Why had she left the path in the first place? Why had she left sight of the path? Just to pee? To pee when she didn't even need to that badly? If so, she must have been crazy.
And then some further craziness had possessed her, making her think she could walk through the uncharted woods (this was the phrase which occurred to her now) in safety. Well, she had learned something today, indeed she had. She had learned to stay on the path. No matter what you had to do or how bad you had to do it, no matter how much yatata-yatata you had to listen to, it was better to stay on the path.
When you were on the path your Red Sox shirt stayed clean and dry. On the path there was no disturbing little minnow swimming in the hollow place between your chest and your stomach. On the path you were safe.
Safe.
Trisha reached around to the small of her back and felt a ragged hole in her shirt. The stub of branch had punched through, then. She had been hoping it hadn't. And when she brought her fingers back, there were little smears of blood on the tips. Trisha made a sighing, sobbing sound and wiped her fingers on her jeans.
"Relax, at least it wasn't a rusty nail," she said. "Count your blessings." That was one of her mother's sayings, and it didn't help. Trisha had never felt less blessed in her life.
She looked along the length of the tree, even scuffed one sneakered foot through the leaves, but there was no sign of the snake. It probably hadn't been one of the biting kind, anyway, but God, they were so horrible. All legless and slith-31 ery, flipping their nasty tongues in and out. She could hardly stand to think of it, even now - how it had pulsed under her palm like a cold muscle.
Why didn't I wear boots? Trisha thought, looking at her low-topped Reeboks. Why am I out here in a pair of damned sneakers?
The answer, of course, was because sneakers were fine for the path... and the plan had been to stay on the path.
Trisha closed her eyes for a moment. "I'm okay, though,"
she said. "All I have to do is keep my head and not go bazonka. I'll hear people over there in a minute or two, any-way."
This time her voice convinced her a little and she felt bet-ter.
She turned around, placed her feet on either side of the black divot where she had lain, and put her butt against the mossy trunk of the tree. There. Straight ahead. The main trail. Had to be.
Maybe. And maybe I better wait here. Wait for voices. Make sure I'm going the right way.
But she couldn't bear to wait. She wanted to be back on the path and putting these scary ten minutes (or maybe now it was fifteen) behind her as soon as she could. So she slipped her pack over her shoulders again - there was no angry, distracted, but basically nice big brother to check the straps for her this time - and set off again. The minges and noseeums had found her now, so many of them buzzing around her head that her vision seemed to dance with black specks. She waved at them but didn't slap. Slap at mosqui-toes, but it's better just to wave at the little ones, her Mom had told her... perhaps on the same day she had taught Trisha how girls peed in the woods. Quilla Andersen (only then she had still been Quilla McFarland) said that slapping actually seemed to draw the minges and noseeums... and of course it made the slapper increasingly aware of her dis-comfort.
When it comes to bugs in the woods, Trisha's Mom had said, it's better to think like a horse. Pretend you've got a tail to swish em away with.
Standing by the fallen tree, waving at the bugs but not slapping at them, Trisha had fixed her eyes on a tall pine about forty yards away... forty yards north, if she still had her bearings. She walked to this, and once she was standing there with her hand on the big pine's sap-tacky trunk, she looked back at the fallen tree. Straight line? She thought so.
Encouraged, she now sighted on a clump of bushes dot-ted with bright red berries. Her mother had pointed them out on one of their nature-walks, and when Trisha explained they were birdberries and deadly poison - Pepsi Robichaud had told her so - her mother had laughed and said, The famous Pepsi doesn't know everything after all. That's kind of a relief. Those are checkerberries, Trish. They're not a bit poison. They taste like Teaberry gum, the kind that comes in the pink pack. Her mother had tossed a handful of the berries into her mouth, and when she didn't fall down, choking and convulsing, Trisha had tried a few herself. To her they had tasted like gumdrops, the green ones that made your mouth feel kind of tingly.
She walked to the bushes, thought about picking a few berries just to cheer herself up, but didn't. She wasn't hungry, and had never felt less capable of cheering up. She inhaled the spicy smell of the waxy green leaves (also good to eat, Quilla had said, although Trisha had never tried them - she wasn't a woodchuck, after all), then looked back at the pine. She ascertained that she was still traveling in a straight line, and picked out a third landmark - this time a split rock that looked like a hat in an old black-and-white movie. Next came a cluster of birches, and from the birches she walked slowly to a luxuriant nestle of ferns halfway up a slope.
She was concentrating so fiercely on keeping each land-mark in view (no more looking back over your shoulder, sweetheart) that she was standing beside the ferns before she realized she was, you should pardon the pun, overlooking the forest for the trees. Going landmark to landmark was all very well, and she thought she had managed to keep on a straight line... but what if it was a straight line in the wrong direc-tion?
It might be the wrong direction just by a little, but she had to have gone wrong. If not, she would've come to the trail again by now. Why, she must have walked...
"Cripes," she said, and there was a funny little gulp in her voice that she didn't like, "it must be a mile. A mile at least."
Bugs all around her. Minges and noseeums in front of her eyes, hateful mosquitoes seeming to hang like helicopters by her ears, giving off that maddening warble-whine. She slapped at one and missed, succeeding only in making her own ear ring. And still she had to restrain herself from smacking again. If she started doing that, she'd end up whacking away at herself like a character in an old cartoon.
She dropped her pack, squatted, undid the buckles, turned back the flap. Here was her blue plastic poncho, and the paper sack with the lunch she had fixed herself; here was her Gameboy and some suntan lotion (wouldn't need that, with the sun now completely gone and the last patches of blue overhead filling in); here was her bottle of water and a bottle of Surge and her Twinkies and a bag of chips. No bug-spray, though. Wouldn't you know it. So Trisha put on the suntan lotion instead - it might keep at least the minges away - and then returned everything to her pack. She paused just a moment to look at the Twinkies, then dumped the package in with the rest. As a rule she loved them - when she got to be Pete's age her face would probably be one great big pimple if she didn't learn to lay off the sweets - but for the time being she still felt totally unhungry.
Besides, you may never get to be Pete's age, that disquieting inner voice said. How could anyone have such a cold and scary voice inside them? Such a traitor to the cause? You may never get out of these woods.
"Shut up, shut up, shut up," she hissed, and buckled the pack's flap with trembling fingers. That done, she started to get up... and then paused, one knee planted in the soft earth beside the ferns, her head up, scenting the air like a fawn on its first expedition away from its mother's side.
Only Trisha wasn't smelling; she was listening, focusing on that one sense with all of her concentration.
Branches rattling in a faint breath of breeze. Whining mosquitoes (rotten, nasty old things). The woodpecker. The far-off caw of a crow. And, at the furthest outpost between silence and audition, the drone of a plane. No voices from the path. Not a single voice. It was as if the trail to North Conway had been canceled. And as the plane's motor faded away completely, Trisha conceded the truth.
She got to her feet, her legs feeling heavy, her stomach feeling heavy. Her head felt light and strange, a gas-filled balloon tethered to a lead weight. She was suddenly drown-ing in isolation, choking on a bright and yet oppressive sense of herself as a living being cast out from her fellows.
She had somehow gotten out of bounds, wandered off the playing field and into a place where the rules she was used to no longer applied.
"Hey!" she screamed. "Hey, someone, do you hear me? Do you hear me? Hey!" She paused, praying for an answer to come back, but no answer came and so she brought the worst out at last: "Help me, I'm lost! Help me, I'm lost!" Now the tears began to come and she could no longer hold them back, could no longer kid herself that she was in charge of this sit-uation.
Her voice trembled, became first the wavery voice of a little kid and then almost the shriek of a baby who lies for-gotten in her pram, and that sound frightened her more than anything else so far on this awful morning, the only human sound in the woods her weepy, shrieking voice call-ing for help, calling for help because she was lost.
Third Inning
SHE YELLED for perhaps fifteen minutes, sometimes cup-ping her hands around her mouth and turning her voice in the direction she imagined the main trail must be, mostly just standing there by the ferns and screaming. She gave one final shriek - no words, just a high birdcall of combined anger and fear - so loud it hurt her throat, then sat down beside her pack and put her face in her hands and cried. She cried hard for maybe five minutes (it was impossible to tell for sure, her watch was back home, lying on the table next to her bed, another smooth move by the Great Trisha), and when she stopped she felt a little better... except for the bugs. The bugs were everywhere, crawling and whining and buzzing, trying to drink her blood and sip her sweat.
The bugs were driving her crazy. Trisha got to her feet again, waving the air with her Red Sox cap, reminding her-self not to slap, knowing she would slap, and soon, if things didn't change. She wouldn't be able to help herself.
Walk or stay where she was? She didn't know which would be best; she was now too frightened for anything much like rational thought. Her feet decided for her and Trisha got 37. moving again, looking around fearfully as she went, wiping her swollen eyes with her arm. The second time she raised the arm to her face she saw half a dozen mosquitoes on it and slapped at them blindly, killing three. Two had been full to bursting. The sight of her own blood didn't ordinarily upset her, but this time all the strength went out of her legs and she sat down again on the needle-carpet in a cluster of old pines and cried some more. She felt headachy and a little whoopsy in her stomach. But I was just in the van a little while ago, she thought over and over. Just in the van, the back seat of the van, listening to them snipe at each other. And then she thought of her brother's angry voice drifting through the trees: - don't know why we have to pay for what you guys did wrong! It occurred to her that those might be the last words she would ever hear Pete say, and she actually shuddered at the idea, as at the sight of some monstrous shape in the shadows.
Her tears dried up more quickly this time and the weep-ing wasn't so intense. When she got to her feet again (wav-ing her cap around her head almost without realizing it) she felt halfway to being calm. By now they'd surely know she was gone. Mom's first thought would be that Trisha had gotten pissed at them for arguing and gone back to the Car-avan.
They'd call out for her, then retrace their steps, asking people they met on the trail if they'd seen a girl in a Red Sox cap (she's nine but tall for her age and looks older, Trisha could hear her Mom saying), and when they got back to the park-ing area and found she wasn't in the van, they'd start get-ting seriously worried. Mom would be frightened. The thought of her fright made Trisha feel guilty as well as afraid. There was going to be a fuss, maybe a big one involv-ing the game wardens and the Forest Service, and it was all her fault. She had left the path.
This added a new layer of anxiety to her already dis-turbed mind and Trisha began to walk fast, hoping to get back to the main trail before all those calls could be made, before she could turn into what her mother called A Public Spectacle. She walked without taking her previous, meticu-lous care in moving from point to point in a straight line, turning more and more to the west without realizing it, turning away from the Appalachian Trail and most of its subsidiary paths and trails, turning in a direction where there was little but deep second-growth woods choked with underbrush, tangled ravines, and ever more difficult terrain.
She alternately called and listened, listened and called. She would have been stunned to learn that her mother and brother were still locked in their argument and did not know, even yet, that Trisha was missing.
She walked faster and faster, waving at the swirling clouds of minges, no longer bothering to skirt clumps of bushes but simply plowing straight through them. She listened and called, called and listened, except she wasn't listening, not really, not anymore. She didn't feel the mosquitoes that were clustered on the back of her neck, lined up just below her hairline like drinkers at happy hour, guzzling their fill; she didn't feel the noseeums caught and wriggling in the faint sticky lines where her tears were still drying.
Her giving way to panic wasn't sudden, as it had been at the feel of the snake, but weirdly gradual, a drawing in from the world, a shutting down of outer awareness. She walked faster without minding her way; called for help without hearing her own voice; listened with ears that might not have heard a returning shout from behind the nearest tree.
And when she began to run she did it without realizing. I have to be calm, she thought as her sneakered feet sped past the point of jogging. I was just in the van, she thought as the run became a sprint. I don't know why we should pay for what you guys did wrong, she thought, ducking - barely - a jut-ting branch that seemed to thrust itself at one of her eyes. It scraped the side of her face instead, drawing a thin scrawl of blood from her left cheek.
The breeze in her face as she ran, tearing through a thicket with a crackling sound that seemed very distant (she was unaware of the thorns which ripped at her jeans and tore shallow gouges on her arms), was cool and strangely exhilarating. She pelted up a slope, now running full-out with her hat on crooked and her hair flying behind her - the rubber-band which had held it in a ponytail was long since lost - hurdling small trees which had fallen in some long-ago storm, topping a ridge... and suddenly there was a long blue-gray valley spread out before her with brazen granite cliffs rising on the far side, miles from where she was. And directly in front of her nothing but a gray shimmer of early summer air through which she would fall to her death, turning over and over and screaming for her mother.
Her mind was gone again, lost in that white no-brain roar of terror, but her body recognized that stopping in time to avoid going over the cliff-edge was an impossibility. All she could hope to do was redirect her motion before it was too late. Trisha swerved to the left, and as she did her right foot kicked out over the drop. She could hear the pebbles dislodged by that foot rattling down the ancient rock wall in a little stream.
