The Butterfly Garden

by Dot Hutchison

  The owner’s eyes lit up when he saw me leaving with the girls. “You live with them now, yes? You be safe?”

  “The customers are gone, Guilian.”

  He dropped the Italian accent and clapped me on the shoulder. “They’re good girls. I’m glad you’ll be with them.”

  His opinion went a long way toward convincing me even before I saw the apartment. My first impression of Guilian had been hard but fair, and he proved me right when he offered a trial week to a girl with a duffel bag and a suitcase beside her at the interview. He pretended to be native Italian because it made the customers somehow think the food was better, but he was a tall, heavyset ginger with thinning hair and a moustache that had eaten his upper lip and was now seeking to devour the rest of his face. He believed a person’s work was a better judge than their words, and he appraised people accordingly. At the end of my first week, he simply handed me the schedule for the next week with my name inked in.

  It was three in the morning when we left. I memorized the streets and the trains, and wasn’t nearly as nervous as I should have been when we walked into their neighborhood. On feet aching from hours of high heels, we trudged up the many flights of stairs to the top floor and then to the roof, weaving through various patio furniture, covered grills, and what looked to be a flourishing marijuana garden in one corner, and down one flight on the fire escape to the large bank of windows. Sophia worked the key into the lock as Hope giggled her way through an explanation of the drunk pervert in the hallway.

  We had a few of those at the hostel.

  It was a huge space, open and clean, with four beds lining each sidewall and a group of couches clustered together in a square in the center. The kitchen had an island counter to separate it from the rest of the room and a door led off to the bathroom, which had a huge open shower with ten different heads facing different directions.

  “We don’t ask questions about the people who lived here before,” Noémie said delicately when she showed it to me. “It’s just a shower though, not an orgy.”

  “You convince maintenance of this?”

  “Oh, no, we fuck with them all the time. That’s half the fun.”

  I smiled in spite of myself. The girls were fun to work with, always tossing jokes and insults and compliments around the kitchen, venting about irritating customers or flirting with the cooks and dishwashers. I’d smiled more in the past two weeks than I could ever remember doing before. Everyone dropped purses and bags on their footlockers and many of them changed into pajamas or what passed for them, but sleep was a long way off yet. Whitney pulled out her psychology textbook while Amber pulled out twenty shot glasses and filled them with tequila. I reached for one but Noémie handed me a tumbler of vodka instead.

  “The tequila is for studying.”

  So I sat on one of the couches and watched Kathryn read through Amber’s practice test, one shot glass for each question. If Amber got the question wrong, she had to drink the shot. If she got it right, she could make someone else drink it. She handed the first one to me, and I tried not to choke on the nasty-as-shit mix of tequila and vodka.

  We were still awake when daylight came, and Noémie, Amber, and Whitney all trundled off to class while the rest of us finally crashed. When we woke up early in the afternoon, I signed the agreement they had in place of a lease and paid my first month from the past two nights’ tips. Just like that, I wasn’t homeless anymore.

  “You said this was your third week in the city?” Victor asks, running through a list of cities she might mean. Her voice is clean of larger dialect markers, no regionalisms that could help identify her origin. He’s fairly sure that’s on purpose.

  “That’s right.”

  “Where were you before that?”

  She finishes off the water rather than answer. Carefully standing the empty bottle on one corner of the table, she sits back in the chair and slowly rubs her bandaged hands up and down her arms.

  Victor stands and shrugs out of his jacket, walking around the table to drape it over her shoulders. She tenses as he walks near, but he takes care not to let his skin brush hers. When he returns to his side of the table, she relaxes enough to slide her arms through. It’s large on her, draping in baggy folds, but her hands emerge comfortably from the cuffs.

  New York City, he decides. Warehouse-style apartments, restaurants open extremely late. Plus she said trains instead of metro or subway—that meant something, didn’t it? He makes a mental note to contact the New York office and see if they can find anything on the girl.

  “Were you in school?”

  “No. Just work.”

  A tap on the window sends Eddison out of the room. The girl watches him leave with some satisfaction, then turns a neutral expression back on Victor.

  “What made you decide to go to the city?” he asks. “It doesn’t sound like you knew anyone there, didn’t have a plan for when you got there. Why go?”

  “Why not? It’s something new, right? Something different.”

  “Something distant?”

  She arches an eyebrow.

  “What is your name?”

  “The Gardener called me Maya.”

  “But that wasn’t what you were before.”

  “Sometimes it was easier to forget, you know?” She fidgets with the edge of the cuffs, rolling and unrolling them with quick motions. Probably not much different than rolling silverware sets when it came to it. “You were in there, no chance of escape, no way of going back to the life you knew, so why cling to it? Why cause yourself more pain by remembering what you don’t get to have anymore?”

  “Are you saying you forgot?”

  “I’m saying he called me Maya.”

  I was mostly isolated from the other girls until my tattoo was finished, with the exception of Lyonette, who still came every day to talk with me, to rub ointment over my raw back. She let me study her mark with no sign of shame or disgust. It was a part of her now, like breathing, like the unconscious grace of her movements. The level of detail was stunning and I wondered how much the intricacy suffered when it came time to refresh the brightness of the ink. Something kept me from asking, though. A good tattoo took years to fade enough that it needed to be touched up; I didn’t want to think about what it would mean to be in the Garden for that long.

  Or worse, what it could mean if I wasn’t.

  The drugs still appeared in my dinner, which Lyonette brought to me on a tray along with her own. Every few days I woke up, not in the bed, but on the hard leather bench, with the Gardener running his hands along the previously inked areas to test how they were healing, how sensitive they were. He never let me see him, and unlike my room with its semi-reflective glass everywhere, the dull metal walls gave me no hope of catching a glimpse.

  He hummed as he worked, a sound that was somewhat lovely on its own but clashed horribly with the mechanical hum of the needles. Golden oldies, mostly: Elvis, Sinatra, Martin, Crosby, even some Andrews Sisters. It was a strange kind of pain, choosing to lie there under the needles and let him write his ownership into my skin. I didn’t see that I had many options, though. Lyonette said she stayed with each girl until the wings were done. I couldn’t explore the Garden yet, couldn’t look for a way out. I wasn’t sure yet if Lyonette knew there was no way out or if she just didn’t care anymore. So I let him put those damn wings on me. I never asked what would happen if I fought, if I refused.

  I almost did, but Lyonette paled so I changed the question to something else.

  I thought it had something to do with the way she never took me through the halls, only out into the Garden itself, through the cave behind the waterfall. Whatever she didn’t want me to see—or didn’t want to show me, which isn’t the same thing at all—I could wait. Cowardly, I guess. Or pragmatic.

  It was near the end of the third week in the Garden that he finished.

  All morning he’d been more intense, more focused, had taken fewer and shorter breaks. The first day he’d inked along
my spine and worked in the outline for the wings and the veins and the blocks of the larger patterns. After that, he’d started at the wing tips and worked his way back in toward my spine, rotating between the four quadrants of my back to keep any one area from getting unworkably raw. He was nothing if not meticulous.

  Then the hum stopped and his breaths were short and fast as he wiped away the blood and excess ink. His hands trembled at their work where before they’d been nothing but steady. Cold, slick ointment came next, rubbed carefully into every inch of skin. “You’re exquisite,” he said hoarsely. “Absolutely flawless. Truly a worthy addition to my garden. And now . . . now you must have a name.”

  His thumbs stroked along my spine, where the first ink was done and the most healed, traveling up to the nape of my neck to tangle in my pulled-up hair. Greasy ointment clung to his hands, leaving my hair matted and heavy in his wake. Without warning, he pulled me down the bench until my feet were on the floor, my upper half still on the leather. I could hear him fumbling with his belt and zipper and I screwed my eyes tightly shut.

  “Maya,” he groaned, running his hands along my sides. “You are Maya now. Mine.”

  A hard knock on the door stops her from describing what came next, and she looks both startled and grateful.

  Victor swears under his breath and lurches out of his chair to the door, jerking it open. Eddison motions him into the hallway. “What the hell is wrong with you?” he hisses. “She was actually talking.”

  “The team going through the suspect’s office found something.” He holds up a large evidence bag filled with driver’s licenses and identification cards. “Looks like he kept all of them.”

  “All of them that had one, anyway.” He takes the bag—Christ, that’s a lot of cards—and shakes it a little to see past the first layer of names and pictures. “Did you find hers?”

  Eddison hands him a different bag, a small one holding a sole piece of plastic. It’s a New York ID and he recognizes her immediately. A little younger, her face softer even if her expression isn’t. “Inara Morrissey,” he reads, but Eddison shakes his head.

  “They’ve scanned the rest and are starting to run them, but they put this one first. Inara Morrissey didn’t exist until four years ago. The Social Security number matches a two-year-old’s who died in the seventies. New York office is sending someone to the last listed place of employment, a restaurant named Evening Star. The address on the ID is a condemned building, but we called the restaurant and got the apartment address. The agent I talked to whistled when he gave it to me; apparently it’s a rough neighborhood.”

  “She told us that,” Victor says absently.

  “Yes, she’s so trustworthy and forthcoming.”

  He doesn’t answer right away, absorbed in studying the ID. He believes his partner that it’s a fake, but damn, what a fake. Under ordinary circumstances, he has to admit he’d be fooled by it. “When did she stop showing up for work?”

  “Two years ago, according to her boss. Taxes support it.”

  “Two years . . .” He hands the larger bag back and folds the plastic bag around the single ID until he can tuck it into his back pocket. “Have them run these as quickly as possible; borrow techs from other teams if they can get away with it. Identifying the girls in the hospital has to be a priority. Then get us a couple of earbuds so the techs can pass along updates from the New York office.”

  “Got it.” He scowls at the closed door. “Was she actually talking?”

  “Talking hasn’t exactly been her problem.” He chuckles. “Get married, Eddison, or better yet have teenage daughters. She’s better than most, but the patterns are there. You just have to parse through the information for what’s significant. Listen to what isn’t being said.”

  “There’s a reason I prefer to talk to suspects rather than victims.” He stalks into the tech room without waiting for a response.

  As long as he’s out of the room, he might as well make use of the break. Victor walks briskly down the hall and out into the team’s main room, weaving through desks and partial cubes to the corner that serves as a kitchen or break room. He pulls the coffeepot from the machine and gives it a judicious sniff. It’s not hot, but it doesn’t smell completely stale either. He pours it into two mugs that look clean and pops them in the microwave. While they nuke, he digs through the fridge for anything that might be open season.

  Birthday cake isn’t quite what he’s looking for, but it’ll serve, and soon he has paper plates loaded with two thick slices and several packets of sugar and creamer. He hooks his fingers through the handles of the mugs and returns to the tech room.

  Eddison scowls but holds the plates for him so he can insert the earbud. Victor doesn’t try to hide the wire; the girl’s too smart for that. When he’s got it settled comfortably, he takes the plates back and enters the room.

  He startles her with the cake, and he carefully hides a smile as he slides one of the plates and a mug across the stainless steel surface. “I thought you might be hungry. I don’t know how you like your coffee.”

  “I don’t, but thank you.” She sips the coffee black, makes a face, but swallows and takes another mouthful.

  He waits until her mouth is full of a red frosting rose. “Tell me about the Evening Star, Inara.”

  She doesn’t choke, doesn’t flinch, but there’s the slightest pause, a moment of absolute stillness that’s gone so fast he wouldn’t have seen it if he weren’t looking for it. She swallows and licks the frosting from her lips, leaving streaks of brilliant red across them. “It’s a restaurant, but then you know that.”

  He pulls the ID from his pocket and places it and the bag on the table. She taps a fingernail against the ID, intermittently obscuring her face. “He kept them?” she asks incredulously. “That seems . . .”

  “Foolish?”

  “Sure.” Her face pulls into a thoughtful frown, and her fingers flatten to hide the plastic card from view. “All of them?”

  “As far as we can tell.”

  She swirls the coffee in the mug, staring at the tiny maelstrom.

  “But Inara is as much a construction as Maya, isn’t it?” he asks gently. “Your name, your age, none of it’s real.”

  “It’s real enough,” she corrects softly. “Real for what it needs to be.”

  “Real enough to get a job and a place to live. But what came before?”

  One of the nice things about New York was that no one ever asked questions. It’s just one of those places people go to, you know? It’s a dream, it’s a goal, it’s a place you can disappear amidst millions of other people doing the same thing. No one cares where you came from or why you left because they’re too focused on themselves and what they want and where they’re going. New York has so much history, but everyone in it just wants to know about the future. Even when you’re from New York City, you can still go to ground somewhere else and they may never find you.

  I took the bus to New York with everything I owned in a duffel bag and a suitcase. I found a soup kitchen that didn’t care if I slept in the clinic upstairs as long as I helped serve food, and one of the other volunteers told me about a guy who had just made him papers for his wife, who was an illegal from Venezuela. I called the number he gave me and the next day I was at the library, sitting under a statue of a lion and waiting for a complete stranger to approach me.

  He didn’t inspire much confidence when he finally appeared, an hour and a half after we’d agreed. He was average height and skinny, his clothes stiff with salt and other stains I didn’t want to identify. His lank hair was in the process of matting into dreads and he sniffled constantly, his eyes darting around each time before he lifted a sleeve to rub at his cherry red nose. Maybe he was a genius at forgery, but it wasn’t hard to guess where the money went.

  He didn’t ask me my name, or rather, he only asked the name I wanted. Birth date, address, license or ID, did I want to be an organ donor? As we talked, we walked into the library to give us an
excuse to be quiet, and when he reached a banner with a swath of clean white, he stood me up against it and took my picture. I’d taken extra care before coming to the library to meet him, even bought some makeup, so I knew I could pull off nineteen. It’s about the eyes, really. If you’ve seen enough, you just look older, no matter what the rest of your face looks like.

  He told me to meet him at a particular hot dog cart that evening and he’d have what I needed. When we reconvened—he was late again—he held up an envelope. Such a little thing, really, but it’s enough to change a life. He told me it would be a grand, but he’d knock it down to five hundred if I slept with him.

  I paid him the grand.

  He walked away in one direction and I in another, and when I got back to the hostel where I planned to spend the night—a good ways from the soup kitchen and anyone who might remember a girl being told about illegal papers—I opened the envelope and got my first good look at Inara Morrissey.

  “Why didn’t you want to be found?” he asks, using a pen to stir the creamer into his coffee.

  “I wasn’t worried about being found; to be found, someone has to be looking for you.”

  “Why wouldn’t anyone be looking for you?”

  “I miss New York. No one asked these kinds of questions there.”

  Static crackles in his ear as one of the techs opens a line. “New York says she got her GED three years ago. Passed with flying colors but never registered for the SAT or asked for the scores to be passed on to a college or employer.”

  “Did you drop out of high school?” he asks. “Or did you get your GED so you wouldn’t have to produce a diploma?”

  “Now that you have a name, it’s much easier to dig into my life, isn’t it?” She finishes off the cake and sets the plastic fork at a neat angle across the plate, the tines down. Paper crinkles as she tears open one of the sugar packets and empties it into a pile on the plate. Licking the only fingertip not covered in gauze and tape, she presses it against the sugar and sticks it into her mouth. “That only tells you about New York, though.”