Jane, let’s have a nice long talk. There’s a lot you might be interested to learn.”

  Lucy turned toward me and in turning lost her balance. Her arms flailed wide and beat the air like the wings of some large, awkward bird. I tried to grab her, but she was too far away, below me on the ledge, and I stumbled before I could reach her. Just before I landed on the rock I saw Deirdre reach for Lucy’s arm and then I heard someone scream and the sound of something cracking. I looked up and saw one figure crouched on the rock. I crept toward her and found it was Lucy. She was looking over the edge of the cliff at the frozen lake below where a long black gash had opened in the ice.

  “YOU SAY LUCY WAS BELOW YOU ON THE LEDGE AND THAT when you stepped forward Deirdre stepped back?”

  I nod. He seems lost in thought for a moment. “What?” I ask.

  “Nothing,” he says, “at least, I have to take a look at the Point again to tell if it’s anything. Go on, tell me what you did after Deirdre went through the ice. Did you go down and try to help her?”

  “There was nothing we could do.”

  He looks at me without saying anything. I remember that he’s read my journal. “Whose decision was it to leave without trying to help her?”

  “Mine,” I say, and when he still stares at me, I add, “Well, first it was Lucy’s and then it was mine.”

  I TRIED TO PULL LUCY AWAY FROM THE EDGE BUT IT WAS AS if she were stuck there, transfixed by that long dark o
pening in the ice.

  “We have to go down and see if we can help her,” I said.

  Lucy looked at me, her eyes wide. “I saw her when she hit the ice,” she said. “Trust me, she was dead before she went into the water.” I saw the horror in Lucy’s eyes and it frightened me.

  “We can’t just leave her. We have to be sure.”

  Lucy nodded. She let me lead the way down to the beach. When we got to the edge of the ice I stopped but Lucy walked right out onto the ice, to the edge of the hole where Deirdre had fallen through. I caught up to her and grabbed her arm and she wheeled around on me so suddenly that I almost lost my balance and fell in.

  “You said you wanted to be sure,” Lucy said. “One of us has to go in. Obviously it should be me. It was my fault she fell.” She spoke softly but her words chilled me. She had that look she got when she was determined to have her way. I didn’t doubt that she’d be willing to plunge into the icy water to find Deirdre’s body. I had the feeling she wouldn’t stop until she found her, not even if it meant following Deirdre to the bottom of the lake. I realized I might lose her, too.

  I stared into the black water. Already I could see a thin film of ice forming on the top. How many minutes had passed since Deirdre fell? Even if she had survived the fall wouldn’t she have drowned by now? Why should Lucy risk her life if Deirdre were already dead?

  I put my other hand on her arm and turned her to face me. “I don’t want you to do it,” I said. “It’s bad enough Deirdre’s gone. I don’t want to lose you, too.” Her eyes regarded me as if I were far away, as if that thin film of ice that was forming over the black water had gotten in between us. I couldn’t tell if she even understood what I was saying and then she looked back at the water and I saw such a look of longing on her face that I immediately started pulling her back to the shore.