As I said, Lottie likes working in the bakery. The last few days, though, have not been among her better ones. She’s done all the things she did when she first started working for her aunt, made all the same stupid mistakes all over again. She’s mixed batter wrong. She’s spilled batter on the floor. She’s left things in the oven too long. She’s taken things from the oven too soon. She’s broken more bowls than she thought possible. Her co-workers have covered for her when and where they could — they don’t like her quite as much as they do her mother, but they still like her well-enough. Even so, she’s gone from being one of the favorite employees to someone whose job is increasingly uncertain. Clara has watched this happen, and I’m pretty sure she knows its cause. She knows that Lottie has gone from thinking the world is flat to learning it’s round, so to speak, and pretty much all at once. For the last few days, her mother has done what she can to keep Lottie out of sight, sending her on as many errands as she reasonably can.
It’s on one of these errands that Lottie has her encounter. Clara’s sent her back to one of the storage closets to fetch some slivered almonds for the danishes. This closet is at the rear of the bakery, next to one of the back doors, and is used to keep whatever there isn’t room for in the main closets. Already narrow and shallow, it’s made more so by the supplies crowded into it. The closet has no light and no window, so Lottie leaves the door open as she searches for the slivered almonds. Later, she’ll say that she heard the back door to the bakery squeak open, but didn’t give it a second thought, since she was busy trying to shift a heavy bag of flour to see what was concealed beneath it. Sure enough, there are the almonds. Lottie heaves the bag of flour the rest of the way off the almonds, listening to the footsteps dragging across the floor behind her. An alarm bell starts ringing in her head, but at that moment she isn’t sure why. I know, I know: with all that she’s learned the past few days, how could she not have known what’s sliding ever-closer? You know yourselves, though, that it’s one thing to hear something in a story, another to meet it in real life. Lottie’s busy trying to ensure the bag of flour isn’t going to topple over, even as she grabs the bag of almonds. Her mission accomplished, she turns to leave and finds Helen standing in the doorway.
Lottie doesn’t scream. She doesn’t drop the almonds, either. It’s funny, she later says the first thought to barge into her head was, Don’t drop the almonds. She clutches the bag to her chest. Helen lurches forward, tugging the door closed behind her and plunging the little space into blackness. Lottie breathes in sharply and retreats a step. The almonds, she’s thinking, the almonds. Helen stays where she is. Lottie can hear her breathing, a slow, labored inhale and a wet, bubbling exhale, what you might expect to hear from a fish dying on the shore, drowning in air. Lottie stands in the darkness, so afraid she can’t breathe. Dead, she thinks, I must be dead. Before Helen closed the door, Lottie had a quick look at her, at those yellow eyes, those blank, pitiless eyes, which she’s sure can see her plain as day. She can smell the woman, can smell her death, a reek of rotten flowers and spoiled flesh that rapidly fills the air in the closet. Lottie gags, momentarily feeling her breakfast churning at the back of her throat. At the sound of Lottie choking, Helen chuckles, a liquid wheeze that sends goosebumps chasing each other across Lottie’s skin. She swallows hard, forcing her legs to take two trembling steps back, until she’s pressed up against the closet’s rear wall. Her left hand pressing that bag of almonds to her chest as if it’s a bag of diamonds, her right hand flails out in the darkness, searching for anything with which she might defend herself. She tries to remember what she saw in this part of the closet and can’t. All she can feel are the ends of bags of salt, stacked one on top of the other and immovable as a heap of bricks. She digs her fingers into one of the bags of salt, waiting for the dead woman’s advance.
Helen chuckles again, that liquid wheeze. Her laugh goes on and on, filling the closet the way her awful smell has. She laughs and she laughs, and Lottie suddenly understands that the woman isn’t laughing, she’s speaking. What Lottie took for one continuous chuckle is actually sentences. They’re in no language she’s ever heard, and between Rainer and living in the camp, she’s encountered a few, living and dead. The words seem little more than phlegmy coughs, grunts, and clicks of the tongue. For the briefest of moments, Lottie wonders if this is Helen’s original language, what she spoke prior to coming to America, but she rejects that idea immediately. She knows, in the way you just know some things, that this is speech Helen has brought back with her from the grave. It is a death-tongue, the tongue you learn once you leave this life for lands uncharted, and Lottie realizes she understands what Helen is saying.
It isn’t so much that Lottie is able to translate Helen’s words as it is that she sees what the woman is saying. More than sees: for a moment, she’s there. One second, she’s standing in a dark closet full of the reek of death. The next, she’s looking out at a vast, black ocean. Great, foaming waves rear and collapse as far as the eye can see, while overhead churning clouds flicker with lightning. When Lottie and her family crossed the Atlantic, they passed through a storm, and she well remembers gazing out at the waves bursting themselves against and over their ship’s prow and deck. Boarding that ship, Lottie had thought it the most enormous thing she’d ever seen; but as it slid up and down the heaving ocean like a toy in a bathtub, its hull sounding the successive booms of the waves’ relentless pounding, she knew that she’d been wrong, that here was true enormity. Now, faced with the black ocean, she confronts a vastness that makes the Atlantic seem little more than a pond. As she watches, huge backs slide up out of and back under the waves; Lottie’s reasonably sure they aren’t whales, since no whale she knows of sports a row of spikes down its spine. She has the sense of more, and bigger, beasts waiting beneath the water’s surface, forms as immense as a nightmare. The ocean is everywhere. Not only does it stretch to the horizon in all directions, it’s under everything as well. I don’t mean underground, I mean — it’s fundamental, you might say. If what’s around us is a picture, then this is what it’s drawn on. Reverend Mapple had a word for it, the subjectile. Lottie said it was like, if you could cut a hole in the air, black water would come pouring out of it.
Helen keeps talking. Lottie hears her there a few feet away from her, but also from across a long distance, as if she isn’t just looking at the black ocean, she’s there. From where Lottie is, which is kind of floating above the scene, a little bit beyond the reach of the highest waves, like she’s in a hot-air balloon, she can see that the surface of the water is crowded, full of floating objects. There are thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands. She can’t tell how many there are. They cover the ocean in all directions. As she peers at them, she realizes that they’re heads, the heads of people submerged in the water up to their necks. It’s as if the biggest shipwreck in history has occurred, and here are the survivors. Only, they aren’t thrashing about and screaming, the way you’d expect people in fear of their lives to do. Lottie thinks they might be dead already, that this might be a sea of corpses. She focuses on one in particular, a girl, and it’s like looking through a telescope. Suddenly, she can see the girl’s face up-close. It’s frozen, the eyes open wide and unblinking, a strand of oily seaweed tangled in her matted hair. Her skin is alabaster-white, her lips blue, but her mouth is moving. She’s speaking, in a low monotone. If Lottie concentrates, she can pick out the girl’s words.