The Girl Who Threw Butterflies (5 page)

Molly liked the irregular shapes of the land masses. She could stare at them the way some people did at clouds, the crazy puzzle pieces of the continents, every map an abstract work of art. But as she tested herself on the Mediterranean, she kept confusing the Ionian and Aegean seas, the islands of Crete and Cyprus. She was always muzzy-headed at night, at her best early in the day. With a few minutes of study in the morning, Molly was confident she'd nail it. Acing a quiz, getting an A, earning good grades like merit badges—back then, it had seemed so important. Back then, if she'd blown a test, that was a bad day. If she'd made a stupid calculation in math, if she'd accidentally skipped an essay question in English, that would be a tragedy. What did she know about tragedy?

When she flicked off her bedside lamp that night, Molly could have drawn a perfectly accurate map of her own world. Her mother was downstairs in the family room, half watching something on television, looking through some work papers. She'd stay up for the news—she made fun of the local anchors but watched anyway. She'd maybe watch a little bit of
Nightline,
then come up to bed.

Her dad was downtown, working the graveyard shift at the newspaper. He was in the big newsroom she'd visited many times over the years, perched on the chair she used to spin and roll around in, staring into his computer screen, a framed picture of her next to his cup of pencils.

He'd always wanted to be a sportswriter. His heroes were those old-time, cigar-sucking, typewriter-pounding fellows.
Guys named Red and Lefty. At the college where he'd met Molly's mother, he'd studied journalism and even had his own column in the school newspaper. Molly knew this because she'd discovered copies of it stashed in the attic: There was a grainy photo of her young dad and his byline.

But somehow he ended up on the copydesk of the
Buffalo News,
where he didn't actually write much of anything except headlines and captions, the sentences under pictures that hardly anybody even read.
Kimberly Royce of West Seneca enjoys a sunny afternoon in Delaware Park with her four-legged friend. Will McMaster of Cheektowaga bows his head in prayer Sunday during the opening of Kingdom Bound.
He cut out extra words and fixed other people's mistakes, put commas in all the right places, made sure that everyone's name was spelled correctly and that the names of federal agencies were appropriately capitalized. He used to joke about irate local bowlers calling him to complain if he misspelled one of their names in the weekly scores. But he rarely talked about what he did at work anymore. When asked, he made a backhand gesture, a bored, wordless dismissal.

Molly sometimes wondered if his work, all the repetition and all the attention he was forced to pay to such trivial things, made him sad. She worried that his job was taking the starch out of him. He seemed grayer lately, slumped. It occurred to Molly that her father needed some kind of project to cheer him up, something he could throw himself into. He'd never been much of a tool guy; he didn't do birdhouses. She decided that he ought to write a book. It was something she intended to mention to him, but she hadn't gotten around to it. She was waiting for the right moment.

Molly was beat; she fell asleep right away. Sometime
during the night she heard something, or rather, later, she remembered hearing things, half hearing, really. Some kind of minor commotion downstairs. Voices, the telephone, the doorbell? It seemed remotely dramatic, urgent but distant and muted, like a television show from another room.

At five-thirty her alarm buzzed. Molly tapped it and got right up. Her mom was a big fan of the snooze alarm, but it didn't work for Molly. She hated the feeling of bobbing along half asleep, getting buzzed every five minutes. If you have to get up, get up—that was her theory. She went through her morning routine—shower, hair drying, getting dressed, making her bed—crisply and quickly. What had she been thinking about? It was hard to remember, it seemed so long ago. It was another lifetime. Was she thinking about Mediterranean islands? Was she worrying about her grades? Hoping that her friends would notice her new sweater?

She had grabbed her backpack and headed downstairs. Her mother was in the kitchen, sitting at the table with Mrs. Rybak. Mrs. Rybak?

Her mother looked as Molly had never seen her before. She'd been crying; her eyes were red. She had a crumpled tissue clutched in her hand. But beyond that she seemed utterly different. Transformed. She looked almost bruised and raw somehow, as if she'd been beaten. She looked as if she'd been peeled.

“Sit down, Molly,” her mother said.

Suddenly, at that moment, the geography of her own little world shifted. Something fixed and vast, a continent, had in an instant disappeared. An ocean dried up. Suddenly she had become an island.

o did you wow 'em?” Celia wanted to know. “Did you make an impression?”

They were at the lunch table, working their way through a stack of crackers, Celia tossing them across the table to her one at a time, like a blackjack dealer. They were nutty-tasting, stone-ground, multigrain wafery things, a little scary-looking but good. But Molly felt like she should tease her friend anyway.

“How about some normal food once in a while?” Molly asked. “How about a normal cracker? Something a little more in the mainstream. Not so left-of-the-dial. I mean, what have you got against Ritz?”

But Celia blew her off. “They're Swedish,” she said, as if that explained everything.

“An impression?” Molly said. “I would say, yes, I definitely made an impression.” Molly told her about her space launch of a pitch at the end of practice.

“Big deal,” Celia said. “One pitch. It doesn't mean a thing.”

“I guess not,” Molly said. When Celia said it, it sounded true, irrefutably, self-evidently true.
One pitch doesn't mean a thing.
Of course. It sounded like something from a book, like something Ben Franklin might have said.

Molly told her about all the stretching—she was sore as could be—and the boys’ muttering gripes about it. She told her how Lonnie House had stepped up to play catch with her—Celia raised an eyebrow, about to say something, but Molly kept going. She told her about Lloyd Coleman trying to skip.

“I love it,” Celia said. “Your coach should make him do Pilates. Wouldn't that be hilarious?” From her lunch bag she produced a block of suspiciously pale, ripe-smelling cheese and started slicing off hunks with a plastic knife. She offered Molly a piece.

Molly just looked at it.

“Don't ask,” Celia said. “Just eat it.”

Molly spotted Mr. Morales patrolling the lunchroom in his yellow short-sleeved shirt. Now, to Molly, who'd seen him on the field the afternoon before, he seemed a little like Clark Kent or Peter Parker. It was as if he had once again assumed his everyday identity, knotted his tie again and become boring and mild-mannered. But Molly knew what she knew. There was more to Mr. Morales than met the eye.

He strolled over to their table and smiled. “Molly Williams,” he said. It was partly a greeting, but it almost sounded like some sort of announcement or introduction. Probably he was just testing himself, trying out her name.

“Hi,” Molly said. Here, she didn't know what to call him, wasn't sure whether he was “coach” or “mister.”

“You threw the ball well yesterday,” he said.

“She's an awesome pitcher, you know,” Celia said.

“I'm sure she is,” Morales said.

“She's got a secret weapon,” Celia said. “A mystery pitch.”

“Is that so?” Morales asked. He looked mildly curious, amused.

“It is so,” Celia said. She looked over her shoulder and leaned forward conspiratorially. “The mothball,” she stage-whispered.

Molly had a mouthful of juice, and it was all she could do not to spew.

Morales looked puzzled.

“A knuckleball,” Molly said. “The butterfly ball.”

Morales had seemed to be sort of humoring Celia, but now he was definitely interested. “You throw a knuckler?”

“My dad taught me,” Molly said.

Morales looked at her as if he were recalculating some-thing, adding “throws knuckleball” into the equation of who she was. “This afternoon you can show it to me,” he said. “Your secret weapon.” And then he strolled away, a lunchroom cop back walking his beat.

“Mothball?” Molly said. “Mothball?”

“What's the big deal?” Celia said. “What's the difference?”

“Mothball?”

“It comes from a cocoon, it has wings, it floats—”

“You,” Molly said. “You are so …”

“What?” Celia asked. “I am so what? Tell me. I can take it. I can handle the truth.”

“You are so … Swedish.”

At practice that afternoon Molly was once again invisible, almost. She timed her arrival carefully, got on the field exactly at three-thirty. By this time the boys were already tossing balls back and forth, and Morales, back in baseball mode, was on the diamond with a rake, along with another man, smoothing the dirt around second base.

Molly stood behind the backstop and stretched a little, twisted her trunk back and forth. It was gray and misty, the sky dark as dusk practically. But in Buffalo this was typical. In Buffalo, any day in April without snow was considered spring. Molly's mother used to take some perverse pleasure in pointing out that Seattle had fewer cloudy days than Buffalo. You can look it up, she used to tell Molly's dad during their regular half-playful, half-deadly serious debates: Buffalo stinks, yes or no. The great gray gloom, her mother called it, depression on a stick.

Morales called them all together briefly and introduced the new guy—Coach V, he called him—and said he'd be helping out when he could. He had an old, weathered, leathery-looking face and a mustache that truly was pencil thin. He had a toothpick in his mouth.

“Grandpa,” somebody whispered.

Once again they did the long warm-up routine, stretching and hopping and skipping. Molly liked it, the tug and
pull of it, even though it hurt, maybe because it hurt—she was that weird. She remembered hearing that to get stronger, you destroyed old muscle cells and made new. She liked to imagine that she might be reconfiguring herself from the in-side, getting quietly, invisibly stronger.

When it was time to play catch, Lonnie House appeared, his beat-up Bisons hat still off-kilter, holding up a ball, a wordless invitation, which Molly accepted.

They started tossing it back and forth. Molly hoped that Lonnie didn't feel sorry for her. She didn't want to be the object of charity. She hoped he wasn't a Boy Scout or some-thing using her for a good deed. He didn't seem like the type, but what did she know?

Lonnie was a little bit of a puzzle. He didn't fit into any easily identifiable group. He wasn't a jock or a nerd. He was smart, though—Molly knew that. He didn't raise his hand, but he always
knew;
he was one of those. He wasn't a punk or a Goth or a stoner. It was hard to get a handle on him. On a standardized test, he was answer E: none of the above.

The one thing everybody knew about Lonnie was that he loved to draw. And he was good. Last fall Ms. Jacoby, the art teacher, invited or permitted him—Molly didn't know whose idea it was—to paint a mural on her classroom wall. What he produced was pretty amazing. It was a green landscape, a kind of dense rain forest, with a canopy, all kinds of fantastical animals half-hidden in the dark foliage, bush baby eyes peering out of the shrubbery, mole-ish creatures snuffling along the jungle floor, bright macaws perched in the branches, hummingbirds hovering. To Molly, it felt humid; she could almost hear the twitter and caw, the soft
breathing. It wasn't real, but still, it was a place Molly would like to visit. It was like one of the places on the other side of her dad's globe; it was like her idea of Fiji.

Molly was thinking about Lonnie's rain forest, feeling her arm loosening up nicely, noticing that Lonnie's form was better today, he was coming over the top now, when all of a sudden she saw a look of alarm cross his face. “Molly, look out!” he hollered, and she thought, crazily, it was some-thing from the sky, a bomb, a missile, some piece of debris.

A ball bounced up and hit her square in the shinbone. It rolled away, and Lloyd Coleman came over to pick it up. He had a nasty smile on his face.

“Sorry,” he said, still smiling.

“Sure,” Molly said. Her shin was killing her. She could feel a welt forming, but she didn't look. She wasn't about to give Lloyd that satisfaction. “No problem,” she said.

“Better watch yourself,” he said. There was something cold and hard in his face, something unfamiliar, something she couldn't immediately assign a name. But then it hit her, after Lloyd had turned and walked away, after she'd assured Lonnie she was fine, and she'd resumed throwing and catching with him. The word came to her, what it was called. It was hatred, that's what it was. Hatred, pure and simple. And it was directed at her.

Morales broke them into groups and set up various stations around the field. They charged grounders at one, fielded fly balls at another, practiced leading off and getting a quick jump at a third. Morales moved among the groups, a bat in his hand, which he sometimes used as a pointer, performing
little demonstrations, making small corrections and adjustments in technique, keeping up a constant stream of encouraging patter. There were quick switches, balls flying, very little standing around, no time to chat. Molly did sneak a peek at her shin and found a nasty-looking knot about the size of a golf ball. She kept Lloyd Coleman on her radar. She raised her personal alert level to red. She didn't intend to get caught by another sneak attack.