Million-Dollar Throw (3 page)

As if she were the one on the clock.

“You gonna let me see that?” Nate said.

“When I’m done,” she said, not looking up, her right hand flying all over the page as if it had a mind of its own.

“Your mom’s right, you know,” she said.

“About what?”

“About you enjoying all this and not putting too much pressure on yourself.”

“C’mon, Abs,” he said. “How can I not? I mean, if I ever make the throw, which I have no chance of actually making, that money would change everything for my mom and dad. Starting with the fact that they wouldn’t have to work so hard. My dad might go back to having one job instead of two.”

“I heard that,” Sue Brodie yelled from the kitchen. “You can worry about money when you’re a dad someday. We’ll handle it around here until then.”

Abby closed her sketchbook, walked over to where Nate was sitting on the couch, and pinched him hard on his left—nonthrowing—arm. “I thought we had a deal,” she said. “Did we not have a deal?”

“We did.”

“And the deal, as I recall, went something like this: This isn’t a job for you. It’s an adventure.”

Nate grinned. “I’m almost positive you stole that from somebody.”

“You do
not
want to tangle with me on this,” Abby said. “You’re the one who’s always telling me that the very best part of sports is how it can make a new memory for you practically every day. And right now you’ve got a memory going that will last both of us our whole lives, whether you make the throw or not.”

She called out to Nate’s mom, asked how much time there was before dinner, was told five minutes, and went back to her chair. She opened her sketchbook back up and put her face so close to the paper Nate thought her nose was going to touch as she studied her work. “Even though you
are
going to make that throw,” she added.

“How can you be so sure?”

“You know me,” Abby said. “I see things nobody else does.”

They had a rule, Nate and Abby:

He never looked in her sketchbook without permission.

But he was allowed to
ask
to see something. Which is what he did now, the two of them sitting out on the Brodies’ small screened-in back porch after dinner, Nate asking to see what she’d drawn when they’d been inside watching SportsCenter.

“Okay,” she said, opening up the book, leafing through pages of drawings Nate knew he’d probably never see, the ones that were for her eyes only. “But I want you to know it’s nothing you’re going to want to slap a frame on, Brady, it’s just a fun thing.”

It was an amazing fun thing.

Nate knew how fast she’d done it, knew it should have looked like the first draft of one of his papers for school, with scratch-outs and corrections all over the page. Only it didn’t look that way at all. Somehow, just using her pencil, it was like she’d taken a picture of what the room had looked like with all of them sitting there in front of the television.

She’d imagined it as if she were on the side, in front of the picture window. So you saw Malcolm’s face from the side, and LaDell’s, and Pete’s. You saw Nate more clearly, and his mom. Somehow you felt how intensely they’d all been focused on the set, which is where Abby had some fun, having a football flying out of it, as if it were on its way through the window and out of the room.

“A
fun
thing?” Nate said. “Abs, this is awesome.
Awesomely
awesome.”

“It’s okay, Mr. Art Critic,” she said. “I could have done better with the picture inside the screen, so I took the easy way out, with the flying football.”

“Yeah, that’s obviously going to take your grade
way
down.”

She leaned over, as if a pinch were coming, making Nate flinch. And making both of them laugh. “You know as much about art as you do needlepoint,” she said. “Or pedicures.”

“I know enough to know what’s good and what isn’t,” he said. “And I know you’re as tough on yourself after you draw as I am on myself after a game. Even if we’ve won.” Nate pointed to her book and said, “How come you’re not in the picture?”

She closed it up and said, “You know me. I like to be invisible and let everybody else tell the story. Wait till you see what I’m going to come up with the night you make the bazillion-dollar throw.”

He smiled at her. But then, smiling at Abby McCall, at the things she said and the things she drew and the way she was, felt as natural to Nate as throwing a football. They had always gone to school together, always lived a block away from each other. Nate couldn’t remember a time when they hadn’t been best friends. Not Nate’s “girl” friend. Just best friend.

Mostly she was just Abby.

Nate’s mom called her a force of nature.

She must have felt him staring at her as she looked out into the backyard with night falling, Nate wondering, as always, what she really saw.

“What?” she said.

“Nothing.”

“Don’t nothing me.”

“I was just thinking.”

She turned and smiled back at him. “Always a good thing, at least until it starts to give you a headache.”

“I was just thinking,” he said, “how great it would be if we could just keep talking about me making that throw, and being excited about me making the throw, but me never actually having to go there and make it.”

“We’ve already been over this a hundred times. You’re going. I’m going with you.”

Nate said, “Where else would you be?”

“Exactly,” she said. “That night I’ll be up in the stands, cheering you on as you put the ball through the silly hole and we all live happily ever after.”

Nate didn’t say anything to that because he never knew what to say when Abby said something like that. It was almost completely quiet now in the back of the house. Nothing from inside the house, where Nate’s mom was reading. No traffic sounds from out front.

“You have to see me do it,” Nate said.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I will.”

“But you said . . .”

“Forget what I said, things haven’t been so bad lately.”

“You never say things are bad.”

“This is another thing we’ve gone over, Brady, about twelve thousand times. Things aren’t good or bad with me. They just are what they are.”

“I don’t want them to be what they are.”

Abby said, “This isn’t one of your games. You can’t control everything because you’re the best player on the field.” She smiled again. “The boy with the golden arm.”

“Doesn’t mean I can’t want to,” Nate said.

“And guess what?” Abby said. “When I hear the crowd that night after you make your throw, I’ll be able to see everything perfectly.”

They both knew she was lying.

Because the truth about Abby McCall was that she was going blind.

N
ate remembered the first time he had known there was a problem with Abby’s eyes. It was a year ago, and they’d decided to go to the movies on a Saturday afternoon in the summer even though most of the guys had gone over to the public pool at Coppo Park.

It was the movie about Kit Kittredge, All-American Girl, and wasn’t one Nate would have gone to see himself, even on a bet. But Abby never complained when he wanted to see one of his movies—Abby called them all the same thing,
War of the Exploding Car-Chasing Aliens
—so Nate went along with her, just to keep her company.

It was something he knew he could never possibly explain to his buds or even to Abby herself. But for Nate, it wasn’t just sitting back in the pocket where he felt the best.

It was pretty much in any room that Abby was in.

So they went to the movies. And Nate didn’t have a clue at the time, because she hadn’t said anything, that she’d started having a terrible time with her night vision. And that she’d already begun to lose most of her peripheral vision.

When Nate found out that part later, he’d said to her, “You can have some of mine.” Meaning his peripheral vision, his ability to see the field in front of him like it was in that wide letter-box format he watched movies in. Nate couldn’t just see the whole field, he felt like he could see
behind
him sometimes, when a would-be tackler thought he had a clear shot at him from that blind side to his left.

Blind side.

It was what all sides were becoming for Abby, like walls closing in on her.

He knew all about the disease called retinitis pigmentosa now. Just not then. All he knew that day was that when they were inside the theater, a few minutes late, there was this night scene that made it hard for even Nate’s eyes to adjust to the dark. And when they were halfway down the side aisle looking for seats, Abby just froze.

Nate didn’t know right away. He had spotted a couple of seats and said, “Right there, Abs.”

Only she wasn’t behind him.

She was about twenty feet back up the aisle, not moving.

“I can’t,” she whispered loudly, and for a second Nate stupidly thought she just didn’t want to sit in the middle seats he’d managed to find.

“Okay,” he whispered back. “We can move closer if you want.”

Then Abby finished her thought.

“I can’t
see,
” she said.

Nate walked back up the aisle to her, still not getting it, saying, “I can’t see too good, either.”

And in this small voice, not sounding anything like herself, she said, “No. I can’t see anything.”

Then the movie went back to daylight and it was like a light switch had been thrown in the theater, and they’d made their way to their seats, and just like that she was back to being Abby. “Well,” she said, “that was certainly weird.”

“Well,
yeah,
” Nate said.

Abby poked him and said, “No, I meant weird that
you
were
my
guide for a change.”

It was her way of making things all right, saying it was no big deal, joking that she’d suffered the eye version of one of Nate’s famous brain cramps in school. And Nate went right along with her, because he always did.

Only now he knew that was the real start of it, everything that was happening to her, and there was nothing anybody could do to stop it.

It was the beginning of everything, and it had forced Nate to learn about how eyes really worked—or didn’t work—about rods and cones and colors.

About how Abby’s world was on its way to being as dark as a movie theater.

That was the summer when Abby realized it was more than her having a problem going from dark to light, more than bumping into things at night, more than having trouble sitting at her window and staring at the stars, one of her favorite things her whole life.

He knew now that the loss of night vision and peripheral vision were just two of her symptoms, knew that the cones closest to the center of her eyes were already making her sense of color go haywire. Abby herself had told him that, explaining why her paintings looked the way they did, explaining that if they both looked at the same rainbow and then she painted it, the colors would look completely different than they had to Nate, as though she were living on the other side of the rainbow.

“It’s why it’s going to be all right, Brady, you wait and see,” she’d said. “Sometimes I feel like I’m painting better than I ever have.”

In those moments Nate would want to scream at her, even though he never would, that she wasn’t going to be able to paint anything once the keyhole shut completely.

That’s the way he saw things inside his head when he imagined the way the world was starting to look to Abby McCall.

He saw them through an old-fashioned keyhole.

Nate had looked up retinitis pigmentosa on the Internet after Abby had finally told him the truth about what was wrong with her eyes. He’d found a “Fighting Blindness” website. And right there on the first page were two pictures. On the left were two little boys, both holding soccer balls, smiling into the camera.