Desmond walked up the path, his case in hand, and stopped beside the rock. “Hi.”
“Hello,” I replied.
Normal was a variable thing in the Garden.
I eyed the case in his hand. Would asking him to play for me flatter his ego? Or would it make him feel like I owed him a favor? I was skilled at reading the Gardener and Avery; Desmond was more difficult. Unlike his father and brother, he didn’t know what he wanted.
I was good at escaping people, not manipulating them. This was new ground.
“Play for me?” I asked eventually.
“You wouldn’t mind? I have a proficiency tomorrow, and didn’t want to wake up Mother. I was going to practice outside, but, uh . . .” He pointed up.
I didn’t look. I could hear the rain against the glass. I missed the feeling of rain.
There was nearly always music playing in the apartment. Kathryn liked classical, but Whitney liked Swedish rap, and Noémie liked bluegrass, whereas Amber liked country, and in the end we had the most eclectic listening experience imaginable. Here some of the girls had radios or players in their rooms but for most of us, music was a rare thing anymore.
I closed the book and sat up as Desmond rosined his bow and stretched his fingers. It was fascinating to watch all the little rituals that went into warming up, but when he finally set the bow to the strings to play for real, I realized why his father called him a musician.
It was more than just playing. Though I was no expert, he seemed technically skilled, but he could make the notes weep or laugh across the strings. He infused each piece with emotion. Down in the pond, the trio stopped splashing and just floated so they could hear. I closed my eyes and let the music wrap around me.
Sometimes when Kathryn and I were sitting out on the fire escape or the roof at three or four in the morning after work, a guy from the next building over would come out onto his roof to practice the violin. He’d fumble his fingering and his bow work wasn’t always to tempo, but sitting in the semi-darkness that was as close to true night as the city could get, it was like the violin was his lover. He never seemed to realize he had an audience, everything in him focused on the instrument and the sounds they made between them. It was pretty much the only thing Kathryn and I routinely did together. Even if we had the night off, we made sure we were awake to go outside and listen to that boy play.
Desmond was better.
He segued smoothly from song to song, and when he eventually let the bow swing down to his side, the last notes hovered expectantly.
“I don’t think you’ll have a problem passing your proficiency,” I whispered.
“Thanks.” He checked over the instrument, cradling it gently, and when he was satisfied all was as it should be, he put it away in the velvet-lined case. “When I was younger, I used to dream about being a professional musician.”
“Used to?”
“My father took me to New York and arranged for me to spend a few days with a professional violinist, to see what it would be like. I hated it. It all felt . . . well, soulless, I guess. Like if I actually did that for a living, I’d grow to hate music. When I told my father I’d rather do something that still let me love music, he said he was proud of me.”
“He seems frequently proud of you,” I murmured, and he gave me a queer look.
“He talks to you about me?”
“A little.”
“Um . . .”
“You’re his son. He loves you.”
“Yes, but . . .”
“But?”
“But it doesn’t strike you a little weird that he talks about his son to his captives?”
I decided not to tell him the entirety of what his father had said about him. “More weird than him having captives at all?”
“True.”
And here he was, finally able to call us captives, and unable to try anything to change that fact.
The stream that connected the waterfall and the pond was barely three feet deep, but Eleni managed to swim all the way up to the rocks before standing. “Maya, we’re going in now. Do you need anything?”
“Not that I can think of, thanks.”
Desmond shook his head. “Sometimes you seem like a house mother.”
“What a twisted little sorority.”
“Do you hate me?”
“What, for being your father’s son?”
“I’m starting to realize just how much,” he said quietly. He sat down next to me on the rock, draping his arms over his bent knees. “One of the girls in my Freud and Jung class has a butterfly tattoo on her shoulder. It’s ugly and badly drawn, one of those butterfly-type fairies with a face that looks like a melted doll, but she was wearing a tube dress and I saw it and all I could think of for the rest of class was your wings and how beautiful they are. They’re horrible, but they’re beautiful, too.”
“That’s pretty much how we look at it,” I replied neutrally, curious to see where he was going with this.
“I doubt the sight of your wings gets you off.”
Oh.
Yes, definitely his father’s son.
But unlike his father, ashamed of that fact.
“In one of my other classes, we were talking about hoarders and I thought of my father’s story about his father’s butterfly collection, but then of course I thought about my father’s version of that, and suddenly I was thinking about you again and how you can be more dignified in nothing but ink and scars than most people can manage fully clothed. For weeks now, I’ve been having these . . . these dreams, and I wake up sweating and hard and I don’t know if they’re nightmares or not.” He shoved his hair back from his face, hooking that hand behind his neck. “I don’t want to believe I’m the type of person who could do this.”
“Maybe you’re not.” I shrugged at his sideways look. “Going along with it is complicated, but it doesn’t mean you’d ever do it yourself.”
“It’s still going along with it.”
“Right and wrong doesn’t mean there’s an easy choice.”
“Why don’t you hate me?”
I’d been thinking about that a lot the past few weeks, and still wasn’t sure I’d found the answer. “Maybe you’re as trapped here as we are,” I said slowly. Except I did hate him a bit, as much as but in a different way than his father and brother.
He turned that over for a while. In a flash of lightning, I tried to make out the emotions racing across his face. He had his father’s eyes, but he was much more self-aware than the Gardener would ever be. The Gardener clung to his delusions. Desmond eventually confronted the hard truths, or at least the beginnings of them. He didn’t know what to do with them, but he didn’t try to make them less than they were.
“Why don’t you try to escape?”
“Because girls before me did.”
“Escaped?”
“Tried.”
He winced.
“There is only one door that leads out of this space, and it is locked and coded at all times. You have to punch in your code for both entry and exit. When maintenance comes in, the rooms become soundproof. We could scream and pound all we wanted to and no one would ever hear us. We could stay out here when the walls come down for maintenance, but someone tried that about ten years ago and nothing happened except that she disappeared.” And reappeared in glass and resin, but Desmond still hadn’t seen those Butterflies. He seemed to forget what his father had said about keeping us after we die. “I’m not sure if your father hires incurious people or if he made it seem unexceptional, but no one came to the rescue. When it comes right down to it, though, we’re afraid.”
“Of freedom?”
“Of what happens if we almost get there.” I looked up at the night beyond the glass panes. “Let’s face it, he could kill all of us pretty quickly if he ever felt the need to. And if one of us made the attempt and failed, what’s to say he wouldn’t punish all of us for it?”
Or at least the one who made the attempt and me, because he t
hinks they tell me everything. How would I not know of such a plan?
“I’m sorry.”
What an asinine thing to say, under the circumstances.
I shook my head. “I’m just sorry you ever came here.”
Another sideways look, somewhere between hurt and amused. “Completely sorry?” he asked after a minute.
I studied his face in the moonlight. Twice he’d helped me through panic attacks, even if he only knew about one. He was fragile in a way his father and brother weren’t, someone who wanted to be good, do good, and just didn’t know how. “No,” I said eventually. “Not completely.” Not if I could figure out some way to lead him to usefulness.
“You’re a very complicated person.”
“And you’re a complication.”
He laughed and held his hand out between us, palm up, and I didn’t hesitate to take it, lacing our fingers together. I leaned into him, resting my head on his shoulder, and found a comfortable silence between us. He reminded me of Topher a bit, if more complex, and just for a little while, I wanted to pretend this boy wasn’t his father’s son, that he was my friend.
I fell asleep that way, and when morning sunlight struck my eyes, I slowly sat up to find that we’d curled together through the night, his hand on my hip and his other arm cushioning my cheek from the stone. The new girl wouldn’t be awake for a few hours yet, but Desmond had classes and at some point, a violin proficiency he’d pass without even trying.
Hesitantly, I reached out and stroked a comma of dark hair back from his forehead. He stirred and unconsciously followed the gesture, and I couldn’t help but smile. “Wake up.”
“No,” he mumbled, and grabbed my hand to shield his eyes.
“You have classes.”
“Skip ’em.”
“You have a proficiency.”
“Mm proficient.”
“You have finals next week.”
He sighed but it turned into a face-splitting yawn, and he grudgingly sat up to rub the sleep from his eyes. “You’re bossy, but nice to wake up to.”
I looked away because I wasn’t sure what was showing on my face. His fingertips, lightly callused from the strings, touched my chin and brought my face back to his, and the only thing there was a soft smile.
He leaned forward, then caught himself and started to pull back. I closed the distance between us, his lips soft against mine. The light touch on my chin moved back until his hand could cup my cheek and he deepened the kiss until my head was swimming. It had been so long since I’d actually kissed someone, rather than just allow them to force a kiss on me. The Gardener thought his son could love me, and I thought he might be right. I also thought love would prove a different motivation for the son than for the father. I hoped.
When Desmond moved away, he pressed a kiss against my cheek. “Can I come see you after classes?”
I nodded even as I silently acknowledged that my life had reached an entirely new level of fucked up.
“And the Gardener was happy about this?”
“Actually, he was. I mean, I’m sure there was a certain degree of self-interest in it—after all, if Desmond was emotionally attached to one or more of us, he was unlikely to risk anything happening to us. That had to be part of it, but I think most of it was that he genuinely enjoyed seeing his son happy.”
Victor sighs. “Just when I think this story can’t get more twisted.”
“It can always get more twisted.” She smiles as she says it, but he knows better than to trust it. It’s not at all a nice smile, not something that should be so easily displayed on a girl her age. “That’s life, right?”
“No,” Victor says quietly. “It isn’t. Or at least it shouldn’t be.”
“But that’s not the same thing. Is and shouldn’t are entirely different things.”
He’s starting to think Eddison isn’t going to come back.
He can’t really blame him.
If this is the twisted she’s admitting to, how much worse is the twisted she’s still hiding?
“How did things change after his finals?”
He was around more in the summer, except for an hour or so in the early afternoon when he walked with his parents in the outer greenhouse. If he came in the mornings, he stayed atop the cliff or in the library, respecting the privacy of my conversations with the other girls in the cave. Danelle had come to replace Lyonette as my balance in the more delicate of those conversations, just as she’d started taking the night shift with our new arrivals.
There wasn’t much to the night shift, given that they were in a drugged sleep, but still. I appreciated being able to get some space.
And despite the wings that spread across her cheeks and forehead, Danelle could be trusted as a sensible option. I’d grown used to her double set of Red-Spotted Purples, with their contrasts of deep, rich color and bright pattern breaks. I won’t say it suited her, any more than the ones on my back suited me, but she’d made them a part of her and learned from the experience. She and Marenka were the last to receive the wings on their faces; after that, they’d talked everyone else out of sucking up to that extent. There were some who came close, but they hadn’t crossed the line yet.
I took the earliest conversations and she traded with me once the new girl showed signs of waking. Danelle held back on actually meeting the new girls until they were more or less settled, just like the others with the wings on their faces did.
After the first session, I was actually in the room whenever the Gardener worked on the new girl’s tattoo. She hated needles, but if I read to her—and let her squeeze the ever-loving fuck out of my arm—she could lie still for it. It was by her request that I was there, rather than the Gardener’s, though I think he was pleased by it. As I read aloud from The Count of Monte Cristo and wondered if that counted as irony, I watched the brilliant ice blue of a Spring Azure spread across her porcelain skin, broken by occasional veins or fringes of silver-white and one narrow band of midnight blue on the tips of the upper wings.
Bliss brought an ice pack with the lunch trays to put on my now-perpetually bruised arm.
The Gardener didn’t touch me if Desmond was in the Garden, but his son’s interest in me roused a corresponding excitement in him. It was no secret among the girls that he liked me best—honestly, I think they were relieved—but he’d gone from coming to me two or three times a week to damn near every day.
He still went to the other girls, of course, but when he was with anyone else, he didn’t care if his younger son was in the Garden or not. And there was still Avery, but his fangs had been mostly pulled by the destruction of his playroom and the clear pride his father had in Desmond. With his younger brother as a strong example of how their father wanted us treated, it was hard for him to give in to the things he enjoyed.
I grew to hate lunch, because every single day, when Desmond went to share the meal and the early afternoon with his mother, the Gardener came to me with a need that made his hands shake. I started taking lunch in my room just so I wouldn’t have to suffer the indignity of him coming to the dining room and calling my name across conversations. Even though he knew Desmond hadn’t done any more than kiss me, just the thought that he could do more was enough to make the Gardener nearly mess his pants.
And dear fucking Christ, the possibility that he scoured the security footage hoping to see his son with me was enough to make my brain turn off completely.
At least those visits had a specific time limit, because he had to be up at the house by a quarter to two to meet his wife for their walk. While the family strolled along the square in the outer greenhouse, I spent the hour with the girl he rechristened Tereza. She was just shy of seventeen, the daughter of two litigators, and almost never spoke above a whisper. When she did, it was important, like her asking me to read to her while the Gardener inked her wings. She could also be drawn into conversation about music. She played piano, we learned, and wanted to be a professional pianist. She and Ravenna could talk fo
r hours about ballet scores. She paid attention, noticed the undercurrents of any given situation, so she seemed to understand our precarious existence even before I showed her the display cases that first week.
For her sake, so she’d have a way to keep herself grounded, I asked the Gardener to give her a keyboard.
He installed an upright piano in one of the empty rooms, replacing the bed with a beautiful instrument and an entire wall of filing cabinets of sheet music. Except for meals, sleep, and putting up with her visits from the Gardener—numerous because she was new—she was in that room, playing the piano until her hands cramped.
Desmond met me in the hallway one afternoon, leaning against the Garden-side wall. His head was tilted to one side as he listened. “What happens if someone has a breakdown?” he asked quietly.
“In what way?”
He nodded in the direction of the doorway. “You can hear it in the music. She’s disintegrating. She’s getting choppy, changing the tempos, pounding at the keys . . . maybe she doesn’t talk, but that doesn’t mean she’s adapting.”
You never really forgot that he was a psych major.
“She’ll either break or she won’t. There’s a limit to what I can do to prevent that.”
“But what happens if she does?”
“You know what happens. You just don’t want to admit it.” He’d never asked why Simone hadn’t returned. Tereza’s arrival was greeted with consternation followed by an obvious, concerted effort to not think about it too deeply.
Desmond paled, but nodded to show he understood. Then he promptly changed the subject. If you don’t look at the bad thing, the bad thing can’t see you, right? “Bliss has some sort of project spread out over the rock. She told me if I sat on any of the clay, she’d shove it up my nose.”
“What was she working on?”
The Butterfly Garden Page 19