The Lake of Dead Languages

by Carol Goodman

  I knew he had me. If I went to work in the city I’d have to put Olivia in day care ten hours a day. A lot of Mitch’s business was off the books, which meant the child support he’d be obliged to pay me wouldn’t amount to more than a few hundred dollars a month. I had no family or friends to turn to. I read ads for jobs I could do from home, but anyone could see that I’d never make enough to support myself, let alone Olivia. I had no skills to speak of.

  “For God’s sake, Jane, you majored in Latin,” Mitch was fond of saying to me. “How impractical can you get?”

  One day, though, I read in the newspaper that Latin was making a comeback. I knew that Mitch would never pay for the classes I’d need to get certified to teach in the public schools, but maybe I could get a job in a private school. I’d already started relearning my Latin. Now I set myself a passage of Latin to memorize each night. I found it oddly soothing. As I picked away at case endings and declensions, alone at the kitchen table, the tangled words unraveled into flowing strands of lucid meaning.

  When I had memorized most of Catullus and Ovid, I called Heart Lake and asked to whom should I write about a teaching position. The secretary told me that all hiring decisions were made by the dean, Celeste Buehl. I hung up the phone. I realized then that I had been lying to myself. I didn’t want a Latin teaching job at some private school. I wanted to go back to Heart Lake. But how could I ask for a job from Celeste Buehl, who knew everything.

  It wasn’t until Olivia was three and a half and I overheard Mitchell telling her, along with her bedtime story, that she should tell Daddy if Mommy ever acted funny, that I called Heart Lake again. I asked to speak to Dean Buehl. When the secretary asked who was calling I gave my maiden name, Jane Hudson, but I didn’t say I was an alumna.

  “Jane Hudson, class of seventy-seven!” Dean Buehl sounded as if she were greeting a celebrity.

  “Yes, Miss Buehl, I mean Dean Buehl, I didn’t know if you’d remember me.”

  “Of course I remember you, Jane. Tell me what you’ve been doing with yourself.”

  When I told her that I was looking for a job teaching Latin the line went quiet and I steeled myself for the inevitable disappointment.

  “You know we’ve never really been able to replace Helen Chambers.”

  My heart sank. I hadn’t thought that by applying for the Latin position I was trying to take Helen Chambers’s place. How could I ever?

  “But then,” she went on, “we’ve never gotten an old girl in the position.” It had taken me a moment to realize that by “old girl” she meant me. I vaguely heard her bemoaning my generation’s lack of interest in teaching. My attention came back when I heard her say that she couldn’t think of anyone better to take the place than one of Helen Chambers’s girls.

  When I finally got off the phone, having arranged to come up to see the new preschool and the cottage where Olivia and I would live (“It’s the one I lived in when I taught science. It’s not much, but, as you might recall, it has a lovely view of the lake”), I felt so warm I felt my forehead to see if I had a fever. It wasn’t, I realized as that warm feeling stayed with me instead of fading over the next difficult months of arguing with Mitchell, just that I had been offered a job. It was what Dean Buehl had called me. One of Helen Chambers’s girls. That was what my problem had been all these years. I had forgotten who I was. I had forgotten where I belonged.

  NOW I WONDER, AS I JOIN OLIVIA IN THE WARM GREEN pool, how I could ever have thought that that was what I wanted. One of Helen Chambers’s girls. I had been lured by that old attraction, the old game that we had played—Lucy and Deirdre and me—to be like her. Look what had become of them. Deirdre and Lucy were dead. And me? I had taken Helen Chambers’s place at Heart Lake and one of my own students had died just as hers had. I have nothing to offer those girls. My place is here with Olivia. So what if I’m not in love with my husband? How many wives are?

  I swim several laps with Olivia paddling behind me. I do dolphin dives under her and spring up in unexpected places making her squeal with delight. Her screams echo off the opaque surface of the dome. I dive deep, all the way to the bottom, and as I begin to come up for air I see, on the other side of the water, a familiar face. The green water seems, suddenly, thick and heavy, pressing me down to the bottom of the pool. I can feel its weight pressing against my mouth, waiting to fill my lungs. I struggle to the top, but even when I break the surface I’m afraid to take a breath. Afraid that breathing in this shimmering air will drown me.

  The man at the edge of the pool reaches out his hand for me and helps me up the ladder. It’s only Roy Corey. I take a breath, gasping in the chlorinated air. I’m so relieved it’s him that for a second I don’t even question what he’s doing here—two hundred miles from his police district—but then he tells me.

  “I went to talk to my old forensics professor at John Jay,” he says, “and now I’m heading up to Cold Spring to visit my mother. You were on the way, so… here,” he says handing me a towel, “you look cold. And pale. Don’t tell me you’ve been in this fish bowl for the whole two weeks.”

  “Has it really been two weeks already?” I ask, toweling myself down and then wrapping the towel around my waist.

  “Yeah. Time flies. Isn’t there a saying in Latin for that?”

  “Tempus fugit,” I say.

  “Yeah, that’s it. Mattie used to say that.” He motions for me to sit down on one of the plastic picnic chairs that surround a glass table. I have the feeling as he settles himself down on the creaking, insubstantial plastic that what he has to tell me about the DNA results requires sitting.

  “The baby was Matt’s.” I say it so he won’t have to.

  He nods. “Yeah, it was Matt’s all right.” He’s looking at me to see how I’m taking the news.

  “I guess I knew all along,” I tell him. He looks so pained to be giving me this information that I find myself wanting to reassure him. “That’s what they argued about the night they drowned. Matt kept asking Lucy whose baby it was. He must have realized it was his.” Roy Corey puffs up his cheeks and blows air out. He reminds me of those drawings of the wind. “But it was Deirdre he should have been mad at,” I add.

  Roy shakes his head. I notice the way the flesh around his mouth shakes a little. Matt would never have turned out like this, I think.

  “No, Deirdre had nothing to do with it.”

  I feel myself smiling a tight, polite smile that makes my skin, dry from so much chlorine, crease. “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “Deirdre Hall wasn’t the baby’s mother,” he says. “The baby was Matt and Lucy’s.”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  BUT HOW?”

  Roy Corey holds up one hand, palm out like a traffic cop. It reminds me that he is a cop and I had promised Mitchell not to talk to him without consulting a lawyer first.

  “I gotta tell you something before you say anything else,” he says.

  I think he is going to read me my Miranda rights, but instead he tells me that he’s read my journal.

  “You did what?” My voice is so loud that everyone under the Aquadome—Olivia in the pool, a family playing putt-putt, the waiters in the poolside restaurant—stop what they are doing to look at us.

  “I’m sorry, Jane, I didn’t mean to invade your privacy, but it’s evidence. We found it with Melissa Randall’s effects.”

  “So she’s the one who had it.”

  Corey nods. “Dean Buehl and Dr. Lockhart agree that she must have found the journal hidden in your old room, under the floorboards, maybe?”

  I nod to indicate that this is not outside the realm of possibility. Lucy must have hidden it that night she followed me to the icehouse. Maybe she was afraid that something in it would reveal that the baby was hers. But what? If I hadn’t guessed her secret, how could my journal reveal it? Could I have written something that revealed the truth without even knowing the truth? The idea that my journal contains secrets even I do not know makes the fact that it has
been in the possession of one of my students even more alarming. Even if the student is dead.

  “. . . and in acting out her paranoid fantasies of persecution…” I catch a shred of what Roy Corey is saying, mostly because the language he is using no longer sounds like his own.

  “Dr. Lockhart’s diagnosis?” I ask

  He nods and grins. “Yeah. Basically she thinks Melissa decided to reenact the events of your senior year and torture you along the way.”

  “But what about Ellen’s suicide attempt?”

  “Melissa had a prescription for Demerol—for cramps, her mother said, can you believe that, letting your daughter take a jar full of Demerol away to school—which she could have used to drug Ellen and then cut her wrists.”

  I wince. “Then Athena was telling the truth. She didn’t try to kill herself.”

  “It was a fake suicide attempt—just like Lucy’s was a fake.”

  “But then why take her own life? Shouldn’t Vesta have been the next target?”

  “Dr. Lockhart says the guilt was probably too much for her. I think she was afraid of being caught. Same difference, I guess. I’ve seen guilt and fear unhinge tougher characters than that poor kid.”

  I look up and see that he is looking at me hard. I feel, like I did with Mitchell, an awareness of being exposed, only I know that Roy Corey is not scanning my body the way Mitch had. He leans closer to me, his hands on his broad thighs, and I can hear the plastic chair creak under his weight.

  “You’ve had a lot to carry all these years,” he says. His voice is husky. When I answer my own throat feels tight.

  “I guess I should have told someone about the baby.”

  “Yeah, you should’ve. But then, who did you have to tell?”

  I think that this is an unconventional line for a policeman to take, especially this policeman who had lectured me about personal accountability, but then I remember that he has read my journal. He knows just how alone I was.

  I pull myself up and adjust the towel around my legs. “Am I being charged with anything?” I ask. “Because if I am—”

  “You’ll want to call your lawyer? What would we be charging you with, Jane? Keeping a journal? Trying to help your best friend? Believing your best friend? I know it’s embarrassing for you that I read your diary, but the one thing it does is establish your innocence. You had no idea what was really going on.”

  I almost laugh at the bluntness of his last comment, but instead the sound that comes out is more like a sob. I think of the night Matt and Lucy drowned, of those last moments on the ice when he kept asking her whose baby it was. He wasn’t asking if it was his; he was asking if it was hers. Matt and Lucy were lovers. How many other things had I missed? Roy Corey is right. I had no idea what had really been going on.

  Corey moves his hand as if he’s going to pat me on the knee, but then thinks better of it. He is so scrupulous in avoiding physical contact with me that I wonder if he has attended some workshop on how to avoid a sexual harassment suit. “Don’t feel bad. No one knew the full story. I suspected there was something different about Matt and Lucy…”

  “But my God… it was incest.”

  Roy puffs up his cheeks and blows out air again, but now he looks less like a jovial wind cloud than a very tired middle-aged man. “Well, that’s the other thing. When we got the DNA results we noticed that Matt’s and Lucy’s were entirely different.…”

  “They didn’t have the same father,” I say. “Everybody knew that.”

  “Yeah, everybody knew Cliff Toller wasn’t Lucy’s father. But what no one knew was that Hannah Toller wasn’t Lucy’s mother. Matt and Lucy weren’t brother and sister. Apparently, they weren’t related at all.”

  THE DAY AFTER ROY COREY’S VISIT I DECIDE TO GO BACK to Heart Lake. I tell Mitchell that I owe it to Dean Buehl, who has generously forgiven me all my lapses of judgment, to finish out the year. We arrange that I will come to visit Olivia every other weekend and I will stay, whether at his house or the Aquadome we don’t say, for spring break. Mitchell says he is disappointed, but I think I see some relief as well. I’m not sure how that makes me feel. I have been trying, these last two weeks, to understand my marriage by reviewing the past, but now I see that I have to go back even further. I don’t think that I can come to any decision without understanding what happened at Heart Lake all those years ago.

  Olivia cries when I tell her I am going. I tell her I will see her every other weekend and talk to her every night but she keeps shaking her head at whatever I say. I say, “Don’t you believe that Mommy will come see you?” and she answers, “But what if the Wilis don’t let you?”

  “Oh honey,” I say, “no Wili will ever keep me away from you. I promise.”

  “But what if they drag you down into the lake and hold you under the water until your face turns blue and the fish come and eat out your eyes?”

  It is such a horrible, vivid image that I am sure it comes from someone else. “Olivia, the day I found you on the sister rock and you told me the Wili lady took you there, did she tell you that would happen to you?”

  Olivia shakes her head. I am relieved, but then she says, “No, she said that’s what would happen to you if I told anyone about her.”

  DRIVING NORTH ON THE TACONIC PARKWAY I TRY TO SORT out all the new information I’ve received. My parting with Olivia is uppermost in mind for the first part of the drive. I am horrified by the idea that she has been living with that threat against me all these months. It’s the sort of thing that a child molester would say to intimidate his victim. Not his, I correct myself, her. Child molesters can be female, too. I have to wonder now if anything else happened to Olivia out on that rock. When I asked Olivia to describe the Wili all she would tell me was that she was a “white lady.” But I couldn’t get out of her whether she was referring to race, hair color, or clothing. Melissa Randall’s hair had been bleached. Can I assume that since it was Melissa who had my journal, Melissa who staged Athena’s suicide, and Melissa who fell from the rowboat at the sisters rock, that Melissa was the Wili? I’m not sure if I can assume it, but I do hope it. Then, at least, the whole thing would be over.

  Still, when I try to imagine Melissa Randall threatening Olivia, or drugging Athena and cutting her wrists, my imagination balks. She simply didn’t seem the type to do such awful things. But then, how good have I been at judging types? I bring to mind another young, blond girl: Lucy Toller, my best friend. I replay in my mind that whole last year. The way Lucy looked when she came back from Italy, rounder and curvier, but also happy and smug. Had she known she was pregnant? With her own brother’s child? Did she know he wasn’t her brother? And did that make any difference? After all they had grown up together as brother and sister.

  I remember the morning I came back from Albany, how Lucy met me at the door to the single while Deirdre slept. How fast she had thought it through! Deirdre was asleep, so she could tell whatever story she wanted. How had she made Deirdre agree to the deception? But I also remember how Deirdre had adored Lucy, how anxious she had been to please her. She had been almost as devoted to Lucy as I had been. I remember all the times I blamed Deirdre for being ungrateful. We cleaned up her mess, I said, again and again, to Lucy. How cool Lucy had been! And that whole trip to the lake and back. She had just given birth. All that blood on the bed—it was hers.

  When I think of the blood on the bed I nearly swerve off the curving road and I see that I am clutching the steering wheel so tightly my knuckles are white. I get off at the next exit and pull to the side of the road. When I pry my hands off the steering wheel they are cold and damp and I feel nauseous. I open the car door and throw up on the grassy verge. All that blood. I don’t know why it is worse that it was Lucy’s not Deirdre’s. I guess it’s something like the difference between seeing someone else’s blood and seeing your own. It explains, I realize, how weak she had been when we’d walked back from the lake.

  BY THE TIME WE GOT BACK TO THE DORM IT WAS SNOWING SO
hard we could barely see two feet ahead of us. I begged Lucy to take the path—what would it matter, now, if we met someone?—and she agreed placidly. Halfway back she took my arm and leaned her whole weight on it so I had to struggle to keep us both upright in the driving snow. I didn’t know how I’d get her up the stairs to our room, but she held on to the banister and hauled herself up the two flights of stairs.

  When I opened the door to our room Deirdre was sitting up on the edge of Lucy’s bed facing the door.

  “You got rid of it?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Lucy answered.

  “What are you going to do about that?” Deirdre pointed toward the single and the bloody bed. I was amazed at Deirdre’s tone—as if we were her servants and this was our problem instead of hers. But Lucy seemed unfazed.

  “I’ve got an idea about that.” Lucy went over to Deirdre and sat next to her on the bed. They both looked at me and I think that Deirdre finally took in that I was back.

  “She knows?” Deirdre asked Lucy.

  Lucy took Deirdre’s hand. “She won’t tell anyone,” she said to Deirdre, and then to me, “Jane, your suitcases are still in the lobby. Someone might notice and come up here. Could you bring them up please?” Lucy seemed calm and steady now, and in control. As I turned to leave the room I saw Lucy and Deirdre leaning their heads together, whispering.

  I walked back downstairs. Five steps from the bottom I lost my footing and fell the rest of the way down, landing painfully on the base of my spine. I clutched the newel post at the foot of the stairs, leaned my head against the soft wood, and wept noisily for I don’t know how long. I kept thinking someone would come—a cleaning lady, the night watchman, Miss Buehl—and I’d have to tell them everything. From my mother dying to the thing we’d put in the lake. I’d tell them everything. It was ridiculous, I realized now, to have gone along with Lucy’s plan. We would never be able to explain all that blood. Deirdre would just have to fend for herself. What did I care what happened to her? I’d tell everyone I had been with Matt so the baby couldn’t be his. I’d sacrifice my name for him.