The Girl Who Threw Butterflies

by Mick Cochrane

  After the last practice he had called her to see if she was okay. Molly had been a little short with him, she wasn't sure why. He seemed concerned, but maybe not concerned enough. Or not concerned in the right way. Or something. The thing about Lonnie was that on the phone he was not a real live wire. He was no chatterbox, that was for sure. All those words written across the back of his hand, but put him on the phone and not that many came out of his mouth. Plus, in the background there was always some unhappy static, some kind of miserable Muzak—the grinding of what sounded like his mother complaining, droning on unpleasantly about something. It was not as if Molly was looking to import more unhappiness into her life at this particular point.

  “What's the matter?” Celia asked. “You two have a tiff? Are you breaking up?”

  Molly went through the motions of her stretch windup again. Brought her hands together. This time she looked back over her right shoulder, at an imaginary runner leading off second base.

  “I'm not sure we were ever together,” Molly said. “So how could we break up?”

  “Why is your hand like that?” Celia said.

  “Like what?”

  Celia pointed. “All weird and clawlike, all crumpled up.”

  Molly had to laugh. “That's my grip,” she said. “For the knuckleball.” Even if it was only a rolled-up pair of socks, that was how she held it. That much at least had become automatic. “Remember? My secret weapon?”

  For the next twenty minutes or so, each of them kept practicing. Celia blew her horn, the same basic rhythm with some Jamaican-flavored variations. If anyone could play reggae tuba, it would be Celia. Molly kept working from the stretch, checking imaginary runners on the bases, holding them close.

  They were together, but they didn't speak. For that time, Molly felt as almost-happy as she had in a long time, at peace even. She liked being with Celia, she liked the music, she liked going through the pitching movements without having to think, she liked not talking. Maybe her trouble with Lonnie wasn't too few words, maybe it was the need for words in the first place.

  The next afternoon Molly threw an inning in a practice game. Her knuckleball was maddeningly inconsistent. It started out fine, and she got a couple of quick outs. But then it turned into a wild, willful child. It wouldn't listen to her. She walked the bases full.

  Lonnie, who'd been brought into the scrimmage along with Molly, came out for a conference. He was breathing hard but didn't seem upset. He raised his mask and shrugged. If her knuckleball was going berserk, he wasn't going to hold it against her.

  “I know,” Molly said.

  “Okay,” Lonnie said.

  He was a weird kid, but he had a good heart, and Molly couldn't stay mad at him for long.

  With runners on base, at least Molly felt comfortable working from a stretch. All that practice in Celia's basement must have paid off. She checked the runners, at third, second, and first. She noticed that the runner leading off first, Eli Krause, had wandered pretty far from the base and didn't seem to be paying all that much attention to her. Everett Sheets, the first baseman, had sneaked in behind him and was flapping his mitt. He wanted Molly to throw it over.

  She took a breath, then, just as she'd been coached, pivoted hard toward first and threw to Everett. It was a strong move, except that what Molly threw to Everett was a knuckleball. Molly watched, horrified, as the spinless ball started shoulder high, then dove. Somehow, though, Everett snagged it in his mitt and applied the tag to Eli, who didn't even slide back into the base—he'd been caught flat-footed. Molly heard someone on the bench cackling with delight—it sounded like Coach V—and just like that, Molly was out of the inning.

  At the end of practice Morales called the team together. Coach V, who'd disappeared a few minutes earlier, returned carrying a big cardboard box.

  “Take a seat,” Morales said.

  In the box were the team jerseys and caps. Morales had a system for distributing them. It was a little ritual, like a graduation. He asked the players to take a seat in front of him on the grass. Molly settled on one knee near the back, next to Lonnie, who was still wearing his shin guards. One by one, Morales called their names. Each player stood and stepped forward, took a jersey from Morales and a cap from Coach V.

  There was nothing special about the uniforms. They were blue double-knit jerseys with white lettering, blue caps with black brims. But still, there was something about them. To Molly, and any other true fan like her dad, a team uniform—the Yankees’ pinstripes, for example—could trigger a whole range of memories and emotions. How a player wore his uniform could tell you something about him. Some were baggy, unbuttoned, and dusty. Some were trim and tucked. You could wear it like a gangster, a hotdog, an old-fashioned dirt eater, a bland company man. But no matter what, the uniform, however you styled it, showed your membership, connected you with something. Gave you something to rep-resent. Somebody wore those colors before, and someone would wear them afterward.

  Molly watched as Morales called her teammates forward one by one and handed them their jerseys. They didn't shake hands, but there was something sort of congratulatory about it. Morales held each jersey up in front of the player, eyeballing them for size, Molly supposed, but there was a kind of formality about it. Desmond, Lloyd, Ian, James, Everett, Lonnie—each took a shirt from Morales and moved down the line to receive a cap from Coach V. The idea seemed to be that a uniform was something they'd earned, that wearing the uniform meant something.

  Molly was among the last to be called up. She stood and approached Morales, who showed her the front, then the back. There was a big white 49, the traditional knuckle-baller's number. “Thank you,” Molly said, and felt a little choked up. When Coach V handed her a cap, he may or may not have winked at her. His face was so wrinkled and twitchy, it was impossible to tell whether it was a sign or just a tic.

  That night after dinner, Molly went into the bathroom up-stairs and tried on her uniform. She pulled the jersey over the white turtleneck she had on and tugged at the shoulders. It fit okay. A little roomy, which was fine. She studied the lettering reversed in the mirror. McKINLEY. Her father used to think it was funny that her school was named after an obscure president who came to Buffalo a hundred years ago and was assassinated by a crazy man. Her mother thought it was sick.

  Molly pulled her hair back and put the cap on her head. She gently curved the bill. She looked into the mirror and made the face she showed to batters, the face she checked runners with. Would anyone take her seriously? Did she look like a pitcher or a poser?

  Molly took a step back. She tugged on the brim of her cap and pretended to look in for a sign from her catcher. In the mirror she seemed to glimpse, just for an instant, not herself, not her current anxiety-ridden self, but the little girl she used to be, the little girl in the home movie, pitching to her dad on a sunny day without a care in the world. That little girl was full of spit and vinegar, that little girl was fear-less and unself-conscious. She didn't need to read a book in order to learn how to be in the moment. That little girl didn't care what she looked like when she threw the ball. She just did it, ferociously.

  Out in the hall, Molly's mother was putting away laundry in the linen closet. Molly could hear the creak of the door and her mother's exhaling in an exhausted, sad sort of way. It was what middle age sounded like. All day on the phone at work, her mother was brisk and full of can-do energy, but at night, when she thought no one was listening, she sounded defeated.

  On impulse, Molly opened the door and stepped out.

  “So what do you think?” she asked. She spun around and struck a goofy pose, arms crossed across her chest.

  Her mother stepped forward and tugged gently at the hem of the jersey, felt the double-knit fabric. If it had been a prom dress, her mother would have known perfectly how to respond. But because this was a baseball uniform, she seemed perplexed. There was no lace, nothing that gathered or plunged.

  “Well?” Molly said.

  Molly
could tell that her mother was trying very hard not to say the wrong thing. “It's very striking,” her mother said at last. She seemed so cautious, nervous even. She seemed scared that Molly might go off. Molly felt sorry for all her testiness in the past. She didn't like thinking that she'd become an emotional terrorist, always on the verge of detonating.

  “Is it me? Molly asked. She wanted to keep it light, the way she would with Celia. “Do I look fabulous?”

  “Oh yes,” her mother said. “It is you. It is so you.”

  “You think?”

  “Think?” her mother said. “I know. Nothing could be more you.”

  17. SIGNS

  uring practice that week, the team worked on the finer points of playing the field—defending against the bunt, executing cutoffs. Molly learned that if she gave up a big hit, she couldn't just stand on the mound and kick the rubber in disgust. There was no time to be angry with herself. She had to back up third base.

  Every day Molly learned how much more there was to baseball than what the camera showed on television. With a runner on first base, it was the pitcher's responsibility to talk to the shortstop and second baseman, letting them know who should cover second. When a ball was hit into the air, Molly was supposed to point at it so that her fielders could pick it up. And if the first and third basemen were both charging a bunt, it was Molly's job to call out who should take it and where to throw it. Shouting didn't come naturally to Molly, but Morales teased her into it. He cupped his ear like an old, hard-of-hearing man. “Did someone say something?” Before long, Molly was hollering out instructions to her infielders loud and clear. She stopped worrying about sounding ladylike and concentrated on being heard.

  Morales was gentle with physical errors. They were un-avoidable, part of the game. What really bugged him were examples of what he called a failure to communicate. Two outfielders running into each other because neither called for the ball, that sort of thing. “You gotta talk to each other,” he told them over and over again.

  At the last practice before their game Morales sat them on the bench and taught them a simple set of signs they'd use when the team was up to bat. If he touched his belt buckle, that was the indicator: What followed then was the real sign, the rest was gibberish. A touch of the forearm meant steal, the bill of his cap was bunt.

  Molly had always liked to watch the third-base coaches in big league games, all their twitchy antics, their elaborate coded messages, all that clapping, pointing, wiping. It was comical, but beyond the goofy theatrics, the whole idea fascinated her: an entire system of wordless communication. She loved the beautiful, perfect clarity of it. A touch of the forearm meant steal. Nothing more, nothing less. There was no chance to be misunderstood. There was no need to puzzle over what it meant.

  It occurred to Molly that maybe she and her mother ought to try communicating using signs. It was an appealing fantasy. The two of them sitting across from each other at dinner, silent, just touching their elbows, going to their belt buckles, tugging their earlobes. It would make for a funny skit. But what if you wanted to convey something more complicated than “bunt” or “steal”? That was the trouble. “I love you and all that, but right now everything about you bothers me.” What would be the sign for something like that? Or how about this: “Please don't make me move to Milwaukee.” Half the time Molly had no idea what she wanted to get across. No signs could help with that.

  During that last practice, it occurred to Molly that in this country of baseball, she was still a kind of alien. Not a tourist. She was learning the customs, could speak the language well enough to get by. But she still didn't quite fit in. Someone like Ben Malone was native born, fluent. He belonged so naturally, he didn't even know it. He took it for granted, he didn't have to think about it. He had no idea how much energy it took to be as ever-vigilant as Molly had to be on the field, always watching herself, always planning her next move, rehearsing, calculating.

  Molly watched enviously as Ben walked along the bench, nonchalantly untucking the shirttails of teammates as he passed by. Without asking permission, he would reach casually into a teammate's bag of sunflower seeds and help himself to a big handful. He knew he was entitled. It was only partly a guy thing.

  Molly wasn't the only one. Lonnie was likewise peripheral. Put him in a lineup with Ben Malone and Mario Coppola and play a quick round of One of These Things Just Doesn't Belong. Lonnie would get chosen every single time. It was hard to say why, tough to put into words just what it was about him. Something. The way he wore his cap, maybe. His humming. Possibly the fact that his mitt was covered with pictograms. Impossible to define precisely, but real.

  In an entirely different way, for completely different reasons, Desmond Davis and James Castle inhabited the margins, too. They were the only African American kids on the team, among the few in a mostly white school. Of course, they were never explicitly excluded from anything. Molly never witnessed anything that could be considered prejudice. Never any name-calling, no meanness. Just the opposite. Molly sensed everyone wanted to show how not-prejudiced they were. It reminded Molly a little of how she had been treated after her dad's funeral, with a kind of studied, almost scripted niceness. To all appearances it was just right, but it didn't feel real.

  There seemed to be invisible barriers, unspoken rules. At school Desmond and James ate lunch together, and at practice they almost always played catch together. They had private, quiet conversations on the bench that halted if you got too near. They even had their own handshake. It was an elaborate one, with many steps. It involved both the front and back of the hand, some knuckle, high and low slaps, some finger snapping. They could do it superfast. They weren't showy about it, but Molly saw them do it a couple of times and, once again, couldn't help but feel like an envious outsider.

  The night before the game, Molly couldn't sleep. She tossed and she turned. She tried to think of the most sleep-inducing topic she could. It was the endless memorization of science, her least favorite subject. She tried, instead of counting sheep, listing the parts of the cell she was going to be quizzed on later in the week. Endoplasmic reticulum. Golgi bodies and lysosomes. Plasma cell membrane. Ribosomes. She had this stuff down cold. She could label a cell diagram with her eyes closed, she could spell “mitochondria” backward and forward.

  These mental gymnastics weren't making her the least bit drowsy. Finally she gave up and got out of bed. She picked up the ball lying on her desk. As always, it felt good in her hand. The thing was, the ball didn't care. That's what she loved about it. It was completely indifferent, without prejudice. The ball didn't care if you were a girl or a boy. Skinny or fat, rich or poor, black or white, cool or uncool, happy or sad, smart and funny or awkward and shy, if you were charming and had a way with words and a winning smile—didn't matter. The ball didn't care.

  She looked out the window and saw the flickering glow of a television next door in the Rybaks’ house. It was one A.M. Face it: Nobody watched television at this hour because of the high-quality programming. Did Mr. Rybak have insomnia? Mrs. Rybak? They didn't seem like the sleepless types. What could possibly be keeping them awake at this hour? Molly had assumed that their happy, wholesome, well-regulated lives excluded all confusion, doubt, middle-of-the-night dread. So maybe not. Maybe the walls of even the nicest, most carefully constructed homes were semipermeable membranes. Siding, double-pane windows, caulk—it didn't matter; sorrow and confusion were going to leak through from time to time.

  There was a phrase Molly had heard her dad use more than once: Dark night of the soul. She hadn't understood it at the time, but the words stuck with her. They must have scared her a little. So this was probably it. Her dark night. It sounded worse than it was. It wasn't so bad.

  Molly stepped away from the window and toed an imaginary rubber. She knew she looked ridiculous, standing in her bedroom wearing plaid flannel pajama pants and a Bills T-shirt, in the middle of the night, getting ready to pitch. But no one was watching. It was her bed
room, her dark night of the soul; she could do whatever she pleased. She gripped the ball for a knuckler, rocked into her windup, and coming over the top the way Morales had coached her, went through the motion of delivering a pitch home.

  Her arm felt good.

  18. GAME DAY

  hen she took her seat next to Lonnie in English class the next morning, Molly noticed that his hand had been injured. His thumb was swollen, purplish, painful-looking.

  “Hey,” she said, and pointed.

  “What happened?” “Dunno,” Lonnie said. He shrugged. Put a look on his face that was supposed to express bewilderment. He was a terrible liar, which was something Molly liked about him. She knew exactly how he must have hurt himself. One of her wild pitches must have ricocheted off his mitt and caught his bare hand. It happened a lot.

  She'd done it to him. Being her personal catcher was no treat. There was a good reason why even big league catchers hated catching knuckleballers. Nobody wanted to go through that misery, endure all the sprains and bruises. Who wanted to get beat up?

  Molly didn't like to think she was capable of injuring someone else. Her mother, her father, the jerkhead boys on the team—they'd injured her, she'd been the victim. That was how she thought of herself, as innocent. But clearly, she could dish out some hurt, too. The evidence was right in front of her. Lonnie's knuckles looked scraped and raw, too, and there were some yellowish bruises on his forearm. She was going to have to readjust her thinking about herself.

  “Does it hurt?” Molly asked.

  “Not a bit,” Lonnie said. Which had to be another lie. It hurt just to look at his hand.