'I did?'
'Sure, don't you remember? It was the team's off night. The night you listened to Walt.'
'Walt ... ?' The name was only vaguely familiar, the significance of it totally lost.
'Walt from Framingham. The El Dopo on the cell phone.'
She started to remember. 'And then the stars fell.'
Tom nodded.
Trisha walked slowly around the post, never taking her hand off the ringbolt. She looked carefully at her surroundings and saw that she wasn't in a clearing at all, not really. There was too much grass-the high green grass you saw in fields or meadows. This was a meadow, or had been once, a long time ago. If you ignored the birches and the bushes and let your eye see the whole thing, you couldn't mistake it for anything else. It was a meadow. People made meadows, just as people planted posts in the ground, posts with ringbolts on them.
Trisha dropped to one knee and ran a hand up and down the post-lightly, mindful of splinters. Halfway around it she discovered a pair of holes and a twisted ring of old metal. She felt below it in the grass, found nothing at first, and dug deeper into the wiry undergrowth. Down there, caught in old hay and timothy, she found something else. Trisha had to use both hands to rip it free. It turned out to be an ancient rusty hinge. She held it up to the sun. A pencil-thin ray fell through one of the screwholes and put a brilliant pinhead of light on one cheek.
'Tom,' she breathed. She looked toward where he had been, leaning back against the maple with his arms crossed, thinking he would be gone again. He wasn't, though, and although he wasn't smiling, she thought she saw a hint of a smile around his eyes and mouth. 'Tom, look!' She held up the hinge.
'It was a gate,' Tom said.
'A gate!' she repeated rapturously. 'A gate!' Something made by humans, in other words. Folk from the magic world of lights and appliances and 6-12 Insect Repellant.
'This is your last chance, you know.'
'What?' She looked at him uneasily.
'it's the late innings now. Don't make a mistake, Trisha.'
'Tom, you-'
But there was no one there. Tom was gone. Not that she had seen him disappear, exactly, because Tom had never been there in the first place. He was only in her imagination.
What's the secret of closing? she had asked him-she couldn't remember exactly when.
Establishing that it's you who's better, Tom had said, her mind perhaps recycling some half-heard comment from a sports show or maybe a postgame interview watched with her father, his arm around her shoulders, her head leaning against him. It's best to do it right away.
Your last chance. Late innings. Don't make a mistake.
How can I do that when I don't even know what I'm doing?
To that there was no answer, so Trisha once more walked around the post with her hand on the ringbolt, as slowly and as delicately as a Saxon girl in some ancient courting ritual of the Maypole. The woods which enclosed the overgrown meadow revolved before her sight the way things did when you were on the merry-go-round at Revere Beach or Old Orchard. They looked no different from the miles of woods she'd already been through, and which way? Which way was the right way? This was a post but not a signpost.
'A post, not a signpost, ' she whispered, walking a little faster now. 'How can I know anything from it when it's a post, not a signpost? How can a numbwit like me. . . '
She had an idea then, and dropped back onto her knees. She banged one shin on a rock, started it bleeding, hardly noticed. Maybe it was a signpost. Maybe it was.
Because it had been a gatepost.
Trisha found the holes in the post again, the ones where the hinge-screws had gone. She located herself with her feet to those holes, then crawled slowly away from the post on a straight line. One knee forward ... then the other ... then the first
'Ow!' she cried, and yanked her hand out of the grass. That had hurt worse than barking her shin. She looked at her palm and saw little beads of blood oozing up through the caked dirt. Trisha leaned forward on her forearms, pushing aside the grass, knowing what had stabbed into her hand, needing to see it just the same.
It was the ragged stump of the other gatepost, broken off about a foot out of the ground, and she'd really been quite lucky not to hurt herself any more than she had; a couple of the splinters sticking up from that post were a good three inches long and looked as sharp as needles. A little beyond the stump, buried in the white and wiry old grass underlying this June's aggressive new green, was the rest of the post.
Last chance. Late innings.
'Yeah, and maybe somebody expects an awful lot from a kid,' she said. She unshouldered her pack, opened it, yanked out the remains of the poncho, and tore off one of the strips. This she knotted around the stump of the broken-off gatepost, coughing nervously as she did it. Sweat ran down her face. Noseeums came to drink it; some drowned; Trisha didn't notice.
She stood up, reshouldering the pack, and stood between the remaining upright post and the blue strip of plastic marking the downed one.
'Here's where the gate was,' she said. 'Right here.' She looked straight ahead, in a northwest direction. Then she about-faced and gazed southeast. - I don't know why any one would put a gate here, but I know that you don't bother unless there's a road or a trail or a riding-path or something. I want . . .' Her voice trembled toward tears. She stopped, gulped them back, and started again. 'I want to find the path. Any path. Where is it? Help me, Torn.'
Number 36 didn't reply. A jay scolded her and something moved in the woods (not the thing, just some animal,
