Million-Dollar Throw

by Mike Lupica

  “Hard Knocks,” she said, “starring Miss Abby McCall. I could end up the new Miley Cyrus, just with ugly glasses.”

  “This isn’t funny, Abs,” Nate said, staring down at the table, shaking his head slowly, like he was hearing her just fine, but she wasn’t hearing him. “Even you can’t make it funny or seem like it’s no big deal. I can’t believe you didn’t even tell me you were thinking about doing this.”

  She told him then that everything had happened kind of fast, that her parents were in constant contact with her teachers and that as “brilliant” as she was, Abby laughing when she said that part, she was having more and more difficulty keeping up, even with her handy dandy Mobile Reader.

  “It’s frustrating,” she said. “And you know me, Brady. Even with these bum headlights, I still want to be perfect.”

  In a voice so quiet it was like it was coming from the back of the room, Nate said, “You already are, Abs.”

  Abby put her fingers to her lips then, reached across the table and touched Nate’s cheek.

  World’s fastest kiss. If you blinked, you missed it.

  “When?” Nate said. “When might you possibly, nothing final yet, be leaving?”

  Feeling as if he were the one who’d been in the dark.

  Abby took a deep breath and said, “This week.”

  Nate felt the breath come out of him now, like air coming out of a balloon.

  But there was more.

  “Actually,” she said, “we leave tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow?” Nate said.

  “It’s a trial week,” she said. “My folks arranged it. So I can figure out if I’ll like it there.”

  “Tomorrow?” Nate said, louder this time.

  Abby said, “I know, I know, it means I gotta miss the game, Brady. But I can’t help it, and besides . . .”

  “I don’t care about the stupid game!” he said. Now he was shouting, the words almost as loud as his fist banging on the table.

  “Yeah, you do care,” Abby said. “And so do I. But I gotta do this to find out if I want to do this, because it’s pretty expensive.”

  As if money had ever mattered to the McCalls the way it did to the Brodies.

  “I’ll pay you not to go,” he said.

  “No, this is serious,” she said. “It’s really expensive.”

  She had overheard her parents the other night, she told Nate. “You know what kind of hearing I’ve got,” she said.

  Nate said, “Tell me about it.”

  “Anyway,” she said, “I was supposed to be asleep but, like a lot of nights lately, I couldn’t. Too many thoughts racing around my head, bumping up against each other like bumper cars. Good ones, bad ones, happy ones, sad ones. Things I’ve seen already. Things I might never see. That was when I heard Mom and Dad from down the hall.”

  Her mom was saying it was no problem, Abby could go to Perkins this year instead of the family going to Nantucket, to the house they’d always rented.

  “My dad was angry, though,” she said. “He said there was going to be no summer vacation this year, with or without Perkins, and that she knew it. Summer vacation wasn’t the issue with Perkins, and she knew that, too. Then he started complaining about health insurance. I didn’t understand half of what he was talking about, some of it was like a foreign language, but I was sort of able to figure it out. He was worried about how he’d be able to pay for it.”

  “Your dad was worried about paying for something?” Nate said.

  Abby shrugged. Then she said, “But then he finished up by telling my mom he didn’t care how much it cost, that I needed this.”

  Nate told Abby then about the night he’d overheard his parents talking about money, about how much they could use the million dollars and all that.

  “We’ve both got pretty awesome parents,” Abby said. “But I wonder sometimes if they’ll ever figure out that they end up telling us important stuff without even knowing they’re telling us.”

  Nate nodded, and for a minute neither one of them said anything. Joe’s was starting to get more crowded, which meant the Valley High game was over. There was a Coldplay song coming out of Joe’s old-fashioned jukebox. Nate heard a burst of laughter from the high school kids in the back room. Every so often the front door would open again and he would feel a quick blast of cold air.

  Not as cold as the blast of air he’d gotten from Abby about the Perkins School for the Blind, though.

  “So you’re leaving tomorrow,” he said.

  “Think of it this way, Brady,” she said. “Because I can still see, I’ll be a total star at Perkins. The Nate Brodie of the whole place.”

  The Sunday Boston Globe was Nate’s favorite paper of the week. He loved the sports section because it was full of stories about the Patriots, pages and pages of stats about their game that day and their opponent, and more pages after that about all the college football games played the day before.

  Nate always woke up first on Sunday, never needing an alarm clock to get him up for church, always beating his parents to the Globe.

  But when he opened the front door this morning, he found more than just the Sunday paper.

  There was a present from Abby.

  He figured it had to be some kind of painting or drawing because of its size and shape, wrapped in brown paper with a string around it. There was an envelope taped to the front that read simply, “Brady.”

  And Nate knew he’d better read the note or card or whatever it was first, imagining that Abby was spying on him to see if he did.

  He didn’t even wait to get inside.

  The note said:Something to remember me by.

  And something to remember you by.

  Love,

  Abby Wonder

  It was her new nickname for herself, in honor of Stevie Wonder.

  When he was back inside, he dropped the Sunday paper on the floor, because this was a day when the football stats and stories about the Patriots could wait. He lugged her present up the stairs, closed the door, and ripped off the wrapping paper.

  Smiled.

  Somehow she had drawn a perfect replica of the target he’d be throwing at in Gillette Stadium. The SportStuff logo was there, the hole cut in the middle.

  Carrying it up the stairs, he had been surprised at how heavy the package was, and wasn’t sure what it was made of even after giving it a rap with his knuckles. But it looked and felt and seemed as heavy as a stop sign.

  In the corner, he saw, Abby had signed it and dated it.

  The date was Thanksgiving night.

  CHAPTER 17

  It was one of those perfect football days.

  One of those early-November days when it was cold but not too cold, the sun painting every part of the day as bright a color as possible: the navy blue road jerseys for the Patriots, the white home jerseys with the royal blue trim for the Melville Cowboys, the green grass, the orange of the leaves still in the trees that surrounded the field.

  It was too good of a day to feel bad about anything, Nate thought, trying to give himself the kind of pep talk he knew Abby would have given him.

  It’s football, he told himself as he ran out on the field to start warming up with the guys.

  It’s not life or death or losing a job the way his dad had lost his, the way he knew dads all over the country were losing theirs. It wasn’t being worried about losing your house or worrying about moving to a new house if you ever managed to sell your old one.

  It sure wasn’t losing your eyesight the way Abby was, or having to go off to a school for the blind where she wasn’t going to know anybody, a school that Nate didn’t think was going to make her feel less different.

  She was Abby, after all. It meant that even with what vision she had left, she was going to see way too much, see way too clearly what her life was going to be like someday, how dark her world was going to become.

  Come on. It was practically like he was shouting at himself inside his head. You put football up against
all that and a morning like this should feel as good and exciting as Christmas morning.

  Nate was doing his pregame stretching now, one leg out in front of him on the grass and then the other, and realized all over again that football was where you went to get away from bad news or bad thoughts. He looked across the field at Melville’s own star quarterback, Danny Gilman, somebody he’d been going up against since he’d started playing football against other towns, and just knew Danny had to be feeling the same way on a day like this.

  So Nate wasn’t going to worry about the perfect throw he wanted to make on Thanksgiving night. Not today, at least. He was just going to worry about making solid throws against Melville. Even though Abby wasn’t sitting up in the stands. Even though he knew she wouldn’t be staring hard at him when he looked up there, believing she could get inside his head the way pro coaches did with those high-tech transmitters that sent plays in to the quarterbacks.

  He was going to play today like this was the kind of priceless day they talked about in the credit-card commercials, the kind of day he’d pay anything for.

  Even a million bucks, if he had it.

  He started playing catch from twenty yards away with Eric Gaffney, did what he always did as he got into it, starting to feel himself humming the ball, motioning for Eric to keep backing up until he was forty yards away. Then Nate hit with him a spiral that should have given off sparks, Eric not having to move a single step to catch it.

  Yeah, Nate thought, this was going to be the day when everything felt right for him and the team and the season, when they played like the team they were supposed to be, with the sure-armed quarterback they were supposed to have.

  Coach Rivers always saved the best part of his own pep talk for last, a few minutes before they ran onto the field for the opening kickoff.

  Sometimes it was about football, sometimes not.

  Today he used baseball.

  “I want you guys to go out there and have a Joe DiMaggio day,” he said. He looked around at them and said, “Anybody happen to know who Mr. DiMaggio was?”

  “One of the greatest baseball players of all time, for the Yankees,” Nate said. He knew about all the great old Yankees because his dad had grown up in upstate New York as a Yankees fan, even if they were living in Red Sox country now. “He was a center fielder, he played in ten World Series in his career, and the Yankees won nine of them.”

  “Excellent!” Coach said. “Now here’s what I mean about having a DiMaggio day. He played this game against the Browns near the end of his career—”

  “The Cleveland Browns?” Eric said.

  Coach smiled. “No, the St. Louis Browns. Who later became the Orioles. Anyway . . . somebody asked him after the game why he had played so hard against a lousy team even though the Yankees had already clinched the pennant, and Mr. DiMaggio said, ‘Because there might be somebody in the stands today who’d never seen me play before, and might never see me again.’”

  Coach let that sink in for a minute, even though Nate knew exactly what he meant, and hoped his teammates did, too. Sometimes the first impression you made on people was the only one you got, in sports or anything else.

  “So go out there and have that kind of game against these guys,” he said. “At the end of it have people think they just saw the best eighth-grade football team they’re going to see all year.”

  Yeah, Nate thought.

  Yeah.

  Only it was Melville that looked that way and played that way on the first drive of the game. Danny Gilman threw on almost every down, to just about every one of his receivers, connecting with them all over the field. Not just confusing the guys on the Valley defense, but making them look a step slow for the first time all season, coming at the Patriots at Nascar speed. Danny’s last pass of the drive was to his tight end, over the middle, wide open in the end zone after a play fake that fooled even Nate on the sideline.

  Three minutes into the game and it was 7-0 for the home team.

  “Okay, kid,” Coach Rivers said to Nate. “Now we show these suckers what we’ve got.”

  Nate already knew the Patriots were coming out throwing today, having seen the first ten plays from the e-mail Coach had sent him the night before. Eight of them were passes.

  But Nate hoped they’d only need the first one.

  “We’re throwing with both hands if we have to,” Coach Rivers said. “Like your buds like to say, Number Twelve. Time to put your man suit back on.”

  The first play of the game was Nate’s favorite from their playbook, a flea flicker they’d never before used to start a game. Nate handed off to LaDell, handed it to him as if it were a straight running play, LaDell running right up Malcolm Burnley’s back side. Except one step before he got to the line of scrimmage, LaDell put the brakes on, same as his blockers did.

  LaDell spun around then, pitched the ball back to Nate.

  And as soon as the ball was back in Nate’s hand, he didn’t hesitate. Like a snap he’d taken in shotgun formation, he turned and looked to the right sideline, where he knew Pete Mullaney was going to be a streak of light, behind the defense already if the play had worked the way it was supposed to.

  It had.

  Like a charm.

  Pete, Nate could see, had blown past the cornerback covering him. And the corner was getting no help from his strong safety, who’d pinched in as soon as he saw LaDell with the ball. Malcolm, meanwhile, had knocked over the Melville nose tackle like a bowling ball knocking over a pin.

  Time to let the ball rip.

  It wasn’t the tight spiral Nate had thrown to Pete on his last warm-up toss, the ball wobbling a little in the air, but it didn’t matter. Nate still managed to lead Pete perfectly. Pete gathered the ball in at midfield and ran away from everybody like he was trying to set a record in the fifty-yard dash. Just like that, one play, Valley was on the board, too.

  Nate didn’t chase Pete into the end zone the way he sometimes did, just ran straight over to the coaches to find out what play they wanted to run for the conversion. They would go for one point—a straight run with LaDell. Malcolm leveled their nose tackle again, LaDell fell across the goal line, and it was 7-7.

  Nate wasn’t thinking about having a Joe DiMaggio day now.

  A Nate Brodie day would do him just fine, thank you very much.

  I’m back, he thought.

  Melville was an even smaller town than Valley, and it showed in the number of players on their team. By Nate’s count of the players on the sideline plus the eleven on the field, they had a total of sixteen. So a bunch of their kids had to play both ways, offense and defense, including Danny Gilman, who on defense was playing the position of rover back. He was big enough to play like a linebacker when he wanted to, but still fast enough to drop back and be an extra safety on sure passing downs.

  Basically he was free to rove the field like a one-man wrecking crew.

  Danny had gotten fooled along with everybody else on the flea flicker to LaDell to start the game. But Nate was still tracking him on every play the way those Weather Channel guys tracked big storms, always making sure he knew where Danny was before Malcolm snapped him the ball.

  But on the Patriots’ fourth possession of the game, the score still 7-7, it was as if Danny was the one inside Nate’s head, reading his mind, as if he knew exactly what Nate was going to do on a second-and-twenty play from midfield.

  Danny stepped right in front of Eric on what was supposed to be a fairly nifty crossing pattern and intercepted the ball before Eric even got his hands all the way up. Then he broke to the outside like he was swimming against the whole flow of the play, and ran the rest of the way untouched for the score that put Melville back up a touchdown.

  Nate thought he’d looked Danny off the second he got himself back in the pocket by eyeballing Pete, hard, on the left sideline, his eyes locked on Pete until he’d counted down in his head and knew it was the perfect time to deliver the ball to Eric, coming from the other side. And Nate
thought he’d had plenty on the throw, like you always had to have when throwing over the middle. It didn’t matter. Danny, using one of his own linebackers as cover, almost like a shield, was so perfectly positioned once the ball was in the air that it was as if he were part of the pattern himself. Like an X on one of Coach’s play sheets had turned himself into an O.

  Coach liked to tell him that football wasn’t a game of one-on-one if you were a quarterback, it was one-on-eleven—all eleven guys on defense. But Nate felt like it had turned into one-on-one now because the other QB had just beaten him badly, like this had turned into basketball and Danny Gilman had just dunked on him, hard.

  When he came off the field, Coach Hanratty got to him first.

  “Dude,” he said, “the guy’s a total gangster. You’re gonna have to know where he is on every play the rest of the game, or you gotta eat the ball.”

  “I’ve been trying,” Nate said. “I thought I knew where he was on that play.”

  Coach Hanratty said, “You know my first rule of football. No medals for trying.”

  On the very next series, the Patriots back on offense, Danny came on a blitz along with what felt like the whole town of Melville, came from Nate’s blind side, hitting him hard and clean and knocking the ball loose. One of the Cowboys’ linebackers recovered it at the Valley 15-yard line.

  Two plays later, after another Danny Gilman touchdown pass and successful conversion, Melville was ahead 21-7.

  They were one series into the second quarter and Nate had already been intercepted once for a touchdown and practically fumbled away another touchdown, coughing up his own confidence at the same time.

  Back? Yeah, he was back, all right.

  Back to throwing the ball around as if he had a rag arm, back to missing wide-open guys, back to fretting over every single throw, whether it was into coverage or not, into Danny Gilman’s area or not. He threw seven straight incompletions.

  It wasn’t quite a miracle that the game was still 21-7 at halftime, because there was no miraculous stuff going on with the Valley defense, who had stepped up their intensity and were playing as if every snap Danny Gilman ran and every series Melville had was the whole game. Sam Baum forced Danny to fumble one time and Malcolm personally separated their fullback from the ball another. And so the Patriots hung in there despite still being down two touchdowns.