The Butterfly Garden

by Dot Hutchison

  She closes her eyes. “She never got one.”

  “Why wouldn’t—”

  “Timing. Sometimes that’s all it came down to.”

  She had skin like ebony, almost blue-black against the dove-grey fitted sheet, with a smoothly shaven head and features that wouldn’t have been out of place on the walls of an Egyptian tomb. In the days following Lyonette’s death, I desperately needed something—anything—to do, but unlike Bliss and Lyonette, I had neither talent nor interest in creating things. I read, and read a lot, but I didn’t make anything of my own. Bliss buried herself in polymer clay, filling the oven with figurines, half of which she later destroyed in fits of temper, but I didn’t have that outlet, either the making or the destroying.

  Three days later, though, the Gardener brought in the new girl, and there was no more Lyonette to give her a graceful introduction. None of the other girls wanted to go near her until she was settled and I wondered just how long Lyonette had been doing her job that no one else even seemed to think about it.

  In the days following Johanna’s death, I’d wondered how much—if at all—I was to blame for her choice. If I’d given her a more graceful introduction to her situation, if I’d been more sympathetic or more comforting, maybe she would have been able to cling to that hope her mama told her to have. Or maybe not. Maybe that first view of the Garden, that first moment where it was real, was what made the difference.

  It wasn’t like I could ask her.

  So I stuck with the new girl, as patient with her as I could be, and tucked the more acerbic comments away. Considering how frequently she burst into tears, it took more patience than I knew I had. Bliss rescued me sometimes.

  Not by coming herself—that would have been a very bad idea—but by sending Evita to be sweet and sincere and in many ways such a better person than I could ever hope to be.

  The day after the third of her tattoo sessions, I stayed with her through the evening until her drugged dinner took effect. Normally that’s when I left, but I’d seen something I wanted to investigate without alarming her, which meant she needed to be fully asleep. Even after her deep, steady breathing, and the way all the tension left her body told me she was asleep, I let the drug work even further.

  Maybe an hour after she fell asleep, I set aside my book and rolled her over onto her stomach. She usually slept on her back, but the process of the tattoo made her sleep on her side to keep pressure off the tender areas. The butterfly book in the library—with Lyonette’s handwriting scrawled in the margins, listing names and locations in the halls—told me the Gardener had chosen a Falcate Orangetip for her, mostly white with a splash of orange on the edge of each upper wing. He liked to choose white and the palest yellows for the darker-skinned girls, for some reason. I guess he was afraid the darker colors wouldn’t show with the same clarity. For this one, he’d finished the orange and moved into the white sections, and something about them just looked wrong.

  Now that I could actually bend close to see it without giving her alarm, I could see the added puffiness, the scale-like swellings under the ink, the way the white bubbled grotesquely in huge blisters. The orange wingtips were nearly as bad. Tracing in closer to her spine, even the black outlines and veins pearled. I pulled out one of my earrings—the Gardener never had taken them—and used the post to carefully pierce one of the smaller blisters. Mostly clear fluid leaked out from the tiny puncture, but when I pressed down gently, a milky white spilled out as well.

  I washed the earring off in the sink and replaced it in my ear as I tried to think of a solution. I couldn’t be sure if she was reacting to the inks or to the needles, but there was definitely an allergic reaction of some sort. Not immediately life-threatening like a peanut allergy can be, but it wasn’t letting the ink heal. Infection could kill just as much as a histamine response, or so Lorraine had told us on one of her rare friendly days.

  Of course, she’d been causing Bliss all sorts of pain by digging around in her feet for splinters, so that probably contributed to the good mood.

  For lack of a better idea, I returned to the girl’s side and tried to measure how bad the reaction was in each area. I’d gotten through the orange and half the white when I felt the change.

  The Gardener was there.

  He leaned against the doorway, thumbs hooked through the pockets of his pressed khakis. Lights were going out all over the Garden as girls went to bed, waiting to see if this would be the night they’d be required to entertain their captor. He’d never called for Lyonette when she was settling a new girl, but then, I wasn’t Lyonette.

  “You look worried,” he said instead of a greeting.

  I gestured to the girl’s back. “She’s not going to heal.”

  As he stepped into the room, he unbuttoned his cuffs and rolled the sleeves of his dark green shirt up to his elbows. The color made his pale eyes glow against his face. He pressed against her back with gentle hands, finding the same things I did, and gradually the concern changed to a look of deep sorrow. “Everyone reacts differently to tattoos.”

  I should have felt sorrow, or rage, or confusion.

  All I felt was numb.

  “What do you do with the girls who never get their full wings?” I asked quietly.

  He gave me a swift, thoughtful look, and I wondered if I was the first girl to ever ask that. “I see them properly buried on the estate.”

  Eddison growls and reaches for his notebook. “Did he say where on the estate?”

  “No, but I think it overlooked a river. Sometimes he’d come to the Garden with mud on his shoes and this wistful look on his face, and on those days, he’d give Bliss river stones to use as a base for some of her figures. Nothing I could see from the trees.”

  He balls up the aluminum foil and tosses it at the one-way mirror. “Get a team out to the riverbank, look for graves.”

  “You could say please.”

  “I’m giving them an assignment, not asking for a favor,” he retorts through gritted teeth.

  She shrugs. “Guilian always said please. Rebekah, too, even when she was just assigning sections. But then, I guess that’s why I loved working for Guilian. He made it a very pleasant and respectful place.”

  She might as well have slapped him in the face. Victor sees the angry flush climb up from his partner’s collar and looks away so he won’t smile. Or at least so Eddison won’t see it. “Was it just the girls who died before the wings were finished?” he asks quickly.

  “No. If they died in such a way that it ruined the wings, he didn’t display them. Avery put several girls into the ground instead of the glass, when he whipped them hard enough to scar across the ink.” She lightly touches her neck. “Giselle.”

  “That wasn’t where the conversation ended, was it?”

  “No, but you already know that.”

  “Yes, but I’d like to hear the rest,” he replies, just as he would to his daughters.

  She quirks an eyebrow at him.

  Like Lyonette had, I usually borrowed a stool from the infirmary to keep beside the girl’s bed. Sitting on the bed probably would have been fine, but this gave her a little space. Gave her a territory that was hers. The Gardener didn’t really recognize territory in that way. He sat with his back against the headboard, placing the girl’s head in his lap so he could run his hand over her shaven skull. So far as I knew, he never visited the girls in their rooms until after they were fully marked, until after he’d raped them for the first time.

  After all, that was what made them his.

  But then, he wasn’t there to see the new girl. He was there to talk to me.

  And he didn’t seem in any big hurry to do it.

  I pulled my ankles up onto the seat, sitting cross-legged on the narrow stool, and spread my book across my lap, reading to fill the empty space until he reached over and gently closed it. Then I gave him my attention.

  “How long have you been watching my family?”

  “Nearly since my wings w
ere done.”

  “But you haven’t said anything.”

  “Not to you or anyone.” Not even to Lyonette or Bliss, though I’d been tempted. I wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was easier to think of him as just our captor. Putting a family in there made it . . . well, more wrong somehow. Just the fact that it could be more wrong was disturbing enough.

  “And what do you think when you see us?”

  “I think your wife is sick.” I rarely lied to the Gardener; the truth was the one thing that could always be mine. “I think she’s scared of Avery and doesn’t want to show it, and I think she dotes on your younger boy. I think she treasures those walks with you as the only time she has your undivided attention.”

  “All that from a stand of trees?” Thank God, he looked more amused than anything. He settled his back more comfortably against the headboard, one arm bent behind him to act as a cushion for his head.

  “Am I wrong?”

  “No.” He looked down at the girl in his lap, then back at me. “She’s been struggling for years against a heart condition. It isn’t severe enough that she qualifies for a transplant, but it causes a significant drop in quality of life.”

  So his wife was a kind of butterfly too. “That’s one.”

  “And she does dote on our younger son. She’s quite proud of him. He keeps perfect grades, is always polite, and is a treat to hear on the piano and violin.”

  “That’s two.”

  “Between the Garden and my business, and her own charitable functions and planning, our schedules are often in conflict. We both make time for our afternoon walks unless we’re out of town. It’s good for her heart.”

  “That’s three.”

  And all that was left was the hard one, the one no parent wants to admit.

  So he didn’t. He left it unsaid, and in the silence there was truth.

  “You pay a great deal of attention to things, don’t you, Maya? To people, to patterns, to events. You find more meaning than others.”

  “I pay attention,” I agreed. “I don’t know that I find more meaning.”

  “You observed a walk in a greenhouse and made it mean all that.”

  “I didn’t make it mean anything. I just noticed body language.”

  Body language was one of the things that told me my next-door neighbor was a pedophile long before the first time he exposed himself, long before the first time he touched me or asked me to touch him. It was in the way he watched me and the other kids in the neighborhood, in the bruised looks of the foster kids who lived with him. I was prepared for his advances because I knew they’d be coming. Body language warned me about Gran’s lawn guy, about the kids in school who would try to beat you up just because they could. Body language was better than a flashing light for warnings.

  And body language told me that as much as he wanted to seem perfectly relaxed right now, he couldn’t.

  “I don’t intend to tell anyone, you know.”

  There it was. Not all of the tension left his body, but most of it. Except when his lust got the better of him, he was a remarkably self-contained man.

  “We don’t know about them . . . and they don’t know about us, do they?”

  “No,” he whispered. “Some things . . .” He never did finish that thought, not out loud at least. “I would never willingly hurt Eleanor.”

  I didn’t know his name, but now I knew his wife’s.

  “And your son?”

  “Desmond?” He actually seemed surprised for a moment, then shook his head. “Desmond is very different from Avery.”

  Even then, all I could think was Thank God.

  He lifted the girl’s head from his lap and eased off the bed, extending his hand to me. “I’d like to ask you something, if I may.”

  I wasn’t sure why asking me something would involve moving, but I obediently stood and took his hand, leaving the book on the stool. The girl wouldn’t be awake until morning, so I wasn’t strictly needed at her bedside. He walked us through the hallways, absently touching each occupied display case as he passed. If I’d had a mind to, I could have asked him to name them, and he could have. Every single name, every single Butterfly, he knew and remembered them all.

  I never wanted to know.

  I thought he was taking me to my room, but he turned aside at the last moment and led us into the cave behind the waterfall. Except for the moonlight that filtered through the glass roof of the greenhouse and fractured through the falling water, the cave was completely dark.

  Oh, and the blinking red eye of the camera.

  We stood in silence in the darkness, listening to the waterfall hit the stream and the decorative rocks. Pia, who’d been there about a year longer than I had, had a theory that there were pipes in the bottom of the pond that kept the water at a certain level by draining it and funneling it through another pipe way up to the tiny pond atop the cliff that fed into the waterfall. She was probably right. Given that I couldn’t swim, I never tried to go down to the bottom of the pond to see for sure. Pia liked to poke at things and figure out how they worked. When the walls came up to reveal Johanna in glass, Pia went to the pond, and said there were sensors along the edge now.

  “I’ve wondered about what draws you to this place,” he said after a time. “The cliff top I can almost understand. It’s open, it’s free, the height gives you a sense of safety. But this place . . . what can this cave offer you?”

  The ability to say whatever the fuck I want to without worrying about reprisals, because the roaring of the waterfall was strong enough to obscure whatever the mics might pick up.

  But he was looking for something more personal than that, something with the meaning he thought I gave everything. It took me a minute or two to come up with that answer for him, something close enough to truth. “There’s no illusion in here,” I said finally. “It’s not lush and green and growing and waiting for death and the possibility of decay. It’s just rock and water.”

  Here the girls and I sat face-to-face and knee to knee, and it was usually easy to pretend there were no Butterflies. The suck-ups had the wings marked around their eyes like Carnevale masks, but even then, in the misty dimness of the cave, it was easy to think it a trick of the shadows. We’d take our hair down, put our backs against the rocks, and there were no fucking Butterflies. Just for a few moments.

  So perhaps there was illusion in here after all, but it was our illusion, not one he’d manufactured for us.

  He dropped my hand and then he was pulling out all the pins that kept my hair up in its braided crown, until it fell in a crimped mass to my hips. Hiding the wings. It was the one thing he never did, unless he was brushing it out. But he just left it down around me, tucking the pins into the breast pocket of his shirt.

  “You are quite unlike any of the others,” he said eventually.

  Not entirely true. I had a temper like Bliss, only I didn’t let it go. I had impatience like Lyonette, which I did my best to spread out. I read like Zara, ran like Glenys, danced like Ravenna, and braided hair like Hailee. I had bits and pieces of most of the others in me, save for Evita’s sweet simplicity.

  The only thing that made me truly different was that I was the only one who never cried.

  Who never could.

  Fucking carousel.

  “You put requests for books on the lists but never overtly ask for anything. You assist the other girls, you listen to them, calm them. You keep their secrets, and apparently mine as well, but you give no one else secrets to keep for you.”

  “My secrets are old friends; I would feel like a poor friend if I abandoned them now.”

  His low chuckle echoed around the chamber before the waterfall swallowed the sound. “I’m not asking you to share them, Maya; your life before is your own.”

  She gives Eddison a pointed look, and Victor can’t help but laugh. “I’m not going to apologize,” Eddison tells her bluntly. “This is my job, and we have to know the truth to put together a strong case against him. The
doctors are fairly confident he’ll survive to stand trial.”

  “Pity.”

  “A trial means justice,” he snaps.

  “In a sense, sure.”

  “In a sense? It—”

  “Does ‘justice’ change any of what he did? Any of what we went through? Does it bring the girls in glass back to life?”

  “Well, no, but it keeps him from doing it again.”

  “So would his death, and without the sensationalism and tax money.”

  “Back to the waterfall,” Victor announces over the beginning of Eddison’s protest.

  “Spoilsport,” mutters the girl.

  “Ask me for one thing, Maya.”

  There was a challenge in his eyes, layered through his voice. He expected me to ask for something impossible, like freedom. Or maybe he expected me to be like Lorraine, to ask for something that could have gotten me out of the Garden but wasn’t freedom at all.

  I knew better than that. Like throwing away well-intentioned phone numbers, I knew better than to ask for things I clearly couldn’t have.

  “Can this one camera be disabled without another one going up in its place?” I asked promptly, and watched shock pass across his shadowed face. “No cameras, no mics?”

  “That’s it?”

  “It would be nice to have one place that’s genuinely private,” I explained with a shrug. It almost felt strange to have my hair shifting across my back and shoulders with the gesture. “You can see us everywhere else we go, even watch us on the toilet if you had a wish to. Having just a single place devoid of cameras would be beneficial. A mental-health exercise, in a way.”

  He watched me for a long time before answering. “Something that benefits all of you.”

  “Yes.”

  “I tell you to ask for anything, and you ask for something that benefits all of you.”

  “It benefits me too.”

  He laughed again and reached for me, pulling me against his chest so he could kiss me. His hands moved over the fastenings of my dress, and as he lowered me to the mist-damp stone, I closed my eyes and let my thoughts drift off to Annabel Lee and her grave in the kingdom by the sea.