T HE LAKE IN MY DREAMS IS ALWAYS FROZEN. IT IS NEVER THE lake in summer, its water stained black by the shadows of pine trees, or the lake in fall, its surface stitched into a quilt of red and gold, or the lake on a spring night, beaded with moonlight. The lake in my dreams reflects nothing; it is the dead white of a closed door, sealed by ice that reaches sixty feet down to the lake’s glacial limestone cradle.
I skate over that reassuring depth soundlessly, the scrape of my blades absorbed by a pillowy gray sky. I feel the strength of the deep ice in the soles of my feet and I skate like I’ve never skated in life. No wobbly ankles or sore thighs, I skate with the ease and freedom of flying. I skate the way skating looks, not feels.
I lean into long, languid figure eights and arch my back in the tight spins, my long hair shedding sparks of static in the cold dry air. When I leap, I soar high above the silver ice and land straight and true as an arrow boring into its mark. Each glide is long and perfect and crosses over the last, braiding tendrils of ice and air out of the spray which fans out in my wake.
Then comes the moment when I am afraid to look down, afraid of what I’ll see beneath the surface of the ice, but when I do look, the ice is as thick and opaque as good linen and my heart beats easier. I am weightless with relief. I pirouette as effortlessly as a leaf spinning in the wind, the fine lines my blades inscribe in the ice as delicate as calligraphy. It is only when I reach the shore and look back that I see I have carved a pattern in the ice, a face, familiar and long gone, which I watch, once again, sink into the black water.
PART ONE
Overturn
Chapter One
I HAVE BEEN TOLD TO MAKE THE LATIN CURRICULUM RELEVANT to the lives of my students. I am finding, though, that my advanced girls at Heart Lake like Latin precisely because it has no relevance to their lives. They like nothing better than a new, difficult declension to memorize. They write the noun endings on their palms in blue ballpoint ink and chant the declensions, “Puella, puellae, puellae, puellam, puella…” like novices counting their rosaries.
When it comes time for a test they line up at the washroom to scrub down. I lean against the cool tile wall watching them as the washbasins fill with pale blue foam and the archaic words run down the drains. When they offer to show me the undersides of their wrists for traces of letters I am unsure if I should look. If I look, am I showing that I don’t trust them? If I don’t look, will they think I am naive? When they put their upturned hands in mine—so light-boned and delicate—it is as if a fledgling has alighted in my lap. I am afraid to move.
In class I see only the tops of their hands—the black nail polish and silver skull rings. One girl even has a tattoo on the top of her right hand—an intricate blue pattern that she tells me is a Celtic knot. Now I look at the warm, pink flesh—their fingertips are tender and whorled from immersion in water, the scent of soap rises like incense. Three of the girls have scratched the inside of their wrists with pins or razors. The lines are fainter than the lifelines that crease their palms. I want to trace their scars with my fingertips and ask them why, but instead I squeeze their hands and tell them to go on into class. “Bona fortuna,” I say. “Good luck on the test.”
When I first came back to Heart Lake I was surprised at the new girls, but I soon realized that since my own time here the school has become a sort of last resort for a certain kind of girl. I have learned that even though the Heart Lake School for Girls still looks like a prestigious boarding school, it is not. It is really a place for girls who have already been kicked out of two or three of the really good schools. A place for girls whose parents have grown sick of drama, sick of blood on the bathroom floor, sick of the policeman at the door.
Athena (her real name is Ellen Craven, but I have come to think of the girls by the classical names they’ve chosen for class) is the last to finish washing. She has asked for extra credit, for more declensions and verb conjugations to learn, so she is up to her elbows in blue ink. She holds out her forearms for me to see and there is no way to avoid looking at the scar on her right arm that starts at the base of her palm and snakes up to the crook of her elbow. She sees me wince.
Athena shrugs. “It was a stupid thing to do,” she says. “I was all messed up over this boy last year, you know?”
I try to remember caring that much for a boy—I almost see a face—but it’s like trying to remember labor pains, you remember the symptoms of pain—the blurred vision, the way your mind moves in an ever-tightening circle around a nucleus so dense gravity itself seems to bend toward it—but not the pain itself.
“That’s why my aunt sent me to an all girls school,” Athena continues. “So I wouldn’t get so caught up with boys again. Like my mother goes to this place upstate when she needs to dry out—you know, get away from booze and pills? So, I’m here drying out from boys.”
I look up from her hands to her pale face—a paleness accentuated by her hair, which is dyed a blue-black that matches the circles under her eyes. I think I hear tears in her voice, but instead she is laughing. Before I can help myself I laugh, too. Then I turn away from her and yank paper towels from the dispenser so she can dry her arms.
I let the girls out early after the test. They whoop with delight and crowd the doorway. I am not insulted. This is part of the game we play. They like it when I’m strict. Up to a point. They like that the class is hard. They like me, I think. At first I flattered myself that it was because I understood them, but then one day I retrieved a note left on the floor.
“What do you think of her?” one girl had written.
“Let’s go easy on her,” another, later I identified the handwriting as Athena’s, had answered.
I realized then that the girls’ goodwill did not come from anything I had said or done. It came because they knew, with the uncanny instinct of teenagers, that I must have messed up as badly as they had to end up here.
Today they leave shaking the cramp out of their hands and comparing answers from the test. Vesta—the thin, studious one, the one who tries the hardest—holds the textbook open to read out the declension and conjugation endings. There are moans from some, little cries of triumph from others. Octavia and Flavia, the two Vietnamese sisters who are counting on classics scholarships to college, nod at each answer with the calm assurance of hard studiers. If I listened carefully I wouldn’t have to mark the tests at all to know what grades to give, but I let the sounds of sorrow and glee blur together. I can hear them all the way down the hall until Myra Todd opens her door and tells them they’re disturbing her biology lab.
I hear another door open and one of my girls calls out, “Hello, Miss Marshmallow.” Then I hear a high nervous laugh which I recognize as that of Gwendoline Marsh, the English teacher. It won’t be Gwen, though, who complains; it’s Myra I’ll catch hell from later for letting them out before the bell. I don’t care. It’s worth it for the quiet that settles now over my empty classroom, for the minutes I’ll have before my next class.
I turn my chair around so that I face the window. On the lawn in front of the mansion I see my girls collapsed in a lopsided circle. From here their dark clothing and dyed hair—Athena’s blue-black, Aphrodite’s bleached blond, and Vesta’s lavender red, which is the same shade as the nylon hair on my daughter’s Little Mermaid doll—make them look like hybrid flowers bred into unnatural shades. Black dahlias and tulips. Flowers the bruised color of dead skin.
Past where the girls sit, Heart Lake lies blue-green and still in its glacial cradle of limestone. The water on this side of the lake is so bright it hurts my eyes. I rest them on the dark eastern end of the lake, where the pine tree shadows stain the water black. Then I pick my homework folder up off my desk and add the assignments I’ve collected today, sorting each girl’s new assignment with older work (as usual, I’m about a week behind in my grading). They’re easy to sort because almost all the girls use different kinds of paper that I’ve come to recognize as each girl’s distinctive trademark: lavender stationery for Vesta, the long yellow legal-size sheets for Aphrodite, lined paper with ragged edges which Athena tears from her black-and-white notebooks.
Sometimes the page Athena gives me has something else written on the reverse side. A few lines at the top that look to be the end of a diary entry. I know from the scraps I’ve read that she sometimes writes as if addressing a letter to herself and sometimes as if the journal itself were her correspondent. “Don’t forget,” I read in one of these coda. “You don’t need anyone but yourself.” And another time: “I promise I’ll write to you more often, you’re all I have.” Sometimes there is a drawing on the back of her assignment. Half a woman’s face dissolving into a wave. A rainbow sliced in two by a winged razor blade. A heart with a dagger through its middle. Cheap teenage symbolism. They could be pictures from the book I kept when I was her age.
I recognize the paper she uses by its ragged edge where it’s been pulled out of the thread-stitched notebook. If she’s not careful, pages will start to come loose. I know because I used the same sort of book when I was her age, the kind with the black-and-white marbled covers. When I look down at the page I think I’ve got another piece of her journal, but then I turn it over and see the other side is blank. Athena’s homework is on a separate page at the bottom of the stack and I’ve lost track whether the page I’m holding is one that was just handed in or was already in the folder. I look back at the page I thought was her homework. There is a single line of tiny, cramped writing at the top of it. The ink is so pale that I have to move the paper into the light from the window in order to make it out.
You’re the only one I can ever tell.
I stare at the words so hard that a dim halo forms around them and I have to blink to make the darkness go away. Later I’ll wonder what I recognized first: the words that I wrote in my journal almost twenty years ago, or my own handwriting.
I MAKE THE STUDENTS IN MY NEXT CLASS RECITE DECLENSIONS until the sound of the other words in my head is a faint whisper, but as I walk to the dining hall the words reassert themselves in my brain. You’re the only one I can ever tell. Words any teenager might write in her diary. If I hadn’t recognized my own handwriting there would be no cause for alarm. The words could refer to anything, but knowing what they do refer to I can’t help but wonder how someone has gotten hold of my old journal and slipped a page of it into my homework folder. At first I had thought it must be Athena, but then I realized that any of the girls could have handed me the page when she handed in her own assignment. For that matter, since I left the homework folder on my desk overnight and the classrooms are unlocked, anyone might have slipped the page into my homework folder.
I know that that particular page is from the last journal I kept senior year, and that I lost it during the spring semester. Could it have been on the property all this time—hidden under the floorboards in my old dorm room perhaps—and Athena or one of her friends has now found it? The thought of what else is in that journal floods through me and I have to actually stop at the foot of the mansion stairs and lean on the railing for a moment before I can start up the steps.
Girls in plaid skirts and white shirts coming untucked from the blue sweaters tied around their waists stream around me as I make my way up the stairs toward the massive oak doors. The doors were designed to intimidate. They are outside the human scale. The Crevecoeur family, who donated the mansion to the school, also owned the paper mill in the nearby town of Corinth. India Crevecoeur ran a tea and “improvement society” for the female mill workers. I picture those mill girls, in a tight gaggle for warmth as much as for moral support, waiting outside these doors. My own grandmother, who worked at the mill before working as a maid for the Crevecoeurs, might have been among them.
When I won the scholarship to come here I wondered what the Crevecoeurs would have thought about the granddaughter of one of their maids attending their school. I don’t think they would have been amused. In the family portrait that hangs in the Music Room they look like dour, unhappy people. Their ancestors were Huguenots who fled France in the seventeenth century and eventually made their way here to this remote outpost in upstate New York. It must have been a shock to them—this wilderness, the brutal winters, the isolation. The fanlight above the door is plain glass now, but when I went here it was stained glass: a red heart split in two by a green fleur-de-lis-handled dagger and the family motto in yellow: Cor te reducit—The heart leads you back. I’ve always imagined them waiting for some deliverance from this savage place, to France, or God perhaps. But since I have found myself back at Heart Lake—a place I swore I’d never return to—I’ve begun to think the heart in the motto is the lake itself, exerting its own gravitational pull on those who have once lived on its shores and bathed in its icy green water.
THE FACULTY DINING ROOM IS IN THE OLD MUSIC ROOM. When I went to Heart Lake the scholarship students worked in the kitchen and served the teachers at meals. Some years ago the practice was discontinued as it was considered demeaning to the scholarship students. I never minded though. Nancy Ames, the cook, always gave us a good meal. Roasts and potatoes, creamed vegetables and poached fish. I never ate so well in all my life. She saved us the rolls she baked fresh for every meal. She gave them to us wrapped in thick linen napkins embroidered with the Heart Lake crest, which we were to remember to return. Walking back through the cold dusk—that last year at Heart Lake resides in my memory as one endless winter dusk—I felt the warmth of them in my pocket, like a small animal burrowed for shelter against my body.
Now the school uses paper napkins and the teachers serve themselves from a buffet. Tuna fish salad and packaged bread. Carrot sticks and hard-boiled eggs. What hasn’t changed, though, is the mandatory attendance for all faculty. It was a tenet of India Crevecoeur, Heart Lake’s founder, that the teaching staff be a community. It is an admirable goal, but on days like today I’d give much to be able to take my sandwich out to a rock by the lake with no one but Ovid for company. As I enter the room I give India’s image in the family portrait a resentful look, which she, snug in the bosom of her large family, disdainfully returns.
The only empty seat is next to Myra Todd. I take out a stack of quizzes to grade and hope they will keep her from commenting on third period’s early dismissal. Half the teachers at the long table have a similar stack of paper-clipped pages at which they peck with their red pens in between bites of tuna fish. When I take out mine, though, I see I still have the journal page with my handwriting on the top of the stack. I hurriedly fold it and stick it into the pocket of my plaid wool skirt just as Myra leans across me for the salt shaker. I have to remind myself that she’d have no reason to think anything of those enigmatic words even if she did see them. Unless she’s the one who found my old journal.
I steal a glance at her to see if she’s paying undue attention to my stack of papers, but she is placidly chewing her sandwich and staring into the middle distance. Under the smell of tuna fish and stale coffee I catch her distinctive smell—a whiff of mildew as if she were one of her own science experiments left too long in the supply closet over Christmas break. I’ve always wondered what peculiar health condition or faulty laundry procedure is the cause of this odor, but it’s hardly the kind of thing you could ask a person as prim and proper as Myra. I try to imagine what she would do if she came upon my old journal, and I am pretty sure she’d take it straight to the dean.
I try to imagine what Dean Buehl would make of my old journal. Celeste Buehl was the science teacher when I went to Heart Lake. She was always kind to me when I was her student—and she was more than kind when she gave me this job—but I don’t think that kindness would survive a reading of my senior-year journal.
When she comes in today I notice how much she’s changed in the twenty years since she was my teacher. I remember her as slim and athletic, leading nature hikes through the woods and skating on the lake in winter. Now her broad shoulders are rounded and her short, cropped hair, once dark and springy, looks lifeless and dull. Myra Todd picks the moment of the dean’s entrance to mention third period’s early dismissal.
“Jane,” she says loudly, “your third-period class disturbed my senior lab this morning. We were at a very delicate stage of dissection. Mallory Martin’s hand slipped and she nicked her lab partner with a scalpel.”
I know Mallory Martin by reputation. My girls call her Maleficent. I somehow doubt the incident with the scalpel was an accident.
“I’m sorry, Myra, I’ll tell them to be quieter. They get so keyed up for these exams.”
“The thing to do is give them extra problems when they finish their tests. That way they won’t be so anxious to finish early.” Simon Ross, the math teacher, volunteers this pedagogical advice and resumes scoring a pile of quizzes with a thick red marker. The tips of his fingers are stained red with the marker, and I notice the color has bled onto his sandwich.
“I let the girls write in their journals,” Gwendoline Marsh offers in a small voice. “It helps them to have an outlet and it’s part of their grade.”
“And just how do you grade these journals?” asks Meryl North, the history teacher who already seemed as ancient as her subject when I was a student here. “Do you read their private thoughts?”
“Oh no, I only read the parts they want me to—they circle the parts I’m not supposed to read and mark them private.”
Meryl North makes a sound between a laugh and a choke and Gwendoline’s pale skin reddens. I try to catch Gwen’s eye to give her a nod of encouragement—she is the closest thing to a friend I have here at Heart Lake—but she is resolutely staring down at a worn volume of Emily Dickinson.
“They do seem to be under a lot of stress,” I say, more to cover Gwen’s embarrassment than because I want to open this particular line of conversation. There were two suicide attempts last year. In response, the administration has instituted weekly faculty seminars on adolescent depression and “How to detect the ten warning signs of suicidal behavior.”
“Anyone in particular?” The question comes from Dr. Candace Lockhart. Unlike the rest of us at the table she has no stacks of papers to grade or texts to study for next period. Her fingers are never stained with ink, her exquisitely tailored dove gray suits never tainted with the ugly yellow chalk dust that the rest of us wear like a wasting disease. She’s the school psychologist, an office that did not exist in my day. There is an aura of secrecy surrounding her appointment here. I’ve heard some of the faculty complain that Dean Buehl hired her without going through the proper channels. In other words, without giving the resident faculty a chance to gossip about her credentials. There’s a whiff of jealousy about the complaints, to which I am not immune. The rumor is that she is conducting research for a groundbreaking study on the psychology of adolescent girls. We all suspect that once her research is done she will leave us for private practice, a glamorous lecture circuit with appearances on “Oprah,” or perhaps a tenure-track post at an Ivy League college—some existence more appropriate to her wardrobe. In the meantime, she resides among us with her pale, almost white, hair, blue eyes and thin, ascetic figure, like a lilac point Siamese slumming with drab tabbies.
Poor Gwen, in her faded Indian print jumper and fussily old-fashioned high-necked white blouse, looks especially dowdy in comparison. Although Candace Lockhart and Gwen Marsh are both in their early thirties, the effects of teaching five classes a day, not to mention sponsoring half a dozen clubs, have left their mark on Gwen. Her complexion is muddy, her hair limp and going gray at the roots, her blue eyes washed out and bloodshot. Candace, on the other hand, clearly has time to get her hair done (that platinum blond can’t be entirely natural) and her blue eyes are as clear and cold as lake water.
I am sufficiently unnerved by those blue eyes to make a mistake. Of course, I should say, “No. No one in particular.” But instead I name a name. “Athena… I mean Ellen… Craven. I noticed today that she has an awful scar on her arm.”
“Well, yes, I know about that of course. That’s old news and not surprising given Ellen’s history.”
I should be glad for her dismissal, but something in the way Dr. Lockhart’s blue eyes glaze over, already looking past me toward whatever illustrious future fate has in store for her, irks me. I am forever thinking I am past such vanities and finding that I am not.
“Some of the pictures she draws on the back of her homework assignments are… well… somewhat disturbing.”
“You let your girls turn in homework with pictures on the back?” Myra Todd looks up from her stack of papers, appalled, only to meet Dr. Lockhart’s cool look of disdain. Gratified to have someone else silenced by those eyes, I go on. It has occurred to me that this is exactly what I should be doing. My responsibility as Athena’s teacher, as an especially trusted teacher in whom the girl confided, demands that I seek help for her emotional problems. To whom else should I refer those problems than the school psychologist?
“Disembodied eyes with tears turning into razor blades, that kind of thing. I suppose the images aren’t unusual…”
I notice that the rest of the table has grown quiet, and it occurs to me that I shouldn’t be talking about my student in front of the entire teaching staff. Dr. Lockhart must think so, too.
“Perhaps you should come see me in my office to talk about Athena. I’m in my office by seven. Why don’t you come in before your first class?” Dr. Lockhart suggests.
She no doubt sees my reluctance to agree to this early appointment—I am thinking of the lake swim I try to take each morning before class—and so she adds this last piece of admonishment.
“It’s crucial we address any preoccupation with death or suicide immediately. These things have a way of turning into trends, as I’m sure you know from your own experience here, Miss Hudson. Don’t you agree, Dean Buehl?”
Dean Buehl sighs. “God forbid that happen again.”
I feel blood rush to my cheeks as if I had been slapped. Any thoughts I had of protesting the early-morning meeting are gone now, and Dr. Lockhart seems to know that. Without waiting for my answer she rises from her chair and adjusts a pale blue shawl over her suit jacket.
“I especially want to know if that Crevecoeur sisters legend…” The rest of her words are drowned out by the bell ringing to signal the end of lunch hour and the scraping of chairs being pushed back from the table.
Dr. Lockhart, unencumbered as she is, glides out of the dining room while the rest of us gather books and shoulder heavy canvas bags. Gwen especially seems to list to one side from the weight of her book bag. I ask if she needs some help and she pulls out a thick manila envelope and hands it to me.
“Oh, thank you, Jane, I was going to ask if someone could type these student poems up for the literary magazine. I’d do it but my carpal tunnel syndrome’s acting up.” She lifts up her arms and I see that both forearms are wrapped in Ace bandages. All I’d meant to offer was to carry something for her, but what can I say?
I transfer the heavy folder from her bag to mine. Now I’m the one listing to one side as we leave the Music Room, and Gwen, lightened of her load, hurries on ahead to class. I trail behind the rest of the teachers thinking about what the psychologist had said about preoccupation with death and suicidal trends. I picture my students with their skull jewelry and kohl-rimmed eyes.
The nose rings and skull jewelry and purple hair may be new, but this preoccupation with suicide is not. Like many girls’ schools, Heart Lake has its own suicide legend. When I was here the story would be told, usually around the Halloween bonfire at the swimming beach, that the Crevecoeur family lost all three of their daughters in the flu epidemic of 1918. It was said that one night the three girls, all delirious with fever, went down to the lake to quench their fever and drowned there. At this point in the story, someone would point to the three rocks that rose out of the water off the swimming beach and intone solemnly, “Their bodies were never found, but on the next morning three rocks appeared mysteriously in the lake and those rocks have from that day been known as the three sisters.”
One of the seniors would fill in the rest of the details as we younger girls nervously toasted our marshmallows over the bonfire. India Crevecoeur, the girls’ mother, was so heartbroken she could no longer live at Heart Lake, so she turned her home into a girls’ school. From the school’s first year, however, there have been mysterious suicides at Heart Lake. They say that the sound of the lake lapping against the three rocks (here the speaker would pause so we could all listen to the sound of the water restlessly beating against the rocks) beckons girls to take their lives by throwing themselves into the lake. They say that when the lake freezes over the faces of the girls can be seen peering out from beneath the ice. The ice makes a noise like moaning, and that sound, like the lapping of the water, draws girls out onto the lake’s frozen surface, where the sisters wait to drag the unsuspecting skater through the cracks in the ice. And they say that whenever one girl drowns in the lake, two more inevitably follow.
If the legend is still circulating, as Dr. Lockhart fears, there are a few things I could tell my girls. I could tell them that the Crevecoeur family did lose their youngest daughter, Iris, but she didn’t drown. She caught a chill from a mishap during a boating party with her two older sisters and died of the flu in her own bed. I could also tell them that nineteenth-century drawings of the lake show the three rocks, which were called, by early settlers, the three graces. But I know that the harder you try to dispel a legend the more power it gains. It’s like Oedipus trying to avoid his fate and running headlong into it at the crossroads. And once I begin to talk about the legend they might ask if there were any suicides when I went to school here. Then I would either have to lie or tell them that during my senior year both my roommates drowned in the lake.
I might even find myself telling them that since then I have always felt the lake is waiting for the third girl.
Chapter Two
B ETWEEN TEACHING AND TAKING CARE OF OLIVIA AFTER school, the question of who has found my old notebook recedes to background noise. I can hear the question whispering at the edge of my consciousness, but I push it away until I can concentrate on it.
That night I scramble eggs for Olivia and me. After dinner we wash out the eggshells for an arts and crafts project for her nursery school. Olivia holds the shells under the running tap water and then hands them to me. I surreptitiously scoop out the transparent jelly that still clings to the hollow cups and set them into an empty egg crate. She explains to me that not just birds come from eggs. Snakes and alligators and turtles also come out of eggs. Even spiders.
“Charlotte made a sack for her eggs and Wilbur carried it home from the fair in his mouth,” she tells me. I remember that her preschool teacher, Mrs. Crane, is reading Charlotte’s Web aloud in class. They’ll study spiders and eggs at the same time and visit a local farm to see pigs. It’s an excellent preschool program, one of the perks of working here.
I set the crate aside on the counter to dry.
“And then Charlotte died,” Olivia finishes.
“That’s a sad part, isn’t it?”
“Uh huh. Can I watch some TV before bed?”
“No, it’s time for your shower.”
Olivia complains bitterly about no TV, about the fact she has to take a shower because the cottage we’ve been given by the school has no bath, and, for good measure, she throws in the fact that her father isn’t here to read to her. It’s on the tip of my tongue to say that he hardly ever read to her anyway, that he was usually at work far past her bedtime, but of course I don’t. I tell her that her father will read to her when he sees her the weekend after next, which requires a lengthy consultation with the calendar before she grasps the time frame of every other weekend visitation.
By the time her shower is finished it is past nine o’clock and my throat is raw from teaching all day and arguing with a four-year-old. Still, I can’t really weasel out of reading to her after that remark about her father. I go into the spare bedroom where I’ve stacked the boxes of books and papers and find one of my old children’s books, a collection called Tales from the Ballet.
Olivia is intrigued with the idea that this is a book I had as a child.
“Did your mommy give it to you?” she asks.
“No,” I tell her, and wonder how I could possibly explain to her that my mother would never have spent money on anything so frivolous as books. “One of my teachers. Here, she wrote something to me.”
Inside on the flyleaf my kindergarten teacher had written, “To Jane, who dances on ice.”
“What’s that mean? Dance on ice.”
“Ice skating. Mommy used to be a pretty good ice skater. I used to skate on this very lake when it froze in the winter.”
“Can I skate on the lake when it freezes?” she asks.
“Maybe,” I say. “We’ll see.”
I flip through the pages of the book looking for a story she’ll recognize—“Cinderella” or “Sleeping Beauty” perhaps—but then the book falls open to a page marked with a dried maple leaf, its once vibrant scarlet faded now to palest russet. “This one!” Olivia demands with that odd certainty of four-year-olds.
It’s “Giselle.” My old favorite, but not the one I would have chosen for Olivia.
“This one has some scary parts,” I say.
“Good,” Olivia tells me. “I like scary parts.”
I figure I can edit out anything too scary. I stop to explain why Giselle’s mother won’t let her dance and then I have to explain what it means to have a weak heart. She likes the part about the prince disguised as a peasant—“Just like in ‘Sleeping Beauty’ ”—and is sad when Giselle dies. I am thinking I will just leave out the part about the Wilis—the spirits of girls disappointed in love who seduce young men and make them dance until they die—but when I turn the page to the picture of the wraithlike girls in their bridal dresses, Olivia is instantly in love with them. Just as I was at her age. This had been my favorite picture.
So I read on. Through the part where the girls dance with the gamekeeper, Hilarion, and lure him into the lake to drown, and up to where the queen of the Wilis tells Giselle she must make Albrecht, her false lover, dance to his doom.
“Will she?” Olivia asks, her face pinched with concern.
“What do you think?” I ask her.
“Well, he did make her sad,” she says.
“But she loves him, let’s see.…”
Giselle tells Albrecht to hold fast to the cross on her tomb, but he is so entranced by her dancing that he joins her. But because of Giselle’s delay, he is still alive when the church clock strikes four and the Wilis return to their graves. “And so she saves him,” I tell Olivia, closing the book. All I’ve left out are the last two lines of the story, which read, “His life had been saved, but he has lost his heart. Giselle has danced away with it.”
WHEN OLIVIA HAS FALLEN ASLEEP I TAKE OUT THE PIECE OF paper folded in my skirt pocket. As I unfold it I am sure that I will see now that the handwriting is Athena’s, or Vesta’s or Aphrodite’s, anyone’s but my own. But as I stare at the words again there is no escaping the truth. I recognize not only my own handwriting, but the ink—a peculiar shade of peacock blue that Lucy Toller gave me, along with a fountain pen in the same color, for my fifteenth birthday.
Still holding the paper, I go into the spare bedroom to find the box marked “Heart Lake.” I tear at the packing tape and rip open the box so hastily that the sharp edge of the cardboard slices into my wrist. Ignoring the pain, I pull out the stack of black-and-white notebooks inside.
There are three of them. I started them in the ninth grade when I first met Matt and Lucy Toller, and faithfully kept a new one each year through our senior year at Heart Lake.
I count them as if hoping that the fourth one will have miraculously rejoined its companions, but of course it hasn’t. I haven’t seen the fourth notebook since spring semester senior year, when it disappeared from my dorm room.
At the time I thought someone in the administration had confiscated the notebook. I spent that last term at Heart Lake sure that it was only a matter of time before I was called into the dean’s office and confronted with the truth of everything that had happened that year, and what I had said at the inquest. But the summons never came. I attended the graduation ceremony and the reception on the lawn above the lake, standing apart from the other girls and their proud families, and afterward I took a taxi to the train station and a train to my summer job at the library at Vassar, where I had a scholarship for the fall. I decided that the notebook must have gotten lost. Sometimes I told myself that it had slipped out of my book bag and fallen into the lake and the lake had washed away all the blue-green ink until its pages were as blank as they were on the first day of senior year.
I open the first notebook and read the opening entry.
“Lucy gave me this fountain pen and beautiful ink for my birthday and Matt gave me this notebook,” I had written in a flowery script that tried to live up to the fancy pen and ink. There were blotches, though, where the pen’s nib had caught the paper. It had taken a while to get used to that pen. “I’ll never have any other friends like them.”
I almost laugh at the words. Other friends. What other friends? When I first laid eyes on Matt and Lucy Toller I had no other friends.
I take out the folded paper and smooth it out next to this page. The handwriting is surer and blotch-free, but the words are written in the same beautiful shade of blue-green.
I go outside to watch the moon rise over Heart Lake. I think, not for the first time, that I must have been crazy to come back here. But then, where else had I to go?
When I told Mitch I wanted a divorce he laughed at me. “Where will you go? How will you live?” he asked. “For God’s sake, Jane, you were a Latin major. If you leave this house you’ll be on your own.”
And I had thought of Electra’s line, “How shall we be lords in our own house? We have been sold and go as wanderers.” And right then I knew I’d go to the only homeland I’d ever had: Heart Lake.
I started to work on my Latin, which I hadn’t touched in years. At night I studied from my old Wheelock textbook, picking away at case endings and verb conjugations until the unintelligible jumble of words sorted itself out. Words paired up like skaters linking arms, adjectives with nouns, verbs with subjects, inscribing precise patterns in the slippery ice of archaic syntax.
And always the voices I heard reciting the declensions and conjugations were Matt’s and Lucy’s.
When I had reread Wheelock twice, I applied for the job at Heart Lake and learned that my old science teacher, Celeste Buehl, had become dean. “We’ve never really been able to replace Helen Chambers,” she told me. I remembered that Miss Buehl had been good friends with my Latin teacher. No one was sadder than she when Helen Chambers had been let go. “But then we’ve never gotten an old girl in the position.” “Old girl” was how they referred to an alumna who came back to teach at Heart Lake. Celeste Buehl was an “old girl,” as were Meryl North, the history teacher, and Tacy Beade, the art teacher. “Your generation doesn’t seem interested in teaching. I haven’t interviewed a graduate since I became dean, but I can’t think of anyone better to take the job than one of Helen Chambers’s girls. Luckily my old cottage is free. It will be perfect for you and your daughter. You remember it, the one above the swimming beach.” I remembered it all too well.
And although the idea of living here was at first disturbing, I’ve come to treasure my view of the lake. It’s only a few yards from my front door to the Point, the stone cliff that bisects the lake, giving it its heartlike shape. From where I stand now I can see the curve of the swimming beach, white in the moonlight, and the stones we called the three sisters rising out of the still, moonlit water.
I go inside and look at Olivia sleeping. The moonlight comes through her window and falls on her tangled hair. I smooth back her hair from her forehead and rearrange the twisted sheets so she’ll be cooler. She stirs and moans softly in her sleep, but doesn’t call my name as she would if she were anywhere near waking. I know she might wake up later, at two or four perhaps, but I’m almost positive she’ll sleep undisturbed for the next few hours.
I go back outside and down the steep stone steps that lead from our house to the lake. Every night I do this and every night I’m amazed at myself for taking the chance. Of course I know I shouldn’t be leaving Olivia alone for even these few minutes—fifteen, twenty minutes, at most, I tell myself, what could happen? Well, I know what could happen. Fire, burglars, Olivia waking up and getting frightened when I don’t come to her call, wandering out into the woods… my heart pounds at the images of disasters my mind so easily conjures up. But still I walk down the steps barefoot, feeling through the soles of my feet when the stone steps become damp from the mist off the lake and then slimy with the moss that grows over the stones.
At the foot of the steps the ground is hardpacked mud. I can hear the restless slap of water on the rocks. I wade through the cold water until I am standing, calf deep, next to the first of the three sister stones. I lean my shoulder against the tall rock and it feels warm. Like a person, I think, although I know it’s only giving off the heat collected through the unseasonably warm day. The three stones are made of a hard, glittery basalt, different from the soft surrounding limestone. Lucy said they’re like the tors in England, foreign stones carried from afar and erected in the lake, but Miss Buehl said they were probably deposited by a retreating glacier and then eroded into their present shapes. Each one has been molded differently by water and time, and the freezing and unfreezing of the lake. The first stone, which I am standing by, is a column rising six feet high above the water, the second is also a column, but it leans in the direction of the southern shore. The third stone is a rounded dome, curving gently out of the deep water.
If you look at the rocks in succession—in the right light or through a faint mist like the one that rises from the lake tonight—you can imagine that the first stone is a girl wading at the edge of the lake, the second is the same girl diving into the water, and the third is the girl’s behind rising above the water as she dolphin dives into the lake.
The lake feels deliciously cold. The weather has been unseasonably warm for early October, but I know this Indian summer can’t last much longer. Any day now a cold front will move down from Canada and it will be too cold to swim. Suddenly I notice how sweaty and sticky I feel, how sore my neck and back are from standing at a blackboard all day and leaning over stacks of papers. I remember that I won’t be able to take my swim in the morning and the thought is like a physical pain. I could leave my clothes on the rock and swim for just a few moments. The cold water would wash away all thought of that lost journal and what is in it.
I am about to take off my shirt when I hear a rustle in the trees behind me. Instinctively, I move into the shadow of the second stone as if I were the errant schoolgirl caught out of her dorm at night. From there I can see three white shapes pass by me and into the lake. They move smoothly into the water, like spirits, and I am reminded eerily of the Wilis in the story I had been reading to Olivia. White sheets billow up around them like the Wilis’ bridal gowns, and then, like animal brides in a fairy tale discarding their skins, they emerge out of the white billows and stroke naked out to the farthest rock.
A white clump floats past me and I pick up its corner and read the laundry marking, which identifies it as the property of the Heart Lake School for Girls.
One of the girls has pulled herself onto the farthest rock. She stands stretching her arms above her head as if reaching for the moon.
“We call on the Goddess of the Lake and make offering to honor She who guards the holy water.”
The two girls in the water giggle. One of them tries to heave herself onto the rock and lands on her chest with a painful-sounding thud.
“Damn, I smashed my boobs.”
“Oh, like they could be any flatter.”
“Thanks a lot, Melissa.”
With their giggling and bickering the three girls are transformed from mysterious Wilis to three awkward adolescents: my students, Athena (Ellen Craven), Vesta (Sandy James), and Aphrodite (Melissa Randall).
“Come on,” Athena says, her hands on her naked hips. “You’re ruining it. How can the Lake Goddess take our offering seriously with you two messing around? I told you we shouldn’t have gotten high first.”
With the last comment I am transformed from innocent bystander—amused voyeur—to responsible teacher, if only in my guilty conscience, because I still don’t reveal my presence. But now I’ve been given some information I should act on. The girls have been smoking pot. And yet, why should this alert me to my role while the sight of my students skinny-dipping at night fails to? Perhaps because skinny-dipping and making offerings to the Lake Goddess are both old Heart Lake traditions. In my day the girls routinely made sacrifices to the spirit of the lake. Sometimes we called her the Lady of the Lake (that was when we were reading Tennyson), which we later translated as Domina Lacunae, and in our senior year we called her the White Goddess. Over the years we offered her half-eaten S’mores, beads from broken necklaces, and locks of hair. Lucy said that if you gave her something at the beginning of the term you wouldn’t lose anything in the lake that year. Girls are always losing things in the lake. I imagine the dark floor of the lake as faintly glimmering with broken ID bracelets, tarnished hairclips, and hoop earrings.
At the thought of the lake bottom I am suddenly cold. I remember Olivia alone in the house and I wonder how much time has elapsed. I want to go back, but if I let the girls see that I have seen them, I will have to report them to Dean Buehl. I remember her expression today when Dr. Lockhart mentioned the Crevecoeur legend and know that the last thing I want to do is remind her of girls making sacrifices to the lake. Also I am afraid to leave them here. What if one of them slips on the rocks or gets a cramp swimming back? Having witnessed them I feel they are now my responsibility. So I wait while they finish their “rite.” I can tell they are cold now, their skin goosefleshed in the moonlight, and impatient to be done. I can’t see what they hold up in their hands as offerings, but I can hear their “prayers.”
“Let me maintain a B average this term so my mom gets off my back,” Vesta says.
“Keep Brian from falling in love with someone else while he’s at Exeter,” Aphrodite pleads.
Only Athena says her bit too quietly for me to hear, but I see that as she whispers her plea she holds up her left arm, bending the wrist back so that her empty palm is flat to the night sky and the long scar on her forearm shows up livid in the moonlight. It’s as if her offering were the scar itself.
Chapter Three
A NOREXIA, SELF-MUTILATION, SUICIDE… THREE SIDES of the same picture. Teenage pregnancy, STDs, drug abuse, you name it. It all begins when puberty strikes. Look at your ten-year-old girls—they’re bright and confident. Then look at your fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds. Girls’ IQs actually plummet during adolescence. And it’s getting worse. Did you know that the suicide rate among girls age ten to fourteen rose seventy-five percent between 1979 and 1988?”
Dr. Lockhart leans back in her swivel chair and waits for my reaction. It is difficult to read her expression. She sits with her back to the window so that her body is silhouetted against the silver mirror of the lake. A light rain had begun not long after I returned to my house last night and continued through the dawn, consoling me, somewhat, for the loss of my morning swim. Now the rain has stopped and the sky, though overcast, is a bright, burnished pewter, against which Dr. Lockhart is a darker, blurrier gray. Neither the swimming beach nor the two rocks closest to the shore are visible from her second-floor office in the mansion; they are obscured by the steep rock wall of the Point. I can just make out, however, the third rock where I saw Athena standing last night.
I tell her I hadn’t been aware of a rising suicide rate after 1979. I don’t mention that by 1979 I was immured at Vassar, poring over my Latin books in the library until midnight. Girls got drunk at the campus bar; my dorm reeked of marijuana; boys wandered in and out of the hall bathroom; girls drove each other to the clinic in Dobbs Ferry for abortions. You could get a prescription for the Pill at the school clinic and no one had heard of AIDS. I memorized Horace and struggled over Latin composition.
“Diderot said to a young girl, ‘You all die at fifteen.’ ”
I am startled by her statement until I realize she isn’t speaking literally. I am somewhat familiar with this line of thought—that girls suffer a loss of confidence with the onset of puberty. I recognize the titles of the books that line Dr. Lockhart’s shelves. Meeting at the Crossroads, Reviving Ophelia. I think of what I had hoped for my life at fourteen, and it isn’t so much as if I had died as that I had fallen into a long sleep like a girl in a fairy tale. But I had thought of my case as unique.
“A girl like Ellen is particularly at risk,” Dr. Lockhart says.
“Why a girl like Ellen?”
Dr. Lockhart wheels herself over to a gunmetal gray file cabinet and pulls a light green file folder from the middle drawer. She looks at it briefly and slips it back into place.
“The girl’s parents are divorced—the father is almost entirely out of the picture and the mother’s an alcoholic who spends most of her time in rehab clinics.” Dr. Lockhart rattles off these facts as if she’s reciting a recipe. I remember what Athena said about her mother drying out. “There’s an aunt who’s the legal guardian, but her solution has been to shuttle the girl from school to school.”
“That’s too bad,” I say. “I knew some girls like that when I went to school here.”
“Did you?” Dr. Lockhart studies me for a moment and then smiles. “Maybe you asked them home to spend the holidays with you.”
I start to laugh at the idea. Those girls from Albany and Saratoga in their shetland wool sweaters and graduated pearls might have been neglected by their wealthy relatives, but I could only imagine what they would have made of my mother’s Campbell’s soup casseroles, the plastic covers on the one good couch, the view of the mill from the living room window. I look at Dr. Lockhart and see she’s no longer smiling. “No,” I admit. “I never thought to ask them home. I guess it was lonely here for some of them.”
“Imagine every time you got settled at one school and made some friends having to start all over again. A person would eventually give up.”
The dry tone has vanished. She really does care about these girls, I realize. “Did you go to boarding school?” I ask.
“Several,” she answers. “So I can guess how lonely it’s been for Athena—switching schools so often. It’s that loneliness that makes a girl susceptible to depression and suicidal urges. It’s essential to curb any such tendencies in our girls. Once the idea of suicide breaks out…”
“You make it sound like a contagious disease.”
“It is a contagious disease, Jane. I’ve seen it happen. One girl might be playing with the notion of suicide, or indulge in cutting herself as a way of coping with emotional pain, then one of her friends might emulate her and succeed in killing herself. The inevitable drama surrounding such tragedies exerts a morbid pull on these girls. Notice their fascination with death—skull jewelry and black clothing, the whole ‘Goth’ look.”
“Yes, my senior Latin class looks like something out of the Middle Ages, and they almost all have scratches on their arms.”
“Do you remember The Crucible?”
“The play by Arthur Miller? Of course, but why… ?”
“Remember how the Salem girls accused their tormentors of pricking them with pins? When the judges examined the girls’ bodies they indeed found scratches and cuts, bite marks, pins sticking in their flesh…”
I flinch and Dr. Lockhart pauses. “I know it’s not a pleasant topic, Jane,” she says, “but it has to be faced. Most of our girls engage in some form of cutting or self-mutilation. Most people don’t realize how long such practices have existed.”
“No,” I say, “I had no idea. How did you… ?”
“My thesis topic,” she explains. “Self-Mutilation and Witchcraft in Puritan New England.” She leans back in her chair and looks out the window at the silvery surface of the lake.
I follow her gaze and once again I think of Athena standing on the rock, holding her arm up to the moon like an offering. A sacrifice.
“Fascinating,” I say.
“Oh, it is,” she agrees. “The connection still exists. Often the same girls who indulge in self-mutilation practice some form of witchcraft. It’s all an attempt to gain control over a world in which they have no power. Even their own emotions, their own bodies, seem out of control. Spells, rites, initiation ceremonies… these are all strategies to order the chaos of adolescence.”
I think of my three students standing naked on the rock in the lake, asking for help with boyfriends and grades. I think of the S’mores and bangles we used to offer up to the Lady of the Lake.
“Don’t adolescent girls always play with this sort of thing? I mean witchcraft and spells? Ouija boards and cootie catchers.”
“You’re saying you practiced witchcraft with the girls you went to school with?”
“The girls I went to school with?” The question takes me by surprise. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I’ve been thinking about Athena all morning. What does this have to do with my schoolmates?”
Dr. Lockhart wheels her chair in closer to her desk, out of the glare from the lake, and I see her blue eyes narrow on me. She touches the edge of a folder that lies on her desk as if to open it, but then she rests her long, slim fingers on its surface.
“Wasn’t there a rash of suicides during your senior year?”
“I wouldn’t exactly call it a rash,” I say perhaps a little too indignantly. I feel as if she has accused me of having a rash. I hear the defensive tone in my own voice and apparently she can, too.
“Are you uncomfortable talking about this?” she asks.
“I just don’t see what it has to do with Athena,” I say.
“I had hoped we could draw on your own experience with troubled, suicidal adolescents. Perhaps what you witnessed back then could throw light on your present students’ troubles.”
I think of what happened during my senior year and instead of light I see murk, the kind of brownish-green murk I see when I open my eyes in the lake. But perhaps Dr. Lockhart is right. Perhaps talking about what happened back then might help me to understand Athena better. And I do want to help Athena.
“There were two students who committed suicide my senior year,” I say.
Dr. Lockhart shakes her head sadly. “That must have been very hard on you. What is so unfortunate in these situations is that one suicide—or suicide attempt—spurs another. As I keep trying to tell you, it becomes almost a fad. An epidemic. The girls were roommates, I believe. Weren’t you all roommates?”
“We shared a suite, yes. Lucy Toller and I shared one room and Deirdre Hall had the single.”
“I believe there was an unsuccessful suicide attempt first.”
“Yes, Lucy slit her wrists over Christmas break. She and Deirdre were alone here on campus. It could be pretty bleak.”
“The notes I have from the school nurse at the time indicate that Deirdre Hall was particularly upset by the event, especially since Miss Toller chose to slit her wrists in Deirdre’s bed.”
“Deirdre had the single. I guess Lucy wanted privacy. But yes, I think Deirdre was upset about that.”
“Upset enough to make her own suicide attempt. Only hers was successful.”
“Yes, she fell from the Point and broke her neck on the ice.” I can’t help but look up at the outcropping of stone as I speak. Dr. Lockhart follows my gaze. And there we are, both staring at the forty-foot cliff as if we expect to see Deirdre Hall appear on its height and perform her last swan dive. For a moment a picture does appear in my mind: Deirdre standing on the Point, her face contorted with rage and fear. I blink away the image and turn my gaze away from the window and back to Dr. Lockhart. “Some people thought it was an accident,” I say.
“According to my files her journal indicated otherwise.” She flips open the folder on her desk and reads silently for a moment. A breeze from the lake stirs the pages and I can tell they are of the light onion skin we used to have in typing class, not the smooth sheets that people use nowadays in computer printers.
“And then Lucy tried again. She drowned in the lake?”
“Yes, she went through the ice.…”
“That could have been an accident as well?”
“Yes, but it wasn’t. I was there.”
“I see. Why don’t you tell me what happened.”
I look out at the lake. A fog is rising from the water, whitening the surface of the lake. I can almost imagine it is winter and the lake is already frozen.
“She had a terrible fight with her brother,” I say. The words come tumbling out before I can consider whether I really ought to relate this information to Dr. Lockhart. Maybe it is because they are words I rehearsed and repeated so many times. “And then she ran onto the ice, which was breaking apart.…”
“What was the fight about?” she asks.
“I only heard part of it and I didn’t understand it all.” I’m amazed that the well-rehearsed lines are there, tripping off my tongue as if the twenty years that have elapsed since I first delivered them had never passed. Like my Latin declensions, they’d stayed in my memory all these years. “But it had to do with a teacher here.”
“Helen Chambers.” I notice that Dr. Lockhart doesn’t need to consult her notes to produce the name.
“Yes, Helen Chambers. She taught Latin and Greek. She was an amazing teacher. She had us all reciting Greek plays. Our senior year, she put on an aquatic version of Iphigenia in Aulis in the lake.”
“In the lake?”
“Yes, in the lake.”
“She sounds remarkable. But why would Lucy and her brother have been arguing about her?”
I shake my head. “I don’t really know, but Lucy idealized Domina Chambers. We all did. It was thought that Lucy had an unhealthy obsession with her.”
“It was thought? What do you think?”
The question is eerily like one that Helen Chambers herself would pose. If you tried to hide behind someone else’s opinion—the introduction in your Penguin edition of Antigone, say, or some predigested litcrit babble from Cliff Notes—she would nail you with those icy blue eyes of hers and ask you—no, demand of you—What do you think? And if your answer failed to measure up to her standards for original thought she would look heavenward and shrug her elegant shoulders. “Perhaps you really haven’t thought at all, Miss Hudson. Come back to us when you have.”
“She could be a bit harsh,” I tell Dr. Lockhart.
Dr. Lockhart smiles. “Don’t you ever find, Jane, that sometimes a teacher has to be a little harsh?”
“Yes, I agree,” I say, but I wonder if I do. I’ve never been much good at the “tough love” school of teaching. “But it was thought—I thought—that she sometimes went too far.”
“Well, then perhaps you should think of Helen Chambers when you’re dealing with your students. As I’m sure you remember, she was let go.”
AFTER MY MEETING WITH DR. LOCKHART I WALK TO THE lodge for my first-period class. The rain has cleared and the girls who run past me have tied their regulation navy school windbreakers around their waists so that they stream out behind them like shiny, rustling tail feathers. A raucous crowd of eighth graders parts to make way and then regroups behind me never losing the thread of their shouted conversation. I might be a stone parting a stream for all the notice they take of me. It makes me feel good. Like a part of the geography.
It’s all I’ve ever wanted. To feel a part of something. I wonder if this was how Helen Chambers felt, when she came back to teach at Heart Lake. I know that to me she always seemed the defining spirit of the place.
On my way to my class I pass the art room. I stop just outside the door and watch Tacy Beade setting up for her next class. The room hasn’t changed since I went here—the girls say Beady deducts points from your grade if you don’t put the art supplies back in their proper places—and neither has Miss Beade. She moves around the room, arranging palettes and easels like a nun performing the stations of the cross. Is this what I want, I wonder, the comfort of teaching in the same place for forty years? To be one of the old girls?
My first class is Language Discovery for Sixth Graders. I trade off with the Spanish and German teachers. It’s a new idea of Dean Buehl’s. This way the kids will have a basis for picking which language they want in seventh grade.
“Think of it as a recruiting opportunity,” Dean Buehl had told me. “Make Latin fun. Build up the Latin program and you’ll have a job for life.”
When I went to Heart Lake Latin was mandatory. The idea of Helen Chambers recruiting is absurd and slightly offensive. I can’t imagine Helen Chambers spending two minutes worrying about how to make Latin fun. And yet we all loved her. We would have done anything for her.
I wonder what Helen Chambers would think of how I teach this class. I use a textbook called Ecce Romani. Here are the Romans. The title always makes me think of a TV sitcom. Oh, those goofy lovable Romans, with their charming villa in southern Italy and their colorful, perky slaves. There’s even an episode in which one of the slaves escapes. When he’s caught, he’s beaten with a stick (virga) and branded on the forehead with the letters FUG, short for fugitivus, runaway.
When Dean Buehl first showed me the new books my mouth went dry. All those nights studying declensions and memorizing Catullus hadn’t prepared me to talk about the weather in Latin (Quaenam est tempestas hodie? Mala est.)
I spent hours in front of the mirror practicing conversational gambits like a nervous teenager preparing for her first date. Salve! Quid est praenomen tibi? Quis es?
Now, when I enter my first-period class, I am greeted by a dozen loud voices. Salve Magistra! Quid agis? And though I know that quid agis means, idiomatically, how are you, this morning, after my meeting with Dr. Lockhart, I hear instead its literal meaning: What are you doing? Why didn’t you tell her about what you saw last night? And I have to stop myself from telling my cheerful, beaming, prepubescent sixth graders, “Nescio.” I don’t know. I have no idea.
IN THE ADVANCED CLASS THAT DAY I TRY NOT TO STARE AT Athena, Vesta, and Aphrodite, but I find myself stealing surreptitious looks while they read their translations. I think I can detect blue circles under Athena’s eyes, but then I know that the girls often affect this sleepless look by smudging kohl under their eyes, which matches the shade of blue lipstick they all favor.
She fumbles, though, in her translation, which is not like her.
“How are you translating praecipitatur in line six?” I ask her.
“She fell under the water.”
“She?”
“It’s the light, not she,” Vesta interrupts. “But I don’t get it: The light throws down its head under the water? Doesn’t praecipito mean, like, to fall on your head?”
Aphrodite giggles. “I think you must have fallen on your head last night, Vesta.”
Vesta and Athena exchange dangerous glances with Aphrodite, and I find myself, of all things, blushing, as if it were my secret that was threatened. Maybe it is. If they knew that I was there last night, what does that say about my authority as a teacher?
“Tace,” I tell Aphrodite. “Praecipitare means to cast down headlong. In the middle sense it can mean to cast oneself down headlong. In this case it means the light casts itself below the water, or, more idiomatically, the light sinks beneath the waves.”
“That’s a lot of English words for one Latin word,” Athena points out.
“Well, Latin is an economical language, especially when it comes to destruction.”
Athena gives me a smile that chills me like a rush of lake water. “That’s exactly why we like it,” she says.
AFTER CLASS, I WALK TO THE PRESCHOOL TO PICK UP Olivia. I am early, so when I come around the corner of the building and see the children on the playground I step into the shadows of a large sycamore so Olivia won’t see me yet.
I look for Olivia in the brightly colored knots of children playing together in twos and threes, running and climbing in the mottled shade of the playground. And then I see her, apart from the others, dancing and singing to herself under the pine trees.
She doesn’t look unhappy, but the sight of her alone worries me. It reminds me of something I can’t at first put my finger on. Maybe, I reason, it’s just that she reminds me of myself at her age. Until I met Lucy Toller in the ninth grade I had no friends.
Olivia’s dance is punctuated now with little swipes to the ground, as if she were picking flowers, only I can see from here that her fingers barely graze the pine needles. It’s a charade of flower-picking, no doubt part of some make-believe. She is so absorbed in her game that she is wandering farther and farther from the playground, into the deeper woods that surround the school grounds and slope down to the lake. And that’s when I realize what she reminds me of: Persephone, straying from her companions to pick flowers on the shores of Lake Pergus, where she was snatched by Hades.
I step out of the shadows to call her, but just as I open my mouth I hear one of the student aides call her back to the playground. It takes a minute for the sound of her name to penetrate her daydream, but then she skips toward the older girl eagerly. I see the aide lean over to tell Olivia something and Olivia nodding. I can tell by the way Olivia’s eyes slant away from the aide that she is being reprimanded for straying away. Good, I think. But I’ll have to talk to her myself tonight.
I follow the children as they leave the playground. Dismissal is from inside and I’ll have to wait while they sing their good-bye song and collect their artwork. I find myself wandering under the same trees Olivia had been playing near. I can see why she likes the spot. It is cool under the pines and the ground is golden with dried pine needles. I kick the needles and unearth something thin and gold and metallic.
Stooping down to pick it up, I am reminded again of Persephone picking her flowers, only it isn’t a flower I retrieve from the pine needles, it is a hairpin, or, rather, several hairpins linked together. When I lift them up into the light I recognize the pattern. Two Ushaped hairpins linked together with a bobby pin bisecting the top one. It looks like the head of a horned animal holding something in its mouth. I shiver, not because of the shade now but because I’ve seen this particular configuration before, but not for twenty years.
Chapter Four
W E CALLED THEM CORNICULA, WHICH, AS LUCY found in Cassell’s New Latin, meant little horned ones. Deirdre used to say she had invented them when she found Helen Chambers’s hairpin in the love seat in the Lake Lounge. I have always thought, though, that they were a truly cooperative endeavor, product of a tripartite genesis.
We were in the suite’s one single room, Deirdre’s room, studying for our Latin midterm, fall semester, junior year, drinking Deirdre’s tea to stay awake. She had the single in our suite because of a note from her mother’s psychiatrist saying Deirdre had boundary issues and severe migraines. Lucy used to say it was overkill, that she ought to have stuck to one thing or the other: boundary issues or migraines.
Deirdre’s habits, which Lucy viewed as affectations, could be annoying. Her parents had something to do with foreign affairs and she’d spent her childhood in various remote corners of Asia. She wore an antique kimono to the shower room instead of the frayed and stained terry robes the rest of us shuffled around in. She liked to dress in outfits composed entirely of silk scarves clinging provocatively to her well-developed figure. It used to make me nervous looking at her in class because I always thought some piece was about to slip off, but the only time they came off was on our nocturnal swims, and then our path down to the lake would be strewn with her discarded silks.
She kept two large China tea tins on her bureau, one filled with pot, the other, and this was considered odder by Heart Lake standards, filled with loose tea. She was as particular about her teas as she was about her marijuana. Sometimes, listening to her rattle on about estate provinces and curing processes, it was difficult to know which she was talking about. I suspected she mixed more than her talk about the two, and there was many a morning I spent dazed and light-headed after drinking a cup of her dark smoky tea and many a night I spent sleepless after smoking one of her exquisitely rolled joints.
On this night Deirdre’s tea had a minty bite to it that set my teeth on edge and made the objects in her room glow around the edges. In between lines of Catullus I found myself mesmerized by the texture of the hemp mats on the floor and at one point the ceremonial dancers on a Balinese tapestry seemed to take a spin around the floor.
We were translating Catullus’s poem 2, the one where Catullus says he’s jealous of Lesbia’s pet sparrow. Deirdre claimed that the poem was really about Catullus’s jealousy of Lesbia’s female sexuality. Lucy, as usual, was annoyed by Deirdre’s reduction of nearly everything in Latin to sex. Having failed to interest Lucy in her interpretation of Catullus, Deirdre cast about the room for something that might capture Lucy’s approbation. Her eye alighted on a bit of folded paper stuck between the pages of the Tantra Asana that Deirdre kept on the night table beside her bed.
She slipped the paper, which had been folded into the shape of a flower, out of the book and held it up in front of Lucy.
“Do you know what’s in this?” Deirdre asked.
“Some illegal substance, no doubt. Honest, Deirdre, you’re going to be dead by twenty if you keep this up.”
“Better a short life full of glory than a long inglorious one,” Deirdre quoted. Deirdre was fond of quotes having to do with death. After sex, death was her favorite subject. She kept a silk-covered notebook filled with quotes from the ancients and moderns on the subject of early death. “Anyway, it’s not drugs.” Deirdre tugged at one petal of the flower and the whole thing blossomed in the palm of her hand, only to reveal another packet folded in the shape of a grasshopper. Deirdre loved this sort of thing, secrets within secrets, Chinese boxes, sanctum sanctorum. She knew Lucy did, too. With a flick of her long lacquered fingernail, the grasshopper sprang open. In the center of the folds lay a single hairpin.
I started to giggle. The unveiling had been so theatrical; the result was anticlimactic. Lucy, I noticed, wasn’t laughing.
“Where’d you find it?” she asked, touching one finger to the coppery wire.
“Behind the cushions of the love seat in the Lake Lounge. Where she always sits.”
Lucy lifted the hairpin out of its paper grasshopper carcass and held it aloft. A single strand of gold hair clung to the metal for a moment and then slipped to the floor where it evaporated into the straw mats. We all three leaned forward at the same time to catch it, but Deirdre plucked it from the matting with a quick dart of her fingers, nimble as a child picking up onesies at jacks.
She held it up to Lucy’s short hair.
“See, it’s the same color.”
“You can’t tell from one strand,” Lucy said, but I knew, with a pang, that she was pleased. That Deirdre had pleased her. To be like Helen Chambers in any small way was all any of us wanted. To find some hidden affinity, or to acquire one by emulation, we studied her more carefully than we studied our declensions and conjugations (and we worked on those hard enough, if only to please her). If Helen Chambers left a cardigan draped over a chair back one of us was sure to read its label. If she left her teacup in the Lake Lounge after four o’clock tea, we read the tea bag she’d chosen and studied the lipstick smudge left on the rim. Later, when we were invited to her apartment in Main Hall, we memorized the book titles on her bookshelves, the album covers stacked by her phonograph, and the perfume bottles on her dresser. We amassed our common knowledge into one eclectic but (to us) cohesive portrait: She wore Shalimar and read a Dickens novel every Christmas. She had gone to Vassar and always stayed at the Vassar Club when she went into the city, which she did twice a year to see the ballet (Giselle was her favorite, too) and shop at Altman’s for the simple but beautifully cut black jersey dresses she favored. Her favorite novel was Persuasion by Jane Austen and her middle name was Liddell, which, Lucy felt sure, must be her mother’s maiden name. We liked to think she was related to the Liddell of Liddell & Scott’s Greek Lexicon, the father of Alice Liddell—the model for Alice in Wonderland. Wouldn’t it be fitting, we thought, if she were related to Alice! But the one thing we never knew was how long her hair was because she always wore it twisted into a knot at the nape of her neck.
Deirdre held the strand of hair between the thumb and forefinger of each hand. “I already measured it,” she said, “twenty-seven inches long. It must hang below her ass.”
I thought Lucy would be most interested in the hair, but instead she held up the hairpin so that its prongs faced up. The metal was crimped halfway down each side.
“That’s to hold the hair better,” I said. “Look.” I took a pin out of my own hair. I had started wearing it up that term because Lucy said it made me look more scholarly. The pin was shaped the same but was darker to match my plain brown hair. I took my pin, prongs down, and linked it with the one in Lucy’s hand. It dangled there limply. Lucy took the single bobby pin she used to hold back the bangs she was growing out that year and slipped it over the prongs of the top hairpin—Helen Chambers’s pin. Then she held the thing up by the end of the bobby pin.
“It looks like some kind of animal,” Deirdre said. “A goat, maybe.”
“It’s a talisman,” Lucy said. “Of the Horned One. A…” she paused, looking into the middle distance, a look she often had right before she read her Latin translation, as if a page invisible to all but her was unfurling in the air. “A corniculum. A little horned one. From now on this will be the sign we leave for each other.”
“A sign of what?” Deirdre asked. “What will it mean when we find one?”
Lucy looked at both of us. I became conscious of how we were sitting, cross-legged in a tight triangle, our knees nearly touching, each of us leaning into the middle. Out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw the tapestry dancers take another spin around the room and then Lucy’s gaze brought me back, told me to pay attention, made the room still again.
“A sign that we’re always here for each other,” Lucy said.
I saw Deirdre smile. It was what she wanted, a sign of affirmation from Lucy (I knew that I was beside the point, but she’d take me because I came with Lucy). It’s what I wanted, too, of course, but there was something in Lucy’s tone that unnerved me, that made what she said less a promise of friendship than a threat of constant surveillance.
IT’S A SENSE OF BEING WATCHED THAT I HAVE NOW, HOLDING the little hairpin totem up so it catches the light slanting down through the tall pines. I look toward the lower school, but all the children have gone inside to collect their things. I can hear, faintly, the good-bye song they sing at the end of each day.
“So long, so long, it won’t be so long till we see each other again.…”
Deirdre and I used to wait here to meet Lucy when she worked at the lower school as an aide. The younger girls would follow her out the door, begging for another song, or another story. I remember there was one girl in particular, a skinny girl with pale, colorless hair like dried straw, who would trail after Lucy dejectedly until Lucy would go back and promise that she’d be back the next day.
“Do you really promise?” the girl, standing at the edge of the woods, would yell.
“Yes, Albie, I promise,” Lucy would yell back, drawing out promise as if it were a magic word that could bind the speaker just by its utterance.
I look behind me toward the lake, which glitters between the tree trunks like slivers of a broken mirror. The water pulses so brightly that when I turn away my vision is slashed with dark jagged shards. I have a hard time spotting Olivia in the crowd of brightly dressed children coming out of the school now. For a moment my heart pounds with the fear that she’s not there, that when I go up to her teacher she will look at me blankly and tell me that someone else has taken her… didn’t I send a note saying it was all right? A ridiculous thought. I saw her go into the school five minutes ago.
Still, I am so panicked that the faces of the children blur into bright spots and I can’t make out Olivia’s face until she rushes right into me. I can barely hear what her teacher is trying to tell me, something she doesn’t want Olivia to hear, I guess, from the exaggerated mouthing adults use when they’re whispering secrets in front of children.
“. . . a bad day…” I make out. “. . . overwrought…” I nod and say something about Olivia not getting much sleep the night before, how we’re still getting used to the new house, excuses that come easy and are, in their way, true.
“She’s probably just tired,” I conclude.
“I am not,” Olivia snaps, as tired children will when told they’re tired.
“Okay, sweetie,” I say, taking Olivia’s hand. “Let’s go home.” I steer her away from the school. “Let’s go home and have a snack. We’ll make cookies…” I say before I remember I don’t have the supplies for baking. In my mind we were heading home to the kitchen in our old house where the matching ceramic canisters were filled with flour and oatmeal and chocolate chips.
“I want to go down to the magic rock and look for tadpoles,” she says.
“Okay,” I say, glad to get out of the baking promise. Tomorrow I’ll go to the store and buy flour and baking powder and cookie sheets.
“. . . and then the tadpoles turn into frogs,” Olivia is telling me, “and Mrs. Crane says we’ll have tadpoles in our class so we can watch it happen.…”
Olivia drops my hand and runs ahead on the path, chattering all the while about frogs and tadpoles. I’m left alone in the woods I used to wander with Lucy and Deirdre. We often came down this path to the swimming beach, and yes, sometimes we came at night and swam out to the farthest sister stone. We made our own sacrifices to the Lake Goddess. And once Deirdre introduced us to it, we were often stoned.
Olivia disappears around a bend in the path, but I can still hear her voice. She is singing one of her made-up songs.
When my students ask me what the school was like when I went here, I know they expect to hear that we worked harder, the rules were stricter, more was expected of us. Some of that is true. It was a given that you’d go from Heart Lake to a Seven Sister college. Our teachers even hinted to us that after our preparation at Heart Lake we’d find the work in college easy. They were right about that. No test I ever took in college was harder than Domina Chambers’s Latin final, or Miss North’s history orals, or the slide test in Tacy Beade’s art class. But what the girls don’t guess—and I can’t tell them—is that when I went here in the seventies the rules were already changing. In some ways, things were looser. The Pill had become available, but no one had heard of AIDS yet. There was no war on drugs, because the teachers didn’t even suspect we had access to them. Cigarettes were vaguely tolerated as a bad habit, like chewing your nails or wearing laddered tights. Even the school uniform had given way to a haphazardly enforced dress code that specified skirt length but neglected to make bras mandatory.
I’ve come to a bend in the path where the path divides in two. To the left the path goes up to our house, to the right it slopes down steeply to the lake. I stop here and realize I don’t know which way Olivia has gone. She’d been talking about seeing the tadpoles, so she probably went straight down to the lake. I stand still and listen for her voice, but the only thing I hear is the wind sifting through the dry pine needles on the forest floor.
I still the flicker of panic that licks at my brain like a small flame. Panic. I hear Helen Chambers’s voice telling us the word originated from the god Pan. The Greeks thought he inspired the unreasoning fear that sneaked up on mortals in wild places.
I head down the path to the lake. The sun has gone behind the clouds again and the water looks flat and gray. If she went to the house, I figure, she’ll be all right for a minute or two, but if she went to the lake… I decide not to finish that thought.
The swimming beach is empty. I look down at the sand for footprints and see some, but they’re too large to be Olivia’s. I realize that they’re probably my own, made last night when I watched Athena, Vesta, and Aphrodite on the rocks. I am about to turn back to look for Olivia at the house when I hear a small splash. The sound seems to come from the farthest edge of the Point and when I look in that direction something white flashes briefly and then is gone. Just the sun glinting off the rock, I think, turning back toward the steps, but then I see her. Olivia is standing on the farthest rock. Her back is to me and she stands on the very edge of the far side of the rock. I start to call her name, but then think I’ll startle her and she’ll fall into the water. The lake, I know, is deep on the other side of that rock.
I kick off my shoes and wade into the water, moving slowly so as not to make any noise. The water is warm at the shallow edge, but as soon as I’m up to my waist I can feel the icy cold currents from the underground springs that feed the lake. I stroke out, keeping my head up, eyes on Olivia, just like Miss Pike, our gym teacher and swimming coach, taught us in Lifesaving.
I approach the rock from the shallow end because I am afraid that if Olivia sees me she might be startled and fall into the water. I am too scared to take my eyes off Olivia even for an instant to look down for a place to put my feet, so I feel the rock with my toes. My feet hit something hard and slimy that falls away when I try to put my weight down. I try again and find a flat rock where I can get enough purchase to lift myself up onto the rock, but my foot, numb from the cold, slips just as I’m pulling myself up.
I hit the rock hard with my stomach and make a sound like “ooof.” Olivia hears me and turns. For a moment I see fear in her face, but then it dissolves into giggles.
“Mommy, why are you swimming in your clothes?”
I crawl over to her and pull her down to the rock before answering. “Well, Miss, I could ask you the same question.” I try to make my voice sound light, a gentle reprimand for getting her good clothes wet, but when I pick up the hem of her dress I notice that her dress—and her sneakers and white ankle socks—are bone dry.
Chapter Five
A FTER I DROP OLIVIA OFF AT SCHOOL THE NEXT MORNING 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.
I fixed my eyes above their heads on the portrait of India Crevecoeur and her family, but instead of looking at India I found myself looking at Iris Crevecoeur, the little girl who’d died of the flu. She stood a few feet away from the rest of her family, small and dark where her sisters were tall and blond, fussed over by a family servant who seemed to be trying to tie the sash at her waist. She looked as miserable and as lost as I felt.
And for the first time I realized that even though Helen Chambers was one of them—one of the old girls—she also stood apart. The black dresses she wore were cut better, her pearls had a softer gleam. She was a little smarter and much more beautiful than any of them. And now they would make her pay for that. Even before the first question I knew what the board members believed. I knew what they wanted to believe.
Did Miss Chambers encourage drug use? Miss North asked.
Only for sacred, not recreational purposes, I answered.
Did Miss Chambers encourage free sex and homosexuality? Miss Beade asked.
She said the same rules didn’t apply to everybody—like in Antigone—and, I quoted, proud to have remembered the words, “Which of us can say what the gods hold wicked?”
Had my friends been unhealthily obsessed with their teacher, Miss Chambers? Miss Macintosh asked.
I told them about the strand of hair we found. I told them about the used tea bags we stole and the lists we kept of things we knew about Domina Chambers.
Did Miss Chambers encourage this obsession? Miss Pike asked.
I told them about the private teas that she invited Lucy and Deirdre and me to and how she then invited just me and Lucy and, finally, just Lucy. I told them that Lucy had stopped sleeping. She seemed upset when she came home from these teas, but she wouldn’t tell me why.
Miss Buehl picked up a piece of thin blue paper. I noticed that her hand was shaking. This is what Lucy wrote to her brother the week before she died: “Domina Chambers has told me something that changes everything. When she told me, I understood why I’ve always felt different from everybody else. The ordinary rules of the world just don’t apply.” Do you know what she meant? Miss Buehl asked.
I told them no, I didn’t know. That was true enough. I didn’t know what she’d meant, but I knew what it sounded like.
Is that what she was fighting about with her brother when she ran out onto the ice?
I didn’t answer right away. I couldn’t tell them what Lucy and Matt had argued about on the lake. So I did what was easier. I agreed with Miss Buehl. I told them they had been arguing about Domina Chambers, but that I hadn’t really understood what it was all about.
I saw Miss North and Miss Beade exchange a knowing look. Then they told me they didn’t have any other questions and that I should go and finish studying for my finals. We see you have a scholarship for Vassar for next year, Miss Buehl said kindly. You’re a smart girl; you shouldn’t let these unfortunate events interfere with your future plans.
I left without looking in Helen Chambers’s direction. I kept my eyes on the floor as I walked past the line of chairs in the foyer even though they were now empty. I saw specks of red and blue and yellow glass glittering on the floor—tiny fragments of the stained-glass heart and the school’s motto: Cor te reducit. Not me, I thought, I’m never coming back here.
Outside the wind was blowing off the melting ice in the lake. I never saw Helen Chambers after that day. Dean Gray announced at dinner that night that all of us at Heart Lake must put the incident behind us and never talk about it again, lest the reputation of the school be irrevocably damaged. (Of course the damage was done. Already parents were pulling their daughters out of the school, not even waiting for the end of term.) She said that Miss Chambers had been let go. When I heard the words I imagined a hand releasing its grip on another hand and I felt something slip away, and that was as much as I knew about how Helen Chambers had ended up.
Athena doesn’t come to class. I ask Vesta and Aphrodite if they know where she is and they both shrug. I assume they’re covering up for that early morning swim Athena took. It may be my imagination, but the advanced girls seem sullen today. Perhaps it is the weather. This spell of Indian summer we have been enjoying seems to be drawing to a close. A fitful wind rattles the windows of the classroom and I can see storm clouds massing on the eastern shore of the lake. There hasn’t been a glimmer of sun since yesterday afternoon. The thought jars something in my memory—a flash of white on the Point just before I saw Olivia stranded on the rock. I’d thought it was the sun glinting off the rock, but now I remember that the sky had been overcast. Could it have been a rowboat just rounding the Point? Could it have been one of my students—maybe three of my students?—who rowed Olivia out to that rock? I look at Vesta and Aphrodite, noticing the deep circles under their eyes that look real, not kohl-induced. If they’re sneaking out to the rocks at night, might they also take a boat out onto the lake? They look edgy to me, but then, so do all the girls. When called on, the girls whisper their translations, which are lost under the hiss of the steam heat. When I ask them to speak up they get nervous and seem to think they have translated their pieces wrong. They turn their sentences around and come up with unintelligible messes. When I try to unravel their syntax I can hear an irritation in my voice I hadn’t even known I was feeling. I give up and tell them to read quietly until the end of the period. Several of them put their heads on their desks and fall asleep. I let them, hoping Myra Todd doesn’t come by and peep through my door window.
At lunchtime I commit the unpardonable sin of dining alone. I purchase peanut butter crackers and a Coke from a vending machine in the lodge basement and go down to the swimming beach. I stare out at the three sister rocks and across the lake to the south shore, where I can just make out the shape of the icehouse. The county extension agent used to keep her boat there. During Christmas break senior year, Lucy and I took the boat out and rowed it all the way across the lake almost to the Point. I’d written the whole episode down in my journal. The journal that I’d lost.
A wind from the north is whipping the water against the three sisters. I watch a flock of Canada geese land on the lake and take off again. When I walk back to the lodge for my last class of the afternoon I think I have gotten things into perspective.
One of the girls—one of my students—has perhaps found my journal and realized that I was involved in two deaths during my senior year, three if you count Matt Toller. I have to face the fact that it might very well be Athena. The “rite” I witnessed on the three sisters indicates an interest in the suicide legend. Although I can’t figure out what she hopes to gain by bombarding me with these relics of my past—the journal entry, the corniculum—and luring my daughter out onto one of the rocks, I can only assume she has some plan to blackmail me or somehow compromise my authority as a teacher. Let’s face it, my authority has already been compromised.
I think of what Dr. Lockhart said, that sometimes a teacher has to be a little harsh.
I decide to go to Dr. Lockhart and tell her everything. Then we’ll go to Dean Buehl. I imagine that I will be reprimanded, but I don’t think I have done anything to merit my dismissal.
With a clear plan in my head, I feel better already. When I open my classroom door, though, my calm dissolves at the sight of Dr. Lockhart seated at my desk leafing through my homework folder.
When she looks up and those cool blue eyes narrow on me I feel a chill gust of arctic air.
“Bad news,” she says. “Ellen Craven has tried to kill herself. She’s been taken to the hospital in Corinth.”
I almost ask who? before realizing she’s talking about Athena.
Chapter Six
I FIND ATHENA SHROUDED IN WHITE. SNOWY WHITE SHEETS are pulled up to her chin. Her arms, which lie on top of the sheets, are bandaged from the tips of her fingers to the crooks of her elbows. Both arms. She is sleeping, or at least I hope it is sleep and not a coma.
Outside the hospital window I can see that the sky above the paper mill has gone blank and white as well. Driving here in Dr. Lockhart’s car, I noticed that the sky in the west was growing overcast. Now it looks like it might snow. Only this morning Athena and I swam in the lake and now the sky is threatening snow. I know from growing up here, on the edge of the Adirondacks, that such shifts of weather are possible. (The night Matt and Lucy drowned had been as warm as a spring night and the next day we got one of the worst snowstorms in the area’s history.) Still, I find the change stunning, although perhaps not as stunning as the change in Athena—from the strong swimmer of this morning to this pale shrouded invalid.
“Is she sleeping?” I ask Dr. Lockhart.
“She’s not in a coma,” she replies. “She regained consciousness briefly after her stomach was pumped. She didn’t take enough sleeping pills to put her in a coma.”
“She took sleeping pills and slit her wrists?” In my mind I hear Lucy’s cool, assessing voice: overkill.
“Yes, I find that distressing as well. Many experts believe that the more violent the means of suicide the more it’s meant as a kick in the face to the survivors. ‘This is how badly I hurt,’ the victim is saying, ‘this is how badly I want out.’ ”
“But she’s alive,” I remind Dr. Lockhart. Or perhaps I am reminding myself. Saturated in white, her skin pale as the sky outside, her lips still stained with the bluish lipstick she habitually wears, my student looks dead.
Dr. Lockhart dismisses my comment with an impatient wave of her hand. “Only because I decided to check up on her when she didn’t show up at breakfast today.”
For all my concern about the girls it had never occurred to me to seek them out at meals.
“You found her?”
“Yes, so I can attest to the violence of her attempt. She used a steak knife we think she stole from the kitchen when she did her clean-up shift last night. She severed both arteries. Thank goodness it happened before the weather got worse.” Dr. Lockhart gestures toward the lowering sky outside the window. “I can’t imagine what we would have done with her if we’d been snowbound. I’ve heard that happened once.”
I nod. “When Lucy cut her wrists. We couldn’t get her to the hospital. Celeste Buehl herself had to suture them.”
Dr. Lockhart shakes her head. “I didn’t think Ellen would make it, not with all the blood she lost. They’ll have to pull up the floorboards in that room to get it all out. I don’t know what to do about my dress.”
I give her a puzzled look and she opens the long charcoal gray coat she has been wearing since I found her in my classroom, and had kept closed during the drive here. Under it she is wearing a dress I take to be burgundy. I think it is an unusual choice of color for her until I realize it’s blood.
“I haven’t had a chance to change,” she says, no doubt seeing the horror on my face. “I had to call her aunt, who’s at a spa in California, and then I wanted to talk to you.”
“Me?” I want Dr. Lockhart to close her coat, but she leaves it open.
“After our conversation about Miss Craven I thought you might be able to help me explain this to her aunt.” She says this and gestures to Athena’s somnolent form. “When was the last time you saw Ellen?”
“Ellen?”
Dr. Lockhart looks at me as if I’ve taken leave of my senses and I do just about the worst thing I could do. I laugh.
“It’s just that I think of the girls by the Latin names they take. She’s Athena to me.”
“Hm. That’s not a Latin name.”
“I know, but I let them pick classical names and this year the girls all wanted goddesses.”
“That’s very interesting. Are they into goddess worship? Do you talk about that in class? Goddess worship? Pagan rites? Wicca covens?”
“Wicca covens? What would that have to do with Latin?”
Dr. Lockhart shrugs. Her coat slips off one thin shoulder and I see that the blood goes at least halfway down her sleeve. It is hard to imagine how Athena could have lost that much blood and still be alive, but then I remember another white room with blood: It was Deirdre Hall’s room, where Lucy had slit her wrists on Deirdre’s bed. When I first came into that room after Christmas break I thought Deirdre’s mother had sent her a red bedspread for Christmas.
“You’d be surprised what some teachers—teachers I’m sure must mean well—consider relevant to the curriculum. The digressions they indulge in—”
“I haven’t been preaching New Age witchcraft to my students, Dr. Lockhart.”
“I’m not saying that, Jane. I know you care about the girls, but you might not realize how much influence you have over them.”
“Are you saying that it was something I said to Athena that made her do this?”
“Why are you getting so defensive, Jane?”
“I’m upset,” I tell her. “I can’t believe Ellen would do a thing like this.”
“But you know she tried to kill herself once before. And just yesterday you told me that she leaves drawings of razor blades on the homework she turns in to you. Did it ever occur to you that she might be asking for your intervention?”
I shake my head. I had thought the pictures were left on her homework by accident, but I can see how lame that would sound now.
“Did you ever try to talk to her about the scars on her wrists?” Dr. Lockhart asks.
I remember the conversation I had with Athena before her last exam, when she saw me looking at the scar. She told me that her aunt had sent her here to dry out from boys. I had laughed and turned away from her. Then there was this morning’s swim. I realize now that I may have been the last person to see her before she went back to her room, swallowed her roommate’s sleeping pills, and took a steak knife to her arms. Was she afraid I would turn her in?
I look up at Dr. Lockhart and remember that I had been planning to tell her about seeing Athena in the lake. I will tell her now. It is not too late.
Only it is. Dr. Lockhart reaches down and touches the collar of my shirt. I flinch as if she had been about to strangle me, but when she draws her hand away I see she has, magicianlike, pulled a long green ribbon from inside my shirt collar. Only it’s not a ribbon, it’s a strand of grass. The kind that grows on the lake bottom.
“Interesting,” Dr. Lockhart says, holding the long strand in the light from the window so that it glows like a shard of green glass. I notice that the white sky outside has broken apart. It has begun to snow.
“We found a piece of grass just like this in Ellen’s clothing. We surmised that she might have tried to drown herself in the lake first, but for some reason couldn’t go through with it. I thought it was odd to be brave enough to slit your wrists but not to drown. But then, maybe someone stopped her.”
She raises one eyebrow and looks at me. I feel the blood rush to my face and for a second I think how the color red must look, in this deathly white room, on her dress and in my face. The nurse comes to the door and Dean Buehl and Myra Todd are with her. I feel caught, as if the blood in my face has something to do with the blood on Dr. Lockhart’s dress and the slim blade of grass she holds in her hand is the murder weapon. What can I do, confronted with such incontrovertible evidence? I tell them about meeting Athena in the lake this morning. I tell them, too, about seeing the girls on the rock two nights ago. The only thing I don’t mention is the page from my old journal. Because, I tell myself, I can’t see what it possibly has to do with Athena’s suicide attempt.
I DRIVE BACK TO THE SCHOOL WITH DEAN BUEHL AND spend the rest of the afternoon in her office. All afternoon classes are canceled so the girls can attend a “Support Meeting” in the Music Room. After I have told my story about what I saw at the lake the night before last and my encounter with Athena in the lake this morning, Dr. Lockhart excuses herself so that she can change her dress and meet with Vesta and Aphrodite—Sandy and Melissa, I remind myself to say—Athena’s roommates. Dean Buehl thanks her for “handling everything.”
“If you hadn’t found the girl…” Dean Buehl’s voice trails off and I notice how haggard she looks.
“It’s what you hired me for,” Dr. Lockhart replies, “to watch after these girls.”
As soon as Dr. Lockhart leaves, Dean Buehl regains her official briskness. “Of course, you should have notified me immediately when you saw the girls in the lake,” she tells me. Myra Todd nods and I get a whiff of her moldy smell. It makes me think my clothes are wet, but it is only that I am sweating in the dean’s overheated office and the mold reminds me of how the changing room would smell after we swam in the lake. “You say they were naked?”
“Yes,” I tell her for the tenth or eleventh time. “Of course I should have told you. I was planning to tell you after my classes today. I didn’t realize it was urgent.”
“You say they were making some kind of sacrifice on the rocks,” Myra says. She makes it sound as if the girls were beheading chickens. “Well, I think that sounds urgent.”
“We all used to do it.” I hate the way my voice whines. I know I shouldn’t try to explain, it just sounds like I’m trying to excuse myself, which I’m not. I’ve accepted the blame. “It’s an old Heart Lake tradition,” I appeal to Dean Buehl, who is herself an old girl, as if I were talking about founder’s day or singing the school song and wearing our school colors, rose and gray. “You’d throw something in the lake for good luck. It’s like…” I grope for a harmless analogy, “like tossing three pennies in the Trevi fountain.”
Myra Todd snorts. “Naked? In the middle of the night?”
Dean Buehl shakes her head sadly. “It’s that three sisters story that has plagued us from the beginning. Surely you, of all people, Jane, should know how dangerous the story is. But there’s something that upsets me even more than your failure to report your students’ nocturnal activities. Although I hope you understand now that you should have come to me immediately…”
I nod vigorously. I can hear Myra twisting in her seat impatiently. She wouldn’t let me get off so easily, that’s for sure, and I imagine that what she’s thinking is that I’m receiving this lenient treatment because I’m an alum. I wish suddenly that I’d kept the fact that I went to school here to myself. But how could I have? Aside from Dean Buehl there are Meryl North and Tacy Beade—old girls—who remembered me. Or at least they remembered me once I had reminded them who I was.
“What I need to know, though,” Dean Buehl continues, “is if you have shared what happened in your senior year with your students?”
I look up, trying not to show my relief. “Absolutely not,” I say with conviction. “I mean, I’ve thought about it, when I’ve heard the girls telling the three sisters story, just to dispel the legend. I know that only one of the Crevecoeurs’ daughters died—and of the flu, not drowning—from what was said at the inquest, but I knew if I started talking about it they might ask me other questions… and so, I’ve avoided it because it’s unhealthy, I think, for them to hear about other girls who killed themselves. I know how that kind of thing can spread.”
I am breathless from this little speech and disappointed to see that Dean Buehl looks unimpressed. Unconvinced.
“Are you sure you’re telling me the truth?”
I nod.
“Then can you explain this.” Dean Buehl holds up a piece of lined notebook paper with a ragged edge. I can see I’m supposed to come get it from her but I suddenly feel weighted to my chair, as if my clothes were indeed drenched and they were pulling me down into deep water. Myra Todd stands up and hands the page from the dean to me.
I am surprised, first off, that although it is clearly a page torn from a bound notebook, the words on it are typewritten instead of handwritten.
“Dear Magistra Hudson,” the note, which I understand is meant to be Athena’s suicide note, reads, “You’ve been a real friend. I’m sorry that you’ll lose another friend in the same way you lost Lucy and Deirdre. I just want you to know that I don’t blame you. Bona Fortuna. Vale, Athena.” The I, I notice, is underlined, by hand, three times. There is a bloody fingerprint in the lower left-hand corner.
I look up from the note. “She’s the one,” I tell Dean Buehl. “She’s the one who has my old journal.”
WHEN I LEAVE DEAN BUEHL’S OFFICE I SEE VESTA AND Aphrodite sitting on folding chairs in the hall outside the Music Room. I would like to stop and talk with them, but I am already late for picking up Olivia from preschool. Besides, they look so pale and nervous I figure they don’t need an extra interrogation. Aphrodite looks like she’s been crying. Vesta looks like she would like to throw up. I rip out a piece of paper from the back of my grade book and hand it to Vesta.
“Write down your dorm room number,” I tell her. “I’d really like to talk to you both later.”
Vesta nods and writes down a number on the paper and hands it back to me folded in half. “Yeah, we’d like to talk to you, too, Magistra. Dr. Lockhart told us you saw us the other night and didn’t tell anyone.”
“Well, yes, I did see you and I was wrong not to tell.”
“We think it was nice of you,” Aphrodite says. I think of Athena’s note: You’ve been a real friend.
“I’ve got to go pick up my daughter now, but I’ll come by the dorm later. Good luck in there.” I almost say Bona Fortuna, but think better of it.
WHEN I GET TO THE NURSERY SCHOOL I EXPECT TO FIND Olivia in tears, angry that I’m late. But instead I find Mrs. Crane, alone in her room, sorting eggshells. I am out of breath from running and can barely form the words “Where’s Olivia?”
She looks up at me with the blank look I have always feared. “Her father picked her up. I figured it must be all right, since you weren’t here.”
“Her father?” Mitchell’s visitation isn’t until next week. “But I wrote on her form she’s never, ever, to be released to anyone but me. You know I’m divorced. He may have kidnapped her.”
Mrs. Crane pulls herself up. “There is no need to yell, Miss Hudson, we’re all upset today about what happened to that girl.” It takes me a moment to realize she means Athena. “I thought you’d probably be at the hospital with her since she was your student and…” She stops herself from saying whatever she was going to say next. I wonder what stories are being told about my relationship with Athena. “I thought you might have called Olivia’s father to come take care of her. I’m sure you’ll find them at your house. Olivia said she wanted to show him her rock collection.”
“Her rock collection?” Mrs. Crane shrugs and spills a carton of eggshells onto a sheet of newspaper. She lays another sheet of newspaper on top and takes a small rubber mallet and slams it on the table. I jump.
“For our mosaic project,” she explains. I think she’s still talking about the rock collection, but then I realize she’s talking about the eggshells. I think about how carefully Olivia and I washed out those eggshells. Then I understand about the rocks. Olivia meant the magic rocks. The three sisters. I leave without saying thank you or good-bye and I can hear Mrs. Crane muttering something to herself as she pounds away with her mallet.
THEY ARE STANDING ON THE SWIMMING BEACH AND MITCH is showing Olivia how to skip rocks on the water. Olivia is more interested in catching snowflakes on her tongue.
“Do you think it will stick?” Olivia asks the minute she sees me. “Will the lake freeze? Can we go ice skating? I want to skate around the sister rocks.”
When did she start calling them the sister rocks? I don’t remember telling her that story, but if I did, and forgot it, maybe I also told the same story to Athena. Or could it have been the person who took her out to the rock who told her the story?
“No, honey, the ground isn’t cold enough and the lake won’t freeze for a while,” I tell her. The temperature is dropping fast. I zip Olivia’s thin sweatshirt up and huddle her against me.
“She ought to have a warmer jacket,” Mitch says, turning to me at last.
“It was seventy degrees this morning. And I had planned to take her home right after school. I wasn’t expecting you.”
“Well, I had some business up this way and I thought I’d come check up on you. I would have taken Olivia home, but you were late picking her up, and I don’t have a key to your house.”
“I wanted Daddy to see the magic rocks,” Olivia says. She points at the rocks. I notice that the snow is coming down so hard now that I can barely see the farthest rock. “They’re supposed to be sisters,” she tells Mitch. “They drowned like Hilarious and now they’re together all the time.”
“Hilarious?” Mitch asks me. “What kind of bedtime stories have you been reading her, Jane?”
“I think she means Hilarion. It’s from Giselle. But I don’t know about the sister part. You know she has a very active imagination.”
“The Wili Queen told me.” Olivia sounds angry, as if I had accused her of lying.
“OK, honey, we’d better go home and get you warmed up. I’ll make some nice warm soup for dinner.”
Olivia heads up the path and Mitch signals for me to walk a few paces behind with him. “I thought I’d take her for dinner,” he says.
“Well, all right, but I wish you had told me. This isn’t the visitation schedule we talked about…”
“There are a few things we didn’t talk about. We didn’t talk about you leaving Olivia alone at night when you go meet your boyfriend down here at the lake.”
“What in the world are you talking about?”
“I guess you still keep a diary, Jane. You ought to be more careful about who sees it. This came over my fax today.”
He hands me a piece of slippery white paper. The top line is typed with the sender’s phone number, which I recognize as the school’s fax number. The rest of the sheet is handwritten.
“Tonight I will go down to the lake to meet him and I’ll tell him everything. I know I shouldn’t go, but I can’t seem to stop myself. It’s like the lake is calling me. Sometimes I wonder if what they say about the three sisters is true. It’s like they’re making me go down to the lake when I know I shouldn’t.”
The page is shaking in my hands and it takes me a moment to realize it’s my hand and not the wind that’s causing it to shake. It’s as if I can feel the hatred of whoever sent this to Mitchell in the paper itself. I have to remind myself that whoever sent the message never even touched this paper. I check the time and date of transmission: 8:30 A.M., today’s date. I got back from my swim a little after 8:00 this morning. Dr. Lockhart found Athena at a little before nine. But why would Athena send this and then go back to the dorm, type me a note saying I’ve been “a real friend,” and then slit her wrists? It doesn’t make any sense.
I look up from the white paper to Mitchell’s face. We’ve reached the top of the path and we have both paused to catch our breath. He’s waiting for a reaction. A denial. But what should I deny? Should I tell him yes, I wrote this, but twenty years ago, and yes, I do leave Olivia alone to go down to the lake, but certainly not to meet this boy who has been dead for nearly twenty years?
I look back down over the lake, at the snow falling onto its placid gray surface, and although I know the snow must melt when it touches the water I imagine the white flakes drifting like white stars through the dark water. The only thing that is clear to me is that whoever sent this message to Mitchell wants to hurt me. And there is no better way to hurt me than to hurt Olivia. Someone—not a fairy, not the Wili Queen—took Olivia out to the farthest stone and left her there. One false step and she would have been in the water… I have a sudden, unbidden image of Olivia’s light hair fanning upward in the dark water as she sinks, her face a pale white star extinguished in the black water.
“Maybe I should take her for a while,” Mitchell says.
I can tell from the combative tone in his voice that he’s bluffing. He’s expecting me to tell him no, call my lawyer, tell him I’ve done nothing to justify his taking her. But instead I say the last thing he expects me to.
“Yes, maybe that’s a good idea. Maybe you should keep her for a little while.” Because even though it breaks my heart to see her go, I am beginning to think that Heart Lake isn’t a very safe place for little girls.
Chapter Seven
T HE COTTAGE, WITHOUT OLIVIA, IS TOO QUIET. AFTER dinner (I scramble eggs and throw out the eggshells) I decide to go over to the dorm to talk to Vesta and Aphrodite. Their dorm is next to the lot where my car is parked. I can see if there’s anything they think Athena would like before I drive to the hospital for visiting hours. It seems like a good plan. The dorm and then the hospital. It seems like a good way to fill the evening.
I walk along the edge of the lake because, I tell myself, it’s a beautiful night. Today’s snow shower has left only a faint white gloss on the ground and a clear moonlit sky. It is cold, near freezing, I think. The moonlight lies on the water like a premonition of ice. It will be many weeks before the lake freezes, but tonight I sense something stirring in the lake. Matt Toller once explained to me how a lake freezes. He said that when the surface water grows colder it also becomes denser, so it sinks to the bottom. When the warmer water rises to the top, it’s chilled by the colder air temperature and sinks. The water circulates like this for weeks—a process called overturn—until the moment when the lake is all one temperature and then the surface begins to freeze. Matt said that if you could be at the lake on that night, the night of first ice, you could see ice crystals forming. I imagine the lake now like a giant mixing machine, stirring old things to the surface.
I pause on the Point. There are ledges on either side of the Point, carved out of the same soft limestone that lines the lake bottom, but the rock here on top is made of something harder—granite I think Miss Buehl told us. Its curved surface is bare except for the cracks and scorings—chattermarks, they’re called—left by the last glacier ten thousand years ago. I think of how even this rock, so impermeable that it bears the scars of a ten-thousand-year-old event, was once under the surface of the earth.
Looking straight across the water I can see where the lake narrows and flows into the Schwanenkill and from there into the Hudson and the sea. Below me to the right the three sisters march into the water off the swimming beach. To my left I see the lights of the mansion and the dorm.
The journal pages, the corniculum, the three sisters story that have come to light are just floating debris, flotsam from a wreck that happened twenty years ago. But now the wreckage itself seems to be surfacing. Events that happened twenty years ago are happening again.
During our senior year Lucy Toller was sent to the infirmary with two slit wrists. A few weeks later our roommate Deirdre Hall was found in the lake, her neck broken. It was determined at the inquest that she jumped from the Point, landed on the ice, and then slipped into the water. A month after that I watched as Lucy, followed by her brother, Matt, walked out onto the thawing lake and vanished beneath the ice.
Could it be that there is something about this place that makes these events recur? Are all the deaths, from Iris Crevecoeur’s to Deirdre’s and Lucy’s and Matt’s, written on the landscape of Heart Lake like the glacier scores left on the rocks? Or is somebody re-creating the events, following a script written twenty years ago?
IT’S ONLY WHEN I AM IN THE DORM STANDING IN FRONT OF the security desk that I realize I don’t know what room Vesta and Aphrodite are in. I dig in my pocket and find the piece of paper Vesta gave me. I show it to the matron at the desk without looking at it and she tells me the room is up the stairs, second door on the left. And so I find myself standing in front of my old dorm room, the one I shared for three years with Deirdre Hall and Lucy Toller.
I knock and a voice from inside calls, “It’s open.” My students, Vesta and Aphrodite (or Sandy and Melissa as I try to think of them now), are sitting cross-legged on the same bed facing each other. I smell cigarette smoke and feel a cold draft. The bed is under the window. If I checked the sill beneath the window blind I am sure I would find an ashtray, but I don’t.
“Magistra Hudson,” Vesta says. “Salve. What a surprise.” There isn’t a trace of surprise in her voice. I realize that I am probably one of a long line of adult visitors the girls have entertained tonight. I imagine the grilling they must have received this afternoon in the Music Room and the well-meaning sympathy calls from teachers.
I notice a book of poems by Emily Dickinson on the bed and detect a faint whiff of mold in the air. Gwendoline Marsh and Myra Todd must have preceded me.
“May I sit down?”
Aphrodite shrugs, but Vesta at least has the good grace to gesture to one of the two desk chairs. I sit in the maple Windsor chair and wonder if it’s the same one I sat in twenty years ago. The desks look the same: soft, dark wood scored by generations of Heart Lake girls’ initials. If I looked hard enough I might find mine. Instead I look down and notice the dark stain on the floor.
“I think we should put something over it, but Sandy says that’ll only make it worse.” It’s the first time Aphrodite has spoken since I came in and I can hear from the hoarseness in her voice that she has been crying. I look at her and take in the dark smudges under her eyes, darker than the ones she used to draw with kohl.
“I’m sure if you asked the dean would let you switch rooms. No one would expect you to stay in here with… that.”
“Yeah, Dean Buehl said we could move and Miss Marsh says we ought to move to another room. She said it would be like living with a ghost staying here and we shouldn’t have to…” Aphrodite’s voice trails off and she looks, I think, as white as a ghost herself. I’m sure Gwen meant well, but the ghost image certainly wasn’t well thought out.
“But Dr. Lockhart says we should stay and face our fears. She says that it’s not good to bury the past,” Vesta says. “I think she’s right. What do we have to be afraid of? That we’re going to suddenly decide to off ourselves just because Ellen went round the bend? I don’t think so.”
“Yeah,” Aphrodite nods eagerly. “It’s not like we believe in that three sisters story.”
“Who told you that story?” I ask.
The girls look at each other. Vesta is scowling at Aphrodite, as if she is mad at her for bringing it up.
“Everyone knows that story. It’s one of our great Heart Lake traditions like tea in the Lake Lounge and ringing the bell on top of the mansion so you don’t die a virgin.”
I laugh before I can stop myself. “You all still do that?”
Vesta and Aphrodite smile, relieved, I think, that they’ve gotten me to laugh. “Yeah, although it’s not such a big issue with some girls,” Vesta says. Aphrodite slaps her playfully on the arm and steals a look at me to see how I’m taking it. I smile at her. I remember what she asked the Lake Goddess—to keep her boyfriend at Exeter faithful.
“Did Athena have a boyfriend?” I ask. “She told me that she was upset last year when her boyfriend broke up with her. Did something like that happen this time?”
The girls go quiet. I can feel them shrinking away from me.
“How could she have a boyfriend here?” Vesta asks. “There are no boys here.”
“Sometimes girls meet boys from town. When I was here…”
I see the sudden interest in their faces and stop.
“What? What did you do when you were here? Did you meet boys out in the woods when you were here?” Aphrodite asks. “Maybe on the swimming beach? You know, you can’t see the swimming beach from the mansion.”
I feel suddenly hot and I notice that the high-intensity desk lamp is beating down on my shoulders. I remember what I came for—to find out if Athena had my journal and, if she had it, do Vesta and Aphrodite have it now. I look around the room. If I had left it hidden in this room twenty years ago they could have found it. I would like to look in my old hiding place—under a loose floorboard behind this desk, but then I had looked there twenty years ago. It had occurred to me at the time that Lucy might have hidden my journal, on that last night before she followed me to the lake, and Lucy was awfully good at hiding things.
Ignoring Aphrodite’s question with the smile I give my students when they ask something too personal, I stretch my leg and touch my toe to the edge of the bloodstain. I notice a gouge in the wood that has been worn smooth by time.
“I wonder if they’ll tear up these floorboards,” I say. “They’re old and loose as it is. I’ll tell you something we used to do when I was here. We used to hide things under the floorboards.”
I look up to see their reaction, but I can’t read their expressions. They look like they’re hiding something, but they’ve looked like that since I came in. It is a not uncommon look for a seventeen-year-old. At any rate, they’ve got nothing to say to my question.
“I bet you could find stuff that girls hid over the years,” I say, deciding to take a more direct route. “Have you ever? Found anything?”
The girls do not look at each other, but I have the feeling they are not looking at each other on purpose.
“No,” Vesta says evenly. “Did you lose something?”
I swivel the chair toward the desk, away from Vesta’s gaze. Does she know this was my old room? Suddenly I feel like I’m the one who’s being interrogated and I start to sweat under the heat of the desk lamp. I push it away from me, knocking over an empty teacup.
“We should get rid of that,” Aphrodite says. “You’re the second one who’s knocked it over tonight. At least now it’s empty.”
I right the teacup and set it next to a history textbook. I idly flip open to the first page and read “Property of Heart Lake School for Girls” printed on the inside cover. Under the school’s seal are places for students to put their names and the year. The names go back to the mid-seventies and I look to see if there’s anyone I knew, but I don’t recognize any of the names. I was never much good at remembering my classmates’ names, mostly because I hadn’t bothered to get to know anyone that well except for Lucy and Deirdre. On the bottom line is Ellen Craven’s name.
“Is this Athena’s desk?” I ask.
“Yes,” one of the girls answers; I don’t notice which one.
I am looking for a black-and-white notebook; I don’t know which notebook I’m looking for, hers or mine.
“I’m going into town to see Athena now. I was wondering if she’d want any of her books.”
“Like her Latin books?” The note of sarcasm in Vesta’s voice sounds vicious, but when I turn around her face is bland and innocent.
“No. I don’t expect her to do her Latin work right now. I thought something more personal. Her journal, maybe. She did keep a journal, didn’t she? I remember seeing a black-and-white notebook.”
“Yeah, she had a bunch of those,” Aphrodite says.
“But you’re too late,” Vesta adds. “Dr. Lockhart came and took them all away.”
ON MY WAY TO THE PARKING LOT I NEARLY SLIP ON THE ICY path twice. I keep my eyes on the ground to avoid the icy patches, but the moonlight coming through the pine branches strews the path with black-and-white blotches that dazzle my eyes. The pattern of moonlight and shadows begins to look like the black-and-white cover of my old notebook—of Athena’s journals, too—so that I feel as if I were skating over the slippery cover of a book.
A bunch of those, Aphrodite said. If Athena had my old journal then it’s possible Dr. Lockhart has it now. I have to find out from Athena if she had it, but will she even be conscious?
When I get to the hospital, I am relieved to find that Athena is awake, but disappointed to see that she is not alone. Dr. Lockhart is sitting in a chair by the window with an open book in her lap. The room is dark except for the small book light attached to her book. When she sees me come in, she closes the book and rises. The book light moves with her and throws lurching shadows across the room. Athena turns her head on the pillow and smiles when she sees me.
“Magistra Hudson,” she says in a painfully raspy voice that makes me think of razor blades. “We were just talking about you.”
“You look like you’re going to sleep,” I say. “I can come back in the morning.”
“Oh no, I was just telling Dr. Lockhart that I wanted to talk to you.”
“Yes, Ellen says that Latin’s her favorite subject. I was just keeping her company until she fell asleep, but now that you’re here, I’ll go.”
Dr. Lockhart comes around the bed and motions me to come with her. “I just want to have a word with Miss Hudson, Ellen, then I’ll leave her to you.”
Athena turns over on her side to watch us move into the hallway. I can see her bandaged arms in the moonlight from the window. They remind me of a horse’s legs taped for a race.
Dr. Lockhart takes me by the elbow and steers me down the hall. “I wanted you to know that she’s in a denial stage,” she whispers. “Don’t take anything she says about the suicide attempt too seriously. It would be better if you didn’t ask her too many questions about what happened.”
“I won’t,” I tell her. “There’s just one thing I wanted to ask you.”
Dr. Lockhart lifts one eyebrow and crosses her arms over her chest. The book light shines up onto her face ghoulishly the way the seniors used to shine a flashlight on their faces when they told us the three sisters story at the Halloween bonfire.
“Athena’s roommates told me you took some journals from her desk, I wondered if…”
“If any of them were yours?”
I nod.
“No, I checked carefully. If she is the one who has your notebook, she’s hidden it well. Maybe someone else has found it.” She pats my arm reassuringly, making the light wobble over the dimly lit hall. The effect is like water reflected on the walls of an underwater cavern. “Don’t worry, Jane,” she says, “surely there’s nothing so bad in your teenage diaries.” She turns and walks down the hall, the light attached to her book wobbling weakly beside her like Tinker Bell in Peter Pan.
Athena’s eyes are closed when I enter her room, but when I sit on the edge of her bed she opens them.
“Oh, Magistra Hudson,” she says, “I’ve been wanting to talk to you all day. You’re the only one I can tell.”
The words sound familiar and I realize they are the ones I found on the journal page left for me two days ago.
“What do you want to tell me?” I take Athena’s bandaged hand and try not to hold it too tight.
“I didn’t do it,” she says.
I think for a second she’s trying to deny taking my journal, but then I realize I haven’t accused her of that.
“Do what?” I ask.
“Slit my wrists. I didn’t try to kill myself. Someone tried to kill me.”
Chapter Eight
P ARANOID DELUSION BROUGHT ON BY DRUG OVERDOSE,” Dr. Lockhart says when I tell her about Athena’s claim that someone tried to kill her. “It’s what I was afraid of.”
We are back in her office with its panoramic view of Heart Lake. Although it’s only been days, it seems like months since I sat here thinking longingly of a swim in the lake. Since yesterday’s first snow the temperature has dropped into the twenties.
“Denial of a suicide attempt is common,” Dr. Lockhart tells me. “In fact, I wrote a monograph on that very subject when I was doing my residency.” She glides backward in her desk chair and reaches for a file drawer behind her. I notice her chair’s sleek ergodynamic design as she arches back in it and how well its charcoal gray velour upholstery complements her clothes. I wonder how she got the school to order her such an expensive chair while the rest of us make do with creaky, straight-backed desk chairs.
She hands me a slim sheaf of paper that I expect is her monograph. I am about to utter some polite assurance that I’ll read it as soon as I catch up on my grading, when I notice it’s not a monograph at all. It is a letter, handwritten on pale blue stationery, from Lucy Toller dated February 28, 1977. The letter is to her brother, who had been sent, that last year of high school, to a military school in the Hudson Valley. True to her fashion she starts out with a quote, one I recognize from Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris: “A greeting comes from one you think is dead.” She then goes on to assure her brother that the official report of her suicide attempt over Christmas break was false. “I can’t explain now, Mattie, but please believe that I’d never willingly take my own life. You see, Domina Chambers has told me something that changes everything. When she told me I understood why I’ve always felt different from everybody else. The ordinary rules of the world just don’t apply. ‘Which of us can say what the gods hold wicked.’ ” I remember that it was this passage that had been so damning to Domina Chambers at the inquest.
At the very bottom of the page she had copied a line from a poem, “And sin no more, as we have done, by staying, but, my Matthew, come let’s go aMaying.” I remember the Robert Herrick poem from Miss Macintosh’s English class.
I read the letter twice and lift it to see what the rest of the papers are, but Dr. Lockhart reaches across the desk and pulls the sheaf of papers out of my hands.
“As you see, even your friend Lucy denied that she tried to kill herself, and if the dean’s notes are to be believed, the blood from her slit wrists soaked through two mattresses.”
At her words my vision is flooded with red. I see the blood-soaked bed, the tangle of crimson sheets.
“And we know that suicide attempt was real. After all, she eventually succeeded. She walked out onto the ice and deliberately drowned herself. You saw it yourself, right?”
I nod, but realize from Dr. Lockhart’s continued silence that she expects more of an answer. “Yes,” I tell her, “she deliberately drowned herself.”
“She didn’t try to hang on to the ice? You couldn’t help her?”
“She didn’t want my help,” I say, “she practically dived under the water. She wanted to die.”
“And she didn’t call for you to help her?”
“No,” I say, trying unsuccessfully to keep the irritation out of my voice. “As I said she went right under. She couldn’t very well call for help from under the water.”
“So we can assume that first attempt was real as well. Besides it would be too awful if your friend Lucy hadn’t meant to kill herself that first time.”
“Why?”
“Because it was the precipitating factor in your other roommate’s suicide. Deirdre Hall?”
Dr. Lockhart extracts another sheet from the stack of papers on her desk. This one is a Xerox of a lined, handwritten page.
“Whatever happens now, it’s all because of what Lucy did at Christmas,” I read aloud. The last lines on the page were cut and pasted from a mimeographed handout. I read them to myself: “I will arise and go now, for always night and day / I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; / While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray / I hear it in the deep heart’s core.” Yet another of Miss Macintosh’s favorites: Yeats’s “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.”
“Deirdre Hall’s last journal entry before she drowned herself in the lake,” Dr. Lockhart says. “No, Jane, I don’t think we should believe that Ellen didn’t try to kill herself. I think we should watch her very closely. And her roommates, Sandy and Melissa. I consider all three girls at grave risk.”
FOR THE NEXT FEW WEEKS I DO LITTLE BUT WATCH MY girls. I tell myself that I am watching them for signs of depression and suicidal tendencies, but truthfully I am also watching them for hints that they have my old journal. They seem, though, if anything, less troubled. Perhaps it’s only the change of wardrobe brought on by colder weather. By the time Athena returns to class all my girls are huddled in layers of sweaters, scarves, and flannel shirts. The sweaters hide the bandages on Athena’s arms and scratch marks on the other girls’ wrists. The girls look more normal, less sepulchral, in their bright red plaids and fuzzy angoras. It’s hard to look like a Goth lumberjack.
The snows begin in earnest early, even for the Adirondacks. By Halloween the ground is covered, by Thanksgiving the mounds on the sides of the paths are knee-high. The campus takes on that enclosed feeling it gets in winter. I know that by January the feeling may be claustrophobic, but for now it feels cozy.
I speak to Olivia each night on the phone and visit her every other weekend. As long as I don’t say anything about her coming back to live with me, Mitchell says nothing about seeking permanent custody. I think it is better to leave things be for the time being.
I receive no more notes from my past. When I look at the lake I can tell it will freeze soon and I find myself looking forward to it, as if the past could be sealed under ice as well.
I go down to the lake every night, hoping to be there for the first ice. One night I find Athena, Vesta, and Aphrodite there and I almost turn back on the path, but then I see that Gwendoline Marsh and Myra Todd are with them along with a few other girls. They have blankets and Thermoses of hot chocolate.
“Magistra,” my girls call when they see me. “Join us. We’re waiting for the lake to freeze. Miss Todd says if there’s a moon when it happens we’ll see the crystals forming.”
They call it the first ice club.
“It’s a Heart Lake tradition,” Vesta says, handing me a mug of hot chocolate.
I nod and burn my tongue on the hot liquid. Myra Todd gives a lecture on the physics of lake freezing and Gwen reads the Emily Dickinson poem that begins, “After great pain a formal feeling comes…” I wonder why until she comes to that last stanza, “This is the Hour of Lead— / Remembered, if outlived / As freezing persons, recollect the Snow— / First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go.”
It’s as good a description of freezing as any I’ve ever heard and it’s not Gwen’s fault if it makes me think of Matt and Lucy’s last moments. First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go. Only they didn’t let go. They had each other to hold on to.
I WONDER IF THEY ASKED THE DEAN’S PERMISSION TO MEET. I wonder if Dr. Lockhart knows about the club. I find I can no longer judge the difference between a club meeting and a pagan rite.
When the girls start stomping their feet in the cold and the hot chocolate runs out we all leave. Gwendoline Marsh and Vesta sing “Silent Night” on the walk back. Club meeting, I think, definitely club meeting.
In the second week of December I notice a change come over Aphrodite. She arrives in class late without her translation done. She’s no good at sight reading, so she can’t fake it. Vesta and Athena try to cover for her. I can tell they are giving her their translations because they are too alike. If I stop Aphrodite to ask her how she got a particular translation or to identify a case ending, she flounders aimlessly amid the syntax. Out of six possible cases she makes four wrong guesses. It’s painful to watch, so I stop calling on her, but still the littlest thing makes her burst into tears: Catullus’s poem about his girlfriend’s infidelity, Book Four of the Aeneid, the definition of the verb prodere.
“What’s wrong with Aphrodite?” I ask Athena after class.
“She’s getting notes from Exeter about her boyfriend, Brian. You know, like that he’s cheating on her and badmouthing her. She’s on the phone with him every night and he swears none of it’s true.”
“She seems to be taking it pretty hard.”
“Well, yeah, they’ve been going together since the ninth grade. She says they’re going to go to college together. Only the way she’s going, she’s never going to make it to college.”
“You mean you think she might kill herself?”
Athena stares at me.
“No. I mean her grades really suck. Haven’t you noticed?”
I DECIDE I’D BETTER TALK TO DR. LOCKHART ABOUT Aphrodite. She listens to my story quietly.
“Of course I’ll have a word with her,” she says when I have finished, “but I doubt if it’s anything serious. The important thing is not to plant the idea into anyone’s head that her sadness might be suicidal. Whatever you do, don’t discuss it with any other student.”
I remember my conversation with Athena and the way she stared at me when I asked if she thought Aphrodite might kill herself. I thank Dr. Lockhart for her time and leave quickly.
That night when I call Olivia she tells me all about her new baby-sitter who watches her after school, about how pretty she is and how they bake cookies together. I think that being jealous of the baby-sitter is the worst I’ll have to suffer tonight until she asks me when she can come back to live with me.
“Soon,” I tell her.
I get off the phone and go into her room and lie down in her bed. On her night table is the Tales from the Ballet. I remember the part of the story when the mother warns Giselle not to dance because of her weak heart. Even with the best intentions, it’s impossible to always protect your child. I’m not sure my intentions have been the best. Did I really consider her welfare when I left Mitchell? I thought I took the job at Heart Lake because it would be a good place for her to go to school, but was I really thinking of her? Or was I following my own desire to return here? I think of the lines I read in Deirdre’s last journal entry: “I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray I hear it in the deep heart’s core.” The last lines make me think not of a human heart but of the lake and what lies at its core.
I’m no longer sure if I even trust myself with Olivia. Am I any good to any of these girls, I wonder, let alone my own daughter? Am I, as Domina Chambers was accused of being, a corrupting influence?
I go out of the house and listen for a moment to the lake. For always night and day I hear water lapping. The sound tonight is maddening. When, I wonder, will the damn thing freeze?
Instead of taking the path down to the lake I walk out onto the Point. Ice has formed in the glacial cracks. One wrong step and a person could slide off the smooth, curved surface of the rock and into the lake below. When Deirdre Hall fell to her death here some people, her parents, for instance, thought it was an accident. But then the administration confiscated her journal. Deirdre liked to collect quotes about death. She was also fascinated by the three sisters legend, especially after her roommate’s suicide attempt. The last quote in her journal, the one from the Yeats poem, seemed to suggest that she felt drawn to the lake in the same way the three sisters legend suggested that Heart Lake girls were drawn to suicide.
I hear a sound to my left and turn a little too quickly. My heel catches in one of the icy cracks and for a moment I lose my balance, but then I feel a gloved hand catch my arm and right me. It’s Athena. She must have been on the ledge below the Point and that’s why I didn’t see her. Behind her, walking up from the ledge, I see Gwendoline Marsh and Myra Todd with my other students, Vesta and Aphrodite. The first ice club.
“Magistra,” Athena gasps in the cold air. “What are you doing up here? It’s dangerous.”
“Yeah,” Vesta says. “We saw someone up here from the beach and we thought it might be a jumper.”
Athena rolls her eyes. “We did not. We just wanted to… you know… make sure.”
Aphrodite has come forward, stepping gingerly over the icy rock. She peers over the dome of the rock into the darkness. “Wasn’t there a girl who killed herself by jumping from here?”
Gwen Marsh puts her hand on Aphrodite’s arm to pull her back. “No dear, that’s just another silly legend,” she reassures her. But Aphrodite is still looking at me for an answer and I can’t seem to think of one.
I FIND MYSELF THINKING THAT IF WE CAN JUST MAKE IT through the rest of December to Christmas everything will be all right. Athena is going to stay with her aunt and there’s a possibility her mother might even be out of rehab for the holidays. Vesta is planning to read Bleak House by the pool at her grandparents’ condominium in Miami. Aphrodite will see Brian and realize that those letters have all been lies. After all, I tell her, you can’t believe everything you read.
And I will spend the vacation with Olivia. I’ve rented a room at the Westchester Aquadome for two whole weeks. It’s all the salary I’ve saved so far, but it will be worth it. We’ll swim in the hotel pool and I’ll take her into the city to see the Rockettes and The Nutcracker. We’ll go skating at Rockefeller Center. Far better than skating on the lake, I tell her, which at any rate remains stubbornly unfrozen.
Gwendoline Marsh tells me at the faculty Christmas party that the first ice club has been disbanded. Gwen looks almost pretty tonight. She’s got on her usual high-necked white blouse, but tonight she’s wearing it with a long brown velvet skirt that makes her waist look tiny. Instead of Ace bandages, her wrists are encircled by broad Victorian cuff bracelets. She’s even teased out a few tendrils from her usually severe bun and curled them into ringlets that tremble as she shakes her head over the lake’s unwillingness to cooperate and freeze. Myra Todd overhears our conversation and comes over to commiserate.
“I blame global warming,” she says. “The lake was always frozen by mid-December.”
Simon Ross, the math teacher, volunteers that the lake was only good for skating four days the previous year.
“It might not freeze at all.”
I turn around to see who has uttered this pessimistic prediction and see that it is Dr. Lockhart. She is wearing a silver dress that shimmers in the Christmas lights strung around the Music Room.
“It’ll freeze when we’re all away on holiday,” I tell her. “When we come back, everything will look different. The school always does, after break.” It may be the two glasses of champagne I’ve drunk, but I find myself oddly cheerful.
“Well, it’ll do us all good to get away,” Gwen Marsh says. “Imagine staying here through the whole break. I hear they used to let the scholarship girls do that to earn extra money.”
“How inhuman,” Dr. Lockhart says, taking a sip of her drink. “Imagine how depressing that must have been for those girls. Did you ever do that, Jane? Stay here during break?”
I notice that everyone is looking at me. I’m an old girl and so an authority on old Heart Lake customs, but no one has ever publicly mentioned before that I was a scholarship student. I wonder how Dr. Lockhart knows, but then I remember those files.
“In tenth and eleventh grade,” I answer. “It wasn’t so bad. My roommates were scholarships, too, so we all stayed. Our Latin teacher, Helen Chambers, stayed on campus and so did Miss Buehl.” I say the last bit loudly enough for Dean Buehl to hear and she comes over, one eyebrow raised inquiringly. “I was just saying that you were always here over Christmas break. We helped you collect ice samples.”
Dean Buehl nods. “Some of the younger girls even stayed with me at my cottage.”
“How kind of you, Dean Buehl,” Gwen Marsh says. “I wonder if any girls would want to stay here with me over break?”
It occurs to me that I haven’t asked Gwen what her plans are for the break. What if she’s stuck here all by herself? I know she has an apartment in town, but I certainly hope she isn’t spending her Christmas alone.
“Oh, I never minded,” Dean Buehl is saying to Gwen. “It was company and I took the girls skating with me. I always wanted to have an old-fashioned ice harvest,” she says, “like the Crevecoeurs had.”
Everyone is immediately fascinated with the idea of an ice harvest. Meryl North describes the icehouse on the other side of the lake at the mouth of the Schwanenkill and explains how even in summer there would still be blocks of ice packed in sawdust. Tacy Beade remembers that when she was a student here they used the ice to make ice sculptures. I notice that as soon as the older teachers come over Dr. Lockhart slips away from the group. I’ve seen her avoid them before and I can’t say I blame her as they both have a habit of droning on endlessly. When Myra Todd starts corralling people into an ice harvest committee (Gwen, I notice, immediately volunteers to do most of the work), I follow Candace Lockhart over to the drinks table that has been laid out under the Crevecoeur family portrait. She is standing with her back to the room, seemingly absorbed in the photograph of India Crevecoeur and her daughters, posing in ice skating costumes on the frozen lake.
“You’d think after the failure of their first ice club they wouldn’t be so gung-ho about an ice harvest,” she says as I help myself to some lukewarm Chardonnay.
“Well, it’s tricky catching the first ice. We always tried…”
“Did you ever see it?”
“I was actually at the lake the night the ice formed my junior year,” I tell her, “but, if you can believe this, I fell asleep.”
“So you missed it,” she says smiling into her drink, something clear and fizzy with ice. “Like you missed that last Christmas break.”
“Excuse me?”
She shakes the ice in her empty glass. “You said you spent the break here tenth and eleventh grade, but not in twelfth. And that’s when your roommate, Lucy Toller, first tried to kill herself. That’s what started it all, wasn’t it? You must have wondered at times if things would have been different if you’d been here.” She turns away from me to refill her glass with club soda. I hear something crack and think it must be the glass in my hand, but it’s only the ice in Dr. Lockhart’s drink, settling in the warm liquid.
“I was in Albany,” I tell her, “with my mother, who was dying of stomach cancer. In fact, she died the day before New Year’s.”
“Oh, Jane,” she says, “I didn’t mean to imply it was your fault what happened. Only that you might feel that way. What is it that the poet says about remorse… ?”
I look at Dr. Lockhart blankly, unable to think of any appropriate line, but of course it’s Gwen, who’s overheard our conversation, who thinks of one. “ ‘Remorse,’ as Emily Dickinson says, ‘—is Memory—awake.’ ”
ON THE MONDAY BEFORE BREAK APHRODITE DOESN’T come to class. I ask Athena and Vesta where she is and they tell me that she went out early that morning to take a walk around the lake and they haven’t seen her since.
After class I go straight to Dean Buehl and report Aphrodite’s absence.
“We’ll go to her room right now,” Dean Buehl tells me.
I am not wild about being in my old dorm room with Dean Buehl, but what choice do I have? Walking from the mansion to the dorm I find myself looking at the Point, which blocks our view of the northeast cove and the swimming beach. I pull my collar up around my neck and start to shake.
“This morning’s weather forecast says the temperature will be in the single digits by nightfall. If we can’t find her by dusk we’ll have to call the State Police and organize a search party. She’ll never make it through the night in that kind of cold.” Dean Buehl and I look at each other and I think we are remembering the same thing—a cold night twenty years ago when I showed up at the door of her cottage. Dean Buehl blushes and looks away first as if she were the one who was embarrassed at the memory.
At the dorm we find Athena and Vesta sitting at their desks with their books open. There is something wrong about the picture, I think. Something stagy about the way their books are laid out and how intently they lean over them. I sniff the air for cigarette smoke and smell, instead, gingerbread. The smell, with its connotations of holiday baking, confuses me. There are no ovens in the dorm. Then I realize what it is: air freshener. The girls were expecting us.
Dean Buehl sits on one of the beds and I stand because the other bed is covered with dirty laundry and it feels strange to sit on the same bed with the dean.
Dean Buehl asks the girls if Melissa seemed upset when she left this morning. The girls exchange guilty glances.
“Um, well, actually we’re not even sure she was here this morning. When we woke up she wasn’t in the single. There’s something on her bed, but it’s not a note or anything—it’s just some dumb poem.”
Dean Buehl and I both look at the door of the single, which is still closed. She nods to me and I open the door and look inside. The bed is neatly made. On its pillow lies a sheet of paper with blue printing. Perhaps it is the blue writing that makes me realize what it is. Who uses mimeographs anymore? Dean Buehl passes me in the doorway and without removing the page from the bed, reads the first two lines: “I will arise and go now, for always night and day / I hear lake water lapping with low sound by the shore…” and I finish the poem aloud: “While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray / I hear it in the deep heart’s core.”
Chapter Nine
H OW’D YOU KNOW THAT?” ATHENA ASKS. “MELISSA’S been repeating that poem for days. Are you the one who gave it to her?”
Dean Buehl, still standing above the single bed, looks my way.
“No,” I say. “It’s just something I remember. We read it when I was in school.”
Athena and Vesta shake their heads as if to say Teachers! Who knows what junk they carry around in their heads!
“Girls,” Dean Buehl says, “run down to the matron and ask for a plastic bag, then come right back up. Don’t talk to anyone.”
The girls scurry out of the room, glad, I think, to be away from us. Dean Buehl moves as if to sit on the edge of Melissa’s bed and then thinks better of it and sits on the window ledge. When she looks up at me I think she’ll ask the same question Athena asked. How did you know that poem? But she doesn’t. Maybe she assumes her old girls ought to know their Yeats.
“I’m going to my office to call the police,” she says. “You’re to follow with Athena and Vesta, but give me half an hour to make the call—no, make it an hour. I don’t want them to overhear what I have to say to the police.”
“What do you think has happened to her?”
Dean Buehl shakes her head. “I just don’t know… it’s all so odd… that poem—it’s the same one that girl left in her journal twenty years ago… that Hall girl.”
“Deirdre.”
“Yes, Deirdre Hall. Right before she jumped off the Point. My God. This was her room, wasn’t it?” She looks around her and then she looks at me standing in the doorway, noticing for the first time, I think, my reluctance to step over the threshold into the small room. She shakes her head. “What the hell is going on here?”
IT IS ONLY 3:30 WHEN ATHENA, VESTA, AND I REACH DEAN Buehl’s office, but already the sun is low behind the mansion, its last rays skating across the lake and filling the room with their deep golden light. The State Police officer, in a chair facing Dean Buehl’s desk, has to shield his eyes from the glare. All I can make out of him is the copper glow of his hair in the sunlight. I usher the two girls in ahead of me and Gwen Marsh, who is sitting on a couch to the side of the desk, gestures for them to sit on either side of her. She slips an arm around each girl even though both of Gwen’s arms are wrapped in Ace bandages. Dr. Lockhart, who is standing with her back to the room, looks at the girls, then at me, and then turns back to the window.
“This is the teacher I was telling you about. Jane Hudson,” Dean Buehl says to the police officer.
The officer rises slowly to his feet and turns toward me. “Yes,” he says, “Miss Hudson and I have met before.”
For a moment the air around me seems to shimmer, as if the light the lake throws into the room was lapping up against me. It’s that feeling I’ve had that the lake, as it moves toward freezing, is churning up the past, casting its secrets into the light of day. And now look whom it’s cast up—Matt.
But then he takes a step toward me, out of the glare, and the copper hair fades to dark brown streaked with gray, the golden skin ages and sallows. Not Matt. Maybe what Matt would have looked like if he’d lived many years past his eighteenth birthday.
“It’s Roy Corey, isn’t it?” I ask, reaching out my hand. He takes my hand and holds it for a moment, really holds it instead of shaking it, and I’m surprised and gladdened by the warmth. “Of course I remember you. You’re Matt and Lucy’s cousin. We met once.”
He drops my hand rather suddenly and that warmth is replaced by a sudden chill in the air. The sun has gone down behind Main Hall and the gold glow goes out of the lake like a light that’s been switched off. I feel inexplicably that I’ve disappointed this man, yet, I think I’m doing pretty well to have remembered as much as I have. After all it’s been twenty years and we only met that once.
He turns his back to me and sits down. Dean Buehl gestures for me to sit in the other chair in front of her desk. “Detective Corey was just saying we ought to check the Schwanenkill icehouse,” Dean Buehl tells me.
“I believe your Heart Lake girls have made a habit over the years of meeting town boys down there.”
I find myself blushing. I’m sure he’s said this to embarrass me—he knows as well as I do what used to go on in that icehouse.
“This Melissa Randall, did she have a boyfriend?” he asks.
Dean Buehl tells him that she did, but that he’s at Exeter.
“Anybody call to see if he’s still there?”
Dean Buehl places the call and speaks to the headmaster. Twenty minutes later he rings back and puts Brian Worthington on the line. At a signal from Corey, Dean Buehl hits the speakerphone so we all can hear Brian Worthington swear he hasn’t been out of New Hampshire since Thanksgiving break.
“When was the last time you heard from Melissa?” the dean asks him.
“Night before last,” he answers. “I knew something was up when she didn’t call last night. She calls every night.” I can hear the weariness in his voice and I’m not sure whom to feel sorrier for, him or Melissa. “She hasn’t done anything stupid, has she?”
Dean Buehl explains that Melissa is missing. She asks Brian to please let the authorities know if Melissa should show up at Exeter and promises to call as soon as she knows anything. When she gets off the phone, Athena raises her hand as if she were in class.
“Yes, Ellen?”
“Melissa said she was going to the hall phone to call Brian at around ten last night. We heard her talking to someone on the phone.”
“Did she say she had reached him when she came back?”
Athena and Vesta shake their heads. “She didn’t say and we didn’t ask. She’d been crying, but that wasn’t unusual.”
“And did she go out after that?”
“We don’t really know,” Vesta answers. “She went into her room and closed the door. We just thought she wanted to be alone to… you know… cry and stuff.”
“We went to sleep around eleven,” Athena continues. “I noticed when we turned out our lights that her light was off. But I don’t know if she was there or not. Her room has a separate entrance.”
“So we really don’t know how long the girl’s been missing,” Corey sums up. He slaps his hands on the arms of the Morris chair he’s in and then shifts his weight forward as if to get up, but pauses there on the edge of the chair. I revise my opinion about him. Matt wouldn’t have looked like this. He’d never have become this… solid.
“We’ll start the search on the south end of the lake and split into two parties to cover the east and west sides,” he says.
“Of course we’ll want to be part of the search effort,” Dean Buehl says.
“That’s up to you, of course, all volunteers are welcome, but I’d appreciate it if you could keep track of your girls. Last thing we need is someone else getting lost.” He lays his hands on the arms of the chair and heaves himself up. “Ask me,” he says, “the best thing would be if your teachers kept the girls calm and in their rooms.”
“We’re perfectly capable of keeping the girls calm, Officer,” Dr. Lockhart replies.
When Corey is gone, Dr. Lockhart sighs and looks out the window. It is dark outside now, too dark for her to see anything but her own reflection in the glass.
“Thank goodness we’re in capable hands,” she says.
“I’m sure the police will do their best,” Gwen Marsh says. It’s the first time she’s said anything since I’ve come in. “I agree with that nice Officer Corey—the girls should stay in their dorms. They’ve been through enough already.”
“That’s not fair,” Athena blurts out, shrugging herself out from under Gwen’s arm. “She’s our friend. We want to help.”
“A very natural response,” Dr. Lockhart says moving from the window and sitting on the edge of the couch next to Athena. “The last thing we want to encourage in the girls right now is a feeling of helplessness.” She looks directly at Gwen and I have the feeling that this has been a bone of contention between Lockhart and Marsh before. What surprises me is how warmly Athena and Vesta respond to Dr. Lockhart’s suggestion.
“We could organize a search team with teachers and students and work in shifts,” Athena says.
I see Dean Buehl considering. “Very well, as long as there’s a teacher in every squad.”
“Well, of course if that’s what you think is best, I’ll get working on a schedule right away, but I’ll need a secretary,” Gwen says, holding up one of her bandaged arms. “Perhaps Sandy will help me.”
I see Vesta exchange a desperate look with Dr. Lockhart, but Dr. Lockhart only shrugs and moves back to the window. Gwen has already commandeered a pad from Dean Buehl’s desk and put Vesta to work.
THAT NIGHT I WATCH THE SEARCHERS’ LIGHTS MOVING through the woods across the lake.
The shift I am assigned doesn’t start until four A.M. I am touched that Vesta and Athena ask to be on my search squad. I know I ought to sleep until then, but I also know that sleep is impossible. I wonder if Athena and Vesta are asleep in their dorm room. I doubt it.
From their window, I know, they, too, can see across the lake to the south shore.
The lights moving through the woods remind me of Wilis, seeking vengeance for earthly betrayal.
At a quarter to four I put on long underwear, jeans and a sweater, gloves and a wool hat and take a flashlight. It is still dark when I walk outside, the moon having set, the woods lit only by faint starlight reflected on the snow. I pause on the Point and look at the lake, which is so still that its surface looks like black marble. It is one of those calm cold nights that don’t, at first, feel as cold as they are because there is no wind. But in a few minutes, despite the layers I am wearing, I feel the cold bearing down on me. I shine my flashlight on the scratches on the rock and imagine the mile-high glacier that made them.
I consider taking a shortcut through the woods to the dorm, but already the snow beyond the paths is too deep. Soon the paths will narrow between two walls of packed snow and daily walks from dorm to dining hall to classroom will follow the same ever-tightening pattern.
“Like rats in a maze,” Lucy would say.
In our senior year she began at the first snowfall carving out her own paths, narrow deer tracks that meandered aimlessly through the woods.
At the dorm I find Athena and Vesta waiting for me on the steps. They are blowing into their mittened hands to warm their faces. “Miss Marsh was just here,” they tell me, “and she says we’re supposed to look down at the swimming beach—in case Melissa took out a boat or something.”
“When I was a student here,” I say slowly and carefully, “I once took a boat out on the lake and rowed to the stones.” I am thinking not just of Aphrodite’s fate right now, but of that afternoon I found a dry Olivia on the farthest rock and the flash of white I saw vanishing around the curve of the Point.
“Yeah, that’s nice, Magistra,” Vesta says impatiently, “but the boats are all locked up for the winter. If a person wanted a boat they’d have to go down to the icehouse. I think I heard Miss Todd say once that the county extension agent keeps a boat down there to take water samples. At least, that’s what I heard.”
I remember suddenly the day I met Athena swimming across the lake and the impression I had that she was meeting someone on the other side.
“Well, then, why don’t we go there instead,” I say.
“You mean deviate from Miss Marsh’s carefully choreographed schedule?” Vesta asks, lifting both eyebrows at me.
“Yes,” I tell her. “Let’s use some initiative. We can walk around the west side of the lake, check the icehouse, and then continue around the east side to the swimming beach. That should warm us up. But remember what Detective Corey said about staying together—I can’t afford to lose one of you.”
At the mention of Detective Corey’s name the girls exchange meaningful glances.
“What?” I ask, feeling suddenly like another teenager, the one not in on the joke.
“Oh, nothing, Magistra,” Athena says. “It’s just that we thought you and Detective Corey would… you know, make a cute couple. What do you think?”
I click my tongue and motion for the girls to start down the path, which is too narrow for three to walk abreast. I want to walk behind the girls so I can keep an eye on them. It helps, too, that they can’t see me smiling at their matchmaking attempt. It’s ridiculous—me and the stocky police officer who clearly seemed not to like me—but it touches me that they’re concerned about my personal life.
We call Melissa’s name as we go and, at Athena’s suggestion, vary our calls of Melissa with Aphrodite.
“She really liked her Latin class name,” Athena tells me. “She said in her old school her Latin teacher assigned names and she got Apia, because Melissa comes from the Greek word for bees and Apia means…”
“Bees,” I finish for her.
“Only the other girls called her Ape and she was… I mean she is… really sensitive about her weight.”
“Kids can be so mean,” I say. I am thinking about that was and wondering if my students are telling me everything they know about their roommate’s disappearance. “When I was here one of my roommates threatened to get my other roommate, my best friend, in trouble by telling a secret they shared. She teased her all the time about it, until my roommate, the one who was my friend, was nearly going crazy.”
“That’s pretty lousy,” Athena says. “I mean, no one likes a tattletale.”
Tattletale. The word is so childlike that instantly I am ashamed of myself for suspecting these girls of any wrongdoing, but then Vesta says, “Yeah, that must have gotten on your friend’s nerves. You could really get annoyed at someone like that.”
“It must have been annoying,” I say, “to hear Aphrodite crying all the time. I could tell her boyfriend, Brian, sounded worn-out.”
Vesta sighs. “God, it’s all we’ve heard all semester. Brian this and Brian that. He’s just this little pimply-faced nerd with a trust fund. Girls makes such fools of themselves over guys.”
“She should have just trusted him or decided he wasn’t worth it. That’s what I told her. I mean, a guy’s just not worth all that heartache.”
“Certainly not,” Vesta murmurs. “You know what they say, ‘A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.’ ” I laugh at the old aphorism. At Vassar we had Tshirts made up with that slogan.
“Hey look, we’ve come to another path. I wonder where that leads,” Athena says.
“It follows the Schwanenkill into town,” I tell them. “The icehouse should be just past here on the other side of the stream.”
I had forgotten that we would have to ford the stream to continue our walk around the lake. Fortunately, the Schwanenkill is mostly frozen.
“There’s a place that’s narrower, just off the path,” I tell the girls. “We just have to go a little into the woods…”
“Good,” Vesta says. “I have to take a leak anyway. I’ll be right back. Can I borrow that flashlight, Magistra?”
Vesta takes the flashlight out of my hands before I can think to object and then disappears into the shadows of the pine trees. Athena and I stand at the place where the two paths cross and wait for her. It occurs to me that this might be a good opportunity to talk to Athena without Vesta’s restraining presence.
“Vesta sounded pretty annoyed with Aphrodite,” I say.
“She just couldn’t understand the attraction,” Athena says in a normal tone of voice, then she leans closer to me and whispers into my ear, “You know, it’s just not her thing.”
When she leans away I can feel the warm breath she left on my cheek crystallizing in the cold air. It’s not until I watch Vesta walking back toward us through the woods, zipping her fly, that I realize that she’s trying to tell me that Vesta’s a lesbian.
“Oh,” I say, to no one really, because the two girls are walking on ahead of me. What impresses me about Athena’s revelation is the lack of malice or censure. When I went to school here girls were teased and called “lezzie,” but it wasn’t something you could talk openly about. For all our drug use and talk of sexual revolution, we really were still naive. And the suggestion at her inquest that Helen Chambers was a lesbian practically sealed her dismissal.
“I see where we can cross,” Vesta calls back to me.
I follow them into the woods, keeping my eyes on the beam from the flashlight which Vesta still holds until I’m forced to watch my footing instead. Off the path the snow is calf deep. I feel the cold and wet seeping into my cheap boots. Each step requires effort and concentration. I watch my feet disappear into the snow and look for places where the snow isn’t so deep. There are places where the snow has drifted up against a tree and my legs sink in to my knees. I slip into one particularly deep spot and find, for a moment, that I can’t pull out. My hands flutter over the surface of the snow seeking for purchase but finding none. I realize how silly I must look, floundering in the snow, and look up, expecting to find the girls laughing at my predicament, but instead I see nothing but snow and pine trees stretching out around me.
For a moment I do nothing but listen to the silence. And then I panic. It’s what they tell you not to do when you’re drowning. Miss Pike said if you try to save someone from drowning and they panic, the best thing to do is sock ’em in the jaw and carry them back to shore unconscious. “Never risk your own life,” she’d tell us. “That’s the first rule of lifesaving.”
When all my thrashing has done nothing but sink me deeper into the snow I stop and listen once again to the silence. The night is so eerily calm that not even a breeze moves through the pines. Then I hear, from behind me, the crunch of snow.
I try to turn around but that only makes me sink deeper.
I can hear it clearly now. Footsteps moving through the deep snow toward me. I can do nothing but wait. I imagine a blow to the head and then sinking, drowning, my mouth and lungs filling with ice.
Then I see the lights. Moving through the woods in front of me, they seem to dance among the pines. Wilis, I think, they’ve come to dance me to my death and drown me in the lake just like Hilarious. It’s the last thought I have before losing consciousness and it makes me happy. Well, at least it makes me laugh.
Chapter Ten
W HAT’S HILARIOUS?” SOMEONE IS ASKING ME. “FOR God’s sake, what’s so hilarious?”
The whole thing, I want to say, but my mouth is full of ice.
I open my eyes and see why I’m so cold. I’m in the icehouse. A face leans over me and I realize why I’m so happy. I am in the icehouse with Matt Toller.
“Magistra,” another voice says. “We’re so sorry we left you all alone.”
It must be Lucy, I think, only why would she call me Magistra? I’m glad, though, that she has finally apologized after all these years. How could they go and leave me alone. It’s all right now though, we’re together again.
“Miss Hudson, please try to drink some of this.” A strong arm holds me up and I sip from the Thermos cup. Matt always remembered to bring the hot chocolate when we went skating.
I take a sip and the bitter, black coffee burns my tongue. I look at the man holding the cup and the wave of sadness that moves through my body is so strong I start to shake all over. I remember that when I gave birth to Olivia I shook like this. It’s because your body has lost all that mass, the nurse told me, it makes your body temperature drop. Yes, I remember thinking, this is what missing someone feels like, like part of your flesh has been torn away. Looking now at the man who is not Matt Toller, who is only his cousin, Detective Roy Corey, I feel that same precipitous drop all over again.
I lean into Corey’s arm and immediately he moves it away as if he just noticed he had it around me. No, I think, the girls are wrong. This man can’t even stand to touch me.
I take another sip of the bitter coffee and look at Vesta and Athena.
“Your girls led me to you,” Corey tells me. “I met up with them here and they were surprised you weren’t right behind them.”
“I got stuck in the snow,” I say.
“You passed out,” he tells me. “I was afraid you had hypothermia, but I think it was just fear. How do you feel now?”
“Fine,” I tell him. I look around the icehouse. “What are you doing here? I thought you were going to check out the icehouse first thing last night.”
“I did, but then all I was looking for was a lost girl. I wasn’t noticing what wasn’t here.”
I sit up and swing my legs over the edge of the wooden ledge. I am sitting, I see, on one of the wide shelves where they used to store the slabs of ice harvested from the lake.
“The boat,” I say. “There’s no boat.”
Corey nods his head and twists his mouth around like a man who’s made a big mistake and hates to admit it. I notice that he has the same full lips that Matt Toller had.
“I should have thought of it directly,” he says. “But I’d forgotten the county extension agent used the icehouse to store her dinghy.”
“You think Aphrodite… Melissa took it?”
Instead of answering, Corey looks at the girls.
“We found it at the beginning of the year and took it out once or twice. I guess Melissa could have taken it,” Athena says.
“Could she have gotten it down to the water by herself?” I ask.
In answer, Corey swings open the double doors at one end of the wooden hut. At first all I see is blackness, but then I realize that what I’m looking at isn’t the blackness of night, but a wide expanse of water—so still it might be air instead of water—spreading out from the edge of the icehouse.
WHEN I HAVE ASSURED COREY AND THE GIRLS THAT I haven’t suffered any ill effects from my faint in the woods, we walk back along the east side of the lake toward the swimming beach.
We are walking two abreast on the path with the girls in front of us. Corey slows his pace a bit and signals for me to do the same. I realize he wants to leave some space between us and the girls. “We found a boat drifting off the swimming beach, caught between two of the rocks,” he says in a voice so low I have to move closer to hear him, “but I wanted to see where the boat came from since the school’s boathouse was still padlocked. That’s when I remembered about the boat in the icehouse.”
“But shouldn’t you be looking for Melissa in the water?” Roy pats the air with his hand, meaning for me to keep my voice down. I hadn’t realized how loud I’d spoken, or how frightened my voice would sound. It’s that image of the empty boat, drifting between the rocks.
“We’ve called the divers in, but they can’t start until sunrise. The girl’s parents are flying in from California. I’d like you to get those girls back to their rooms before then. I don’t think they need to see this.”
“I understand,” I tell him. “I’d like to come back. If you don’t mind.”
He looks at me. “You were there when they took Matt and Lucy out of the lake, weren’t you?”
“Yes,” I say. “Sometimes I wish I hadn’t been.”
“Really? I’ve always wished I had been here. You know, Matt was staying with us the weekend he took off and hitched back here.” I nod, remembering that the military school Matt had been sent to senior year was near his aunt and uncle’s house. “I knew he was doing it. He told me he had to see his sister. That was the last time I ever saw him alive.”
So someone else has been carrying the weight of Matt Toller’s death all these years. For a moment it makes me feel lighter, and then heavier. This is why Roy Corey is so standoffish with me. He blames me for what happened to Matt and Lucy.
“You shouldn’t blame yourself,” I say, but what I’m really saying is please don’t blame me. “You were just a kid.”
“That’s no excuse,” he tells me. “I’ve thought about this a lot since then. You can’t duck responsibility because you’re young. You have to take accountability.”
“Is that why you became a cop? To hold people accountable for their mistakes? To unmask the villains?”
He stops on the path and looks at me as if I’d slapped him. I hadn’t meant to sound so angry, but I’m tired of being blamed.
“Look,” I say, laying my hand on his arm. I want to explain to him how I feel, but he moves away from me and walks up the path so quickly I can hardly keep up with him.
AFTER I DROP OFF ATHENA AND VESTA AT THE DORM I walk back to the swimming beach. The sun hasn’t risen yet, but I can see a lightening in the sky across the lake and know that it soon will. I was upset at first after my talk with Corey, but once I got over the fact that he obviously holds me responsible for what happened to Matt and Lucy, I realized how lucky I am to have found him.
Roy Corey saw Matt Toller just before he came back here to Heart Lake that last time. Maybe Matt talked to him about me and, if he did, I might find out what Matt was thinking about me at the end. For the past twenty years I’ve felt like I was talking to someone on the phone when the lines went down. Right in the middle of the most important conversation of my life. Roy Corey might be able to fill in some of the lost pieces.
When I round the Point and see the police cars and ambulance parked on the road above the swimming beach I feel ashamed of myself for worrying at a time like this about Matt’s opinion of me. Vesta is right, we girls make such fools of ourselves over men.
I can imagine what must have happened to Aphrodite. Frantic over Brian’s purported faithlessness and feeling powerless hundreds of miles away from him she resorted to a childish witchcraft. What was that Dr. Lockhart said? It’s all an attempt to gain control over a world in which they have no power. She wanted to go to the farthest three sisters rock and make an offering to the Lake Goddess. Only it was too cold to swim there, so she got the boat from the icehouse and rowed across the lake. It was probably when she was trying to get from the boat onto the rock that she slipped and fell into the water. The cold of the water must have shocked her… or maybe she hit her head…
From what Vesta and Athena have said, I know that Aphrodite could have gotten the idea to take the boat from their previous exploits. But something else bothers me. Lucy Toller and I once took the rowboat from the icehouse and I wrote about it in my senior-year journal. What if Aphrodite got the idea from my journal? Then I have an awful thought. I think: Maybe Aphrodite had my journal with her when she fell into the lake. If so, maybe my old dream of the lake washing clean those pages has finally come true. It’s an awful thought because for a moment it has made me glad.
I walk down the steps to the swimming beach and stop midway. Roy Corey is there, so is Dean Buehl and a middle-aged couple in matching Burberry trench coats. Melissa’s parents, no doubt. I find that I don’t want to join the group on the beach, so I sit down on the cold stone, about halfway down the steps, and wrap my arms around my knees, trying to make myself small and compact against the relentless cold.
Three men in oily black rubber suits are talking to Corey. They all look at the eastern shore where the sun has just appeared through the pine trees. I can imagine what they are saying. That it’s probably better to wait until the sun is higher, shining through the water. But then they look back at the parents. The first morning light hits the woman’s face and it’s like a blade cracking her open. I imagine this woman looked ten years younger just twelve hours ago.
The divers walk into the water. When they are chest deep they spread their arms over the surface of the water and then they dive. On the beach there is nothing to do but wait. No one talks.
The sun rises above the tips of the pines on the eastern shore and bathes the farthest of the three sisters rocks in light. I notice, for the first time, that the rocks are perfectly aligned with the angle of the rising sun. As the sun rises, the light touches each rock in turn, like a child jumping across stepping-stones. The sunlight glazes the beach and the step I am sitting on, but there’s no warmth in it. Instead, I feel as if I, and all the other figures on the beach, have been sealed in ice. The lake is so still that I find it hard to believe that divers are moving below the surface, but then I see a black head surface in the middle of the cove. I see a hand rise out of the water, and Roy Corey, who is watching the diver through binoculars, waves back.
I see Mrs. Randall turn to Corey as if to ask a question, but then she turns back to her husband and kind of leans in on him, like a tree tilting in the wind.
Out in the lake the head is gone. The surface of the water is still again.
We are all still looking toward the center of the cove so we don’t notice the diver surface to the left of the swimming beach. He is shoulder deep in the water and his arms, instead of spreading across the water, are below the surface and look as if they are being pulled down as he walks slowly through the water toward the beach.
He’s carrying Melissa Randall.
As soon as he lays her down on the beach the paramedics snap into life and try to resuscitate what even I, from this distance, can see is a corpse. The group on the beach contracts into a tight fist around the drowned girl. I am probably the only one who notices the second diver surfacing a little to the left of the three sisters. He is carrying something, too, but something smaller and lighter.
Roy Corey notices and breaks away from the group. He meets the diver at the edge of the water and reaches for the rusty tin box. I am up and moving across the beach, although I don’t know what I think I can do about it. Roy Corey is moving his hand over the domed surface of the box, which is a little larger than a shoe box. A webbed belt is fastened around the box. I see him unfasten the brass buckle and the belt falls away, rotting, to the ground. He wipes away the layer of green slime that covers the tin, revealing an improbable landscape of gold mountains that glints in the morning sun. He flicks back a little gold latch and opens the lid.
Inside is a heavy white cloth embroidered with a heart and words I can’t make out from where I am. But I don’t have to. I know them by heart. Cor te reducit. The heart leads you back. Roy Corey lifts the cloth, delicately, with a little flourish even, like a magician culminating his final trick. But there’s no flutter of white wings; instead, nestled in a circle of greenish-gray stones, are the perfectly preserved bones of a tiny human being.
I look away from the small skeleton toward the lake and notice that something is happening. I remember again how the nurse said that after birth the mother’s body temperature drops precipitously. It is as if now that the lake has given up these two bodies its own temperature has achieved an equilibrium of cold. It’s as if that flutter of white handkerchief has produced magic after all because shooting out in all directions at once, brilliant in the morning sun, ice crystals explode across the still surface of the lake. It’s what we’ve all been waiting for: first ice.