The Girl Who Threw Butterflies (16 page)

Molly played catch as she usually did with Lonnie. His hand didn't seem to be bothering him. He looked good in his uniform. Unlike the thing he wore at practices, his uniform cap seemed to fit and sat relatively straight on his head. Underneath, his hair was under control, sort of. He looked like a real ballplayer.

On the first-base side of the field, people were filling in the wooden bleachers; some were beginning to settle in to watch the game from along the right-field line. Mom and dad and grandparent types were unfolding chairs, spreading blankets, setting up the toddlers with coloring books.

Lonnie threw one ball over Molly's head, and the next one was in the dirt. Molly's return throw bounced off the heel of his glove. What was up with him? All of a sudden he couldn't play catch?

Lonnie wasn't paying attention, that was the problem. His head was turning again and again to the sidelines—he was checking out the fans. Molly pretended to stretch her trunk and, as subtly as she could, turned to have a look herself.

There was one man Lonnie was completely focused on. It was easy to pick him out. He was wearing a pink polo shirt, holding a baby on his chest in a Snugli. Molly knew it had to be Lonnie's dad. He looked like the poster boy for
midlife crisis. Next to him there was a tan, blond woman with sunglasses perched on her head. Molly recognized them immediately from Lonnie's description. They were the new, improved family.

Part of Molly felt jealous of Lonnie, just for an instant, that he had a dad at the game at all, even a pink-shirted one. It was a kind of spasm—quick, involuntary, and painful. But it passed. It passed as soon as she glanced back at Lonnie and saw how he looked. He didn't look scared, he didn't look upset. He looked abandoned—and forlorn, that was the word. He looked as sad and as hopeless as the word sounded. Painfully aware that there was nothing he could do, not today, not ever, to measure up, to win the day. In baseball lingo, he'd been mathematically eliminated, and he knew it. Lonnie looked as if he wished he were some-where else, as if he wished he were someone else.

Over the past several weeks, Lonnie had revealed bits and pieces about his dad, very cautiously, a detail or two here, a story there. He'd taken to waiting for Molly after practice, not always, but usually. She'd step out of the girls’ locker room and find him there on the sidewalk, sitting on his bike, spinning a pedal, loitering. She was always glad to see him. They lived in the same general direction, so they walked along together for a few blocks, Lonnie pushing his old bike alongside Molly on the sidewalk, until they parted ways at Molly's corner. They made small talk, about school, about practice. Or they just went along in silence. Occasionally Lonnie would volunteer something about his family situation, his dad in the suburbs and his new half sister. Molly just listened. She never pressed for more. Always
Lonnie framed things in a good light. He'd seen baby Zoey only a few times, but he obviously adored her. Still, Molly got the picture. Lonnie's father was a guy who fulfilled his court-ordered visitation to the letter of the law, never a day more, hardly a minute more. He had a wallet containing a whole album of Zoeys and not a single Lonnie. The new wife called Lonnie “my husband's son.”

Molly understood why Lonnie looked so stricken. She had probably never cared more for him than she did at that moment. She wanted to protect him, to be a fierce advocate for him. She felt like slapping his father's self-satisfied face, she felt like kicking dirt on his wicked step-mother. But what good would that do?

“Okay,” Molly shouted to Lonnie. “I'm warm,” which is what you say when you're through playing catch. Lonnie looked relieved and grateful. Together they jogged off the field and into the dugout.

A dugout was one of the things Molly had always envied about boys’ baseball. The girls’ teams, for some reason, always sat on benches, exposed. A dugout was private, half underground—you stepped down into it. It felt protected, like a bomb shelter, and exclusive, like a clubhouse, some-place you'd need to know a secret password to enter.

Morales had posted the starting lineup and batting order on the dugout wall:

1. Eli Krause 2B
   

2. James Castle CF
   

3. Desmond Davis P
   

4. Lloyd Coleman SS
   

5. Mario Coppola 3B
   

6. Everett Sheets 1B
   

7. Ian Meriwether LF
   

8. Ryan Vogel RF
   

9. Ben Malone C
   

Molly and Lonnie looked it over and then sat down side by side on the bench in silence. Molly couldn't think of anything to say. She was starting to feel angry with herself now, her amazing non-way with words, when she heard Lonnie clear his throat. Then he let loose a stream of spit in the direction of the field. Molly had never seen Lonnie spit before—he wasn't the spitting type. But this was a surprisingly strong effort, well executed, with respectable distance. It landed in the dirt outside the dugout. It was a brave gesture, it seemed to Molly, much more to the point than anything she could have said.

“Okay,” Lonnie said, mostly to himself. It was as if he had expelled something poisonous and was feeling better already. He pounded his fist into his mitt a couple of times. The other team was taking the field for infield practice. Mustache Boy was jogging over to take first base. He kicked the bag. There was something about him Molly just didn't like. His attitude, which was something like ownership, or entitlement. First base was his, he seemed to think—the field, the game, it was all his. Molly cleared her throat and got ready for her first spit of the season.

Five minutes before game time, Coach Morales took Everett Sheets and Eli Krause, the tall and the short of it, to home
plate to meet with the umpire and the Sheridan coach and captains. Molly watched them, sitting by herself now in the corner of the dugout. Lonnie was down at the other end of the bench, filling up a cup with water from the team's plastic cooler. Desmond Davis and James Castle were standing just a few feet away from Molly, flexing and stretching, getting ready to take the field.

“Gimme some,” Desmond said to James, and they launched into their handshake. There seemed to be some new flourishes, a few more fancy touches at the end that made Molly smile. She envied their style, their private language of friendship.

Desmond noticed that Molly had been watching. He paused for just a beat, as if deciding something, then spoke. “Molly,” he said.

She was afraid that she'd invaded their space, intruded upon a private ritual that was none of her business. She was just about to apologize, but Desmond interrupted her. “Come on,” he said. “I'll show you how it's done.”

Desmond broke it down for her, step by step, while James looked on, grinning. Two times through and she had it down. Slap, slap, up and down, knuckle and elbow, with a near miss and a wiggle at the end. She'd never say so, but it was just a hipper version of patty-cake, rhythmic and percussive, a little combative but still friendly. She and Desmond ran through it once more, full speed, and neither missed a beat.

Watching them, James cracked up. Molly had never seen him so animated. “Okay, girl,” James said. “One more time. Gimme some.”

olly was sitting next to Coach V on the bench, watching the game and watching V keep score. It was the bottom of the fifth. Morales was busy coaching third base, giving signs to the batter and shouting instructions to the base runners, so it was up to V to record what happened in the official scorebook.

Ian Meriwether took ball four, tossed his bat aside, and jogged down to first base. Coach V wrote a “w” for walk in the little square reserved for Ian and the fifth inning and drew a line, showing he'd advanced to first.

Coach V used the same basic system of scorekeeping Molly had learned from her dad. V's method did have its
own peculiarities, some eccentric variations. He kept track of every single pitch, for one thing, something her dad never did—balls, strikes, even foul balls—with tiny antlike marks. Plus he talked while he scored, kept up a little private commentary.

When Ben Malone took a called third strike at the knees, V made a large K in his box. No one had ever told Molly why K was the symbol of a strikeout, not S or SO, but she understood it was more fitting somehow, more dramatic, even brutal. Coach drew this K backward to show that Ben's strikeout was looking rather than swinging. “What can you do with a pitch like that?” he asked sadly.

Molly understood that keeping score was a kind of storytelling, an almost magical translation of loud and dusty events in the world—a stolen base, an around-the-horn double play, a triple—into pencil marks, a kind of secret code, numbers and lines and shapes, like cuneiform or hieroglyphics, the handiwork of some ancient scribe.

In Coach V's book, Molly could read the story of the game so far. Not just the score, McKinley 3, Sheridan 2, but also how the runs came about. In the first inning, the first three McKinley batters—Eli, James, and Desmond—had gotten on base, an infield single and two walks. What the scorebook didn't show, but what Molly remembered, was how nervous the Sheridan pitcher had looked, or what a joyful scene it was when Lloyd Coleman cleared the bases with a double—whistles and cheers from the grandstand, whoops and high fives in the dugout.

Back then, in the first inning, it looked easy. The game seemed like it was going to be a blowout. What's so hard
about this game? That's what it felt like. But Molly knew baseball didn't work that way. You're cruising along one minute, feeling like you can do no wrong. Life is good, all's right with the world. And then all of sudden, for no apparent reason, things change.

Now the Sheridan pitcher—Jarvis, the back of his shirt said—had regained his composure. He'd shut McKinley down since the first inning, while his team got back two of the runs. Molly watched him work on the mound. Not as a fan. And even though he was a nice-enough-looking boy, not that way either. She watched as a fellow practitioner, another member of the club. Coach Morales would approve of his mechanics. He came hard over the top and always followed through. He had good stuff—a fastball with some movement, and a tantalizing slow curve. He threw two of those curves for strikes to Eli Krause, who watched both of them with a look of amazement on his face.

Behind in the count 0-2, Eli swung and missed a pitch almost over his head. Coach V made another K in the book. Molly meanwhile was fantasizing about a scoring system not for baseball but for life. If she said something stupid, forgot to bring home her science book—those would be errors. If her mother came through for her about a third of the time—that sounded about right—her batting average would be .333. Back when her locker had been defaced and Lonnie came along and rescued her, he could have been credited with a save.

Would a system like that be a brilliant invention? Or would it be a nightmare? James Castle made the third out by popping up to the second baseman, and V recorded it in his
book. “No runs, no hits, no errors,” he muttered. “One man left on base.”

Molly was grateful in fact that her every error off the field had not been counted and tabulated and published in the Sunday paper. In everyday language, if you said some-one was keeping score, it meant they carried a grudge. To imagine V making note of all her mistakes, her fumbles and whiffs, writing them down for posterity—it gave her the willies. Maybe forgetfulness could be a gift, a kind of blessing.

Between innings, Molly grabbed her glove and a ball and warmed up Ryan Vogel, the right fielder. In band he used to bug her, but he was okay as a teammate. He wasn't obnoxious on the field. Playing catch with him was something she didn't mind doing. It needed to be done, for one thing. The infielders threw the ball around among themselves, the center fielder played catch with the left fielder, and the right fielder was the odd man out. So it was a way for her to be a team player, to contribute something even though she wasn't in the game. (For the first couple of innings, she'd been lining up the bats and batting helmets but stopped when it occurred to her that it was too domestic—let the boys tidy up after themselves.) She liked to stay loose, too. Among the half dozen throws she exchanged with Ryan, she mixed in one knuckleball, which floated beautifully. But it made Ryan complain.

“Hey,” he said. “Knock it off.”

Molly didn't want to get fired as right fielder warmer-upper, so she resolved to refrain, to control her urge to knuckle.

Jogging back to the dugout, Molly once again scanned the bleachers, the sidelines, the cars in the lot angled toward the field. Between the second and third innings, she'd spotted Celia. She had her current needlework project on her lap, a vest—stitchery was her latest mania—but she set her needle and thread down long enough to give Molly an enthusiastic wave. And behind Celia were Tess Warren and Ruth Schwab, her old softball teammates. If they'd been hurt by her defection to the boys’ team, Molly was glad they were over it. It was good of them to come out.

Now she was looking for her mom. Molly was certain she had told her at breakfast the right time and the right place. But Molly couldn't find her, and she was surprised that she was so disappointed. She had told herself it didn't matter, one way or another, she didn't care. Whatever. But she did care. What had Celia told her? It's okay to want something.