The Butterfly Garden (8 page)

Then we did it again, and that time I did.

We spent the next few weeks fooling around, until he met a girl at church he wanted to be serious with, but as easily as we’d become friends with benefits we went back to being friends, without any awkwardness or hurt feelings at all. Neither of us had fallen for the other, neither of us was putting more into it than the other. I loved when he came by the apartment, but not because I expected sex after he started dating his church girl. Topher was just a good guy, someone we all adored.

It did not, however, make me understand my parents’ fascination with sex to the exclusion of all else.

She unscrews the cap and takes a long drink of water, rubbing at her sore throat as she swallows. Victor is grateful for the silence and thinks Eddison must be as well, both men staring at the table. Trauma being what it is, Victor can’t recall a victim interview where sex was such a frank topic.

He clears his throat, turning the photos over so he doesn’t have to see the hallways lined with dead girls in glass and resin. “Your next-door neighbor when you were a child was a pedophile, you said, but when did you see the others?”

“Gran’s lawn guy.” She stops, blinks, and glowers at the bottle of water, and Victor can’t help but think she didn’t mean to say it. Perhaps the exhaustion is setting in with a stronger grip. He files that thought away for now, but he’ll watch for other opportunities.

“You saw your Gran often?”

She sighs and picks at a scab on one of her fingers. “I lived with her,” she answers reluctantly.

“When was this?”

My parents finally got divorced when I was eight. All the questions about money, about the house and cars and all the
things
were taken care of in one meeting. The next eight months were spent with each arguing that the other should be stuck with me.

Isn’t that fantastic? Every kid should be forced to sit through eight months of listening to their parents actively not want them.

Eventually it was decided that I’d be sent to live with Gran, my mother’s mother, and both my parents would pay her child support. When the day came for me to leave, I sat on my front step with three suitcases, two boxes, and a teddy bear, the grand total of everything I owned. Neither of my parents was home.

A year before, we’d gotten new neighbors across the street, a youngish couple who’d just had their first child. I used to love going over to see the baby, a beautiful little boy who wasn’t broken or fucked up yet. With parents like his, maybe he never would be. She’d always give me a plate of cookies and a glass of milk, and he taught me how to play poker and blackjack. They were the ones who took me to the bus station, who helped me buy my ticket with the money my parents had left on my nightstand the day before, the ones who helped me load everything under the bus and introduce me to the driver and help me find a seat. She even gave me a lunch for the trip, complete with oatmeal raisin cookies still warm from the oven. They were another family I wished I could be a part of, but I wasn’t theirs. Still, I waved goodbye to them as the bus pulled away, and they stood together on the curb, their baby held between them, and waved until we couldn’t see each other anymore.

When I got to the city where Gran lived, I had to take a taxi from the bus station to the house. The driver swore all the way there about people who had no business having kids, and when I asked him what some of the words meant, he even taught me how to use them in sentences. My Gran lived in a big, dilapidated house in a neighborhood that was moneyed sixty years ago but quickly went to shit, and when the driver had helped me unload everything onto her tiny front porch, I paid him and told him to have a great fucking day.

He laughed and tugged my braid, told me to take care of myself.

Menopause did strange things to Gran. She was a serial bride—and widow—when she was younger, but That Time convinced her she was dried up and halfway into the grave, so she holed up in her house and started filling all the rooms and halls with dead things.

No, seriously,
with dead things
. Even the taxidermists thought she was creepy, and you have to be really fucking bad to win that award. She had things she’d purchased premade, like wild game or exotics, things like bears and mountain lions that weren’t something you saw in a city. She had birds and armadillos, and my personal most hated, the collection of neighborhood cats and dogs that had been killed in various ways over the years that she’d taken in to be stuffed. They were everywhere, even in the bathrooms and kitchen, and they filled every single room.

When I walked in, dragging my things behind me into the entryway, she was nowhere to be seen. I heard her, though. “If you’re a rapist, I’m all dried up, don’t waste your time! If you’re a thief, I have nothing worth stealing, and if you’re a murderer, shame on you!”

I followed the sound of her voice and finally found her in a small family room with narrow walkways between all the stacks of stuffed animals. She was in an easy chair wearing a full-body tiger-print unitard and a dark brown fur coat, chain-smoking as she watched
The Price Is Right
on a seven-inch television whose picture wavered and frequently fell to discoloration.

She didn’t even look at me until the commercials. “Oh, you’re here. Upstairs, third door on the right. Be a good girl and bring me the bottle of whiskey on the counter before you go.”

I got it for her—why not—and watched in amazement as she poured the entire bottle into small dishes and bowls in front of the dead cats and dogs lined up on a couch that would have been hideous under the best of circumstances.

“Drink up, my beauties, being dead is no treat, you’ve earned it.”

Whiskey fumes quickly filled the room, joining with the musty scent of fur and stale cigarettes.

Upstairs, third door on the right led into a room full of so many dead animals they tumbled out when I opened the door. I spent the rest of that day and all that night hauling them out and finding places to stick them so I could bring up my things. I slept curled up on top of the biggest suitcase because the sheets were so gross. I spent the next day cleaning the room top to bottom, beating the dust and mouse droppings—and mouse corpses—out of the mattress, and putting my own sheets from home on the bed. When I had everything arranged as close to home as I could manage, I went back downstairs.

The only indication Gran had moved was her unitard, now a bright, shiny purple.

I waited until the commercials and then cleared my throat. “I’ve cleaned out the room,” I told her. “If you put any more dead things in there while I’m living here, I’ll burn the house down.”

She laughed and slapped me. “Good girl. I like your gumption.”

And that was moving in with my Gran.

The setting changed, but life didn’t. She had her groceries delivered once a week by a nervous-looking boy who got a tip almost as big as the grocery bill purely because that was the only way he’d come to our neighborhood. It was pretty simple to call the grocery store and have new things added to the staples. I was enrolled in a school that taught absolutely nothing, where the teachers wouldn’t even take attendance because they didn’t want truancy to stick them with these kids for another year. There were supposed to be some really good teachers in the school, but they were few and far between and I never got any of them. The rest were burned out and just didn’t care anymore as long as they got a paycheck.

The students certainly encouraged that. Drug deals went down right there in the classrooms, even in the elementary school, on behalf of older siblings. When I went up into the middle school, there were metal detectors on every outer door but no one gave a shit or investigated when they went off, which was frequently. No one noticed if you weren’t in class, no one called home to check up on students who’d been gone for several days in a row.

I tested that once, stayed home for a full week. I didn’t even get makeup work when I went back. I only returned because I was bored. Sad, really. I left everyone else alone so they left me alone too. I didn’t leave the house after dark, and every night I fell asleep to a lullaby of gunshots and sirens. And when Gran’s lawn guy came twice a month, I hid under my bed in case he came into the house.

He was probably in his late twenties, maybe a little older, and always wore jeans that were too tight and too low, trying to make the best of a package that even at that age I didn’t think was very impressive. He liked to call me
pretty girlie
, and if he was there when I came home from school, he’d try to touch me and ask me to bring him things. I kicked him once, right in the balls, and he cursed and chased me into the house, but he tripped over the stag in the entryway and Gran ripped him a new one for making too much noise during her soaps.

After that, I hung out at the gas station a few blocks over until I saw his truck drive past.

“And your parents never questioned your well-being?” He knows it’s a stupid question, but it’s already out of his mouth, and he nods even as her mouth twists.

“My parents never came to see me, never called, never sent cards or gifts or anything. Mom sent checks for the first three months, Dad for the first five, but then those stopped too. I never saw my parents or heard from them again after I went to Gran’s. I honestly don’t even know if they’re still alive.”

They’ve been at this all day, the birthday cake the first thing he’d had since last night’s dinner. He can feel his stomach complaining, knows she must be at least as hungry. It’s been almost twenty-four hours since the FBI arrived at the Garden. They’ve both been awake longer than that.

“Inara, I’m willing to let you tell things in your own way, but I need you to give me a straightforward answer to one question: should we have child services in here?”

“No,” she says immediately. “And that’s the truth.”

“How close is that truth to a lie?”

It’s actually a smile this time, crooked and wry, but even so small a smile as that softens her entire face. “I turned eighteen yesterday. Happy birthday to me.”

“You were
fourteen
when you got to New York?” Eddison demands.

“Yep.”

“What the hell?”

“Gran died.” She shrugs, reaching for the water bottle. “I came home from school and she was dead in the chair with burns on her fingers where the cigarette burned all the way down. I’m kind of amazed the whole damn place wasn’t on fire from the whiskey fumes. I think her heart gave out or something.”

“Did you report it?”

“No. The lawn guy or the grocery boy would find her when they went to get paid, and I didn’t want anyone arguing about what to do with me. Maybe they would have tracked down one of my parents and I’d be forced to go with them, or they’d just dump me into the system. Or maybe they would have tracked down one of those uncles or aunts on my dad’s side and shoved me off onto yet another relative who didn’t want me. I didn’t like those options.”

“So what did you do?”

“I packed a suitcase and a duffel, then raided Gran’s stash.”

Victor’s not sure if he’s going to regret the answer, but he has to ask. “Stash?”