The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (3 page)

“Who cares, I'm peeing,” she said sulkily, and walked a little way down the path marked
KEZAR NOTCH
. Here the pines which had stayed modestly back from the main trail crowded in, reaching with their blueblack branches, and there was underbrush, as well—clogs and clogs of it. She looked for the shiny leaves that meant poison ivy, poison oak, or poison sumac, and didn't see any . . . thank God for small favors. Her mother had shown her pictures of those and taught her to identify them two years ago, when life had been happier and simpler. In those days Trisha had gone tramping in the woods with her mother quite a bit. (Pete's bitterest complaint about the trip to Plant-A-Torium was that their
mother
had wanted to go there. The obvious truth of this seemed to blind him to how selfish he had sounded, harping on it all day long.)

On one of their walks, Mom had also taught her how girls peed in the woods. She began by saying, “The most important thing—maybe the
only
important thing—is not to do it in a patch of poison ivy. Now look. Watch me and do it just the way I do it.”

Trisha now looked both ways, saw no one, and decided she'd get off the trail anyway. The way to Kezar Notch looked hardly used—little more than an alley compared to the broad thoroughfare of the main trail—but she still didn't want to squat right in the middle of it. It seemed indecorous.

She stepped off the path in the direction of the North Conway fork, and she could still hear them arguing. Later on, after she was good and lost and trying not to believe she might die in the woods, Trisha would remember the last phrase she got in the clear; her brother's hurt, indignant voice:
—don't know why we have to pay for what you guys did wrong!

She walked half a dozen steps toward the sound of his voice, stepping carefully around a clump of brambles even though she was wearing jeans instead of shorts. She paused, looked back, and realized she could still see the Kezar Notch path . . . which meant that anyone coming along it would be able to see
her,
squatting and peeing with a half-loaded knapsack on her back and a Red Sox cap on her head. Em-
bare-ASS
-ing, as Pepsi might say (Quilla Andersen had once remarked that Penelope Robichaud's picture should be next to the word
vulgar
in the dictionary).

Trisha went down a mild slope, her sneakers slipping a little in a carpet of last year's dead leaves, and when she got to the bottom she couldn't see the Kezar Notch path anymore. Good. From the other direction, straight ahead through the woods, she heard a man's voice and a girl's answering laughter—hikers on the main trail, and not far away, by the sound. As Trisha unsnapped her jeans it occurred to her that if her mother and brother paused in their oh-so-interesting argument, looking behind them to see how sis was doing, and saw a strange man and woman instead, they might be worried about her.

Good! Give them something else to think about for a few minutes. Something besides themselves.

The trick, her mother had told her on that better day in the woods two years ago, wasn't going outdoors—girls could do that every bit as well as boys—but to do it without soaking your clothes.

Trisha held onto the conveniently jutting branch of a nearby pine, bent her knees, then reached between her legs with her free hand, yanking her pants and her underwear forward and out of the firing line. For a moment nothing happened—wasn't that just typical—and Trish sighed. A mosquito whined bloodthirstily around her left ear, and she had no hand free with which to slap at it.

“Oh waterless cookware!” she said angrily, but it was funny, really quite deliciously stupid and funny,
and she began to laugh. As soon as she started laughing she started peeing. When she was done she looked around dubiously for something to blot with and decided—once more it was her father's phrase—not to push her luck. She gave her tail a little shake (as if that would really do any good) and then yanked up her pants. When the mosquito buzzed the side of her face again, she slapped it briskly and looked with satisfaction at the small bloody smear in the cup of her palm. “Thought I was unloaded, partner, didn't you?” she said.

Trisha turned back toward the slope, and then turned around again as the worst idea of her life came to her. This idea was to go forward instead of backtracking to the Kezar Notch trail. The paths had forked in a
Y
; she would simply walk across the gap and rejoin the main trail. Piece of cake. There was no chance of getting lost, because she could hear the voices of the other hikers so clearly. There was really no chance of getting lost at all.

T
HE WEST SIDE
of the ravine in which Trisha had taken her rest-stop was considerably steeper than the side she had come down. She climbed it with the aid of several trees, got to the top, and headed over more even ground in the direction the voices had come from. There was a lot of underbrush, though, and she swerved around several thorny, close-packed patches of it. At each swerve she kept her eyes pointed in the direction of the main trail. She walked in this fashion for ten minutes or so, then stopped. In that tender place between her chest and her stomach, the place where all the body's wires seemed to come together in a clump, she felt the first minnowy flutter of disquiet. Shouldn't she have come to the North Conway branch of the Appalachian Trail by now? It certainly seemed so; she hadn't gone far down the Kezar Notch branch, probably not more than fifty paces (
surely
no more than sixty, seventy at the very most), and so the gap between the two diverging arms of the
Y
couldn't be very big, could it?

She listened for voices on the main trail, but now the woods were silent. Well, that wasn't true. She
could hear the sough of the wind through the big old west-country pines, she could hear the squawk of a jay and the far-off hammering of a woodpecker digging his midmorning snack out of a hollow tree, she could hear a couple of freshly arrived mosquitoes (they were buzzing around both ears now), but no human voices. It was as if she were the only person in all these big woods, and although that was ridiculous, the minnow fluttered in that hollow place once more. A little more strongly this time.

Trisha started walking forward again, faster now, wanting to get to the trail, wanting the relief of the trail. She came to a great fallen tree, too high to climb over, and decided to wriggle under it instead. She knew the smart thing would be to go around, but what if she lost her bearings?

You've already lost them,
a voice in her head whispered—a terrible cold voice.

“Shut up, I have not, you shut up,” she whispered back, and dropped to her knees. There was a hollow running beneath one section of the moss-caked old trunk, and Trisha squirmed into it. The leaves lining it were wet, but by the time she realized this the front of her shirt was already soaked through and she decided it didn't matter. She wriggled further and her pack hit the trunk of the tree—thump.

“Damn and blast!” she whispered (
damn and blast
was her and Pepsi's current favorite swear—it
sounded so English country-house, somehow) and backed up. She got to her knees, brushed clinging damp leaves from her shirt, and noticed as she did that her fingers were trembling.

“I'm not scared,” she said, speaking out loud on purpose because the sound of her voice whispering was freaking her out a little. “Not scared a bit. The trail's right there. I'll be on it in five minutes, and running to catch up.” She took off her pack and, pushing it ahead of her, began to crawl under the tree again.

Halfway out, something moved under her. She looked down and saw a fat black snake slithering through the leaves. For a moment every thought in her mind disappeared into a silent white explosion of revulsion and horror. Her skin turned to ice and her throat closed. She could not even think the single word
snake
but only feel it, coldly pulsing under her warm hand. Trisha shrieked and tried to bolt to her feet, forgetting that she wasn't yet in the clear. A stump of branch thick as an amputated forearm poked agonizingly into the small of her back. She went flat on her stomach again and wriggled out from under the tree as fast as she could, probably looking a bit like a snake herself.

The nasty thing was gone, but her terror lingered. It had been right under her hand, hidden in the dead leaves and
right under her hand.
Evidently not a biter, thank God. But what if there were
more? What if
they
were poisonous? What if the woods were full of them? And of course they were, the woods were full of everything you didn't like, everything you were afraid of and instinctively loathed, everything that tried to overwhelm you with nasty, no-brain panic. Why had she ever agreed to come? Not only agreed but agreed
cheerfully
?

She snagged the strap of her pack in one hand and hurried on with it banging against her leg, casting mistrustful looks back at the fallen tree and the leafy spaces between the standing ones, afraid of seeing the snake, even more afraid that she might see a whole battalion of them, like snakes in a horror movie,
Invasion of the Killer Snakes,
starring Patricia McFarland, the riveting tale of a little girl lost in the woods and—

“I am
not
l—” Trisha began, and then, because she was looking back over her shoulder, she tripped on a rock sticking out of the mulchy earth, staggered, waved the arm not holding her pack in a doomed effort to keep her balance, and then fell heavily on her side. This sent up a flare of pain from her lower back, where the stump of branch had jabbed her.

She lay on her side in the leaves (damp, but not all nasty-squelchy like the ones in the hollow beneath the fallen tree), breathing fast, feeling a pulse throb between her eyes. She was suddenly,
dismally aware that she didn't know if she was going in the right direction anymore or not. She had kept looking back over her shoulder, and she might not be.

Go back to the tree, then. The fallen tree. Stand where you came out from underneath and look straight ahead and that's the direction you want to go in, the direction of the main trail.

But was it? If so, how come she hadn't come to the main trail already?

Tears prickled the corners of her eyes. Trisha blinked them back savagely. If she started to cry, she wouldn't be able to tell herself she wasn't frightened. If she started to cry, anything might happen.

She walked slowly back to the fallen, moss-plated tree, hating to go in the wrong direction even for a few seconds, hating to go back to where she had seen the snake (poisonous or not, she loathed them), knowing she had to. She spotted the divot in the leaves where she'd been when she saw (and—oh God—
felt
) the snake, a girl-length smutch on the floor of the forest. It was already filling up with water. Looking at it, she rubbed a hand dispiritedly down the front of her shirt again—all damp and muddy. That her shirt should be damp and muddy from crawling under a tree was somehow the most alarming thing so far. It suggested that there had been a change of plan . . . and when
the new plan included crawling through soggy hollows under fallen trees, the change was not for the better.

Why had she left the path in the first place? Why had she left
sight
of the path? Just to pee? To pee when she didn't even need to that badly? If so, she must have been crazy. And then some further craziness had possessed her, making her think she could walk through the uncharted woods (this was the phrase which occurred to her now) in safety. Well, she had learned something today, indeed she had. She had learned to stay on the path. No matter what you had to do or how bad you had to do it, no matter how much yatata-yatata you had to listen to, it was better to stay on the path. When you were on the path your Red Sox shirt stayed clean and dry. On the path there was no disturbing little minnow swimming in the hollow place between your chest and your stomach. On the path you were safe.

Safe.

Trisha reached around to the small of her back and felt a ragged hole in her shirt. The stub of branch had punched through, then. She had been hoping it hadn't. And when she brought her fingers back, there were little smears of blood on the tips. Trisha made a sighing, sobbing sound and wiped her fingers on her jeans.

“Relax, at least it wasn't a rusty nail,” she said.
“Count your blessings.” That was one of her mother's sayings, and it didn't help. Trisha had never felt less blessed in her life.

She looked along the length of the tree, even scuffed one sneakered foot through the leaves, but there was no sign of the snake. It probably hadn't been one of the biting kind, anyway, but God, they were so
horrible.
All legless and slithery, flipping their nasty tongues in and out. She could hardly stand to think of it, even now—how it had pulsed under her palm like a cold muscle.