The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon(47)

Halfway across this new clearing, which was no different than a dozen others she had passed through, she began to cough. It hurt deep in her chest, made her feel as if there were a great big hook in there. Trisha doubled over, grabbed hold of a jutting stump, and coughed until tears popped out of her eyes and her vision doubled. When the coughing finally tapered off and stopped, she remained bent over at first, waiting for her heart to slow its fearful pounding.

Also for those big black butterflies in front of her eyes to fold their wings and go back to wherever they came from.

Good thing she'd had this stump to hold onto or she would have fallen over for sure.

Her eyes went to the stump and her thoughts abruptly ceased. The first to come back was I'm not seeing what I think I'm seeing. It's another make-believe, another hallucination. She closed her eyes and counted to twenty. When she opened them the black butterflies were gone, but the rest was the same. The stump wasn't a stump. It was a post. On top, screwed into the gray and spongy old wood, was a rusty red ringbolt.

Trisha grasped it, felt the old iron reality of it. She let go and looked at the flecks of rust on her fingers. She grasped it again, flicked it back and forth. That sense of deja vu swept her as it had when she had turned in a circle, only it was stronger now, and somehow associated with Tom Gordon.

What...?

"You dreamed it," Tom said. He was standing about fifty feet away with his arms folded and his butt leaned up against a maple tree, dressed in his gray road uniform. "You dreamed we came to this place."

"I did?"

CHAPTER 13

"Sure, don't you remember? It was the team's off night.

The night you listened to Walt."

"Walt...?" The name was only vaguely familiar, the sig-nificance of it totally lost.

"Walt from Framingham. The El Dopo on the cell phone."

She started to remember. "And then the stars fell."

Tom nodded.

Trisha walked slowly around the post, never taking her hand off the ringbolt. She looked carefully at her surround-ings and saw that she wasn't in a clearing at all, not really.

There was too much grass - the high green grass you saw in fields or meadows. This was a meadow, or had been once, a long time ago. If you ignored the birches and the bushes and let your eye see the whole thing, you couldn't mistake it for anything else. It was a meadow. People made meadows, just as people planted posts in the ground, posts with ring-bolts on them.

Trisha dropped to one knee and ran a hand up and down the post - lightly, mindful of splinters. Halfway around it she discovered a pair of holes and a twisted pring of old metal. She felt below it in the grass, found nothing at first, and dug deeper into the wiry undergrowth. Down there, caught in old hay and timothy, she found something else.

Trisha had to use both hands to rip it free. It turned out to be an ancient rusty hinge. She held it up to the sun. A pencil-thin ray fell through one of the screwholes and put a brilliant pinhead of light on one cheek.

"Tom," she breathed. She looked toward where he had been, leaning back against the maple with his arms crossed, thinking he would be gone again. He wasn't, though, and although he wasn't smiling, she thought she saw a hint of a smile around his eyes and mouth. "Tom, look!" She held up the hinge.

"It was a gate," Tom said.

"A gate!" she repeated rapturously. "A gate!" Something made by humans, in other words. Folk from the magic world of lights and appliances and 6-12 Insect Repellant.

"This is your last chance, you know."

"What?" She looked at him uneasily.

"It's the late innings now. Don't make a mistake, Trisha."

"Tom, you - "

But there was no one there. Tom was gone. Not that she had seen him disappear, exactly, because Tom had never been there in the first place. He was only in her imagination.

What's the secret of closing? she had asked him - she couldn't remember exactly when.

Establishing that it's you who's better, Tom had said, her mind perhaps recycling some half-heard comment from a sports show or maybe a postgame interview watched with her father, his arm around her shoulders, her head leaning against him. It's best to do it right away.

Your last chance. Late innings. Don't make a mistake.

How can I do that when I don't even know what I'm doing?

To that there was no answer, so Trisha once more walked around the post with her hand on the ringbolt, as slowly and as delicately as a Saxon girl in some ancient courting rit-ual of the Maypole. The woods which enclosed the over-grown meadow revolved before her sight the way things did when you were on the merry-go-round at Revere Beach or Old Orchard. They looked no different from the miles of woods she'd already been through, and which way? Which way was the right way? This was a post but not a signpost.

"A post, not a signpost," she whispered, walking a little faster now. "How can I know anything from it when it's a post, not a signpost? How can a numbwit like me..."

She had an idea then, and dropped back onto her knees.

She banged one shin on a rock, started it bleeding, hardly noticed. Maybe it was a signpost. Maybe it was.

Because it had been a gatepost.

Trisha found the holes in the post again, the ones where the hinge-screws had gone. She located herself with her feet to those holes, then crawled slowly away from the post on a straight line. One knee forward... then the other... then the first -  "Ow!" she cried, and yanked her hand out of the grass.