The Lake of Dead Languages Read Online Free

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 palestrusset. “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.”
    W HEN O LIVIA HAS FALLEN ASLEEP I TAKE OUT THE PIECE OF paper folded in my skirt pocket. As I unfold it I am sure thatI 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