The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon(23)

Trisha closed her eyes. Tears slipped out from beneath her mudcaked lids and ran down her equally muddy cheeks.

The corners of her mouth quivered up and down. She wished briefly that she was dead - better to be dead than have to endure such fear, better to be dead than to be lost.

Further off, another branch cracked. Leaves shook in a brief windless gust, and that was further off still. It was going, but it knew she was here now, in its woods. It would be back. Meanwhile, the night stretched out ahead of her like a thousand miles of empty road.

I'll never get to sleep. Never.

Her mother told her to pretend something when Trisha couldn't sleep. Imagine something nice. That's the best thing you can do when the sandman's late, Trisha.

Imagine that she was saved? No, that would only make her feel worse... like imagining a big glass of water when you were thirsty.

She was thirsty, she realized... dry as a bone. She guessed that was what got left over when the worst of your fear departed - that thirst. She turned her pack around with some effort and worked the buckles loose. It would have been easier if she'd been sitting up, but there was no way in the world she was coming out from under this tree again tonight, no way in the universe.

Unless it comes back, the cold voice said. Unless it comes back and drags you out.

She grabbed her bottle of water, had several big gulps, recapped it, restowed it. With that done, she looked long-ingly at the zippered pocket with her Walkman inside. She badly wanted to take it out and listen for a little while, but she should save the batteries.

Trisha rebuckled the pack's flap before she could weaken, then wrapped her arms around it again. Now that she wasn't thirsty anymore, what should she imagine? And she knew, just like that. She imagined Tom Gordon was in the clearing with her, that he was standing right over there by the stream.

Tom Gordon in his home uniform; it was so white it almost glowed in the moonlight. Not really guarding her because he was just pretend... but sort of guarding her. Why not? It was her make-believe, after all.

What was that in the woods? she asked him.

Don't know, Tom replied. He sounded indifferent. Of course he could afford to sound indifferent, couldn't he? The real Tom Gordon was two hundred miles away in Boston, and by now probably asleep behind a locked door.

"How do you do it?" she asked, sleepy again now, so sleepy she wasn't aware that she was speaking out loud.

"What's the secret?"

Secret of what?

"Of closing," Trisha said, her eyes closing.

She thought he would say believing in God - didn't he point to the sky every time he was successful, after all? - or believing in himself, or maybe trying your best (that was the motto of Trisha's soccer coach: "Try your best, forget the rest"), but Number 36 said none of those things as he stood by the little stream.

You have to try to get ahead of the first hitter, was what he said.

You have to challenge him with that first pitch, throw a strike he can't hit. He comes to the plate thinking, I'm better than this guy.

You have to take that idea away from him, and it's best not to wait.

It's best to do it right away. Establishing that it's you who's better, that's the secret of closing.

"What do you..." like to throw on the first pitch was the rest of the question she meant to ask, but before she could get all of it out, she was asleep. In Castle View her parents were also asleep, this time in the same narrow bed following a bout of sudden, satisfying, and totally unplanned sex. If you had ever told me was Quilla's last waking thought. I never in a million years would have was Larry's.

Of the entire family, it was Pete McFarland who slept the most uneasily in the small hours of that late spring morning; he was in the room adjoining his parents', groaning and pulling the bedclothes into a tangle as he turned restlessly from side to side. In his dreams he and his mother were argu-ing, walking down the trail and arguing, and at some point he turned around in disgust (or perhaps so she wouldn't have the satisfaction of seeing that he had begun to cry a little), and Trisha was gone. At this point his dream stuttered; it caught in his mind like a bone in a throat. He twisted back and forth in his bed, trying to dislodge it. The latening moon peered in at him, making the sweat on his forehead and temples gleam.

He turned and she was gone. Turned and she was gone.

Turned and she was gone. There was only the empty path.

"No," Pete muttered in his sleep, shaking his head from side to side, trying to unstick the dream, to cough it loose before it choked him. He could not. He turned and she was gone. Behind him there was only the empty path.

It was as if he had never had a sister at all.

Fifth Inning

WHEN TRISHA woke the next morning her neck hurt so badly she could hardly turn her head, but she didn't care.

The sun was up, filling the crescent-shaped clearing with early daylight. That was what she cared about. She felt reborn. She remembered waking in the night, being itchy and needing to urinate; she remembered going to the stream and putting mud on her stings and bites by moon-light; she remembered going to sleep while Tom Gordon was standing watch and explaining some of the secrets of his closer's role to her. She also remembered being terribly frightened of something in the woods, but of course nothing had been there watching; it was being alone in the dark that had frightened her, that was all.

Something deep in her mind tried to protest this, but Trisha wouldn't let it. The night was over. She wanted to look back on it no more than she wanted to go back to that rocky slope and repeat her roll down to the tree with the wasps' nest in it. It was daytime now. There would be search-parties galore and she would be saved. She knew it.