I didn’t think angels would ever be jealous of me.
It’s astonishing how much of a question she can answer without ever actually answering the question. There’s a small, inappropriate part of Victor that would love to put her on the stand right now and watch both sets of lawyers tear their hair out in frustration. Even when she seems forthcoming, her answers almost always veer sideways, providing something like substance without giving away the heart. Ask about the boy and she starts there, or seems to, and somehow it ends in a completely different conversation, and the boy is barely glimpsed. Yes, the lawyers will hate her come trial. He shoves the impulse aside and takes the picture of the boy from its stack, setting it on the table so she can see it right-side up.
She looks away at first, eyes flicking to the mirror, to the floor, to her burned and cut-up hands, before a sigh shudders through her body and she turns her face to the photo. She lifts it gently by the edges, studying the unenhanced blowup from his driver’s license. The glossy paper trembles in her grasp, but no one mentions that.
“You get used to things in the Garden,” she says pensively. “Even the new girls coming in are something you just get used to, something you expect when another one dies. And then, suddenly, everything changes.”
“When?”
“Just shy of six months ago. A few days after Evita died.”
Maybe it was that Evita was one of those people you couldn’t help but love. Maybe it was that her death was an accident, nothing we could have prepared for. Maybe it was the Gardener’s reaction, the openness of it.
Whatever it was, the Garden stank of despair in the days following Evita’s accident. Most of the girls kept to their rooms, and Lorraine had to put all the meals on trays and bring them to us, and God, didn’t that piss her off to no end. Of course, she was in a mood same as the rest of us, though for a different reason. We mourned Evita. She mourned another filled display case that didn’t include her.
Sick fuck.
I left my room at night, unable to bear the four walls and silence. We weren’t coming into a weekend, so I didn’t have to worry about maintenance or the solid walls coming down. There wasn’t a reason in the world I couldn’t spend the night wandering around. Sometimes the illusion of freedom, of choice, was more painful than captivity.
It’s not like the Gardener couldn’t find me if he wanted me, though he was with someone else.
At night the Garden was mostly silent. There was the waterfall, of course, and the babble of the stream, the hum of machinery and moving air, and the muffled sound of girls crying from scattered points on the perimeter, but compared to the day, it was close enough to silent. I took my book and book light up the cliff to sit on one of the large rocks. I called it the sunbathing rock.
Bliss called it Pride Rock, and laughed when I dared her to find a lion to dangle off the edge.
She made one from polymer clay, and when I’d managed to start breathing again from laughing so hard, she gave him to me. He lived on the shelf above my bed, along with the other things most precious to me. I guess he’s there still, or was, until . . .
Bliss joined me up on the cliff around midnight, tossing me a figurine. I held it under the book light to discover a dragon curled around itself. It was dark blue, his head hunched into his shoulders, and somehow the shape of the brow ridge over huge black eyes gave him the most pathetic look a clay figure could possibly have. “Why is he so sad?”
She glared at me.
Right.
The dragon’s home was next to Simba, and where the lion was just a joke, the dragon actually came to mean something.
But that day he was new and sad, and Bliss was angry and sad, so I rested him on my knee and went back to reading Antigone until she felt up to saying something.
“If my room is intact, do you think there’s a chance of my getting the figures back? And the origami menagerie? And the . . . well, all of it, really.”
“We can ask,” Victor hedges, and she sighs.
“Why Antigone?” Eddison asks.
“I always thought she was pretty cool. She’s strong and brave and resourceful, not above a certain level of emotional manipulation, and she dies, but on her own terms. She’s sentenced to live out the rest of her days in a tomb and she says fuck that, I’m going to hang myself. And then there’s her betrothed, who loves her so much that he flips his shit at her death and tries to kill his own father. And then, of course, he dies too, because come on, it’s a Greek tragedy, and the Greeks and Shakespeare really love killing people off. It’s a great lesson, really. Everyone dies.” She lays the photo down and covers the boy’s face with her hands. Victor can’t be sure she even realizes she’s done it. “But I might have picked something else if I’d known Bliss was going to join me.”
“Oh?”
“It seemed to inspire her.”
She paced around me as I read, snatching leaves off plants and shredding them as she walked until you could follow her progress by the slaughter of green bits on the rock. She snarled and swore with every step, so I didn’t bother to look up until she fell silent.
She stood on the very edge of the false cliff, her toes curled over the rock, with her arms spread wide beside her. Her pale skin glowed in the moonlight where it showed through the gaps in her knee-length black dress. “I could jump,” she whispered.
“But you won’t.”
“I could,” she insisted, and I shook my head.
“But you won’t.”
“I will!”
“No, you won’t.”
“And why the fuck not?” she demanded, spinning to face me with her fists planted on her hips.
“Because you can’t guarantee that you would die, and if you were injured, it might not be badly enough for him to kill you. It’s not that high a fall.”
“Evita fell from lower.”
“Evita broke her neck on a tree branch. You have luck like mine; if you tried, you’d fuck it up and be fine except for a few bruises.”
“Godfuckingdammit!” She flopped beside me on the stone, her face buried in her arms as she wept. Bliss had been there three months longer than I had. Twenty-one months, for her. “Why isn’t there a better option?”
“Johanna drowned herself. Think that’s less painful than an uncertain fall?”
“Pia says it won’t work. He added sensors in the bank; if the water rises, it sends him an alarm and he can check the cameras. She said you can see the nearest cameras move to focus on whoever’s swimming.”
“If you waited till he was out of the house, or even out of town, it would probably give you enough time to drown if you really wanted to.”
“I don’t want to drown,” she sighed, sitting up to mop at her tears with her dress. “I don’t want to die.”
“Everyone dies.”
“Then I don’t want to die now,” she snarled.
“Then why jump?”
“You have absolutely no sense of sympathy.”
Not entirely true, and she knew it, but true enough.
I closed the book and turned off the book light, setting them both on the ground with the sad little dragon on top of them so I could twist onto my stomach to lie alongside her.
“I get so sick of this place,” she whispered, and even though we weren’t in the cave—the one place we were truly private—I thought she’d probably said it softly enough to avoid getting picked up. None of us knew if he went back through the recordings, never knew if it was safe to talk even when we knew for a fact he wasn’t sitting at a monitor.
“We all do.”
“Then why can’t I make the best of it, like you do?”
“You had a happy home, right?”
“Right.”
“That’s why you can’t make the best of it.”
I’d been happy in the apartment, which had eventually become home, but I’d lived through bad things before getting there, so I’d lived through bad things before coming here. Bliss never had, or at least, n
ot nearly to the same extent. She had too much good to compare this to.
“Tell me something from before.”
“You know I won’t.”
“Not something personal. Just . . . something.”
“One of my neighbors had a weed garden on the roof,” I said after a moment. “When I moved there it was just a corner, but as time went by and no one reported it, it expanded until it covered half the roof. Some of the children from the lower floors used to play hide-and-seek in it. Eventually, though, someone tipped off the police, and he saw them coming, panicked, and set the whole damn crop on fire. We were all a little bit high for a week, and we had to wash everything we owned multiple times to get the smell out.”
Bliss shook her head. “I can’t even imagine.”
“That’s not a bad thing.”
“I’m forgetting things from home,” she confessed. “I was trying to remember my street address earlier and I couldn’t remember if it was a road or an avenue or a street or what. I still can’t. One-oh-nine-two-nine Northwest Fifty-Eighth . . . something.”
Which was really what all the fuss came down to. I shifted to lay one of my hands over hers, because there was nothing I could say.
“Every morning when I wake up and every night before I fall asleep, I tell myself my name, my family’s names. I remind myself what they looked like.”
I’d seen Bliss’s family, a collection of clay figures. She made so many figures that there was no reason to give this set any special significance, unless you noticed the glossy parts where her fingers had worn the clay smooth, or that they were positioned in such a way that they were the first and last things she saw in a day.
Maybe the Gardener was right, and I do give everything a meaning.
“What happens when that isn’t enough?”
“Keep reminding yourself,” I told her. “Just keep doing it, and it’ll have to be enough.”
“Does it work for you?”
I never memorized my address in New York. When I had to put it down on a form, I asked one of the other girls, and they laughed at me every time but never actually made me learn it. I never changed my license from the fake one because I didn’t know how well it would stand up to real scrutiny, or if the DMV would do more than a cursory check of the information.
But I remembered Sophia, the faded plumpness she grew into after she kicked the addictions, and Whitney’s red-gold hair, and Hope’s laugh, and Jessica’s nervous giggle. I remembered Noémie’s gorgeous bone structure, from a Blackfoot father and a Cherokee mother, remembered the way Kathryn’s smile could light up a room on the rare occasions she gave it. I remembered Amber’s bright, flashy clothing, the patterns never working together and yet always working, because she loved them so much. I didn’t remind myself of them, didn’t strain to keep them in my memory, because they were indelibly written there.
Just like I could have gladly forgotten my mother’s and father’s faces, my Gran’s stretchy unitards, almost all the people from before New York. But I remembered them too, and in a misty way I even remembered aunts and uncles and cousins, and running around in convoluted games I never understood, and posing for pictures I never saw. I just remembered things, remembered people.
Even when I would rather not.
We sat up at the same time, propping ourselves on our elbows, as a door opened and a flashlight beam swept into the far end of the Garden.
“The fuck?” Bliss whispered, and I nodded in silent agreement.
The Gardener was in Danelle’s room, seeking comfort and ostensibly giving her comfort as well for being the one to count in Evita’s final game of hide-and-seek. Even if he was leaving, he never needed a flashlight. Neither did Avery, who was banned from the Garden for another two weeks for breaking Pia’s arm, or Lorraine, who was either asleep or crying herself to sleep at this time of night. There was a button in the infirmary that buzzed in her room and the kitchen if she was needed in her capacity as nurse.
The figure was dressed all in black, which might have seemed like a good idea until he stepped onto one of those white sand paths. He moved cautiously, the cone of light sweeping before every step, but we could tell from his posture that he was gawking at everything.
I never questioned that I immediately labeled the intruder as male. Something about the way he walked, maybe. Or the idiocy of bringing a flashlight if you’re trying to sneak around.
“Which do you think would get us in more trouble?” Bliss breathed against my ear. “Finding out who he is, or ignoring him?”
I realized I had a pretty good idea of who the intruder was, but I’d told the Gardener I wouldn’t tell anyone. Not that a promise to a serial killer holds a great deal of weight, but still. I pretty much never made promises, simply because then I felt bound to keep them.
But what the fuck was the Gardener’s younger son doing breaking into the inner greenhouse complex? And what did it—could it—mean for us?
The first question answered itself almost as soon as it crossed my mind, because it was the same reason I climbed those trees almost every afternoon to catch those glimpses of a real world Outside the glass. Curiosity, among other things, for me. Probably just curiosity for him.
The second question . . .
There were girls who could die if we chose the wrong thing to do. If he was just in the Garden itself that would be fine—it was a private garden space, who cared?—but if he explored the hallways at all . . .
Maybe he’d see the dead girls and call the police.
But maybe he wouldn’t, and then Bliss and I would be left explaining why we saw an intruder and did nothing.
Swearing under my breath, I slipped off the rock, crouching low to the ground. “Stay here, and keep an eye on him.”
“And do what if he does something?”
“Scream?”
“And you are—”
“Giving this to the Gardener to deal with.”
She shook her head but didn’t try to stop me. In her eyes, I could see the same awareness of being stuck. We couldn’t risk everyone’s lives on hoping this boy would be better than the rest of his family. And it wasn’t like seeing the Gardener with someone would be a first for me. He usually went for the privacy of a room, but every now and then . . . well. Like I said, he was a remarkably self-contained man, until he wasn’t.
I nearly crawled down the path on the far side of the cliff, where there was actually a slope rather than a mostly sheer face. The sand muffled my steps when I reached the ground, and by moving slowly I was able to step into the stream without a splash. I ducked behind the waterfall and moved quickly down the back hall to Danelle’s room.
The Gardener had pulled his trousers on but not his shirt or shoes, and he sat on the edge of the bed working a brush through Danelle’s auburn curls until they fluffed into a mane all around her. More than any of the rest of us, Danelle loathed his fascination with our hair because it always made hers unmanageable.
They both looked up when I slipped into the room, Danelle’s confusion echoed but edged in anger in the Gardener’s face. “I’m sorry,” I whispered, “but it’s important.”
Danelle cocked an eyebrow at me. When she’d first come to the Garden four years ago, she’d thought sucking up to the Gardener would get her home and had the inked wings on her face to show for it, a mask of red and purple. She’d mellowed through the years, though, and graduated to the “let him do whatever, just don’t participate” way of thinking. I knew what she was asking, but I only shrugged. Whether or not I told her would largely depend on what actually happened.
Stuffing his feet into his shoes and grabbing his shirt, the Gardener followed me out into the hall. “That—”
“There’s someone in the Garden,” I interrupted as quietly as I could. “I think it’s your younger son.”
His eyes widened. “Where is he?”
“Near the pond when I came to get you.”
He shrugged into his shirt and gestured for me to b
utton it while he ran his hands through his hair to get rid of the dishevelment. He was kind of screwed on the funky smell, though. When he set off down the hallway, I followed. After all, he didn’t tell me not to. Well, at least not until we got to one of the doorways and he could see the boy for himself, still waving around the silly flashlight. The man watched his son for a long time in silence, and I couldn’t read the expression on his face. With a hand on my shoulder, he pointed down, which could have meant either sit or stay.
I was the wrong kind of bitch for sit, so I chose stay, and he didn’t argue with me.
From the hallway, I watched him walk out into the Garden, openly and without apparent hesitation. His voice broke the near silence like a gunshot. “Desmond!”
The boy’s head whipped around and he dropped the flashlight. It bounced off a rock with the sound of cracking plastic, and when it fell to the sand the light flickered and died. “Father!”
The Gardener’s hand went into his pocket, and a moment later the walls came down around me, locking the other girls into their rooms and hiding the display cases. And left Bliss and me somewhat stranded, her up on the rock and me in the hall. And I hadn’t exactly told the Gardener she was up there. Shit.
I leaned against the wall and waited.
“What the hell are you doing here? I told you the inner greenhouse was off limits.”
“I . . . I heard Avery talking about it, and I just . . . I just wanted to see it. I’m sorry I disobeyed you, Father.”
It was hard to put an age to his voice. It was a light tenor, which had the effect of making him sound young. He was uncomfortable and embarrassed, clearly, but he didn’t actually seem scared.
“How did you even get in here?”
And could a Butterfly use it to get out?
The boy—Desmond, I supposed—hesitated. “A few weeks ago, I saw Avery pull aside a panel by one of the maintenance doors,” he said finally. “He closed it again when he saw I was there, but not before I saw a punch pad.”
“Which has a security code, so how did you get in?”
The Butterfly Garden Page 12