The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (20 page)

Trisha picked up the small flayed fish by the tail, carried it back to the stream, and dipped it to get rid of the pine-needles and grime. Then she cocked her head back, opened her mouth, and bit off the trout's top half. Small bones crunched under her teeth; her mind tried to show her the trout's eyes popping out of its head and onto her tongue in little dark dabs of jelly. She got one blurry look at this
and then her body banished her mind yet again, this time slapping instead of merely pushing. Mind could come back when mind was needed; imagination could come back when imagination was needed. Right now body was in charge, and body said dinner, it's dinner, it may be morning but dinner is served and this morning we got fresh fish.

The trout's top half went down her throat like a big swallow of oil with lumps in it. The taste was horrible and also wonderful. It tasted like life. Trisha dangled the trout's dripping lower half in front of her upturned face, pausing only long enough to pull another piece of bone out of it, whispering: “Dial 1-800-54-FRESH-FISH.”

She ate the rest of the trout, tail and all.

When it was down she stood looking across the stream, wiping her mouth and wondering if she was going to puke it all back up again. She had eaten a raw fish, and although the taste of it was still coating her throat, she could hardly believe it. Her stomach gave a funny little lurch and Trisha thought,
This is it.
Then she burped and her stomach settled again. She took her hand away from her mouth and saw a few fish-scales gleaming on the palm. She wiped them on her jeans with a grimace, then walked back to where her pack lay. She stuffed the remains of her poncho and the severed hood (which had turned out to work pretty well, at least on fish that were young and stupid) into it on top of her food supply, then reshouldered
the pack. She felt strong, ashamed of herself, proud of herself, feverish, and a little nutzoid.

I won't talk about it, that's all. I don't have to talk about it and I won't. Even if I get out of here.

“And I deserve to get out,” Trisha said softly. “Anyone who can eat a raw fish deserves to get out.”

The Japanese do it all the time,
said the tough tootsie as Trisha set out once more along the side of the stream.

“So I'll tell
them,
” Trisha said. “If I ever get over there for a visit I'll tell
them.
”

For once the tough tootsie seemed to have no comeback. Trisha was delighted.

She made her way carefully down the slope and into the valley, where her stream bowled along through a forest of mixed firs and deciduous trees. These were thickly packed, but there was less underbrush and fewer bramble-patches, and for most of the morning Trisha got along well. There was no sense of being watched, and eating the fish had revitalized her strength. She pretended that Tom Gordon was walking with her, and they had a long and interesting conversation, mostly about Trisha. Tom wanted to know all about her, it seemed—her favorite classes at school, why she thought Mr. Hall was mean for giving homework on Fridays, all the ways Debra Gilhooly had of being such a bitch, how she and Pepsi had planned
to go trick-or-treating as Spice Girls last Halloween and Mom had said
Pepsi's
Mom could do whatever she wanted, but no nine-year-old girl of
hers
was going out trick-or-treating in a short skirt, high heels, and a cammi top. Tom sympathized completely with Trisha's utter embarrassment.

She was telling him about how she and Pete were planning to get their Dad a custom-made jigsaw puzzle for his birthday from this company in Vermont that made them (or if that was too expensive, they would settle for a Weed Whacker), when she stopped suddenly. Stopped moving. Stopped talking.

She studied the stream for almost a full minute, the corners of her mouth drooping, one hand waving automatically at the cloud of bugs around her head. The underbrush was creeping back in among the trees now; the trees themselves were stuntier, the light brighter. Crickets hummed and sang.

“No,” Trisha said. “No, huh-uh. No way. Not again.”

The stream's new quietness was what had first distracted her from her fascinating conversation with Tom Gordon (pretend people were such good listeners). The stream no longer babbled and brawled. That was because the speed of its current had slowed. Its bed was weedier than it had been above the valley's floor. It was beginning to spread out.

“If it goes into another swamp, I'll kill myself, Tom.”

An hour later Trisha pushed her way wearily through a snarl of mixed poplars and birches, raised the heel of her hand to her forehead to crush a particularly troublesome mosquito, and then just left it there, hand to brow, the image of every human in history who is exhausted and doesn't know what to do or where to turn.

At some point the stream had spilled over its low banks and drowned a large area of open land, creating a shallow marsh of reeds and cattails. Between the vegetation, the sun glittered on standing water in hot pricks of light. Crickets hummed; frogs croaked; overhead, two hawks cruised on stiff wings; somewhere a crow was laughing. The marsh didn't look nasty, like the bog of hummocks and drowned deadwood she'd waded through, but it stretched for at least a mile (and probably two) before coming to a low, pine-covered ridge.

And the stream, of course, was gone.

Trisha sat down on the ground, started to say something to Tom Gordon, and realized how stupid it was to be pretending when it was clear—and growing clearer with every passing hour—that she was going to die. It didn't matter how much walking she did or how many fish she managed to catch and choke down. She began to cry. She put her face in her hands, sobbing harder and harder.

“I want my
mother!”
she yelled at the indifferent day. The hawks were gone, but over by that wooded ridge the crow was still laughing. “I want my
mother,
I want my
brother,
I want my
dolly,
I want to go
home!”
The frogs only croaked, reminding her of some story Dad had read her when she was little—a car stuck in the mud and all the frogs croaking
Too deep, too deep.
How that had frightened her.

She cried harder still, and at some point her tears—all these tears, all these
goshdamn tears
—made her angry. She looked up, bugs spinning all around her, the hateful tears still spilling down her mucky face.

“I want my
MOTHER!
I want my
BROTHER!
I want to
get out of here, DO YOU HEAR ME
?” She kicked her legs up and down, kicked them so hard that one of her sneakers flew off. She knew she was doing a full-fledged tantrum now, the first one since she'd been five or six, and didn't care. She threw herself onto her back, pounded her fists, then opened them so she could tear handfuls of grass out of the ground and throw them into the air.
“I WANT TO GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE! Why don't you find me, you stupid puppy-shit assholes? Why don't you find me? I . . . WANT . . . TO GO . . . HOME!”

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 assholes 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 shading 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 shallower 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 valley'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 leaving the path in the first place. Had she crossed the marsh and climbed the ridge, she would have found herself looking 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 weekenders 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 little 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 hundred miles ahead was Montreal.

Between it and her, not much.

T
HE YEAR
before the separation and divorce, the McFarlands 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 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 hollow 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.