Last Man Out

by Mike Lupica

  “At least she came out of her room for something other than school, or to get food,” Tommy said.

  “For an adventure,” she said.

  “I still should have been here.”

  “Like she said, she could’ve gotten out even if you’d been here.” His mom sipped her tea. “But you can be here for her now.”

  “I don’t know how!” he said. “She never wants to talk to me. It’s like we’re living in the same house but we’re not even on the same planet.”

  “That doesn’t mean you should give up on her. You never give up on anything, not football, and not this family.”

  “I’ll try and think of something,” he said, “to make up for being the planet’s worst babysitter.”

  “That’s all I’m asking for.”

  His mom walked into the kitchen and started banging around some pots and pans to get dinner started.

  He sat there on the couch, the television still muted, the game between Mississippi and LSU in a commercial. Then an idea came to him. Sometimes when he’d tell Greck he had an idea about something, Greck would say, “It was inevitable.”

  Tommy was usually overflowing with ideas.

  He shut off the TV, got off the couch, and went back out to the garage.

  • • •

  When he knocked on Em’s door, he heard his sister say, “I don’t know why anybody bothers to knock, you know you’re coming in.”

  When Tommy opened the door, she looked over at him from her bed and saw he was holding her soccer ball.

  “What are you doing with that?” she said.

  “I’m asking you to come kick this ball around with me at Rogers,” he said. “I heard on television that soccer can actually improve your footwork in football.”

  “It does, actually.”

  “So come show me.”

  And to his surprise—or maybe his shock—Em said, “Okay.”

  He watched as she hopped off her bed, went into her closet, got her soccer cleats, sat on the floor and put them on.

  “I might not stay very long,” she said.

  Tommy grinned.

  “Afraid you’ll get bored being with me?” he said. “How do you know I won’t get bored with you first?”

  “Because you’re more boring than I am.”

  She put her head down, maybe so he wouldn’t see the smile on her face. Tommy didn’t feel like he’d won some kind of game in that moment.

  But he at least felt as if he’d made a good play.

  • • •

  It wasn’t as if one trip to Rogers Park was enough to turn her back into the same fun—and funny—girl she’d been before the fire took their dad. It wasn’t as if a little chirp in her room, and on their way to Rogers, had brought her back from the sad, quiet place that her world had become.

  But for a little while, it was like they were at least brother and sister again.

  Tommy had no way of knowing how long it might last. He wasn’t even going to ask why she’d agreed to go to the park. His mom tried to not act surprised when they’d come into the kitchen and told her they were going to Rogers, and would be back by supper.

  All she’d said was “Take as much time as you want, we can eat whenever.”

  One minute his mom had been about to call the police to find Em, the next she was giving him a fist pump as he looked over his shoulder leaving the kitchen on the way to Rogers. With Em, these days, you took what you could get. And what he was about to get was a soccer lesson, one she said he needed almost as soon as they started warming up.

  “You are the worst kicker ever,” she said. “Seriously? No one ever showed you how to kick a soccer ball?”

  “I never played,” he said. “I never tried out, because as soon as I was old enough for team sports, I played football.”

  “You still should be able to kick.”

  “I kick butt on a football field,” he said. “Doesn’t that count?”

  His sister shook her head, sadly, as if that wasn’t even worth commenting on.

  He looked around Rogers Park in the late afternoon. It was pretty empty. There were a couple of parents in the distance with baby strollers, and a couple of boys throwing around a Frisbee, their dog barking and chasing the Frisbee when it was in the air.

  It occurred to Tommy that, just like the firehouse, he hadn’t been back to Rogers, either, since his dad died.

  “Hey,” Em said. “Hey, you.”

  Tommy gave his head a quick shake to snap out of it.

  “What were you thinking?”

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “Yeah,” she said in a soft voice. “Me too.” Then she said, “Come on, let’s do this.”

  She placed the ball on the ground and dribbled it ahead of her in the grass, focused only on the ball and where she was going. She and Tommy had set up a couple of plastic trash cans to use as a goal. When she got to the other end of the park, she stopped suddenly, spun, put the ball on the inside of her left foot, and blasted a kick that knocked into the top of one of the trash cans, just missing the center.

  “Caught the post!” Tommy yelled down to her. “That’s gotta sting.”

  “I meant to hit it,” Em said, “so I didn’t have to chase the ball. Now get down here.”

  She showed him how to control the ball without having to look down at it. In a funny way it was a little like skateboarding: going as fast as you could, knowing where you wanted to end up, your balance being the key to everything.

  “This is kind of fun,” he said.

  “Duh,” she said.

  Em showed him how to plant and swing his leg to make the ball go where he wanted, no matter how hard he hit it. He had no handle at first with his left foot, but his accuracy got better pretty quickly with his right.

  “In football,” Em said, “it doesn’t matter how good a quarterback’s arm is if he’s not accurate, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Same here.”

  She even showed him how he could control a high pass to his chest, though he kept wanting to use his hands.

  “No hands!” she kept saying.

  “I’m a defensive guy!” he said. “My first instinct is to reach for the ball!”

  Em said, “Soccer’s about being so good with the rest of your body you don’t need your hands. Daddy told me that, and he didn’t know anything about soccer at first.”

  “But he learned.”

  “So can you.”

  “He was smarter than me.”

  “Practically everybody is,” Em said.

  This time she didn’t hide her smile.

  Tommy was enjoying himself. Not so much the soccer part, more just seeing Em not be sad for a little while. She kept trying to show him the finer points of the game, but all he really wanted to do was pretend he was a soccer-style kicker in football, because they all were now, and see how far and high he could kick her ball.

  Tommy didn’t know how long they’d been at it when, trying to act as casual as possible, he said, “Hey, sis: You ever think about going back to save your soccer team?”

  She was a few yards away from him, doing that soccer move where she kept the ball in the air with her feet and her knees and even by leaning back and bouncing it off her chest sometimes, making you think the ball was never going to hit the ground.

  But when Tommy said that, the ball finally dropped.

  “I can’t,” she said, in a voice Tommy could barely hear.

  He saw her lower lip start to tremble, like she was finally about to cry today, like she was the one who couldn’t hold herself together anymore. Then she turned away from him, picked up her ball and started walking, looking exactly like a kid taking her ball and going home.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  THE BEARS WON AGAIN the following Saturday, ag
ainst the Natick Raiders. Tommy managed to stay penalty-free for the whole game, and even came up with an interception early in the fourth quarter that helped turn the game around.

  It had been tied 13–13 at that point, but the Raiders had been driving. On a second and one play deep in Bears’ territory Tommy had read a ball fake perfectly, and been ready when the Natick tight end had taken off down the left sideline, behind Mike. But Tommy had sprinted back into coverage, and when the Natick quarterback had let the ball go, Tommy had been in perfect position to cut in front of the tight end and pick the ball off.

  He’d even managed to stop his momentum before it carried him out of bounds, turn the play around, and take off. He hadn’t gotten knocked out of bounds until he’d made it all the way to the Natick twenty-five. Three plays later Nick had hit Danny Martinez, his favorite receiver, for the touchdown that had given the Bears the lead for good. Tommy and the guys on defense had been the key to the turnaround.

  “Today,” Coach Fisher said when it was over, “we looked like the team we were supposed to be. On offense, on defense, on special teams.”

  “We are a special team,” Greck said, and the rest of the Bears cheered.

  It was another one of those days that reminded Tommy why he loved football. Not that he ever needed much reminding. But as low as he’d felt after the loss to Watertown, as much as he’d started to doubt himself, he felt as if the last two games had been his way of getting back up. And trying to be himself again on a football field.

  As much as he did love football, though, he’d started to realize something over the past couple of weeks. Football wasn’t everything to him the way it used to be. Which made him realize something else: He needed more.

  Skateboarding was more.

  Especially now that he had his own cool board.

  He’d come home from school and finish his homework as quickly as he could, or at least finish most of it, and head right over to the hill on Danforth before football. Then he would work that hill hard until it was time to head to practice.

  An old lady who lived on Danforth said to him one day, “You’re around so often I feel like you’re one of my neighbors now.”

  “I hope I’m not bothering you,” Tommy said.

  “You’re not,” she said. “You look so happy when you’re flying down this street.”

  She was small and white-haired and looked like a grandmother. There was something nice about her, and she was always smiling. Usually when Tommy would show up, she was either starting a walk or finishing one in her pink sneakers.

  “By the way,” she said, “you’re getting a lot better at it.”

  He was getting better. He could feel it. On nights when there wasn’t football practice, he and Mike would head over to Wirth Park, and work the bowl or the downhills.

  Tommy still couldn’t do all the things Mike could. He still couldn’t get high enough on the sides of the bowl to pull off the spins and twirls that Mike could.

  Slowly, though, he was dialing things up. They started finding even steeper roads Mike knew about that were deeper into the park, and Tommy would take them on without hesitation, and with less and less fear.

  “It’s like you’ve been doing this as long as I have,” Mike said, two nights before their game against Wellesley.

  “Untrue,” Tommy said. “But I’m getting there.”

  Skateboarding wasn’t a team sport—it was just you and the board. But in any sport, you had to be honest about what you could and couldn’t do. Tommy knew that he wasn’t close to being as good as Mike. Maybe someday. Soon.

  “If you keep coming on like this, and taking these hills the way you do,” Mike said, “I may have to think about moving you up to the big leagues.”

  “You mean some of these hills aren’t?”

  Mike grinned. “You’ll see what I mean soon enough.”

  “That sounds mysterious.”

  “Nah,” Mike said. “Just bigger fun.”

  Tommy still fell. And fell just often enough that he was glad his mom made him wear his helmet and pads. But sometimes they didn’t do a whole lot for him on what Mike called Wirth’s “back roads” when Tommy would misjudge his speed going into a bend, or hit a small pothole, or just lose concentration long enough to lose his balance.

  But the falls were coming less frequently, even though that didn’t make them hurt any less.

  Falling didn’t scare him, though. Or didn’t scare him enough to make him consider stopping. The more he boarded, the more he understood that the fear of falling and the fear that he’d experience at the top of the next steep hill were almost as exciting as the ride down itself.

  The faster he went the more he liked it. And somehow knowing that he could fall only made boarding more of a rush. It was like he was competing against his fears.

  And there was one more advantage to having skateboarding in his life along with football: The busier he was with both of them, the less he thought about his dad.

  That didn’t mean he missed his dad any less. He was always going to miss him. Tommy was always going to be angry about what had been taken away from him, mostly the time they were supposed to have together. The best he could do was find ways to think about it less.

  He made sure not to neglect his schoolwork, because that was never going to fly with his mother. He knew that she would shut him down on boarding in a heartbeat if she saw his grades starting to drop. And it wasn’t as if all his free time away from the Bears was spent on a skateboard, or with Mike over at Wirth Park. Tommy still found time to hang out with Greck—nothing was ever going to change that; they were as much boys as they’d ever been.

  But as soon as he was done skating, he couldn’t wait to get back on his board the way he couldn’t wait to get back on the field. And being busier than ever, he knew, was a good thing.

  Sometimes he’d wake up in the morning and for the first few seconds he was awake, he’d forget that his dad wasn’t down the hall. Or there would be this feeling he’d get when he’d come through the front door and, just by habit, start to call out to his dad that he was home.

  The feeling would only last long enough for him to want to turn, and go back outside.

  Keep busy. Yeah. That was the key. Keep going.

  Downhill.

  Fast.

  Bring it on.

  TWENTY-NINE

  EM SEEMED TO FEEL a little better each day.

  She still wasn’t coming out of her room a lot the way she used to. And she wasn’t a big talker like she’d been back when she’d want to tell them all about her day at the dinner table.

  But she was talking a little more.

  Just not about the Brighton Bolts.

  The next time Tommy asked her to go to Rogers Park with him, she turned him down. Not in a mean way. Just with a quick shake of the head.

  “I’m good,” she said.

  Tommy knew she was anything but. But for now he felt as if he’d done all he could for her. And one thing he knew about his sister was that you couldn’t push her, because all that would do was push her away. He wished she would go back to playing soccer, and being with her team. He would never understand how you could be that good at something and not want to play. To just up and quit the way she had. No matter how much she was hurting. But as much as he loved her, there was only so much he could do to help her feel better. He’d come to the conclusion that even though she was only ten years old, still a little girl, she was going to have to figure some stuff out on her own.

  Tommy had his own life to worry about, starting with the Bears’ game against the Wellesley Wildcats, the top-ranked team in their league.

  They were the Bears’ toughest competition yet, by a long shot.

  Tommy and the Wildcats’ quarterback, Blake Winthrop, had been playing against each other since they’d first started peewee ball. From day
one they hadn’t gotten along.

  It just happened that way sometimes. Tommy didn’t know why, but they had always gotten under each other’s skin. His dad used to say it was because Blake had always been the best quarterback in whatever league they were playing in, and Tommy had always been the best defender.

  But it was a lot more complicated than that.

  Blake was from Wellesley, through and through, which was known as a rich-kid town. His dad was even president of one of the banks there. Brighton, as Coach Fisher liked to say, was a town for working stiffs. That was enough to start a rivalry. Blake’s sister was even a soccer star for the Wellesley team in what used to be Em’s league.

  The Wildcats came in having blown away all their competition, but that wouldn’t matter if the Bears could beat them today, leaving both teams tied for first place. Even this early in the season, it had the feel of a playoff game.

  Blake Winthrop wasn’t a trash-talker, but somehow he and Tommy always seemed to find a way to have a few conversations—and sometimes more than a few—when their teams would meet. And Tommy had to admit it: The boy could get it done on a football field. Blake was also a star left-handed pitcher in baseball, and sometimes made you think he could throw a football even faster and harder than he did a baseball. He was the biggest reason why the smallest margin of victory for the Wildcats this season had been thirteen points. From Facebook—he and Tommy had friended each other, even though they’d never been friends—Tommy knew that Blake had at least one passing touchdown and one rushing touchdown in every one of the Wildcats’ victories.

  “I am not losing to that guy the way we did last year,” Tommy said after they finished warm-ups.

  “You think I want to?” Greck said. “Guy threw a game-winning pass over me. On the last play of the game.”

  “It was over both of us,” Tommy said. “Then after the game he gives me that smile of his in the handshake line and says, ‘Just lucky, I guess.’”

  “We need to wipe that smile off his face today,” Danny said.