The Lake of Dead Languages Read online

  I thought Lucy would be most interested in the hair, but instead she held up the hairpin so that its prongs faced up. The metal was crimped halfway down each side.

  “That’s to hold the hair better,” I said. “Look.” I took a pin out of my own hair. I had started wearing it up that term because Lucy said it made me look more scholarly. The pin was shaped the same but was darker to match my plain brown hair. I took my pin, prongs down, and linked it with the one in Lucy’s hand. It dangled there limply. Lucy took the single bobby pin she used to hold back the bangs she was growing out that year and slipped it over the prongs of the top hairpin—Helen Chambers’s pin. Then she held the thing up by the end of the bobby pin.

  “It looks like some kind of animal,” Deirdre said. “A goat, maybe.”

  “It’s a talisman,” Lucy said. “Of the Horned One. A…” she paused, looking into the middle distance, a look she often had right before she read her Latin translation, as if a page invisible to all but her was unfurling in the air. “A corniculum. A little horned one. From now on this will be the sign we leave for each other.”

  “A sign of what?” Deirdre asked. “What will it mean when we find one?”

  Lucy looked at both of us. I became conscious of how we were sitting, cross-legged in a tight triangle, our knees nearly touching, each of us leaning into the middle. Out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw the tapestry dancers take another spin around the room and then Lucy’s gaze brought me back, told me to pay attention, made the room still again.

  “A sign that we’re always here for each other,” Lucy said.

  I saw Deirdre smile. It was what she wanted, a sign of affirmation from Lucy (I knew that I was beside the point, but she’d take me because I came with Lucy). It’s what I wanted, too, of course, but there was something in Lucy’s tone that unnerved me, that made what she said less a promise of friendship than a threat of constant surveillance.

  IT’S A SENSE OF BEING WATCHED THAT I HAVE NOW, HOLDING the little hairpin totem up so it catches the light slanting down through the tall pines. I look toward the lower school, but all the children have gone inside to collect their things. I can hear, faintly, the good-bye song they sing at the end of each day.

  “So long, so long, it won’t be so long till we see each other again.…”

  Deirdre and I used to wait here to meet Lucy when she worked at the lower school as an aide. The younger girls would follow her out the door, begging for another song, or another story. I remember there was one girl in particular, a skinny girl with pale, colorless hair like dried straw, who would trail after Lucy dejectedly until Lucy would go back and promise that she’d be back the next day.

  “Do you really promise?” the girl, standing at the edge of the woods, would yell.

  “Yes, Albie, I promise,” Lucy would yell back, drawing out promise as if it were a magic word that could bind the speaker just by its utterance.

  I look behind me toward the lake, which glitters between the tree trunks like slivers of a broken mirror. The water pulses so brightly that when I turn away my vision is slashed with dark jagged shards. I have a hard time spotting Olivia in the crowd of brightly dressed children coming out of the school now. For a moment my heart pounds with the fear that she’s not there, that when I go up to her teacher she will look at me blankly and tell me that someone else has taken her… didn’t I send a note saying it was all right? A ridiculous thought. I saw her go into the school five minutes ago.

  Still, I am so panicked that the faces of the children blur into bright spots and I can’t make out Olivia’s face until she rushes right into me. I can barely hear what her teacher is trying to tell me, something she doesn’t want Olivia to hear, I guess, from the exaggerated mouthing adults use when they’re whispering secrets in front of children.

  “. . . a bad day…” I make out. “. . . overwrought…” I nod and say something about Olivia not getting much sleep the night before, how we’re still getting used to the new house, excuses that come easy and are, in their way, true.

  “She’s probably just tired,” I conclude.

  “I am not,” Olivia snaps, as tired children will when told they’re tired.

  “Okay, sweetie,” I say, taking Olivia’s hand. “Let’s go home.” I steer her away from the school. “Let’s go home and have a snack. We’ll make cookies…” I say before I remember I don’t have the supplies for baking. In my mind we were heading home to the kitchen in our old house where the matching ceramic canisters were filled with flour and oatmeal and chocolate chips.

  “I want to go down to the magic rock and look for tadpoles,” she says.

  “Okay,” I say, glad to get out of the baking promise. Tomorrow I’ll go to the store and buy flour and baking powder and cookie sheets.

  “. . . and then the tadpoles turn into frogs,” Olivia is telling me, “and Mrs. Crane says we’ll have tadpoles in our class so we can watch it happen.…”

  Olivia drops my hand and runs ahead on the path, chattering all the while about frogs and tadpoles. I’m left alone in the woods I used to wander with Lucy and Deirdre. We often came down this path to the swimming beach, and yes, sometimes we came at night and swam out to the farthest sister stone. We made our own sacrifices to the Lake Goddess. And once Deirdre introduced us to it, we were often stoned.

  Olivia disappears around a bend in the path, but I can still hear her voice. She is singing one of her made-up songs.

  When my students ask me what the school was like when I went here, I know they expect to hear that we worked harder, the rules were stricter, more was expected of us. Some of that is true. It was a given that you’d go from Heart Lake to a Seven Sister college. Our teachers even hinted to us that after our preparation at Heart Lake we’d find the work in college easy. They were right about that. No test I ever took in college was harder than Domina Chambers’s Latin final, or Miss North’s history orals, or the slide test in Tacy Beade’s art class. But what the girls don’t guess—and I can’t tell them—is that when I went here in the seventies the rules were already changing. In some ways, things were looser. The Pill had become available, but no one had heard of AIDS yet. There was no war on drugs, because the teachers didn’t even suspect we had access to them. Cigarettes were vaguely tolerated as a bad habit, like chewing your nails or wearing laddered tights. Even the school uniform had given way to a haphazardly enforced dress code that specified skirt length but neglected to make bras mandatory.

  I’ve come to a bend in the path where the path divides in two. To the left the path goes up to our house, to the right it slopes down steeply to the lake. I stop here and realize I don’t know which way Olivia has gone. She’d been talking about seeing the tadpoles, so she probably went straight down to the lake. I stand still and listen for her voice, but the only thing I hear is the wind sifting through the dry pine needles on the forest floor.

  I still the flicker of panic that licks at my brain like a small flame. Panic. I hear Helen Chambers’s voice telling us the word originated from the god Pan. The Greeks thought he inspired the unreasoning fear that sneaked up on mortals in wild places.

  I head down the path to the lake. The sun has gone behind the clouds again and the water looks flat and gray. If she went to the house, I figure, she’ll be all right for a minute or two, but if she went to the lake… I decide not to finish that thought.

  The swimming beach is empty. I look down at the sand for footprints and see some, but they’re too large to be Olivia’s. I realize that they’re probably my own, made last night when I watched Athena, Vesta, and Aphrodite on the rocks. I am about to turn back to look for Olivia at the house when I hear a small splash. The sound seems to come from the farthest edge of the Point and when I look in that direction something white flashes briefly and then is gone. Just the sun glinting off the rock, I think, turning back toward the steps, but then I see her. Olivia is standing on the farthest rock. Her back is to me and she stands on the very edge of the far side of the
rock. I start to call her name, but then think I’ll startle her and she’ll fall into the water. The lake, I know, is deep on the other side of that rock.

  I kick off my shoes and wade into the water, moving slowly so as not to make any noise. The water is warm at the shallow edge, but as soon as I’m up to my waist I can feel the icy cold currents from the underground springs that feed the lake. I stroke out, keeping my head up, eyes on Olivia, just like Miss Pike, our gym teacher and swimming coach, taught us in Lifesaving.

  I approach the rock from the shallow end because I am afraid that if Olivia sees me she might be startled and fall into the water. I am too scared to take my eyes off Olivia even for an instant to look down for a place to put my feet, so I feel the rock with my toes. My feet hit something hard and slimy that falls away when I try to put my weight down. I try again and find a flat rock where I can get enough purchase to lift myself up onto the rock, but my foot, numb from the cold, slips just as I’m pulling myself up.

  I hit the rock hard with my stomach and make a sound like “ooof.” Olivia hears me and turns. For a moment I see fear in her face, but then it dissolves into giggles.

  “Mommy, why are you swimming in your clothes?”

  I crawl over to her and pull her down to the rock before answering. “Well, Miss, I could ask you the same question.” I try to make my voice sound light, a gentle reprimand for getting her good clothes wet, but when I pick up the hem of her dress I notice that her dress—and her sneakers and white ankle socks—are bone dry.

  Chapter Five

  AFTER I DROP OLIVIA OFF AT SCHOOL THE NEXT MORNING I go back to the swimming beach. It is getting late in the year to swim—already the water by the shore is coated with a skin of dead leaves and a cold mist, which I push away to enter the water—but I am determined to keep to my routine as long as this spell of Indian summer lasts. The lake is cold even in summer, but since I’ve been back I’ve gotten in the water as often as I can. And, I tell myself, I need to have a look at those rocks again to figure out how Olivia got to the farthest one without getting her clothes wet.

  When I asked her she told me, first, that she flew. Then she told me that it was the Queen of the Wilis who came in a magical boat and carried her to the rock. Maybe Mitch was right when he said I read her too many fairy tales. When I demanded that she tell me the truth she burst into tears and said I was mean for not believing her. I told her Mommy was tired and couldn’t have this argument right now. (Talking about myself in the third person is a clear sign that my patience is slipping.) She responded by throwing her chocolate milk on the floor. I screamed at her to go to her room and she told me she couldn’t because her room wasn’t in this house. I pulled her up by the armpits and said, “March, young lady.” She folded her arms across her chest and stamped her foot. I gave her a little push, just to get her going, and she crumpled to floor, screaming that I had shoved her.

  Things went downhill from there. Afterward I thought of what she might say to her father.

  When I think of how our fights might sound, or look, to an outsider I go hot with shame. The cold water of the lake is a relief, the impact of the cold draining my body of any feeling but the rush of the cold. I stroke out past the first two rocks and then to the third, measuring the distance with my eye. There is no way that anyone, let alone a four-year-old child, could jump from the second rock to the third rock. My head is dizzy with trying to solve the problem of how Olivia made it to the rock. I float on my back, arching my neck so that the lake soaks the top of my scalp, and then I turn over and strike out for the deep water.

  The lake is a half mile across from the swimming beach to the south end. When Lucy and I were here it was a graduation requirement to swim back and forth twice. Now the swimming area is roped off and the girls are only permitted to do a lake swim accompanied by a lifeboat.

  My girls believe that this rule is because of the three sisters and their suicidal pull on Heart Lake girls. They tell stories about the girls who have drowned in the lake since the Crevecoeur sisters and claim that their spirits still haunt the lake. They say you can see their ghostly forms in the mist that comes off the water on an autumn morning like this. Their faces have been seen, the story goes, peering out from beneath the ice in winter.

  When I look up I see I am off course. I always swim with my eyes closed because there is something about looking into that bottomless green that unnerves me. Even with my eyes shut I see it—a sunlit grass green so bright you could imagine the light came from the bottom of the lake and not the other way around.

  Halfway across the lake I pause and tread water. The lake is seventy-two feet deep here and I can feel the cold of that depth pulling at my feet. When they pulled Deirdre Hall out of the lake she had only been in the water a few hours. She didn’t look so bad, considering. But when Lucy and her brother Matt drowned in the lake it took longer to find their bodies. The night they drowned the temperature dropped to ten below zero and a blizzard blew down from Canada and held the school snowbound for three days. When the police could finally start looking for their bodies they had to bring an icebreaker from the river to tear up the ice before they could dredge the lake. It took five more days for them to find the bodies. They had died clinging to each other, their arms and legs wrapped around each other and then they had frozen like that. Their mother told me later that she had to have them buried together because they would have had to break their bones to pry them apart.

  This is the coldest part of the lake—Miss Buehl used to tell us there was an underground spring that fed into the Schwanenkill at the south end of the lake. In the winter it makes a thin spot in the ice and in the summer it makes a cold spot in the water. It is almost unbearable staying still in it, but I do this every morning as a kind of penance. I think of it as an appeasement to whatever local genius inhabits Heart Lake. I don’t believe in the Lake Goddess we gave our S’mores and bracelets to all those years ago, but the Romans have taught me something about lares et penates, household gods and nature spirits, and the importance of giving them their due. Instead of offering them crumbs and bangles I offer myself—my body flayed by the cold water.

  There’s a spot in my left arm where my shoulder was once dislocated that begins to ache in the cold water. When I feel I have stayed long enough—when the ache in my arm feels like icy fingers pulling at my flesh—I stroke forward with my arms and kick my legs out behind me. And hit something solid in the water. I spin around and see, directly in front of me, a white forehead—hair slicked back and pale eyes—rising out of the water. An arm arcs out of the water and grabs my hair. Icy cold fingers graze my scalp with a touch I’ve felt in nightmares. I open my mouth to scream and swallow water instead, the cold mineral taste flooding my brain with fear. I feel myself slipping under and grab the arm and twist it away from my hair. It’s only when I see the blue spiral on the hand that I realize who it is.

  “Athena,” I say in the same voice I’d use if she were talking out of turn in class.

  “Miss Hudson!” Her lips are at water level and she spits a little as she says my name. “Oh my God, Miss Hudson. I didn’t see you. There’s the fog and I was swimming with my eyes closed.”

  We’ve pulled away from each other, beating the water with our arms.

  “Well, you would hardly expect to run into someone in the middle of the lake. Don’t you know you’re not supposed to swim alone.”

  I think only to admonish her, but she turns her head fractionally toward shore and I think I might hear someone else moving in the water, but the fog is so thick now that I can’t be sure.

  “Yes,” she says, “I know. You won’t tell, will you? I mean about me swimming across the lake.”

  I had forgotten for a moment that it was against the rules.

  “Well, you know it’s very dangerous to swim alone, Athena.” I mean only to withhold my cooperation for a moment—just long enough to preserve my teacher’s authority. I’ve been thinking since my talk with Dr. Lockhart that I o
ught to be a little stricter with the girls.

  “One more infraction and I’m out of here,” she says.

  I notice that Athena’s chin is trembling and I’m afraid she’s about to cry, but then I realize that it’s her teeth chattering from the cold. Her lips are bluish-purple, the color of dead skin. I know why I subject myself to this cold water every morning, but I wonder what self-punishing instinct brings Athena into the lake. Perhaps it’s only a teenage dare.

  “It’s OK,” I say. “I won’t turn you in.”

  The blue lips press together in what might be a smile or just an attempt to keep her teeth from chattering. I feel the beginning of a cramp in my right calf muscle and it makes me wonder what I would do if Athena got a cramp out here. Would I be able to get her to shore? We took lifesaving training every year with Miss Pike, but it has been years since I practiced. I was never any good at it. Once when I was “saving” Lucy I kicked her in the side so hard she wasn’t able to play field hockey for two weeks.

  “We’d better swim back,” I say.

  Athena turns her head, not in the direction of the swimming beach but toward the opposite shore. I wonder if she is supposed to meet someone there. I remember that on the south end of the lake, just across from the swimming beach, is the Schwanenkill icehouse where Lucy and I used to go meet her brother, Matt. I wonder if there is some boy from town that Athena has arranged to meet there. Well, whoever it is would just have to wait. I am not about to leave Athena out in the lake alone. I feel responsible for her. If I don’t turn her in and she keeps swimming out here I am responsible for anything that might happen to her.

  “Come on,” I say in as stern a teacher’s voice as I can muster between chattering teeth.

  Swimming back I stay a little behind her. I swim with my head up so I can keep an eye on her. She is a good swimmer, but I know that is no guarantee. Good swimmers can drown, too.

  When we approach the swimming beach Athena swims to the west end of the cove, to the place under the Point where there’s a shallow cave in the rock. It’s where I left my clothes this morning. Athena reaches behind a rock and pulls out a sweatshirt and jeans. I find my clothes behind another rock. I feel her watching me, taking in my hiding place and the secrecy it implies. I am not supposed to be here any more than she is.