The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (17 page)

When she reached the place where she had stood earlier, trying to muster up enough courage to
reach out and touch what she saw, she felt almost herself again. Not entirely, but still pretty good.
Whole
was the word that occurred to her, and she liked it so well she said it out loud, not once but twice.

She trudged to the brook, dragging the pack beside her, then sat down under a tree. In the water, like a happy omen, she saw a small speckled fish shoot by in the direction of the flow: a baby trout, perhaps.

Trisha sat where she was for a moment, turning her face up to the sun and closing her eyes. Then she dragged her pack into her lap and put her hand inside, mixing the berries and nuts together. Doing this made her think of Uncle Scrooge McDuck playing around in his money-vault, and she laughed delightedly. The image was absurd and perfect at the same time.

She hulled a dozen or so of the beechnuts, mixed them with a like number of berries (this time using her madder-stained fingers to remove the stems with ladylike care), and tossed the result into her mouth in three measured handfuls: dessert. The taste was heavenly—like one of those trailmix breakfast cereals her mother always ate—and when Trisha had finished the last handful, she realized she wasn't just full but gorged. She didn't know how long the feeling would last—probably nuts and berries were like Chinese food, they filled you up
and an hour later you were hungry again—but right now her midsection felt like an overloaded Christmas stocking. It was wonderful to be full. She had lived nine years without knowing that, and she hoped she would never forget: it was wonderful to be full.

Trisha leaned back against the tree and looked into her knapsack with deep happiness and gratitude. If she hadn't been so full (
too stuffed to jump,
she thought), she would have stuck her head in like a mare sticking her head into an oatsack, just to fill her nose with the delicious combined smell of the checkerberries and beechnuts.

“Saved my life, you guys,” she said. “Saved my goshdarn life.”

On the far side of the rushing stream there was a little clearing carpeted with pine needles. Sunlight fell into it in bright yellow bars filled with slow-dancing pollen and woods dust. Butterflies also played in this light, dipping and swooping. Trisha crossed her hands on her belly, where the roaring was now still, and watched the butterflies. In that moment she did not miss her mother, father, brother, or best friend. In that moment she did not even want to go home, although she ached all over and her butt stung and itched and chafed when she walked. In that moment she was at peace, and more than at peace. She was experiencing her life's greatest contentment.
If I get out of this I'll never be able to tell them,
she thought. She
watched the butterflies on the other side of the stream, her eyelids drooping. There were two white ones; the third was velvety-dark, brown or maybe black.

Tell them what, sugar?
It was the tough tootsie, but for once she didn't sound cold, only curious.

What there really is. How simple. Just to eat . . . why, just to have something to eat and then to be full afterward . . .

“The Subaudible,” Trisha said. She watched the butterflies. Two white and one dark, all three dipping and darting in the afternoon sun. She thought of Little Black Sambo up in the tree, the tigers running around down below and wearing his fine new clothes, running and running until they melted and turned into butter. Into what her Dad called ghee.

Her right hand came unlaced from her left, rolled over, and thumped palm-up to the ground. It seemed like too much work to put it back and so Trisha let it stay where it was.

The Subaudible what, sugar? What about it?

“Well,” Trisha said in a slow, sleepy, considering voice. “It's not like that's
nothing
 . . . is it?”

The tough tootsie didn't reply. Trisha was glad. She felt so sleepy, so full, so wonderful. She didn't sleep, though; even later, when she knew she must have slept, it didn't seem as if she had. She remembered thinking about her Dad's back yard behind
the newer, smaller house, how the grass needed cutting and the lawn-dwarves looked sly—as if they knew something you didn't—and about how Dad had started to look sad and old to her, with that smell of beer always coming out of his pores. Life could be very sad, it seemed to her, and mostly it was what it could be. People made believe that it wasn't, and they lied to their kids (no movie or television program she had ever seen had prepared her for losing her balance and plopping back into her own crap, for instance) so as not to scare them or bum them out, but yeah, it could be sad. The world had teeth and it could bite you with them anytime it wanted. She knew that now. She was only nine, but she knew it, and she thought she could accept it. She was almost ten, after all, and big for her age.

I don't know why we have to pay for what you guys did wrong!
That was the last thing she had heard Pete say, and now Trisha thought she knew the answer. It was a tough answer but probably a true one: just because. And if you didn't like it, take a ticket and get in line.

Trisha guessed that in a lot of ways she was older than Pete now.

She looked downstream and saw that another stream came pouring into hers about forty yards from where she was sitting; it came over the bank in a spraying little waterfall. Good deal. This was
the way it was supposed to work. This second stream she had found
would
get bigger and bigger, this one
would
lead her to people. It—

She shifted her eyes back to the little clearing on the other side of the stream and three people were standing there, looking at her. At least she assumed they were looking at her; Trisha couldn't see their faces. Their feet, either. They wore long robes like the priests in those movies about days of old. (“In days of
old
when knights were
bold
and ladies showed their
fan
-nies,” Pepsi Robichaud sometimes sang when she jumped rope.) The hems of these robes puddled on the clearing's carpet of needles. Their hoods were up, hiding the faces within. Trisha looked across the stream at them, a little startled but not really afraid, not then. Two of the robes were white. The one worn by the figure in the middle was black.

“Who are you?” Trisha asked. She tried to sit up a little straighter and found she couldn't. She was too full of food. For the first time in her life she felt as if she had been
drugged
with food. “Will you help me? I'm lost. I've been lost for . . .” She couldn't remember. Was it two days or three? “. . . for a long time. Will you please help me?”

They didn't answer, only stood there looking at her (she
assumed
they were looking at her, anyway), and that was when Trisha began to feel afraid. They had their arms crossed on their chests and you couldn't
even see their hands, because the long sleeves of their robes flowed over them.

“Who are you? Tell me who you are!”

The one on the left stepped forward, and when he reached up to his hood his white sleeves fell away from long white fingers. He pushed the hood back and revealed an intelligent (if rather horsey) face with a receding chin. He looked like Mr. Bork, the science teacher at Sanford Elementary who had taught them about the plants and animals of northern New England . . . including, of course, the world-famous beechnut. Most of the boys and some of the girls (Pepsi Robichaud, for instance) called him Bork the Dork. He looked at her from across the stream and from behind little gold-rimmed spectacles.

“I come from the God of Tom Gordon,” he said. “The one he points up to when he gets the save.”

“Yes?” Trisha asked politely. She wasn't sure she trusted this guy. If he'd said he
was
the God of Tom Gordon, she knew damned well she wouldn't have trusted him. She could believe a lot of things, but not that God looked like her fourth-grade science teacher. “That's . . . very interesting.”

“He can't help you,” Bork the Dork said. “There's a lot going on today. There's been an earthquake in Japan, for instance, a bad one. As a rule he doesn't intervene in human affairs, anyway,
although I must admit he
is
a sports fan. Not necessarily a Red Sox fan, however.”

He stepped back and raised his hood. After a moment the other whiterobe, the one on the right, stepped forward . . . as Trisha had known he would. These things had a certain form to them, after all—three wishes, three trips up the beanstalk, three sisters, three chances to guess the evil dwarf's name. Not to mention three deer in the woods, eating beechnuts.

Am I dreaming?
she asked herself, and reached up to touch the wasp-sting on her left cheekbone. It was there, and although the swelling had gone down some, touching it still hurt. Not a dream. But when the second whiterobe pushed back his hood and she saw a man who looked like her father—not exactly, but as much like Larry McFarland as the first whiterobe had looked like Mr. Bork—she thought it had to be. If so, it was like no other dream she had ever had.

“Don't tell me,” Trisha said, “you come from the Subaudible, right?”

“Actually, I
am
the Subaudible,” the man who looked like her father said apologetically. “I had to take the shape of someone you know in order to appear, because I'm actually quite weak. I can't do anything for you, Trisha. Sorry.”

“Are you drunk?” Trisha asked, suddenly angry. “You are, aren't you? I can smell it from here. Boy!”

The Subaudible guy gave her a shamefaced little smile, said nothing, stepped back, raised his hood.

Now the figure in the black robe stepped forward. Trisha felt sudden terror.

“No,” she said. “Not you.” She tried to get up and still couldn't move. “Not you, go away, give me a break.”

But the black-clad arms rose, falling away from yellow-white claws . . . the claws that had left the marks on the trees, the claws that had torn off the deer's head and then ripped its body apart.

“No,” Trisha whispered. “No, don't, please. I don't want to see.”

The blackrobe paid no attention. It pushed back its hood. There was no face there, only a misshapen head made of wasps. They crawled over each other, jostling and buzzing. As they moved Trisha saw disturbing ripples of human feature: an empty eye, a smiling mouth. The head hummed as the flies had hummed on the deer's ragged neck; it hummed as though the creature in the black robe had a motor for a brain.

“I come from the thing in the woods,” the blackrobe said in a buzzing, inhuman voice. He sounded to Trisha like that guy on the radio who told you not to smoke, the one who had lost his vocal cords in a cancer operation and had to talk through a gadget he held to his throat. “I come from the God of the Lost. It has been watching
you. It has been waiting for you. It is your miracle, and you are its.”

“Go away!” Trisha tried to yell this, but only a husky whining whisper actually came out.

“The world is a worst-case scenario and I'm afraid all you sense is true,” said the buzzing wasp-voice. Its claws raked slowly down the side of its head, goring through its insect flesh and revealing the shining bone beneath. “The skin of the world is woven of stingers, a fact you have now learned for yourself. Beneath there is nothing but bone and the God we share. This is persuasive, do you agree?”

Terrified, crying, Trisha looked away—looked back down the stream. She found that when she wasn't looking at the hideous wasp-priest, she could move a little. She raised her hands to her cheeks, wiped away her tears, then looked back. “I don't believe you! I don't—”

The wasp-priest was gone. All of them were gone. There were only butterflies dancing in the air across the stream, eight or nine now instead of just three, all different colors instead of just white and black. And the light was different; it had begun to take on a gold-orange hue. Two hours had gone by at least, probably more like three. So she had slept. “It was all a dream,” as they said in the stories . . . but she couldn't remember going to sleep no matter how hard she tried, couldn't remember any
break in her chain of consciousness at all. And it hadn't
felt
like a dream.

An idea occurred to Trisha then, one which was simultaneously frightening and oddly comforting: perhaps the nuts and berries had gotten her high as well as feeding her. She knew there were mushrooms that could get you high, that sometimes kids ate pieces of them to get off, and if mushrooms could do that, why not checkerberries? “Or the leaves,” she said. “Maybe it was the leaves. I bet it was.” Okay, no more of
them,
zippy or not.

Trisha got up, grimaced as a cramp pulled at her belly, and bent over. She passed gas and felt better. Then she went to the stream, spotted a couple of good-sized rocks sticking out of the water, and used them to hop across. In some ways she felt like a different girl, clear-eyed and full of energy, yet the thought of the wasp-priest haunted her, and she knew her unease would only get worse after the sun went down. If she wasn't careful, she'd have the horrors. But if she could prove to herself it had only been a dream, brought on by eating checkerberry leaves or maybe by drinking water that her system still wasn't entirely used to . . .

Actually being in the small clearing made her feel nervous, like a character in a slasher movie, the stupid girl who goes into the psycho's house asking, “Is anybody here?” She looked back across the stream, immediately felt that something was looking
at her from the woods on this side, and reversed direction so fast she almost fell down. Nothing there. Nothing anywhere, as far as she could tell.

“You dingbat,” she said softly, but that feeling of being watched had come back, and come back strong. The God of the Lost, the wasp-priest had said. It has been watching you, it has been waiting for you. The wasp-priest had said other things, too, but that was what she remembered:
Watching you, waiting for you.