The Butterfly Garden

by Dot Hutchison

  Gradually, the girls felt comfortable with him in a way they never would with his father and brother, because he was never going to ask anything of them. Most of them had given up hope of ever being rescued, so there wasn’t even much bitterness as to why he didn’t report anything.

  And the Gardener was over the moon.

  The very first time we talked about Des, he’d said “his mother’s very proud of him.” I had thought that meant that he wasn’t, but I knew better now. He was always proud of Desmond, but when faced with a girl who knew only Avery, he had to acknowledge the son who openly shared the same fascination with keeping an unwilling harem. Now that Desmond was part of the Garden, his father’s happiness was complete. Tereza’s breakdown was the only one that summer. There were no accidents, no twenty-first birthdays, nothing to force us to remember that we couldn’t have just a little bit of fun.

  Well, except for the Gardener and Avery still raping at will. That put a damper on things.

  But the Gardener shifted how he treated me. After Desmond and I had sex, the Gardener didn’t touch me that way anymore. He treated me like a . . . well, like a housemother, I guess. Or a daughter. I wasn’t like Lorraine, I wasn’t being exiled from his affection, but somehow he decided that I was Desmond’s now. With Avery he shared; with Desmond, he gave.

  Fucked up, no?

  But just for a while, I was willing to accept that without question. If I was going to have any hope of moving Desmond, it couldn’t just be infatuation. I needed him to truly love me, to be willing to fight for me, and that wasn’t going to happen if he was still sharing me with his father and brother.

  The Gardener even disabled the camera in my room because Des asked him to, said it made him self-conscious to think that his father was watching him have sex, and couldn’t he be trusted not to hurt me, when he loved me so dearly?

  Okay, I’m sure the conversation was a bit more graceful and manly than that, but Bliss had the girls in stitches with her version of it.

  Desmond was still his father’s son, though. Whenever I tried to walk him to the door, he’d politely but firmly send me away so I couldn’t see him put in his code. “It would destroy my mother,” he said when I finally mentioned it. Taking direct action against his father would be complicated, I got that, but why not give us the chance to rescue ourselves? “My family’s name, our reputation, our company . . . I can’t be the one to destroy that.”

  Because a name means more than a life. Than all our lives.

  The weekend before the fall semester started, we had a concert in the Garden. Desmond brought in better speakers and set them up on the cliff, and just for the evening, the Gardener gave us all bright colors and treats, and fuck, it was pathetic how happy we were that evening. We were still captives, we still had death sitting on our shoulders and counting down to our twenty-first birthdays, but that night was magical anyway. Everyone laughed and danced and sang, no matter how badly, and the Gardener and Desmond danced with us.

  Avery sat off to one side and sulked, because the whole thing had been Desmond’s idea.

  After we cleaned everything up and the girls split off into the rooms for the night, Des brought the smallest speaker back to my room and we danced, swaying in place as we kissed. Intimacy with Des wasn’t real, any more than with his father, but he didn’t realize that. I’d never said it, but he thought I loved him too. He thought this was happiness, that this was somehow healthy and stable, the kind of thing you build a life around. He either missed or glossed over my frequent reminders that caged things have shorter lives.

  Des wanted so badly to be good, to do good, but our circumstances hadn’t changed, nor were they likely to.

  When we finally tumbled onto the bed, I was almost dizzy from his kisses, and he couldn’t stop laughing. His hands were everywhere, and he followed them with his mouth, his laughter tickling my skin. Sex with Des wasn’t intimacy, but it was fun. He drove me crazy with his teasing, until I finally rolled us over and pinned him, biting my lip as I sank down onto him. He groaned and rolled his hips, then laughed when a really inappropriate song started playing. When I slapped his stomach, he sat up to kiss me dizzy again, then pushed me onto my back at the foot of the bed.

  Which is when I saw Avery, standing in the doorway and scowling as he jacked himself off.

  I yelped—not proud of that—and Desmond looked up to see what had alarmed me. “Avery! Get out!”

  “I have as much right to her as you do,” Avery growled.

  “Get. Out!”

  There was a small part of me that was about to die laughing. Fortunately, that part was mostly squashed in the general sense of fury and mortification. I thought about reaching for a blanket, but Avery had seen all of me before, and Desmond . . . well, his bits weren’t exactly showing at the moment. I closed my eyes as they argued over my head because I didn’t want to know if Avery still had himself in hand while he fought with his brother.

  And because the laughter was threatening to win.

  Enter the Gardener. Because of course. “Just what the hell is going on? Avery, put that away.”

  I opened my eyes to see Avery fastening his pants and the Gardener trying to button his shirt. Oh, look, the whole family except for Eleanor. Swearing under his breath, Desmond pulled away from me and handed me my dress before reaching for his pants.

  Sometimes it’s the little things.

  “Would you care to explain why your argument is carrying over the entire Garden?” the Gardener demanded, his voice low and dangerous.

  The brothers started talking over each other but their father cut them off with a sharp gesture.

  “Maya?”

  “Des and I were having sex, and Avery decided to invite himself to the party. He was standing in the door and jacking it.”

  After a wince at my crudeness, the Gardener stared at his firstborn, the anger slowly joined by an appalled horror. “What were you thinking?”

  “Why does he get to have her? He’s never helped you bring anyone in, he’s never gone out with you to find them, but you give her to him like a fucking bride and I’m not even allowed to touch her?”

  It took a minute for the Gardener to find his voice. “Maya, would you please excuse us?”

  “Of course,” I answered politely. Because Courtesy is as much a bitch as Disdain. “Would you like me to leave?”

  “Not at all, this is your room. Desmond, join us, please. Avery. Come.”

  I stayed on the bed until I couldn’t hear their footsteps anymore, then pulled on my dress and raced down the hall to Bliss’s room. She sat on her floor with a stack of clay beside her and what looked like a teddy bear massacre on cookie sheets in front of her.

  “What was the fuss?”

  I sprawled on her bed as I told her, and she giggled herself into near hysterics.

  “How long do you think until he bans Avery completely?”

  “I don’t know if he would ever do that,” I said regretfully. “Avery is hard enough to control when he’s here; how much harder must it be out there?”

  “We’ll never find out.”

  “That’s true.”

  She handed me a ball of clay to knead. “Can I ask you something personal?”

  “Personal like how?”

  “Do you love him?”

  I almost asked which him—especially since we’d just been talking about Avery—but I realized what she meant half a second before I could make myself look like an idiot. I glanced up at the winking red light of the camera and slid off the bed so we were huddled together. “No.”

  “Then why are you doing all this?”

  “Do you believe a Butterfly escaped?”

  “No. Maybe. Sort of? Wait . . . well, fuck. Suddenly the world makes sense again. Think it’ll work?”

  “I don’t know,” I sighed, kneading the ball of clay. “He’s horrified of being his father’s son, but he’s also . . . proud? For the first time in his life, it’s easy for him to see that his
father is proud of him. That still means more to him than I do, and he’s too scared to think of right and wrong.”

  “If there’d never been a Garden, if you’d met him at the library or something, do you think you’d love him?”

  “Honestly? I don’t think I know what that kind of love is. I’ve seen it in a few others, but for myself? Maybe I’m just not capable of it.”

  “I can’t decide if that’s sad or safe.”

  “I can’t think of any reason it can’t be both.”

  The couple across the street loved each other almost to distraction, and the arrival of their baby somehow made them more complete, rather than detracting from what they had between them. Rebekah, the lead hostess at the Evening Star, deeply loved her husband—who happened to be Guilian’s nephew—and sometimes seeing them together was so sweet we all melted a little.

  Even as we teased them, of course.

  Taki and Karen had it, their daughter and her wife had it.

  But each time I saw it, I knew I was in the presence of something extraordinary, something that not everyone found or was capable of recognizing and sustaining.

  And I’m the first person to admit that I am one fucked-up individual.

  “That’s fair. And honest.” She took the clay from me and handed me another, this one a bright fuchsia that left colored streaks all over my skin. “We never really thank you.”

  “What?”

  “You take care of us,” she said quietly, her brilliant blue eyes locked on the teddy bear forming in her hands. “It’s not like you’re maternal or anything, because really, fuck that, but you give the tough love and you listen and there’s that interference you run with the Gardener in that private room of his.”

  “That’s not something we need to talk about.”

  “All right. Give me the clay and go wash your hands.”

  Bemusedly, I did as she said, scrubbing the fuchsia streaks from my skin. She handed me a turquoise ball of clay. This time when I sat down beside her, I actually looked at all the pieces. Half the scattered teddy bear parts—heads, paws, and tails—were black, the other half white. Some of them had actually been assembled with uniforms, the black in shades of red and the white in shades of blue. Half of each color were slightly larger and their uniforms more ornate, and several of them seemed to be paired. “Are you making a chess set?”

  “Nazira’s twentieth birthday is in a couple of weeks.”

  And my eighteenth birthday was a few weeks after that, but birthdays weren’t generally celebrated in the Garden. It felt a little too much like mockery, like we were celebrating how much closer we were to death. Other people got to look at a birthday and say, “Yay! One year older!” We met our birthdays with “Fuck. One year less.”

  “It’s not a birthday gift,” she continued sourly. “It’s an ‘I’m sorry your life sucks so fucking much’ gift.”

  “Good gift.”

  “And shitty timing,” she agreed. She rolled a tiny ball of gold clay into a rope, pinched it in half, twirled it together, and the red king got a shoulder braid for his uniform. “Do you hate him just a little too?”

  “More than a little.”

  “He would be going against his family.”

  “Whereas now he’s just going against common decency and the law,” I sighed. I held out the softened clay and she handed me a ball of royal blue. I knew better than to ask to make one of the bears—my clay creations sucked. “Bliss, I guarantee you there isn’t a side of this I haven’t turned over in my head. It stopped making sense a long time ago, if it ever did.”

  “So just go with it and see what happens.”

  “Pretty much.”

  “He’s coming.”

  Footsteps sounded down the hall, growing louder, and a moment later Desmond walked in and dropped to the floor beside me, handing each of us an orange. “Is that a chess set?”

  Bliss rolled her eyes and didn’t answer, so while she made teddy bear soldiers, I kneaded the clay and Desmond played with his iPod and travel speaker to continue the concert.

  And that orange? First and only time I ever got the peel off in a perfect spiral.

  Eddison finally returns holding two bags, one containing bottles of soda and water, the other with what proves to be meatball subs. When he gives one to the girl, he also pulls a small plastic bag from his pocket and sets it on the table before her.

  She picks up the bag, then stares at the contents. “My little blue dragon!”

  “I talked to the scene techs; they said your room was protected by the cliff.” He sits down across from her, busying himself with unwrapping his sub. Out of courtesy, Victor pretends not to see his blush. “They’ll box everything up for you once it’s released, but they went ahead and gave me that one to pass on.”

  She opens the bag and cradles the small clay creature in her hands, one thumb rubbing over the tiny, pajama-clad teddy bear tucked into the crook of its arm. “Thank you,” she whispers.

  “You’ve been more forthcoming. Somewhat.”

  She smiles.

  “Vic, the scene techs are looking through the house. They’ll let us know if they find the pictures.”

  For a time, conversation stops as they eat, though the girl has to wrap her tender hands in napkins to hold the hot sandwich. When the meal is done and the debris thrown away, she picks up the sad little dragon and curls her hands around it.

  Victor decides it’s his turn to be brave. “What happened to Avery?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Did his father punish him?”

  “No, they just had a long talk about respecting each other’s privacy, and that the Butterflies were not possessions to be passed around but individuals to be cherished. To hear Des tell it, there was also a pretty sharp reminder that Avery wasn’t allowed to touch me anyway, given the whole branding thing. Well, ‘given the prior incident,’ and Des had never asked about the scar on my hip. If you don’t ask, you can keep your head buried in the sand.”

  “So things went back to normal.”

  “Such as it was.”

  “But something had to change.”

  “Something did. Its name was Keely.”

  Or, more properly, its name was Avery, and its victim was Keely.

  I saw a lot less of Desmond once the semester started. It was his senior year and he was carrying a full course load, but he came in the evenings and brought his textbooks so he could study, and just like I’d helped Whitney, Amber, and Noémie study once upon a time in the apartment, I helped him. Without booze. Bliss helped too, by making fun of him whenever he got something wrong.

  Or even just not completely right.

  Bliss seized on any opportunity to make fun of him, really.

  Avery’s mood went from foul to worse as he watched his brother be such a part of the Garden. Like I said, most of the Butterflies liked Desmond. He didn’t ask anything of them. Well, he asked them questions, and left it to them whether or not to answer.

  He asked their names sometimes, but it had somehow become a tradition in the Garden that you only gave your name as your goodbye. But we told him that Simone had once been Rachel Young, that Lyonette had been Cassidy Lawrence. Any of the ones we knew who couldn’t be hurt by the reminder.

  Desmond wasn’t a threat to them.

  Avery, on the other hand, savaged Zara so badly during sex that his father banned him for a full month, then had to drug him to avoid the hissy fit that tried to follow. Zara could barely walk after that, and every part of her was bruised. Someone stayed with her at all times just to help her with basic functions like showering, getting to the toilet, and eating.

  Lorraine was a competent enough nurse—if hardly a compassionate one—but she wasn’t a miracle worker.

  Infection set into Zara’s hip, and it was either take her to a hospital or put her in glass.

  I think you can safely guess which one the Gardener chose.

  For the first time, he told us that morning, so
we could have a full day with her to make our goodbyes.

  I gave him a sideways look when he told me that, which was met with a lopsided smile and a kiss to the temple. “Even when it’s just a swift embrace and a stolen whisper, you share things with each other in those moments. If it can provide Zara—and the rest of you—any comfort, I’d like to see that you get it.”

  I said thank you because he seemed to expect it, but part of me wondered if it was better to just have it happen all at once, rather than dragging it out over the day.

  Before he left for class, Desmond brought us a wheelbarrow so we could maneuver Zara through the Garden. He smiled when he brought it, smiled as he kissed my cheek and left for school, and Bliss swore so fluently that Tereza blushed.

  “He doesn’t know, does he?” she panted when she could speak a language other than Obscenity. “He really has no clue.”

  “He knows Zara is ill; he thinks he’s doing something nice.”

  “That—that . . .”

  Some things don’t need a translator.

  That afternoon, while the Gardener walked with his wife in that other greenhouse that was so much closer than it seemed, Zara pushed herself up to sitting on her bed, sweat matting her fiery orange hair. “Maya? Bliss? Can you wheel me around for a bit?”

  We folded a blanket into the wheelbarrow and arranged a few pillows under and around her, stabilizing her hip as much as possible. It wasn’t her only broken bone, but it was decidedly the most painful. “Just in a lap through the hallway,” she instructed.

  “Looking for real estate?” Bliss asked, and Zara nodded.

  It was something you couldn’t help but wonder about. When you died, which case would you be in? I was pretty sure I knew which one the Gardener had picked out for me; it was right beside Lyonette, and positioned in such a way that you could see it from the cave. Bliss thought she’d be on my other side, just the three of us, hanging out forever in the fucking wall for future generations of Butterflies to wonder about and fear.