The Butterfly Garden (30 page)

“I didn’t recite Poe that time, in case you were wondering.”

“No, for that I’m sure you were paying full attention,” Victor agrees dryly. “So, were you serious?”

“What, me and Des?”

“Well, yes, but more specifically, what you said about your mother.”

“Actually, yes.”

He ponders that for a moment, tries to make sense of it.

He fails.

“Still want to find out who I am and where I came from?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

He sighs and shakes his head. “Because I can’t put a fake person on the stand.”

“I’m not a fake person; I’m carefully and genuinely handcrafted.”

He shouldn’t laugh. He really shouldn’t laugh but he does and then he can’t stop, and he’s leaning against the table trying to at least muffle the sound. When he finally looks up, she’s smiling at him, a real one this time, and he answers it gratefully.

“The real world intrudes, doesn’t it?” she asks gently, and his laughter fades.

“Keeping me honest?”

“It hurts you to ask, and it hurts you to listen, even when so much of it you’ve heard before. I like you, Special Agent Victor Hanoverian. Your girls are lucky to have you. The story’s almost over anyway. Then it can’t hurt for a little while.”

The end of the summer brought a shift in the Garden. Desmond had spent so much time with us he’d become a fixture, and even though I was the only one he touched, I wasn’t the only one who got to know him. Tereza talked to him more than she talked to me, because music crossed the boundaries of our cage and made her forget, even if just for a while. Even Bliss seemed to like Desmond, though I wouldn’t stake a wager on how much of that was for my sake.

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.”