by Mike Lupica
Tommy wanted everything to speed up.
But he was having so much fun that he waited too long to shift his balance as he leaned into the bend. Rookie mistake. The kind he’d made the first day on what he now thought of as the baby hill.
Then he tried to correct his mistake, which only made things worse, causing the board to tip and skid out from under him.
Then he went flying through the air.
There were big rocks on the right side of the path. Tommy managed to miss them, and a tree almost right in front of him, and finally land in a small patch of grass, feeling in the moment as if he’d been dropped there from the top of the tree.
The pad on his right elbow took most of his weight as he landed. He tried to roll, the way his dad had taught him to in order to soften a hard fall. As he did, feeling the world spinning, he caught the side of his helmet on that same tree. He felt like he often did after getting blasted by a block in football he didn’t see coming.
But as he started to get up, he knew right away that he hadn’t hurt himself. Looking down, he saw that he was mostly just dirty.
He was having trouble catching his breath. When he did, he took a deep breath and let it out. He closed his eyes, trying to picture what had just happened to him, trying to put himself back in the moment when he’d been in the air, and had no idea where he was going to land, or how, or how hard.
Tommy smiled.
Because he’d loved it.
Loved. It.
Tommy Gallagher, alone in this corner of Wirth Park, halfway down Heartbreak Hill, feeling like he was alone in his own little corner of the world, wasn’t just smiling.
He was laughing his head off.
Then he picked up his board and walked back up the hill, ready to try it all over again.
• • •
Coach John Fisher called about half an hour after Tommy got home.
“I just got off the phone with them this minute,” Coach said.
Tommy just waited.
“You get to play next week.”
Tommy pumped his fist in the air like he’d just won the league championship.
“Coach!” Tommy said. “How’d you persuade them?”
“I actually didn’t have to do much persuading. I told them what happened on the field, what Blake said, and then about the conversation the two of you had after the game. They were very understanding about your circumstances, Tommy, to a man. So there’ll be no suspension, under one condition.”
“Anything,” Tommy said.
“The condition is this: If you get called for another unsportsmanlike conduct penalty this season, which would mean another ejection, you’re gone for the year. They were very clear about how sensitive they are to your loss. Some of the men on the call knew your father personally. But they were just as clear that nothing like this can happen again.”
“It won’t.”
“I know,” Coach said. “See you at practice Monday night.”
“Coach?”
“I’m still here.”
“Thank you,” Tommy said.
“You don’t have to thank me,” he said. “It’s like I tell you boys all the time. On this team, we don’t even have to turn around to know somebody’s got our back.”
Tommy went downstairs and told his mother the news. She nodded, smiling, and came across the kitchen and hugged him.
“We’ll get through it,” she said finally.
“You mean what happened today?” Tommy said. “Sounds like I’m already in the clear.”
“I mean all of it,” his mom said. “People keep saying that your father would have wanted this or that. But what he really would have wanted was for us to bring out the best in each other.” When she pulled back from the hug she said, “Who are we playing next week? I forget.”
“Needham. At home.”
“They’re going down.”
“Look at you,” Tommy said. “Talking smack.”
“What can I say?” she said. “I learned from the best.”
THIRTY-TWO
IT WASN’T EVEN CLOSE.
The Bears beat Needham by three touchdowns the next Saturday. It could have been worse than that, but Coach took out Nick and Danny and most of his skill-position players early in the fourth quarter, because Coach Fisher never ran up the score.
On defense, Tommy had his best overall game of the season, forcing a fumble, recovering one, sacking the Needham quarterback three times. And the most important stat of all? No penalties.
The Bears’ record was now 6–1, and they were still tied with the Wellesley Wildcats at the top of the league standings with three games left in the regular season. As long as the Bears won out, they were guaranteed one of the spots in the championship game. And just about all the guys on the team wanted the opponent to be Blake Winthrop and the Wildcats.
“I want to play them so badly,” Greck said after the Needham game. “A lot of their guys have been going around making excuses, saying it would have been different in the first game if they’d had Blake the whole time.”
“They might be right,” Tommy said.
“Are you saying you don’t think we can beat them straight up?”
“Let’s just keep winning,” Tommy said. “That way we can all find out.”
It had been a good couple of weeks for him since he’d been thrown out of the Wellesley game. Football was going well for him and the team. His grades were solid, which pleased his mom most of all. And all that meant he was keeping himself busy most of the time. The busier he was, the less time he had to be sad.
To top it off, skateboarding was going great. The Sunday after the Needham game, Mike took him to a new skateboard park near Cleveland Circle, on the other side of the reservoir at Boston College. The bowl was newer and much bigger than the one at Wirth Park, with steeper ramps, cool stairs, and longer straightaways. They even had the boarding version of lifeguards around, so that when it was crowded the way it was today, things didn’t get too crazy.
“Every man for himself,” Mike said.
“Now it does feel like a contact sport,” Tommy said.
Mike said the crowds would start to thin out now that they were a couple of days away from November. But today felt like summer, and Mike said that serious skateboarders were always looking to make summer last as long as they possibly could.
“You know we’re done skateboarding when winter comes, right?” Mike said.
“That just means we gotta go as hard as we can for as long as we can.”
Mike grinned at him, board on his shoulder. “It’s official. I’ve created a monster.”
“Nah,” Tommy said, “it’s like it says on my board here: I’m a warrior.”
“Always looking for new challenges.”
But no matter how busy he was, no matter how much activity he tried to jam into each day, there wasn’t a single one that went by when he didn’t think about his dad.
And when he did, there was nothing he could do to stop the sadness and anger from overwhelming him. It was the kind of feeling that would stop him in his tracks and freeze him up. It was just too hard to come to grips with the idea of Patrick Gallagher being gone for good.
Sometimes it would be something as simple as pickup after practice, watching the dads who showed up to get their sons. He’d watch one of his teammates, like Greck, walking from the field to the parking lot, and Greck’s dad would put his arm around his shoulder, and Tommy would feel as if he’d been punched hard in the stomach.
He’d watch Nick and his dad during practice, when they’d stop to go over a play, or just stand together while taking a water break, laughing about something or other.
Then there was the day when Tommy was riding his bike past the public tennis courts about a half mile from his house, and stopped and walked his bike inside, r
emembering how his dad had first taught him how to ride a bike on those courts when he was little.
It all came rushing back: how at first his dad had just walked him along, hand on Tommy’s shoulder. Then they’d slowly stepped it up, his dad jogging alongside, Tommy picking up speed, but making his dad promise not to let go.
“I won’t let go till you’re ready, boyo,” his dad had said. “I’ll never let you fall.”
Finally, though, came the day when they both knew Tommy was ready to ride alone, when he’d suddenly yelled “I’ve got this, Daddy,” and had practically ordered his dad to let go.
And his dad had understood he was ready.
For the first time, Tommy had ridden that red two-wheeler on his own, no hand on his shoulder even though his dad was still close by. His mom had been there, too, that day, taking the picture that was still in the top drawer of Tommy’s dresser: his dad’s arms outstretched, as if he was saying, Look, no hands! And Tommy, leaning over his handlebars, his face serious, almost in a frown.
But his dad was smiling.
Man, was he smiling.
When Tommy got home that day, he went to his room and took that picture out of his drawer, where he’d put it the night of the funeral. He stared at it, losing track of time, and did something he only did when he was alone:
He cried.
Usually when he’d feel the tears coming on, when they showed up out of nowhere and he knew there was no way for him to stop them, he’d rush to turn up the music on his laptop, or go into the bathroom and shut the door and even turn the shower on sometimes so no one could hear him.
But all he did right now was sit there on his bed and look at the picture of his dad’s happy face, his dad looking as if he was going to live forever, and cry so hard it made his chest hurt.
“Why did you have to leave me?” he said.
Then he heard Em’s voice from the other side of his door.
“Tommy?” she said. “Did you call me?”
He managed to get enough air to say, “Just talking to myself, sis.”
“About what?” Em said.
“Nothing,” he said.
Everything.
THIRTY-THREE
A COUPLE OF TIMES MOM ASKED Em if she might want to check out a Bolts game and see how her old team was doing. Both times Em shut her down with the same remark: “They’re not my team anymore.”
She said it now at dinner, the night before the Bears were set to play the Chestnut Hill Chiefs in an away game.
“But the girls on the team are still your friends,” their mom said. “Don’t you want to support them, or keep up to date on how they’re doing?”
“My friends on the team won’t stop keeping me up to date on how they’re doing,” Em said. Then she looked straight at their mom. “I’m not going back to the team. It’s too late.”
“No, it’s not,” their mom said, in an even quieter voice than before.
“Yes, it is.”
As usual, that was the end of that.
Tommy would actually check the Bolts’ website every week to see how they were doing. So he knew that even without Em they still had a chance to win their championship, sitting in second place with two losses, one game behind Wellesley. It was weird, he thought, his team and Em’s old one fighting it out in their leagues with teams from Wellesley.
But even though Em didn’t want to go to soccer games, she was coming to every one of Tommy’s games now. He never asked her to do it, and neither did their mom. She just kept volunteering.
So there she was in the stands the next morning, coldest Saturday of the season so far, as the Bears got ready to play the Chiefs. She had even wished Tommy good luck when they got out of the car.
“I’m glad you like coming to the games now,” he said to his sister.
She gave him that almost-bored look she would give him sometimes. “Who said I liked it?”
Tommy looked at his mom. “Who gives a better pep talk than Em?”
The Chiefs had two losses this season, one to Wellesley and one to Watertown. So they’d only lost to good teams, and if they could beat the Bears today, they would be tied with them in the standings, in second place behind Wellesley, which had already won its game against Needham on Friday night.
“We’re winning out,” Greck said.
“We can only do that if we win today,” Tommy said.
“You think I couldn’t figure that out for myself?” Greck said.
Tommy grinned. “It’s tough for me to know when something’s going to turn out to be a brain buster for you.”
“Is this where you give me the speech about how the most important game we’ll play all season is the one we’re playing today?”
Tommy shrugged. “If you already know the answer, why even ask the question?”
The Chiefs turned out to be good, very good, whether they’d lost two games or not. Their quarterback, Matt Foley, wasn’t a great thrower, but didn’t need to be, because the Chiefs mostly wanted him to run their option offense. He was already as big as a high school quarterback, and had a pretty good sense of when to keep the ball on the option and when to pitch it. The Chiefs scored on their first possession of the game, but after that Tommy and the guys on defense started to come up fast on the option and jam it up, daring Matt to throw.
But the Chiefs defense was playing nearly as well, stifling Nick and the offense for most of the day. The game was 7–6, Bears, at the start of the fourth quarter, the difference in the game being the stop Tommy had made on Matt when he tried to keep on the conversion after the Chiefs’ touchdown.
The longer the game went, and as first downs became more and more rare, Tommy was convinced that it wasn’t going to be a big play on offense that decided this game. It was going to come down to defense, which was exactly how Tommy Gallagher liked it.
But with under four minutes left, the Chiefs were driving, mostly because Matt had surprised everybody with a deep pass on first down, pulling up when it looked like he was about to run another option, throwing across the field to a wide receiver who hadn’t sniffed a reception all day. Tommy wasn’t anywhere near the receiver, having sold out trying to stop Matt. By the time Mike caught up with the guy, he’d run all the way to the Bears’ twenty.
“My fault,” Mike said when they were all in the huddle. “I should have had the guy deep.”
“He was my guy,” D.J. Healey, one of the Bears’ cornerbacks, said.
“It was everybody’s fault,” Tommy said. “Matt suckered us all.”
“So we make a play now to make it right,” Greck said.
“Let’s do this,” Tommy said.
The Chiefs ended up with third and three from the thirteen-yard line. They had run two options, Matt keeping the ball on first down for a gain of three yards, then pitching it on second, his running back rushing for four more.
Tommy figured Matt was gearing up to run the option again, whether he kept it or not, because even if the Chiefs didn’t get the first down, they were in four-down territory with the game on the line. Nobody in their league, as far as Tommy knew, had tried a field goal all season.
Two minutes and thirty seconds left.
Even though Tommy and everybody else had been burned on the long pass, he told himself to focus on the Chiefs’ offensive linemen if Matt rolled to his right, the way he was taught. He hadn’t been watching them closely enough when Matt had pulled up and gone deep, hadn’t picked up on the fact that none of them had crossed the line of scrimmage.
They didn’t cross it now as Matt sprinted to his right, his tailback trailing him.
He wasn’t looking to get a first down, he was looking to throw a touchdown pass and win the game right here.
But as Matt stopped his momentum this time, Tommy was already scrambling back out into coverage. The Chiefs must have run some kind
of pick play with the wide receiver and the tight end, and Mike and D.J. must have crossed wires and stayed with the wide receiver, because the tight end was wide open on the goal line.
As Matt released the ball, Tommy thought it would trail over his head. But seeing how open the kid was, Matt had been a little too careful with the throw, babying it just enough to give Tommy a chance to make a play.
It always came down to that.
Tommy timed his leap perfectly, getting more lift out of his legs than he thought they had in them, reaching as high as he could with his right arm.
Greck would tell him after the game that even when it looked like he’d reached the top of his jump, somehow he elevated even more.
Tommy felt the ball on his fingertips, not sure where it was in that moment, but then he looked up to see the ball falling right into his arms, like a basketball rebound he’d somehow managed to tip to himself.
Suddenly there was all this open field in front of him. Just like that, defense had turned into offense.
And Tommy Gallagher was the guy with the ball.
D.J. cut across the field and put a block on the tight end before he could think about getting at Tommy. Greck had appeared out of nowhere and was in front of Tommy, acting like a downfield blocker.
When Tommy got to the sideline, he saw just one red uniform up ahead of Greck. Tommy slowed just slightly, thinking that if Greck could push the kid to the inside he could go all the way.
But slowing up cost him, because he felt somebody come up from behind him and shove him out of bounds. It was just that, a shove, not enough to knock Tommy down, which is why he was still upright when Matt Foley blasted him with a late hit that sent him flying over the Bears’ bench, and nearly into the chain-link fence behind it.
As he lay there on his back, the ball still under his arm, Tommy couldn’t help thinking: And Blake Winthrop thought my hit was a cheap shot.
As Tommy rolled himself into a sitting position, he saw Greck jawing at Matt. Then a lot of his teammates were standing beside Greck, but they were trying to keep their distance as both refs threw their flags in the air, not wanting to duplicate what had happened at the end of the Wellesley game.