The Lake of Dead Languages

by Carol Goodman

  “You mean Melissa?”

  Athena shrugs and wipes her eyes with the back of her hand, giving me an even better view of the savaged skin. “Well, Dr. Lockhart keeps telling me it was Melissa, but I still find it hard to believe. I mean, we were friends…”

  “Keeps telling?” I ask. “How often do you see Dr. Lockhart?”

  “Twice a week, which, like, really sucks. She keeps asking me how it made me feel to have my roommate kill herself. Like what am I going to say? It makes me feel good? It makes me feel like shit—sorry—but it doesn’t make me want to off myself. She acts like killing yourself is a kind of germ and maybe I’ve got it. The other girls act that way, too, like I’ve got cooties or something.”

  I almost laugh at the childish term, something Olivia would say, but stop myself.

  “I know what you mean. When one of my roommates killed herself my other roommate and I had to go to counseling.”

  “Did it bother you?”

  “Well, I didn’t love it, but it really drove my other roommate crazy.”

  “Yeah, it would.” Athena gives me a small, tentative smile. “People thinking you’re crazy could make you go crazy.”

  The smile encourages me to reach out and rub her arm. “Well, you’ll just have to prove them wrong.” The advice comes out a little forced, a little too cheerleaderish, but Athena nods and dries her eyes and tries another smile.

  “Thanks, Magistra,” she says gathering her books to go, “that’s the best argument I’ve heard for not plunging through the ice and drowning myself.”

  DURING LUNCH I KEEP REPLAYING ATHENA’S LAST WORDS, trying to convince myself that it’s a coincidence that the method of suicide she chose to cite was the way Matt and Lucy died. What I can’t help thinking, though, is that if someone were playing out the events from twenty years ago, that would be the next method of death. I’m roused from these morose musings by a harsh, jangling sound in my ears. I look up and see Dr. Lockhart standing by the empty seat next to me, dangling a silver key chain in her right hand and absentmindedly shaking it while she answers a question from Gwen Marsh.

  “No, Gwen, I don’t think we should cancel midterms because the girls are having a tough semester,” she says. When she sits down she lays the keys next to her plate. Not only doesn’t this woman carry a tote bag bursting with books or papers like the rest of us, she doesn’t even feel the need of a purse or pockets. No doubt the clutter would disrupt the line of her tailored suits.

  I reach into the pocket of my baggy cardigan and find a pen, chalk stubs, and a note I confiscated from one of my sixth graders. I take the wadded paper out of my pocket and see that it’s a “cootie catcher”—a fortune-telling device popular with prepubescent girls. There are colored dots on the outside folds and numbers on the inside, which you pick to find out which flaps to open.

  Gwen Marsh reaches over and takes the cootie catcher from my hands. “Ooh, I loved those when I was a girl. Let me tell you your fortune.” She slips her fingers into the folds. “Pick a color.”

  “Green,” I tell her.

  “Gr-ee-n.” Gwen opens and shuts the paper mouth for each letter. When she’s done she asks me to pick a number.

  “Three.”

  “One, two, three, open the door to your destiny.”

  I reach to open the flap but Gwen’s already folded it back, “ ‘You are such a fake, go drown in the lake.’ Oh my,” she says. “We had stuff like, ‘You will marry a millionaire.’ You see, Candace, what I meant about the girls being under so much pressure. How can we give the midterms…”

  “If you go easy on them, they’ll take advantage of you,” Dr. Lockhart says, rising from the table even though she has barely touched her lunch.

  “I don’t think my girls take advantage of me,” Gwen says. “They mean everything to me… this school… it means everything.…” Her voice wobbling between tears and anger trails after Dr. Lockhart. I wonder if she’ll turn back, but it’s Dean Buehl who calls her back to the table. “Candace, you’ve left your keys again, here.” Dean Buehl scoops the keys up and tosses them to her. She catches them neatly in one hand and turns to go without a thank-you to Dean Buehl or a word or apology to Gwen.

  Gwen sniffs noisily. “Well, I’m still going to bring up the issue at today’s faculty meeting.”

  “We have a faculty meeting today?” I ask.

  I hear Myra Todd click her tongue at my forgetfulness and what she no doubt believes to be my reluctance to attend. But she’s wrong. Although I usually hate faculty meetings, it’s given me an idea. I’ve finally hit on what’s been bothering me about my talk with Athena this morning. It wasn’t just the comment about plunging through the ice. When I told Athena that my high school roommate killed herself she wasn’t surprised. It’s something she could only know if she had read my old journal. It makes me wonder what’s been going on at those twice weekly sessions with Dr. Lockhart. I remember a pale green folder with Athena’s name on it in Dr. Lockhart’s file cabinet and I’m quite sure that the key to that file cabinet, and to her office door, will be lying on the table at tonight’s meeting.

  I ARRIVE EARLY TO THE MEETING, BUT THEN LOITER AT THE door to the Music Room, pretending to read the notices on the bulletin board. Along with the usual chess club and suicide intervention group notices there’s a new flyer with a black-and-white photocopy of an old Currier and Ives print. The print is of a frozen pond. A horse stands in the middle of the pond, harnessed to a wagon filled with what look like giant sugar cubes. In the right foreground stooped figures stand around a hole in the ice. One of the figures holds a long, spear-tipped rod which he uses to prod a square of ice. In the left foreground a slant-roofed shed, which looks exactly like the Schwanenkill icehouse, stands at the edge of the ice. In the background, tiny figures skate on the ice.

  “ICE HARVEST MEETING TONIGHT,” it says under the picture. “8:00 P.M. IN THE MUSIC ROOM. SLIDE SHOW AND LECTURE BY MAIA THORNBURY, COUNTY EXTENSION AGENT.” Under the typed print someone has hand-drawn, in jagged print intended to look like icicles, but which look more like daggers, a promise of ice pops for refreshments. The notice is dated yesterday. It’s just the type of thing I should be attending to get back in Dean Buehl’s good graces.

  “Jane,” I hear from behind me, “are you interested in the ice harvest?”

  I turn to Dean Buehl. “Yes,” I say, “I’m sorry I missed this, I was busy sewing stolas for our Lupercalia Festival.” The lie comes so easily to me that I blush with shame at myself.

  “Well, then you’re in luck,” Myra Todd, coming up behind Dean Buehl, informs me. “The meeting was postponed till tonight right after the faculty meeting. I could use some help bringing the ice pops up from the basement freezer.”

  Before I can think up an excuse, some classical garment I need to sew, like Penelope’s shroud perhaps, Myra Todd passes me and goes into the Music Room. I can see the table is filling up. If Dr. Lockhart doesn’t get here soon I won’t get a seat next to her.

  I see her then, descending the main stairs unhurriedly, the silver key chain dangling from her right forefinger. I try not to look at the keys as she comes up to me in the doorway.

  “Dr. Lockhart!” I say cheerily. “Are you going to the Ice Harvest meeting later?”

  She looks at me as if I’ve taken leave of my senses, but at least it makes her slow her pace enough so we walk into the room together. “I think it’s appalling,” she says, as she makes for a solitary seat at the near end of the table. “It’ll ruin the lake for skating.”

  “Why, you’re right,” I say, enthusiastically grabbing her elbow and steering her toward two seats at the far end of the table. “I hadn’t thought of that. Let’s sit together and oppose the project.” I feel her arm flinch away from my touch, but she allows herself to be herded into the chair next to mine. I watch to see if she’ll lay the key chain on the table, but instead she folds her hands in her lap, keeping the key chain between them. At lunch she needed her hands to eat
, but here she could keep her hands in her lap the whole time.

  Dean Buehl is calling the meeting to order. I notice that most of my colleagues have produced paper and pens for note taking. I scramble in my tote bag and find a Xeroxed handout I’d prepared for the senior class. It’s a maze I drew of Aeneas’s route to the underworld that can only be solved by following a word trail. You have to connect an adjective to the noun it modifies and then find a verb to match the noun, and so on and so on. I am quite proud of it and I admire it for a moment before turning it over and scribbling the date and “faculty meeting” on the reverse side. Dr. Lockhart apparently feels no compulsion to take notes.

  The first order of business is reviewing the costs of snowplowing the main paths and installing the new lighting system.

  Myra Todd, who serves as secretary to the Board of Trustees, reports that the costs were approved by the board, but that the board expressed concern over any further expenditure, “especially considering that the school’s lease is coming up this spring.”

  I scribble “What lease?” on the back of my handout and slide the paper over to Dr. Lockhart’s place at the table. She scowls at me and waves her right hand, which, I notice, no longer holds the keys, dismissively.

  When the financial business is concluded, Dean Buehl asks Dr. Lockhart to report on the status of the suicide intervention program.

  “We haven’t lost any more students, have we?” Simon Ross says loudly. “So I guess it’s going pretty well.”

  Dr. Lockhart gives Ross a withering look as she rises from the table. I notice that, in rising, Dr. Lockhart has placed the key chain on the table.

  “I’ve had three girls come to me complaining of nightmares about Melissa Randall’s death. Curiously, the common thread in these nightmares seems to be a conviction that somehow Melissa is still in the lake, below the ice.”

  I think of my dream of the figures trapped in the crevasse. I feel suddenly cold. I reach into my bag for my sweater, but instead of pulling it out I haul the bag onto the table with a loud thump. Myra Todd purses her lips at me and makes a shushing sound. I smile apologetically.

  “Several girls have also reported that the noises from the lake keep them up at night. They think that the noises are the moans of the dead girl.” Dr. Lockhart raises her voice to be heard over the commotion I am making with my tote bag, but otherwise she doesn’t in any way acknowledge the disruption I’m causing during her speech. In pulling out my sweater, my Cassell’s Latin-English Dictionary and Oxford History of the Classical World thud noisily to the table and slide onto the floor.

  “Such ignorance!” Myra Todd exclaims.

  I lift my head, thinking she’s talking about my behavior, but I see that even my rudeness at a faculty meeting can’t compete with attributing superstitious beliefs to a natural phenomenon.

  “I’ve explained again and again,” Myra says, thumping her hand on the table with each “again,” “about contraction and expansion of the ice, but they just don’t get it!”

  “You’re the one who doesn’t get it.”

  Everyone at the table stares at Gwen Marsh. Two red spots have appeared on her face. I’ve never seen her this angry. I’m so taken aback that I forget my plans to get the key for a moment.

  “Don’t you see what a shock Melissa Randall’s death has been to them? They haven’t just lost a friend, they’ve lost their faith in Heart Lake. It’s supposed to be a haven for them, a safe place to come back to, a place where everybody knows them…”

  Someone, I can’t tell who, starts humming the theme song to “Cheers.”

  “You can mock if you like, but unless we go easier on them there will be another death.”

  “If we go easier on them,” Dr. Lockhart says in slow, measured tones, “we’re enabling their helplessness.”

  “I am not an enabler!” she says so shrilly that I wonder if she’s been accused of this before. I reach over to touch her arm and she shrieks.

  “That’s my bad arm, Jane. You know that.” She stands up and leaves the room. Everyone watches her go. Except me. I use the moment to sweep my books, along with Dr. Lockhart’s keys, into my tote bag. As soon as I’ve got them, I rise from my seat.

  “I’ll go after her,” I say, and I’m out the door before anyone else can offer to help.

  I sprint up the main stairs to the second floor and head, not to the Lake Lounge, but to Dr. Lockhart’s office. At the door to her office I have to dig in my bag to find the keys, and when I do find them the metal slips greasily through my sweaty fingers. The first key I try doesn’t fit. The second does, but it won’t turn. I remember that in my old dorm room you had to pull the door toward you to make the key turn. I pull the knob toward me and the door bangs against its frame so loudly the sound echoes down the hallway. I stop to look down toward the stairs, but then feel the key turn and the door, taken by a draft in the hall, pulls me into the dark office.

  I have to push the door against the draft to close it and again the sound it makes is horribly loud. I’m afraid to risk turning on the light, but fortunately, Dr. Lockhart has left her drapes open and the moon reflecting off the lake fills the room with silvery light. The varnished wood of her desk, which is empty except for some stone paperweights, gleams in the moonlight like a pool of still water. The round stones cast elliptical shadows on the smooth surface. I pick up one and immediately feel that I’ve disrupted some pattern that Dr. Lockhart will notice has been disturbed.

  I place the stone back again, aligning it with the other two in what I hope is the same spot, and cross to the file cabinet. The middle drawer, I remember. The little key opens the drawer, which slides silently forward on its metal casters. I walk my fingers along the tops of the files, which are neatly labeled in an elegant, sloping script. They’re arranged alphabetically within class years, so I find “Craven, Ellen” about two thirds through the drawer. I pull out the pale green folder and move into the moonlight to read its contents.

  The first few pages are the standard forms everyone at the school fills out. I notice that Athena’s parents are divorced and that the emergency contact number is an aunt in Connecticut. I flip through the pink insurance forms and Athena’s transcripts from previous schools. She started at Dalton, transferred to Miss Trimingham’s in Connecticut, and then went to some place called the Village School in southern Vermont. Her grades had gone from As and Bs at the good schools to Cs and Ds at the worse schools. While she worked her way up the northern seaboard, she’d been steadily sliding down the academic scale.

  Until this semester at Heart Lake. In the first quarter she’d still gotten mostly C’s except for the B I’d given her in Latin. In the second quarter she’d gotten an A in Latin and Bs in the rest of her subjects. It looked like she was trying to turn herself around. So why did she seem so out of sorts? And why was she seeing Dr. Lockhart twice a week?

  I turn next to a sheaf of handwritten notes on unlined paper. The date of each session is entered in a beautiful flowing script in the right-hand margin. The notes are in the same precise and elegant hand, written apparently with a fountain pen. I’ve never seen notes taken from a psychiatric session, but I would have imagined that there would be cross-outs, abbreviations, additions in the margins. There are none. Dr. Lockhart wrote from one margin to the other in a steady, slanting script. The sentences could have been exercises from a calligraphy workbook.

  The story they tell flows smoothly from one session to the next. If not for the dates in the margins I would think I was reading from a novel. What stands out the most, though, is the compassion Dr. Lockhart feels for her patient.

  “Ellen has been shuttled from one institution to the next with little concern for her emotional well-being,” I read. “Such displacement readily explains her tendencies toward depression and self-loathing. No wonder she inflicts harm on herself when the adults closest to her take so little responsibility for her.”

  Farther down the same page I read, “Ellen claims to have made
several friends here at Heart Lake. It is obvious, though, that she has become emotionally dependent on these girls to an unhealthy degree. She would do anything to keep their friendship. Clearly she is using these friendships as a replacement for the affection she’s failed to receive from her mother.” This interpretation has never occurred to me and I’m ashamed at myself for having had so little insight into my student—a student whom I thought I was close to. It’s even more chastening to see here Dr. Lockhart’s empathy for Athena’s situation. In fact her notes read not so much like a transcription from oral conversation as a direct channeling from Athena’s mind onto the page—as if Dr. Lockhart had access not only to her mind but to her heart and soul.

  I notice, too, that as I page through the stack of notes, the handwriting changes. It becomes not exactly messier so much as tighter, as if Dr. Lockhart were trying to cram more into each line, as if the story she were getting from Athena threatened to swell beyond the confines of the written words. I have to move closer to the window to make it out.

  “While it is probably true that the suicide attempt in October was faked, it is unlikely that Ellen had no complicity in it. It is more likely that she agreed to fake the suicide attempt to assist her friends in their persecution of Jane Hudson. Clearly their attempt is to discredit their teacher and get her fired.”

  I am so startled by the appearance of my name that for a moment the words in front of me blur. Has Athena truly revealed some calculated plot to torture me? Or is this Dr. Lockhart’s interpretation? The notes are maddeningly obtuse, and now, nearly illegible. I take another step closer to the window and realize, finally, that the reason I can’t see is that the moonlight is gone.

  I look up at the window, expecting, I think, to find it blocked by some hovering figure outside the glass. But that’s ridiculous. Dr. Lockhart’s office is on the second floor. It’s only a cloud passing over the moon that has blocked the light. As I watch, the moon reemerges and its white light pours down on the curved rock face of the Point so that I can see, directly across from me at roughly the same level as this second-floor window, a figure standing close to the edge of the cliff. The figure lifts its arm to its forehead so that for a moment I have the absurd notion it’s waving at me. But then I see a glint of moonlight on glass and realize it’s worse; the figure on the Point—whoever it is—is watching me through binoculars.