Million-Dollar Throw (24 page)

Malcolm walked on the other side of him. Nate’s mom and dad were behind him. Nate forced himself to stop looking around now, to stop looking into the stands and at the television cameraman walking along with them, his camera trained on Nate, all the other cameramen taking their place up near the 30-yard line.

Nate tried to keep his eyes on the target.

Now he heard Gil Santos, the voice of the Patriots for a period that Nate’s dad described as forever, welcoming everybody to a very special Thanksgiving halftime show, explaining to the people in the stands that thirteen-year-old Nate Brodie of Valley, Massachusetts, was about to try to throw a football through the hole in the middle of the SportStuff target to win a million dollars for himself and his family.

“Here they are crossing midfield right now!” Gil Santos said. “So let’s give a rousing Gillette Stadium welcome to the young man of the hour . . .
Nate Brodie
!”

Then they were all walking into the most incredible sound Nate had ever heard, one he couldn’t believe was for him. The force of it seemed to knock the air out of him, making him feel at the same time as if his legs had stopped working.

“Wow!” Abby yelled. “Wow wow wow!”

“Yeah,” Malcolm said. “What she said.”

Somehow Nate kept walking.

They stopped at the 40, ten yards from where Nate would make the throw. Somehow it seemed more cameramen and photographers had appeared, out of nowhere. Gil Santos introduced Mr. Levine, who waved to the crowd.

Then Gil Santos motioned for Nate to come forward.

“Are you possibly ready for this, Nate?” Gil said when Nate was standing next to him.

Nate swallowed and said, “I better be.”

The crowd cheered.

“Then we are just about ready to get this party started,” Gil Santos said. “But before we do, you probably want to warm up, right?”

“Yes, sir,” Nate said, and was about to tell him that’s why he’d brought his friend Malcolm with him, give Malcolm a shout-out to the crowd.

But before he could, Gil Santos said, “Well, if you’re going to warm up, you probably want to do that with your quarterback coach, don’t you, Nate?”

“My coach . . . ?” Nate said.

Then Gil was shouting into his microphone and over the Gillette Stadium sound system, “Tom Brady, why don’t you come over here and give Nate some last-minute advice!”

There was another cheer then, louder than before, louder than anything, as the Patriots’ No. 12 came running out of the tunnel.

H
e was bigger than Nate had thought, just like the stadium had been.

He didn’t have his helmet with him, and his hair was all over the place, looking as it usually did, as if the best quarterback in the world had cut his hair himself.

“Nice to meet you, Nate,” he said, putting out his right hand.

And Nate was so flustered, so excited to be actually shaking Brady’s hand—with his hands shaking the way they were—that he forgot he was holding his football and promptly dropped it.

Brady laughed. Somehow so did Nate, feeling as if he’d used up all the available air in his body. “They told me you’re a QB yourself, right?” Brady said. Nate nodded. “Then you know,” Tom Brady said. “
Never
put the ball on the ground.”

Before Nate could reach down to pick the ball up, Brady beat him to it. As he did, he looked at the signature and smiled.

“This yours?” he said to Nate.

“Bought it with my own money.”

“And you’re using this one to make the throw?”

“Yeah,” Nate said.

“Wow, now the pressure’s on me, too,” Brady said. “I’ve
got
to come through for you.”

Then Nate said what he’d said upstairs, told Tom Brady he was welcome to make the throw for him, and Brady said, “Nah, Nate. Right now you’re the man out here. Now let me see the arm.”

Like it was the two of them out at Coppo. Brady was the one who ran up the field, turned around, motioned for Nate to throw him the ball. Nate did. It wobbled a little, but got there. Him and Tom Brady, having a game of catch at Gillette. The crowd roared. Brady threw the ball back, making it look as easy as he had in the first half. The crowd roared again.

Somehow, even knowing what was about to happen, Nate didn’t want this part of the night to end.

They threw it back and forth to each other a few more times, Brady acting as if he had all the time in the world. Finally Brady walked back to Nate, put his arm around his shoulders.

“That first Super Bowl,” he said, “nobody—and I mean nobody—thought I could take our team down the field. But it didn’t matter. Because
I
believed. So
you
believe, okay?”

“Okay,” Nate said. “But you couldn’t have been as scared in the Superdome as I am right now.”

“But, see, that’s the beauty of sports,” Tom Brady said. “I still get scared. But I never stop believing. The way I never stopped believing I would come back and play this way again after my knee surgeries.” Then he said something Nate couldn’t believe, as if he’d gotten inside Nate’s head. “Now go make this movie come out the way you want it to.”

Brady handed the ball back to him, went over and stood with Nate’s parents, and Abby, and Malcolm.

Now Gil Santos said, “So this is the moment we’ve all been waiting for. And
you’ve
been waiting for, Nate Brodie. Let’s see you try to win a million dollars.”

In that moment, Nate didn’t just hear the noise of Gillette Stadium, he felt it. Then, just as suddenly, it got quiet, at least for him, the way it got quiet at the end of a game.

Nate walked toward the SportStuff logo, the small one they’d made for him at the 30-yard line. His mark. When he got there, he took one last look back, looking at Abby, saw her pat her heart twice.

Believe,
the great Tom Brady had said.

And in that moment, Nate did.

He believed as he thought about all the times he’d made this throw behind the house, all the times he’d told himself that he was threading the needle over the middle to Bradley, or Pete, or Eric, or Ben. Ball, target. His dad had told him that from the time the two of them had first gone into the backyard with a football about half the size of the one he held in his right hand now.

The Brady ball, on Brady’s field.

With Brady himself a few yards away, watching.

Why not?
Nate asked himself, for the very last time.

He didn’t wait, didn’t hesitate. He had waited long enough. He stepped toward the target, fingers on the laces, like he was stepping up in the pocket.

And released the ball.

That’s what he thought, what he was sure of, when he released it.

Only he was wrong.

Maybe because that’s not the way the story was supposed to end.

The last few yards the spiral he’d thrown at the SportStuff target looked like an arrow finding a bull’s-eye as it sailed cleanly through the hole.

All the money in the world.

Everything that happened next seemed to happen at once—the explosion of noise that seemed to come crashing down on Nate, the flashing lights all over the stadium, even the fireworks that appeared in the sky.

Nate turned then. And before he looked to Abby, before he looked to his parents, Nate found himself staring right at Tom Brady, smiling at him. Brady smiled back, pumping his fist at him, then pointing as if to say,
You did it.

So this is what it feels like, Nate wanted to say to him.

This is what it’s like to be you.

He’d have to watch the tape later to remember what he’d said into the microphone when it was over. He did remember his mom crying and hugging him. And his dad hugging him and yelling into his ear, “The only kid who could have made that throw just made it.”

Then they were bringing out one of those huge fake checks you saw golfers and tennis players get after they won tournaments, the check with “Nate Brodie” on it and “$1,000,000” on the line where the amount was, the check so long that Nate imagined it stretching all the way to the other end zone.

Then Malcolm was on him, lifting him into the air, slapping him one high five after another when he put him down, slapping him so hard it should have made Nate’s right hand start hurting again, but Nate was feeling no pain tonight at Gillette Stadium.

“Dude!” Malcolm said. “That was
sick
. Like, one of those
plagues
we read about in history sick.”

Nate took a step back, like a fighter covering up, and said, “Dude? Easy on the throwing hand. We’ve still got one game left to play, remember?”

Malcolm said, “If you can make a throw like that, no
way
we’re losing to Blair.”

Nate saw Abby then, hanging back, still standing where she’d been before Nate made the throw. She was crying again, he could see, but Nate knew these were happy tears this time. He could see it in those eyes. He walked straight for her, not knowing if the TV cameras were still tracking him or not, not caring. Then he hugged Abby McCall in front of the whole stadium and maybe the whole country. She hugged him back, for all she was worth.

“Did you . . . could you see it go through, Abs?” he said.

She shook her head, and in that moment must have seen the look that started to come across Nate’s face like a cloud passing over all the lights of Gillette.

“But don’t worry,” she said. “It was only because I was watching you the whole time.”

“I couldn’t have made it without you, Abs,” he said.

Now there were no tears, just a huge smile. “Like I don’t know that,” she said.

They were starting to clear the field now. Nate could hear the public address announcer saying that the second half would be starting shortly.

All of a sudden he and Abby were alone at the 30-yard line, the two of them standing right on top of the SportStuff logo.

“So I’ve got to ask, Brodie,” she said, still calling him that. “What
are
you going to do with all that money?”

Finally, the end of the movie.

“I’m giving it to you,” he said. “I found a way for you to see.”

Y
ou’re going to do
what
with all that money?” his mom said.

Friday morning at their house. Thanksgiving with the Brodies, at least as soon as his dad got back. Even on what felt like an instant national sports holiday, his dad was showing two houses this morning, in his new job with Johnson Moriarty, the biggest real estate company in Valley. The job offer had been one of what felt like a hundred messages on their phone when they’d finally gotten home from Foxboro the night before.

Nate thinking it was like one more cool scene, the kind they showed you sometimes when the credits were rolling and you were walking out of the theater.

But for now it was Nate and his mom, bottom of the front stairs.

He decided he’d tell her first, about the surgeon who’d saved the eyesight of a thirteen-year-old boy in London with the same kind of Leber’s disease Abby had. The surgeon and the surgery Nate had finally discovered after all those days and nights and searching on the web, sometimes checking every hour on the hour.

He saw the story on Google the same day it showed up on another Web site he’d been going to every day for the last couple of months, run by the Foundation Fighting Blindness.

Not an experimental trial this time, he told his mom, but the real deal, a real-live surgery that had restored the sight of a boy whose vision had started deteriorating at about the same age Abby’s had.

His mom knew Nate had been looking into possible surgeries and cures. That’s why they’d gone to see Dr. Hunter at Children’s Hospital Boston. Yet she didn’t know there was a surgery that could give Abby her sight back.

But Dr. Hunter had told him how expensive it was going to be, how much time Abby might have to spend in England.

All that.

Now he told his mom.

“I don’t know if it will cost a million, Mom,” he said, talking fast. “But it’s going to cost a lot, and Abby’s dad lost his health insurance and . . . and I don’t care, as long as Abby can see again.”

She didn’t say anything right away, just looked at him, shaking her head. Nate thought she might have some of those happy tears going. “
Always
leading with the heart,” she said.

“Something like that,” Nate said. “I’ve been thinking about this for a while.”

“Really? I hadn’t noticed.”

Then his mom said, “You’ve talked about this with Abby?”

“Not till last night.”

“So this was your plan all along. Like one of your game plans.”

“You helped by taking me to see Dr. Hunter. He’s been in contact with the London doctors ever since.” Nate grinned. “And it didn’t hurt that I won that little prize by making the throw.”