The Lake of Dead Languages

  She has stopped, too. She lifts the back of her right wrist, the hand still gripping the lower end of the shaft, to wipe her eyes. The point of the ice pike tilts up and I realize, a moment too late, that it’s my best opportunity to rush her, but she sees me coming and lowers the pole again so that I nearly impale myself on it. The metal tip slices through my down parka as I backskate away from it.

  “You killed her,” she cries, moving forward again. “You left her to die even though you promised you’d come back for her.”

  MATT FOLLOWED LUCY ONTO THE ICE AND I FOLLOWED HIM. I saw cracks shooting out in all directions from his footsteps and the ice seemed to scream as if it were human flesh being torn. The black water crept between the cracks. But still Matt walked forward as if he didn’t notice the ice breaking all around him. For every step he took forward Lucy took one backward. It was like a dance along an invisible tightrope and I realized they were walking over the same ice that Lucy and I had broken through with the boat. It was where the underground spring fed into the Schwanenkill and the ice was always the thinnest.

  I called to them but they paid no attention to me.

  “Matt,” I called, desperate to get his attention, “I’ll tell you. I did see the baby and his hair was red.”

  Matt turned to me and in that instant a crack opened up in the ice just behind Lucy. She staggered for a moment, beating the air with her arms. For a moment I thought she had caught her balance. Matt turned back to her. He was so close to her that all he’d have to do is reach out his hand and grab her and she’d be safe. But when he turned to her I saw something change in Lucy’s face. It was the first time, I think, that I’d ever seen her truly frightened. She took a step back and fell into the black water.

  “IT WAS BECAUSE YOU TOLD HIM,” DR. LOCKHART SAYS IN a whisper so low I can barely hear it over the scrape of her skates moving steadily toward me. “You should have seen the look on his face when he knew it was his baby. It killed her.”

  “But how did you see…” and then I understand. She wasn’t hiding behind the door of the icehouse. She’d been hiding behind the sister stone. The only part of the argument she’d heard that night was when I told Matt that the baby was his. “But Dr. Lockhart,” I say, “Albie, I tried to save her. I loved her, too.”

  She lowers the ice pike and for a moment I think I’ve gained some ground. I think she’s going to drop the pole to the ice, but instead she lifts one knee and, drawing her lips back like a snarling cat, snaps the pole neatly in two. The crack it makes echoes over the ice. “Liar,” she hisses, “I saw everything,” and then, holding the lighter weapon like a hockey stick, comes at me.

  I turn and tear into the ice with my skates. I feel cold metal graze my neck and I fall headlong to the ice, splaying out on the slippery ice. She’s on me at once. Her knee digs into the small of my back and she pulls my head up off the ice by yanking my hair back. I can feel the serrated tips of her skate blades grinding into my legs.

  “You left her to die,” she hisses into my ear. “You promised to save her and you left her on the ice to die.” She wraps her hand once in my hair and slams my face to the ice. I hear a loud crack and I think it must be my skull. Before my eyes darkness spreads like a cool green blanket waiting to envelop me. OK, I think, OK. Somewhere far above me I hear a child crying.

  “She said she’d never leave me. She promised, she promised.” With every promise my head slams into the ice and the darkness spreads, like blood pooling. It is blood pooling. My blood. It’s seeping between the cracks in the ice. Dripping into the black water. Through the red-stained blackness I see Lucy’s face. Her lips are forming a word but I can’t hear what she’s saying because all around us the ice is cracking.

  WHEN HE SAW LUCY STEP BACK INTO THE WATER, MATT FROZE. I thought he’d go to her, but he stood on the ice as if he’d become a part of it. When I passed him I brushed against his arm and I felt that he was trembling. I saw why. Between him and Lucy the ice had broken into three pieces. The piece that Lucy clung to was loose. When she tried to move her elbow forward on it, the slab tilted toward her. I got down on my hands and knees and held down the other end of the ice.

  “Look,” I said to Matt. “If you hold this still, maybe I can help her back up.” I looked back over my shoulder to see if he had heard me. His eyes were fixed past me, on Lucy’s face, just as her eyes were fixed on his. It was like I wasn’t even there.

  I tugged on his pant leg and pulled him down to his knees. “Just hold this,” I yelled. He didn’t move his eyes off Lucy, but he did what I told him to. He crouched on the edge of the unbroken ice and held the slab of ice that lay between us and Lucy. I crawled onto the slab of loose ice and felt it rock in the water, but I also felt Matt adjust his grip to steady it. I got on my belly and crept forward. When I got to Lucy I could see that ice was clinging to her hair and her lips were blue. She was trying to say something, but her teeth were chattering too hard for me to understand her. I tried to move closer, but just as I touched her hand the ice beneath me rocked free and I saw Lucy’s eyes widen in fear. I looked over my shoulder and saw Matt crouched on the edge of the ice. He was still looking at Lucy, but he’d let go of the ice and stretched his arms over his head, his two hands coming together as if in prayer. I tried to remember where I’d seen him in this pose before and then remembered. At the swim club.

  He only looked away from Lucy at the last moment to tuck in his chin. He went into the water without a splash. His form perfect.

  “Jane,” Lucy said, “Jane.” I could see she was struggling to control the shaking so that she could speak. “You have to save him.”

  “I can’t,” I told her. “He’s below the ice. Let me help you.” But as I spoke we both saw him surface a few feet away. He got one arm onto the ice, but made no effort to pull himself up. He looked around and when he saw us—or saw Lucy, I should say, because he seemed to look right through me—he shook his head.

  I took Lucy’s hand and tried to pull her up but she pulled her hand out of mine. “No,” she said, “I won’t come out until he’s safe. Go help him and then me. Promise, Jane. Promise you’ll save him first.”

  I could see it was no good arguing with her. I turned on the ice and crawled toward Matt. I could hear Lucy behind me. Every time I stopped she called my name. “Jane,” she said, over and over, “you promised.” And so I kept going away from her.

  When I was a few inches from Matt I think he finally saw me. He smiled. Like a boy playing keep away. Then he took a deep breath and sank back under the water. I saw his face, like a pale green star under the black water, grow smaller and smaller and then disappear. I turned back to Lucy, and saw that she’d sunk lower in the water, her lips touching the surface. She was going under. There wasn’t time to crawl to her. I threw myself down on the ice and reached for her hand. I felt her fingers under mine—felt them pull away from me and saw her slip into the darkness.

  THE ICE FEELS COOL AGAINST MY CHEEK NOW THAT DR. Lockhart has stopped slamming my head into it. At some point, she promised became you promised. I picture her—I picture Albie—hiding behind the sister stone and listening to Lucy saying these words to me as I crawled away from her. I can’t blame her for thinking I left her to die. Even if I could explain that the promise I made was to save Matt, the truth would be the same. I let her convince me. She knew how I felt about Matt. Knew I would go. And when I reached for Lucy’s hand what Albie saw was not Lucy pulling her hand away but me prying her fingers off the ice and sending her to her death.

  “You promised, you promised,” she whimpers. She sounds like a child and I know she isn’t just repeating Lucy’s last words. I wonder how long Albie stayed there that night, hiding on the ice because there was no one to come for her. Not even Lucy who had promised always to come for her. When she finally left she stole into our room and found my journal. She’d read the last line I’d written that night. I won’t let anyone stand in my way. Not even Lucy.

  When they tore up t
he ice on the lake Albie smashed the fanlight above the doors to Main Hall. She smashed the heart and the words of Lucy’s broken promise. I picture shattered glass, like the window in Dean Buehl’s office this morning, only instead of light pouring through the cracks there’s black water—a blackness that’s swallowing me, making it hard to think.

  You promised, I hear, and there is something about the childish refrain—you promised, you promised—that I think I should remember.

  I feel the weight lift off my back and something sharp and metal gnaws into my side. I remember who said that last. Olivia. But you promised, she said on the phone.

  The knife in my side is Dr. Lockhart’s skate. She’s kicking me over, rolling me like a log. I roll once, and feel something dig into my side. It’s not Dr. Lockhart’s skate though. It’s the can of de-icer in my coat pocket. I open my eyes and through a blur of blood see where I’m being rolled. We’re inches from the open black water of the ice canal. She only has to roll me once more and I’ll be in the water, my heavy skates pulling me to the bottom.

  And then I won’t see Olivia tomorrow. She’ll wait and wait for me and think she wasn’t worth coming for. After all, I’ve already abandoned her once.

  I wait for the sharp metal to mash into my skin again and when the searing pain blooms there, I wrap my left arm around her ankles and pull her down. When her face is close enough I pull out the de-icer and spray it directly into her eyes. She screams and tumbles over me, almost gracefully, and would, I later think, have neatly regained her balance if she’d landed on ice and not the edge of the canal. She teeters for a moment and then slips into the black water.

  I lie on the ice for a moment, trying to hear above the sound of my own ragged breath sounds of struggle in the water. But there’s nothing. She’s dropped as silently as a stone into the lake. After a minute, I turn myself painfully onto my stomach and creep along the ice to the edge of the canal. I’m only an inch or two from the edge when I see the fingernails embedded in the ice. I try to push back, but my hair trails in front of me and she grabs a handful and pulls herself up by it. I see her blue eyes, like painted eyes on a marble statue, just above the surface of the ice, fixed on mine. But then I realize that the chemical spray has blinded her. She can’t see me.

  I reach out my hand along the ice, and lay it over her other hand, the one not holding onto my hair. She tries to pull away, but I talk softly. “It’s OK, Albie,” I say, “It’s Lucy. I’ve come to get you. Let me help you.” I see her trying to dig her nails out of the ice to take my hand, but she can’t. So I move forward another inch and take her hand, prying each finger out of the ice until I’ve got a good grip. I’ve never noticed how small and slender her hands are. Just like Lucy’s.

  And like Lucy she has a grip like a vise. She snakes her hand around my wrist and pulls. I slide forward on the ice and would slide in, except now I feel another pull, someone pulling on my feet. I begin to slide away from the canal, but she won’t let go of my hand and she won’t try to help herself up onto the ice. A clump of my hair tears away in her hand and she slips down under the water, but still she holds on to my wrist.

  “Let go!” I hear someone shout behind me. It’s Roy. “You can’t save her. The ice is cracking.”

  I turn my head a little to one side and see dark cracks, like fine veins in marble, radiating out all around me.

  “She won’t let go of me,” I say, so faintly I’m sure he won’t hear me, but he does. I feel him creeping up beside me, careful to keep one arm around me so I won’t slip into the canal. He must see the dark veins widening under his weight, but he doesn’t stop until his face is near mine and we are both looking over the canal’s edge into the water. Candace Lockhart’s face is a few inches below the water, the whites of her open eyes tinged green by the lake. Roy reaches over me to where she’s got my wrist and tries to unpry her fingers from my hand.

  “No,” I breathe.

  “She’s gone, Jane. Look at her.”

  I look back into the water. Her eyes are open, her lips slightly parted, but there are no air bubbles coming from her mouth. Still, I can feel those eyes watching me, some will rising up toward me through the filter of cold green water, and then I see her, just as I saw Matt’s features rise up in Roy’s, I see Lucy, her eyes looking out of Albie’s blue eyes.

  I reach forward with my other hand, but just as I do I feel her fingers, one by one, lifting off my wrist and her small, white hand, relaxed and open, slips below the water, the fingers slightly curled. She sinks, straight and slow, her white hair fanning up around her face, her blue eyes burning like twin stars until they’re extinguished by the darkness.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  WHATEVER MADE THEM PICK MAY DAY FOR THE Founder’s day Picnic?” Hespera, the eighth grader whose stola I am fixing, complains. “It’s too cold up here to frolic half naked around a Maypole.”

  I try to smile but my mouth is full of hairpins.

  Athena answers for me. “It’s the founder’s birthday, or close to it.”

  I nod, taking the pins out of my mouth. “Yep, India Crevecoeur was born on May 4, 1886. So this would be her one hundred and tenth birthday and it’s the seventieth anniversary of the school’s founding. I actually met her once.”

  “Really, Magistra? You couldn’t possibly be that old,” Octavia, who’s sewing up a seam on Flavia’s stola, asks wide-eyed. Flavia rolls her eyes at her sister. When the sisters came back to Latin they demanded a Latin club. To revive our classical spirit, they said. Now they vie with one another to see who has the most classical spirit and who can be nicest to their teacher who valiantly saved the life of one of their classmates. It was their idea to stage a Procession of Floralia for the Founder’s Day Maypole dance.

  “Prima,” I say, “I am that old, and secunda, she was ancient. Ninety, I guess, because it was my junior year and the fiftieth anniversary of the school’s founding.”

  “Wow, was she like all senile?” Mallory Martin, although not a Latin student, has volunteered to join in the Procession of Floralia. Mostly because, Athena asserts, she thinks she looks good in a sheet.

  “No, actually she was sharp as a tack. She recognized me as the granddaughter of her maid, who’d worked for her fifty years before.”

  “Your grandmother was a maid here?” Athena asks, pushing her hair, recently dyed sea-green, out of her eyes. I’d been looking forward to seeing its natural shade grow out, but she’d gone to the city last weekend and “caved in to peer pressure” at some East Village clip joint. I was disappointed at first, but now that I’ve gotten used to the color I have to admit that with her green eyes and pale skin it’s kind of arresting. Especially today. For her role as goddess of the lake for the Procession of Floralia she’s robed in a green satin sheet, a sheet volunteered by, of all people, Gwen Marsh. Satin sheets, Gwen? I say every time I see her now. It’s just one of the surprising things I’ve learned about Gwen Marsh in the last few weeks as I’ve tried to get to know her better. The other is that under those Ace bandages are old scars.

  “Uh-huh,” I say absently as I notice the time. “But we’re going to be late for our meeting. Hadn’t you better change?”

  Athena shrugs and pulls on a denim jacket over her sea-green stola. “Why? Is it a formal thing?”

  “I don’t know what kind of thing it is. Dean Buehl just said it was Heart Lake business and she wants both of us in the Music Room at noon.”

  “I think they will give you a medal for saving Athena’s life,” Octavia says.

  “And for defeating the evil Dr. Lockhart,” Flavia adds.

  I could say for the hundredth time that I tried to save Dr. Lockhart and failed, but even I am getting tired of hearing myself say it.

  “Well, if that’s the occasion,” Athena says, “I definitely think I should go as Goddess of the Lake.” Athena strikes a pose—one finger to her left temple, her right hand curled in the air as if holding a scepter—much like a figure of a Greek goddess I once sa
w on an Attic vase. For not the first time I think there is something regal in Athena’s bearing. Maybe that’s why her name seems to suit her so well.

  “All right,” I say. “Deo parere libertas est.” Before Octavia can get out her book of Latin quotations I provide the source and translation. “Seneca,” I say, “To obey a god—or in this case, a goddess—is freedom. OK, then, Octavia and Flavia, I leave it to you to organize the procession. You’ve got the wreaths and garlands.”

  “Check.”

  “Athena and I will meet you outside the mansion at one o’clock then. Bona fortuna, puellae.”

  We have to stop twice on the path to the mansion to pin closed the seams on Athena’s stola which keeps blowing open in the wind. Most of the girls have opted to wear clothes under their stola, but Athena, always a purist, is not even wearing underwear. Luckily I have a pocketful of safety pins. I remember that Domina Chambers always kept a supply of pins on hand for errant toga and stola seams. When we get to the foot of the mansion steps she stops and walks a few feet away to the edge of the lake. I think there must be a problem with her outfit again, but when I catch up to her I see that she’s started to cry. I sit down on a rock by the edge of water and pat the stone for her to sit next to me.

  “We’re already late,” she says tucking the folds of the sheet up around her knees so she can sit down on the rock. I’m glad that the stone has been warmed in the sun. Even though Hespera is right about it being too cold to frolic half naked around a Maypole, it is an extraordinarily beautiful day. The lake, under a cloudless blue sky, is so bright it’s hard to look at it.

  “They’ll wait,” I tell Athena. “After all, how can they start without the Goddess of the Lake?”

  “Maybe that wasn’t such a good idea, considering…” Her voice trails off as she stares into the hard glitter of the lake. We both know how much there is to consider. I wonder if Athena will ever look at this lake without remembering the two friends she lost to it. I know I can’t.