The Girl Who Threw Butterflies (9 page)

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.

“Mom,” Molly said. She tried to sound just a little exasperated, pained but patient, willing to school her mother. “Nobody does that anymore. People don't ‘go out.’ They
don't exchange rings and go steady. We're just friends, boys and girls, we hang out together, all of us. Lonnie's my friend.”

When Molly heard herself say that—”Lonnie's my friend”—it sounded surprisingly true. She was pretty sure she liked the sound of it.

“Of course,” her mother said, and dried her hands. When she felt dated, she would usually back off. Molly didn't en-joy making her mother feel old and out of it, but it worked. Right now she was willing to do what she had to in order to protect her privacy.

Once the kitchen had been restored to order, they made themselves sandwiches, peanut butter on whole wheat. Molly poured a couple of glasses of milk and they ate at the kitchen table.

“How was practice?” her mother asked.

Molly knew her mother meant softball, the girls’ team, but she hadn't said that, not specifically. “Fine,” Molly said.

Technically, she was telling the truth, but she felt like she was lying, and she didn't like the sensation. She felt guilty being deceptive. But she didn't feel ready to go there, not yet, not with her mother. Molly didn't know what words she would even use to explain what she was doing.

When she first went out for baseball, she'd talked to Tess Warren about it. Molly was a little afraid that her softball friends might be hurt that she'd abandoned the team. Rejected them somehow. What Molly said came out part explanation, part apology. “Go for it” was what Tess said. She didn't sound cold exactly, but she didn't sound all that warm either.

When Molly tried to imagine telling her mother, it came
out sounding stupid. Maybe it
was
stupid. So Molly took a big bite of her sandwich, filled her mouth with peanut butter, nodded, and made some agreeable noise.

On Friday, for the first time, Molly threw to hitters in a scrimmage. The batters wore helmets. On the bench players spit sunflower seeds nervously and kept their eyes glued to what was happening on the field. There was no joking around. Everyone understood that what happened could decide who made the team and who got cut.

Coach V stood behind the mound and called balls and strikes. Molly knew some of the boys thought he was just a weird old guy. They rolled their eyes behind his back. They called him “Gramps.” There were rumors about him. Who was he, anyway? some of the boys wanted to know. Why didn't he use his full name? What was he hiding? He was a Cuban defector, somebody said, a former Olympic ball -player who floated into Miami on a raft. Somebody else said he was a criminal, and this was his court-ordered community service.

Molly tried to think of him as a Zen master, a teacher trained in the old ways, a sensei, someone whose long experience was worthy of respect. He didn't say much, but when he did, it often had that slow-burning Zen quality. It would be something you might have to take some time and think about.

Molly got off to a shaky start. Her first knuckleball didn't knuckle at all: it spun rather than floated, and Ryan Vogel, her bad-breathed saxophone buddy, hit it to left field for a solid single. She walked the next batter on four straight
pitches, all knuckleballs, none of them close to being strikes. She threw one decent floater to Lloyd Coleman, who swung under it and popped out softly to the second baseman, but then she got wild again and walked another batter.

Bases loaded now and one out. If Lonnie let a ball get past now, a run would score. The pressure was on both of them. Molly took a deep breath and tried to recall the les-sons she'd been reading in her Zen book. In archery the secret was letting go. There was a whole chapter about that. Shooting an arrow was not about gritting your teeth and trying hard. Neither was throwing a knuckleball. It wasn't about getting mad or all pumped up and red faced, none of that kill-kill football mentality.
Don't think,
the master says.
Be like a child.

“Just play catch,” Desmond Davis hollered at Molly from shortstop. Desmond was probably the best athlete on the team, fast and strong with a rocket arm. He was quiet, not shy but self-contained. He mostly kept to himself. It pleased Molly that he would offer some encouragement. “Just play catch.”

It was a baseball cliché, one of the oldest. It was what you said to a wild pitcher. But this time Molly heard it, really heard it, for the first time maybe, and realized it was great advice, brilliant even. The batter didn't have to be part of the equation. In the backyard, that was what Molly had done with her dad, she'd just played catch. The batters were imaginary, so they never bothered or distracted or frightened her.

Molly played catch with Lonnie. She threw two knucklers
for called strikes, one for a ball, and then one more that the batter swung at and missed. The pitch did a little hop at the end, but Lonnie held on. Two outs.

“That's the way!” Desmond hollered. “That's how it's done.”

Next up was Grady Johnston. Molly had known him forever. She remembered that in the third grade they sat at the same table and once worked together to make up a secret code, a complicated bunch of numbers and letters they used to spell out their names. These days he was all attitude and posture. Sometimes Molly would walk past Grady and his pals on the school lawn, and they'd be draped across their bicycles like little hoodlums in training, smirking and swearing, whispering and pointing at girls.

Now, at the plate, Grady was energetically chewing a big wad of bubble gum. He pawed at the dirt and tugged at his batting gloves. When he finally assumed his stance, his bat kept moving in tight, menacing circles.

“That boy looks awfully eager,” Coach V said.

Molly knew it wasn't about eagerness. It wasn't about bluster. It was about waiting. She decided to make Grady wait a little longer. She motioned for Lonnie to join her on the mound for a conference.

Lonnie pushed his mask off his face and Molly noticed some fresh writing on the back of his hand. It was practically covered in blue ink, not just a word or a phrase, but long lines of tiny letters, whole sentences. It looked like a paragraph—it could have been the first chapter of a novel.

“Aren't you afraid of ink poisoning?” Molly asked.

“Everybody asks that,” Lonnie said.

“I wonder why.”

“Ink isn't poisonous,” he said.

“You better hope not.”

Molly was trying to read his hand, but it wasn't easy to do, not upside down, written across the contours of his skin. But she saw her name.
Maybe
it was her name, or something like it. But that's all. She couldn't make out the rest. If it was in a full sentence, and she was the subject, she didn't know the predicate. How did she feel about that? Her name on his skin. She wasn't sure.

“Okay,” Coach V said. “Enough chitchat. How about we play ball?”

Lonnie resumed his position behind the plate, and Grady stepped into the box, still chewing and twitching and tugging and waggling.

Lonnie asked for a knuckleball, and Molly gave him one. This one came in high but dropped into the strike zone.

Coach V raised his right hand. “One,” he said.

Grady kept up his little ritual of digging and wagging. It was what her science teacher called display behavior: what an animal does to show off and to appear fierce. A guy like Grady was all about display. Molly tried her best to ignore him. She was just playing catch. Her second pitch did a little wiggle and came in over the outside corner.