by Mike Lupica
But the tight end wasn’t open this time.
Tommy was there as the ball arrived, stepping between Jack and his receiver. The ball hit him in his belly and Tommy didn’t even think about going anywhere as he wrapped his arms around it. He fell forward on purpose, waiting for the refs to whistle the play dead.
All Nick had to do was kneel down one time and it was over.
Bears 21, Bengals 20.
This game was over, but their championship run was just getting started.
Tommy looked up into the stands one more time before Greck and the rest of the guys mobbed him.
Thinking to himself: Thanks, Dad.
THIRTY-SIX
THE PATS DIDN’T PLAY UNTIL 4:15 the next afternoon, so Tommy and Mike headed over to the skateboarding bowl at Cleveland Circle.
Even though they mostly had the place to themselves, Tommy lost interest after a while, much sooner than he usually did, even after he managed to hold his own with Mike in their boarding version of a game of H-O-R-S-E.
“I’m bored,” Tommy said.
“You’ve never gotten bored on a board before!” Mike said.
“Good one.”
“But I know what you mean. No matter how much cool stuff you can do here, after a while it starts to get old doing the same runs.”
“We could go over to Wirth,” Tommy said, “but it would take too long. And I want to watch the game. If the Jets upset us today, they’ll actually be tied with us for first place.”
“Yeah, I promised my dad I’d be back to watch with him,” Mike said. Then he quickly added, “Sorry, dude.”
“It’s okay,” Tommy said. “You don’t have to apologize because you’re watching a Pats game with your dad.”
“Okay.”
“Is there anywhere around here where we can get the kind of rides we do at Wirth?”
Mike paused, as if he were trying to decide something, before he finally said, “Actually, there is, even though I’m not sure it’s the kind of ride you’ll be wanting to tell your mom about.”
Tommy cocked his head to the side. “You think I go home and tell my mommy everything I did?”
“Nah, I didn’t mean it like that. This is just something I usually do by myself, when I want to get a little crazy.”
“I’m in,” Tommy said.
“I didn’t tell you where we’re going.”
“Don’t care. Let’s do it.”
A little crazy was exactly what Tommy was looking for right about now.
• • •
They rode their bikes up Beacon Street, past the reservoir behind Alumni Stadium, where the Boston College team played football, past the parking garage attached to the stadium and to Conte Forum, where the hockey and basketball teams played. Tommy had gone to some football games at Alumni with his dad, but Mike had an uncle who’d gone to BC, and his uncle had season tickets to their football games, so Mike knew the campus much better than Tommy did. He even knew about a bike rack next to McElroy Commons where they could lock theirs up.
“So where’s this big hill?” Tommy asked after they’d stashed their bikes and were back out on Beacon.
“You’re looking at it.”
Mike pointed back down Beacon, in the direction of the football stadium and reservoir.
“C’mon, how fast can we go on this sidewalk?” Tommy said. “Not to mention there are too many kids walking around.”
Just then, one of the BC shuttle buses on the other side of the street took off down Beacon.
“As fast as that bus,” Mike said. “Since we’re going to be hanging on to the back of the next one that comes along.”
Tommy’s eyes almost lit up, but he stopped himself, trying to play it cool. “I can dig that.”
Mike said there were only a few rules. The main thing was to not let the driver see you when you got behind the bus. Tommy, still trying to act nonchalant, casually asked what would happen if they got caught. Mike laughed. “We’d get yelled at mostly, unless they could flag down a policeman to yell at us.”
Other than that, Mike said, there was no real trick to what they were about to do. You just hung on to the back of the bus, on one of the ends, so you could lean out and see what was coming, or be ready for a sudden stop.
“You still have to pay attention,” Mike said. “Because what you don’t want to do, trust me, is face-plant.”
“Like being a bug on a windshield,” Tommy said. “Just at the back of the bus.”
“You got it.”
Mike said skaters did this sort of thing all the time. If you went to YouTube, there were all these cool videos, some people even using it as a way to travel to work.
“But isn’t this against the law?” Tommy said.
“My cousin who’s in his twenties got fined once when he got caught by a cop who saw him go riding by,” Mike said. “Another time he got off with a warning not to do it again.”
“Did he stop?”
“Heck no.”
When Mike saw the worried look on Tommy’s face he said, “Look, we wouldn’t be up here if I didn’t think you could handle this with your eyes closed. This’ll be easy. Nothing compared to the time I rode behind a city bus all the way from Cleveland Circle to Fenway Park.”
“No way!”
“Way,” Mike said. “But for now let’s just stick with the student shuttle. Baby steps.”
They waited for the next shuttle to pull up across from McElroy Commons, casually holding on to the boards at their sides, hanging back while some college kids got on the bus.
Despite what he’d said, Tommy wasn’t feeling too relaxed. He could feel his heart beating fast and hard, as he got ready for a different kind of ride.
But that didn’t mean he wasn’t so ready to go. The fear just made it more exciting.
Mike grabbed the bar near the right rear fender, the side of the bus closest to the sidewalk. Tommy took the left, which meant he was basically out there in the middle of Beacon Street. Mike said he’d have a better view from there.
As the bus took off, Tommy turned and gave Mike a thumbs-up. Mike had talked about baby steps. Tommy felt like they were a long way from that first baby hill at Wirth Park.
The bus went past classroom buildings to Tommy’s left, past Alumni Stadium and its garage. Tommy could feel them start to pick up speed as they made the bend to the left at the reservoir, which just looked to Tommy like this big, beautiful lake. Up above him, Tommy could see joggers on the running track. All the while they made sure to stay out of the bus driver’s view.
Mike had said that a bus like this didn’t go nearly as fast as the city buses he’d ridden behind up Beacon and Commonwealth. But it was going fast enough for Tommy.
“Awesome, right?” Mike yelled over to him.
Tommy made sure not to show any fear, grinning as he yelled back, “Totally!”
The bus went faster. Tommy held on tighter to the bar in front of him. The speed made it harder for Tommy to read the traffic on the street, trying to read it like he’d read an offense in football, trying to anticipate when the bus would turn and speed up. But with his adrenaline spiking like crazy, it was hard to concentrate on his path. Focus, he told himself. He’d always valued his ability to stay focused.
He was turning his head, about to ask Mike how fast he thought they were going, when the bus slowed suddenly, and swerved to the right.
The boy who prided himself on being able to read an offense, and now a skateboard course, realized at the last minute that he’d misjudged this one.
Tommy lost his grip on the bar.
He managed to stay on his board, but now he was out from behind the bus and in the middle of Beacon, going faster than he ever had on a skateboard.
In the middle of traffic going both ways.
The car to worry about was
the one he could see coming at him, about a hundred yards away. In that moment, with Tommy whizzing by so quickly, it looked like a race car.
Tommy cut hard to his left, going for the safety of the sidewalk on the reservoir side.
The car was right in front of him.
But he hadn’t seen the one coming from behind.
He heard a car horn, not sure if it was in front of him or behind him, but kept looking at the grass near the sidewalk like it was an end zone and he was just a few feet away from breaking the plane. So close.
He made it to the “end zone,” avoiding both cars. But next thing he knew, his board was gone, out from underneath him, and he felt like he was helicoptering through the air, slamming into a streetlight like he’d hit a brick wall.
Tommy Gallagher went down and stayed down.
When he heard the siren, he knew it was for him this time.
THIRTY-SEVEN
THE AMBULANCE GOT THERE FAST.
One of the joggers, a BC student, had heard the car horns, and the screech of tires, and then saw Tommy on the ground next to the light pole, and was afraid he might have gotten hit. She was already calling the BC infirmary as she ran toward him from the reservoir.
She stayed there with Tommy and Mike, telling Tommy not to move until the ambulance arrived.
Tommy didn’t have to be told to keep still. He knew this wasn’t like any of his other skateboarding falls. He knew he’d hurt his left shoulder pretty seriously.
The two guys from the ambulance, not looking much older than students themselves, asked him where he was in pain. When he told them his left shoulder, they asked if he could move the arm. As soon as he tried, and they saw how difficult it was, one of them brought him a sling and told him they were taking him straight to St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center in Brighton, which happened to be about five minutes by car from Tommy’s house.
By then Mike had called Tommy’s mom. He didn’t lie to her. Tommy could hear him explaining exactly what had happened, telling her that it was all his fault.
Then he handed Tommy the phone and said, “She wants to talk to you.”
Tommy heard her say, “How bad is it, Tommy?”
“I banged my shoulder pretty hard, Mom, not gonna lie. The guys from the ambulance think I might have separated it.”
“Did you hit your head?”
“No,” he said.
“Thank God,” she said. “Put one of the men from the ambulance on the phone, please.”
Tommy handed one of them the phone. His name tag read “Moriarty.” He walked away from Tommy as he spoke to Tommy’s mom. Tommy could see him nodding and mostly listening. When he came back he said, “Your mom will meet us at St. E’s.”
Tommy turned and looked up at Mike. “What about our bikes?”
“Don’t worry about the stupid bikes,” Mike said. “My dad will bring me back and I’ll get them later.”
Tommy thought Mike might cry.
“I never should have talked you into doing this,” Mike said.
“Are you serious?” Tommy said. “It’s more like I talked you into it.”
“I really hope your shoulder’s okay, T.”
Tommy managed a small smile, though he felt like even that made his shoulder hurt more. “Dude, it’s probably not too bad,” he said, trying to make Mike feel less guilty.
But he knew it was. Real bad.
• • •
His mom was waiting for him in front of the St. E’s emergency room. She ran toward Tommy as soon as he was out of the ambulance.
Mike carried the skateboards.
“I’m so sorry, Mom,” Tommy said. “The last thing I wanted to do was scare you.”
“All I care about is that you’re okay,” she said. “From what Michael told me, it could have been so much worse.”
“It was the most boneheaded move of all time,” Tommy said.
“How much does your shoulder hurt?”
“A lot,” he said.
“Let’s get you inside.”
They were lucky—there was nobody else in the emergency room in the middle of the afternoon. Tommy’s mom called that a minor miracle.
The ER doctor did a lot of talking once she had shown Tommy and his mom into the examining room, obviously trying to keep him calm. She even joked and asked him if he played any other sports “that you’re good at?”
“Funny,” he said, then told her he was a football player.
“Pats fan, I assume?”
“What else?”
“Well, let’s get you out of here so you can go watch the game,” she said. “Do you hate the Jets as much as I do?”
“More.”
She said she was going to try not to hurt him as she took off the sling and asked him to slowly and carefully make small movements with his shoulder. His mom watched in silence. Then the doctor told his mom to stay put while she and Tommy walked down the hallway to take some X-rays.
All he kept thinking was that maybe Moriarty was wrong, maybe it was just a bad bruise.
Holding out hope that he might be healthy enough to play Wellesley in two weeks, next week being an off week to give the teams extra time to prepare for the championship game.
When they were done, the doctor told him she’d meet Tommy and his mom in the examining room when the X-rays were ready. Then she helped him into a sling, and told him to keep his left hand pressed to his chest.
The doctor was only gone about five minutes. The wait felt like five hours to Tommy. All he kept thinking about was the prospect of missing the game of his life.
When she came back in, she was smiling.
“Good news,” she said. “It’s only a type one separation. As hard as Tommy says he hit that pole, it’s the best we could have hoped for.”
“There’s more than one type of shoulder separation?” Tommy’s mom said.
“About half a dozen, actually. And trust me, this is not one of those sports where you want the highest score.”
“So I didn’t break anything?” Tommy said.
“No, sir, you did not. I know you’re not feeling like it right now, but you caught a break.”
Before the doctor could say anything else, Tommy said, “My team is in the championship game in two weeks. Is there any chance I’ll be better enough to play in it?”
Her smile disappeared. That was enough to tell him the answer.
“I’m sorry, Tommy. But there’s no chance.”
Hearing that hurt even worse than flying into that streetlight had, just in a different way.
Just like that, his season was over. The doctor was talking to Tommy’s mom, telling her the sling would do Tommy fine during the day, but at night there was a brace he could wear that might ease the pain if he moved around in his bed. She gave out more instructions, but the words barely reached his ears.
All Tommy could think about was the Wellesley game. He wanted to cry, but he wasn’t going to, not in front of a doctor he barely knew.
It was his mom who cried when they were alone in the car, as if she was the one who had been waiting to cry all along, her head pressed against the steering wheel.
“Mom,” he said, “don’t cry. I’ll be fine.”
She turned to face him, tears streaming down her cheeks.
“Well, I’m not fine!” she said. “I already lost someone because he loved taking chances so much. I’m not going to lose you, too!”
THIRTY-EIGHT
TOMMY WAS EIGHT THE DAY his dad jumped out of a window and broke his ankle.
It was a house fire not all that far from the firehouse. Patrick Gallagher and his crew were the first responders, no hesitation from him when they got there, his dad the first of the first responders to rush into the house, past the fire, and up the stairs to where the family who owned the house was trapp
ed.
“There’s an expression that he who hesitates is lost,” Tommy’s mom told him that day. “Your father thinks that if he hesitates, a whole family is lost.”
Tommy would hear the whole story from Uncle Brendan, when he came over later to have dinner with them. His dad was outside, a cast already on his ankle, grilling hamburgers and hot dogs. He never liked to go over all the details of what had happened at a fire, not wanting to scare them, even though Tommy’s mom always said that not knowing scared her a lot more.
The fire was already starting to burn out of control by the time they got there with Engine 41. But with Tommy’s dad and Uncle Brendan leading the charge, they managed to get the four children and the two parents through the flames and back down the stairs before the front part of the house started to collapse on itself, the fire clearly winning the fight against the hoses, even when backup arrived from other firehouses in the area.
It was then that the youngest child, a little girl, asked where Casey was.
That stopped everybody.
“Who’s Casey?” Tommy’s dad asked.
“My dog!” she said.
Tommy’s dad asked where she’d seen the dog last. The girl said under her bed. She said she got scared when they couldn’t get down the stairs, but still thought one of her family members had grabbed Casey.
Uncle Brendan said the little girl looked more scared now, worrying about her dog, starting to cry, than she had when he’d picked her up to carry her outside to safety.
Uncle Brendan said he’d go back for the dog.
But Patrick Gallagher was already running back through the front door and into the fire.
“Nobody could stop him,” Tommy heard Uncle Brendan say to his mom.
“Shocker,” she said.
You couldn’t even see where the front door had been. No time to get a ladder up, just enough to watch it happen and pray.
Then they all saw Tommy’s dad leaning out an upstairs window with Casey.
“He’s smiling like he just won the big game,” Uncle Brendan said.