Million-Dollar Throw

by Mike Lupica

  “It would be great to have the million dollars,” she said. “But whether you win it or not, it is still going to be one of the great nights of your whole life. Of our family’s life. Which is why I don’t want you to spend the next three weeks, or whatever it is, walking around with the weight of the world on your shoulders. Or thinking that you’re going to be letting anybody down if you miss.”

  Nate nearly whispered as he said, “I want to make it so bad.”

  “I know you do.” She lifted herself up a little bit so she could kiss him on top of his head. “But it’s like I tell you all the time, about everything. All you can control is the process. Not the result. So enjoy the process and who knows? We might end up in fat city.”

  Fat chance, Nate thought.

  He didn’t say that to his mom, though, just told her it was time for him to start getting ready for practice, and went back up to his room. Then he pulled Abby’s amazing replica of the SportStuff target from behind his chair, and propped it up against his desk.

  He stared at the twenty-inch hole in the middle the way he did a lot these days.

  He closed his eyes and imagined the ball going through clean and true on Thanksgiving night.

  Imagined himself running over to wherever his parents and Abby were.

  Tried to imagine—again—the roar of the crowd in Gillette Stadium.

  Imagined the flashing lights of the cameras all around him, no matter which way he turned.

  There was just one problem with the picture:

  If he couldn’t even throw as well as his backup quarterback, how was he going to throw one through that hole?

  Coach Rivers pulled Nate aside before practice, asking him to take a walk with him, Nate thinking as he did that maybe everybody wanted to have a talk with him today.

  Only he knew this one was going to be about his job, not his mom’s.

  “You know all about Bill Parcells, right?” Coach said. “Not everybody on this team is old enough to know what he did as a coach, but when it comes to football history, I know you’re about as old as the ocean.”

  Coach, Nate knew, had his own way of getting to things. Getting into them.

  “He came to the Patriots not too long after I was born,” Nate said. “Drafted Drew Bledsoe and put us back in the Super Bowl. He’d already won two Super Bowls coaching the Giants.”

  “Just making sure.”

  “At least I can still deliver when it comes to history,” Nate said.

  “Hush and listen,” Coach said. “Parcells wasn’t just one of the greatest coaches of all time, he probably said more smart things about sports than anybody I know.”

  “ ‘You are what your record says you are,’” Nate said, quoting him, not knowing where he’d heard that one from Parcells, just that he had.

  “My favorite,” Coach Rivers said. “But he said something just as smart once about quarterbacks. Said he didn’t judge quarterbacks after they’d thrown three or four touchdown passes and won the game. He said that the real measure of a quarterback, for him and for the team, was after he’d thrown a bunch of interceptions and the crowd was booing and the media was after him and everybody wanted the backup to play.”

  They were leaning against one of the goalposts while the rest of the team started to warm up, one on either side. Now Coach leaned around so he was looking right at Nate. Grinning at him now. “You see where I’m going with this?” he said.

  “I’d have to have my helmet on backward not to, Coach,” Nate said.

  “Parcells said that was when big players stepped up and showed what they were made of,” Coach said. “I already know that about you.” He pointed out at the other players. “Just make sure you show them, starting tonight.”

  And walked away.

  Nate threw the ball in scrimmage much better than he had against Melville—after all, how could he not? He was still inconsistent, still didn’t have his best control, still would see where he wanted to put the ball only to see it sail wide or high, or even bounce in front of a receiver.

  But he hit Bradley one time in traffic, led him just enough and put the ball just high enough that only Bradley could catch the sucker. He floated one perfectly down the sideline to Ben and over Sam Baum, who was covering him, a ball that either Ben was going to catch or nobody was, at least not inbounds. He even cut loose with the best deep ball he had thrown lately, this one to Pete, straight fly, Pete reaching out as far as he could with his last stride at the 5-yard line, laying out, crossing the line. The rest of the guys on offense, led by Malcolm, actually applauded after that one. And Nate felt good enough about the throw, forty yards on a line, that he was able to joke about getting cheered for a practice pass.

  “I don’t want your pity,” he said as Coach moved them back to midfield and told them to huddle up again.

  “Wasn’t pity,” Malcolm said. “Shock, maybe.”

  “Shock and awe,” Pete said.

  Nate said to Pete, “Whoa, you mean you do pay attention in history sometimes?”

  LaDell said, “Was a pretty fresh throw.”

  “It was Malcolm who said we should give you the standing O,” Pete said, “on account of you really did look right-handed again.”

  Malcolm said, “See, there had been some conversation, just among us boys, that maybe you’d been a lefty trapped in a righty body all this time.”

  Nate smiled. “I think I liked your pity better,” he said.

  In this moment, just the normal give-and-take with the guys, Nate felt happy. Or relieved. Or both. Not just because he’d made the deep throw to Pete. Because he felt a part of it again, felt like he was really in the action again, even if it was just practice, not a spectator like he was at the end of the Melville game.

  If practice had ended right there, with the pass and the chop-busting that came after it, Nate would have gone home happy. Only practice didn’t end then. Nate ran one more series, got the offense into the end zone again with a short pass to a wide-open LaDell, and then Eric replaced him so he could get his reps with the first team.

  And as Nate stood off to the side again, right next to the coaches the way he had been as Eric single-handedly beat Melville, he knew he was watching a different quarterback tonight.

  He wasn’t sure if anybody else on the field noticed it, at least with the exception of Coach Rivers, who somehow managed to see everything on the field, even with his back turned. But Nate sure noticed it, as if somebody had trained a spotlight on Eric Gaffney all of a sudden.

  Eric was different because he knew he could do it now.

  Knew how.

  It wasn’t anything he said or did. Wasn’t anything the other players on the Valley offense said or did. But these weren’t just end-of-practice reps now, Coach making sure Eric knew the plays and any new formations he’d thrown in just for fun. Eric was wearing the confidence of a real quarterback now like a shiny new badge, and Nate, who’d never been anything but, knew it better than anybody on the field.

  Eric wasn’t the starter, he was just playing like one. Throwing like one. Acting like one. Coming up to the line of scrimmage and moving Pete a little farther from the down linemen before he started calling signals. Turning and saying something to LaDell and Ben before another snap, switching off the play Nate knew had been called, faking the ball to LaDell and then keeping the ball himself and getting ten yards.

  He didn’t have any more arm than he had before the Melville game, it just seemed that way tonight, like he was a baseball pitcher who’d suddenly found a few extra miles per hour on his fastball. He ended practice with the same kind of two-minute drill he’d run in a real game two days before, finished up with a sweet throw to Ben in the corner of the end zone, Ben reaching up high and making a hands catch and still managing to keep his feet inbounds, dragging them like he was Randy Moss.

  Then Eric ran over to Ben and bumped helmets with him like they’d won on the last play of the game all over again.

  If you didn’t know anyt
hing about the Valley Patriots, didn’t know one player from another, were just sitting in the bleachers watching, you would have thought he was the starting QB, and maybe even the best player on the field.

  You would have thought this was Eric’s team.

  CHAPTER 20

  Abby called as soon as she got back from Perkins on Friday afternoon.

  “Get over here, Brady,” she said. “Now.”

  Nate hopped on his bike and raced to her house at Tour de France speed, glad that his mom hadn’t seen how ridiculously excited he’d been on his way out the door.

  Abby was in her art room when he got there, wearing the old sweatshirt she liked to wear when she was painting, the one so full of colors on the front and on the sleeves that it looked like she had lost several paintball wars. Badly.

  “You had me break the world pedaling record to come over here and watch you work?” he said.

  “Pretty much,” she said.

  “I guess it only took me one week to forget you’re Multitask McCall,” he said.

  Abby smiled at him. “Oh,” she said, “is that how long we’ve been apart. I barely noticed.”

  “Ha! You missed me sooooo much. Admit it.”

  It was the kind of thing he only said to Abby, and only when they were alone.

  “Okay,” she said in a soft voice, the one that came out of the place where he knew the truest Abby lived. “I admit it.”

  “But you’re back now. That’s all that matters.”

  “Matters for now.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means I still might be going back for second semester,” she said. “Or have you conveniently forgotten I told you that was a possibility at Joe’s the day before I left?”

  And Nate said, “Amazingly, no, I haven’t forgotten. I was just hoping you might have.”

  “Well, we don’t have to talk about that right now. I’ve got a few other balls in the air,” she said, then told him about a visit she’d made to Children’s Hospital Boston, to see one of their top eye doctors.

  “Dr. Hunter is his name,” she said. “Very cool guy, even not giving me the best news I’ve ever gotten.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like if I’m going to be the world-famous thirteen-year-old artist Abby McCall, I’d better roll on that,” she said.

  “I have a feeling he didn’t say it like that.”

  “Maybe not in those exact words,” she said, her tone light and fun, as if they were discussing some must-see new YouTube video. “He did tell me that my vision shouldn’t be deteriorating this fast, not at my age. But it is, Brady. It just plain old is.”

  Nate’s words came out hot and fast, the force of them surprising him. “There has to be something they can do to stop it!”

  “They can’t, Brady. It’s why I’ve got to paint as fast as I can, whether I go back there or not.”

  She just let that settle then in the quiet room, like the dust Nate could see in the shafts of light coming through her blinds. He sat in his director’s chair. His Nate chair. The easel she was working on was facing Abby. She didn’t want him to see what she was working on, and he knew well enough not to ask. Her brushes and paints were on the floor around her. She went to work now, her face serious. Solemn almost.

  After a few minutes, her hand moving in every direction at once, or so it seemed to Nate, she said, “This is my favorite place in the world. Especially when you’re in it.”

  She could talk while she painted or sketched, had always been able to do that. And Nate had always loved listening to her. It wasn’t like when he was alone with his mom and she talked just to talk sometimes, going on and on, eventually losing even Nate along the way. Making him want to get to the quiet of his room. Nate had never been afraid of quiet. He actually liked quiet.

  It was why the guys on the team knew that when the game started, there was going to be only one voice in the huddle unless Nate asked somebody a question, and the voice was going to be his.

  Yet the sound of Abby’s voice never bothered him.

  Never.

  It was the absence of that voice that bothered him.

  She was talking about Perkins again now. The more she did, the more Nate could see something clear as day, like he could see forever:

  The real reason she hadn’t called him while she’d been away wasn’t just because she was too busy. It was because she loved it there.

  Loved being at a school for the blind.

  This was her new world.

  She needed it.

  And Nate knew what he needed to do.

  She finally took a break from painting and looked over at Nate. “So the last game stank, huh?”

  “Like dirty laundry,” he said.

  “Still plenty of season left,” she said. “You’ll figure it all out before Thanksgiving night.”

  “You don’t know that!”

  His words came out hot, even made Abby jump a little, startled.

  “Whoa,” she said.

  He took it down a couple of levels. “You don’t know that,” he said.

  “I know you.”

  He took a deep breath.

  Like he’d made a snap decision at the line to change the play.

  Knowing it was the right thing to do.

  “You know the me I used to be when it came to football,” he said. “Not the player I’ve turned into. You probably hung around with guys at your new school who could throw more accurately than I can right now.”

  “Not funny.”

  “Not trying to be,” he said. He took a deep breath, let it out, and kept going. “I’m just tired of people telling me that the season’s going to work out fine, that everything is going to be the way it used to be. ’Cause it’s not.”

  Then he quoted Parcells to her, telling her you are what your record says you are.

  “Listen to me,” she said.

  Abby’s voice was quiet, like she wanted the same from Nate. Like this room wasn’t a place for loud voices or angry words and never would be.

  “You know you don’t really believe that,” Abby said.

  “See, that’s what I mean,” Nate said. “That’s the thing. You think you know everything about me, every single thought inside my head. And you don’t.”

  He could see the hurt in her eyes. “I don’t think that,” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said, “you do.”

  He looked at her. “You don’t always know me, Abs.”

  “No,” she said. “I guess not.” Her eyes were locked on his, Nate not knowing in this moment whether she looked more surprised or hurt at what had happened to her first afternoon back.

  “Maybe I should just leave,” he said finally.

  “Maybe you should.”

  And he did.

  CHAPTER 21

  It was the first time he’d ever made it through a whole weekend, at least a weekend when he and Abby McCall were both in Valley, without calling her or talking to her online. Or seeing her.

  Even though he wanted to.

  At least there was a game for him to play and focus on, Saturday against Salisbury, a game the head coaches nearly called off because it was raining so hard. But because of the way the schedule was set up, there was no weekend the rest of the season when the two teams could play each other. So they played through the conditions, in what felt like the Mud Bowl game of all time.

  Nate didn’t have to worry about his throwing because it was almost impossible to throw in the wind and rain. He attempted two passes in the first half, two in the second half, handed off the ball more than ever to his running backs, and watched the two defenses slug it out. Finally, after the wet ball launched awkwardly from the Salisbury long-snapper to their punter, Nate cheered as Ben slipped from the outside to block a punt with four minutes left, then recover it in the end zone for a 6-0 Valley victory.

  When it was over, Malcolm Burnley came over to Nate and said, “We are never going to be clean again.”
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  Nate said, “I remember football in the mud being a lot more fun when we were little.”

  “Dude, are you joking?” Malcolm said. “We won. If that isn’t fun, it’s gonna have to do until something more fun comes along.”

  Nate thought about calling Abby when he got home, to tell her about the conditions at Salisbury, tell her what it was like trying to play football in what felt like quicksand. But he didn’t. Didn’t call her all day Sunday either, just spent part of the day on his computer and part of it at the library, feeling the way he assumed coaches had to feel when they were game-planning for the other team.

  Looking for one opening that might change the game.

  On Monday morning he and Abby sat next to each other on the bus the way they always did, acting as if nothing had changed between them, both of them knowing differently from the minute she sat down next to him.

  He took a deep breath.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey yourself.”

  “Good weekend?”

  “Yeah. You?”

  “We beat Salisbury on Saturday in the storm. Ugliest game of all time. I kept expecting a cow to come flying across the field like in that movie Twister.”

  “How’d you do?”

  “I didn’t make any mistakes,” he said. “For a change.”

  “Cool.”

  Normally she would have wanted to know all about it. Abby was always interested in the game even though she wasn’t interested in football, interested in it because of Nate. It was the same way he felt about her painting: All paintings looked pretty much the same to him unless they were hers.

  But things felt different today, not just on the bus.

  At school, Abby sat in a front seat in every single classroom now, no matter where she’d been sitting before. And in Miss Buchanan’s math class, their first class after lunch, her desk now had a small monitor that was like her own closed-circuit TV, Abby getting a close-up of the problems Miss Buchanan was writing out on the blackboard.

  When math was over, Abby said to Nate, “This was one of the things they suggested at Perkins, and it turned out audiovisual was able to hook it up for me. You think it looked totally weird?”