Million-Dollar Throw (23 page)

He’d told them the day before they could “relax” up there.

“Yeah,” Nate said in the back of the limousine, the first limousine ride of his life. “That’s what I’m planning to do between now and halftime. Relax. You guys’ll probably have to wake me up from my nap so I don’t sleep through the throw.”

“You look calm enough to me,” his mom said.

“Cool as a cucumber,” his dad said.

Nate shook his head. “Whatever veggie’s
not
cool? That’s me.”

Malcolm was sitting next to him, having made the trip with the Brodies from Valley to Foxboro the night before. Nate had told Malcolm that he wanted him along so he’d have somebody to warm up with, even though Malcolm didn’t exactly have the softest hands on the Patriots. That was the cover story, anyway. The real reason was that Malcolm was his best friend on the team and he’d always been able to make Nate feel better about almost everything just by being around.

For tonight, Malcolm was describing himself as Nate’s “quality control coach.”

“You’re gonna be cool because you
are
cool,” Malcolm said in the limo. “Gonna be the same on this field as it’s gonna be against Blair in the championship game. Nobody is gonna see my man sweat.”

“I wish,” Nate said.

Doug Compton was waiting for them in VIP parking, as promised. They’d met Doug at the hotel last night, when he’d come over to “walk them through” the halftime show.

“We’re rooting for you tonight,” Doug said.

Nate said, “But I could cost you a million dollars.”

“Nate, listen to me,” Doug said. “If a thirteen-year-old boy makes that throw on national television, nobody at our place is going to feel like a loser. You’ve got to trust me on that one.”

Now he handed them all the credentials they were supposed to wear around their necks. When they were inside, Nate asked Doug Compton to double-check again that the tickets had been left for Abby and her parents. Doug said he would when they got upstairs, then said to Nate, “Well, you look nice and relaxed, considering the circumstances.”

Nate looked at Malcolm and rolled his eyes. “Yeah,” he said. “Cool as a cucumber.”

When they got to the suite, neither Nate nor Malcolm could believe their eyes. “My whole
house
isn’t as nice as this,” Malcolm said. There was a living area with a huge flat-screen TV that was showing the Cowboys game from Dallas, and a kitchen and four rows of seats looking out at the 45-yard-line, and even a stack of video games and controllers that Doug said SportStuff had ordered for the occasion.

“I don’t just want to watch the game from here,” Malcolm said. “I want to
move
here.”

Doug Compton told everybody to help themselves to food and drinks, that a waiter would be arriving any second, then reminded Nate and his parents that he would walk them downstairs with about five minutes remaining in the first half. When the half ended, he’d take them out on the field along with the president of SportStuff, then Nate would be interviewed briefly by Gil Santos, the Patriots radio play-by-play man, over the stadium’s public address system.

“At that point,” Doug Compton said, “somebody will hand you the ball.”

Nate said, “I brought my own,” and opened up the small gym bag he’d brought with him and showed Doug Compton the Brady ball.

Before Doug left, Nate asked if it would be all right for him and Malcolm to go back down to the field for a few minutes, just so he could loosen up a little and get used to the lights, maybe even the wind. He didn’t want halftime to be the first time he was on that field. Doug made a quick call on his cell phone, said, “No problem,” and then he and Nate and Malcolm went back down the elevator.

Nate wasn’t sure what he would feel like in a few hours, when he was making the walk toward the field for real. But even now, walking past the Pats’ locker room, his heart was pounding so hard and so fast, making him feel so out of breath, that it was as if he’d skipped the limo ride and
run
all the way here from the hotel.

A lot of the Patriots’ players were already on the field. They weren’t dressed in full pads yet, no helmets—just sweatshirts, some playing catch, some stretching, some doing wind sprints. All were getting ready for their own big night on Thanksgiving. Nate looked around for Tom Brady, hoping he might be out early, but didn’t see him anywhere.

Nate asked Doug Compton again if Abby and her parents would have the same credentials he had so they’d be able to come down to the field at halftime, too.

If this did end the way Nate wanted it to, she had to be there.

“Just spoke to them,” Doug said. “On her mom’s cell. They hit some traffic but got to the suite right after we came down here. So no worries. Why don’t you go get your throwing in? SportStuff has a lot of juice around here, but they’re not going to let us stay on the field forever.”

Nate and Malcolm went over and began soft-tossing behind the Patriots’ bench. Nate took his time between throws so he could look around, at the open end of the stadium, at the SportStuff signs and an even bigger one for F. W. Webb, the huge Gillette sign over the scoreboard. Finally seeing the world of pro football—Brady’s world—from the inside. The lights. The signs. The fans starting to fill the seats. The wire over his head, the one with the camera attached to it, zooming along this way and that, as if the camera were warming up, too, for when it would give people watching on television those amazing overhead shots.

Nate even noticed how green the grass was, how white the white of the hash marks looked from down here, how bright the colors of the lettering for “Patriots” in the end zones and the Patriots logo on the field.

As bright as Abby colors.

The first time Nate’s dad had taken him to Fenway Park, Nate had been surprised that the place looked even smaller than he’d expected from watching on television. Gillette Stadium was bigger. He thought, Everything is bigger tonight.

Except maybe the target.

All along, every day of practice, every night when this throw was the last thing he’d think about—when he wasn’t thinking about what was happening with Abby—Nate kept telling himself the same thing: It would be the same target in Gillette that he was throwing to in his backyard. Only now, standing on this field, he knew better. Now even the thought of the pep talks he’d been giving himself made him laugh out loud, loud enough for Malcolm to hear over the pregame rock music being piped into Gillette Stadium.

Malcolm yelled down to him, “What’s so funny?”

Nate put the Brady ball under his arm and made a gesture with his left hand that tried to take in the whole stadium.

“This!” he yelled back. “Us being here. Me trying to make the throw tonight.”

“And this . . . amuses you?”

“Yeah, it kind of does,” Nate said.

Nate threw him one last pass, a spiral so tight the ball seemed to shrink in the air, then signaled that he was finished. Malcolm jogged over to him and handed him back the ball.

“You always tell me that winning’s more fun than anything,” Malcolm said. “Well, tonight you’re gonna win something people will never forget, and turn this into the funnest night of your life.”

Nate knelt down behind the bench then, grabbed a clump of grass, a big one, stuck it in the pocket of his jeans. Malcolm gave him a look. Nate said, “Souvenir.” Malcolm nodded and grabbed some grass of his own.

Doug Compton led them back toward the tunnel. Malcolm started talking about all the things he’d buy for himself with a million dollars if he only had to spend it on himself: flat screens, an iPhone, every cool video game known to man, season tickets to the Patriots’ games, and a fancy sports car that he would hold on to until he was old enough to drive it to Gillette Stadium.

“What about you?” he said to Nate. “You must’ve thought about it.”

“Yeah, dude,” Nate said. “I have.”

“So, you gonna tell?”

Nate smiled and shook his head. “It’s like you don’t tell what your wish is before you blow out the candles,” he said.

Nate believed it.

He believed, tonight more than ever, that if you said it out loud, about the million bucks, it would never happen in a million years.

For most of the first half, what turned out to be a dream first half for Brady and the Patriots, Nate focused on every move the quarterback made. Thinking he might never have a view of a quarterback this good again. And knowing he’d better appreciate it, knowing how quickly things could change, how quickly things had changed for Tom Brady the day he’d gotten hurt.

It had been harder for him to come back than anybody had ever expected. There had been complicatons after the first surgery followed by more setbacks and then even more surgery, which meant starting rehab all over again. Some people wondered if he would ever play again. But finally, Tom Brady was back. Boy, was he ever back—and playing as if he’d never been away, completing the first fourteen passes he attempted, three of them for touchdowns. He was in complete command of himself and his team, and if you watched him move around in the pocket, you wouldn’t have known that anything had ever happened to one of his knees. The Patriots didn’t even attempt a punt until their second possession of the second quarter.

“Your guy isn’t cheating us tonight, is he?” Nate’s dad said, sitting next to him in the front row of the suite.

Nate said, “You think he’d mind making my throw for me? Because he hasn’t missed anything he’s aimed at all night.”

Abby punched Nate from the row behind him. “You’re not missing either, Brodie.”

“I’m
Brodie
now?” he said.

Nate turned around, saw Abby squinting at the field, where Brady had just completed another pass down the field to Randy Moss. “He’s Brady tonight,” she said. “You’re Brodie.”

Nate had been trying not to look at the clock too much, not even sure if he wanted it to go slower or faster. But before long there was five twenty-eight showing on the game clock. He heard a knock on the window from inside and saw Doug Compton and the president of SportStuff, Mr. Levine, waving at him. Nate’s mom was with them. Then Doug smiled and pointed at his watch.

Nate walked back inside and his mom said, “Showtime.”

Mr. and Mrs. McCall said they were too nervous, they were going to stay upstairs, watch from here. So the rest of them formed a caravan as they walked down the hall to the elevator bank: Nate, his parents, Abby, Malcolm, Doug Compton, Mr. Levine.

It was then that Doug noticed that Nate was bringing his ball with him.

“Whose autograph?” Doug said, pointing at the ball.

“Tom Brady,” Nate said.

“Should’ve known,” Doug said. Then he smiled and said, “Absolutely perfect.”

By the time they were at the entrance to the tunnel, watching the game from there, Brady had thrown his fourth touchdown pass of the half and the Patriots were ahead 28-7. Major beatdown. It wasn’t ever going to make up for that loss to the Giants in the Super Bowl a few years before, the night in Arizona when the Patriots were trying to go undefeated for a whole season, but for tonight it would do.

I’m the one trying to go undefeated tonight, Nate thought, not Brady.

When the half ended, the players from both teams went running right past them, all of them seeming to arrive at once. Nate tried to spot Brady but couldn’t, figuring he must be hidden by a bunch of linemen who up close looked as big as SUVs.

“Okay,” Nate’s dad said, “let’s do this,” and then Doug Compton led them all toward the other end of the field, where Nate could see workmen wheeling out the SportStuff target.

Abby was holding on to Nate. No cane tonight. No special glasses, even with the stadium lights as bright as they were. She gave his arm a squeeze.

“You ready?”

“No,” he said.

She laughed, hooked her arm inside his now, totally the old Abby in that moment. “C’mon,” she said. “It’s going to be great.”