The Girl Who Threw Butterflies Read online

  She'd had her own first tiny glove when she was a toddler. At some point her father must have taught her a pitcher's windup. She'd seen her little self perform it on a family video. Out in the front yard, their shutters a dark blue then, which she couldn't remember, on a bright summer afternoon that she couldn't recall either, there she was, wearing pigtails and a Cubs cap and a T-shirt, toeing an imaginary rubber, pumping her arms, rocking and pivoting and then miming a big overhand pitch toward the camera. Even at that age she didn't really throw like a girl. She had excellent mechanics.

  Molly knew that other girls had tea parties with their dads. She played catch with hers. It wasn't weird, it wasn't cool, it was just what they did together. She never thought much about it one way or another. She took it for granted.

  They used to go into the backyard and throw the ball back and forth. It was like one never-ending game, with breaks. They played catch when Molly was in elementary school, they played catch the summer before her dad's accident. As the years passed, they stood a little farther apart, and Molly threw the ball harder, but it was the same game.

  Molly loved the rhythm of it, throw and catch, throw and catch, the gentle pop of the ball in her dad's glove, a little puff of dust. It was comforting, calming, almost hypnotic, like meditation maybe. If she wanted to tell her dad some-thing, she liked to tell him while they were throwing the ball back and forth. Good news, bad news, some scrap of a story from her day. It came out, unfolded itself naturally while each of them would throw and catch, throw and catch. Much of the time, though, they were silent. They were connected and content, the ball passed back and forth between them, and there was no need to speak.

  Molly used to like to pitch to her dad. She polished her toddler's windup summer after summer in the backyard. She'd pitch entire imaginary games. He'd announce the batter and call out balls and strikes. It was a goofy, meaningless game, but Molly enjoyed it.

  It required attention, for one thing. She needed to focus on her dad's big glove, her target, imagine the ball going right where she directed it. It was hard work that felt good. Throwing in the backyard to her dad on a hot summer day was the one time she wasn't embarrassed about sweating. Some big league pitchers grunted when they threw hard, and sometimes so did Molly. And there was some drama in their games, too—a 3-2 pitch with the bases loaded in a tied game. But just for fun, with nothing really at stake. None of those hollering, overexcited, red-faced parents and coaches. Afterward, win or lose, it didn't matter, they'd sit on the deck and drink pop.

  Her dad flashed her signals. One finger meant fastball. Two fingers was a curveball, which Molly couldn't really throw and her dad wouldn't permit at her age—”you'll hurt your arm”—so she just pretended. Three fingers was a changeup, an unexpected slow one. Four fingers was a special pitch, their secret weapon. The knuckleball.

  Molly grabbed a scuffed baseball from the bottom of the trunk, tossed it into her glove, and walked out into the backyard. It was dark now, a few scrappy clouds being blown across a silvery quarter moon. Her mother had flipped on the back floodlight, a small gesture of reconciliation maybe.

  Molly could see her mother in the kitchen, still sitting at the table, hunched over the mail. The image of her reminded Molly of the paintings of Edward Hopper, one of the American artists she and her classmates were supposed to be learning to appreciate. If it were a painting, something in a gallery, it would be entitled Tense Woman Reading. A study in isolation. Molly didn't really want to add to her mother's anxiety or raise her blood pressure; she didn't want to be another gray hair. It gave her no pleasure to complicate her mother's life. She was willing to be a go-along when she could. But the prospect of another season of soft-ball, of having to watch Lu Baxter tap-dance her way through another inning—she couldn't take it.

  Next door, she could see the Rybaks sitting around their dining room table, Mr. and Mrs., little Caitlin in her booster seat, Kyle dressed in his white karate outfit. Technically, they were in a suburb, but only three blocks outside the city limits, it didn't feel like a suburb. There were trees and side-walks and some old people. There were no cul-de-sacs; the garages weren't attached. The houses were close together. Molly had a clear view of the Rybaks’ dinner.

  It wasn't nice, but Molly was jealous of their perfect little family unit. There seemed to be three or four big serving dishes on their table, and Molly wondered what was inside them. She was tired of takeout.

  Molly walked over to her spot, where she stood when she played catch with her dad. The lawn was scraggly still and brown, but at night, under the lights, it looked fine. She looked across the yard to where her dad used to position himself. She tried to imagine him there, putting down a sign.

  Once Molly had asked him, “Do you think a girl could ever play in the big leagues?”

  She was still pretty little. She'd only recently figured out that of all the players they watched on television, not one was a girl. Her dad paused and thought about it. Even when she was small, he never talked down to her, he didn't offer up the chirpy, cheerful lies most parents handed out to their kids like Kleenex (“Of course you can, honey! You can do anything you want to!”). If she asked him a question, he answered it, for better or worse.

  “Well,” he said. He tugged at his ear and thought about it. “I don't think she could be a position player. Not a power hitter. Muscle mass and all that—sorry.”

  Then his eyes lit up. Molly could practically see the lightbulb above his head. “But sure,” he said. “A girl could play in the big leagues. A smart girl. It's possible. It's definitely possible. A pitcher. She'd have to have some serious junk. A trick pitch.”

  “Like?” she asked.

  “Like a knuckleball,” he said. “The old butterfly ball.”

  To throw a knuckler, you gripped it with your fingertips, your nails really, kept your wrist stiff, and let go of it as gently as possible. If you did it right, the ball didn't spin at all. You could see the laces, practically count them. It really fluttered—like a butterfly.

  The first time her dad threw her his knuckleball, she couldn't believe it. How do you make a ball not spin? How do you make it wiggle like that? It was like a magic trick. Right then and there, Molly wanted to know how it was done.

  Her dad showed her—some old coach had shown him, years ago—and she practiced. Eventually, she mastered it. She was no more than nine or ten at the time. In their backyard games, Molly threw it more and more. Her dad would sometimes complain because a knuckleball could be hard to catch. It was completely unpredictable. It would drop at the last minute, bounce, and hit him in the shins. Even though he'd gripe, Molly could tell he was proud of her.

  Her ability to throw a knuckleball was an amazing talent, completely without interest to just about anybody else in the world. If she'd been double-jointed, or capable of belching the alphabet or turning her eyelids inside out, that would have been different. Something like that would've knocked 'em dead at the lunch table or at sleepovers. If she'd been a phenomenal speller, she might have ended up on television. But a knuckleball?

  Still, it made her happy. It felt great to be so good at something. When she was in the backyard pitching to her dad, and the floater was working—darting and dipping, her dad whistling in admiration—all was right with the world. It didn't matter if she'd bombed a quiz that day, didn't matter if her mom was frazzled and angry, didn't matter if her chin was weird and she had giraffe legs, didn't matter if the world was full of terrorists. At that moment, when she was winding up and letting it go, everything was okay. She felt intensely present, alive.

  The knuckleball wasn't just a pitch. It was an attitude toward life; it was a way of being in the world. It was a philosophy. “You don't aim a butterfly,” her father used to say. “You release it.” Each pitch had a life of its own. It wasn't about control, it wasn't about muscle. Each floating and fluttering pitch was a little miracle. It was all about surprise. To her, though she would never say so, every knuckleball she threw s
eemed like a living thing, each of them full of impish high spirits.

  Molly assumed her pitcher's stance, leaned in to get the sign. Four fingers was the old butterfly ball. She took a deep breath. She started her windup: took a little step back and pivoted. This was a kind of dance, too, Molly understood. She lifted her front leg and found her balance point. She drew her arm back, pushed off, stepped forward, and let loose.

  Maybe because it was her first pitch of the year, maybe because it was nighttime, maybe the moon was working some magic, maybe something else, but for whatever reason, this one was special. The ball seemed to dart from her hand, as if it was eager to take flight. In the light, she could see its perfect nonspin, the laces vivid and clear. If there had been a message written on the ball, she could have read it. The ball wobbled and wiggled, dipped and darted. Before it landed in a flower bed and rolled under a bush, it would have crossed the plate knee high, diabolically unhittable, and into her dad's big glove.

  “Pretty pitch, Mol,” he would say. “That was a beaut.”

  Suddenly it hit Molly, an idea with the electric force of inspiration, an idea so beautifully right, so perfectly obvious, it seemed inevitable. A perfect strike. Of course.

  3. HER STUPID PLAN

  ou're gonna do what?” Celia whispered, too loud, and Mr. Zelmani gave them a look. It was second period. They were in Honors English, supposedly revising their Great Expectations essays.

  They'd been friends forever, Molly and Celia. Molly couldn't do anything crazy without telling Celia. They'd met on the bus the first day of kindergarten. Celia had a little beaded frog dangling from her knapsack that first day, and Molly admired it. Next day, she handed one to Molly. They'd been best friends ever since.

  “I'm going out for the baseball team,” Molly said.

  “Not softball?” Celia said.

  “Baseball,” Molly said.

  “Not girls’ baseball?” Celia asked. “Not intramurals? Baseball-baseball?”

  Celia was not big into sports, but even she understood it meant something to play on the boys’ baseball team. There was real status in being on the team: Not everybody who tried out made it. They played regulation baseball—a full-sized diamond and all that—and competed against schools from all over the area.

  “Baseball-baseball,” Molly said. “The real deal.”

  By this time Mr. Zelmani was busying himself with Lonnie House, a sweet kid whose expectations, Molly feared, were not that great. Mr. Zelmani was kneeling beside Lonnie's desk, trying to read what he'd written. Lonnie was smart as could be, brilliant maybe, the class artist, but his work was always late, incomplete, crumpled, smeared.

  “You're not kidding,” Celia said. “You're serious about this.”

  In October Mr. Zelmani and the English class had sent Molly and her mother a big flowery card with an ornate message of condolence and everyone's signature. A few of her friends had shown up at the wake, filed grimly through the line, and offered limp handshakes and tentative hugs. A few more were at the church for the funeral. Back then Molly and her mother had turned into grieving robots, nodding mechanically, hearing the same words again and again, saying the same words again and again.

  Of all her friends only Celia had stayed until the end, only Celia had come to Molly's house and eaten sympathy cake and potato salad with her, had let her cry and had never spoken a single supposedly consoling cliché. And when Molly came back to school, only Celia hadn't seemed frightened of her.

  “It's a tryout is all,” Molly said. “I'm going to try.”

  “Any other girls trying out?” Celia asked. “Any other girls ever try out?”

  “I don't think so,” Molly said.

  Celia grinned. She'd always had a rebellious streak. When the school's dress code had been revised the year before to exclude clothing with slogans, Celia had shown up wearing a T-shirt with the words FREE SPEECH printed across the back. From her older brother Michael, who was some kind of alternative vegan activist, she'd picked up some radical politics. If asked, she was prepared to argue that the omnipresent Nike swoosh was in fact also a slogan, advocating exploitation of third-world labor and all that. She had a whole spiel she was prepared to deliver. But no one asked; no one objected. Probably they knew Celia would be too much to handle.

  She was not shy, that was for sure. She was part of the horn section in band with Molly. She played the tuba. All her parts were boring, of course—it wasn't like she was ever going to play a solo. But Molly always figured that her friend simply relished the chance to make a big noise.

  “This is big news,” Celia said. “You're breaking new ground. You're a pioneer. That's what you are.”

  “If you say so,” Molly said.

  “Really,” Celia said. “I mean it. You're like one of the pioneers we read about during Women's History Month. You're Amelia Earhart.”

  “Oh, shut up,” Molly said.

  Celia stiffened suddenly, and Molly knew Mr. Zelmani must be standing behind her. He was a big man, but he walked softly, on little cat feet.

  “Joe is crucial to the novel because he offers Pip unconditional love,” Celia announced. “Wouldn't you agree?”

  “Oh yes,” Molly said. “Absolutely.”

  Mr. Zelmani managed to make a little sound in his throat, a kind of muffled cough that somehow expressed perfectly how not-fooled he was. But Molly knew he wouldn't yell at her. Six months later, he was still cutting her slack.

  At lunch Celia quizzed her about her plan. The only thing Celia didn't ask was why. For that Molly was grateful. She didn't think she could justify or explain herself, convince anyone that this made sense. It just felt right, and maybe Celia, bless her, understood that.

  “What does your mom think about this?” she wanted to know.

  Because Celia had three brothers and two sisters, and because Molly had none, they'd always been fascinated with each other's lives and families, curious.

  “What's it like to be a lonely child?” Celia had asked her back in first grade. Molly had corrected her—”it's only child”—but she'd never forgotten Celia's phrase.

  Until Celia asked, Molly had never thought of herself as a lonely child. But it was true, she was. Sometimes. Com -pared to her best friend, she was. Celia didn't have to go out for a sport—her family was a team. The last of the big families, like some sort of sitcom. There were eight people, six or seven of them living at home, one bathroom, two cars. Every morning was a fire drill, every day of the week was like a field trip. When Celia wanted some peace and quiet, when she wanted to hear herself think, she came to Molly's house.

  When Molly wanted to lose herself, she went to Celia's. There was always something going on. A pack of boys shooting baskets in the driveway. Somebody standing at the stove in sweats scrambling eggs. Her dad reading the paper at the kitchen table and holding forth to anyone who'd listen. about the state of the world. There was always music in the house, too—somebody blowing a horn or banging on their scarred upright, the Beatles blasting out of somebody's bedroom.

  Molly liked the happy noise. She envied the fact that Celia's parents didn't—couldn't—pay so much hawkeyed attention to her, her every grade, her every mood, what a certain look or remark meant.

  “I may not have mentioned it to my mom,” Molly said.

  “It may have slipped your mind,” Celia said. She laughed and offered Molly half of her pita and hummus. Somehow, Celia's mom, an intensive-care pediatric nurse, got all her kids’ custom-made lunches right. Molly's mom gave her money to buy, but the choices were almost all gross. So usually she just bought a drink, maybe some pretzels, and then leeched off Celia and pocketed the change.

  “What about the coach?” Celia wanted to know. “Who is it?”

  “Mr. Morales,” Molly said. He was a tall, bland-looking guy she'd seen doing lunchroom duty. He taught social studies.

  “Is he a misogynist?” Celia asked. “Does he hate women?”

  “I know what it means,” Molly said
. “I don't think so.” A couple of weeks before, as she'd come toward him to toss the remains of her lunch in the trash, Morales had looked her in the eye and smiled. Am I supposed to know you? Molly wondered. Then it occurred to Molly that he was just one human being acknowledging another, wishing her well, offering her a little bit of unearned kindness—not the sort of thing that happened all that often in the school cafeteria. He looked amused, as if he and Molly were sharing a wordless joke, both knowing what a funny thing it is to be in a cafeteria on a Tuesday afternoon.

  “He seems pretty mild,” Molly said. “I don't think he hates anybody.”

  Celia pulled a pear from her lunch. With a plastic knife she sliced off a big, juicy-looking piece and slid it across the table to Molly.

  “You know who thinks this is great?” Celia asked. “You know who couldn't be happier?”

  “I know,” Molly said.

  At the end of the school day Celia came by Molly's locker. “Are you ready?” she wanted to know.

  “As I'll ever be,” Molly said. She'd just been thinking that if she hadn't stupidly announced her stupid plan, she'd be able to slink home now, forget all about it. Softball didn't seem so bad, hanging out with Tess and Ruth. But she'd coughed it up and Celia knew, and now she had to go through with it.

  “What are you gonna wear?” Celia asked. “Something dramatic, I hope. Something that makes a statement.”

  “A statement,” Molly said.

  “That's right,” Celia said. “You want to wear something that says, ‘I'm all woman, but I am going to strike your butt out.’ That look.”

  “Funny you should say that,” Molly said. “That's exactly what I had in mind. Cleats and tube socks, sweats and T-shirt, hoodie.”

  “Perfect,” Celia said. “Especially the hood. It adds mystery. Who am I underneath? Who am I really?”