The Lake of Dead Languages (20 page)

“It doesn’t?” Deirdre asked.

Lucy gave her a scornful look, but Matt continued his explanation patiently.

“If it did that all the fish and other creatures would die. But what happens is that at four degrees Celsius water becomes less dense. That means that ice is actually less dense than water.”

“I may be too dense to get this,” Deirdre said, passing Matt the joint. “Science was never my thing.”

I was surprised at Deirdre putting herself down like this in front of Matt. I thought she would want to impress him. It was weird, too, because Deirdre wasn’t dense about stuff like this. She was actually pretty good at science. If she hadn’t spent most of her time getting stoned and thinking about boys, she would have gotten all A’s. As it was, she did almost no work and still got B’s.

Matt took a hit off the joint and passed it to Lucy, then he reached across me and took Deirdre’s hands in both of his.

“It’s like this.” He turned her right hand so that its back lay against the palm of her left. I saw Deirdre wince, but she didn’t complain and I don’t think Matt noticed he was hurting her.

“This is what a water molecule is like above four degrees Celsius. The two hydrogen atoms fit together like two spoons lying in the same direction. When people lie like that they call it spooning.”

I imagined lying next to Matt like that. I imagined what it would feel like to lie against his back, against his broad swimmer’s shoulders, and bend my knees to fit into the space where his knees bent. I wondered if Deirdre was imagining the same thing. Why hadn’t he used my hands for his demonstration? Why hadn’t I said I was dense?

“The oxygen atom lies alongside the two hydrogen atoms,” he added, balling his hand like a fist against the palm of Deirdre’s right hand. “But at four degrees Celsius the hydrogen atoms flip around.” Matt turned Deirdre’s right hand over so that her palms were facing each other as if in prayer. “See that space between your hands,” he tickled the inside of her palms and she giggled. “There’s a little pocket between the atoms now. That’s why ice is lighter than water.”

“I still don’t get it,” I said.

Matt dropped Deirdre’s hands. I was hoping he would take mine, but instead he made two peace signs with his fingers and held them up.

“Tricky Dick,” Deirdre said. She had a cartoon tacked to her wall of Nixon holding his fingers up in two V’s.

He lowered his fingers so they were pointing out, into the center of the circle we made inside the boat. “You can also think of it like this. Each water molecule is made up of three atoms—two hydrogen, one oxygen—so it’s like a triangle. When water is liquid, the molecules just lie on top of each other like this.” He lay one peace sign over another. “But at four degrees Celsius, the hydrogen molecules flip around because they want to touch.”

“Oooh,” Deirdre cooed. “Lezzie molecules.”

“Jesus, Deir,” Lucy said, “only you could make hydrogen bonding sexy.”

“Well, it is kind of sexy,” Matt admitted. “I mean it has to do with attraction. In a water molecule, the positively charged nuclei of these three atoms are stuck together by negatively charged electrons. But the oxygen atom is so greedy for the attention of electrons that it strips the two hydrogen atoms of their negative charge. That makes the hydrogen atoms attracted to other electrons, like the oxygen atom in another water molecule. That’s why water is liquid. When water freezes, the hydrogen bonds hold each molecule apart.”

Matt reached out both his arms and took my hand and Lucy’s. “You guys hold hands, too,” he said.

I saw Lucy reluctantly take Deirdre’s hand and Deirdre took my hand.

“Now hold your arms out straight.”

We had to shuffle around in the boat a little to make space so we could all hold our arms out straight. The boat rocked on the wooden floor of the icehouse. It was a good thing, I thought, that we weren’t doing this on the water.

“See how we take up more space now,” Matt said. “We’re ice.”

“My ass is ice,” Deirdre said. She released Lucy’s and my hands and stood up. The boat lurched toward her and then, when she stepped out of it, careened away from her. Lucy and I both fell against Matt. I felt Matt’s arm around me, steadying me.

“Hey, you broke the molecular bond,” Matt said.

“I always was a great ice breaker,” Deirdre said, shimmying her shoulders and hips. Even under a sweater and down jacket you could see her breasts swaying. I realized she hadn’t worn a bra. I looked at Matt and it seemed his gaze also rested on Deirdre at about chest level.

“I think that concludes the science portion of the evening,” Deirdre said. “And now for the sacred rite of the horned god. Got your antlers ready, Matt?”

Matt held up his fingers in V’s again, but this time he held them over Lucy’s head. “I always thought Lucy would make a good deer,” he said. “She’s about as brave as one.”

Lucy shook his hands away and got up out of the boat. She stood at the doorway of the hut and stretched her arms over her head. She was wearing a pale blue ski parka that glimmered against the cold black water. She was like a deer, I thought, leggy and lithe. I thought of a line from Book Four of the
Aeneid.
It’s when Dido realizes that Aeneas doesn’t love her anymore and he’s going to leave her.
“Qualis coniecta cerva sagitta,”
I recited, impressed at myself for remembering the Latin.

With her back to us, Lucy took up the passage, reciting it to the lake. As she spoke Deirdre moved next to her and held her arms up, too. I stayed in the boat with Matt. He had put his arm back around my shoulder.

“Quam procul incautam nemora inter Cresia fixit pastor agens telis liquitque volatile ferrum nescius: illa fuga silvas saltusque peragrat Dictaeos; haeret lateri letalis harundo,”
Lucy recited.

“Wow,” I said. “How’d you remember all that?”

Lucy shrugged. “It’s my favorite part.”

“Might an ordinary mortal ask for a translation?” Matt asked.

“Just as when a deer pierced by an arrow from some shepherd, who unknowing leaves in her the flying iron, wanders the woods and mountain glades with the deadly shaft still
clinging to her flesh,” I told him. I had left out a bunch of words, but that was the gist of it. “It’s like, even though she runs away the thing that’s going to kill her stays with her. She can’t escape her fate.” I was surprised to hear my own voice quiver. It had always gotten to me, the way Dido was doomed to kill herself from the moment she set eyes on Aeneas.

Matt squeezed my shoulder and I felt his lips brush the side of my face. “You’re a sweet kid, Jane,” he whispered in my ear, “but I think these two might rip me to shreds, so I better hightail it.”

He was gone before I knew it; only the sway of the empty boat and a damp spot on my cheek where his lips had brushed told me he’d been there a minute ago. Deirdre and Lucy ran after him. I could hear them, laughing and shrieking through the woods. I could have caught up with them, but instead I lay back in the boat and watched the moon move from behind a cloud. The rocky prow of the Point, as if awakened by the cascade of white light, seemed to glide toward me, silent as an iceberg in a still, black sea.

O
N THE NIGHT BEFORE
C
HRISTMAS BREAK
I
CAME BACK
to our room from dinner and found a corniculum tacked to the door. I was surprised because it was so cold, but Lucy said we couldn’t miss the solstice because it would be a propitious night for the first ice to form. It was a windless night and the full moon seemed unusually close and bright.

“It’s going down below zero tonight,” Deirdre said. “We could get frostbite. And besides, I feel awful.” Deirdre sneezed and blew her nose. She had gone to the infirmary that day and the nurse had excused her from her last final and said she should stay in bed until it was time to catch her train home.

“You don’t have to go if you don’t want to,” Lucy said. “How about it, Jane? Are you afraid of the cold?”

Truthfully, I didn’t relish the idea of going out in the cold. I felt like I was coming down with whatever Deirdre had. We’d stayed up late studying for finals all week. Deirdre had produced a white powder that she said was crystal methedrine. She showed Lucy and me how to snort it through a straw. It burned my nostrils and made me feel cold and brittle.

“I wouldn’t want to disappoint Matt,” I said. “I guess I’ll go. I’ll just put on some long underwear.”

Lucy turned to Deirdre, who was boiling water on her hot plate. When the water came to a boil she poured a little into a willow-patterned teapot and swished it around. Then she dumped the water out onto the window ledge. Because she had been doing this all winter unusual ice structures had formed.

“Oh well, we wouldn’t want to disappoint Mattie.” Deirdre knew Lucy hated it when she called him Mattie. “But I suggest we all have some tea before we go.” Deirdre opened several of her tins and put a pinch from each one into the teapot.

“Someday she’s going to poison us,” Lucy said to me.

“Or herself,” I suggested.

Deirdre smiled and filled the teapot with steaming water. “Only if I meant to,” she said. She tapped the lid of a small, red lacquer box. “I have some stuff that would put a person to sleep for a long winter’s nap.”

Deirdre poured out the tea into three china cups. She handed one to me and one to Lucy.

“But I would never do that to you guys,” she said. “I mean, you guys are the best friends I’ve ever had. One for all and all for one, right?
E Pluribus unum.”

Deirdre held up her steaming teacup and we all clinked cups together.

The tea actually made me feel better. It coursed through my veins like the warm currents that you sometimes swam through in the lake. I could imagine the glow in my blood staving off the winter chill. We waited that night until after the last bed check and then pulled jeans and sweaters over our long underwear. The hard part was holding on to the drainpipe when we climbed out the bathroom window. I had to take off my mittens to get a good grip and the metal was so cold that my clammy hands nearly stuck to it. Even after I put my mittens back on my skin felt raw. And not just the skin on my hands. The fire Deirdre’s tea had lit in my blood had turned into an icy trickle. My whole body felt flayed by the cold.

We followed the path around the west side of the lake. A few inches of new snow had fallen that evening so the path looked clean and bright in the moonlight; I felt like I could see each individual crystal. The path had narrowed between two low walls of snow so we couldn’t walk three abreast. Sometimes I walked behind Lucy and Deirdre and sometimes Deirdre would run forward on the path and Lucy and I were next to each other. I thought to myself that my mother really was wrong about threesomes, that the balance between us was always shifting, not set in stone. Sometimes, though, I missed how it was when it was still Lucy and Matt and I.

Just before we reached the end of the lake I heard a movement in the woods. I stopped to peer into the maze of pine trunks and the long shadows they cast on the white snow. I watched the shadow of a branch swaying in the wind and then realized that there was no wind. The branched shape suddenly detached itself from the shadows and moved away from me, flitting over the white surface of the snow.

I turned back to the path to find Deirdre and Lucy but they had walked on without me. They must have rounded the end of the lake because they were nowhere in sight along the path. When I turned back to the woods the branched shape had vanished. I figured it must have been a deer. Nothing else could move so swiftly and silently.

Or else Deirdre really had added something to the tea and I was hallucinating.

The thought was terrifying. Had Deirdre drugged me and then somehow gotten Lucy to go along with abandoning me in the woods? What might I see next? I turned around quickly and my eyes caught a movement in the trees—a glitter like fireflies drifting through the pine needles. Only it was the dead of winter; there were no fireflies.

When I rounded the end of the lake I thought that must be it—I was hallucinating—because standing on the path with Deirdre and Lucy were three hooded figures.

Deirdre detached herself from the group and came skipping toward me. She grabbed my hand and pulled me over to one of the hooded figures. She was babbling something in my ear that I found difficult to make out. There were too many things wrong here for me to sort out: too many people and it should have been Lucy, not Deirdre, taking my hand and making sure I was included.

One of the hooded boys—they were just boys, I realized now, all three of them wearing hooded sweatshirts beneath their down parkas—nodded gruffly to me and I realized I had missed hearing his name. I noticed, though, that he had the same square jaw and ruddy complexion as Matt, even the same height and build, and it occurred to me that he must be the cousin from downstate I was always hearing about. I understood then why Deirdre was so anxious to pair me up with him. Deirdre the matchmaker. He wouldn’t do for Lucy because he was Lucy’s cousin.

I turned to the other three on the path: Lucy, Matt, and Ward Castle. Jesus, I thought, whatever possessed Matt to bring Ward Castle? Lucy had barely endured his insults throughout ninth-grade Latin. His favorite epithet for her was “Loose Toe-Hair.” She called him “Wart.”

“Hey, hey, hey, my darling Clementine,” he warbled to me. “How’s it hanging?”

Behind Ward I saw Matt wince. “You remember Ward Castle,” Matt said to me. “Ward’s my lab partner this year. He said he wanted to see the lake freeze.”

“Yeah, I’m here for the chemistry lesson,” Ward said.

Had Matt really believed Ward was interested in seeing the lake freeze? For the first time it occurred to me that Matt could be too trusting.

“Oh, we’ll be experimenting with an assortment of chemicals.” Deirdre had somehow worked her way around Matt’s cousin and Ward and repositioned herself next to Matt. She lit a joint and passed it to Matt. “Shall we start with some cannabis before the sacred rites begin?”

“Sacred rites?” Ward asked. “Like sacrificing a virgin?” Ward put his arm around Lucy and pulled her to him. The night was so still I could hear the rustle their down coats made rubbing against each other. Lucy’s head barely reached his armpit. She smiled up at him sweetly.