The Lake of Dead Languages (47 page)

When I drop the sweater back to the chair a moth flutters out of its folds and beats itself against the lamp. I slowly turn in a circle, taking in the whole room. Matt’s hockey stick is propped against the bookshelf where Wheelock’s Latin leans against Peterson’s
Field Guide to Birds.
Matt’s collection of Hardy Boys on the top shelf. Lucy’s Nancy Drews on the middle. Over Matt’s bed hangs a pennant for Dartmouth College. I’d forgotten that’s where Matt wanted to go to college. He said he liked that it was founded by an Indian.

I look back at the desk and notice a few sheets of stationery with “Exeter” printed on top. The letters from Brian. There, too, are a supply of hairpins. A piece of lined paper, its edges ragged where it was ripped out of its stitched binding, lies under a smooth gray-green rock. I lift the rock and see there’s only one line written on the top of the page. It’s
the last page from my journal. The last line I wrote before going down to the lake to find Matt.
I won’t let anyone stand in my way,
I’d written,
not even Lucy.

As I put the stone down I hear a sound from the back of the house. There’s no window facing the back in the attic, so I run down the stairs, through the dark house, thankful there’s no furniture to bump into. I unlatch the back door and step into the fog. I can’t see more than a few feet in front of me and when I try to listen all I can hear is the drip of melting snow and the rush of moving water somewhere in the woods. It must be the Schwanenkill, thawed out, flowing out of Heart Lake. Then I look down at my feet and see that I’m standing in a narrow groove, a footpath carved out of the snow, just wide enough for one. And something gleaming in the wet snow. I bend down and pick it up. It’s a tiny silver skull earring. A macabre thing, but I recognize it as Athena’s. It’s impossible, in this fog, to see where the path goes, but I’m already following it into the woods.

A
T FIRST THE PATH RUNS PARALLEL TO THE
S
CHWANEN
kill. I know, not because I can see the stream but because I can hear it—a faint watery whisper like the murmuring of an unseen companion passing through the woods beside me. Then it veers abruptly left and plunges into the deep, fog-white woods.

It’s like entering a white tunnel. On either side the snow rises steeply and where the snow leaves off the white fog rises, like a curtain being lifted from the ground to shield … shield what? I’m reminded of a slide Tacy Beade showed us in her ancient art lecture of two handmaidens holding up a draped cloth to shield the goddess at her bath. The face I see staring out behind the curtain now is the wide-eyed frightened face of a lost child. The awkward little girl we called Albie who used to follow us through the woods. The little girl who’s turned the game around and become the leader instead of the follower.

The path loops around tree trunks and meanders through the forest. When I come to the first branch I don’t know which way to go and stare hopelessly into the white mist. Then in the stillness of the woods I hear a faint chiming. At first I think I’m imagining it—a tinny bell that might be the ringing of my own blood in my ears—but when I follow the sound to the left branch of the trail I catch the faint glimmer
of metal swinging from an overhanging branch. Three hairpins linked in the shape of a horned animal dangling among the pine needles. I take that trail and from then on, at every divergence, I look for the corniculum like a trail blaze and follow it. I’ve soon lost any sense of direction or time. The convolutions of the trail seem to grow tighter and more erratic, folding back on themselves like a Mobius strip, until I feel as though I am no longer following a path through the woods but a train of thought in some addled brain. But whose addled brain? Because even though I know it’s Albie’s path I’m following, I feel as if I’m traveling into my own past, taking the same path I took that night twenty years ago when I went down to the lake to meet Matt at the icehouse.

W
HEN
I
LEFT THE DORM
I
GRABBED A JACKET ONLY HALF
noticing that it was Lucy’s pale blue parka instead of mine. I was halfway down the hall before I remembered that I had left the corniculum on the door. Should I go back and take it down? If I left it on the door, Lucy would no doubt come along to the icehouse when she got back. Then I wouldn’t be alone with Matt. I thought of going back, but I felt too impatient, too anxious to be out, breathing the wet, sweet air. I was already past the matron’s desk (I told her I’d left a book in the dining hall); I was already on the path heading around the west side of the lake.

Outside the night was even more stirring than it had promised to be. The wind moved through the trees spraying pinescented water across my face. The lake was still coated with a white layer of ice but its surface was dull and I could hear the water moving restlessly beneath the surface as if trying to break free. Patches of ice, gritty and opaque, still littered the path. When I stepped on them pale air bubbles raced beneath my feet. All around me, the melting snow rose in a pure white mist, like a linen cloth pulled away to reveal some magical transformation: paper flowers, the flutter of pale
wings. I kept looking into the woods, expecting something to show itself behind the shredded wisps of fog, but although I heard, once or twice, the snap of a branch or a watery sigh, I saw no one and I dismissed my sense of being followed to my imagination. I thought about Matt waiting at the icehouse and the thought that I was going to be with him soon moved through my body like the wind moving through the pine trees.

S
HE MUST HAVE BEEN WATCHING ME THAT NIGHT, JUST AS
she’s watching me now. When I have wandered in enough circles to wear myself out will she pounce on me from behind the white fog? Or will she merely leave me in the woods to freeze to death while she makes away with Athena? The thought of Athena sharpens my wits for a moment. What does she have in mind for her? I am beginning to understand why Dr. Lockhart hates me. As she sees it, I killed her two best friends and caused her favorite teacher to lose her job and ultimately kill herself. She spent the rest of her school days in a rigid, loveless place. She must have felt she was in exile. How Heart Lake and the memory of Lucy and
Domina
Chambers must have grown in her mind. It must have infuriated her to see me come back here and take
Domina
Chambers’s place.
Think of Helen Chambers when you’re dealing with your students,
she said to me at that first meeting. And from that moment on my life has been a replica of what happened to Helen Chambers. That is the punishment she devised for me.

I stop for a moment on the path and stare into the impenetrable fog. I hear, again, the whisper of water on the wind and together with the fog it reminds me of that last night I went down to the icehouse to meet Matt. I think about that last meeting and try to see it through Albie’s eyes.

A
S
I
ROUNDED THE END OF THE LAKE,
I
SAW THAT THERE WAS
a light coming from the icehouse. I crossed the Schwanenkill
carelessly, crashing through the thin ice in the middle. He must have heard me, because as I struggled up the bank I saw him above me, reaching out his arm to give me a hand up. I took off my mitten so I could feel the warmth of his flesh right away.

“I knew you’d come,” he said, pulling me up the bank. His voice sounded hoarser and deeper than I remembered. He pushed back the hood of my parka and touched my face.

“Jane!” he said. I couldn’t tell if it were surprise or excitement that I heard in his voice. And then I saw the unmistakable look of disappointment in his face and I knew.

“Where’s Lucy?” he said. “Why didn’t she come?”

I stared at him and tried to keep the tears from coming. After all, just because he’d expected his sister didn’t mean he didn’t want to see me as well.

“She was with
Domina
Chambers so I came first. I left the corniculum on the door, though, so she’ll be here soon.” I was glad, now, that I had left it. “I thought… well, I thought, you might want to see me, too.”

Matthew sighed and put his arm around my shoulder.

“Of course I want to see you, too. Good old Jane. It’s just that I’m worried about Lucy. I heard about what happened at Christmas and then about what happened to poor Deirdre. And then Lucy sent me a very confusing letter …”

“She told you about what happened at Christmas?”

“Well, I heard from my parents that she tried to kill herself. At first I just couldn’t believe it, and then I thought I might understand why …”

“But didn’t she write and say she didn’t really mean to kill herself?”

“Yes, but don’t people always say that after they’ve tried and failed? That they didn’t really mean it? She did cut herself, didn’t she? I can’t stand the idea of her hurting herself especially when it’s probably all my fault.”

I saw the look of pain on his face and I thought to myself,
well, at least I have the power to do something for him. “She didn’t try to kill herself at all, Mattie, it was all a sham.”

“A sham?”

“Yes, it was a cover-up. For Deirdre. Not that she appreciated it, although I guess I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead.”

“What are you talking about, Jane?”

“Look, let’s go inside the icehouse and sit down. I’ll explain everything.”

T
HE PATH,
I
NOTICE, IS BEGINNING TO SLOPE DOWNWARD.
At one point it becomes so steep I have to hold on to branches to keep from sliding down the icy chute. I hear a soft moaning sound and I strain to hear if it’s Athena.
It’s me you want,
I say to myself, over and over. And then I call it out. “Albie, it’s me you want for letting Lucy die, not Athena.”

My own words come back in an echo as if they’ve bounced off a rock wall. And then I see why. I’ve come to the end of the path and it ends in sheer ice. I’m at the edge of the lake, on the southern tip, not far from the icehouse. Directly across from the rock wall of the Point. I could have gotten here in fifteen minutes from the Toller house if I’d followed the Schwanenkill instead of following the crazy meandering of Albie’s path. She’s worn me out and given herself more time and gotten me just where she wants me.

I hear again the sound of bells, louder than the tinny chime of the cornicula, and when I look up I see, hanging like Damocles’ sword, twin silver blades. I step out from under them and see that they’re skates hanging from a branch by their knotted laces. An index card has been threaded through the laces and on it, in childish scrawl, is written “Lucy’s Skates,” only the name Lucy has been exxed out and under it there’s my name, crossed out as well, then Deirdre’s name, crossed out, and then, finally, my name again. Jane’s skates, it is then. I take them down and, as I’m meant to, put them on.

They’re a little tight (it’s a good thing I’m wearing thin stockings), but otherwise they fit well, and, I notice as I stroke
out over the slick ice, the blades have recently been sharpened. As tired as I am I seem to be skimming over the surface of the lake effortlessly. I even do a little spin and land looking back at the icehouse, at the doors left open from the recent ice harvest, creaking in the wash from the channel that’s been carved out of the ice. Is that where Albie hid that night, behind the doors? If she had, she would have heard everything I said to Matt.

H
E
’
D LEFT HIS FLASHLIGHT ON THE LEDGE; THAT WAS THE
light I’d seen coming from the icehouse. We sat down in the boat and leaned against the stern, next to each other so we could both look at the lake. I remembered the last time I had looked out these doors onto the lake. It was when Lucy and I were putting back the boat. The blizzard had started and the air was so full of snow it had blotted out the lake. Now the air was white from that same snow evaporating back into the sky. I liked the idea of the snow returning to the sky; it was the past rewritten with all its mistakes rubbed clean.

While I talked Matt bowed his head so that I couldn’t see his face. I told him everything that had happened the day I came back from Albany, from the moment I walked into the dorm room to the last glimpse I had of the tea tin sinking into the black water. When I finished he asked one question.

“Whose baby was it?”

“Lucy thought it was Ward’s because that’s who Deirdre was with on May Day.”

Matt lifted his head, but he didn’t look at me. His eyes were on the lake, as if drawn there by some kind of magnetism.

“Why did she think the baby was conceived on May Day?”

“Because Deirdre hadn’t been with … anyone … for weeks before. Because of the rain, remember? And the time before that, well, that would have been too long. Lucy said the baby was small so it was probably early and the time worked with May Day.” I was beginning to realize what Matt was afraid of.

“Did you see it?”

I nodded and then realized he still wasn’t looking at me. I decided then to say no, but he must have seen me out of the corner of his eye.

“Who did it look like?” he asked.

“Oh Matt, it hardly looked like a person. It was tiny.” I remembered the way the skin had glowed like opals and the pale red hair like fire.

Matt turned to me and took me by the shoulders. “Did it look like me, Jane? Tell me the truth.”

“Matt,” I cried, surprised at how hard he was gripping me. “It couldn’t be yours because you weren’t with Deirdre on May Day.”

“Shut up, Jane.”

The words startled me more than the way Matt was hurting me. They came from behind us. Matt got up and stepped out of the boat, which rocked so hard I slid and knocked my head on the stern. When I scrambled to my feet and got out at the front of the boat I saw Matt facing his sister, his hands balled into tight fists. I’d never seen him look so angry. Actually, I couldn’t remember ever seeing him angry at all.