The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon

Page 5

  She reshouldered her pack (this time putting it on over the poncho) and walked carefully toward the bluff and the fallen ash tree. She now looked back on her panicky plunge through the woods with the mixture of indulgence and embarrassment adults feel when looking back upon the worst of their childhood behavior, but she found she could still not go very close to the edge. It would make her feel sick if she did. She might faint again. . . or vomit. Vomiting up any of her food when she had so little would be a very bad idea.

  She turned to the left and began walking through the woods with the drop-off to the valley about twenty feet to her right. Every now and then she would force herself to go closer and make sure she wasn't drifting away - that the bluff with its wide view was still there. She listened for voices, but not very hopefully; the trail might be anywhere now, and to stumble on it would be pure dumb luck. What she was listening for was running water, and at last she heard it.

  Won't do me any good if it goes over that stupid cliff in a water-fall, she thought, and decided she had to get close enough to the edge to check out the drop before she reached the stream. If only to guard against disappointment.

  The trees had drawn back a little here, and the space between the edge of the forest and the edge of the drop was dotted with bushes. They would, four or five weeks later, bear a lush crop of blueberries. Now, however, the berries were just tiny buds, green and inedible. Still, there had been checkerberries; they were in season, and it might be a good idea to keep that in mind. Just in case.

  The ground between the blueberry bushes was scaly and shifty with busted rock. The sound under Trisha's sneakers made her think of broken plates. She walked ever more slowly over this scree, and when she was ten feet or so from the edge of the drop, she got down and crawled. I'm safe, per-fectly safe because I know it's there, nothing to worry about, but her heart was still hammering in her chest. And when she got to the edge she uttered a bewildered little laugh because the drop was hardly there at all anymore.

  The view across the valley was still wide and sweeping but wouldn't be for much longer, because the terrain on this side had been sinking - Trisha had been listening so hard and thinking so hard (mostly reminding herself to keep her head, not to go bazonka again) that she hadn't even real-ized.

  She worked her way further, pushing through a final little screen of bushes, and looked down.

  The drop was now only about twenty feet, and no longer sheer - the rock face had become a steep, rubbly slope.

  Down below were scrubby trees, more fruitless blueberry bushes, tangles of brambles. And scattered everywhere were heaps of broken-up glacial rock. The downpour had stopped, the thunder had retreated to the occasional ill-natured mutter, but it had continued to drizzle and these heaps of rock had a slick, unpleasant look, like slag from a mine.

  Trisha backed up and got to her feet, then continued to make her way through the bushes toward the sound of run-ning water. She was starting to feel tired now, her legs aching, but she thought she was basically okay. Afraid, of course, but not so badly as before. They would find her.

  When people got lost in the woods they always found them.

  They sent out planes and helicopters and guys with blood-hounds and they hunted until the lost person was found.

  Or maybe I'll kind of save myself. Find a camp in the woods somewhere, break a window if the door's locked and there's no one home, use the telephone. . .

  Trisha could see herself in some hunter's cabin which hadn't been used since the previous fall; she could see camp furniture covered with faded paisley dropcloths and a bearskin rug on the board floor. She could smell dust and old stove ashes; this daydream was so clear she could even smell a trace of ancient coffee. The place was empty but the telephone worked. It was one of the oldfashioned ones, the handset so heavy that she had to hold it in both hands, but it worked and she could hear herself saying: "Hello, Mom? This is Trisha. I don't know exactly where I am, but I'm all r - "

  She was so absorbed in the imaginary cabin and the imaginary phone call that she came close to falling into a small stream that emerged from the woods and cascaded down the rubble-strewn slope.

  Trisha grabbed at the branches of an alder and stood looking at the stream, actually smiling a little. It had been a crappy day, all right, tres crappy, but her luck finally seemed to be turning and that was a big hooray. She walked to the edge of the slope. The stream spilled down it in a foamy rush, here and there striking a bigger rock and kicking up spray that would have held rainbows on a sunny afternoon.

  The slope on both sides of the water looked slippery and unreliable - all that loose wet rock. Still, it was also dotted with bushes. If she started to slide, she would grab one of those as she'd grabbed the alder at the edge of the stream.

  "Water leads to people," she said, and started down the slope.

  She descended sideways, in little hops, on the right side of the stream. At first she was all right even though the angle of the slope was steeper than it had looked from up above and the broken ground shifted under her sneakers every time she moved. Her pack, of which she had hardly been aware up until now, began to feel like a large, unstable baby in one of those papoose carriers; every time it shifted she had to wave her arms to keep her balance. She was all right, though, and a darn good thing, because when she paused halfway down the slope, her propping right foot actually buried in loose rock below her, she realized she couldn't climb back up anymore. One way or the other, she was bound for the valley floor.

  She got moving again. Three quarters of the way down, a bug - a big one, not a minge or a mosquito - flew into her face. It was a wasp, and Trisha batted at it with a cry. Her pack shifted violently to her downhill side, her right foot slipped, and suddenly her balance was gone. She fell, hit the rock slope on her shoulder with a tooth-rattling thud, and began to slide.

  "Oh shit on toast!" she cried, and grabbed at the ground.

  All she got was a strew of loose rock that slid along with her and a sharp jab of pain as a broken chunk of quartz cut her palm. She snatched at a bush and it came out by its stupid shallow roots. Her foot struck something, her right leg bent at a painful angle, and she was suddenly airborne, the world revolving as she did an unplanned somersault.

  Trisha came down on her back and slid that way, legs spread, arms waving, screaming in pain and terror and sur-prise.

  Her poncho and the back of her shirt pulled up to her shoulderblades; sharp pieces of rock tore snatches of skin from between them. She tried to brake with her feet. The left one struck a jutting outcrop of shale and turned her to the right. That put her into a roll - first on her stomach and then onto her back and then onto her stomach again, the pack digging into her, then pitching upward each time she went over. The sky was down, the hateful broken scree of the slope was up, and then they swapped places - swing your partner with a dosey-do, everybody change.

  Trisha went the final ten yards on her left side with her left arm stretched out and her face buried against the fold of her elbow. She thumped against something hard enough to bruise her ribs on that side. . . and then, before she could even look up from her arm, a needle of pain drove into her just above her left cheekbone. Trisha shrieked and jerked to her knees, slapping. She crushed something - another wasp, of course, what else - even as it stung her again, even as she opened her eyes and saw them all around her: yellow-brown insects that looked weighted down in the tailsection, plump ungainly poison factories.

  She had slid into a dead tree standing at the foot of the slope about twenty-five feet from the brawling streamlet. In the dead tree's lowest fork, just at eye-level to a little girl who was nine but tall for her age, was a gray paper nest.

  Agitated wasps were crawling all over it; more were flying out of a hole in the top.

  Pain needled the right side of Trisha's neck, just below the bill of her cap. Another sting lit up her right arm above the elbow. Screaming, in a total panic,
she bolted. Something stung the back of her neck; something stung the small of her back, above the waistband of her bluejeans, where her shirt was still pulled up and the plastic poncho hung in tatters.

  She ran in the direction of the stream without any thought or plan or intent; it was just that the ground there was rela-tively open. She wove her way around the clumps of bushes, and when the underbrush began to thicken she bulled through it. At the stream she stopped, gasping for breath, looking tearfully (and fearfully) back over her shoulder. The wasps were gone, but they had done plenty of damage before she had managed to outrun them. Her left eye, close to where the first one had gotten her, was swelled almost shut.

  If I get a bad reaction, I'll die, she thought, but in the after-math of her panic she didn't care. She sat down by the little stream which had gotten her into all this trouble, sobbing and sniffling. When she felt a little bit in control of herself again, she took off her pack. Tight, fierce shudders wracked her, each one making her body harden up like a spring and pulling red-hot darts of pain from the places where she had been stung. She put her arms around her pack, rocked it like a doll, and cried harder. Holding the pack that way made her think of Mona lying in the back seat of the Cara-van, good old Moanie Balogna with her big blue eyes. There had been times, while her parents were getting ready to divorce and then actually doing it, when Mona had felt like her only comfort; there were times when not even Pepsi could understand. Now her parents' divorce seemed like very small beans. There were bigger problems than grownups who couldn't get along, there were wasps, for one thing, and Trisha thought she would give anything to see Mona again.

  At least she wasn't going to die from the stings, or she'd probably be dying already. She had overheard her Mom and Mrs. Thomas from across the street talking about someone who was allergic to stings, and Mrs. Thomas had said, "Ten seconds after it gut im, poor ole Frank was swole up like a balloon. If he hadn't had his little kit with the hyperdermic, I guess he woulda choked to death. "

  Trisha didn't feel choky, but the bites throbbed horribly, and they had swole up like balloons, all right. The one by her eye had built a hot little volcano of tissue that she could actually look at, and when she probed gingerly with her fin-gers, a bolt of pain shot into her head and made her cry out in misery. She was no longer exactly weeping, but that eye ran helplessly with tears just the same.

  Moving her hands slowly and carefully, Trisha examined herself. She isolated at least half a dozen stings (she thought there was one location, on her left side just above the hip, where she might have sustained two or even three - it was the sorest place of all). Her back felt all scraped up and her left arm, which had absorbed most of the damage during the final part of her slide, was a net of blood from wrist to elbow. The side of her face where the stump of branch had poked her was bleeding again, too.

  Not fair, she thought. Not f - Then a terrible idea occurred to her. . . except it was more than an idea, it was a certainty. Her Walkman was broken, shattered to a million pieces in its little side pocket.

  Had to be. There was no way it could have survived the slide.

  Trisha tugged the pack's buckles with bloodstreaked trembling fingers and at last worked the straps free. She pulled out her Gameboy and that was smashed, all right, nothing left of the window where the little electronic blips had gamboled but a few shards of yellow glass. Also, her bag of potato chips had burst open and the Gameboy's cracked white housing was covered with greasy crumbs.

  Both plastic bottles, the one with the water in it and the bottle of Surge, were dented but whole. Her lunch-sack was smooshed into something that looked like roadkill (and covered with more potato chips), but Trisha didn't even bother looking inside. My Walkman, she thought, unaware that she was sobbing as she unzipped the inner pocket. My poor poor Walkman. To be separated from even the voices of the human world seemed more than she could bear on top of everything else.

  Trisha reached into the pocket and pulled out a miracle: the Walkman, intact. The earphone cord, which she had rewrapped neatly around the little gadget's body, had come loose in a tangle, but that was all. She held the Walkman in her hand, looking incredulously from it to the Gameboy lying beside her. How could one be whole and the other so badly shattered? How was that possible?

  It's not, the cold and hateful voice in her head informed her. It looks all right but it's broken inside.

  Trisha straightened the cord, slipped the earbuds into place, and settled her finger on the power button. She had forgotten the stings, the insect bites, the cuts and scrapes.

  She closed her swollen, heavy eyelids, making a little dark.

  "Please, God," she said into it, "don't let my Walkman be broken. " Then she pushed the power button.

  "This just in," said the female announcer - she might have been broadcasting from the middle of Trisha's head. "A Sanford woman hiking a Castle County section of the Appa-lachian Trail with her two children has reported her daughter, nine-year-old Patricia McFarland, missing and presumably lost in the woods west of TR-90 and the town of Motton. "

  Trisha's eyes flew wide open and she listened for the next ten minutes, long after WCAS had reverted, like someone with unbreakable bad habits, to country music and NASCAR reports. She was lost in the woods. It was official.

  Soon they would swing into action, whoever they were - the people, she supposed, who kept the helicopters ready to fly and the bloodhounds ready to sniff. Her mother would be scared to death. . . and yet Trisha felt a small strange trickle of satisfaction when she considered that likelihood.

  I wasn't supervised, she thought - not without self-right-eousness.

  CHAPTER 4

  I'm just a little kid and I wasn't properly supervised.

  Also if she gives me hell I'll just say "You wouldn't stop arguing and finally I couldn't stand it anymore. " Pepsi would like that; it was just so V. C. Andrews.

  At last she turned the Walkman off, rewrapped the head-phone wire, gave the black plastic case a perfectly unself-conscious smooch, and tucked it lovingly back into its pocket. She eyed the mashed-up lunchbag and decided she couldn't bring herself to look inside and see what shape the tuna sandwich and the remaining Twinkie might be in. Too depressing. A good thing she'd eaten her egg before it could turn into egg salad. That thought probably deserved a gig-gle, but there were apparently no giggles in her; the old giggle-well, which her mother believed inexhaustible, seemed to have temporarily gone dry.

  Trisha sat on the bank of the little stream, which was less than three feet across here, and disconsolately ate potato chips, first out of the burst chip-bag and then plucking them off her lunch-sack and finally dredging the smallest fragments out of the bottom of her pack. A big bug droned past her nose and she cringed from it, crying out and raising a hand to protect her face, but it was only a horsefly.