The Butterfly Garden (24 page)

“I’m sure they’ll all adjust to his being here.”

“And you, Maya? What do you think of my younger son?”

I almost looked toward the kitchen, but if he didn’t want his father to know he was there, I wouldn’t give him away. “I think he’s confused. He doesn’t really know what to make of all this.” I took a deep breath, gave myself a moment to convince myself that the next question was for Desmond’s sake, to give him another view into the reality of the Garden. “Why the displays?”

“What do you mean?”

“After keeping us, why do you keep us?”

He didn’t answer for a time, his fingers tracing nonsense symbols on my skin. “My father collected butterflies,” he said eventually. “He went hunting for them, and if he couldn’t capture them in good condition he paid others for them, and he pinned them into their display cases while they were still alive. Every one of them had a black velvet background, a little bronze plaque giving its common and proper names, creating a veritable museum of shadowboxes on his office walls. Sometimes he’d hang my mother’s embroidery between the cases. Sometimes they were single butterflies, sometimes entire bouquets, picked out in beautiful colors on the cloth.”

His hand left my thigh and traveled up my back, tracing the wings. He didn’t even have to look at them to know their shapes. “He was happiest in that room, and once he retired he spent almost every day in there. But there was a small electrical fire in that section of the house, and all the butterflies were ruined. Every single one, the collection he’d spent decades acquiring and working on. He was never quite the same after that, and died not long after. I suppose he felt as though his entire life had been burned away in that fire.

“The day after his funeral, Mother and I had to attend an Independence Day fair in town. They were presenting Mother with an award for her charity work and she didn’t want to disappoint anyone by not attending. I left her in the company of sympathetic friends and wandered through the small fair, and then I saw her: a girl, wearing a butterfly mask made of feathers and passing out little feather and silk rose petal butterflies to the children who came through the silk maze. She was so vibrant and bright, so very alive, it was hard to believe that butterflies could ever die.

“When I smiled at her and went into the maze, she followed me in. It wasn’t hard to get her home from there. I kept her in the basement at first, until I could build the garden to be a proper home. I was in school and I’d just taken over my father’s business, and before too long I was married, so I think she was very lonely, even once I moved her into the garden, so I brought in Lorraine for her, and others, to be her friends.” He was lost in memory, but for him it wasn’t painful. For him, it only made sense, was only right. Rather than bringing his Eve to a garden, he’d built one around her, and served as the angel with the flaming sword to keep her in. He rearranged me on his lap, tugging me against his chest until he could lay my head between his neck and shoulder. “Her death was heartbreaking, and I couldn’t bear to think that brief existence was all she would ever have. I didn’t want to forget her. As long as I could remember her, a part of her would still live. I built the cases, researched ways to preserve her against decay.”

“The resin,” I whispered, and he nodded.

“But first the embalming. My company keeps formaldehyde and formaldehyde resins on hand in the manufacturing division, for clothing if you can believe it. It’s easy to order more than they need and bring the rest here. Replacing the blood with the formaldehyde retards decay, enough for the resin to preserve everything else. Even when you’re gone, Maya, you will not be forgotten.”

The sick thing was, he genuinely meant it to be comforting. Unless an accident happened or I pissed him off, in three and a half years he would run formaldehyde through my veins. I knew just enough to know that he would stay with me the entire time, maybe even brushing my hair and pinning it into its final arrangement, and when all my blood was gone, he’d place me in a glass case and pump it full of clear resin to give me a second life no mere electrical fire could end. He would touch the glass and whisper my name every time he passed, and he would remember me.

And sitting in his lap left no illusions as to how he felt about all of that.

He gently pushed me off his lap, spreading his legs to make me kneel between them, one hand tangling in my hair. “Show me that you won’t forget me, Maya.” He pulled my head closer, his other hand busy at the drawstring of his pants. “Not even then.”

Not even when I was long dead and gone, and the sight of me would still be enough to make him hard.

And I obeyed because I always obeyed, because I still wanted those three and a half years even if it meant this man telling me he loved me. I obeyed when he damn near choked me, and I obeyed when he yanked me back onto his lap, obeyed when he told me to promise I wouldn’t ever forget him.

And this time, instead of writing someone else’s poems and stories against the inside of my skull, I wondered about the boy on the other side of the kitchen counter, listening to it all.

The thing that convinced me my long-ago next-door neighbor was a pedophile was more than the looks he gave me. It was the looks the foster children gave each other, the bruised, sick knowledge they shared between them. All of them knew what was happening, not just to themselves but to each other. None of them would say a word. I saw those bruised looks and I knew it would only be a matter of time before he put his hand up my dress, before he took my hand and put it in his lap and whispered about a present for me.

The Gardener kissed me when he was done and told me to make sure I got some rest. He was still pulling his pants back in place as he walked out of the dining room. I walked back to the other side of the counter, picked up the rest of my orange, and sat down next to Desmond, whose face was wet and shiny with tears. He stared at me with dull eyes.

Bruised eyes.

I ate the rest of the orange in the time it took him to find something to say, and then he didn’t say anything at all, just handed me his sweater. I put it on and when he reached for my hand, I let him take it.

He was never going to go to the police.

We both knew it.

All that the past half hour had changed was that now he hated himself a little for it.

“You haven’t asked who survived.”

“You’re not going to let me go see them until I’ve told you everything you want to know.”

“True.”

“So I’ll find out when we’re done, when I can actually spend time with them. My being there now can’t change anything anyway.”

“Suddenly I can believe you haven’t cried since you were six.”

A faint smile flickers across her face. “Fucking carousel,” she agrees pleasantly.

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 bullshit 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.
”