The Butterfly Garden

by Dot Hutchison

  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?”

  “Of cash. Gran only sort of trusted banks, so any time she got a check, she cashed it and hid half of it up the German shepherd’s ass. The tail was on a hinge, so you could reach under and pull out the money.” She takes a sip, then purses her lips and presses them against the mouth of the bottle, letting the water soak against the chapped cracks. “There was almost ten grand in there,” she continues when she pulls the bottle away. “I hid it away in my suitcase and duffel, spent the night at the house, and in the morning I woke up and walked down to the bus station rather than school, and bought a ticket to New York.”

  “You spent the night in the house with your dead grandmother.”

  “She wasn’t stuffed yet, but otherwise what was the difference than any other night?”

  He’s grateful for the static in his ear. “We ordered food for the three of you,” Yvonne reports from the observation room. “Couple more minutes on it. And Ramirez called. A few of the girls have started talking. Not much yet; they seem more concerned with the dead ones than themselves. Senator Kingsley is on her way from Massachusetts.”

  Well, it started out as good news. It’s probably too much to hope that the senator will be forced to make an early landing somewhere due to bad weather.

  Victor shakes his head and leans back in his chair. The senator isn’t here yet; they’ll deal with her once she is. “We’re going to take a break soon so we can all eat, but one more quest
ion before that.”

  “Only one?”

  “Tell us about how you came to the Garden.”

  “That isn’t a question.”

  Eddison slaps his thigh impatiently, but it’s still Victor who speaks. “How did you come to the Garden?”

  “I was kidnapped.”

  Three teenage daughters and he can practically hear the unspoken “duh” at the end of it. “Inara.”

  “You’re really good at that.”

  “Please.”

  She sighs and brings her feet up onto the edge of the chair, wrapping her bandaged hands around her ankles.

  Evening Star was a pretty nice restaurant. Reservation only, unless it was a slow night, but the prices were high enough that most people wouldn’t just walk off the street for a meal. On normal nights, the waiters wore tuxedos and the waitresses black strapless gowns with stand-alone collars and cuffs like the tuxes. We even had black bow ties that were a bitch and a half to get right—we weren’t allowed clip-ons.

  Guilian knew how to cater to the stupidly rich, though, so you could actually rent out the entire restaurant for special occasions and put the waitstaff in costumes. There were a few basic rules—he drew the line at indecency—but within a fairly broad range of options, you could provide the costumes and we would wear them for the event, and then got to keep them. He always gave us warnings about the costumes so we could trade shifts if we didn’t think we could deal with it.

  Two weeks before my sixteenth birthday—or as far as the girls knew, my twenty-first—the restaurant got rented out by someone doing a fundraiser for one of the theatres. Their first show was going to be a production of Madame Butterfly, so we were dressed accordingly. Only girls were allowed to work this one, by request of the client, and we were all given black dresses that came high around a pair of huge wire and silk wings that stayed on with spirit gum and latex—fuck, what a process that was—and we all had to wear our hair completely up.

  We all agreed it was better than the shepherdess fetish costumes or the Civil War–themed wedding rehearsal dinner that stuck us all with hoopskirts that we’d finally converted to Christmas light chandeliers when we got sick of them taking up an entire corner of the apartment. Even if it meant getting to work hours early so we could put the damn wings on, the rest of it wasn’t that bad, and we could all use the dresses again. Trying to wait tables with large wings behind you was a clusterfuck, though, and by the time the main course had been served, and we could retreat to the kitchen during the fundraising presentation, most of us didn’t know whether to swear or laugh. A number of us were doing both.

  Rebekah, our lead hostess, sighed and sank down on a stool, propping her feet up on a sideways crate. Her pregnancy had finally made high heels impossible, and had also spared her from having to bear the indignity of wings. “This thing needs to come out of me now,” she groaned.

  I squeezed behind the stool as best I could with the wings and started massaging her tight shoulders and back.

  Hope peeked out through a gap in the swinging doorway. “Anyone else think the guy in charge is totally fuckable for an old man?”

  “He’s not that old, and watch your mouth,” Whitney retorted. There were certain words Guilian preferred we didn’t use at work, even in the kitchens, and fuck was one of them.

  “Well, his son looks older than me, so he is an old man.”

  “Then ogle the son.”

  “No, thanks. He’s hot, but there’s something wrong with him.”

  “He isn’t looking at you?”

  “He’s looking a lot, at a bunch of us. He’s just wrong. I’d rather eye-fuck the old man.”

  We stayed in the kitchen, chatting and making up gossip about the guests, until the presentation’s intermission, when we circulated with refills and bottles of wine and dessert trays. At the host’s table, I got a good look at Hope’s old man and his son. Right away I knew what she meant about the son. He was handsome, well-muscled and good-featured, with dark brown eyes and his father’s dark blond hair, which looked good against his tanned skin.

  Even if the tan looked a little fake.

  It was something deeper than that, though, a cruelty that showed through in his otherwise charming smile, the way he watched all of us as we moved through the room. Next to him, his father was simply charming, with an easy smile that thanked us all wordlessly for our efforts. He stopped me with two fingers against my wrist, not too familiar, not threatening. “That’s a lovely tattoo, my dear.”

  I glanced down to the slit in my skirt. All of us in the apartment, even Kathryn, had gone out together and gotten matching tattoos a few months before, something we still found absurd and couldn’t quite figure out why we’d done it, except that most of us had been a bit tipsy and Hope nagged us until we gave in. It was on the outside of my right ankle, just above the bone, and it was an elegant thing of sweeping black lines. Hope had picked it out. Sophia, the other sober one, argued against the butterfly, because it was overdone and so damn typical, but Hope didn’t budge. She was a freaking honey badger when she wanted to be; she called it a tribal butterfly. Normally we had to keep tattoos covered up with clothing or make-up for work, but because of the event theme, Guilian had said we could leave them uncovered.

  “Thank you.” I poured the sparkling wine into his glass.

  “Are you fond of butterflies?”

  Not particularly, but that didn’t seem a bright thing to mention given the theme of his party. “They’re beautiful.”

  “Yes, but like most beautiful creatures, very short-lived.” His pale green eyes traveled from the tattoo on my ankle up my body until he could smile into my eyes. “It is not just your tattoo that’s lovely.”

  I made a note to tell Hope that the old man was as creepy as his son. “Thank you, sir.”

  “You seem young to be working in a restaurant like this.”

  One thing no one had ever said to me was that I seemed too young for something. I stared at him a moment too long, saw some kind of satisfaction flicker in his pale eyes. “Some of us are older than our years,” I said finally, and promptly cursed myself. The last thing I needed was a wealthy customer convincing Guilian I was lying about my age.

  He didn’t say anything when I moved on to the next glass, but I felt his eyes on me all the way back to the kitchen.

  During the second half of the presentation, I snuck back to the locker room to dig a tampon out of my purse, but when I turned to leave for the bathroom, the son was standing in the doorway. He was maybe in his mid-twenties, but alone in a small room with him, he definitely gave off a more experienced vibe of menace. I didn’t generally credit Hope with being too perceptive, but she was right, there was something really wrong with this guy.

  “I’m sorry, but this is a staff-only area.”

  He ignored me, still blocking the doorway as one hand reached out to flick the edge of one of the wings. “My father has exquisite taste, don’t you think?”

  “Sir, you need to leave. This is not a customer area.”

  “I know you’re supposed to say that.”

  “And I say it too.” Kegs, one of the busboys, shouldered him roughly out of the way. “I know the owner would be sorry to make you leave the restaurant, but he’ll do it without regret if you don’t rejoin your party.”

  The stranger looked him over, but Kegs was tall and burly and perfectly capable of slinging people around like beer kegs, hence the name. With a scowl, the stranger nodded and stalked away.

  Kegs watched him until he turned the corner into the main dining room. “You okay, lovely?”

  “I am, thanks.”

  We called him “our” busboy, mainly because Guilian always assigned him to our sections and he considered us his girls. Whether he was working that night or not, Kegs always walked the closing girls to the subway and saw us safely onto the train. He was the one person who inexplicably ignored Guilian’s rules about tattoos and piercings. True, he was a busboy, not a waiter, so he w
asn’t interacting with the customers, but he was still visible. Guilian never commented on the gauged ears, the pierced eyebrow, lip, and tongue, or the heavy black tribal tattoos that marched all the way down both arms and nearly glowed through his white dress shirt. They peeked out from the cuffs onto the backs of his hands and up on the back of his neck when it wasn’t obscured by his long hair. Sometimes he knotted the hair up and you could see the tattoos climb onto the shaved lower half of his skull.

  He kissed my cheek and walked me to the bathroom, standing outside while I took care of things, and then walked me back to the kitchen. “Be careful around the host’s son,” he announced to all the girls.

  “I told you,” giggled Hope.

  That night Kegs escorted us all the way to the apartment. The next day, Guilian listened to what had happened with a concerned frown, then told us not to worry too much about it, because the clients had returned to Maryland. Or so we thought.

  A couple of weeks later, when Noémie and I left the library one afternoon and bumped into two of her classmates, I waved her on with them and told her I could get the rest of the way home by myself.

  I managed three blocks before something stabbed me, and before I could even cry out, my legs fell out from under me, and the world turned black.

  “In the afternoon on the streets of New York?” Eddison asks skeptically.

  “Like I said, most people in New York don’t ask too many questions, and both father and son can be very charming when they want to be. I’m sure they said something that made sense to the people around us.”

  “And you woke up in the Garden?”

  “Yes.”

  The door opens to show the female tech analyst with her hip still on the handle, her hands full of drinks and food sacks. She nearly drops them on the table, thanking Victor as he helps her steady the cardboard drink caddy.