change the throb in her eyes (and the stung places, now they were throbbing, too) or ease the coppery fear-taste in her mouth.
Trisha fought her way through a tangle of trees growing so close together they were almost intertwined and came out in a little crescent of clearing where the brook took an elbow-bend to the left. This crescent, hemmed in on all sides by bushes and raggedy clumps of trees, looked like a little patch of Eden to Trisha. There was even a fallen treetrunk for a bench.
She went to it, sat down, closed her eyes, and tried to pray for rescue. Asking God to not let her Walkman be broken had been easy because it had been unthinking. Now, however, praying was hard. Neither of her parents were churchgoers-her Mom was a lapsed Catholic, and her Dad, so far as Trisha knew, had never had anything to lapse from-and now she discovered herself lost and without vocabulary in another way. She said the Our Father and it came out of her mouth sounding flat and uncomforting, about as useful as an electric can-opener would have been out here. She opened her eyes and looked around the little clearing, seeing all too well how gray the air was becoming, clasping her scratched hands nervously together.
She couldn't remember ever discussing spiritual matters with her mother, but she had asked her father not a month ago if he believed in God. They had been out behind his little place in Malden, eating ice cream cones from the Sunny Treat man, who still came by in his tinkling white truck (thinking of the Sunny Treat truck now made Trisha feel like crying again). Pete had been 'down the park,' as they said in Malden, goofing with his old friends.
'God,' Dad had said, seeming to taste the word like some new ice cream flavor-Vanilla with God instead of Vanilla with Jimmies. 'What brought that on, sugar?'
She shook her head, not knowing. Now, sitting on the fallen trunk in this cloudy, buggy June dusk, a frightening idea bloomed: what if she had asked because some deep future-seeing part of her had known that this was going to happen? Had known, had decided she was going to need a little God to get through, and had sent up a flare?
'God,' Larry McFarland had said, licking his ice cream. 'God, now, God. . .' He thought awhile longer. Trisha had sat quietly on her side of the picnic table, looking out at his little yard (it needed mowing), giving him all the time he needed. At last he said, 'I'll tell you what I believe in. I believe in the Subaudible.'
'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?'
