The Girl Who Threw Butterflies (10 page)

Coach V raised his right hand once more. “Two,” he said.

Be like a child, Molly told herself. She ignored Grady. She looked at Lonnie's mitt and imagined it was her dad's big floppy Wilson. She imagined she was in her backyard on a summer day feeling happy and carefree. She didn't aim, she just wound up and let the ball go.

If it were possible for a pitched baseball to have a sense of humor, this one did. It came in belt high, nice and slow, right over the middle of the plate. It looked like the fattest, juiciest pitch imaginable. That was the setup of the joke it was going to tell.

Grady's eyes got big. He lunged forward and took a huge swing. But while Grady was lurching forward, the pitch de-livered the punch line of its little joke. It veered off toward Grady's shoe tops, where Lonnie scooped it up on one hop just as Grady was following through from his mighty whiff.

Grady stood frozen for a moment, as if stunned. Coach V raised his thumb in the air—”Batter's out,” he said matter-of-factly—and Lonnie stood up, a big grin on his face.

Grady came to then. He looked a little wild. He ripped the batting helmet off his head and sailed it in the general direction of the bench. It bounced and skidded toward Coach Morales, who was standing there alone, his arms folded across his chest.

Morales calmly stepped aside and watched while the helmet spun and came to rest in the dirt.

“All right,” he said. “I've seen enough.”

riday night Molly babysat for the Rybaks, the family next door. Even though she'd done it many times before and knew the drill, Mrs. Rybak ran through her excruciatingly detailed list of instructions and list of telephone numbers. Molly knew Kyle was allergic to walnuts, she knew Caitlin's bedtime was eight o'clock. They were just going to dinner and a movie, but Molly got the full briefing. She nodded attentively and responsibly. She liked Caitlin and Kyle, and liked the extra money, and she really liked the chance to be out of her house for a while, if only next door.

As soon as the Rybaks left, Kyle hunkered down with his Game Boy, and Caitlin dragged Molly off into her room to play Pretty Pretty Princess. It was a dress-up board game,
like Candy Land, only with plastic jewelry, which players earned, piece by piece—rings, bracelets, earrings. Caitlin never got tired of it. She could play Pretty Pretty Princess all night. For Molly the fun of the game was watching Caitlin's face: how excited she was to put on a bracelet, how solemn she looked when she won a game and put on the cardboard crown. Molly liked lying on her belly on the carpeted floor of Caitlin's pink girly-girl room. She could be as silly or as stupid as she liked. It was like being on vacation from her real life, her serious self. No one was watching her, no one was grading her, no one was judging her.

After she performed the bedtime routines with the kids—bath, snack, and books—Molly went downstairs and called Celia.

“What's the food situation there?” Celia wanted to know. “Have you looked in the fridge yet?”

Molly walked the phone into the kitchen and looked around. A bowl of fruit on the counter, jars of pasta, milk and yogurt and eggs in the refrigerator. Nothing unusual.

“You know what I like to do when I sit?” Celia asked. “I pig out on the kids’ cereal. Cap'n Crunch, Frosted Flakes, anything with those little marshmallows.”

“You do?” Molly couldn't believe it. Celia scarfing up Lucky Charms? It seemed so unlikely. “You? Miss Health Food?”

“You know why?” Celia asked. “Nostalgia. Other than the smell of Play-Doh, cereal is the fastest way to bring back childhood. One taste of Cocoa Puffs and I'm a little kid again. It's a blast from the past.”

“My mom wouldn't buy me sugary cereals,” Molly said.

“All the more reason then to dig in and taste the for-bidden fruit,” Celia said. “But you better be careful.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You might OD on all that sugar,” Celia said. “If you've never done Trix before, you might start to hallucinate. The toaster might talk to you. You might think you can fly.”

“If I do,” Molly said, “I'll call you.”

“You do that,” Celia said. “I'll talk you down.”

Later, when Molly looked in on Caitlin, she remembered what Celia had said about childhood. For Molly, the feeling didn't come in a cereal box or a can of modeling clay. For her, it was right there in Caitlin's little-girl room: the canopy bed, the frilly pillows, the glow-in-the-dark stars on her ceiling, her collection of stuffed bears and poodles. Molly's childhood bedroom had looked different—not so pink, not so frilly. But
it felt
the same, just as safe and secure and carefree. Caitlin was sound asleep. Molly had heard the phrase “not a care in the world” and understood now what it meant. It was in the rhythm of Caitlin's breath. Molly en-vied her a little: her innocence, her cocooned, protected happiness, which she did not appreciate, which you could not possess and appreciate at the same time. To love it, you first had to lose it.

Molly looked out Caitlin's window and saw the blinking red light of a radio tower in the distance. When she was a little girl, she used to watch that same red light outside her own bedroom window. She remembered that sometimes she used to make a wish—not on a star, the way you were sup-posed to, but on that stupid light. What did she wish for?
She couldn't remember. Did her wishes come true? They must not have.

From Caitlin's window, Molly could see her own house. It looked serene and safe. There was a light on in the family room, a light shining in the kitchen. It could be where a happy television family lived, a place where all problems could be solved within thirty minutes.

Molly saw her mother's figure cross by the kitchen window. And then she was standing at the sink, rinsing a dish. From her perch at Caitlin's window, Molly could see her mother plain as day. She wasn't that far away from her. Molly tried to think of her mother neutrally, objectively. What if she were not her mother? What if she were just the woman next door? At this distance, from this perspective, she seemed smaller somehow, less intimidating, less annoying. Less everything. She looked tired. Her head was bobbing a little, as if she might be humming a tune. What song would her mother hum? Molly had no idea. There was a lot she didn't know about her.

Molly impulsively knocked on Caitlin's window. “Mom?” she said. “Mom!” But her mother couldn't hear her. Molly watched as her mother stepped away from the sink and turned off the light.

Downstairs, Molly walked through the house and listened to its foreign noises. The hum of the fridge, the whir of the dishwasher in the dry cycle, a clock ticking somewhere. She decided to give Lonnie a call. She didn't have anything particular to say, she just wanted to hear a friendly voice. Lonnie's mother answered, sounding exhausted and frazzled.
With her impeccable telephone manners drilled into her by her mother, Molly identified herself and asked whether she might please speak to Lonnie. Mrs. House muttered some-thing that Molly couldn't make out and set the phone down. There was a television playing in the background, some-thing loud and possibly angry, something that definitely didn't sound educational or informative.

“Hey, Lonnie,” Molly said when he picked up. “It's me.”

“I guess the mighty Grady struck out,” Lonnie said.

“He wasn't too happy, was he?”

“You should have seen him in the locker room.”

“No thanks.”

“Monday is when Coach is gonna post the list,” Lonnie said.

“I know,” Molly said.

“Are you worried?”

“I'm trying to not think about it.” Of course, Molly didn't say, it was impossible to not think about something. The harder you tried, the more you thought about it.

There was some background noise on Lonnie's end, an unhappy voice. It might have been the television, it might have been Lonnie's mother. Reality TV, or maybe just reality. Molly felt bad for Lonnie, but what could she do? The show he was living in was a complicated mess. “I'll let you go,” she said. “See you Monday.”

“Fingers crossed,” Lonnie said.

The house was quiet now, the kids were asleep. The toys were picked up and put away. In the family room, Molly flicked on the television and cranked herself back in Mr.
Rybak's recliner. It reminded her of being at the dentist. She tried one of the beanbags, where Kyle and Caitlin watched their cartoons and Disney videos. She slid off at first, and though she finally managed to get perched on one of them, she just couldn't get comfortable. She felt like Goldilocks. In the Rybaks’ house she was a restless intruder.

There was a big wooden desk with a rolling chair. Molly tried that. She took a seat and immediately felt important. She could imagine making major decisions here, paying some big bills. There was a leather blotter on the top of the desk, file-cabinet drawers built into the sides.

She pulled open a drawer and took a peek. There was a yellow envelope of family photographs and some paperwork for appliances, instructions and warranties. Some bills and bank statements.

Molly didn't mean to snoop. It didn't occur to her that the Rybaks harbored any secrets. They were an all-American family. Their life was an open book.

She didn't think she was looking for anything. And then she found it: her dad's obituary cut from the newspaper. Already it looked old, aged, historical. Was it a tribute to her dad that the Rybaks saved it, or just an oversight?

Along with the story, there was a photograph of her dad, which Molly didn't like. Her mother had insisted on a closed casket at the funeral, wanting, Molly assumed, to spare them all the pain of seeing his lifeless face. But in this obituary photograph he looked lifeless, too. He was smiling, but in a stiff, unnatural way. It was like a bad school portrait. He was wearing a tie. That's not how he looked, Molly thought, not how he smiled. She was afraid to look at it for
too long. She didn't want it to replace the pictures in her head, her memory's snapshots of how he really smiled. His crooked grin when she used to tell him the kind of corny jokes he never tired of. The conspiratorial smile when he and Molly pulled something over on her mother—when he'd slip her an extra cookie or spring her from bedtime to watch the last few innings of a ballgame with him. When he smiled for real, his eyes got narrow and his nose crinkled.

Molly's name was in the article: she was the daughter he was survived by. It was probably written by one of his friends from the newspaper, maybe his best pal, Milt Hedstrum, whom Molly had always called Uncle Milt. At the wake he had looked so broken down and red eyed, Molly had felt the urge to comfort him. The obituary reported the fact that her dad had died in a single-car accident. It was a phrase Molly had heard repeated again and again at the time of her dad's death. When she heard someone say it, “ single-car accident,” it sounded sinister and secretive. It was like a message in a code she could never crack.

hat night Molly dreamed about her father again. He was dressed in the shirt and tie he wore in the obituary picture, and Molly understood that he was dead. His eyes were open, he was alert, he was seated at some sort of desk, but he was dead. Molly knew it just by looking at him. She knew it in that way you know something in a dream. His eyes were huge and mournful. They were Abraham Lincoln's eyes.

She understood what a terrible thing it was to be dead. All this time she'd been thinking only of herself. How much she missed him, how hard it was not to have him in her life. But she'd never really given any thought to her dad. At the funeral the preacher said he'd gone to a better place. But in
Molly's dream he did not seem to be in a better place at all. He was seated stiffly in some chokingly formal pseudo living room. It was not a place where someone actually lived. It was more like a furniture store display, or a stage set. There was dark carpeting and heavy curtains. It was the funeral home, Molly realized.

Molly wanted to speak to her dad, she wanted to hear him speak. No matter what he might say, she wanted to hear the sound of his voice. In the early days and weeks after his death, she'd been able to hear his voice clearly in her head. Lately, though, she was afraid that it had faded away.