The Girl Who Threw Butterflies (6 page)

Later Coach V threw batting practice. He had a short no-windup delivery: one quick step, and the ball came in straight and true, middle of the plate, half speed. He worked at a constant rate, regular as a metronome. Step and throw, step and throw, step and throw. Molly had never seen any-thing like it. He was a pitching machine with a mustache.

When it was Molly's turn, she stepped in and performed respectably. She had a short, compact swing from softball and usually made contact. She didn't try to kill it. She whiffed on the first pitch but connected on all the rest—sent two ground balls to the right side, a decent line drive over third base, and, on her final swing, a line drive up the middle. V gave her a little nod, a sign, Molly wanted to think, of approval.

Near the end of practice, Morales called Molly over to the right-field line, where he was working with pitchers and catchers. She jogged over, and he handed her a ball. “You loose?” he asked.

Molly nodded. The ball felt good in her hand. She stepped onto the pitcher's rubber positioned in the grass and looked in at the masked boy who was squatting behind a
makeshift home plate. She couldn't tell who it was, not Lonnie, but whoever it was, he was set up solidly and giving her a good target.

“Let's see what you got,” Morales said.

It was an audition, no doubt about it. What did she have? Molly had no idea, really. She took a deep breath and thought about throwing in her own backyard, all those games of catch with her dad, all those imaginary games. It was no different, really. The ball was the same.

She wound up and delivered a strike, which landed with a satisfying pop in the catcher's glove. The catcher, whoever it was, held it there for a moment. Was he surprised? Molly threw a few more pitches, not rockets by any means, but all of them in or near the strike zone with decent velocity. She felt good, smooth; she could do this.

“Okay,” Morales said. “Show it to me.” Molly looked at him. “You know,” he said. “The floater. The mothball.”

Molly couldn't help but smile. Celia's Swedish crackers and her big mouth. She gripped the ball with her fingertips, just the way her dad had taught her years ago, just as she always had. She wound up and let it go. Molly loved watching one of her knuckleballs in flight, but what she felt was not self-admiration at all, just simple curiosity.
What is this one going to do?
This ball started to come in high but then made a sudden swoop, a birdlike dive. It skittered past the catcher, who remained fixed in his squat, looking a little stunned. He got up and chased it then, and Molly glanced at Morales. He'd turned toward the infield diamond, where Coach V was still throwing BP.

“V!” he hollered. “Over here. Come have a look at this.”

While Molly's catcher chased down the ball and returned it to her, Coach V ambled over and positioned himself next to Morales, both of them with their arms folded identically across their chests, waiting for her.

Molly felt beyond nervous now. “In the zone” is how she'd heard professional athletes describe that feeling of being right, in synch, and that's how she felt. She gripped the ball, reared back, and let another knuckler go, this one coming in waist high and at the very end making a hop, a little aerial hiccup, just enough to throw the catcher off—the ball glanced off the side of his glove and bounced off his kneecap.

The catcher took his mask off, and Molly saw that it was Ryan Vogel, her saxophone partner. He was shaking his head and seemed to be talking to himself, making some unhappy noise, gesturing accusingly in her general direction.

Coach V had a big crooked smile on his face. “Well,” the old man said. “Well, well, well.”

t was almost nine o'clock. Molly was sitting with her mother in the family room. It was an addition to the house, built when Molly was maybe five or six. She still remembered it vividly as her dad's big project. She could recall him studying the plans for what seemed like months, and once the work had actually begun, Molly remembered how every day he inspected what had been accomplished. Together they looked at beams and drywall. He took photographs. Molly loved the smell of lumber. Though not a handyman at all, her dad did some painting and last-minute finishing. It was just a room, carpeting and a couch and television, a sliding patio door and a fuel-efficient fireplace, but he was
so proud of it. To her father, it wasn't just a room, it was an idea. He would never spell it out, but Molly understood that the idea involved bowls of popcorn and cups of hot chocolate, lounging on the couch, the Sunday newspaper. It was a place where you could wear pajamas and not worry about spills. It was where they decorated the Christmas tree and hung their stockings. It was where they watched sappy movies and baseball games together.

His own father, Molly gathered from bits and pieces over the years, was the man who wasn't there, a briefcase and martini and newspaper. He had died when her dad was in high school. He never talked about him. There were no warm stories. Molly somehow understood that his father was the man her dad didn't want to be. The family room must have contained his own idea of fatherhood.

The family room. That's what they'd always called it, but now Molly thought of it in quotation marks, the “family room.” So-called family room. The two of them, Molly and her mother, didn't seem to constitute much of a family these days. Two people at Celia's would be considered an empty house, nobody home. Two people—if they were a club, they wouldn't have a quorum. If they were a team, they'd have to forfeit.

Molly's mother had established a position on the couch. She was a woman who needed gear—equipment, accessories—in order to watch television. Herbal tea, magazines and catalogs, daily planner, hand lotion. Not to mention her purse, in size and shape exactly resembling a horse's feedbag, that big, that deep, virtually bottomless, from which she might extract almost anything: lip balm, reading glasses,
cell phone, restaurant leftovers, office supplies—paper clips, Post-its, a mini-stapler, you name it.

They were watching—not watching, that sounded way too focused—they were
absorbing
a cable news program, angry middle-aged men in red power ties hollering at each other from studios in different cities. One guy was making dire predictions about dirty bombs and subway smallpox, smiling a little bit with self-satisfaction, looking pretty pleased that terrorism was so good for his career. Molly was looking over her science notes, and her mother was writing something in her planner, but they were taking it in, both of them, secondhand current-events anxiety. Molly thought about making a comment to her mother, attempting a joke: What are the ill effects of twenty-four-hour cable news? Hasn't it been shown to cause nausea in laboratory animals? They used to laugh together sometimes about all the junk on television, the scandals and hypes, the stupid graphics, the snarly hosts. But there was something about her mother's demeanor. She had that do-not-disturb look. Molly let it pass, the urge to banter. She decided not to bother.

Her mother was right there in front of her, and still, somehow, Molly missed her. It didn't make sense, but it was true. She missed her mother who laughed, her mother for whom life was not one tedious task after another. It was as if that woman had been kidnapped—she might be tied up in a basement somewhere. And in her place there was this mother, a joyless impostor wearing her real mom's clothes.

Her mother was busy now sorting through a big pile of what looked like store receipts, yellow and pink duplicate something-or-others. Her stuff was spread out all over the
place. It filled the couch; it spilled into little satellite piles next to her on the floor. If her dad had been present, Molly wondered, where would he even sit?

It had always been her mother's nature, Molly believed, to expand—to get bigger, louder, bolder, to fill up more shelves, spread out, invade new territory. Her father's personality was just the opposite. Under pressure he contracted, hunkered down, shrank back, grew silent. Because of that, to some kind of neutral observer—the woman who came once a month to clean, say—he wouldn't have seemed all that present. You couldn't miss her mother's stuff, acres of clothes and miles of shoes, her file-folder and magazine mountains, all the decorative doodads—wood carvings, wire-sculpture thingies, baskets and vases, ceramics, framed prints—that came and went and moved around constantly, and that Molly, taking her cue from her dad, never commented on and certainly never complained about.

Her mother even smelled big: When she walked through a room, her scent lingered long afterward. Evidence of her father's existence had always been real but more subtle. You'd have to know what you were looking for to spot the signs of him. A folded newspaper, pencil, and completed crossword puzzle. His keys hanging on a hook by the back door. A couple of cans of Coke in the back of the fridge.

And now, after just six months, Molly was afraid that little by little, bit by bit, the last traces of him were in danger of disappearing altogether. Some of her father's effects—that's what they call your stuff after you die—were gone now. They'd disappeared from the house. Molly had looked for them. She knew where they belonged, where they'd
always been. She knew every nook and cranny in the house, where her mother hid presents. Molly searched on the top shelves and in the low drawers, behind the furnace. Things had gone missing. His golf clubs with their tassel covers. The grass-stained sneakers he wore when he mowed the lawn. Molly knew that her mother was responsible, but she never caught her in the act. Never saw her packing a box or dragging a bag to the curb, never saw her with tears in her eyes.

So it was a gradual, invisible, but profound disappearance, like erosion. The surface of the earth being trans-formed. But this was worse, really—it was intentional. It was thievery. Her mother was, if not a suspect, then what the police would call “a person of interest.” In this case, the only one.

Molly stood and stretched. Her hamstrings were tender, and there was a soreness in her shoulders. Morales and his stretching. But it was okay. She liked the idea that she might be getting stronger, more limber.

Molly wandered into the kitchen and drew herself a glass of water from the tap. She looked back in on her mother—crossing something off one of her to-do lists from the looks of it, still achieving at this hour—and headed upstairs.

At the top of the stairs she made a hard right into her parents’ bedroom. It was neat in a generic sort of way, inspired, Molly assumed, by a magazine, some designer's idea of simple luxury, or luxurious simplicity. It cost a bundle to look Amish. The bed, dressers, and bedside tables were light wood and clean lines. On the bed there was an eggplant-colored
quilt her mother had paid a fortune for in Pennsylvania.

On her dad's side of the bed there was no book, which was wrong. Back in October he'd been reading a fat biography of Lincoln, and Molly was curious how far he'd gotten, but it had disappeared. His little digital alarm clock was still there, but probably not for long. It seemed somehow not right to Molly that it was still keeping time, still clicking off the minutes.

Alone in her parents’ bedroom Molly felt sneaky and weird, like a burglar or a sleepwalker. But she couldn't help herself. Now she felt drawn inexplicably to her dad's closet. She'd visited a couple of times before, when she had a moment alone in the house, just to think about him, to feel him maybe, to breathe him.

She stepped into the closet and inhaled. He was a flannel-shirt, cotton-sweater, and jeans guy. For her dad, every day basically was casual Friday.

When she was little, she used to make him take off any-thing made of wool, anything scratchy, so she could snuggle into his vast, warm softness. She used to slip into his big shoes and shlup around the house. He used to put a shape-less canvas hat on her head, some kind of fishing hat, his yard-work hat, and Molly would wear it happily, despite her mother's protests (“That thing is filthy!”), because her dad had told her that the hat possessed magic powers. While she wore that hat, he told her, “No harm can come to you.” She loved to hear him say those words.

Her dad's favorite brown corduroy jacket was still hanging in the closet. He'd had it as long as she could remember.
If he needed to look semidressy, that's what he'd put on—for a band concert or an open house at school, for a Christmas party. Sometimes he wore it to work over jeans. Molly's mother bought him new jackets from time to time, preppie gold-buttoned blazers and tweed herringbones. He'd thank her, admire them and try them on, and then the next time he needed a jacket, he'd be wearing the brown corduroy.

Molly took it off the hanger and slipped it on. It was way too big, of course; she was swimming in it. But she pushed up the sleeves. It was probably a look that Celia could pull off. With the right attitude, baggy could be hip. If Celia wore it, it might become a fashion trend, the Next Big Thing. Molly knew that she looked exactly like a girl wearing her dad's sport coat. No matter. The lining was smooth, and Molly liked the sensation of being encased once again in her dad's bigness.