The Girl Who Threw Butterflies

by Mick Cochrane

  And Molly thought about what Celia had said about magic. When she was a little girl, her dad used to read to her from a big book of fairy tales. These were the real thing, Grimm, not Disney. And some of them were grim. Her mother disapproved: “Such stuff! You'll give the poor girl nightmares.” But Molly loved them, the stranger the better. There was darkness and death and plenty of wickedness, sure, but it was no worse than the nightly news. And there was magic, too—spells and powers, transformations and wishes granted. That was what Molly loved, what she remembered best about those stories. When Cinderella planted a branch on her mother's grave and watered it with her tears, a magic tree grew.

  9. SECRET SOCIETY

  here's a boy at the door,” Molly's mother shouted up the stairs at her. It was Saturday morning, almost eleven. Molly had been lying on her bed, paging through a thick biography of Abraham Lincoln, the book her dad had been reading back in October, the book he'd never finished. She'd rescued it from a box on the back porch. She'd been studying pictures of Lincoln but thinking about her dad.

  “Molly,” her mother said again. “There's a boy at the door.” She stressed the word “boy,” and her voice had such a weird intonation, it sounded like some kind of crazy coded message. Those were the first words spoken to her that day. It was such an odd thing to say—a boy at the door? For a moment Molly couldn't understand what it meant or how she was supposed to respond. What exactly are you sup-posed to do about a boy at the door?

  She took a quick glance in the mirror and didn't much like what she saw there. She hardly ever did. She gave her hair a couple of quick brushes and tied it back in a tight ponytail, the way she fixed her hair under a baseball cap. But it didn't make much difference, one way or another. In the mirror there was still a plain-faced, apprehensive-looking girl. Molly stuck her tongue out at her and headed downstairs.

  Turned out “a boy at the door” meant Lonnie House, who was sitting on her front steps. An old, blue, fat-tired bicycle was kick-standed behind him in the driveway. At first Molly thought that Lonnie must have been riding by and got a flat, that he needed some roadside assistance. He looked slumped and stranded. But it was hard to tell: He always looked a little bit stranded.

  “Lonnie,” Molly said.

  She looked and saw that his tires were fully inflated. So this wasn't an accident after all—it was a social call.

  Lonnie was wearing jeans, a big T-shirt, high-tops, his usual getup, but today he looked better put together than usual somehow. Molly couldn't put her finger on it exactly.

  “So did Niedermeyer torture you?” Molly asked Lonnie. She hadn't had a chance to talk to him since the locker thing. “Did he give you detention?”

  “Nah,” Lonnie said. “I got a warning.”

  “Just a warning?”

  “A stern warning,” Lonnie said, and smiled. “I had to promise never to draw on lockers again. Or else.”

  Molly had been a little disappointed when she'd discovered that while she was in class, someone on the maintenance staff had cleaned off Lonnie's mural. There were a few black smudges remaining, a couple of stray lines, which cheered her up while she dialed the numbers of her combination. She could imagine the rest. “It was a great picture,” Molly said.

  “Kind of a rush job,” Lonnie said. “I could've done better with more time.”

  There was a pause. Then Lonnie pointed to his baseball glove, which he'd looped over the handlebars of his bike.

  “I thought maybe we could practice a little,” he said. “Not that you need it or anything.”

  “Oh, I need it,” Molly said. “Practice is just what I need.”

  Molly led Lonnie around the side of the house into the backyard. She opened the garage door and grabbed her glove and a ball. Molly went to her usual place, and Lonnie gravitated unknowingly to her dad's old spot, positioning himself the right distance from her, the distance between the pitcher's mound and home plate, right where her dad used to stand.

  At that point Molly realized why Lonnie looked different—his hair was combed. That was it. Molly liked him fluffy just fine, but it was touching, almost, to think of him running a comb through his hair on her account.

  They tossed the ball back and forth easily, nice and slow, and Molly was grateful that it wasn't necessary to say any-thing. Small talk, especially with a boy, sometimes seemed impossible. Last September Brett Sparks, a boy from her homeroom, had invited her to meet him for a bagel. He seemed like a nice kid, but their meeting had been an ordeal. What killed her were the silences. She'd racked her brain, come up with some questions, a couple of reasonably interesting observations, and what she got back were mono-syllables—”yes,” “no,” “yeah.” It was horrible.

  Here, with Lonnie, tossing the ball, they were making some noise, the ball was popping in their gloves. They weren't just staring at each other, stiff as a couple of mannequins. With Brett, Molly had felt like a complete dork, awkward and nervous. Something as simple as a swallow of chocolate milk or a bite of bagel and cream cheese seemed like humiliation-waiting-to-happen. But with a glove on her hand, Molly knew how to act, she felt like herself.

  Molly mixed in one knuckler. It took a little dip and Lonnie nabbed it deftly on one hop. He grinned. “Let's see that again,” he said.

  Molly's mother appeared in the kitchen window. Molly remembered that night when she'd come out all by herself and hatched her scheme while watching her mother through the same window. Molly suspected that her mother approved of her having a visitor. A boy at the door would be a good thing in her eyes, evidence that Molly was normal or maybe even popular. But she'd want it all done the right way. Her mother believed in propriety, etiquette, proper channels, meeting the parents. She'd want to do a background check on any boy Molly was interested in.

  A couple of pitches caromed off his glove, a few skipped past him entirely, but Lonnie didn't seem the least bit upset about it. He'd retrieve the ball, toss it back, and get ready for the next pitch. The longer they threw, the fewer he missed.

  After a while, once she'd broken a sweat, Molly let Lonnie know that she was ready for a break. She held up her hand. “Enough for now,” she said.

  There were a couple of plastic lawn chairs on the back deck, and Molly waved him over. They settled in like a couple of oldsters, staring out across the lawn. This was her deck, her lawn. It was where she'd sat hundreds of times, watching her dad grill burgers, eating her mom's potato salad off a paper plate. Sitting here with Lonnie, though, it looked different—not better, not worse, just different.

  Lonnie asked how long she'd been throwing the knuckler, and she told him just a little about playing catch with her dad. He wanted to know how she gripped it, and she showed him. Molly was a little embarrassed by her unglamorous hands, her stubby fingers on the ball, her chewed-up nails. But Lonnie was a kid who wrote on his hands, not just a phone number or address but strings of words, long lines of tiny blue text filling the back of his hand, full sentences probably. It was a running joke at school—”Hey, House, ever hear of paper?” He didn't have much ground to be judgmental about her need for a manicure.

  Lonnie leaned forward, squinting a little, studying her grip with the same sort of concentration he had devoted to the composition of his locker mural. He was an artist, Molly supposed; he was into technique, he was all about how-to.

  Lonnie seemed so genuinely interested in what she had to say, Molly told him more. She shared some of the knuckleball lore her father had passed along to her over the years. She told him how a guy named Paul Richards invented a special oversized floppy mitt to make catching a knuckler a little bit easier.

  “I could use one of those,” Lonnie said.

  She told him about the masters: Hoyt Wilhelm, Wilbur Wood, the Niekro brothers. She explained that in honor of Wilhelm, most knuckleball pitchers chose to wear the same uniform number, 49, Wilhelm's age when he retired.

  “It's like a club,” Lonnie said.

  “I guess it is.”

&nbs
p; “A secret society,” Lonnie said.

  “Something like that,” Molly said.

  They sat there for a moment, not saying anything. Lonnie took the ball from Molly and slowly arranged his fingers into the knuckleball grip she'd demonstrated, not perfect, but pretty close. He'd been paying attention.

  “You really miss your dad,” Lonnie said. He said it quietly, almost to himself, but Molly heard him, loud and clear.

  It was so simple, so true. Molly felt it like a punch in the gut. All of a sudden there was something happening in her chest, something behind her eyes.

  Molly already knew that she was going to tell Celia this story—the boy at the door, their baseball date. It would make a good story. Celia would appreciate it. But Molly understood that when she told it, she was going to leave some things out. She would leave out the part when she started crying. She wouldn't try to describe the way her shoulders shook, how Lonnie took her hand and held it tight, not patting, not rubbing, just a good firm grip, how he waited quietly while she regained her composure.

  It wasn't that she didn't trust Celia. But some things couldn't be put into words. What happened to her insides when Lonnie mentioned her dad. It was sorrow. It was grief. It was what your body felt when it knew the sad truth.

  Molly would tell Celia they'd talked some more, but she'd be vague about the details. She wouldn't pass along what Lonnie told her about missing his own father. His wasn't dead but divorced, living in a new house in a distant suburb with a new wife and a new baby, a new car, every-thing so sparkling and perfect that he and his mother now seemed shabby in comparison. They seemed like an embarrassing mistake, the first draft of a life his father had discarded.

  That was private. That was between the two of them. It was something he had entrusted to her, and she intended to be worthy of it.

  10. A ZEN THING

  n Monday morning, in homeroom, Celia gave Molly something. It was a thin, beat-up paperback book. About Zen and the art of archery.

  “You need to read this,” Celia said.

  “Archery?” Molly said. “As in bows and arrows?”

  “You need to read this,” Celia said.

  “As in Robin Hood? You're kidding, right?”

  “Molly,” Celia said. Her tone of voice was kindly but stern. It was how you'd talk to a naughty toddler or a wild puppy. “You need to read this.”

  “Because …”

  “You need to read it,” Celia said, “because you need to read it. Trust me. It's a Zen thing.”

  Later that morning, during study hall, when she probably should have been doing a math worksheet, Molly took a look at the book. There were loose pages and passages underlined in red and blue. The paper was yellowed with age. Probably it had belonged to Celia's brother Michael, who was currently or used to be a Buddhist.

  The book was about a guy who goes to Japan to study Zen. But you don't just study Zen; you don't just read a book or take a class. You have to learn to do something, to master some kind of art—flower arranging, drinking tea (ac-cording to the book, drinking tea could be an art), archery, whatever. You have to devote yourself. It didn't matter what you did, what mattered was how you did it. And to learn to do it right apparently took a long time. The author of the book seemed to have practiced with a master for years—years!—before he made much progress with his bow and arrow. A lot of it sounded like gibberish, like New Age babble: Consciousness and Unconsciousness, Emptiness, Illumination, Oneness, Artless Art.

  But by the time the bell rang, Molly had at least figured out where Celia was coming from. Baseball might be like archery. The real contest was with yourself. That's what the book said. Throwing a knuckleball might be like shooting an arrow. There was a target you were trying to hit, but you didn't just aim and fire—it was more complicated than that.

  Last Friday, Molly had been a little afraid to return to practice after the locker incident. She was worried about what Lloyd and his gang were going to do, how they planned to target her next. But they were apparently lying low, at least for now. That afternoon and throughout this week, they didn't aim anything at her.

  Today Molly noticed Lloyd and Lonnie talking before practice. They were sitting on the bench together, their heads turned toward each other. Molly was too far away to hear what they were saying. She couldn't imagine what the two of them had to talk about. It wasn't like they were friends. “What was that about?” she'd asked him later while they were shagging balls in the outfield. “You and Lloyd?” Was Lloyd giving Lonnie a hard time about his drawing? Lonnie telling Lloyd to back off? Lonnie wasn't talking. “Nothing” was all he said. “It was about nothing.”

  Molly thought she seemed a little less invisible to some of the other boys. During warm-ups she retrieved a ball for James Castle, and he thanked her. When it was time for pitchers and catchers to work, Ben Malone let her know. “Hey, Williams,” he'd said. “Coach wants us.” She liked to think that maybe she had earned some respect by not cowering, by just coming back for more.

  Molly noticed things had changed somehow between her and Lonnie. Neither mentioned his Saturday visit, their game of catch and their conversation afterward. But things had shifted. For one thing, when it was time to pair up and play catch, they immediately found each other. No milling around, no questions asked.

  As part of her little lecture on the history of the knuckle-ball, Molly had explained to Lonnie how many knuckleball pitchers came to have one catcher who specialized in catching that pitch for that particular pitcher. In the 1960s a guy named J. C. Martin made a living catching the great Hoyt Wilhelm's knuckleball. Doug Mirabelli always caught Tim Wakefield and his knuckleball for the Red Sox. They were called “personal catchers.” Catching a knuckleball was so difficult and so unpleasant for most regular catchers that if you could do it reasonably well (nobody did it really well), that one skill could keep you on the team. The personal catcher would sit on the bench until the knuckleballer took the mound, and then he and his special floppy mitt would enter the game. It was an odd kind of intimacy, to be joined together like that, a weird baseball marriage.

  During this week of practice it became clear that Lonnie had become Molly's personal catcher. Nobody said it, but everyone understood. During the second half of each practice, pitchers and catchers split from the rest of the squad, and Lonnie and Molly always worked together. That was fine with her. Lonnie had even acquired a catcher's mitt of his own. It looked new, or newish. Molly didn't ask, and Lonnie didn't tell. It somehow seemed too personal to mention.

  Though he didn't look like anybody's idea of an all-star ballplayer, Lonnie was getting good at catching the knuckler. Molly liked throwing to him. Maybe it was because he seemed so fearless, so unflappable. Nothing fazed him. He never flinched. Molly had seen a couple of baseball-sized bruises on his arms, but he never complained. If a pitch got by him, he didn't grouse about it, he just retrieved it. When Lonnie was catching, he sometimes made that same humming sound as when he was drawing. Molly believed he probably wasn't even aware of it himself; it was just how he concentrated. When she looked in and saw him—crouched and ready, masked and padded, but underneath it all, still Lonnie, hair sticking out—it calmed her down.

  On Wednesday night Molly got home before her mother and decided to just go ahead and fix her own dinner. It seemed like a good idea at the time. A way to declare her independence. But things weren't going well. There'd been some mishaps. By the time her mother came through the door, there was a blackened pan soaking in the sink, cheesy debris all over the countertop, a melted spatula in the garbage, and the smell of burned oil in the air.

  Over the years Molly had watched her dad make plenty of omelets, and so imagined she could whip one up for her-self tonight, no problem. How hard could it be?

  Her dad liked to talk while he cooked. He recited little rules of thumb, cooking theories and principles, which Molly thought she remembered. Hot pan, cold oil. He was always saying that. Or was it cold pan, hot oil? Both sounded true
. Her dad used to say you should cook eggs at the lowest possible temperature. Or was it the highest?

  And who knew there were so many kinds of oil? Vegetable, corn, olive, flavored and unflavored. Molly opted for olive oil, which sounded healthy, but while it was heating in her dad's favorite skillet, she got focused on beating eggs and grating cheese. She was wondering if cooking could be a Zen art, too, if maybe she could find illumination in the kitchen.

  Next thing Molly knew, the smoke alarm was beeping, a spatula, which she'd left too close to the burner, was melting down, and her pan was an evil-looking, scorched mess.

  Of course that was when her mother came in the door. She surveyed the scene, quietly assessed the damage. Molly had turned on the fan and disengaged the alarm, but still. It looked pretty bad. But Molly's mother didn't lecture or scold. She didn't say much of anything at all. She grabbed a dishcloth and helped Molly clean up.

  They worked together for a while in silence before her mother finally spoke. “Lonnie seems like a nice boy,” she said. It was a holdover remark from Saturday—her mother was apparently still puzzling over the boy at the door.

  Molly had dodged her mother's questions the day of Lonnie's visit the best she could, provided only the minimal background data. She'd told her that he was in Honors, which was both true and just the sort of thing she would like, and that they both liked to play ball, which was basically true, too.

  “Yes,” Molly said. She was sometimes afraid that every-thing she said to her mother could and would eventually be used against her. So she found ways to be pleasant but to divulge as little as possible. “He is a very nice boy.”

  “So,” her mother said. She was rinsing her hands in the sink with a kind of studied nonchalance. “You two are going out.” It was a classic interrogation technique: She wasn't asking a question, just floating an incriminating statement and then waiting for confirmation. It was how they some-times coaxed confessions from murderers on TV cop shows: So then you killed her.