Until Lyonette.
I’d been in the Garden for six months, and while I’d become friendly with most of the other girls, I was closest to Lyonette and Bliss. They were the most like me, the ones who really didn’t feel up to the high drama of weeping or bemoaning our inevitably tragic fates. We didn’t cower before the Gardener, we didn’t suck up to him like becoming favorites would somehow change our fortunes. We were the ones who put up with what we had to and otherwise did our own thing.
The Gardener adored us.
Except for meals, which were served at specific times, there was never a place we had to be, so most of the girls room-hopped for comfort. If the Gardener wanted you, he’d simply check the cameras and come find you. When Lyonette asked Bliss and me to spend the night in her room, I didn’t think anything of it. It was something we did all the time. I should have recognized the desperation in her voice, the edge to her words, but that was something else the Garden numbed you to. Like beauty, desperation and fear were as common as breathing.
We were provided with clothing for the daytime—always in black, always things that left our backs bare so the wings could be seen—but were given nothing for sleeping. Most of us just slept in our underwear and wished for bras. The hostel and the apartment had been good practice for me; I had far less modesty than most of the other girls had had coming into the Garden, one less humiliation that might break me.
The three of us curled together atop the mattress, waiting for the lights to go out, and gradually we became aware that Lyonette was shaking. Not like a seizure or anything, just a tremor that ran under her skin and electrified every part of her with movement. I sat up, reaching for her hand to lace our fingers together. “What’s wrong?”
Tears gleamed in her gold-flecked eyes, making me suddenly nauseated. I’d never seen Lyonette cry before; she hated tears in anyone, especially herself. “Tomorrow’s my twenty-first birthday,” she whispered.
Bliss squeaked and threw her arms around our friend, burying her face in Lyonette’s shoulder. “Fuck, Lyon, I’m so sorry!”
“We have an expiration date then?” I asked quietly. “Twenty-one?”
Lyonette clutched Bliss and me with desperate strength. “I . . . I can’t decide if I should fight or not. I’m going to die anyway, and I kind of want to make him earn it, but what if fighting makes it more painful? Shit, I feel like such a coward, but if I have to die, I don’t want it to hurt!”
She started sobbing and I wished this was one of the times the solid walls came down around the glass, so we could be trapped in this little space and her weeping wouldn’t be heard by everyone down the hall. Lyonette had a reputation for strength among the girls, and I didn’t want them to think her weak once she was gone. But for the most part, the walls only came down two mornings a week—what we’d taken to calling the weekend, whether it was or not—so the actual gardeners could do maintenance around our beautiful prison. The hired help never saw us, and the multiple sets of closed doors between us and them guaranteed they never heard us either.
No, wait. The walls came down when a new girl was brought in too. Or when one died.
We didn’t like it when the walls came down. Wishing they would was kind of extraordinary.
We stayed with Lyonette the entire night, long after she’d wept herself into an exhausted sleep and had woken only to weep again. Around four, she roused enough to stumble into the shower, and we helped her wash her hair, brushed it out and arranged it in a regal braided crown. There was a new dress in her closet, an amber silk fancy with glimmering gold threads that was bright as a flame against all the black. The color made her wings glow against her light brown skin, brilliant pumpkin-orange flecked with gold and yellow closest to the black spots and the white fringed bands of black on the very tips. The open wings of a Lustrous Copper.
The Gardener came for her just before daylight.
He was an elegant figure of a man, maybe a little above average height, well built. The type of man who always looked at least ten to fifteen years younger than he really was. Dark blond hair, always perfectly in place and well-trimmed, pale green eyes like the sea. He was handsome, that couldn’t be argued, even if my stomach still turned at the sight of him. I’d never seen him dressed all in black before. He stood in the doorway, thumbs hooked in his pockets, and just looked at us.
Taking a deep breath, Lyonette hugged Bliss tightly, whispered something in her ear, before kissing her goodbye. Then she turned to me, her arms painfully tight around my ribs. “My name is Cassidy Lawrence,” she whispered, so quietly I could barely hear it. “Please don’t forget me. Don’t let him be the only one to remember me.” She kissed me, closed her eyes, and allowed the Gardener to lead her away.
Bliss and I spent the rest of the morning in Lyonette’s room going through the small personal items she’d managed to accumulate over the past five years. Five years she’d been there. We took down the privacy curtains, folded them together with the bedding into a neat stack on the edge of the naked mattress. The book she kept under her pillows turned out to be the Bible, with five years of rage and despair and hope scrawled around the verses. There were enough origami animals for all the girls in the Garden and then some, so we spent the afternoon giving them away, along with the black clothing. When we sat down to dinner, there was nothing left of Lyonette in the room.
That night, the walls came down. Bliss and I curled together in my bed, which actually had more bedding than a sewn-on sheet now. Personal touches were things we earned by not being troublesome, by not trying to kill ourselves, so I had sheets and blankets now, the same rich rose and purple as the lower wings on my back. Bliss cried and swore when the walls came down and trapped us in the room. They rose after a few hours, and before they’d come higher than a foot off the floor, she grabbed my hand and squeezed us through so we could search the hallways.
But we only had to go a few feet.
The Gardener stood there, leaning back against the garden-side wall as he studied the girl in the glass. Her head was bowed nearly against her chest, small stirrups under her armpits keeping her upright. Clear resin filled the rest of the space, the gown caught in the liquid like she was underwater. We could see almost every detail of the bright wings on her back, nearly pressed against the glass. Everything that was Lyonette—her fierce smile, her eyes—was hidden away, so the wings were the only focus.
He turned to us and ran a hand through my sleep-tangled hair, gently tugging through the knots he encountered. “You forgot to put your hair up, Maya. I can’t see your wings.”
I started to gather it to twist into a rough knot but he caught my wrist and pulled me after him.
Into my room.
Bliss swore and ran down the hall, but not before I saw her tears.
The Gardener sat on my bed and brushed my hair until it gleamed like silk, running his fingers through it again and again. Then his hands moved elsewhere, and his mouth, and I closed my eyes and silently recited “The Valley of Unrest.”
“Wait, what?” Eddison interrupts, a sickened expression on his face.
She looks away from the picture, giving him a bemused look. “‘The Valley of Unrest,’” she repeats. “It’s a poem by Edgar Allan Poe. ‘They had gone unto the wars, trusting to the mild-eyed stars, nightly, from their azure towers, to keep watch above the flowers’ . . . I like Poe. There’s something refreshing about a man who’s so unabashedly morose.”
“But what—”
“It’s what I did whenever the Gardener came to my room,” she says baldly. “I wasn’t going to fight him, because I didn’t want to die, but I wasn’t going to participate either. So I let him do his thing, and to keep my mind occupied, I recited Poe’s poems.”
“The day he finished your tattoo, was that the first time, uh . . . the first time—”
“I recited Poe?” she finishes for him, one eyebrow arched mockingly. Victor flushes but nods. “No, thank God. I’d gotten curious about sex a few months bef
ore, so Hope loaned me one of her boys. Sort of.”
Eddison makes a choking sound and Victor can’t help but be grateful that his wife has these kinds of discussions with their daughters.
In any other setting, we probably would have called Hope a whore, except that Sophia—who actually had been a prostitute until her daughters were taken away by the cops—was a little sensitive about words like that. Plus, Hope was in it for the fun, not the money. She could have made a fortune, though. Male, female, pairs, trios, or groups, Hope was up for anything.
And there really wasn’t any such thing as privacy in the apartment. Except for the bathroom, it was all one room, after all, and the curtains between the beds weren’t thick enough to conceal much. No canopies, anyway. They certainly didn’t make anything soundproof. Hope and Jessica weren’t the only girls to bring people home, but they did it with the most frequency, sometimes more than once in a day.
Early exposure—no pun intended—to pedophiles had left me mostly uninterested in sex. That, plus my parents. It seemed a horrific business, not one I wanted any part of, but living with the girls gradually changed that. When they weren’t doing it, they were frequently talking about it, and even when they laughed at me, they answered silly questions about it—or in Hope’s case, decided to demonstrate how to masturbate—so eventually curiosity won out over the distaste and I decided to give it a try. Well, I decided to think about giving it a try. I backed away from a lot of opportunities at first because I still wasn’t sure.
Then one afternoon when I didn’t have to go into work in the evening, Hope came home trailing two boys. Jason we worked with, one of the few males on the overwhelmingly female waitstaff, and his friend Topher was a pretty standard fixture in the apartment. They frequently dropped by whether Hope was there or not; we thought they were fun to hang out with. Sometimes they brought food. The three were barely in the door before Hope was busy pulling off Jason’s clothing, and the two of them were completely naked by the time they tumbled laughing through the curtains onto her bed.
Topher at least had the grace to blush and kick the trail of clothing closer to the bed.
I was on one of the couches with a book. One of the first things I did once I had a real address was to get a library card, and I made a couple trips a week. Reading had been an escape when I was younger, and even though I didn’t have anything I particularly needed to escape from anymore, it was still something I loved. When the clothing was more or less contained, Topher poured two glasses of orange juice—social services had swung by a couple of days ago, so the fridge was actually stocked—and handed one of them to me as he flopped next to me on the couch.
“What, not joining them?” I teased, and his blush deepened.
“It’s no mystery that being with Hope is a little like having a time-share, but I don’t share at the same time,” he mumbled, and I snickered. Hope was exactly like a time-share, and proud of it.
Topher was a model, maybe nineteen, who sometimes helped Guilian with the deliveries to make a few extra bucks. He was good-looking in that bland model way—you know, the kind of good-looking that seems really ordinary because it’s shoved in your face all the time? He was a decent guy, though. We talked about the matinee a whole slew of us had gone to see the week before, about a gig he had for a few days as a living dummy for a temporary museum exhibit, about one of our mutual acquaintances getting married, and whether or not it would last, all while Hope and Jason went at it screaming and giggling.
So, pretty much a normal afternoon.
Eventually, though, their fun had to end. “It’s almost four o’clock!” I yelled over the groaning. “You two need to get to work!”
“Okay, I’ll finish him off!”
True to her word, she had Jason grunting in less than thirty seconds, and ten minutes later, they’d both had a quick rinse in the shower and were off to work. Most of the girls were working that night, except for Noémie and Amber, who both had a night class on Wednesdays and wouldn’t be back until almost ten. Topher left for a little while but came back with takeout from Taki’s on the corner.
I knew Hope’s usual invitation to sex was to kiss someone and shove her hand down his or her pants, but I wasn’t Hope.
“Hey, Topher?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you want to teach me about sex?”
I was a different kind of straightforward.
Anyone else probably would have blanched, but Topher was a friend of Hope’s. Plus, he’d been there for some of the conversations. All he did was smile, and I was reassured by the fact that it wasn’t a smirk. “Sure, if you think you’re ready for it.”
“I think so. I mean, we can always stop.”
“Yes, we can. Just tell me if you get uncomfortable, okay?”
“Okay.”
He took the remains of our dinner and shoved them into the overflowing trash can by the door; Hope was supposed to take it out when she left for work. When he came back to the couches, he dropped down onto the cushion and gently pulled me to lean against him. “We’ll start slow,” he said. And he kissed me.
We didn’t actually have sex that night; he called it Everything But. It was comfortable, though, and fun, and we laughed as much as anything, which in itself would have been strange just a year before when I’d first moved in. We kept the clothes on after Noémie and Amber came home from class, but he stayed with me that night in my narrow bed and we played more under the sheets until Noémie—in the next bed over—laughed and said if we didn’t shut up she was going to join us. It was a few days later that we had the privacy to go all the way, and the first time, I didn’t really understand what the big deal was.
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.
The Butterfly Garden Page 5
