'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 sea-shell 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 sof-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 tucked up, but she didn't feel them. She gazed at the last held glimmerglow in the brook-fading
