The Lake of Dead Languages

  “Something nice about Lucy?” I repeat. “But how…”

  Doris Corey comes back to the couch and hands me a letter written on pale gray stationery in blue-green ink. “Dear Mrs. Corey,” I read. “I’d like to inquire about purchasing the house on River Street. I know it’s been vacant for many years and I understand how you might be reluctant to part with your sister’s old house.”

  Doris Corey points to the first paragraph. “I thought this girl must be either very naive or very rich. Or both. Imagine keeping a piece of real estate for sentimental value!”

  I continue reading.

  “I’d like to assure you that the house would be in very good hands. You see, I, too, have sentimental reasons for wanting to live in the house on River Street. I attended Heart Lake for three years in the late seventies (because of circumstances outside my control I had to leave) and that was how I came to know your niece, Lucy. Although she was several classes ahead of me, she was kind enough to take an interest in me. I had a very lonely childhood and I’ve never forgotten the kindness she showed me, almost as if she were an older sister. When she died I felt as if I had lost a part of my family, almost, indeed, a part of myself. Now that I’ve returned to Heart Lake (I often think that my decision to work with troubled adolescent girls is a way of repaying my debt to Lucy) I would cherish the opportunity to live in her old house.”

  There followed a generous cash offer for the house.

  “Can I use your phone?” I ask, handing the letter back to Doris Corey.

  I dial Dean Buehl’s office. She answers on the first ring and at the sound of my voice nearly shouts at me. “My God, Jane, we’ve been looking everywhere for you. Where are you? Are Athena and Dr. Lockhart there with you?”

  Doris Corey must see how pale I get because she wraps the afghan around my shoulders.

  “No. How long have they been missing?”

  “Since Athena stormed out of my office this morning. We’re afraid she’s done something to Dr. Lockhart—”

  “Dean Buehl,” I interrupt. “Was Dr. Lockhart a student at Heart Lake?”

  “Well, yes, for a few years, but she didn’t like people to know because she was expelled. But you know all about that, Jane, I told you…”

  I remember standing at the train station looking across the tracks at the small girl posed rigidly beside her luggage, her face set in a frozen glare, while Miss Buehl told me that she had been expelled for breaking the fanlight above the front door of Main.

  “She’s Albie. You hired Albie, didn’t you? You felt sorry for her and you hired her.”

  “Well, yes. That poor girl had been through so much. All she wanted was to come back to Heart Lake. But I didn’t lie, she wasn’t an old girl because she didn’t graduate…”

  “But you should have told me.”

  “But Jane, I thought you knew. After all it’s what her name means in Latin: white. That’s why she was called Albie.”

  Candace. It means fire-white. That’s what I feel now—a mix of fire and ice that tingles in my veins and gets me to my feet, Doris Corey’s afghan falling to the floor like a pile of brightly colored leaves.

  “Listen,” I say to Dean Buehl, “explain all of this to Roy Corey. Tell him that Dr. Lockhart is Albie and tell him I’m on my way back.”

  BEFORE I GET BACK ON THE TACONIC I STOP AT A PAY PHONE and make another call. I could have used Doris Corey’s phone but I’d been ashamed to make this call in front of anybody. I’m out of change so I call collect.

  Mitch accepts the charges and without a word to me hands the receiver over to Olivia.

  “Mommy? Are you almost here? I’m waiting up for you so you can read me my bedtime story.”

  “Honey,” I say, and then pause, letting my head rest on the cold, grimy metal pay phone booth, “Mommy’s going to be a little late, but I’ll try to be there when you get up.”

  There’s a silence so long that I think the connection’s been broken, then I hear a small voice, which sounds in the rushing static as though it were underwater. “But you promised.”

  There’s just nothing I can say to that. I tell her I’m sorry and that I’ll try to make it up to her and I get off the phone before she can ask me just how I think I’m going to do that. Then I get in the car and drive north and try not to think about Olivia. I think, instead, about another little girl: Albie.

  I try to remember what Deirdre and Lucy told me about her, but the truth is I was never that interested. She was a homely little kid who tagged along following us all over campus. Lucy seemed to accept her adulation as her due. Deirdre felt sorry for her, because, like herself, she was shuttled from school to school, unwanted. Even Domina Chambers had taken an interest in her. I had tried to talk to her once or twice, but she never seemed to like me. Maybe she saw me as a rival to Lucy’s affections.

  As I drive farther north, the rain turns into icy sleet. My windows frost up and my car slithers and fishtails on the upgrades. I drive fast, though, wiping the frost away from the windshield with the heel of my hand like a child pushes tears away.

  Or was it the other way around? Had I seen her as a rival? After all, how many poor scraggly “orphan” girls could Lucy befriend? I think of all the times I caught her spying on us in the woods. How many times had she watched us without me knowing? I remember the figure I thought I saw on the Point when Lucy and I sank the tin in the lake, the sense I had of being watched the night Deirdre died… What was it Roy had said? If someone was hiding on the west ledge it would have looked like I was the one who made Deirdre fall to her death.

  When I reach the Northway I expect better road conditions, but instead I hit fog. The sleet, which I expected to turn to snow as I got farther north, turns back to rain. Most of the traffic stays in the right lane and crawls slowly through the dense white shroud. I get in the left lane and do eighty.

  And that last night… the night I’d gone down to the icehouse to meet Matt. I had that same sense of being followed through the woods. What would she have made of that final scene on the ice? I close my eyes against the picture and nearly run into the guardrail. She would blame me for Lucy’s death. Had I even thought, twenty years ago, of looking for her after Lucy died? To comfort her? No, I was too busy with my own grief. The next thing I knew about her was that she’d been expelled for smashing the stained-glass fanlight. The one inscribed with the school’s motto. I remember the day Lucy explained to Albie what the motto meant. “It means there’s always a place for you here. And it means I will always be here for you, too…”

  But Lucy hadn’t been able to keep that promise. In her rage, Albie had thrown rocks through the window—through the broken promise of those words. Then she had been sent to St. Eustace. St. Useless. Where they sent you when you were no use to anyone.

  I spot the Corinth exit with barely enough time to cut across two lanes of slow-moving traffic and skid onto the exit ramp. The fog is even worse now that I’m off the highway. I can barely see the side of the road. I roll my windows down and fix on the little reflective bumps that mark the median to gauge the two-lane road that climbs up to Corinth. About halfway, I come up against a slow-moving lumber truck that is crawling up to the mill. There’s no way to pass it, so I put my car in low gear and tail so close behind that I can smell the sickly sweet smell of fresh-cut pine.

  I can tell I’ve reached town by the yellow tinge to the fog as I pass the mill. I sniff at the familiar scent of pulp. I used to think when I was little that the yellow smoke that rose from the mill was the ghosts of trees, and the white paper the mill produced their earthly remains—the bleached white bones of northern forests.

  Finally, the truck pulls off and I accelerate through the rest of the village, crossing the bridge so fast my teeth vibrate. I’m on River Road, passing the old Victorians, which loom out of the fog like prehistoric monsters. At the end of the road, just before the turn off to Heart Lake, is the little house that always seemed to me like something out of a fairy tale. The o
nly thing I hadn’t realized was that as far as the woman living in it is concerned, I’m the bad witch. I made Deirdre fall off the Point. I let Lucy drown under the ice. I lied at the inquest and got her favorite teacher fired. I sent her into Siberian exile.

  I turn the engine off, wishing I’d thought to park farther down the road or at least turned my headlights off. When I do that now I see that the house is not completely dark. Like the first night I found Dr. Lockhart here, there’s a light in the attic.

  What I should do is find a phone and call the police—see if they can reach Roy. What I do instead is reach deep into my book bag until my fingers graze cold metal. Dr. Lockhart’s keys. I still have them. That I should use them seems the next logical step. I open my glove compartment and look for something I can use as a weapon. There’s the flashlight, but its batteries are still dead and it’s made of cheap, light plastic. The only other thing in the glove compartment is the small aerosol can of de-icer. I slip it into my pocket, figuring I can use it like mace. Then I get out of the car as quietly as I can and walk through the unshoveled snow to the front door. By the time I make it there my jeans are soaked to the knees and I’m sweating under my down parka. The snow, I notice, is slushy and steaming, exuding a thick white fog like some pestilential vapor. When I touch the doorknob I find it’s warm.

  There are only three keys on the chain and I already know that two of them are for Dr. Lockhart’s office and filing cabinet. I put the third key in the lock and it turns easily. I push open the door into a darkness that feels smoky, as if the fog from the melting snow had somehow gotten inside and turned black. I look around the living room, trying to make out the shape of furniture, but after a moment I realize that the room is completely empty. There isn’t a single stick of furniture on the first floor.

  But the light I saw was coming from the attic. As I go up the stairs the darkness pales and turns pink. When I get to the head of the stairs I see why. There’s a night-light in the shape of a pink poodle plugged into an outlet. The only other source of light comes from the room on the left. Matt’s room. I go in and see that the light comes from a green-shaded banker’s lamp on one of the desks by the window.

  Lucy’s desk. There’s no other word for it. Even before I walk across the room and reach it I know it will be exactly as I saw it the last time I was in this room twenty years ago. The same lumpy pottery cup that Matt made for her in second grade holding the same collection of peacock-blue fountain pens. A brass eternal calendar in the shape of a globe, the day marked February 28, 1977. There’s a blue Fair Isle cardigan hung across the back of the chair, which, when I lift, holds the shape of the chair in its shoulders. I see by its faded label it’s from Harrods. It’s the sweater I borrowed from Lucy and left in the woods.

  When I drop the sweater back to the chair a moth flutters out of its folds and beats itself against the lamp. I slowly turn in a circle, taking in the whole room. Matt’s hockey stick is propped against the bookshelf where Wheelock’s Latin leans against Peterson’s Field Guide to Birds. Matt’s collection of Hardy Boys on the top shelf. Lucy’s Nancy Drews on the middle. Over Matt’s bed hangs a pennant for Dartmouth College. I’d forgotten that’s where Matt wanted to go to college. He said he liked that it was founded by an Indian.

  I look back at the desk and notice a few sheets of stationery with “Exeter” printed on top. The letters from Brian. There, too, are a supply of hairpins. A piece of lined paper, its edges ragged where it was ripped out of its stitched binding, lies under a smooth gray-green rock. I lift the rock and see there’s only one line written on the top of the page. It’s the last page from my journal. The last line I wrote before going down to the lake to find Matt. I won’t let anyone stand in my way, I’d written, not even Lucy.

  As I put the stone down I hear a sound from the back of the house. There’s no window facing the back in the attic, so I run down the stairs, through the dark house, thankful there’s no furniture to bump into. I unlatch the back door and step into the fog. I can’t see more than a few feet in front of me and when I try to listen all I can hear is the drip of melting snow and the rush of moving water somewhere in the woods. It must be the Schwanenkill, thawed out, flowing out of Heart Lake. Then I look down at my feet and see that I’m standing in a narrow groove, a footpath carved out of the snow, just wide enough for one. And something gleaming in the wet snow. I bend down and pick it up. It’s a tiny silver skull earring. A macabre thing, but I recognize it as Athena’s. It’s impossible, in this fog, to see where the path goes, but I’m already following it into the woods.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  AT FIRST THE PATH RUNS PARALLEL TO THE SCHWANENKILL. I know, not because I can see the stream but because I can hear it—a faint watery whisper like the murmuring of an unseen companion passing through the woods beside me. Then it veers abruptly left and plunges into the deep, fog-white woods.

  It’s like entering a white tunnel. On either side the snow rises steeply and where the snow leaves off the white fog rises, like a curtain being lifted from the ground to shield… shield what? I’m reminded of a slide Tacy Beade showed us in her ancient art lecture of two handmaidens holding up a draped cloth to shield the goddess at her bath. The face I see staring out behind the curtain now is the wide-eyed frightened face of a lost child. The awkward little girl we called Albie who used to follow us through the woods. The little girl who’s turned the game around and become the leader instead of the follower.

  The path loops around tree trunks and meanders through the forest. When I come to the first branch I don’t know which way to go and stare hopelessly into the white mist. Then in the stillness of the woods I hear a faint chiming. At first I think I’m imagining it—a tinny bell that might be the ringing of my own blood in my ears—but when I follow the sound to the left branch of the trail I catch the faint glimmer of metal swinging from an overhanging branch. Three hairpins linked in the shape of a horned animal dangling among the pine needles. I take that trail and from then on, at every divergence, I look for the corniculum like a trail blaze and follow it. I’ve soon lost any sense of direction or time. The convolutions of the trail seem to grow tighter and more erratic, folding back on themselves like a Mobius strip, until I feel as though I am no longer following a path through the woods but a train of thought in some addled brain. But whose addled brain? Because even though I know it’s Albie’s path I’m following, I feel as if I’m traveling into my own past, taking the same path I took that night twenty years ago when I went down to the lake to meet Matt at the icehouse.

  WHEN I LEFT THE DORM I GRABBED A JACKET ONLY HALF noticing that it was Lucy’s pale blue parka instead of mine. I was halfway down the hall before I remembered that I had left the corniculum on the door. Should I go back and take it down? If I left it on the door, Lucy would no doubt come along to the icehouse when she got back. Then I wouldn’t be alone with Matt. I thought of going back, but I felt too impatient, too anxious to be out, breathing the wet, sweet air. I was already past the matron’s desk (I told her I’d left a book in the dining hall); I was already on the path heading around the west side of the lake.

  Outside the night was even more stirring than it had promised to be. The wind moved through the trees spraying pine-scented water across my face. The lake was still coated with a white layer of ice but its surface was dull and I could hear the water moving restlessly beneath the surface as if trying to break free. Patches of ice, gritty and opaque, still littered the path. When I stepped on them pale air bubbles raced beneath my feet. All around me, the melting snow rose in a pure white mist, like a linen cloth pulled away to reveal some magical transformation: paper flowers, the flutter of pale wings. I kept looking into the woods, expecting something to show itself behind the shredded wisps of fog, but although I heard, once or twice, the snap of a branch or a watery sigh, I saw no one and I dismissed my sense of being followed to my imagination. I thought about Matt waiting at the icehouse and the thought that I was going to be with
him soon moved through my body like the wind moving through the pine trees.

  SHE MUST HAVE BEEN WATCHING ME THAT NIGHT, JUST AS she’s watching me now. When I have wandered in enough circles to wear myself out will she pounce on me from behind the white fog? Or will she merely leave me in the woods to freeze to death while she makes away with Athena? The thought of Athena sharpens my wits for a moment. What does she have in mind for her? I am beginning to understand why Dr. Lockhart hates me. As she sees it, I killed her two best friends and caused her favorite teacher to lose her job and ultimately kill herself. She spent the rest of her school days in a rigid, loveless place. She must have felt she was in exile. How Heart Lake and the memory of Lucy and Domina Chambers must have grown in her mind. It must have infuriated her to see me come back here and take Domina Chambers’s place. Think of Helen Chambers when you’re dealing with your students, she said to me at that first meeting. And from that moment on my life has been a replica of what happened to Helen Chambers. That is the punishment she devised for me.

  I stop for a moment on the path and stare into the impenetrable fog. I hear, again, the whisper of water on the wind and together with the fog it reminds me of that last night I went down to the icehouse to meet Matt. I think about that last meeting and try to see it through Albie’s eyes.

  AS I ROUNDED THE END OF THE LAKE, I SAW THAT THERE WAS a light coming from the icehouse. I crossed the Schwanenkill carelessly, crashing through the thin ice in the middle. He must have heard me, because as I struggled up the bank I saw him above me, reaching out his arm to give me a hand up. I took off my mitten so I could feel the warmth of his flesh right away.