The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon

AUTHOR'S POSTSCRIPT

FIRST, I TOOK some liberties with the Red Sox's 1998 schedule ... small ones, I assure you.

There is a real Tom Gordon, who does indeed pitch in the closer's role for the Boston Red Sox, but the Gordon in this story is fictional. The impressions fans have of people who have achieved some degree of celebrity are always fictional, as I can attest of my own personal experience. In one particular the real Gordon and Trisha's version of him are the same: both point skyward after the final out of a successful save has been recorded.

In 1998 Tom "Flash" Gordon recorded forty-four saves to lead the American League. Forty-three of them came consecutively, an American League record. Gordon's season came to an unfortunate conclusion, however; as Bork the Dork says, God may be a sports fan, but He doesn't seem to be a Red Sox fan. In Game Four of the Divisional Playoff against the Indians, Gordon surrendered three hits and two runs. The Red Sox lost, 2-1. It was Gordon's first blown save in five months, and it ended the Red Sox's 1998 season. It did not, however, detract from Gordon's extraordinary accomplishments-without those forty-four saves, the Red Sox probably would have finished fourth in their division instead of winning ninety-one games and compiling the American League's second-best record in 1998. There's a saying, one that most closers like Tom Gordon would probably agree with: some days you eat the bear ... and some days the bear eats you.

The things Trisha eats to stay alive can indeed be found in the woods of northern New England during the late spring season; had she not been a town girl, she might have found lots more supplies-more nuts, roots, even cattails. My friend Joe Floyd helped me with this part of it, and it was Joe who told me that fiddleheads grow right into early July in the marshes of the northern backwoods.

The woods themselves are real. If you should visit them on your vacation, bring a compass, bring good maps ... and try to stay on the path.

STEPHEN KING

Longboat Key, Florida February 1, 1999