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.