The Butterfly Garden

by Dot Hutchison

  Bliss made a carousel, did I mention that?

  She could make damn near anything out of polymer clay, baking sheet after sheet in the oven with Lorraine scowling at her the entire time as supervision. She was the only one of us with oven privileges. She was also the only one who’d ever asked.

  The night before she died, in those long hours we spent curled together on her bed, Lyonette told us stories about when she was younger. She didn’t give us names or locations, but she told them just the same, and the one that made her smile, the one that she loved more than any of the others, was about a carousel.

  Her father made the figures for a lot of carousels, and sometimes little Cassidy Lawrence would draw some out and her father would incorporate the designs into the next project, let her choose the colors or the expression on a face. Once her father let her go with him to deliver the horses and sleighs to a traveling carnival. They placed the figures all around the disc and she sat on the rail and watched as they ran the wiring through the golden poles so the horses moved up and down, and when everything was done, she ran around and around the carousel, petting the horses and whispering their names in their ears so they wouldn’t forget. She knew every single one, and she loved them all.

  The Gardener’s traits don’t exist in isolation, just in extremes.

  But the horses weren’t hers, and when it came time to go home, she had to leave them all behind, probably to never see them again. She couldn’t cry because she’d promised her father she wouldn’t, promised she wouldn’t make a scene when they had to go.

  That was when she made her first origami horse.

  In the cab of the truck on the way home, she made her first two dozen origami horses, using notebook paper and fast-food receipts to practice until she could make them well, and when she got home, she graduated to using computer paper. She made horse after horse after horse and colored them all to match the ones she’d left behind, whispering their names as she did, and when she was done, she carefully painted thin dowels and stuck them through the middles with a little bit of glue.

  She drew out and colored the patterns on the floor, all the paintings on the sloped ceiling, even the pictures framed in the elaborate curlicues that ran along the base of the tent top, and her mother helped her put them all together. Her father even helped her make a crank for the base so the whole thing could slowly spin. Her parents were so proud of her.

  The morning of the day she was kidnapped, when she left the house for school, the carousel was still sitting in pride of place on the mantel.

  After Lyonette died, I had the nameless new girl to keep me occupied.

  Bliss had her polymer clay.

  She didn’t show anyone what she was working on and none of us asked, letting her work through her grief in her own way. She was unusually focused on this project. Honestly, as long as it wasn’t a Lustrous Copper figurine, I wasn’t too worried. She’d done that for a few of the other dead girls and somehow I found those two-inch-tall butterflies more macabre and disturbing than the girls in the glass.

  But then the new girl’s infection reached a critical point—her tattoo was never going to heal properly. Even if the infection didn’t kill her, the wings would be hopelessly flawed, and that was something the Gardener couldn’t accept. Not when beauty was why he chose us.

  The doors had come down in the dark hours of earliest morning, like they would have for her normal tattoo session, but when they came up, she wasn’t in the tattoo room or her bed. She never appeared in the display cases. There was no goodbye.

  There was just . . . nothing.

  There was literally nothing left of her, not even a name.

  Bliss was in my room when I came back from looking, sitting cross-legged on my bed with a wrap skirt draped over a bundle in her lap. Dark shadows bruised the pale skin under her eyes and I wondered how much she’d slept since Lyonette had said goodbye to us.

  I sank down next to her on the bed, one leg curled under my body, and leaned my back against the wall.

  “Is she dead?”

  “If not, she soon will be,” I sighed.

  “And then you’ll sit through another new girl’s arrival and tattoos.”

  “Probably.”

  “Why?”

  I’d wondered that myself over the past week or so. “Because Lyonette thought it was important.”

  She pulled the fabric away from her lap, and there was the carousel.

  Lyonette had made another origami carousel when she came to the Garden; it had been sitting on the shelf above Bliss’s bed since her death. She’d reproduced all the patterns and designs and colors, and so had Bliss in her own medium. The golden poles even had the spiral ridges. I reached out and nudged the red pennant on top and the whole thing spun just a little.

  “I had to make it,” she whispered, “but I can’t keep it.”

  Bliss broke into furious, heartbroken sobs on my bed. She didn’t know about my carousel. She didn’t know that I’d sat on a black-and-red painted horse and finally understood that my parents didn’t love me, or at least didn’t love me nearly enough. The day I finally understood—and accepted—that I wasn’t wanted.

  I lifted it gently out of her lap and nudged her knee with my toe. “Shower.”

  She hiccupped and slid off the bed to obey, and while she washed away two weeks of grief and rage, I studied the horses to see if any of them matched the one that I’d splashed with the last of my tears ten years before.

  And the answer was almost. This horse had silver chasings instead of gold, and it had red ribbons tied into its black mane, but otherwise they were very, very close. I shifted onto my knees and placed it on the shelf next to Simba, next to the origami menagerie and the other polymer figures, next to the rocks Evita had painted and the poem Danelle had written and all the other things I’d somehow managed to accumulate after six months in the Garden. I wondered if I could have Bliss make a tiny girl with dark hair and golden skin to sit on that black-and-red horse and spin and spin and spin on the carousel and watch all the rest of the world walk away from her.

  But if I’d asked, she would have asked why, and that little girl didn’t need the sympathy so much as she needed to just finally be forgotten.

  Bliss came out of the shower, body and hair wrapped in violet and rose towels, and finally slept curled against me like one of Sophia’s girls. I kept one arm behind my head and I stayed against the wall, and every now and then I reached out and gave the carousel a little nudge so I could watch the black-and-red horse glide just a little farther away.

  He wishes he could let her have that distraction. Let the conversation derail, let her avoid the train wreck he has to put her through.

  But Victor sits forward in his chair and clears his throat, and when she turns her miserable eyes on him, he nods slowly.

  She sighs and folds her hands in her lap.

  For the next week, Desmond stayed out of the Garden completely. He didn’t use his codes, didn’t come in with his father, he just stayed away. Bliss was the one to ask the Gardener about it, in her usual appallingly blunt fashion, but he laughed and said not to worry, his son was just focusing on his upcoming finals.

  I was okay with that.

  Whether he was hiding, staying away, or just thinking through things, I didn’t mind the absence of another male to entertain. I appreciated the space to think.

  Avery was back in the Garden, after all, which meant a constant, subtle interference had to be played to protect the more fragile girls from his interest. Running it all from Simone’s bedside just made it more difficult.

  She’d noticeably lost weight in the past week and a half, unable to keep anything down longer than a half hour or so. During the days, I stayed with her, and during the nights, when Danelle came to relieve me, I went into the Garden and slept out on the sun rock, where I could pretend the walls weren’t closing in and time wasn’t running out.

  I liked Simone. She was funny and wry, never buying into the b
ullshit but making the best of it anyway. I helped her back into bed from another toilet dive and she clutched my hand. “I’m going to have to take a test, aren’t I?”

  Bliss said Lorraine had stayed at breakfast, asking questions. “Yes,” I answered slowly. “I think you will.”

  “It’ll come up positive, won’t it?”

  “I think so.”

  She closed her eyes, one hand pulling away the sweat-damp hair from her forehead. “I should have realized sooner. I saw both my mom and my oldest sister go through pregnancies and they were sick for two months solid.”

  “Want me to pee on the stick for you?”

  “What the hell is wrong with us that that is a declaration of love and friendship?” But she shook her head slowly. “I don’t want us both dead, which we both know would be the result.”

  We sat in silence for a while, because some things just don’t have an answer.

  “Can you do me a favor?” she asked eventually.

  “What do you need?”

  “If we have the book in the library, can you read it to me?”

  When she told me what she wanted, I almost laughed. Almost. Not because it was funny but because I was relieved that this was one thing I could do for her. I retrieved it from the library, settled next to her on the bed with her hand in mine, and opened the book to the proper page so I could start to read.

  “Most terribly cold it was; it snowed, and was nearly quite dark, and evening—the last evening of the year. In this cold and darkness there went along the street a poor little girl, bareheaded, and with naked feet.”

  “What book is that?”

  “Part of a book,” the girl corrects. “It’s ‘The Little Match Girl’ by Hans Christian Andersen.”

  Victor can almost remember it, something from a ballet his daughter Brittany did when she was much younger, but it’s lost to memories of The Nutcracker and The Steadfast Tin Soldier.

  “It’s the kind of story that makes more sense in the Garden than in the real world.”

  I went on to other stories when that one was done, but fell silent when Lorraine walked in. She had a tray with two lunches on it and sitting between them was a pregnancy test kit.

  “I have to be here when you take it,” she said.

  “No shit.”

  Sighing, Simone sat up against the headboard and reached for her glass of water, downing it all in one go. I handed her another glass off the tray, this one of fruit juice, and she drank it down as well. She made a good attempt at lunch, which was just soup and toast, but most of it went untouched. When the water finally got through her system, she grabbed the kit off the tray, stalked to her little toilet, and tugged the curtain to conceal herself.

  Lorraine hovered in the doorway like a vulture, her shoulders hunched and her eyes on the fabric screen.

  Simone leaned forward to catch my eye, then jerked her head toward the bitch in the doorway. Nodding, I took a deep breath and started reading “The Steadfast Tin Soldier.”

  At the top of my lungs.

  It earned me a ferocious scowl from the cook-nurse, but at least it let Simone piss in peace. We heard the flush and a moment later, she came out from behind the curtain and tossed the dripping stick of plastic at the older woman. “Have fun. Go report. Just get out.”

  “Don’t you want to—”

  “No. Get out.” Simone threw herself onto the bed, draping her upper half over my lap. “Will you keep reading?”

  I laid the book across her back, hiding the dull brown wings of a Mitchell’s Satyr, and picked back up where we’d left off. She slept through much of the afternoon, waking up from time to time to hurl herself toward the toilet. Danelle joined us for a bit later on, brushing Simone’s dark brown hair into an elegant twist. Bliss brought us dinner, and pinned small polymer larkspur blooms into the twist, and when I’d eaten and Simone had pushed her food around the plate, Bliss took the trays back to the kitchen for Lorraine.

  As the deepening evening made the shadows shift in the hallway, the Gardener appeared in the doorway.

  With a dress.

  It was a multi-layered confection of sheer silks in shades of brown and creams, all meant to echo her wings and flatter her dusky skin tone. Simone looked up at our sudden silence, saw the dress, and quickly turned her face away before he could see her tears.

  “Ladies?”

  Blinking rapidly, Danelle kissed the curve of Simone’s ear, the closest to her face she could reach, and silently left the room. Simone slowly pushed herself up to sitting and wrapped her arms around me, burying her nose in my shoulder. I squeezed back as tightly as I could, feeling the tremors start.

  “My name is Rachel,” she whispered against my skin. “Rachel Young. Will you remember?”

  “I will.” I kissed her cheek and reluctantly let her go. With the book of fairy tales in hand, I walked to the doorway, where the Gardener lightly kissed me.

  “She won’t be in pain,” he murmured.

  She’ll be dead.

  This was the part where I was supposed to go back to my room, or Bliss’s room, or Danelle’s room. This was the part where we were supposed to gather in small groups, pretending we’re anything other than what we are, and mourn the loss that hadn’t actually happened yet. This was where we were supposed to wait for Simone to die.

  And for the first time, I couldn’t do it.

  I just couldn’t do it.

  The lights flickered, our warning to get to our rooms before the walls came down over the doorways. I stepped out onto the sand path, aware of movement in the shadows in the far side of the Garden. I wasn’t sure if it was Avery, Desmond, or another of the girls, and at the moment I didn’t care. The lights went out and the walls hissed behind me, settling into their grooves with heavy thumps that fell flat against the silence.

  Walking deeper into the Garden, I stepped along the bank of the stream until I reached the waterfall. I dropped the book on a rock a safe distance from the water and spray and crossed my arms across my stomach, clutching my elbows against a solid weight growing in my chest. My head lolled back on my neck and, leaning against the cliff, I stared up at the panes of glass overhead. Stars were winking into sight against the deepening night, some bright and silver, some pale and blue or yellow and one lone red light that might have been a plane.

  A tiny flash of light streaked across the sky, and even though I knew the science—knew that it was just space debris, just rock or metal or scrap from a satellite burning up in the atmosphere—all I could think of was that stupid story. “Someone is just dead!” said the little girl; for her old grandmother, the only person who had loved her, and who was now no more, had told her, that when a star falls, a soul ascends to God.

  And that stupid little girl stood in the winter and kept lighting matches to catch glimpses of families that weren’t—could never be—hers and froze to death in those harsh moments of reality between matches, because even though matches can burn, they’re light, not heat.

  My breath caught against that solid, expanding weight and couldn’t get past it. I couldn’t breathe in, couldn’t breathe out, just this knot of stale air choking me. Leaves and branches rattled in the distance as I fell to my knees, gasping for breaths that wouldn’t come. I curled my hand into a fist and pounded it into my chest but aside from a second, throbbing pain, nothing changed. Why couldn’t I breathe?

  A hand touched my shoulder and I whirled around, slapping it away as I fell back from the uncoordinated movement.

  Desmond.

  I rolled onto my hands and knees, scrambled to my feet and through the waterfall into the cave, but he followed me, catching me when I tripped on a dip in the floor and fell again. He lowered me gently to the ground and knelt in front of me. He studied my face as I struggled for air. “I know you don’t have any reason to trust me, but do it anyway, just for a minute.”

  His hand came toward my face and I slapped it away again. Shaking his head, he spun me quickly and pinned my arms to
my side with one arm, and his other hand covered my nose and mouth. “Breathe in,” he whispered against my ear. “Doesn’t matter if it’s a full breath, you’ll still get some air. Breathe in.”

  I tried, and maybe he was right, maybe there was some, but I couldn’t feel it. All I could feel was his hand between me and what I needed to live.

  “All I’m doing is forcing you to breathe in a high concentration of carbon dioxide,” he continued calmly. “Breathe in. The carbon dioxide attaches to your bloodstream in place of oxygen and slows your body’s responses. Breathe in. When your body gets to a critical point, when you’re on the verge of passing out, your body’s natural responses push past the psychological factors. Breathe in.”

  Each time he gave me the instruction, I tried to obey, I truly did, but there just wasn’t any air. I stopped struggling, my limbs leaden and heavy, and sagged against his chest. His hand stayed sealed over my nose and mouth. With all of me so heavy, I could barely feel the weight in my chest, and slowly, as he periodically repeated his instruction, air trickled in. My head swam with sudden light-headedness, but I was breathing. He moved his hand to my shoulder, rubbing it up and down my arm as he continued to whisper, “Breathe in.”

  Eventually it became a habit again, something I didn’t have to think about, and I closed my eyes against a blinding sense of shame. I’d never had a panic attack before, though I’d seen them plenty in others, and my own inability to do anything sensible was mortifying. More so, having someone else witness it. When I felt fifty percent sure I wouldn’t fall flat on my face if I stood, I tried to push to my feet.

  Desmond’s arms tightened around me. Not painfully, but enough that I wasn’t going anywhere without a fight. “I’m a coward,” he said quietly. “And worse than that, I think I may be my father’s son; but if I can help you this way, please let me.”

  If the little match girl had someone curled around her like this, someone warm and solid against her back, his own body wrapped around her, would she have survived?