The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon(7)
She walked to the bushes, thought about picking a few berries just to cheer herself up, but didn't. She wasn't hungry, and had never felt less capable of cheering up. She inhaled the spicy smell of the waxy green leaves (also good to eat, Quilla had said, although Trisha had never tried them - she wasn't a woodchuck, after all), then looked back at the pine. She ascertained that she was still traveling in a straight line, and picked out a third landmark - this time a split rock that looked like a hat in an old black-and-white movie. Next came a cluster of birches, and from the birches she walked slowly to a luxuriant nestle of ferns halfway up a slope.
She was concentrating so fiercely on keeping each land-mark in view (no more looking back over your shoulder, sweetheart) that she was standing beside the ferns before she realized she was, you should pardon the pun, overlooking the forest for the trees. Going landmark to landmark was all very well, and she thought she had managed to keep on a straight line... but what if it was a straight line in the wrong direc-tion?
It might be the wrong direction just by a little, but she had to have gone wrong. If not, she would've come to the trail again by now. Why, she must have walked...
"Cripes," she said, and there was a funny little gulp in her voice that she didn't like, "it must be a mile. A mile at least."
Bugs all around her. Minges and noseeums in front of her eyes, hateful mosquitoes seeming to hang like helicopters by her ears, giving off that maddening warble-whine. She slapped at one and missed, succeeding only in making her own ear ring. And still she had to restrain herself from smacking again. If she started doing that, she'd end up whacking away at herself like a character in an old cartoon.
She dropped her pack, squatted, undid the buckles, turned back the flap. Here was her blue plastic poncho, and the paper sack with the lunch she had fixed herself; here was her Gameboy and some suntan lotion (wouldn't need that, with the sun now completely gone and the last patches of blue overhead filling in); here was her bottle of water and a bottle of Surge and her Twinkies and a bag of chips. No bug-spray, though. Wouldn't you know it. So Trisha put on the suntan lotion instead - it might keep at least the minges away - and then returned everything to her pack. She paused just a moment to look at the Twinkies, then dumped the package in with the rest. As a rule she loved them - when she got to be Pete's age her face would probably be one great big pimple if she didn't learn to lay off the sweets - but for the time being she still felt totally unhungry.
Besides, you may never get to be Pete's age, that disquieting inner voice said. How could anyone have such a cold and scary voice inside them? Such a traitor to the cause? You may never get out of these woods.
"Shut up, shut up, shut up," she hissed, and buckled the pack's flap with trembling fingers. That done, she started to get up... and then paused, one knee planted in the soft earth beside the ferns, her head up, scenting the air like a fawn on its first expedition away from its mother's side.
Only Trisha wasn't smelling; she was listening, focusing on that one sense with all of her concentration.
Branches rattling in a faint breath of breeze. Whining mosquitoes (rotten, nasty old things). The woodpecker. The far-off caw of a crow. And, at the furthest outpost between silence and audition, the drone of a plane. No voices from the path. Not a single voice. It was as if the trail to North Conway had been canceled. And as the plane's motor faded away completely, Trisha conceded the truth.
She got to her feet, her legs feeling heavy, her stomach feeling heavy. Her head felt light and strange, a gas-filled balloon tethered to a lead weight. She was suddenly drown-ing in isolation, choking on a bright and yet oppressive sense of herself as a living being cast out from her fellows.
She had somehow gotten out of bounds, wandered off the playing field and into a place where the rules she was used to no longer applied.
"Hey!" she screamed. "Hey, someone, do you hear me? Do you hear me? Hey!" She paused, praying for an answer to come back, but no answer came and so she brought the worst out at last: "Help me, I'm lost! Help me, I'm lost!" Now the tears began to come and she could no longer hold them back, could no longer kid herself that she was in charge of this sit-uation.
Her voice trembled, became first the wavery voice of a little kid and then almost the shriek of a baby who lies for-gotten in her pram, and that sound frightened her more than anything else so far on this awful morning, the only human sound in the woods her weepy, shrieking voice call-ing for help, calling for help because she was lost.
Third Inning
SHE YELLED for perhaps fifteen minutes, sometimes cup-ping her hands around her mouth and turning her voice in the direction she imagined the main trail must be, mostly just standing there by the ferns and screaming. She gave one final shriek - no words, just a high birdcall of combined anger and fear - so loud it hurt her throat, then sat down beside her pack and put her face in her hands and cried. She cried hard for maybe five minutes (it was impossible to tell for sure, her watch was back home, lying on the table next to her bed, another smooth move by the Great Trisha), and when she stopped she felt a little better... except for the bugs. The bugs were everywhere, crawling and whining and buzzing, trying to drink her blood and sip her sweat.
The bugs were driving her crazy. Trisha got to her feet again, waving the air with her Red Sox cap, reminding her-self not to slap, knowing she would slap, and soon, if things didn't change. She wouldn't be able to help herself.