The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon(16)
He had looked around the yard with its too-high, too-patchy grass, the little swing-'n-gym set he had set up for his son and daughter (Pete had outgrown it, and Trisha really had, too, although she still swung or would go down the slide a few times when she was here, just to please him), the two lawn-dwarves (one barely visible in an extravagant splurge of spring weeds), the fence at the very rear that needed painting.
In that moment he had looked old to her. A little confused.
A little frightened. (A little lost in the woods, she thought now, sitting on the fallen log with her pack between her sneakers.) Then he had nodded and looked back at her.
"Yeah, something. Some kind of insensate force for the good. Insensate, do you know what that means?"
She had nodded, not knowing exactly but not wanting him to stop and explain. She didn't want him to teach her, not today; today she only wanted to learn from him.
"I think there's a force that keeps drunken teenagers - most drunken teenagers - from crashing their cars when they're coming home from the senior prom or their first big rock concert. That keeps most planes from crashing even when something goes wrong. Not all, just most. Hey, the fact that no one's used a nuclear weapon on actual living people since 1945 suggests there has to be something on our side. Sooner or later someone will, of course, but over half a century... that's a long time."
He had paused, looking out at the lawn-dwarves with their vacant, cheery faces.
"There's something that keeps most of us from dying in our sleep. No perfect loving all-seeing God, I don't think the evidence supports that, but a force."
"The Subaudible."
"You got it."
She had gotten it but hadn't liked it. It was too much like getting a letter you thought would be interesting and important, only when you opened it it was addressed to Dear Occupant.
"Do you believe in anything else, Dad?"
"Oh, the usual. Death and taxes and that you're the most beautiful girl in the world."
"Da-ad." She'd laughed and wriggled as he hugged her and kissed the top of her head, liking his touch and his kiss but not the smell of beer on his breath.
He let her go and stood up. "I also believe it's beer o'clock. You want some iced tea?"
"No, thanks," she said, and perhaps something prescient had been at work, because as he started away she said: "Do you believe in anything else? Seriously."
His smile had faded into a look of seriousness. He stood there thinking (sitting on the log she remembered being flat-tered that he would think so hard on her behalf), his ice cream starting to drip over his hand now. Then he had looked up, smiling again. "I believe that your heartthrob Tom Gordon can save forty games this year," he said. "I believe that right now he's the best closer in the major leagues - that if he stays healthy and the Sox hitting holds up, he could be pitching in the World Series come October. Is that enough for you?"
"Yessss!" she had cried, laughing, her own seriousness bro-ken .. . because Tom Gordon really was her heartthrob, and she loved her father for knowing it and for being sweet about it instead of mean. She had run to him and hugged him hard, getting ice cream on her shirt and not caring.
What was a little Sunny Treat between friends?
And now, sitting here in the growing grayness, listening to the drip of water all around her in the woods, watching the trees blur into shapes which would soon become threat-ening, listening for amplified shouts ("COME TO THE SOUND OF MY VOICE!") or the distant barking of dogs, she thought: I can't pray to the Subaudible. I just can't. She couldn't pray to Tom Gordon, either - that would be ludi-crous - but perhaps she could listen to him pitch... and against the Yankees, at that. WCAS had their Sox on; she could put hers on, too. She had to conserve her batteries, she knew that, but she could listen for awhile, couldn't she?
And who could tell? She might hear those amplified voices and barking dogs before the game was over.
Trisha opened her pack, reverently removed her Walk-man from its inner pocket, and settled the earbuds into place. She hesitated a moment, suddenly sure the radio would no longer work, that some vital wire had been jog-gled loose in her tumble down the slope and this time there would be only silence when she pushed the power button. It was a stupid idea, maybe, but on a day when so many things had gone wrong, it seemed like a horribly plausible idea, too.
Go on, go on, don't be a chickenguts!
She pushed the button and like a miracle her head filled with the sound of Jerry Trupiano's voice... and more importantly, with the sounds of Fenway Park. She was sitting out here in the darkening, drippy woods, lost and alone, but she could hear thirty thousand people. It was a miracle.
" - comes to the belt," Troop was saying. "He winds. He fires. And... strike three called, Martinez caught him look-ing!
Oh, that was the slider and it was a beaut! That caught the inside corner and Bernie Williams was just frozen! Oh my! And at the end of two and a half innings, it's still the Yankees two, the Boston Red Sox nothing."
A singing voice instructed Trisha to call 1-800-54GIANT for some sort of auto repair, but she didn't hear it.
Two and a half innings already played, which meant it had to be eight o'clock. At first that seemed amazing, and yet, given the faded quality of the light, not so hard to believe, either. She'd been on her own for ten hours. It seemed like forever; it also seemed like no time at all.