Million-Dollar Throw (12 page)

She was trying to smile her way through this, giving Nate a crash course on the famous blind woman from the front booth at Joe’s Pizza.

All Nate heard was this: Abby might be leaving.

“It’s only a semester, Brady,” she said. “Even if I do leave, it’s not as if I’d be leaving you forever.”

“But . . . you’re not blind,” he said.

“Yet.”

“Okay,” he said. “You’re not blind
yet
.”

“Listen, I know I could wait to start learning the stuff I need to learn,” she said. “But we finally decided, or we’re just about all the way decided, that the stuff I
could
learn at Perkins while I still can see, what they call ‘life skills’ there”—Abby put air quotes around the words—“would be easier than if I tried to learn them after the lights go out.”

Making it sound like a switch somebody was going to throw. Nate thinking: And I’m worried about making a throw in football.

“Say something, Brady.”

“I’m not smart enough to say the right thing. Or know what the right thing is.”

“It’d be one semester,” Abby said. “Think of it as if I was going off to boarding school and then coming back in time for summer.”

“You make it sound like some kind of vacation,” he said. “But I
am
smart enough to know it’s not.”

“Okay, it’s not,” she said. “So from now on we’ll think of it as boot camp for blind people.” She brightened then and said, “Hey! Maybe we could get somebody to do one of those TV series about me going to Perkins the way they do those dopey training-camp football shows you make me watch with you. What’s it called?”

“Hard Knocks,”
he said.

“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:

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.

I
t 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.