The Girl Who Threw Butterflies

by Mick Cochrane

  On the field Lloyd Coleman seemed to be sneaking glances her way—it looked to Molly as if he was smirking. She remembered his little monologue. What joy he must have felt watching her be upended. She could just imagine his rude commentary.

  Molly watched Lonnie, who was catching a pitch from Desmond Davis. Lonnie waited while Morales hit a ground ball, then tossed another ball to him. Lonnie looked at ease and unconcerned, casual even. She felt angry at him—unfairly, probably, but since when is anger fair? How could he resume baseball business as usual while she was sitting there, hurt and humiliated? She wanted something from him. She didn't know what exactly, but something. What good was a personal catcher if he couldn't take care of you when you were bruised?

  Morales called an end to practice a few minutes later. The players gathered around him, as always, for a few parting words. Molly stood slowly and walked over and joined the team. Already, after just a few minutes on the sidelines, she felt like an outsider. Everyone else was dusty and sweaty, breathing hard, and she had an ice pack in her hand.

  “Okay,” Morales said. “Listen up.” Ordinarily, Morales made only very brief remarks, telling them what they had done well, what they needed to work on. Today, though, he gave them a little talk, preached a little sermon—about failure.

  Morales told them that baseball, more than any other sport, is all about failure. “Nobody goes undefeated in base-ball,” he said. “It's not like college football.” Morales explained that if a batter fails seven times out of ten, then he's among the very best. An all-star. How many times did Babe Ruth strike out? More than a thousand times. Think about that: striking out a thousand times. The greatest pitchers ever have won three hundred games in their careers, but how many did they lose along the way? Hundreds.

  Molly knew all this. It was the conventional wisdom. It was the sort of thing announcers would discuss during a rain delay. It had been one of her dad's favorite set pieces.

  It was not what Molly wanted to hear. She was in no mood to listen to a hymn to failure. Not while she was still smarting from her fall. Not while she was annoyed with Lonnie. She remembered the human chain they'd formed less than two hours earlier. She remembered how solid she felt, how connected. It had not taken long for that feeling to evaporate, for the chain to fall apart.

  15. MOLLY STIRS IT UP

  olly's mother arrived home later than usual that night. Molly had set up at the kitchen table with her homework and a bag of baby carrots. She'd begun work on her social studies project, which was to invent and describe her own country. It had seemed like a stupid assignment at first, but now Molly was getting into it. She was crunching carrots and sketching a map of her country, and it was taking her mind off what she didn't want to think about.

  Molly's country was going to be an island, she knew that much. Her country—the Kingdom of Molly, she was tempted to call it—would be in the Pacific, somewhere between Hawaii and New Zealand. It would be ruled by a girl queen. Sparkling bits of coral would be used as money. There'd be no written language, no technology. Anything important—laws, history, whatever—would be sung. The national pastime would be a primitive form of baseball played with small coconuts.

  Molly's mother came through the door, brisk and cheerful, suspiciously cheerful, a bag of groceries in her arm, a bunch of celery sticking out of the top. “Hi, honey,” she practically chirped. She could have been auditioning for some retro sitcom.

  Molly looked up from her country. “Hi.” Her mother had been to the salon. She'd gotten some color and a new haircut. It was sort of sculpted, casually ragged—a Meg Ryan kind of look.

  “How was your day?” her mother asked.

  Molly could tell that her mother wanted her to say something about her hair. She had that vacant supermodel look. It was a self-absorbed, how-do-I-look? expression, like someone looking into a mirror. Someone using another per-son as a mirror. She wanted a compliment. She seemed pathetically eager for attention. But Molly wasn't willing to play that game.

  “Would you like some carrots?” Molly said, and pushed them across the table. She didn't want to play girlfriend to her mother. Thanks, but no thanks. Maybe the fact that Molly was eating dinner out of a plastic bag would make her mother feel guilty.

  Her mother opened the fridge and started loading it from the grocery bag. She gave her head a little shake. Her mother's birthday was just three days off, Molly remembered, on Saturday. Maybe they'd go out for dinner to celebrate.

  No matter what, Molly had to think of a gift for her. The need to shop for her mother made Molly feel a creeping kind of anxiety and even dread. It was an impossible task. If you asked what she wanted for her birthday—or for Christmas, or Mother's Day, for that matter—she'd smile and say, “Nothing.” (What was it that Celia had said? It's okay to want something.) Or she'd suggest some loving-mom version of nothing: something homemade, a hug. But it was a trap. When she'd open Molly's sincere offering—a hand-picked bouquet, a hand-lettered poem—her mother would smile and say all the right things, but it seemed like a hollow performance. Whatever she really wanted, this wasn't it. It made Molly feel stupid, like a failure. Once Molly presented her with a book of coupons, for things like breakfast in bed, but she never redeemed a single one of them.

  A few days before her mother's birthday, Molly and her dad used to hit the mall together. He seemed as clueless as Molly about what might please her. And he seemed baffled, frightened even, by women's things—perfume, lingerie, jewelry. But somehow they always had fun on these doomed shopping missions. She'd tease her dad by dousing him with perfume or by suggesting that they surprise her mom with something hugely inappropriate. A moped. A set of wrenches. A few rap CDs. They'd eventually choose something innocuously beautiful—a silk scarf, say—and then, relieved, happily off the hook until Mother's Day at least, they'd eat Chinese in the food court. Molly realized that this would be another gloomy first without her dad. She'd have to go it alone this time.

  “So, Molly,” her mother said. “Guess who I ran into? Lorna Schmidt.”

  “That's nice,” Molly said. She was drawing a river and didn't look up. The river would divide Upper Molly from Lower Molly and bring fresh water to all her subjects. Lorna Schmidt was the mother of Eva Schmidt, a girl in Molly's grade whom she'd been friends with briefly back in fourth grade. Molly's mother seemed to believe they were still close, and Molly never bothered to set her straight.

  “You know what she says to me?”

  “What?” Molly said. “What does Lorna Schmidt say to you?”

  “She says, ‘I hear Molly is really stirring it up at school.’ ‘Oh,’ I say. Stirring it up. I don't know what she's talking about, but I play along. I pretend that I have a daughter who tells me things. A daughter who keeps me in the loop. I pre-tend that I have a daughter who talks to me while she's out there making waves and stirring it up.”

  Molly put down her pencil. She could feel her face growing warm. “I have no idea what you're talking about,” Molly said, but of course she did. It had only been a matter of time, and now she was busted. Eva Schmidt was a gossip, a girl without a life of her own, who had nothing better to do than entertain her mother with stories of her former friend's goings-on at school.

  “Oh really,” her mother said. Her mother told her the story she'd gotten from Lorna Schmidt. Call it “Molly Stirs It Up.” It was pretty funny, as ludicrous and distorted as what gets announced at the end of a game of telephone, after the long chain of whispers, just about everything lost in translation. Molly would have laughed, except that in this story, she was the main character.

  The single accurate fact in the story was that Molly was on the baseball team, the only girl. The rest was embroidery, speculation, buzz. In this version of the story, her playing baseball sounded like some wacky stunt. No mention that she had earned her spot on the team, nothing about striking Grady Johnston out, no suggestion that she might actually be a good ballplayer. There was something catty about it, as if playing base
ball were a way to meet boys, as if she were some kind of boy-crazy hussy.

  “Why wouldn't you tell me?” her mother asked. “Why don't you talk to me?”

  “I was going to tell you,” Molly said. “I was just waiting for the right moment. I know how busy you are.”

  “If you don't talk to me, if you keep secrets from me, how can I trust you?”

  “Mom, I've been playing baseball, not shooting heroin.”

  “I deserve better.”

  Naturally, Molly didn't say, it's all about you, what you deserve.

  Molly picked up her colored pencil and went back to tracing the river in her country. She pushed too hard and snapped off the tip. Didn't she deserve better, too?

  Molly felt her mother's hand on her shoulder. “Playing baseball won't bring him back,” her mother said quietly.

  Her mother's touch was kindly, but still Molly recoiled a little. It could go either way.

  “I know baseball was special to the two of you,” her mother said. “Playing catch. Watching the games on television together. It was sweet. It really was.”

  Molly despised the word “sweet.” She had been on the brink of breaking down, but that one word pulled her back. It was a pat on the head. She loosed herself from her mother's grip.

  Her mother said, “Molly, you need to …” She paused.

  Molly fixed her mother with what she hoped was a glare. Need to what? she wondered. Move on? Get over it? If her mother used the word “closure,” Molly believed, she would launch herself at her and claw her face.

  “What?” Molly demanded. “What do I need to do? I'd really like to know. Please tell me. I'm all ears.”

  Her mother took her measure. “I'm going to start some dinner. You need to pick up your schoolwork and wash up. That's what you need to do.”

  Her mother did in fact make dinner, chicken and rice and steamed broccoli, which was a pleasant surprise. They ate, mostly in polite silence. But there was a softness in her mother's manner, a gentleness. She inquired politely whether Molly wanted more of this or that. She refilled her water glass. She smiled.

  Molly decided to take advantage of her mother's mood and ask something she'd been stewing about.

  “Was he sad?” she asked.

  “Your father?”

  “Yes,” Molly said. “My father. Your husband. Peter J. Williams. Was he sad?”

  “Sometimes. Everybody is sad sometimes.”

  “How sad?”

  “There's no Richter scale, Molly. Sometimes he was sad. Mostly he wasn't. Was he depressed? Is that what you're getting at?”

  “Maybe,” Molly said. “Something like that.”

  “Was his accident not an accident? Is that what you're asking me?”

  “No,” Molly said. Now her mother was the one who was glaring.

  “Because if you are, I can tell you. It was not intentional. It was an accident.”

  “Okay,” Molly said.

  “He didn't crash his car on purpose.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know because I know.”

  “He drove on that stretch of highway year after year, hundreds and hundreds of times. And then one night he goes off the road at full speed.”

  “The police think he might have dozed off,” her mother said. “Fallen asleep.”

  “But he was always drinking coffee.”

  “I know, I know. Go figure.”

  “It doesn't make sense,” Molly said. “Why?”

  “Don't you think I've asked myself the same thing?” For once her mother didn't sound composed. Beneath her buoy-ant new hairdo, her face was twisted with confusion.

  “And?” Molly asked.

  “There is no why, Molly. There's just is.”

  Her mother cleared the dishes from the table and returned with a cup of hot water and a tea bag. “There's something I want you to think about,” she said.

  “Sure,” Molly said. “I'll think about anything.”

  “Good,” her mother said. “I want you to think about moving.”

  “Moving?” Molly said. At first Molly didn't understand what she meant. It seemed like a weird thing to say. “As opposed to standing still?”

  “As opposed to staying in this house, in this city.”

  Her mother had never liked Buffalo. She'd come because it was where she and Molly's dad both found good jobs after college. She'd thought they'd just be passing through. Buffalo would be a short, funny line on her résumé. For her, just like for the rest of the country, it was a punch line, the city of snow and Super Bowl losers, the city of chicken wings and unemployment. It was part of the Rust Belt. Where the big ideas for urban renewal were casino gambling and a fishing tackle superstore. It was what people hoped didn't happen to their cities. It was like Siberia, a place you'd go to disappear, to be punished.

  “Moving as in van,” Molly said.

  “Back to Milwaukee,” her mother said. The house would be just one more thing to be discarded, just like her dad's clothes.

  “Milwaukee,” Molly said. It was where her mother grew up, where they made car trips every other summer to pay a visit.

  “We would be near Grandma. A new job for me, a new school for you. It could be a fresh start. For both of us.”

  Molly felt too exhausted to say anything. Where would she even begin? She didn't especially want to be nearer to her grandmother. To Molly, Buffalo was no joke. For better or worse, it was home. She didn't want a fresh start. Maybe her life was messed up, but she wasn't ready to trade it for a new one.

  Molly stood up. With her new haircut and hopeful offer, her mother seemed like some kind of sales agent.

  “I'll definitely think about it,” Molly said. She felt as if she and her mother maybe were supposed to shake hands at that point, like shady business partners contemplating some kind of greasy deal.

  Later, alone in her room, Molly looked out her window and studied the blinking red light of the distant radio tower. She thought about little Caitlin next door, snug in her bed, and remembered the view from her room. Molly couldn't think of a single wish to wish. She was completely wishless.

  She thought about what her mother had told her about her dad's accident. Why was she not relieved to hear that what she had feared most was not what had happened? Was a terrible explanation better than no explanation? How could her dad have fallen asleep? What was he thinking? How could he have done that to her?

  Molly's life felt like one of those impossible knots she got in her sneaker laces when she was a little girl. The more she worked at it, the harder she pulled, the worse it got. She was part of a team that didn't seem to want her; annoyed with a boy who was maybe her friend, maybe just a catcher; obsessed with a crazy pitch taught to her by a father who fell asleep at the wheel; at war with her mother, who wanted her just to get over it and move on, whatever “it” was.

  She looked down below, stared into the darkness of the lawn, her old playground, where, just a couple of weeks before, after her last blowout with her mother, she'd thrown that one magical knuckler. So much had happened since then. It seemed so long ago.

  But even now Molly didn't want to get over baseball, and she sure didn't want to get over her dad. She didn't even want to get over her grief, that aching sadness in her chest. It connected her to him. It was a painful connection, but it was a connection just the same, and she would never willingly give that up.

  Molly opened the window. There was a breeze, which felt good. She tried to imagine herself down in the yard, winding up, her dad crouched and giving her a target. She squinted into the shadows and could almost see it. The white ball, released from her hand, floating, dipping and rising in impossible waves, riding the air current like a hawk, floating, floating, floating.

  16. MOLLY'S GRIP

  o Eva Schmidt's mother spilled the beans,” Molly told Celia. “Told my mom all about it.”

  They were at Celia's house, down in the basement, a big family rec room full of interesting stuff—baske
ts of laundry, a drum set, a Ping-Pong table piled with boxes of old books, a stationary bike, skis and skates, a pair of crutches. Celia's parents stayed out—if they needed something, they shouted down the stairs. It was like a clubhouse, an independent nation.

  Celia was sitting on a folding chair, holding her tuba, the big mouthpiece covering her lips. She conveyed her sympathetic disgust by shaking her head slowly back and forth.

  “Busted,” Molly said. She was standing with her back to Celia. She brought her hands together at her waist and looked over her shoulder at her. In Molly's hand was a rolled-up pair of sweat socks. She was practicing pitching from the stretch position, going through the motions so they would become automatic, second nature. With runners on base, she couldn't use the full windup she knew best—if she did, they'd steal. Instead, she had to use this modified motion, including a pause, during which she was supposed to look at the runners, fix them with a stare. If a runner strayed too far from the base, she was supposed to throw over and pick him off.

  “She was going to find out sooner or later,” Celia said.

  “I know,” Molly said. “But still.”

  Celia squinted at the music on the stand in front of her—she needed glasses but was in denial about it—and blew a funky-sounding bass line. Molly stepped forward and tossed the sock-ball across the room. She followed through just as she would have for real.

  The team's first game was just a week away. It seemed impossible that she would ever be ready. It was one thing to practice, one thing to do it right in Celia's basement or in a drill with no one watching, when you had the chance to do it over if you messed up. It was something else entirely to do it when it counted, against kids you didn't know, on the varsity field, in front of a crowd.

  “Does she know about Lonnie?” Celia asked.

  “Know what about Lonnie?” Molly said. “What is there to know about Lonnie?” There'd been no more visits to her house. But he always caught her at practice. They had a few awkward telephone conversations. He waited for her after practice sometimes, and they talked, a little. “I don't know about Lonnie,” Molly said.