The Lake of Dead Languages (28 page)

As I walked along our hall I stripped off my coat and scarf. How had Deirdre and Lucy been able to stand it? It was like a sauna in here. When I put my hand on our doorknob it was warm to the touch.

I heard, again, the sound of crying as I opened the door. On the bed under the window—Lucy’s bed—someone was lying under the covers with her back to the door. I thought it was Lucy and that she must have been the one who was crying, but as I crossed the room I heard the sound again, and another sound, like metal scraping metal. I turned in that direction just as the door to the single opened and saw in the doorway, not Deirdre as I expected, but Lucy.

She was wearing a red flannel shirt—Matt’s, I thought—that was so big on her that when she held up her arms and put a hand on either side of the doorjamb, the shirt covered the whole doorway. If she hadn’t been so short she would have blocked my view of the single. I could see, though, over her head, but I couldn’t see why she was trying to block my view. Then we both took a step forward at the same time and nearly collided.

“Jane,” she said, “what are you doing back?”

“My mother died,” I said, as if that explained everything. I was looking at Deirdre’s single, trying to figure out what was different about it, but the only thing I could see that was different was that she had gotten a new bedspread. A red bedspread. I didn’t even notice that Lucy wasn’t saying the things she should have been saying, like “I’m so sorry” or “How terrible.” I took another step toward the room so that I was on the threshold and realized that what I was looking at wasn’t a red bedspread. It was a sheet soaked in blood.

I looked at Lucy and then at the body under the covers on Lucy’s bed.

“She’s asleep,” Lucy whispered. She took my hand in her small hand and pulled me into the single. She had to pull quite hard because I didn’t want to go in there. I’d forgotten what a strong grip she had.

She closed the door behind us.

I stood over the bed and noticed that the blood had soaked through the mattress.

“She tried to kill herself?” I asked.

Lucy looked up at me for a moment and then shook her head. “Yes, it’s Deirdre’s blood,” she said, “but she didn’t try to kill herself. She was pregnant. She had a baby.”

“Deirdre was pregnant? How could that be?”

“You remember last year, the nights we spent out at the lake, and May Day. I think it was May Day because she didn’t go out all those weeks it rained and I think the baby was early, it was so small …”

I grabbed her arm and shook it. I noticed how thin her arm felt under the big shirt. “She had the baby
here?”
I said, her words finally sinking in.
“Alone?”

Lucy looked offended. “I was here,” she said, “I stayed with her all night.”

“Why didn’t you go to the infirmary?”

“She begged me not to. She said they would definitely throw her out and put her in a reform school this time. What could I do, Jane? And then it came so quick. I think because it was so small …”

It was the second time she had mentioned the baby’s size, but small or not it surely wasn’t invisible.

“Where …?”

Lucy looked over at Deirdre’s bureau and I followed her gaze to the large metal tea tin, the one decorated with golden mountains that Deirdre used to store her pot.

“It wasn’t breathing,” she said. “It was born dead.”

My knees felt suddenly watery as if the tendons holding them together had just melted. I brushed my hand against my face and it came back wet. The one window in the single was opaque with water condensation. I walked over to the window and wrenched it open. I leaned out the window and threw up onto the ledge.

Lucy came up behind me and put a cool hand on my forehead. She held my hair back until I had finished throwing up and then sat me down on the inside ledge. She held me by the shoulders until I stopped shaking.

“Fuck, Lucy, we’ve got to tell someone.”

She shook her head. “They’ll throw her out for sure. What good will it do?”

“But what if she’s still bleeding.” I looked at Deirdre’s bed. Could a person lose that much blood and be all right?

“I gave her a sanitary napkin and it seemed like most of the bleeding stopped an hour ago. I think she’ll be all right.”

“But what are we going to do about that?” I pointed at the tea tin. “We can’t just leave it there.”

“Of course not,” Lucy said reasonably. “I’ve been thinking about it all morning. The ground’s too frozen to bury it …” For some reason I thought of my mother’s body lying in a funeral home’s refrigerator in Albany, waiting for the spring thaw. I tasted bile in my throat and would have thrown up again if Lucy hadn’t placed two cool hands on either side of my face. Looking into those blue eyes of hers I suddenly felt calmer.

“You understand why we have to take care of this, Jane? It’s not just for Deirdre, it’s for Matt, too.”

“But he wasn’t with her on May Day,” I said.

“He was the only one caught that morning and Deirdre will say it was him. Remember how she caved in on the wine flask. It will ruin Matt’s life forever.”

“But if the ground’s frozen …”

“But the lake’s not,” she said, “we can sink it in the lake.”

W
E
’
LL HAVE TO TAKE THE BOAT
,”
LUCY SAID AS WE
were leaving the dorm. “It’s the only way we can be sure it sinks deep enough.”

“It” was the way Lucy referred to the thing in the tea tin. She had placed the tin in her gym bag and carried it, not by the handles, but cradled upright in her arms—the way a person would carry a cake in a box.

Before we left the room I checked on Deirdre. She was sleeping soundly, her lips moist and parted, her cheeks pink in the overheated room. She didn’t look like a person bleeding to death, but like someone drugged.

“I gave her some of that tea she’s always saying is such a good sleep potion,” Lucy told me. I noticed the red lacquer box lying empty beside the bed. “She’ll be OK.”

When we left the dorm I turned onto the path but Lucy steered me into the woods. “We can’t risk taking the path,” she said. “We might run into someone.”

The campus felt deserted. I knew that some teachers stayed on over break. Miss Buehl, for instance, tended her lab experiments and followed animal tracks in the snowy woods. There was a groundskeeper and Mrs. Ames, but I imagined that the workers from the town, like my taxi driver,
would have gone home by now rather than risk getting caught out here in the storm.

Lucy’s footpath through the woods was so narrow we had to walk single file. At first I kept my eyes on her back, on her pale blue snow parka, but my gaze kept drifting to the navy blue gym bag that she cradled over her right hip. Although I couldn’t see it in the bag I kept picturing the tin. The gold mountains under a blue sky. A green lake in the foreground.

I turned my eyes to the path. It had been trod into the snow over many weeks and then frozen into a knee-deep crevasse—a miniature of the ones in the film strip on glaciers Miss Buehl showed us. I thought of the weeks it took Lucy to make the path and wondered if it would be filled in by the approaching storm.

We came out at the south tip of the lake, not far from the Schwanenkill. When I looked up I noticed for the first time that there was a thin sheet of ice covering the lake.

“Damn, it must have frozen just last night,” Lucy said, more to herself than to me. She shifted the gym bag to her left hip and eased herself down the bank. She swayed in the deep, untrodden snow and I thought that I should offer to hold the gym bag, but I didn’t.

Lucy stretched one leg down to the lake’s surface and tapped it with her booted toe. A splintering sound echoed across the lake.

“How thick is it?” I called and heard my words echo hollowly. I looked up at the sky and saw that the ominous green clouds hung low over the lake like a shallow dome. I felt as if Lucy and I were being pressed between the sky and snow-covered ground, like autumn leaves ironed between two sheets of waxed paper.

“Not very,” Lucy said coming back up the bank. “It’s thinnest where the Schwanenkill flows out of the lake. I think we can break the ice with the boat oars.”

First we had to cross the stream, which was only partially frozen. Lucy, usually so surefooted, seemed unbalanced by
the weight she was carrying on her hip. I pictured her falling and dropping the bag and the tin snapping open.

“Here,” I said, crossing the stream ahead of her, “take my hand.” I planted one foot in the middle of the stream and felt the icy water creeping through the soles of my boots. I noticed when I took her hand that Lucy was shaking.

We made it to the icehouse only to find that the door was locked.

“The extension agent must have locked it after she saw Matt here on May Day,” Lucy said. We hadn’t used the icehouse this winter. “But I doubt she could have locked the doors on the lake side because they don’t close completely. We’ll have to go around.”

I looked at Lucy and noticed how pale she was; her skin had a greenish cast to it, as green as the snow-laden sky. After all, she had been up all night with Deirdre and the shock of witnessing that birth—a stillbirth, no less—was no doubt beginning to tell on her. I was suddenly filled with hatred for Deirdre. Why should we have to clean up her mess? But then I remembered that we were doing it for Matt, too.

“I’ll go,” I said. “You stay here and rest on this rock.”

Lucy nodded and sat down on a large flat rock. She hugged the gym bag to her chest and closed her eyes.

I went down to the edge of the lake and studied the narrow ledge of mud and ice that ran in back of the icehouse. I noticed that one of the doors was wedged partially open—just as it had been on the night I’d approached it from the ice.

I came back around and called to Lucy. “This door is open.” I heard “open” echo across the lake. “But the front door is probably padlocked so I’ll have to get the boat out onto the water and bring it to shore.”

I half expected Lucy to object. I wasn’t really sure I’d be able to get the boat out by myself. But she only nodded and lay back on the rock, one hand resting on the gym bag by her side.

I made my way along the icy edge of the lake, one hand on
the wall of the icehouse. Both my feet were soaked by the time I reached the open door and pulled myself into the small hut. I was relieved to see that the rowboat was still there, with both its oars lying in the shallow hull. The prow of the boat was facing the lake.

I opened both doors and then went to the rear of the boat, took a deep breath, and pushed. At first nothing happened, but then I heard a scraping noise as the boat inched forward on the wooden floor. I crouched down and put my shoulder to the stern and pushed again. The scraping sound changed to a crash that was so loud in the echoing silence of the lake that I was sure someone from the school must have heard it. I looked across the lake toward the cliff wall of the Point and for a moment thought I saw a figure standing on the rock. I thought of Miss Buehl in her cottage just beyond the Point. But then the figure vanished and I couldn’t be sure if I’d imagined it or not.

I looked down and saw that the boat was drifting out into the lake.

I lunged after it, caught the rear, and pulled it back to the shore. My jeans were now soaked up to my knees, so I figured I might as well wade through the water, guiding the boat with me until I’d gotten it past the icehouse. By the time I’d pulled it halfway up onto the shore I couldn’t feel my toes anymore. I trudged up the bank, the wet sucking sound my boots made somehow familiar. I paused and saw in my mind my mother’s hospital room and heard the wet gurgle of the pump that cleared her lungs of fluid. I felt suddenly, of all things, immeasurably sleepy and I think that if I had been alone I would have lain down in the soft snow and taken a nap under that pillowy green-gray sky.

But from where I was I could see Lucy lying on the rock and the navy blue gym bag lying beside her. I shook myself awake and approached her. She didn’t move at my approach even though the sound my boots made scraping through the crusted snow seemed unbearably loud to me. I looked down
at her and saw that she had fallen asleep. Again I was startled by how pale she looked, her eyelids and lips blue in the cold, shimmering air. I shook her arm and her eyes snapped open.

“I’ve got the boat,” I said.

She looked at me as if she didn’t know what I was talking about, but then she noticed the gym bag and nodded her head. She got up slowly, swayed unsteadily, and sat back on the rock.

“We need some rocks,” she said.

It was my turn to look at her uncomprehendingly.

“To weigh it down,” she explained, gesturing toward the bag.

I looked around but of course any rocks that might have been there were two feet under the snow.

“In the stream,” she said. “There are always rocks at the bottom of the Schwanenkill.”

I turned back to the stream, expecting her to follow me, but she stayed seated on the rock. At the stream’s edge I knelt in the snow and took my gloves off. I reached into the middle of the stream, I was into it up to my elbow before my fingers grazed the bottom. I felt frozen mud and something hard and round. I pulled up a smooth, round rock about the size of my fist and laid it on the stream bank. When I’d found about a dozen rocks I stuffed them into my pockets and went back to Lucy.

I emptied the rocks onto the flat rock next to where she sat and she nodded.

“That’ll do it,” she said. Then she slid the tea tin out of the gym bag and opened the lid.

Inside there was a tiny white baby about the size of a small cat. Its skin was nearly translucent, gleaming blue and pink like an opal. Its eyelashes and the light hair on its scalp were sandy red. Lucy picked up a rock and wiped the mud off on her jeans. Clean and dry the rocks were a beautiful greenish bluish gray—the color hazel eyes were sometimes. Lucy arranged them around the baby as if she were packing
eggshells in tissue paper. Then she took out a white cloth from her pocket, shook it out, and smoothed it over the baby. It was one of the linen napkins from the dining room, stitched with a heart and the school’s motto:
Cor te reducit.
The heart takes you back. Not a bad requiem for the little thing about to be buried in the lake. Then she closed the lid and fastened the metal catch.