The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (8 page)

“The
what
?” She had looked at him, not sure if he was joking or not. He didn't
look
as if he was joking.

“The Subaudible. Do you remember when we lived on Fore Street?”

Of course she remembered the house on Fore Street. Three blocks from where they were, near the Lynn town line. A bigger house than this, with a bigger back yard that Dad had always kept mown.
Back when Sanford was just for grandparents and summer vacations and Pepsi Robichaud was just her summer friend and arm-farts were the funniest things in the universe . . . except, of course, for real farts. On Fore Street the kitchen didn't smell of stale beer the way this house's kitchen did. She nodded, remembering very well.

“It had electric heat, that house. Do you remember how the baseboard units would hum, even when they weren't heating? Even in the summer?”

Trisha had shaken her head. And her father had nodded his, as if that was what he expected.

“That's because you got used to it,” he said. “But take my word, Trish, that sound was always there. Even in a house where there aren't baseboard heaters, there are noises. The fridge goes on and off. The pipes thunk. The floors creak. The traffic goes by outside. We hear those things all the time, so most of the time we don't hear them at all. They become . . .” And he gestured for her to finish, as he had done since she was very small, sitting on his lap and beginning to read. His old dear gesture.

“Subaudible,” she said, not because she completely understood what the word meant but because it was so clearly what he wanted from her.

“Pree-cisely,” he said, gesturing once more with his ice cream. A splatter of vanilla drops ran up one leg of his khaki pants, and she'd found herself wondering how many beers he'd had already that day.
“Pree-cisely, sugar, subaudible. I don't believe in any actual thinking God that marks the fall of every bird in Australia or every bug in India, a God that records all of our sins in a big golden book and judges us when we die—I don't want to believe in a God who would deliberately create bad people and then deliberately send them to roast in a hell He created—but I believe there has to be
something.
”

He had looked around the yard with its too-high, too-patchy grass, the little swing-'n-gym set he had set up for his son and daughter (Pete had outgrown it, and Trisha really had, too, although she still swung or would go down the slide a few times when she was here, just to please him), the two lawn-dwarves (one barely visible in an extravagant splurge of spring weeds), the fence at the very rear that needed painting. In that moment he had looked old to her. A little confused. A little frightened. (
A little lost in the woods,
she thought now, sitting on the fallen log with her pack between her sneakers.) Then he had nodded and looked back at her.

“Yeah, something. Some kind of insensate force for the good. Insensate, do you know what that means?”

She had nodded, not knowing exactly but not wanting him to stop and explain. She didn't want him to teach her, not today; today she only wanted to learn from him.

“I think there's a force that keeps drunken teenagers—
most
drunken teenagers—from crashing their cars when they're coming home from the senior prom or their first big rock concert. That keeps most planes from crashing even when something goes wrong. Not all, just most. Hey, the fact that no one's used a nuclear weapon on actual living people since 1945 suggests there has to be
something
on our side. Sooner or later someone will, of course, but over half a century . . . that's a long time.”

He had paused, looking out at the lawn-dwarves with their vacant, cheery faces.

“There's something that keeps most of us from dying in our sleep. No perfect loving all-seeing God, I don't think the evidence supports that, but a force.”

“The Subaudible.”

“You got it.”

She had gotten it but hadn't liked it. It was too much like getting a letter you thought would be interesting and important, only when you opened it it was addressed to Dear Occupant.

“Do you believe in anything else, Dad?”

“Oh, the usual. Death and taxes and that you're the most beautiful girl in the world.”

“
Da-ad.
” She'd laughed and wriggled as he hugged her and kissed the top of her head, liking his touch and his kiss but not the smell of beer on his breath.

He let her go and stood up. “I also believe it's beer o'clock. You want some iced tea?”

“No, thanks,” she said, and perhaps something prescient
had
been at work, because as he started away she said: “
Do
you believe in anything else? Seriously.”

His smile had faded into a look of seriousness. He stood there thinking (sitting on the log she remembered being flattered that he would think so hard on her behalf), his ice cream starting to drip over his hand now. Then he had looked up, smiling again. “I believe that your heartthrob Tom Gordon can save forty games this year,” he said. “I believe that right now he's the best closer in the major leagues—that if he stays healthy and the Sox hitting holds up, he could be pitching in the World Series come October. Is that enough for you?”

“
Yessss!
” she had cried, laughing, her own seriousness broken . . . because Tom Gordon really
was
her heartthrob, and she loved her father for knowing it and for being sweet about it instead of mean. She had run to him and hugged him hard, getting ice cream on her shirt and not caring. What was a little Sunny Treat between friends?

And now, sitting here in the growing grayness, listening to the drip of water all around her in the woods, watching the trees blur into shapes which would soon become threatening, listening for amplified shouts (“COME TO THE SOUND OF
MY VOICE!”) or the distant barking of dogs, she thought:
I can't pray to the Subaudible. I just can't.
She couldn't pray to Tom Gordon, either—that would be ludicrous—but perhaps she could listen to him pitch . . . and against the Yankees, at that. WCAS had their Sox on; she could put hers on, too. She had to conserve her batteries, she knew that, but she could listen for awhile, couldn't she? And who could tell? She might hear those amplified voices and barking dogs before the game was over.

Trisha opened her pack, reverently removed her Walkman from its inner pocket, and settled the earbuds into place. She hesitated a moment, suddenly sure the radio would no longer work, that some vital wire had been joggled loose in her tumble down the slope and this time there would be only silence when she pushed the power button. It was a stupid idea, maybe, but on a day when so many things had gone wrong, it seemed like a horribly
plausible
idea, too.

Go on, go on, don't be a chickenguts!

She pushed the button and like a miracle her head filled with the sound of Jerry Trupiano's voice . . . and more importantly, with the sounds of Fenway Park. She was sitting out here in the darkening, drippy woods, lost and alone, but she could hear thirty thousand people. It was a miracle.

“—comes to the belt,” Troop was saying. “
He
winds.
He
fires. And . . . 
strike three called,
Martinez caught him looking! Oh, that was the slider and it was a beaut! That caught the inside corner and Bernie Williams was just frozen! Oh my! And at the end of two and a half innings, it's still the Yankees two, the Boston Red Sox nothing.”

A singing voice instructed Trisha to call 1-800-54-GIANT for some sort of auto repair, but she didn't hear it. Two and a half innings already played, which meant it had to be eight o'clock. At first that seemed amazing, and yet, given the faded quality of the light, not so hard to believe, either. She'd been on her own for ten hours. It seemed like forever; it also seemed like no time at all.

Trisha waved at the bugs (this gesture was now so automatic she didn't even realize she was doing it) and then delved into her lunchbag. The tuna sandwich wasn't as bad as she had feared, flattened and torn into hunks but still recognizably a sandwich. The Baggie had sort of kept it together. The remaining Twinkie, however, had turned into what Pepsi Robichaud would likely have called “total sploosh.”

Trisha sat listening to the game and slowly ate half of her tuna sandwich. It awoke her appetite and she easily could have gobbled the rest, but she put it back in the bag and ate the splooshed Twinkie instead, scooping up the moist cake and the nasty-tasty white creme filling (that stuff was always creme and never cream, Trisha mused) with
one finger. When she had gotten all she could with her finger, she turned the paper inside out and licked it clean.
Just call me Mrs. Sprat,
she thought, and put the Twinkie wrapper back into her lunchbag. She allowed herself three more big swallows of Surge, then went prospecting for more potato chip crumbs with the tip of one grimy finger as the Red Sox and Yankees played through the rest of the third and the fourth.

By the middle of the fifth it was four to one Yankees, with Martinez gone in favor of Jim Corsi. Larry McFarland regarded Corsi with deep mistrust. Once, while talking baseball with Trisha over the telephone, he had said: “You mark my words, sugar—Jim Corsi is no friend of the Red Sox.” Trisha got giggling, she couldn't help it. He just sounded so
solemn.
And after awhile Dad had gotten giggling, too. It had become a catch-phrase between them, something that was just theirs, like a password: “Mark my words, Jim Corsi is no friend of the Red Sox.”

Corsi was a friend of the Red Sox in the top of the sixth, though, getting the Yankees one-two-three. Trisha knew she should turn off the radio and conserve the batteries, Tom Gordon wasn't going to pitch in a game where the Red Sox were three runs behind, but she couldn't bear the thought of disconnecting Fenway Park. She listened to the seashell-murmur of the voices even more eagerly
than to the play-by-play guys, Jerry Trupiano and Joe Castiglione. Those people were there, actually
there,
eating hotdogs and drinking beer and lining up to buy souvenirs and soft-serve ice cream and chowder from the Legal Seafood stand; they were watching as Darren Lewis—DeeLu, the announcers sometimes called him—stepped into the batter's box, the bright banks of lights casting his shadow behind him as daytime gave up overhead. She could not bear to exchange those thirty thousand murmuring voices for the low hum of mosquitoes (thicker than ever as dusk advanced), the drip of rainwater from the leaves, the rusty
rick-rick
of the crickets . . . and what other sounds there might be.

It was the other sounds she was most afraid of.

Other sounds in the dark.

DeeLu singled to right, and one out later Mo Vaughn got hold of a slider that did not slide. “
Back back WAYYY BACK!
” Troop chanted. “
That's in the Red Sox pen!
Someone—I think it might have been Rich Garces—caught it on the fly.
Home run, Mo Vaughn!
That's his twelfth of the year and the Yankee lead is cut to one.”

Sitting on her tree-trunk, Trisha laughed and clapped her hands and then resettled her signed Tom Gordon hat more firmly on her head. It was full dark now.

In the bottom of the eighth, Nomar Garciaparra hit a two-run shot into the screen on top of the
Green Monster. The Red Sox took a five-to-four lead and Tom Gordon came on to pitch the top of the ninth.

Trisha slid off the fallen tree to the ground. The bark scraped against the wasp-stings on her hip, but she hardly noticed. Mosquitoes settled with immediate hungry intent on her bare back where her shirt and the tatters of the blue poncho had rucked up, but she didn't feel them. She gazed at the last held glimmerglow in the brook—fading tarnished quicksilver—and sat on the damp ground with her fingers pressed to the sides of her mouth. Suddenly it seemed very important that Tom Gordon should preserve the one-run lead, that he should secure this victory against the mighty Yankees, who had lost a pair to Anaheim at the start of the season and had hardly lost since.

“Come on, Tom,” she whispered. In a Castle View hotel room her mother was in an agony of terror; her father was on a Delta flight from Boston to Portland to join Quilla and his son; at the Castle County state police barracks, which had been designated Rally Point Patricia, search-parties very much like the ones the lost girl had imagined were coming back in after their first fruitless sallies; outside the barracks, newsvans from three TV stations in Portland and two in Portsmouth were parked; three dozen experienced woodsmen (and some
were
accompanied by dogs) remained in the forests of
Motton and the three unincorporated townships which stretched off toward New Hampshire's chimney: TR-90, TR-100, and TR-110. The consensus among those remaining in the woods was that Patricia McFarland must still be in Motton or TR-90. She was a little girl, after all, and likely hadn't wandered far from where she had last been seen. These experienced guides, game wardens, and Forest Service men would have been stunned to know that Trisha had gotten almost nine miles west of the area the searchers considered their highest priority.

“Come on, Tom,” she whispered. “Come on, Tom, one two three, now. You know how it goes.”

But not tonight. Gordon opened the top of the ninth by walking the handsome yet evil Yankee shortstop, Derek Jeter, and Trisha remembered something her father had once told her: when a team gets a lead-off walk, their chances of scoring rise by seventy percent.

If we win, if Tom gets the save,
I'll
be saved.
This thought came to her suddenly—it was like a firework bursting in her head.

It was stupid, of course, as dopey as her father knocking on wood before a three-and-two pitch (which he did every time), but as the dark drew deeper and the brook gave up its final silver tarnish, it also seemed irrefutable, as obvious as two-and-two-makes-four: if Tom Gordon got the save,
she
would get the save.