She was sick, she had been right about that, but her body fought the infection in her throat and chest and sinuses with remarkable tenacity. For hours at a time she would feel feverish, hardly in the world at all. The light, even when it was dim and filtered by heavy tree-cover, hurt her eyes, and she talked nonstop - mostly to Tom Gordon but also to her mother, brother, father, Pepsi, and all the teachers she had ever had, right back to Mrs. Garmond in kindergarten. She woke herself up in the night, lying on her side with her knees curled to her chest, shaking with fever and coughing so hard she feared something inside her would rupture. But then, instead of getting worse, the fever would either fade or disappear entirely, and the headaches which accompanied it would lift. She had one night (it was Thursday, although she didn't know it) when she slept right through and woke almost refreshed. If she had coughed during that night, it wasn't hard enough to wake her. She picked up a patch of poison ivy on her left forearm, but Trisha recognized it for what it was and slathered it with mud. It didn't spread.
Her clearest memories were of lying beneath heaps of branches and listening to the Red Sox while the stars glared coldly overhead. They won two out of three in Oakland, with Tom Gordon getting saves in both wins. Mo Vaughn hit two home runs and Troy O'Leary (one very cute baseball player, in Trisha's humble estimation) hit one. The games came through to her on WEEI, and although the reception grew a little worse each night, her batteries held up well.
She remembered thinking that if she ever got out of this, she would have to write a fan letter to the Energizer Bunny.
She did her part by turning the radio off when she got sleepy. Not once, even on Friday night, when she was wracked with chills and fever and watery bowels, did she go to sleep with the radio on. The radio was her lifeline, the games her life preserver. Without them to look forward to she thought she would simply give up.
The girl who had gone into the woods (almost ten and big for her age) had weighed ninety-seven pounds. The girl who came blundering half-blind up a piney slope and into a brushy clearing seven days later weighed no more than seventy-eight. Her face was swollen with mosquito bites and a large coldsore had bloomed on the left side of her mouth. Her arms were sticks. She hitched constantly at the waist of her loose jeans without realizing it. She was muttering a song under her breath - "Put your arms around me... cuz I gotta get next to you" - and looked like one of the world's younger heroin addicts. She had been resource-ful, she had been lucky with the weather (moderate temper-atures, no rain since the day she'd gotten lost), and she had discovered deep and totally unexpected reserves of strength within herself. Now those reserves were almost gone, and in some part of her exhausted mind, Trisha knew it. The girl making her slow, weaving way through the clearing at the top of the slope was nearly finished.
In the world she had left, a desultory remnant of the search went on, but she was nonetheless now presumed dead by most of those looking for her. Her parents had begun to discuss, in a blundering and still unbelieving way, whether they should have a memorial service or wait for the body to be found. And if they decided to wait, how long? Sometimes the bodies of the lost were never found. Pete said little, but he had grown hollow-eyed and silent. He took Moanie Balogna into his room and sat her in the corner where she could look toward his bed. When he saw his mother looking at the doll, he said, "Don't you touch it. Don't you dare."
In that world of lights and cars and paved roads she was dead. In this one - the one that existed off the path, the one where crows sometimes hung upside down from branches - she was close to it. But she kept on truckin. (That one was her father's.) Her course sometimes wavered a bit to the west or the east, but not often and not much. Her ability to keep moving steadily in one direction was nearly as remark-able as her body's refusal to give in completely to the infec-tions in her chest and throat. Not as helpful, however. Her path took her slowly but steadily away from the larger con-centrations of towns and villages and deeper into New Hampshire's chimney.
The thing in the woods, whatever it was, kept her com-pany on her journey. Although she dismissed a great deal of what she felt and thought she saw, she never dismissed her sense of what the wasp-priest had called the God of the Lost; never chalked up the clawed trees (or the headless fox, for that matter) to mere hallucination. When she felt that thing (or heard it - several times she had heard breaking branches in the forest as it kept pace with her, and twice she heard its low inhuman grunt), she never questioned the fact of its actual presence. When the feeling left her, she never questioned the fact that the thing was really gone. She and it were tied together now; they would remain so until she died. Trisha didn't think that would be long now. "Right around the corner," her mother would have said, except there were no corners in the woods. Bugs and swamps and sudden drop-offs, but no corners. It wasn't fair that she should die after fighting so hard to stay alive, but the unfairness didn't make her so angry now. It took energy to be angry. It took vitality. Trisha was nearly shot of both.
Halfway across this new clearing, which was no different than a dozen others she had passed through, she began to cough. It hurt deep in her chest, made her feel as if there were a great big hook in there. Trisha doubled over, grabbed hold of a jutting stump, and coughed until tears popped out of her eyes and her vision doubled. When the coughing finally tapered off and stopped, she remained bent over at first, waiting for her heart to slow its fearful pounding.
Also for those big black butterflies in front of her eyes to fold their wings and go back to wherever they came from.