The Lake of Dead Languages

by Carol Goodman

  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.”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  WE’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 sc
raping 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.

  “We ought to wrap something around it to make sure it doesn’t open. Do you have any string?”

  I shook my head. String? What the hell was she thinking? She opened her coat and felt the top of her jeans. “I’m not wearing a belt,” she said. “Are you?”

  I opened my coat and unthreaded my belt through the belt loops of my jeans. It was made of thick, webbed cotton—I’d bought it at the army/navy store in town—with an adjustable brass buckle.

  “Perfect,” Lucy said, tightening the belt around the tin and fastening the buckle. “That should hold. Let’s go.”

  I had to help Lucy into the boat while she held the tin. This time I did offer to take it from her but she shook her head and held on to it more tightly.

  I pushed the boat into the water and then hopped in and grabbed the oars. I turned the boat around so the prow faced the lake and I faced the shore rowing. Lucy sat behind me. When the boat grazed thicker ice she directed me.

  “There’s a path of thinner ice that goes all the way through the lake,” she told me, “it must follow the underground spring.” I remembered the day we had skated here and she had gone through the ice. The place she had gone in must have been over the spring.

  Twice we had to stop and I had to pass her one of the oars to chop the ice. I was afraid, each time, that she’d drop the oar into the lake and we’d be stranded out here.

  “It must be deep enough here,” I said after we were stopped by the ice for the third time, but she shook her head and battered the ice with the oar. The chopping sounds reverberated against the layer of heavy clouds and the rock wall of the Point. The jutting prow of the Point seemed close now and I could see, a little to the east, one of the three sister stones emerging from the ice, standing like a silent witness to our deed.

  “We’re more than halfway across the lake,” I said. “We’re getting too close to the other shore.”

  Lucy stopped hammering with the oar and looked behind her. Her hair was so damp with sweat that it had frozen together in clumps and when she swung her head back to face me I could hear the sound her frozen hair made brushing against her nylon parka.

  “OK,” she said, “here.”

  We both looked down at the tea tin sitting in the bottom of the boat. The blue sky over golden mountains looked to me like a dream of summer during winter. I looked up at the lowering black-green sky above us and tried to remember what such a sky looked like. Lucy knelt down in the bottom of the boat and picked up the tin. She tried to hold it in one hand while using one hand to brace herself against the rim of the boat to get up. The boat careened toward the east shore and then swung back to the west, sluicing us with icy water.

  “Jesus,” I said taking the tin from her, “let me have that.” I heard the stones knock together inside the tin. The whole thing felt lighter than I expected and I wondered if it would really sink to the bottom. “Let’s get this over with,” I said. I balanced the tin on the edge of the boat and looked at her. She nodded.

  I leaned over, holding the tin parallel to the water’s surface in a patch Lucy had cleared of ice. I didn’t like to think of it flipping over and sinking to the bottom upside down. When it was a few inches from the surface I let it go. I watched it sink below the water and saw the blue sky and gold mountains turn pale green and then vanish into the green-black depths of the lake. I stared for a moment at the shards of white ice floating on the black water until I noticed that white crystals were beginning to fill in the black spaces. I thought the water was freezing again in front of my eyes and I was afraid that when I looked back at how we had come the path across the lake would be sealed with ice. But when I looked up I saw that the path back to the icehouse hadn’t closed. It was the green sky above that had opened up to disgorge its burden of snow, a stream of snow so thick it felt as if the sky were falling down upon us.

  PART THREE

  The Ice Harvest

  Chapter Twenty-four

  EVEN THE AIR HERE IS TAINTED, DYED A CITRINOUS green that shimmers under the frosted dome like green Jell-O. We spend the day splashing in murky water the same color and temperature as the air. Or Olivia swims and I lie in a plastic lawn chair staring up at the pale green bubble of sky. We play putt-putt on spiky green plastic grass. We eat our meals at a restaurant next to the pool and so even our food tastes like chlorine. Our room’s only wind
ow looks onto the interior dome. By the third day I’ve lost all sense of night and day; it seems like we’ve been here for years, not days. When I turn out the light for bedtime, the green light from the dome seeps through the cracks in the curtains. Even Olivia is restless and spends the night clinging to me in the oversized bed. I awake, tangled in her damp hair, breathing in its comforting smell of bleach and salt.

  I thought it made sense to stay in a hotel with an indoor pool, so I spent the last of my savings on two weeks at the Westchester Aquadome. When I gave Dean Buehl the phone number she asked how long I planned to stay and I realized that I might not have a job anymore. When I told her I didn’t know she said to call her in two weeks and we’d talk it over.

  “Take some time to think about what you really want to do, Jane.” The words sounded familiar and I realized it was the same thing she had said to me the day I graduated from Heart Lake. She’d come down to the train station to see some of the younger girls off. She did this every year and usually she was a cheerful sight, calling a hearty “see you next year” and waving her handkerchief at the departing trains. But that year a lot of girls wouldn’t be coming back. Two students and a town boy had drowned in the lake and a teacher had been let go because she had somehow been involved. Parents reacted by pulling out their children and their money. I saw Miss Buehl first on the opposite side of the tracks, the northbound side, fussing nervously over Albie, trying, unsuccessfully, to slick back her pale wisps of hair into a large bow pinned to the back of her head. When she saw me she hurried over the bridge leaving Albie looking small and lost beside a tower of matching monogrammed suitcases.

  “I wanted to wish you luck at Vassar, Jane,” Miss Buehl said when she had crossed to the southbound side. “You don’t know how lucky you are to be getting out now.”

  “Have that many girls been pulled out?” I asked.