Most of us wore our hair down under the crowns, simply because for that one night we could.
There was a sharp edge to the laughter as we all prepared. We were doing this for Zara, but the Gardener had made it into a fancy. Even knowing our reason for it, I’m sure he was convinced that it was a measure of how happy we were under his loving care that we wanted to put on an entertainment for him. That man had an astonishing talent for seeing what he wanted to see.
He hadn’t even noticed that Lorraine had bought a wig so she could still seem to have long, well-maintained hair for him to want to play with, the sick bitch.
And he persuaded Desmond to attend.
He was thrown, I think, by his son’s reaction to Zara’s death. Des was his father’s son, but he didn’t have his perspective. Desmond couldn’t see it as anything but murder, yet it didn’t push him into action.
At the end of the first week of silence and absence from his son, the Gardener came to my room before breakfast. “Desmond seems very out of sorts,” he announced as soon as I was marginally awake. “Did you two argue?”
I yawned. “He’s having trouble processing what happened to Zara.”
“But Zara’s fine. She’s out of pain.” He honestly seemed confused.
“When you said you were going to take care of her, he thought you meant take her to a hospital.”
“That would have been foolish; there would have been questions asked.”
“All I’m doing is translating.”
“Yes, of course. Thank you, Maya.”
I’m sure there were a number of father-son conversations in the intervening weeks to which I wasn’t privy, but Desmond showed up for the reading looking like he hadn’t slept for shit. He must have had a presentation in class that day, because he was wearing a dress shirt and tie with his khakis. Granted, the shirt was open at the collar, the tie loose, and the sleeves rolled back, but it was still dressier than usual, and I was somewhat disgusted with myself for the fleeting thought that the sea-foam green shirt looked very good with his eyes.
He had a hard time looking directly at any of us, especially me. I’d told Bliss the gist of our last discussion over a night of making fake chocolate chip cookies with which to trick Lorraine. She’d shrugged and said I was kinder than she would have been.
Seeing as the clay cookies were her idea, I didn’t argue.
The reading started really well. Until Zara’s notes, I’d never paid much attention to the words—once you hear “to be or not to be” mangled by toothpaste, it gets a little hard to care—but this was a really funny play, and we amped it up wherever we could. Bliss played Hermia, and during one of the scenes where we argued, she actually pounced on me from across the stream, startling a belly laugh from the Gardener.
In the middle of one of Marenka’s speeches as Puck, the front door slammed open to frame Avery, a tiny bundle over one shoulder. Marenka stopped and looked to me, her eyes wide within her mask of a White Peacock. I stood and went to her side, watching Avery jog into the Garden. After a moment, the Gardener and Desmond stood beside us.
“I brought us a new one!” Avery announced, his face wreathed in smiles. He shrugged off his burden, letting it drop to the sand. “I found her, I got her. Look, Father! See what I found for us!”
The Gardener was too busy staring at his older son, so I knelt down and twitched aside the wrapped blanket with shaking hands. A few of the girls screamed. Oh fuck oh fuck oh fucking shit.
The girl inside hadn’t even hit puberty yet. Blood crusted one side of her face in streaks from her temple, the fair skin there already starting to bruise, and other bruises, scratches, and impressions could be seen through tears in her clothing as I pulled away the rest of the blanket. More blood soaked her thighs and the fabric around it. Shit, her underwear was covered with pink and purple cursive Saturdays, the kind of thing you just know they don’t make in big girl sizes. A really inappropriate part of my brain noted that it was only Thursday.
She was small, with gangly limbs and the impression of growth, like suddenly she’d shoot up. Pretty, in a preteen kind of way, with a ruined ponytail of almost copper hair, but very, very young. I wrapped the blanket back around her to hide the blood and held her close, utterly speechless.
“Avery,” whispered the shocked Gardener. “What the hell have you done?”
I absolutely did not want to be a part of that conversation. Danelle helped me stand with the girl in my arms, supporting her head. “Bliss, your dress with the back, can we have that?”
She nodded and raced away to her room.
Danelle and I walked quickly to my room, where we stripped the girl, threw her ruined clothing in the laundry chute, and washed her. I had to wash the blood from her thighs and gently squirt more water into her to flush the fluids and bits of torn tissue; Danelle was busy retching into the toilet. She came back, wiping a shaky hand across her mouth. “She doesn’t even have any hair down there yet,” she whispered.
No hair on her crotch or underarms, no breasts, no hips, this was definitely still a child.
Danelle held her up so I could wash her hair. By then Bliss was there with her dress—the only thing that was likely to fit her and keep her fully covered, even if it was a bit loose—so we got her dried off, clothed, and tucked into my bed.
“Now that she’s here, do you think . . .” Not even Bliss could finish that thought.
I shook my head, inspecting the girl’s hand where several nails had torn short. She must have fought. “They’re not touching her.”
“Maya—”
“They’re not touching her.”
A pained bellow ripped through the Garden and we flinched.
But it wasn’t from a female, so we didn’t move.
Other girls fled from the sound, crowding into my room, until I finally had to tell most of them to leave. We had no idea when this child was going to wake up, and she was going to be terrified and in pain and really didn’t need twenty-something people staring at her. Only Danelle and Bliss stayed, Danelle keeping herself behind the girl so her face wouldn’t be seen right away.
Except the bookshelf on my right wall didn’t entirely hide Lyonette.
Bliss tugged the curtain for my toilet as far as it could go, lifting the bottom and tucking it between several of the books to anchor it. If you knew something was there you could still see her hair, the curve of her spine, but not at a casual glance.
And we waited.
Bliss made a quick errand to fetch bottles of water, as well as bullying a few aspirin out of the cowed Lorraine. Aspirin wasn’t going to do much in the long run—it was great against headaches from the drugs, but that wasn’t what she had—but it was something anyway.
Then the Gardener appeared in my doorway. He glanced at the wall and the arrangement of the curtain, then to the girl on the bed, and nodded, reaching into his pocket. He pulled out a small control, and after a minute or so of fiddling with it, the walls came down on either side, leaving the front open. “How is she?”
“Unconscious,” I said shortly. “She’s been raped, she’s been hit very hard in the head, and she’ll have a world of other hurts.”
“Was there anything to show her name? Or where she came from?”
“No.” I gave her hand to Bliss so I could walk across the room, standing right next to the pale, suddenly worn-looking man. “No one touches her.”
“Maya—”
“No, no one touches her. No wings, no sex, nothing. She is a child.”
To my shock, he actually nodded. “I’m giving her to your care.”
Danelle cleared her throat. “Sir? She hasn’t actually woken up yet; couldn’t she be taken somewhere? Left at a hospital or something? She wouldn’t know anything.”
“I can’t trust that she didn’t see Avery,” he said heavily. “She has to stay.”
Danelle bit her lip and looked away, her hands stroking the girl’s hair.
“I think it best if you leave,”
I told him evenly. “We don’t know when she’s going to wake up. It would be best to not have any males present.”
“Of course, yes. You’ll tell me if . . . if she needs anything?”
“She needs her mother and her virginity,” snapped Bliss. “She needs to be safely at home.”
“Bliss.”
She snorted, but fell silent at his warning tone.
“You’ll tell me,” he said again, and I nodded. I didn’t bother to watch him leave.
He wasn’t gone long before Desmond came, that bruised look even stronger in his eyes. “Will she be all right?”
“No,” I said stiffly. “But I think she’ll live.”
“That yell? Father caned Avery.”
“Yes, because that will make her feel so much better,” Bliss snarled. “Go fuck yourself.”
“What did he do to her?”
“What do you think he did to her? Shook her hand?”
“Desmond.” I didn’t continue until he was finally looking at me, meeting my eye. “This is what your brother is, but it’s what all three of you do, so right now you need to not be here. I know you’re all full of self-pity and loathing right now, but I will not have any males around this child. You need to go.”
“I’m not the one who hurt her!”
“Yes, you are,” I snapped. “You could have prevented this! If you had just gone to the police, or let one of us go so we could go to the police, Avery wouldn’t have been free to kidnap her, to savage her, to rape her, to bring her here where it will happen to her again and again and again until she’s dead too young. You allowed this to happen, Desmond, actively allowed it, so yes, you are the one who hurt her. If you’re not going to do anything to help her, you need to get the hell away from her.”
He stared at me, his face pale and shocked. Then he turned and walked away.
How could a child be worth less than a name? How could all our lives be worth less than a reputation?
Bliss looked after him, then reached out to touch my hand. “Do you think he’ll come back?”
“I don’t care.”
It was even mostly true. I was tired in a way that went deeper than my bones. I simply did not have the energy to think about Desmond’s continued uselessness.
The girl finally regained consciousness around two in the morning, groaning as she started to feel all the various aches and pains. I sat on the bed and gave her hand a gentle squeeze. “Keep your eyes closed,” I said softly, pitching my voice low and comforting as Lyonette had taught me. I’d pretty much never done it before, but this girl needed me to be softer to her, fiercer for her. Sophia, I thought, would have recognized that distinction. “I’m going to put a damp cloth over your face to help take away some of that pain.”
Danelle wrung out the washcloth and handed it to me.
“Where—what?”
“We’ll get to that in a bit, I promise. Can you swallow pills?”
She started crying. “Please don’t drug me! I’ll be good, I promise, I won’t fight anymore!”
“It’s aspirin, nothing more. I promise you that. It’s only to help the pain a little.”
She let me sit her up enough to put the pills on her tongue and drink some water. “Who are you?”
“My name is Maya. I was taken by the same people who took you, but I’m not going to let them hurt you anymore. They won’t be able to touch you.”
“I want to go home.”
“I know,” I whispered, adjusting the cloth over her eyes. “I know you do. I’m so sorry.”
“I don’t want to be blind anymore, please let me see!”
I shielded her eyes and slid away the cloth, watching her blink against even that much light. Her eyes were different colors, one blue and one grey, and the blue one had two freckles in the iris. I angled my hand so she could see my face without staring directly into the overhead light. “Better?”
“I hurt,” she whimpered. Tears spilled from the corner of her eyes into her hair.
“I know you do, sweetheart. I know.”
She rolled over and pressed her face into my lap, her skinny arms wrapping around my hips. “I want my mom!”
“I know, sweetheart.” I curled over her, my hair spilling around her like that was any kind of shield, and held her as tightly as I could without causing pain. “I’m sorry.” Sophia’s Jillie would be eleven by now; this girl seemed around the same age, maybe a year older. But thinking of Jillie hurt just then. This child just looked so young and fragile, so broken. I didn’t want to think of bold little Jillie like that.
She cried herself back to sleep, and when she woke again a few hours later, Bliss brought us all fruit. “Lorraine didn’t make breakfast,” she whispered to me and Danelle. “She’s been sitting in the kitchen staring at the wall all night, according to Zulema and Willa.”
I nodded and took one of the bananas, taking my seat next to the child. “Here, you must be hungry.”
“Not really,” she said miserably.
“Part of that is shock, but try to eat anyway. The potassium will help your muscles, help them not be so tight and painful.”
She gave a quivering sigh, but took the banana and bit into it.
“This is Bliss,” I said, pointing to my tiny friend. “And this is Danelle. Can you tell us your name?”
“Keely Rudolph,” she answered. “I live in Sharpsburg, Maryland.”
Forever and a half ago, Guilian had said something about Maryland.
“Keely, do you think you can be brave for me?”
Tears welled up in her eyes again, but God love her, she nodded.
“Keely, this place is called the Garden. There’s a man and his two sons who take us and keep us here. They make sure we have food and clothing, that we have what we need, but they don’t let us go. I am so sorry that you were kidnapped and brought here, but I can’t change that. I can’t promise that you’ll ever see your home or family again.”
She sniffled and I slid my arm around her shoulders, hugging her against my side.
“I know it’s hard. I’m not just saying that, I really do know. But I promise you that I will take care of you. I won’t let them hurt you. Those of us who are kept here form a kind of family. We argue sometimes, and we don’t always like each other, but we’re a family, and family looks out for each other.”
Bliss gave me a crooked smile; even though she didn’t know much, she knew that wasn’t how I’d been raised.
But I’d gotten a taste of that in the apartment, and I’d learned the rest of it here. We were a fucked-up family, but a family nonetheless.
Keely looked at Danelle and shrank against me. “Why does she have a tattoo on her face?” she whispered.
Danelle knelt down in front of the bed, taking both of Keely’s hands in hers. “This is another thing you have to be brave for,” she said gently. “Do you want to hear it now, or do you want to wait for a little bit?”
Biting her lip, the child gave me an uncertain look.
“It’s your choice,” I told her. “Now or later, you can choose. If it makes it easier, I promise that it’s not going to happen to you.”
With a deep, shaky breath, she nodded. “Now then.”
“The man who keeps us? We call him the Gardener,” Danelle said simply. “He likes to think of us as Butterflies in his Garden, and he tattoos wings on our backs because it helps him pretend. When I was first brought here, I thought that if I made him like me more than anyone else, he’d let me go and I could go home. I was wrong, but I didn’t learn that quickly enough, and he did the wings on my face to show others that he thought I was happy with what he did.”
Keely looked up at me again. “You have wings too?”
“On my back, yes.”
Her eyes flicked over to Bliss, who nodded. “But you won’t let him do that to me?”
“I won’t let him touch you at all.”
We took her out into the Garden in the early afternoon, Bliss going ahead of us to warn th
e other girls. Normally most of the others stayed away from the new girl until she was settled. Keely was different. Singly or in pairs, as nonthreateningly as possible, every girl but Sirvat came to say hello, to introduce herself, and, maybe most importantly, to promise that they’d help protect her. I was okay with Sirvat absenting herself from that.
Marenka knelt down and let Keely trace the white, browns, and black of the wings on her face so she wouldn’t be scared anymore. “I’m going to move my things so you’ll be right next to Maya,” she told her. “That way if you get scared or don’t want to be alone, you won’t have to worry about getting lost. You’ll be right next to her.”
“Th-thank you,” she managed.
Lorraine roused herself enough to put together a cold lunch for us, though she was crying the entire time. I wanted to believe that maybe she’d finally realized just what the Gardener was, that she was horrified that a child so young had been taken, that she was mortified over how she’d been mooning and jealous of dead girls. I really wanted to believe that little bit of good of her. I didn’t, though. I didn’t know why she was so shocked and upset, but I didn’t think it was for anyone’s situation but hers. Maybe buying the wig—or, more likely, Bliss not getting in trouble for the attack—finally made her realize that the Gardener was never going to love her again.
We took our lunches up on the cliff, where the sun was warm and the space around us open. Keely still didn’t have much of an appetite, but she ate to humor us. Then she saw Desmond walking up the path and she buried herself against me. Bliss and Danelle moved in close, as well, protecting her from all sides.
Desmond wasn’t the threat, but he was a male. I understood the impulse.
He stopped a safe distance away, kneeling down on the rock and spreading his arms wide. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he said quietly. “I’m not going to touch you, or even come any closer than this.”
I shook my head. “Why are you here?”
“To ask her name and where she came from, so I can do what’s right.”
I started to scoot off the rock, but Keely’s arms tightened around my waist. “It’s okay,” I whispered, hugging her close. “I’m just going to go talk to him. You can stay right here with Bliss and Danelle.”
The Butterfly Garden Page 23