The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon(45)
She lay looking up at the sky, panting. Her stomach hurt and her throat was sore from screaming, but she felt a little better, as if she had gotten rid of something dangerous. She put an arm over her face and dozed off, still sniffling.
When she woke up, the sun was over the ridge on the far side of the marsh. It was afternoon again. Tell me, Johnny, what do we have for our contestants? Well, Bob, we have another afternoon. It's not much of a prize, but I guess it's the best a bunch of puppy-shit ass**les like us can do.
Trisha's head swam when she sat up; a squadron of large black moths unfolded their wings and went flying lazily across her field of vision. For a moment she was sure she was going to faint. The feeling passed, but her throat was still sore when she swallowed, and her head felt hot. Shouldn't have slept in the sun, she told herself, except sleeping in the sun wasn't the reason she felt this way. The reason was that she was getting sick.
Trisha put on the sneaker she had kicked off doing her stupid tantrum, then ate a handful of berries and drank some stream-water from her bottle. She spied a cluster of fiddleheads growing at the edge of the marsh and ate them, too. They were fading and a lot tougher than they were tasty, but she forced them down. With high tea over, she stood up and looked across the marsh again, this time shad-ing her eyes from the sun. After a moment she shook her head slowly and wearily - the gesture of a woman instead of a child, and an old woman, at that. She could see the ridge clearly and she was sure it was dry over there, but she couldn't face slogging through another quagmire with her Reeboks tied around her neck. Not even if this one was shal-lower than the other one and not as nasty underfoot; not for all the late spring fiddleheads in the world. Why should she, with no stream to follow? She was as apt to find help - or another stream - in another, easier, direction.
So thinking, Trisha turned fully north, walking along the east side of the marsh that sprawled across most of the val-ley's floor. She had done a great many things right since becoming lost - more than she ever would have guessed - but this was a bad decision, the worst she'd made since leav-ing the path in the first place. Had she crossed the marsh and climbed the ridge, she would have found herself look-ing down at Devlin Pond, on the outskirts of Green Mount, New Hampshire. Devlin was small, but there were cottages on its south end and a camp-road leading out to New Hampshire Route 52.
On a Saturday or Sunday, Trisha would almost certainly have heard the burr of powerboats on the pond as week-enders towed kids on water-skis; after the Fourth of July there would have been powerboats out there on any day of the week, sometimes so many that they had to weave to avoid each other. But this was midweek in early June, there was no one out on Devlin but a couple of fishermen with lit-tle twenty-horse putt-putts, and Trisha consequently heard nothing but the birds and the frogs and the bugs. Instead of finding the pond, she turned toward the Canadian border and began walking deeper into the woods. Some four hun-dred miles ahead was Montreal.
Between it and her, not much.
Seventh Inning Stretch
THE YEAR before the separation and divorce, the McFar-lands had gone to Florida for a week, during Pete and Trisha's February school vacation. It had been a bad holiday, with the children too often glumly shelling together on the beach while their parents fought in the little beach house they had rented (he drank too much, she spent too much, you promised me you'd, why don't you ever, yatata-yatata-yatata, dahdah-dahdah-dahdah). When they flew back, Trisha somehow got the window seat instead of her brother.
The plane had descended toward Logan Airport through layers of overcast, lumbering as carefully as an overweight old lady walking down a sidewalk where there are patches of ice. Trisha had watched, fascinated, with her forehead pressed to the window. They would be in a perfect world of white... there would be a flash of the ground or the slate-gray water of Boston Harbor below them... more white... then another flash of the ground or the water.
The four days which followed her decision to turn north were like that descent: mostly a cloudbank. Some of the memories she did have she did not trust; by Tuesday night 171. the boundary between reality and make-believe had begun to disappear. By Saturday morning, after a full week in the woods, it was all but gone. By Saturday morning (not that Trisha recognized it as Saturday when it came; by then she had lost track of the days) Tom Gordon had become her fulltime companion, not pretend but accepted as real. Pepsi Robichaud walked with her for awhile; the two of them sang all their favorite Boyz and Spice Girls duets and then Pepsi walked behind a tree and didn't come out on the other side. Trisha looked behind the tree, saw that Pepsi wasn't there, and understood after several moments of frowning thought that she had never been there at all. Trisha then sat down and cried.
While she was crossing a wide, boulder-strewn clearing, a large black helicopter - the sort of helicopter the sinister government conspiracy guys used in The X-Files - came and hovered over Trisha's head. It was soundless except for the faintest pulse of its rotors. She waved to it and screamed for help, and although the guys inside must have seen her, the black helicopter flew away and never returned. She came to an old forest of pines through which the light slanted in ancient dusty beams like sunrays falling through the high windows of a cathedral. This might have been on Thursday.
From these trees hung the mutilated corpses of a thousand deer, a slain army of deer crawling with flies and bulging with maggots. Trisha closed her eyes and when she opened them again the rotting deer were gone. She found a stream and followed it for awhile and then it either quit on her or she wandered away from it. Before this happened, however, she looked into it and saw an enormous face on the bottom, drowned but somehow still living, looking up at her and talking soundlessly. She passed a great gray tree like a hol-172 low crooked hand; from within it, a dead voice spoke her name. One night she awoke with something pressing down on her chest and thought the thing in the woods had finally come for her, but when she reached for it there was nothing there and she could breathe again. On several occasions she heard people calling for her, but when she called back there was never any answer.