The Lake of Dead Languages (7 page)

A
FTER
I
DROP OLIVIA OFF AT SCHOOL THE NEXT MORN
ing 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 ought 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.

I pull my sweatshirt over my wet suit and climb into my jeans without toweling off. I feel the wet seeping through the seat of my pants almost immediately. When I turn to Athena she is finger-combing her wet hair, the blue spirals on her hand weaving in and out between the wet ropes of hair. The color has returned to her lips. I have a sudden, unbidden image of Helen Chambers in her apartment in Main Hall taking down her hair and combing it while Lucy and I watched. She had handed the brush to Lucy and asked if she wouldn’t mind combing her hair out.

I remember, too, what Dr. Lockhart said at the end of our meeting the day before.

Think of Helen Chambers when you’re dealing with your students.

I’
M FIVE MINUTES LATE FOR MY NINE O
’
CLOCK CLASS.
I quickly scan the hall to see if anyone has noticed, but luckily Myra Todd is off first period and Gwen Marsh is also late—when I stick my head in her class her girls are either writing in their journals or reading. I go into my room and tell my ninth graders to translate the next lesson in
Ecce Romani.
When they finish that I let them read—
Gwen does,
I think—because I’m not up to much in the way of teaching. I can’t help myself from doing what Dr. Lockhart advised—I think of Helen Chambers.

Specifically I think about how she ended her tenure at Heart Lake.

After two of her students, and the brother of one of her students, ended up dead in the lake, an inquest was held to look into Miss Chambers’s professional behavior. The effects of the two dead girls were examined and students were interviewed. Deirdre Hall had kept that journal with quotes about premature death and suicide. Several of the quotes were either attributed directly to Helen Chambers or Deirdre had credited her teacher as the supplier of the quote. Lucy hadn’t kept a journal but she had written a letter to her
brother the week before their deaths. In it she told Matt that
Domina
Chambers had opened her eyes to a secret that had changed everything for her,
for the both of them,
she wrote.
When I tell you what it is you’ll understand why we have always felt different from everybody else. The ordinary rules of the world don’t apply to us.

The board asked Miss Chambers to explain what her student meant by this enigmatic letter. Into what secrets had Miss Chambers initiated this young girl? Miss Chambers declined to answer the board’s questions. She said it was a private matter between her student and herself and she couldn’t discuss it.

Miss Chambers’s students and colleagues were called in for questioning. We were all called in. We waited in a row of chairs that had been placed along the wall outside the Music Room. The cold weather and storms that had delayed the dredging of the lake had broken and it was unseasonably warm. The school grounds were awash in melted snow and slush. The foyer floor was gritty with mud and broken glass (someone had broken the fanlight over the front doors) and we sweated in our Fair Isle sweaters. We were told not to speak with one another. No one was allowed to discuss the questions they had been asked in the Music Room. Whenever a girl came out of the Music Room she went out the front door without looking back at the rest of us. Wet,
lakey
air gusted into the foyer and we all sniffed the breeze like dogs scenting game until the door slammed shut and we were left in the stale, overheated hallway, the boarded-up fanlight staring back at us like the blinded eye of the Cyclops.

I was the last to go because, I assumed, as the roommate of the two dead girls I would know the most. When it was my turn I went into the room and sat at the single chair that had been placed in front of the long dining room table behind which the members of the board sat. Helen Chambers was there, a little apart, in a chair in front of a window. A dark figure silhouetted in the bright glare of the melting lake ice.

It was odd seeing her sitting apart. The board was made up almost exclusively of “old girls.” Truly a jury of her peers, it was a club to which she’d not only belonged, but seemed to epitomize: women of indeterminate ages, who favored frumpily elegant dresses and wore their hair in untidy buns or cut boyishly short. They’d all gone to good women’s colleges after graduating from Heart Lake and gone on to get a master’s degree or some apprenticeship in the arts. There was Esther Macintosh, the English teacher, who had gone to Mount Holyoke and was supposed to be working on a book about Emily Dickinson. She even dressed like Emily Dickinson, in high-necked white blouses, her lank brown hair parted severely in the middle. Tacy Beade, the art teacher, worked her way through Sarah Lawrence as an artist’s model. There was a certain slide—shown only in Honors Art—of an abstract expressionist nude that was purported to be of her. Dean Gray, Celeste Buehl, Meryl North, and even Elsa Pike, the chunky gym coach, were all there in almost identical black dresses and graduated pearl necklaces. Silhouetted against the windows they looked like a row of crows perched on a telephone wire.