The Butterfly Garden

by Dot Hutchison

  “Desmond didn’t know the true nature of the Garden for a while,” she tells his hands. “Maybe a long while, by the way of things. His father made sure of that.”

  The Gardener didn’t give an access code to his younger son right away. For the first couple of weeks, he escorted Desmond through the Garden, controlling what he saw and who he spoke to. Bliss, for example, was one of the later introductions, after the Gardener had a chance for several long conversations with her about what was and was not appropriate to show or tell his son.

  Desmond wasn’t shown the criers or the suck-ups, and those of us he was allowed to interact with received a dress with a back.

  Bliss hurt herself laughing when she found hers neatly folded outside her room. Lorraine was the one to deliver them, and for a moment she seemed so satisfied. She didn’t know that Desmond had discovered the Garden, didn’t know that this was temporary.

  She thought we were sharing her punishment, her exile.

  The dresses were simple but elegant, like everything else in our wardrobes. He knew all our sizes and had probably sent Lorraine out to get them—regardless of her panic attacks at the thought of leaving the safety of the Garden—but we had them so fast there couldn’t have been another way. Still black, of course. Mine was almost a shirt, sleeveless and collared with buttons to the waist where it disappeared under a wide black stretch belt and became a swishy skirt to my knees. I secretly loved it.

  Our wings were hidden, but much to the Gardener’s delight, I still had some wings showing. The black tribal butterfly I’d gotten with the girls in the apartment was still stark and fresh on my right ankle. As long as our wings were hidden anyway, we were even allowed to wear our hair however we liked. Bliss left hers down in a riot of curls that got tangled in everything, while I wore mine back in a simple braid. It felt remarkably self-indulgent.

  The Desmond of the first two weeks was his father’s shadow, polite and respectful, mindful of his questions so as not to strain his father’s patience. We were all carefully coached in our responses. If he asked anything about our lives before, we were to cast our eyes down and murmur something about painful things being best forgotten. It wasn’t until the fifth or sixth time he heard this that something struck him as odd.

  That it struck him at all made me revise my initial estimation of his intelligence.

  Only a little, though. After all, he was still buying into his father’s story.

  He came in the evenings for a few hours, not every evening but most of them. After classes were done, and if he didn’t have too much homework. During that introduction, Avery was banned from the Garden completely and the Gardener didn’t touch any of us while Desmond was there. He touched us later, of course, or before, but not where his son could see. The walls stayed down over the girls in glass, not just from the outside but the sidewalls in the rooms as well. We went weeks without seeing any dead girls, and though there was guilt at wanting to forget or ignore them, it was glorious to not have that constant reminder of our impending mortality and immortality.

  Desmond’s introduction was like the way Lyonette brought girls into the Garden. First you make them feel better. Then you show them, tell them, a piece at a time. You don’t bring the markings up right away, you don’t bring up the sex right away. You acclimate them to one aspect and then, when they didn’t balk at that anymore, you introduced another.

  One of the many reasons my introductions weren’t nearly as graceful as Lyonette’s.

  I mostly kept to my routine whether Desmond was in the Garden or not. I spent the mornings talking to girls in the cave, ran my laps before lunch, and spent my afternoons either reading up on the cliff or playing games down on the ground. Wherever he and his father started in the afternoon, they usually ended conversing with me up on the cliff. Bliss was sometimes there for that.

  More often, she saw them coming up the path and climbed down the face to avoid them.

  As much as he liked Bliss’s temper and spirit, the Gardener was all right with that. It meant less of a risk that his son would discover the truth before his father had adequately prepared him.

  That last evening of direct supervision, the Gardener started the conversation with me and Desmond, then left it in our hands as he made his way down the path and into the hallways. The display cases had been covered, after all, and I think he missed them. But the conversation petered out not long after he left, and when Desmond couldn’t find a way to continue it—because it was certainly not my responsibility to do so—I turned back to my book.

  “Antigone?” Eddison asks.

  “Lysistrata,” she corrects with a small smile. “I needed something a little lighter.”

  “Can’t say I’ve read that one.”

  “Doesn’t surprise me; it’s the kind of thing you appreciate more when you’ve got a steady woman in your life.”

  “How—”

  “Really? The way you snap and snarl, the graceless way you interact, and you want to try to tell me you have a wife or girlfriend?”

  An ugly flush stains his cheeks but—he’s learning. He doesn’t rise to the bait.

  She flashes him a grin. “Spoilsport.”

  “Some of us have jobs to do,” he retorts. “You try dating when your job can call you in at any time.”

  “Hanoverian is married.”

  “He got married in college.”

  “Eddison was too busy getting arrested in college,” Victor remarks. A flush mottles the back of his partner’s neck.

  Inara perks up. “Drunk and disorderly? Lewd and lascivious?”

  “Assault.”

  “Vic—”

  But Victor cuts him off. “Campus and local cops bungled the investigation into a series of rapes across campus. Possibly on purpose—the suspect was the police chief’s son. No charges were filed. The school imposed no discipline.”

  “And Eddison went after the boy.”

  Both men nod.

  “A vigilante.” She settles back in her chair, a thoughtful expression on her face. “When you don’t receive justice, you make it.”

  “That was a long time ago,” mutters Eddison.

  “Was it?”

  “I uphold the law. It isn’t perfect but it’s the law, and it’s what we have. Without justice, we have no order and no hope.”

  Victor watches the girl absorb that, turn it over.

  “I like your idea of justice,” she says finally. “I’m just not sure it really exists.”

  “This,” Eddison says, and taps the table, “this is part of justice too. This is where we start to find truth.”

  She smiles slightly.

  And shrugs.

  We sat in silence for long enough that he grew uncomfortable, fidgeting on the rock and tugging off his sweater in the reflected heat from the glass roof. I mostly ignored him, until his cleared throat indicated his desire to finally speak. I closed the book on a finger and gave him my attention.

  He shrank back. “You’re, uh . . . a very direct person, aren’t you?”

  “Is that a bad thing?”

  “No . . .” he said slowly, like he wasn’t entirely sure. He took a deep breath, and closed his eyes. “How much of what my father is telling me is complete shit?”

  That was worth finding the bookmark. I slid it between the pages and set the book carefully on the rock behind me. “What makes you think any of it is?”

  “He’s trying too hard. And . . . well, that whole thing with it being private. When I was little, he took me into his office, showed me around, and explained that he worked very hard there and needed me to never come in there to interrupt him. He showed me. He never did with this place, so I knew it had to be different.”

  I turned to face him more fully, cross-legged on the sun-warmed rock as I arranged my skirt to cover everything important. “Different in what way?”

  He followed my example, so close that our knees touched. “Is he really rescuing you?”

  “Don’t you think
that’s a question you should put to your father?”

  “I’d rather put it to someone who might tell me the truth.”

  “And you think that’s me?”

  “Why not? You’re a very direct sort of person.”

  I smiled in spite of myself. “Direct doesn’t mean honest. It could just mean that I’m very direct and straightforward with my lies.”

  “So you plan to lie to me?”

  “I plan to tell you to ask your father.”

  “Maya, what is my father really doing here?”

  “Desmond, if you thought your father was doing anything inappropriate, what would you do?” Did he have any idea how important his answer could be?

  “I would . . . well, I would . . .” He shakes his head, scratching at his slightly overgrown hair. “I guess it would depend on what that inappropriate thing was.”

  “Then what do you think he’s doing?”

  “Besides cheating on my mother?”

  Point.

  He takes another deep breath. “I think he comes to you all for sex.”

  “And if he is?”

  “He’s cheating on my mother.”

  “Which would be your mother’s concern, not yours.”

  “He’s my father.”

  “Not your spouse.”

  “Why aren’t you giving me a direct answer?”

  “Why are you asking me, instead of him?”

  “Because I’m not sure I can trust what he says.” He blushed, like questioning the word of his father was somehow shameful.

  “And you think you can trust me?”

  “All the others do.” His gesture took in the whole of the Garden, the handful of girls allowed out of their rooms when Desmond was there.

  But all the walls were down on the girls who used to suck up in hopes of release, their second sets of wings displayed on their faces. They were down on the weepers and the listless and—except for Bliss—the chronically bitchy. They were down over all those dozens of girls in glass, and the scattering of empty cases that weren’t enough to hold the current generations, and no one knew what he was going to do when he ran out.

  “You’re not one of us,” I said flatly. “Because of who you are, what you are, you never will be.”

  “Because I’m privileged?”

  “More than you can ever fathom. They trust me because I’ve proven to them they can. I have no interest in proving that to you.”

  “What do you think his reaction would be if I asked him?”

  “I don’t know, but he’s coming up the path, and I’ll thank you not to ask him in front of me.”

  “It isn’t easy to ask him for anything,” he murmured.

  I knew why that was true for us. I thought it cowardice that it was apparently true for him.

  His father rejoined us then, standing over us with a smile. “Getting along well enough, Desmond?”

  “Yes, sir. Maya’s very pleasant to talk with.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.” His hand twitched as if to touch my hair, but at the last second he brought it up to rub at his jaw. “It’s time for us to join your mother for dinner. I’ll check in on you later, Maya.”

  “Of course.”

  Desmond stood and brought my knuckles to his lips. Seriously? “Thank you for your company.”

  “Of course,” I repeated. I watched them make their way back through the Garden. Soon they’d be sitting down in a dining room with Eleanor and Avery, a perfectly normal family conversing over a meal, never mind the lies that hovered over the table like fog.

  A few minutes later I heard Bliss come up beside me. “What a tool.” She snorted.

  “Maybe.”

  “Will he go to the police?”

  “No,” I said reluctantly. “I don’t think he will.”

  “Then he’s a tool.”

  Sometimes it was hard to argue with Bliss’s logic, such as it was.

  But sometimes, tools could be used.

  “Why didn’t you think he’d go to the police?”

  “For the same reason he wasn’t going to ask his father those important questions,” she answers with a shrug. “Because he was scared. What if he went to the police and his father’s explanation was actually true? Or worse, what if it wasn’t? Maybe he wanted to do the right thing, but he was barely twenty-one. How many of us know the right thing at that age?”

  “You haven’t even reached that age yet,” Eddison points out, and the girl nods.

  “And I don’t claim to know the right thing. He wanted to believe his father. I’ve never had anyone I wanted to believe that badly. I never felt that kind of need for someone to be proud of me.”

  She smiles suddenly, soft and sour and slightly sad. “Lotte worried about that, though.”

  “Lotte?”

  “Sophia’s younger girl. I remember one time, after we’d worked till three in the morning, Sophia was at the girls’ school at eight-thirty in the morning so she could see their class plays. She told us about it after she’d gotten a nap in.” The smile spreads, deepens, and for a moment Victor thinks he sees the real Inara Morrissey, the girl who found a home in that strange apartment. “Jillie was fearless, confident, the kind of kid who could throw herself into anything, no hesitation. Lotte was . . . not. Girls with older sisters like Jillie probably never are.

  “Anyway, there we were around the coffee table, sitting on the floor to eat a crazy assortment of food from Taki’s, and Sophia’s too tired to bother getting dressed. She just pads over in her underwear, her hair covering most of her ink and not much of her tits, and plops down to eat. Lotte had been fretting about her line for weeks, practicing it over and over again with each of us when we went with her mother to visit, and we all wanted to know if she’d remembered it.”

  Victor’s been to those class plays. “Did she?”

  “Half of it. Jillie shouted the rest of it from the audience.” The smile shifts, fades. “I’ve never been an envious person, never really saw a point to it. Those girls, though, what they had with each other and Sophia . . . they were worth envying.”

  “Inara—”

  “You could get anything at Taki’s,” she interrupts briskly, flicking her burned and sliced fingers as if to dismiss the sentimentality. “It was between the station and our building, never closed, and he’d make anything, even if you bought the stuff at the bodega next door. Working in the restaurant, none of us ever wanted to cook.”

  The moment he could have pushed is gone as quickly as it came, but he makes a mental note of it. He’s not naïve enough to think she trusts them. Still, he doesn’t think she means to reveal this much emotion. Whatever she’s hiding—and he agrees with Eddison, she’s hiding something important—she’s so focused on it that other things are starting to slip.

  He likes Inara, and he sees his daughters every time he looks at her, but he has a job to do. “And the Garden?” he asks neutrally. “I think you mentioned Lorraine had orders to make only healthy food?”

  She makes a face. “Cafeteria style. You stood in line, received your meal, and then sat down at these tables complete with benches to make you feel like you were back in grade school. Unless you wanted to take the tray back to your room, which you could pretty much do whenever you felt like it as long as you brought it back at the next meal.”

  “What if you didn’t like what was being served?”

  “You ate what you could off the plate. If there was an actual allergy involved, there was forgiveness, but if you didn’t eat enough or if you were too picky, things didn’t end well for you.”

  There was a set of twins there when I first arrived. They looked identical, right down to the wings tattooed on their backs, but they were very, very different people. Magdalene and Magdalena. Maggie, the elder by several minutes, was allergic to life. Seriously, she couldn’t even go out into the main Garden because she couldn’t breathe out there. If you ever needed help falling asleep, all you had to do was ask her to list her food allergies. Len
a, on the other hand, wasn’t allergic to anything. In one of his rare lapses into insensitivity, the Gardener kept them in the same room and always visited them at the same time.

  Lena liked to run around in the Garden, and as often as not ended up soaked and muddy and covered in plant bits. This created a rather large problem when she tried to go back to the room to shower. Even if Maggie was in the dining room, she’d come back later, find a shred of grass on the floor, and freak the fuck out. Maggie was allergic to the first twenty or so soaps the Gardener provided, and even then she complained about how dry her skin was, how lank her hair was, and always, always how she couldn’t breathe and why her eyes were so blurry and none of us had any sympathy for her, oh holy fuck.

  Maggie was used to her parents falling over themselves to make her comfortable at every step.

  I liked Lena, though. Lena never complained—even when Maggie was at her most annoying—and she explored the Garden just as much as I did. Sometimes the Gardener even hid little treasures for her to find, simply because he knew she would. She loved to laugh and seized on any excuse to do so, creating one of those relentlessly cheerful outlooks that would be irritating if you didn’t know she knew the gravity of the situation. She chose to be happy because she didn’t like being sad or pissed off.

  She tried to explain it to me, and I sort of got it, but not really, because let’s face it: I’m not that person. I don’t choose to be sad or pissed off, but I don’t exactly choose to be happy, either.

  Maggie never ate with the rest of us because she said just being in the same room with things would make her have a severe reaction. Her sister nearly always had to take her a tray of specially prepared food, then swing by to pick it up before the next meal. But then, Lena had the time for that, because you could put any meal before her and she’d suck it down under five minutes. Lena would eat everything without a complaint.

  And Lena was one of the very few people in the Garden I genuinely feared for, because most of us understood that if the Gardener kept the twins as a pair in all other things, he would in death as well.