The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon(15)

But as the shadows in the woods thickened and joined hands, there was only the sound of the stream - no wider and no smaller than when she had tumbled down the slope beside it - and the sound of her own breathing. Her mental pictures of the men in the brown uniforms weakened, little by little.

I can't stay out here all night, she thought, no one can expect me to stay out here all night -  She felt panic trying to grab her again - it was speeding her heartbeat, drying out her mouth, making her eyes throb in their sockets. She was lost in the woods, hemmed in by trees for which she had no name, alone in a place where her town-girl vocabulary had little use, and she was conse-quently left with just a narrow range of recognition and reaction, all of it primitive. From town girl to cave girl in one easy step.

She was afraid of the dark even when she was at home in her room, with the glow from the streetlight on the corner falling in through the window. She thought that if she had to spend the night out here, she would die of terror.

Part of her wanted to run. Never mind how flowing water was bound to take her to people eventually, all that was likely just a crock of Little House on the Prairie shit. She had been following this stream for miles now, and all it had brought her to was more bugs. She wanted to run away from it, run in whatever direction the going was easiest.

Run and find people before it got dark. That the idea was totally nutso didn't help much. It certainly didn't change the throb in her eyes (and the stung places, now they were throbbing, too) or ease the coppery fear-taste in her mouth.

Trisha fought her way through a tangle of trees growing so close together they were almost intertwined and came out in a little crescent of clearing where the brook took an elbow-bend to the left. This crescent, hemmed in on all sides by bushes and raggedy clumps of trees, looked like a little patch of Eden to Trisha. There was even a fallen tree-trunk for a bench.

She went to it, sat down, closed her eyes, and tried to pray for rescue. Asking God to not let her Walkman be bro-ken had been easy because it had been unthinking. Now, however, praying was hard. Neither of her parents were churchgoers - her Mom was a lapsed Catholic, and her Dad, so far as Trisha knew, had never had anything to lapse from - and now she discovered herself lost and without vocabulary in another way. She said the Our Father and it came out of her mouth sounding flat and uncomforting, about as useful as an electric can-opener would have been out here. She opened her eyes and looked around the little clearing, seeing all too well how gray the air was becoming, clasping her scratched hands nervously together.

She couldn't remember ever discussing spiritual matters with her mother, but she had asked her father not a month ago if he believed in God. They had been out behind his lit-tle place in Malden, eating ice cream cones from the Sunny Treat man, who still came by in his tinkling white truck (thinking of the Sunny Treat truck now made Trisha feel like crying again). Pete had been "down the park," as they said in Malden, goofing with his old friends.

"God," Dad had said, seeming to taste the word like some new ice cream flavor - Vanilla with God instead of Vanilla with Jimmies. "What brought that on, sugar?"

She shook her head, not knowing. Now, sitting on the fallen trunk in this cloudy, buggy June dusk, a frightening idea bloomed: what if she had asked because some deep future-seeing part of her had known that this was going to happen? Had known, had decided she was going to need a little God to get through, and had sent up a flare?

"God," Larry McFarland had said, licking his ice cream.

"God, now, God..." He thought awhile longer. Trisha had sat quietly on her side of the picnic table, looking out at his little yard (it needed mowing), giving him all the time he needed. At last he said, "I'll tell you what I believe in. I believe in the Subaudible."

"The what?" She had looked at him, not sure if he was joking or not. He didn't look as if he was joking.

"The Subaudible. Do you remember when we lived on Fore Street?"

Of course she remembered the house on Fore Street.

Three blocks from where they were, near the Lynn town line.

A bigger house than this, with a bigger back yard that Dad had always kept mown. Back when Sanford was just for grandparents and summer vacations and Pepsi Robichaud was just her summer friend and arm-farts were the funniest things in the universe... except, of course, for real farts. On Fore Street the kitchen didn't smell of stale beer the way this house's kitchen did. She nodded, remembering very well.

"It had electric heat, that house. Do you remember how the baseboard units would hum, even when they weren't heating? Even in the summer?"

Trisha had shaken her head. And her father had nodded his, as if that was what he expected.

"That's because you got used to it," he said. "But take my word, Trish, that sound was always there. Even in a house where there aren't baseboard heaters, there are noises. The fridge goes on and off. The pipes thunk. The floors creak.

The traffic goes by outside. We hear those things all the time, so most of the time we don't hear them at all. They become..." And he gestured for her to finish, as he had done since she was very small, sitting on his lap and begin-ning to read. His old dear gesture.

"Subaudible," she said, not because she completely understood what the word meant but because it was so clearly what he wanted from her.

"Pree-cisely," he said, gesturing once more with his ice cream. A splatter of vanilla drops ran up one leg of his khaki pants, and she'd found herself wondering how many beers he'd had already that day. "Pree-cisely, sugar, subaudible. I don't believe in any actual thinking God that marks the fall of every bird in Australia or every bug in India, a God that records all of our sins in a big golden book and judges us when we die - I don't want to believe in a God who would deliberately create bad people and then deliberately send them to roast in a hell He created - but I believe there has to be something."