The Lake of Dead Languages (21 page)

“Yes,” she said, “we’re going to sacrifice a virgin. A boy virgin. Any volunteers?”

I could see in the bright moonlight Ward turn as white as the snow.

“Hey, it’s a little cold out here for that stuff,” he said. “I thought you said you had a place.”

Matt jerked his chin in the direction the path led. “Yeah, it’s up here. We just have to cross the stream.” He turned and we followed.

We walked in twos now: Matt and Deirdre, Lucy and Ward, me and the nameless cousin, who seemed mute as well as nameless. He’s probably mortified to be paired with me, I thought. No doubt he had been taken with Deirdre before I showed up on the path. That was why Deirdre had been so anxious to pair us off, because if she got stuck with the cousin, I’d get Matt. And I knew that was the last thing she wanted.

The Schwanenkill was nearly frozen, but when I was halfway across it my foot broke through the ice. I would have fallen if the cousin hadn’t grabbed my elbow and steadied me. It was tricky, too, getting up the opposite side. He scrambled up the bank deftly, with more grace than you’d expect from a boy his size.

He’s probably terrified of ending up alone with me, I thought, as I struggled up the slippery bank. I’d taken my mittens off so I could grab tree branches to pull myself up, but my hands were still sore from climbing down the drainpipe and I couldn’t get a grip. My throat felt raw, whether from cold or holding back tears I wasn’t sure. I looked up, expecting the cousin to be well on his way to the icehouse, but instead he was standing at the top of the bank, his feet angled
into the snowy slope for purchase, his arm stretched out toward me. I took his hand and was surprised to feel warm skin. He’d even taken his glove off to grip my hand better.

“Thanks,” I said when he’d pulled me to the top of the bank.

He shrugged and mumbled something. God, he was even clumsier and shier than I, I thought, but before he let go of my hand I felt his broad thumb stroke the inside of my wrist and the movement sent a warm electrical current through the core of my body, reigniting the warmth that had started that night in Deirdre’s tea.

We got to the icehouse, but the door was shut. I reached for the handle, but he stopped me.

“Uh, maybe they want some privacy,” he said.

“The four of them?” I asked incredulously.

He turned his head up the path and I saw two figures just disappearing over a rise. From the disparity in their heights I guessed it was Lucy and Ward. That left Matt and Deirdre in the icehouse. And it left me and the cousin out here in the cold.

“Where do you think they’re going?” I asked.

“Lucy said something earlier about sneaking back into the dorm. You two share a room?”

I nodded. I couldn’t imagine Lucy and Ward together, but then a lot of things had happened this night that I hadn’t been able to imagine. The cousin rubbed his hands together and blew into them to warm his face.

“I guess you’d like to get inside,” I said. “There’s a supply shed on the lower school playground …”

“You know, I’d like to see if Mattie’s right about the ice. I’ve lived near frozen ponds all my life, but I can’t say I’ve ever been there when the ice formed.”

I looked at the lake. It was black and still, but as far as I could tell, unfrozen.

“We could go to the swimming beach,” I said. “The boat-house is locked, but there’s a place in the rocks that’s almost
like a little cave. At least it would be sheltered, and we can see the lake from there.”

“Sounds good,” he said.

We walked the rest of the way in silence, but it didn’t feel like an uncomfortable silence now. Once I thought I saw something moving in the woods and I was glad I wasn’t alone. I was glad, too, when we got to the top of the swimming beach steps that I didn’t have to warn him to be quiet so Miss Buehl wouldn’t hear us from her house. I led the way down the steps and showed him the hollow in the cliff wall behind the second sister stone. Part of the cave was under water, but there was a raised ledge along the cliff wall you could follow to get inside and then there was a flat rock above the water where two people could sit. It was out of the wind, but as soon as we sat down I started to shiver.

“Do you think we could make a little fire without attracting attention?” he asked.

“We can’t be seen from the mansion or the dorms here,” I told him. “And Miss Buehl is probably fast asleep.”

We gathered some branches and pinecones from the beach and banked them against the cliff wall. He took out a wooden match and lit it by striking his fingernail against its sulfur tip. Then we sat with our backs against the cliff and watched the lake. When he saw I was still shivering he put his arm around me and I put my head against his chest and closed my eyes.

I must have fallen asleep because when I opened my eyes the fire was out. I looked at the boy next to me and in the shadow of the cliff it could have been Matt. I slipped my hand out of my mitten and with the backs of my fingers I stroked the side of his face, along the jawbone, just under his ear. He stirred at my touch and moved into the light that angled into the cave. In the dim gray light of dawn I saw that this wasn’t Matt, and wouldn’t ever be.

I became aware of a numbness spreading through my legs and I got up to get my blood moving. From the east, where the sun was rising, a flock of Canada geese were moving
through the sky. I watched them land on the lake and, instead of skidding into the water, stand on its surface. I moved closer to the edge of the cave and saw that a thin layer of ice covered the water. I hugged myself against the cold and against the sense that I had missed something.

A
FTER
C
HRISTMAS BREAK
M
ATT AND
L
UCY
’
S COUSIN
went back home. The three of them had come looking for me on New Year’s Day to take me skating, but my mother had turned them away at the door, saying I had chores to attend to, so I never did see the cousin again. I was disappointed, at first, that I didn’t get a chance to say good-bye to him, but then, remembering that moment at dawn when I’d touched his face, I was relieved. I knew I’d be embarassed every time I saw him, even if he had been asleep.

By the time school started again the lake ice measured a good three inches. By all rights, we should have disbanded the first ice club. But we didn’t. When the ice was thick enough Matt suggested we turn the first ice club into a skating club. Deirdre was none too happy about this development because she didn’t know how to skate.

“You don’t have to come,” I told her, sharpening my blades. I still had the skates Lucy had given me. I’d changed from thick socks to thin in order to get into them this year. I hoped that my feet had stopped growing.

“Oh, is that right, Clementine? You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

I’d noticed that Deirdre was a little on edge since Christmas break. She’d spent it with an aunt in Philadelphia because
her parents hadn’t been able to leave their new post in Kuala Lumpur. Her aunt had told her, though, that she’d have to spend spring break on campus and she’d been enrolled in a boarding school in Massachusetts for the summer. I think that the sense of being shuttled between institutions and apathetic relatives was beginning to get to her. The only person she seemed sympathetic to those days was, oddly, “Lucy’s little shadow” as she called Albie, the lower school girl who still dogged our steps around the campus.

“I thought she gave you the creeps,” I whispered to Deirdre one day when I came back to our room and found her helping Albie with her Latin homework. I didn’t think she could hear me—the girl was in Deirdre’s single; Deirdre had come out to borrow Lucy’s Latin dictionary—but she looked up at the two of us and I realized it probably was obvious that we were talking about her.

“Hey, Albie,” I called. “So, you’re in Latin now.
Salve!”
The girl looked at me for a long moment and then looked down at her book without answering. There was something about her appearance that struck me as strange, stranger even than usual, and then I realized what it was: She was dressed all in white, a white blouse and a white pleated tennis skirt.

“Why is she wearing all white?” I scribbled on a page in my journal, which I showed to Deirdre.

“It’s Miss Macintosh’s influence,” Deirdre wrote back. “She told the girls about Emily Dickinson always wearing white.”

“Don’t you think that’s weird?” I wrote.

Deirdre shrugged and went back to Albie, shutting the door of the single behind her. Later, Deirdre complained to Lucy that I’d made Albie feel uncomfortable.

“Uncomfortable? How do you think she makes me feel—she looks like a ghost and won’t even talk to me?”

“I wish you girls would quit bitching at each other,” Lucy snapped. Deirdre and I both looked up in surprise, more at Lucy’s choice of words than her tone.

“Lucy, dear,” Deirdre cooed, “what have you been picking up from Ward Castle? Nothing contagious, I hope.”

Lucy flung her skate down on the floor. The serrated tip of the blade gouged a deep scratch into the wood floor.

“We don’t all give out on the first date, Deir.” Lucy grabbed her parka and stormed out of the room. I grabbed mine and followed her without looking back at Deirdre.

I found her on the path in front of the dorm, stalled in the crossroads between three paths. There was the path that led to the lower school, the one that led to the mansion, and the one that led to the lake. They had each grown a good foot narrower since Christmas break. It was hard now to walk even two abreast.

Lucy kicked at the thigh-high wall of snow. I put my hand on her arm, but she shook it off and suddenly, like a deer bolting from cover, she vaulted the snow mound into the woods. Half her leg disappeared into the snow but, miraculously, she kept on moving, surging out of each deep hole like a swimmer doing the butterfly stroke.

I clambered over the snow wall and tried to follow her, staying in her deep footsteps. I couldn’t keep up with her though. By the time her trail led me to the lake she was gone—I couldn’t tell which way. I looked out over the lake, looking for breaks in the ice, but there were none. I stood at the shore, listening to the sounds the ice made. The new ice made a skittering noise, as if a thousand mice were scurrying just below its surface. It made me nervous. I felt like something was crawling up my legs. I spun around and caught a glimpse of the girl Albie just ducking behind a tree.

“Hey,” I called, “have you seen Lucy out here?”

I saw half a face appear from behind a pine tree. One icy blue eye stared at me.

I took a step toward her, slowly, the way you’d approach a wild animal.

“Hey,” I said again. It was the way I’d talk to a scared animal.
“You know me; I’m Lucy’s roommate. I’m looking for her.”

The girl didn’t move, but I had the sense she’d spring away if I moved an inch closer.

“You like Lucy, don’t you?” I said. “I like her, too. I’m just trying to help her.”

The blue eye narrowed, the way a cat’s eye half closes when it’s about to pounce.

“No, you’re not.” Her voice was surprisingly clear and strident in the cold air. It sounded like the scratching sounds on the ice behind me. “You just like her brother.”

“I think you’re confusing me with our other roommate, Deirdre.”

Albie smiled. “Yes, she likes him, too.”

“You certainly notice a lot.” I thought about what Deirdre had said about her, how she’d grown up in boarding schools and had no real family. Although I had a family it didn’t always feel that way. Since I’d come to Heart Lake my parents had seemed like distant strangers. My father, I think, was shy of the manners and clothes I’d acquired here; my mother, who I’d thought would be pleased that I was moving up in society, seemed disappointed I hadn’t made any friends other than Lucy and Deirdre. It occurred to me that Albie and I had something in common. She was the kind of girl I should be reaching out to, the way that Lucy had reached out to me back in ninth grade.

“I bet you know a lot of stuff about the girls here,” I said. I only meant to draw her out, but I saw right away that she’d taken it the wrong way.

“Yes,” she said, “but I’m not telling
you.”
She practically spat the last word.

“Hey.” I moved a step forward, “I didn’t mean …”

I heard a crack behind me and turned back to the lake. For a moment I thought I saw a hole in the ice, but then the clouds moved and I saw it was only a shadow. When I looked back Albie was gone. She’d disappeared as quickly as the
shadow that I had seen on the night of the solstice, and I wondered if it could have been Albie then. But the girl was only eleven or twelve. Surely she wasn’t running around the campus alone at night.

I made my way back to the dorm, sticking to the paths this time. When I got back to the room I found Deirdre and Lucy sharing a pot of tea and trying on skates.

“Hey, Jane,” Lucy said as I came in. “What do you know, my old skates fit Deirdre, too.”

A
S THE ICE THICKENED THE SOUNDS IT MADE CHANGED,
from a nervous skittering to a low-pitched moan I could hear even in my room. I listened to it, alone, on the nights Deirdre and Matt and Lucy and Ward went skating on the lake. It sounded to me like a woman keening and for some reason it made me think of India Crevecoeur and the daughter she had lost. I knew by then that it had been only the one daughter—Iris, for whom my scholarship had been named—who died in the influenza epidemic, but still the groans and wails the lake made could have been the sound of a legion of mothers grieving for a legion of daughters.

Deirdre was only interested in using the skates at night, so I was free to take them during the day. I felt squeamish sliding my feet into them, the way I felt putting on bowling shoes or stepping into the thick cotton swimsuits issued by the school. I’d never minded when I knew Lucy had worn them first. Now, though, I could feel how Deirdre’s wide ankles had stretched out the uppers and I imagined the rough leather liner was darker with her sweat. I wore heavy socks again and pulled the laces so tight I broke two pairs and had to knot them together again.