The Butterfly Garden (20 page)

He doesn’t want to know. He really, truly doesn’t want to know, and he can see that same wish mirrored in Eddison.

But they have to know.

“The hospital didn’t say anything.”

“You all dragged me here before the hospital could do the rape kit they’d intended.”

He takes a deep, shaky breath and lets it out on almost a whistle. “Inara.”

Without a word, she stands and folds the sweater and tank tops halfway up her stomach, exposing other burns, cuts, and the bottom edge of a line of stitches on her side. The button on her jeans is already undone, so she tugs down the zipper, then reaches to her left side and hooks a thumb through the denim and her green striped cotton underwear, pulling them down just enough for the agents to see.

The scar tissue is bright pink and thickly ridged along her hip bone. Only the edges of the wings are faded to pale pink and white. She gives them a crooked almost-smile. “They say everything comes in threes.”

Three butterflies for a broken girl: one for personality, one for possession, and one for pettiness.

She fixes her clothing and sits down, pulling a cheese Danish from the box that got forgotten in favor of the homemade cinnamon rolls. “Any chance I could get some water, please?”

There’s a tap from the other side of the glass in answer.

Victor thinks it’s probably Yvonne. Because it’s easier when you have something to do.

The door opens, but it’s a male analyst who sticks his head in, tossing three bottles of water to Eddison before closing the door again. Eddison hands one to Victor, then unscrews the cap on another and puts it in front of Inara. She looks at her damaged hands, at the ridges on the plastic cap, and nods, taking a long drink.

Victor reaches for the picture of the boy and lays it prominently on the table. “Tell us about Desmond and the Garden, Inara.”

She presses the heels of her hands against her eyes. For a moment, the spread of pinks, reds, and purples across her face looks like a mask.

Almost like a butterfly.

Victor shudders, but he reaches across the table to gently pull her arms down. He keeps his hands over hers, careful not to put too much pressure on the burns, and waits for her to find the words. After several minutes of silence, she turns her hands under his until she can lightly clasp his wrists, and he returns the grip.

“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?”