Molly & Pim and the Millions of Stars

by Martine Murray

  “I tell you what, Molly. Even your house feels, well, it feels like a circus or a Gypsy tent. It’s not like most people’s houses. You’re lucky.”

  “Lucky?” Molly laughed. She sat down at the desk where her mama worked. Behind her were shelves stacked with small, amber-colored bottles with white lids and labels such as LION’S FOOT, LOOSESTRIFE, and LOQUAT written in black felt pen. “I bet if you lived here, you’d wish you could live in a normal house, same as everyone else.”

  Pim snorted. “Why? Why would I want to be like everyone else? Boring. The world is full of people just like everyone else.” He picked up a bottle. “Mallow! What’s that for?”

  “For softening, actually. When you’re angry, you chew the root and meditate on your heart becoming warm, and you try to bring that warmth to the person you’re angry at.”

  Molly was surprised she knew that. She was even more surprised she had told Pim, especially since feelings of the heart were not something she wanted to talk about with a boy. Perhaps she wanted to impress him with the things she knew that were different from what everyone else knew.

  “You can eat mallow. Most people think it’s a weed, but it’s actually more nutritious than spinach.” She tried to sound casual. “Is that why you hung the angel on the flagpole? To be different?”

  Pim grinned. “Nah, I’m not trying to be different. Truth is, I like to find ways to make school more interesting. I have a whole book of photos of that angel in all sorts of different places.”

  “What do you want to learn at school?”

  “Not football, that’s for sure. And not multiplication tables. I want to know how stuff works. And how to make one thing become something else. Light, for instance, or sound. What does it feel like to fly? How does an albatross guide itself as it flies across the ocean? What’s a star? It’s not your kind of magic, but it’s something.”

  Molly considered this. How could a boy not like football and like light and sound instead? These were not things that he liked; they were what colored the world, what gave it a certain feeling. She was about to reply that the magic was not hers but her mama’s, but she stopped herself. She’d always hidden anything that belonged to her mama’s world. But maybe having a feeling for plants was just like having a curiosity for how things work. Maybe Molly should start her own red notebook, take care of her knowledge. Knowledge was valuable, after all.

  “Smell this. It’s meadowsweet,” she said, handing a bottle of tincture to Pim. “We might use it in the green oil. It gives the ability to change directions.”

  Pim whistled. “Right. So an herb can help you change directions? I’m not saying I don’t believe, but I’d like to see for myself.”

  Pim bent his head to examine the red notebook. He drifted to the couch and sat down next to Claudine, who let out a large meow of protest. When Pim showed no sign of moving, Claudine leaped from the couch and circled Molly’s leg sulkily. Molly, however, was busy pondering what Pim had said and she hardly noticed Claudine.

  She hadn’t ever imagined anyone would be interested in knowing about weeds. And it hadn’t occurred to her that knowing this stuff could be something to be proud of.

  Molly took the meadowsweet tincture and put it on the desk next to the jar of spurge weed sap. What else did her mama put in the green oil? Fat hen, three-cornered jack, curled dock, sow thistle, prickly lettuce, sticky weed, chickweed, yarrow. All these Molly could identify easily. Her mama used the leaves in pies or salads and boiled the crushed roots in syrup or made ointments by mixing boiled, chopped leaves in lanolin.

  “Wow, this stuff is pretty out there! Listen to this,” Pim interrupted her thoughts. “You know what it makes me think? Maybe it’s not a potion that’s going to turn your mama back into a person. Maybe it’s something we have to do. A sort of ritual, or a dance?” Pim went on excitedly, “This page talks about merging with the plant. I think that’s what happened: your mother merged with the tree. One thing became another. So, maybe you should try to merge with the tree too.”

  “We should dance with the tree?” Molly did a wonky pirouette.

  Pim closed his eyes and put the notebook on his head. Molly laughed. He opened his eyes and grinned. Then he came toward her. “No,” he said cautiously. “Not we dance with the tree. You dance. I think it’s something you have to do.”

  Molly wasn’t sure she would be able to create the right feeling on her own.

  Pim headed toward the door. “I better get going. Mum will start getting worried.”

  “Are you coming back?” Molly’s voice was thin, and it came out with a tremble. It wasn’t that she was scared to stay there alone, because actually she felt safe sleeping in the boughs of the Mama tree, safer than anywhere else. It was more that she felt lonely, lonely in the way you feel when your life feels so very different from anyone else’s. When Pim was there, she felt a little sense that he was sharing her problem. Even if it wasn’t his mama and he couldn’t feel what she felt, as least he knew about it. And once he left, she would be alone again.

  “Well, I’ll come back after school tomorrow.”

  “Okay,” said Molly stiffly. She watched out the window as he grabbed his bike, swung a leg over the bar, and glided out of sight. And then she went and lay down next to Maude in the last golden beam of sunlight that spilled in through the window.

  What she really wanted, Molly thought to herself, was to crawl into her mama’s arms and tell her how very hard this was, and for her mama to tell her it would all be all right. She looked at her mama’s empty bed and then she looked at hers, without its mattress. Both seemed so abandoned. Beneath hers a breeze caught at a folded piece of paper. It scuttled along the floor. Molly gasped. It was her last birthday letter. Her mama wrote her one every year. Molly had stuffed it under her mattress. And here it was escaping toward her. She ran over and scooped it up. It wanted her to read it, of course. Molly wouldn’t have been surprised if the Mama tree had blown that little breeze in herself.

  My dear Little Pump,

  Here is my advice for my new ten-year-old. You who are made of stars. Build a house inside yourself. In it put that sweet little self of yours. Be kind and gentle to it. When there is a storm, don’t fight, just surrender to it from inside your little house. Let the wild weather take you where it will. Welcome all the mysteries, uncertainties, and doubts that life will throw at you with all the wildness of a raging storm. And keep exploring. You, my brave little love.

  Molly battled back a surge of feelings. Life had certainly thrown a storm-sized mystery at her, and within it was every uncertainty and doubt that any raging storm could muster. It was as if her mama knew it. And if her mama was right, all Molly had to do was to hold on for the ride. She folded up the letter and tucked it into her pocket. She would put it with her other treasures in the tree. In her Mama tree.

  Molly lay in her bed of branches. Maude was beside her, curled up with her head on her paws. Molly wrapped herself around Maude, and even though Maude didn’t particularly like being cuddled, she put up with it.

  “I know you don’t like it, Maude, but that’s why I love you, because you let me do it anyway.”

  Maude raised her head and beat her tail briefly in response, but then sank back down and seemed to fall instantly back to sleep.

  “Oh, Maudie,” said Molly with a long sigh that slid through the night and blended with the other quiet, gentle noises of leaves whispering and faraway owls hooting and distant cars on some highway going somewhere. The world was never completely still and quiet, but the night had a special sort of hushed activity. Things rustled and seemed hidden within the blackness, and it was as if dreams bloomed like shadows and escaped from their moorings and grew in momentous, invisible ways.

  Molly listened to the night. What should I do now? she wondered. Wondering was very different from thinking. Thinking always looked for answers. It was like folding the question up and putting it in the box it fitted into best. But wondering was like going for a walk w
ithout a destination in mind.

  Could I dance around the tree like Pim said? Molly wondered. The tree was humming. Was her mama humming to her, calming her? Molly pressed her ear to a branch. The vibrations were smooth and syrupy. She curled herself around the branch. Then she sat on top of it and swung her legs. She was wide awake now. Around her Molly saw the garden: the black, silent forms of the trees and, as she climbed higher, the whole sloping valley of the town. The sky was a dark, glowing blue with wisps of clouds, a large white moon, and one shining star.

  “Venus,” whispered Molly. Her mama always pointed it out. But tonight it was different, because it was Molly who had seen it, and because she had seen it and said its name, she felt she had introduced herself, and now she and Venus would forever know each other. It was like this with everything around her. It was as if she was seeing it all for the first time, seeing it with her very own self, taking the sense of it inside her. The black, shadowy tips of trees against the glow of light coming from the houses, the dark-forever-and-ever sky, the cluster of homes in the valley, where Molly imagined children snug in their beds, dogs flopped out tired on their rugs, someone rising from a piano, someone else sinking into a couch.

  This cozy, golden light seeping out from windows made Molly feel she was watching the very great drama of inside and outside. The wild, dark sky and the star and moon and mountains and trees were all out of reach and beyond and wondrous and soaring like dreams. And the houses with their small lights were the steady, comforting bones of life, set snugly, one next to the other, together and connected like beads on a string. Yet inside wouldn’t be inside without the wild, quiet roar of outside.

  Somewhere out there, there was another child just like her, one who didn’t live in a house, who didn’t have a lamp on, who didn’t have a mother or a father putting her to bed, and who didn’t feel right at all. Out there in the wide world, there were hundreds of worries much, much worse than Molly’s, maybe even thousands or millions of them. Molly’s problem was a tiny dot in the night. And if you joined up all those dots, it would make the big, inexplicable shape of lives being lived.

  Lives went in all ways. Life was a jagged dance of joys and sorrows, up and then down and sometimes in knots or jolts or dizzying rushes over or around again. And in Molly’s town at that moment among all those houses that sat there in the valley, there was Ellen Palmer’s house, where everything was always snug. But Molly’s best friend was gravely ill in her own bed with the pink curtains and the dressing table and everything as nice as you could wish for.

  Molly closed her eyes and wished for Ellen. She clung on tightly to her branch as if she and her mama were holding hands and both wishing for Ellen to get better. And it seemed that the branch clung back, just as it seemed that the sky swelled a little to fit that wish in, and the stars shone more with the feel of it.

  “A million tiny stars,” said Molly to the night, “and one more now.” Molly smiled. This was exactly the strange sort of wisdom her mama would utter, and now Molly had said it herself. More than that, she had felt it.

  Those stars swirled in her head and jiggled in her heart. She slid along her branch and made her way down the tree, swinging from branch to branch easily, nimble as a monkey. Perhaps it was magic, perhaps it was that she knew her mama wouldn’t let her fall.

  Imagine if you were never scared of falling, how much higher you might climb, she thought. Or, if you weren’t afraid of being clumsy and awkward, how much more gracefully you might dance.

  Molly jumped to the ground. The dark crept toward her, long black fingers of it. She leaned into the tree’s trunk. The sound of her breath echoed back from the tree. She could break the dark’s quiet. She could shake it all off her.

  Molly stood so close to the tree the bark tickled her nose. She circled the trunk. She stomped, she shook. Her mind gave way to the night. She cried out. She flung her arms and shook her hands. She leaped and crouched and sprang as wide as she could and twisted and twirled till she was too tired to move anymore.

  Then she stood very still and let her breath subside, but she watched the dark carefully. Had she frightened it away?

  The night was still. The Mama tree was still, but Molly could feel something within it. It had a strange paleness, and it moved high in the branches. Molly rose on her tiptoes and angled her head to get a better look. Something lifted high above the tree and rose, spinning in the dark sky like a small spaceship. Then it fell, gliding down to Molly’s feet.

  It was her mama’s sun hat, with the red ribbon dangling a little over the brim. She picked it up and clasped it to her chest. And then she climbed back up to her bed and lay down again.

  A shriek pierced the dark. It was, no doubt, Prudence Grimshaw, alert as a hyena, attempting to scare a wallaby out of her garden. A chill crept along Molly’s spine. She cuddled Maude and held on tight to the sun hat.

  The next morning Molly yanked Mama’s sun hat out from beneath her and tied the red ribbon around her wrist. Because the Mama tree had sent the hat spinning down to her, like a trophy, Molly knew she was a step closer to wherever she needed to be.

  “Well, Mama, I’m still here, and I’m not giving up either.” She patted the branch reassuringly, and for a moment she felt as if she was the mother. She wasn’t going to give any attention to her loneliness today; she wasn’t even going to think about it. She was going to think about someone else’s loneliness. Ellen Palmer’s. She was going to do something about it too.

  Molly got up quickly and picked herself some fruit from the Mama tree for breakfast. The flavors had changed. The white flesh now tasted like coconut and the green was like celery-and-potato soup. Then she swung herself down and hurried inside to feed Claudine.

  It was time to find the rest of the weeds for the green oil. Molly took Maude, and they walked over the bridge to the woods where her mama had last collected herbs. Molly carried her mama’s basket, and she wore the sun hat, which was slightly too big, and the brim made it hard for her to see ahead. She stomped along, looking down and crouching every now and then to pick some curled dock.

  Molly and Maude walked for a while alongside the railway track, where the path was stony and the only weeds Molly found were plantain and some prickly lettuce, which she didn’t pick, as she had forgotten to bring gloves.

  Molly wished she could remember the exact recipe. She had a feeling there was nettle in it and comfrey, which both grew in their vegetable garden. And she was certain there was spurge and calendula and tansy. She needed strong herbs that could, for instance, grow on a parched, stony path. These would give the strength that Ellen needed.

  —

  Once home again, Molly set about making the green oil. She took down from the shelf some of the tinctures from her mama’s collection, and the milky spurge sap that she and Pim had squeezed, drop by drop, into a jar. She boiled up the fresh weeds and mixed the strained water with the herb tinctures and some olive oil. She hoped that would do it.

  She put the jar of sap with the bottled tinctures and read the names out loud to make sure they all sounded as if they belonged. She closed her eyes and tried to feel love; her mama said it was important. But all she felt was a strange tapping at her heart, as if someone was locked up in there and wanted to escape.

  Molly opened her eyes and let out a short, loud, busy sort of sigh. It was hard to summon feelings exactly when you needed them.

  She lifted the bottle of calendula tincture and poured it into a mixing bowl. She hardly noticed Claudine, who had been circling Molly’s leg beneath the table and who now leaped onto the table, knocking over the jar of spurge sap. The sap spread in a useless white puddle on the table.

  Molly looked at it in horror. Claudine sniffed it disparagingly, as if to say, “It’s not even real milk.” She leaped down again and sat with her tail curled in, looking elsewhere, as cats sometimes do when they think they might be in trouble.

  “Well, Claudine, if you think this is going to make me get you some milk,
you are very, very wrong, as now I think you are just a spoiled cat, and I am not in the mood at all for trying to find you some milk.” Molly threw her arms up. “You’ve ruined my green oil. Ruined!” she added dramatically.

  Molly pushed aside her mama’s notebooks, which were smeared with spurge sap, and as she shook one dry, a piece of paper fell out. She picked it up and read it. It was in her mama’s handwriting.

  Uses for petty spurge, also known as milkweed, wartweed, radium weed: sap burns off sunspots, warts, corns, and some skin cancers. Active ingredient: ingenol mebutate. The sap is toxic and should not be used internally.

  “Oh, wow,” said Molly out loud. Claudine glanced slyly back toward her. Molly had got it wrong. The sap from spurge was used for removing things, not for nourishing. Molly shuddered as she imagined what might have happened if Claudine hadn’t knocked it over. She squatted next to Claudine, who turned her head away huffily.

  Molly patted her under her chin, just where she liked it. “Okay, Claudine. I’m sorry for being mean. You were right. You even saved the day. And I will try to get you some milk.”

  —

  It was some time before Molly set to work again on the green oil. First she began reading her mama’s books about plants. But she knew she was avoiding the oil because she’d almost lost her nerve. And, even worse, she was waiting for Pim to show up. Molly didn’t like to admit this to herself, because she didn’t like to feel she could possibly be depending on Pim Wilder. She was the one who knew about plants, not Pim. It wasn’t as if he would know what to do. And even if he did make suggestions, it wasn’t his best friend who was ill, so he wouldn’t put the right feeling into it.