The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (11 page)

“It's nothing,” he said. “Just a dream. A nightmare
you woke up with and turned into this feeling.”

“No,” Quilla said, shaking her head so violently that her hair whipped lightly against his cheek. “She's in danger, I feel it. Terrible danger.” And she began to cry.

Trisha did not cry, not then. At that moment she was too scared to cry. Something watching her.
Something.

“Hello?” she tried again. No response . . . but it was there and it was on the move now, just beyond the trees at the back of the clearing, moving from left to right. And as her eyes shifted, following nothing but moonlight and a feeling, she heard a branch crack where she was looking. There was a soft exhalation . . . or was there? Was that perhaps only a stir of wind?

You know better,
the cold voice whispered, and of course she did.

“Don't hurt me,” Trisha said, and now the tears came. “Whatever you are, please don't hurt me. I won't try to hurt you, please don't hurt me. I . . . I'm just a kid.”

The strength ran out of her legs and Trisha did not so much fall down as fold up. Still crying and shivering all over with terror, she burrowed back under the fallen tree like the small and defenseless animal that she had become. She continued begging not to be hurt almost without realizing it. She
grabbed her pack and pulled it in front of her face like a shield. Big shuddery spasms wracked her body, and when another branch cracked, closer, she screamed. It wasn't in the clearing, not yet, but almost. Almost.

Was it in the trees? Moving through the interlaced branches of the trees? Something with wings, like a bat?

She peered out between the top of the pack and the curve of the sheltering tree. She saw only tangled branches against the moon-bright sky. There was no creature among them—at least not that her eyes could pick out—but now the woods had fallen completely silent. No birds called, no bugs hummed in the grass.

It was very close, whatever it was, and it was deciding. Either it would come and tear her apart, or it would move on. It wasn't a joke and it wasn't a dream. It was death and madness standing or crouching or perhaps perching just beyond the edge of the clearing. It was deciding whether to take her now . . . or to let her ripen a little while longer.

Trisha lay clutching the pack and holding her breath. After an eternity, another branch cracked, this one a little further off. Whatever it was, it was moving away.

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 longingly 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 arguing, 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.

W
HEN
T
RISHA
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 moonlight; 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. She
deserved
to be saved, after spending all night alone in the woods.

She crawled out from under the tree, pushing her pack before her, got to her feet, put on her hat, and hobbled back to the stream. She washed the mud from her face and hands, looked at the cloud of minges and noseeums already re-forming around her head, and reluctantly smeared on a fresh coat of goo. As she did it she remembered one of the times she and Pepsi had played Beauty Parlor when they were little girls. They'd made such a mess of Mrs. Robichaud's makeup that Pepsi's Mom had actually screamed at them to get out of the house, not to bother washing up or trying to clean up but just to get out before she totally lost it and swatted them crosseyed. So out they had gone, all powder and rouge and eyeliner and green eyeshadow and Passion Plum lipstick, probably looking like the world's youngest stripteasers. They had gone to Trisha's house, where Quilla had first gaped, then laughed until tears rolled down her face. She had taken each little girl by the hand and led them into the bathroom, where she had given them cold cream for cleaning up.

“Spread upward
gently,
girls,” Trisha murmured now. When her face was done she rinsed her hands in the stream, ate the rest of her tuna sandwich, then half of the celery sticks. She rolled the lunchbag up with a distinct feeling of unease. Now the
egg was gone, the tuna fish sandwich was gone, the chips were gone, and the Twinkies were gone. Her supplies were down to half a bottle of Surge (less, really), half a bottle of water, and a few celery sticks.

“Doesn't matter,” she said, tucking the empty lunchbag and the remaining celery sticks back in her pack. To this she added the tattered, dirty poncho. “Doesn't matter because there's going to be search-parties galore throughout the store. One'll find me. I'll be having lunch in some diner by noon. Hamburger, fries, chocolate milk, apple pie à la mode.” Her stomach rumbled at the thought.

Once Trisha had her things packed away, she coated her hands with mud, as well. The sun had found its way into the clearing now—the day was bright, with the promise of heat—and she was moving a little more easily. She stretched, jogged in place a little to get the old blood moving, and rolled her head from side to side until the worst of the stiffness in her neck was gone. She paused a moment longer, listening for voices, for dogs, possibly for the irregular
whup-whup-whup
of helicopter blades. There was nothing except for the woodpecker, already hammering for his daily bread.

S'all right, there's plenty of time. It's June, you know. These are the longest days of the year. Follow the stream. Even if the search-parties don't find you right away, the stream will take you to people.

But as the morning wore on toward noon, the stream took her only to woods and more woods. The temperature rose. Little trickles of sweat began to cut lines through her mudpack. Bigger patches formed dark circles around the armpits of her 36
GORDON
shirt; another, this one in a tree-shape, began to grow between her shoulderblades. Her hair, now so muddy it looked dirty brunette instead of blonde, hung around her face. Trisha's feelings of hope began to dissipate, and the energy with which she had set out from the clearing at seven o'clock was gone by ten. Around eleven, something happened to darken her spirits even further.

She had reached the top of a slope—this one was fairly gentle, at least, and strewn with leaves and needles—and had stopped to have a little rest when that unwelcome sense of awareness, the one which had nothing at all to do with her conscious mind, brought her on alert again. She was being watched. There was no use telling herself it wasn't true because it was.

Trisha turned slowly in a circle. She saw nothing, but the woods seemed to have hushed again—no more chipmunks bumbling and thrashing through the leaves and underbrush, no more squirrels on the far side of the stream, no more scolding jays. The woodpecker still hammered, the distant crows still cawed, but otherwise there was just her and the humming mosquitoes.

“Who's there?” she called.

There was no answer, of course, and Trisha started down the slope next to the stream, holding onto bushes because the going was slippery underfoot.
Just my imagination,
she thought . . . but she was pretty sure it wasn't.

The stream was getting narrower, and that was most certainly
not
her imagination. As she followed it down the long piny slope and then through a difficult patch of deciduous trees—too much underbrush, and too much of it thorny—it shrank steadily until it was a rill only eighteen inches or so across.