“I know, so I need you to tell me about what came before.”
“I liked being Inara.”
“But that isn’t who you are,” he says gently, and anger flashes through her eyes. Gone just as fast as her almost-smiles or her surprise, but there just the same.
“So a rose by any other name isn’t still a rose?”
“That’s language, not identity. Who you are isn’t a name but it is a history, and I need to know yours.”
“Why? My history doesn’t tell you about the Gardener, and isn’t that what it’s really about? The Gardener and his Garden? All his Butterflies?”
“And if he survives to come to trial, we need to provide the jury with credible witnesses. A young woman who won’t even tell the truth about her name doesn’t cut it.”
“It’s just a name.”
“Not if it’s yours.”
That not-quite-smile twists her lips briefly. “Bliss said that.”
“Bliss?”
Lyonette stood outside the tattoo room as ever, her eyes politely averted from me until I could put on the slinky black dress that had become my only piece of clothing. “Close your eyes,” she told me. “Let’s take this in stages.”
I’d kept my eyes closed so long in that room that the thought of being voluntarily blind again made my skin crawl. But Lyonette had done well by me so far, and she’d clearly done this before for other girls. I made the choice to trust her a bit further. Once I closed my eyes, she took my hand and led me down the hall in the opposite direction than we usually went. It was a long hallway, and we turned left at the end of it. I kept my right hand out against the glass walls, my arm flopping free whenever we passed one of the open doorways.
Then she directed me through one of the doorways and positioned me where she wanted with gentle hands on my upper arms. I felt her step back. “Open your eyes.”
She stood in front of me, off-center in a room nearly identical to mine. This one had small personal touches: origami creatures on a shelf above the bed, sheets and blankets and pillows, pumpkin-colored curtains hiding the toilet, sink, and shower from sight. The edge of a book stuck out from under the largest pillow and drawers lined the space under the bed.
“What name did he give you?”
“Maya.” I staved off the shudder that came from saying it aloud for the first time, from the memory of him saying it over and over while he—
“Maya,” she repeated, and gave me another sound to hold on to. “Take a look at yourself now, Maya.” She held up a mirror, positioning it so I could use it to look into another mirror behind me.
Large portions of my back were still pink and raw and swollen around the fresh ink, which I knew was darker than it would become once the scabs flaked off. Fingerprints were visible on my sides where the fabric gapped, but there was nothing to obscure the design. It was ugly, and terrible.
And lovely.
The upper wings were golden-brown, tawny like Lyonette’s hair and eyes, flecked through with bits of black, white, and deep bronze. The lower wings were shades of rose and purple, also marked through with patterns of black and white. The detail was astonishing, slight color variations giving the impressions of individual scales. The colors were rich, almost saturated, and they filled almost my entire back, from the very tips of my shoulders to a little below the curve of my hips. The wings were tall and narrow, the outer edges just barely curving onto my sides.
The artistry couldn’t be denied. Whatever else he was, the Gardener was talented.
I hated it, but it was lovely.
A head popped through the doorway, quickly followed by the rest of a tiny girl. She couldn’t have topped five feet with her shoulders back, but no one could see those curves and think her a child. She had flawless, frosty-white skin and huge blue-violet eyes, framed by a haphazardly pinned profusion of tight black curls. She was all striking contrasts, with a button nose that leaned toward cute rather than beautiful, but like all the girls I’d glimpsed in the Garden, she was nothing less than stunning.
Beauty loses its meaning when you’re surrounded by too much of it.
“So, this is the new girl.” She flopped down on the bed, hugging a small pillow to her chest. “What’d the bastard name you?”
“He might hear you,” Lyonette chided, but the girl on the bed just shrugged.
“Let him. He’s never asked us to love him. So what’s he call you?”
“Maya,” I said in time with Lyonette, and the word got a little less hard to hear. I wondered if it would continue to be that way, if in time the word wouldn’t hurt at all, or if it was a tiny shard that always would, like the piece of a splinter you can’t reach with tweezers.
“Huh, that’s not too bad then. Fucker named me Bliss.” She rolled her eyes and snorted. “Bliss! Do I look like a blissful person? Ooh, let’s see.” Her fingers made a twirling motion, and in that moment, she reminded me a little of Hope. With that in mind, I slowly spun to show her my back. “Not too bad. The colors flatter you, anyway. We’ll have to look up what kind that is.”
“It’s a Western Pine Elfin,” Lyonette sighed. She shrugged at my sideways look. “It’s something to do. Maybe it makes it a little less awful. I’m a Lustrous Copper.”
“I’m a Mexican Bluewing,” added Bliss. “It’s pretty enough. Awful, of course, but it’s not like I have to look at it. Anyway, the name thing? He could call us A, B, or Three and it wouldn’t matter. Answer to it but don’t pretend it’s somehow yours. Less confusing that way.”
“Less confusing?”
“Well sure! Remember who you are and then it’s just playing a part. If you start to think of it as you, that’s when the identity crisis hits. Identity crisis usually leads to a breakdown, and a breakdown around here leads to—”
“Bliss.”
“What? She seems like she can handle it. She isn’t crying yet, and we all know what he does when the ink is finished.”
Like Hope, but much smarter.
“So what does a breakdown lead to?”
“Check the hallways, just don’t do it after you eat.”
“You’d just walked through the hallways,” Victor reminds her.
“With my eyes closed.”
“Then what was in the hallway?”
She swirls the remainder of the coffee in her mug rather than answer, giving him a look that suggests he should already know.
Static crackles in his ear again. “Ramirez just called from the hospital,” Eddison says. “She’s sending pictures of those the doctors expect to make it. Missing Persons has had some luck. Between them and the ones fresh in the morgue, they’ve got about half the girls identified. And we have a problem.”
“What kind of problem?”
The girl looks at him sharply.
“One of the girls they identified has some important family. She’s still calling herself Ravenna, but her fingerprints matched to Patrice Kingsley.”
“As in Senator Kingsley’s missing daughter?”
Inara settles back in her chair, her expression clearly amused. Victor isn’t sure what she finds funny about what promises to be a hell of a complication.
“Has the senator been informed yet?” he asks.
“Not yet,” answers Eddison. “Ramirez wanted to give us a heads-up first. Senator Kingsley has been desperate to find her daughter, Vic; there isn’t a chance in hell she won’t push into the investigation.”
And when that happens, any privacy they may be able to offer these girls will be out the window. Their faces will be plastered on every news network from here to the West Coast. And Inara . . . Victor rubs wearily at his eyes. If the senator learns they have any suspicions about this overly contained young woman, she won’t rest until charges are filed.
“Tell Ramirez to hold off as long as she can,” he says finally. “We need time.”
“Roger.”
“Remind me how long she’s been missing?”
“Four and a half years.”
“Ravenna,” Inara murmurs, and Victor stares at her. “No one ever forgets how long they’ve been there.”
“Why not?”
“It changes things, doesn’t it? Having a senator involved.”
“It changes things for you, as well.”
“Of course it does. How could it not?”
She knows, he realizes uneasily. Maybe she doesn’t know specifics, but she knows they suspect her of some kind of involvement. He measures the amusement in her eyes, the cynical twist to her mouth. She’s a little too comfortable with this new information.
Time to change the subject, then, before he loses the power in the room. “You said the girls in the apartment were your first friends.”
She shifts slightly in her seat. “That’s right,” she answers warily.
“Why is that?”
“Because I hadn’t had any before.”
“Inara.”
She responds to that tone of voice the same way his daughters do—instinctively, grudgingly when she realizes it a moment too late, and just a bit sulky. “You’re good at that. You have kids?”
“Three girls.”
“And yet you make a career in broken children.”
“In trying to rescue broken children,” he corrects. “In trying to get justice for broken children.”
“You really think broken children care about justice?”
“Wouldn’t you?”
“Never really did, no. Justice is a faulty thing at the best of times, and it doesn’t actually fix anything.”
“Would you say that if you’d gotten justice as a child?”
That not-quite-smile, bitter and gone too fast. “And what would I have needed justice for?”
“My life’s work, and you think I won’t recognize a broken child when she sits in front of me?”
She inclines her head to concede the point, then bites her lip and winces. “Not entirely accurate. Let’s call me a shadow child, overlooked rather than broken. I’m the teddy bear gathering dust bunnies under the bed, not the one-legged soldier.”
He smiles slightly and sips his rapidly cooling coffee. She’s back to dancing. However disconcerting Eddison might find it, Victor’s on familiar ground. “In what way?”
Sometimes you can look at a wedding and realize with a certain sense of resignation that any children produced in that marriage will inevitably be fucked up and fucked over. It’s a fact, not a sense of foreboding so much as a grim acceptance that these two people should not—but definitely will—reproduce.
Like my parents.
My mother was twenty-two when she married my father; he was her third marriage. The first was when she was seventeen and married the brother of her mother’s then-current husband. He died in less than a year from a heart attack during sex. He left her pretty well off, so a few months later, she married a man only fifteen years older than her, and when they divorced a year later, she came off even a little better. Then came my dad, and if he hadn’t knocked her up, I doubt the wedding would have happened. He was good-looking, but he wasn’t wealthy and he didn’t have prospects and he was only two years older, which to my mother was an insurmountable series of obstacles.
For that we can thank her mother, who had nine husbands before early menopause made her decide she was too dried up to remarry. And every single one of them died, each faster than the one before. No foul play about it, either. Just . . . died. Most of them were ancient, of course, and all of them left her with a tidy sum of money, but my mother was raised with certain expectations and her third husband met none of them.
I will say this for them, though: they gave it a try. For the first couple of years we lived near his family and there were cousins and aunts and uncles and I can almost remember playing with other children. Then we moved, and the ties were cut from one end or the other, and it was just me and my parents and their various affairs. They were always either visiting their latest lovers or holing up in their bedrooms, so I became a pretty self-sufficient kid. I learned how to use the microwave, I memorized the bus schedule so I could get to the grocery store, I staked out the days of the week when either of my parents were likely to have cash in their wallets so I could actually buy things at the market.
And you’d think that would look strange, right? But whenever anyone at the store asked—a concerned woman, a cashier—I’d say my mom was out in the car with the baby, keeping the air running. Even in winter they believed that, and they’d smile and tell me what a wonderful daughter and sister I was.
So not only was I self-sufficient, I came to have a pretty low opinion of most people’s intelligence.
I was six when they decided to give marriage counseling a go. Not a try, a go. Someone at my dad’s office told him insurance would cover counseling, and counseling looked better with a judge and helped speed up a divorce. One of the things the counselor told them to do was take a family trip, just the three of us, somewhere fun and special. A theme park maybe.
We got to the park around ten, and for the first couple of hours things went okay. Then the carousel. I fucking hate carousels. My dad stood at the exit to wait for me to come off, my mom stood at the entrance to help me get on, and they just stood there on opposite sides of the thing and watched me go round and round in circles. I was too small to reach for the iron rings and the horse I was on was so wide it made my hips hurt, but round and round and round I went, and I watched my father walk away with a petite Latina. Another time around and I saw my mother leave with a tall, laughing ginger in a Utilikilt.
A nice older kid helped me down off the horse after he lifted his little sister down, and held my hand as we walked to the exit. I wanted to stay with that family, to be the little sister of someone who went on rides with you and held your hand while walking, someone who smiled down and asked if you had fun. But we got outside the carousel and I thanked him, waving at a woman paying attention to nothing but her cell phone so the boy thought I’d found my mom, and I watched him and his sister walk back to parents who were delighted to see them.
I spent the rest of the day wandering around the park, trying not to get noticed by security, but sunset came and the park closed and I still hadn’t found either of my parents. Security noticed and hauled me off to the Hall of Shame. Well, they called it the Lost Parents Place. They cycled a list of calls over the PA system, asking parents missing their children to come claim them. There were others there, too, other kids who’d been forgotten or just wandered away or had been hiding.
Then I heard one of the adults mention child services. Specifically she mentioned calling child services for anyone who wasn’t claimed before ten o’clock. My next-door neighbors were a foster home and the thought of living with people like them was horrific. Fortunately, one of the younger kids pissed himself and sent up such a squall that all the adults started fussing over him, trying to calm him, and I managed to sneak out the door and back into the park.
It took some searching, but I finally found the main gate and got out without being seen, attaching myself to the rear of a school group that had gotten stuck for a while on one of the rides, and out into the parking lot. From there it took over an hour for me to walk through all the parking lots to a gas station that was still brightly lit for all the folks heading home. I still had most of the snack money my dad had shoved in my pocket before the carousel so I called their cell phones, and then I called the house phone, and then because I couldn’t think of anything else to do, I called my next-door neighbor.
It was almost ten o’clock at night, but he hopped in the car and drove two hours to come pick me up, and another two hours home, and there were no lights on at all in my house.
“Was this the neighbor who was a foster father?” Victor asks when she pauses to lick her chapped lips. He reaches for the empty bottle of water and holds it up toward the one-way mirror, not putting it down until one of the techs says Eddison is on his way.
“Yes.”
“But he got you safely home, so why was the thought of living with him so horrific?”
“When we pulled up in front of his house, he told me I needed to thank him for the ride by licking his lollipop.”
The plastic bottle shrieks a protest as it crumples in his fist. “Christ.”
“When he pulled my head toward his lap, I stuck a finger down my throat, and made myself throw up all over him. Made sure to hit the horn, too, so his wife would come out.” She opens another sugar packet and tips half of it into her mouth. “He got arrested for molestation a month or so later, and she moved away.”
The door slams open and Eddison tosses a new bottle of water at the girl. Protocol says they’re supposed to remove the cap for them—choking hazard—but his other hand is occupied with a sheaf of photo papers that he drops onto the table, along with the bag of IDs in the crook of his elbow. “By not telling us the truth,” he snarls, “you’re protecting the man who did this.”
Inara was right; it is different seeing it than just reading about it. Victor lets out a slow breath, using it to push down the instinctive revulsion. He shifts the first picture off the pile, then the second, the third, the fourth, all depicting portions of the hallways in the ruined garden complex.
She stops him at the seventh one, easing the paper away so she can look at it more closely. When she sets it back down on top, her finger pets a tawny curve near the center of the image. “That’s Lyonette.”
“Your friend?”
Her bandaged finger gently moves along the line of glass in the picture. “Yeah,” she whispers. “She was.”
Birthdays, like names, were best forgotten in the Garden. As I got to know the other girls, I knew they were all fairly young, but ages weren’t something you asked about. It just didn’t seem necessary. At some point we’d die, and the hallways provided daily reminders of what that would mean, so why compound the tragedy?
The Butterfly Garden Page 4