The Butterfly Garden

by Dot Hutchison

  The real world had not the Gardener, but the man non-Butterflies knew him to be, a man who was involved with arts and philanthropy, and some kind of business venture—or rather, many kinds of business ventures, from what he sometimes hinted. That man had a house somewhere on the property, not visible even from the trees. That man had a wife and family.

  Well, he had Avery, and clearly the asshole had to come from somewhere, but still.

  There was a wife.

  And she and the Gardener walked through that outer greenhouse together almost every afternoon from two to three, her hand tucked through his elbow for support. She was slender almost to the point of sickliness, with dark hair and impeccable style. From so far away, that was all I could see. They’d walk slowly down the leg of the square, stopping from time to time to inspect a flower or plant more closely, and then slowly walk on until they passed from my limited range of sight. They’d be back once or twice more before their walk was done.

  She was the one who determined their pace, and whenever she lagged, he turned to her solicitously. It was the same tenderness he showed to his Butterflies, soft and sincere in a way that sent spiders crawling under my skin.

  It was the same tenderness with which he touched the glass of the display cases, with which he wept over Evita. It was in the way his hands trembled when he saw what Avery had done to me.

  It was love, as he knew it.

  Two or three times a week, Avery accompanied them, trailing along behind and rarely staying for the full hour. He usually did a single revolution and then walked into the Garden, where he looked for someone who was sweet and innocent and so easily gave him the fear he craved.

  And twice a week, on consecutive days that were the same as our maintenance mornings, there was a younger son, with his mother’s dark hair and slim build. As with his mother, the detail was lost to distance, but it was clear she doted on him. When he joined them, she moved between her husband and younger son.

  For months, I watched them unobserved, until one day, the Gardener looked up.

  Right at me.

  I kept my cheek pressed against the glass, curled within the leaves high in my tree, and didn’t move.

  It was another three days before we spoke of it, and even then only over the bed of a stranger, not even a Butterfly.

  Victor takes a deep breath, pushing away that bizarre image of normalcy. Most of the sickos he arrests seem normal on the surface. “He’d kidnapped another girl?”

  “He took several a year, but never until the previous one was fully marked and more or less settled in.”

  “Why?”

  “Why he took several a year? Or why he waited between them?”

  “Yes,” Victor tells her, and she smirks.

  “For the first—attrition. He never took more than the Garden could support, so generally he only went shopping when one of the Butterflies died. That wasn’t always the case, but usually. For the second . . .” She shrugs and presses her palms flat against the table, studying the stippling of burned tissue across the backs. “A new girl was a stressful time in the Garden. Everyone got on edge, remembering their own kidnapping and how it was when they woke up the first time, and then the inevitable tears just made it all worse. Once a new girl settled, things were quiet for a while, until the next death, the next wings on display, the next new girl. The Gardener was always—mostly—exquisitely sensitive to the prevailing mood in the Garden.”

  “Is that why he allowed Lyonette to act as a guide?”

  “Because it helped, yes.”

  “Then how did you end up doing it?”

  “Because someone had to, and Bliss was too angry, the rest too skittish.”

  It wasn’t the girl after me but the next one that I first helped with, because Avery had brought the flu into the Garden and it was cutting a hell of a swath through the girls.

  Lyonette was a train wreck. She was pale and sweating, her tawny hair plastered to her neck and face, and the toilet bowl was a much truer friend than I could ever be. Bliss and I told her to stay in bed, to let the Gardener deal with his own mess for once, but as soon as the walls lifted to let us out of our rooms, she pulled on clothes and staggered out into the hallway.

  Swearing, I tied on a dress and jogged after her until I could loop one of her arms around my shoulders. She was so dizzy she couldn’t walk without keeping a hand to the wall. She didn’t flinch away from the display cases like she usually did even after almost five years. “Why does it have to be you?”

  “Because it has to be someone,” she whispered, and stopped to swallow back her need to vomit. Again. Even though she’d been kneeling in front of the toilet for most of the past eighteen hours.

  I didn’t agree, not at that point.

  Maybe not ever.

  The Gardener was very, very good at guessing ages, better than any carnival whack I’d ever heard of. A few girls came in at seventeen, but most were sixteen. He wouldn’t kidnap younger—and if he thought there was a chance of fifteen or less, he said he chose someone else—but he tried not to go any older. I guess he wanted the full five years whenever possible.

  The things that man felt comfortable talking about with his captives . . . or maybe just with me.

  The new girl was in a room that was every bit as naked as the one I’d woken up in. Mine was slowly starting to accumulate personal touches, but for now she had a plain grey fitted sheet and nothing else. Her skin tone was dark and, combined with the cast of her features, suggested mixed race: Mexican and African, I’d find out later. She wasn’t much taller than Bliss, and except for a rather astonishing set of tits that looked like they’d been a quinceañera gift, she was reed-slender. Small holes marched all the way up one ear and most of the other. Another hole on the edge of her nostril and yet another around her navel suggested they’d been pierced as well.

  “Why’d he take them all out?”

  “Maybe he thought they were tacky,” groaned Lyonette, sinking to the floor beside the unshielded toilet.

  “My ears were double pierced when I came. Still are.”

  “Maybe he thinks yours are classy.”

  “Plus the cartilage cuff on the right.”

  “Maya, don’t be a bitch. This is rough enough, all right?”

  Surprisingly, that actually was enough to make me stop. It wasn’t just that she was clearly pathetic at the moment. It was also the undercurrent. Trying to make sense of why the Gardener did what he did was an exercise in futility, and completely unnecessary besides. We didn’t need to know why. We just needed to know what.

  “Not that you’re actually capable of going anywhere, but wait here.”

  She flapped her hand and closed her eyes.

  There were two refrigerators in the kitchen attached to our dining room. One held our meal ingredients and was always kept locked, Lorraine having the only key. The other held drinks and what snacks we were allowed to have between meals. I grabbed a couple bottles of water for Lyonette and a juice for myself, then pillaged a book from the library to read aloud to her while we waited for the new girl to wake up.

  “There was a library?” Eddison asks incredulously.

  “Well, yeah. He wanted us to be happy there. That meant keeping us occupied.”

  “What kinds of books did he give you?”

  “Whatever we asked for, really.” She shrugs and settles back into her chair, arms crossed loosely over her chest. “It was mostly classics at first, but those of us who genuinely enjoyed reading started a wish list by the doorway, and every now and then he’d add a few dozen or so volumes. And some of us had personal books, direct gifts from him, that stayed in our rooms.”

  “And you were one of the readers.”

  She starts to give him a disgusted look, then reconsiders. “Oh, right, you weren’t here for that part.”

  “What part?”

  “The part where I explained that being in the Garden was usually boring as fuck.”

  “If that’s boring,
you’re clearly not doing it right,” he mutters, and it startles a laugh out of her.

  “It wasn’t boring when it was my choice,” she admits. “But that was before the Garden.”

  Victor knows he should drag the conversation back to the original question, but the sight of the two of them in agreement about something is far too entertaining, so he lets it go, even ignores the slight trace of a lie in the girl’s face.

  “And I suppose your favorite was Poe?”

  “Oh, no, Poe had a purpose: to distract. I liked the fairy tales. Not the watered-down Disney shit, or the sanitized Perrault versions. I liked the real ones, where horrible things happened to everyone and you really understood it wasn’t intended for children.”

  “No illusions?” Victor asks, and she nods.

  “Exactly.”

  New Girl took a long time to regain consciousness, long enough that Lyonette even debated sending for Lorraine. I talked her out of it. If the girl was going to die from it, there was little enough our nurse could do to prevent it, and that pinch-faced bitch wasn’t the first thing I would want to see. Lyonette used that to insist I be the first thing New Girl saw.

  Given that Lyonette looked like death warmed over, I didn’t even argue . . . much.

  It was late in the afternoon before the girl finally stirred, and I closed Oliver Twist on a finger to see if she was actually waking up. We got another two hours of reading in before you could call her any sort of coherent. Under Lyonette’s instructions, I poured a glass of water to have ready and wet down a few cloths to help against the headache. When I folded one of them under the girl’s neck, she batted at my hand and swore at me in Spanish.

  Good enough.

  Eventually she gathered enough of her wits to pull the washcloths away from her face and try to sit up, her entire body swaying with the force of her nausea.

  “Careful there,” I said quietly. “Here’s some water, it’ll help.”

  “Get away from me, you sick fuck!”

  “I’m not the one who kidnapped you, so save it. Either you want the water and aspirin or you can eat shit and die, your choice.”

  Lyonette groaned. “Maya.”

  The girl blinked at me, but meekly took the pills and the cup.

  “Better. You’re being held by a man known as the Gardener. He gives us new names, so don’t bother telling us yours. Remember it, but don’t say it. I’m called Maya, and the lovely one with the flu over there is Lyonette.”

  “I’m—”

  “No one,” I reminded her sharply. “Not until he gives you a name. Don’t make it harder than it has to be.”

  “Maya!”

  I glanced over at Lyonette, who was giving me the pathetic, exasperated, incredulous, what-the-fuck-are-you-doing-to-me look she usually reserved for Evita. “You do it, then. You weren’t the first face she saw, hooray! Now you can take over if you don’t like how I’m doing it.”

  I’d had Sophia as a maternal example for young children. New Girl wasn’t that young, and I wasn’t Sophia.

  Lyonette closed her eyes and whispered a prayer for patience. Before she could finish, though, she had to fold herself over the toilet bowl again.

  The new girl’s hands started to shake, so I took them between my own. It was always warm in the Garden, except sometimes in the cave behind the waterfall, but I knew the shivers were from shock more than anything. “Here’s the thing, and it’s terrifying and bewildering and fuck-all unfair, but it’s still the thing: we are here as the unwilling guests of a man who will come to you for company and, as often as not, sex. Sometimes his son will come to you. You belong to them now, and they will do what they want to you, including mark you as theirs. There are quite a few of us here, and we support each other as we can, but the only way you’re getting out of here is to die, so you’re going to have to decide if this life of ours is better or worse than death.”

  “Suicide is a mortal sin,” she whispered.

  “Good, that means you’re not too likely to want to off yourself.”

  “Jesus, Maya, why not just hand her some rope?”

  The girl swallowed hard but—God love her for it—squeezed my hands. “How long have you been here?”

  “About four months.”

  She looked over at Lyonette.

  “Almost five years,” she murmured. If I’d known then . . . but it didn’t matter. It never did. Knowing it didn’t change anything.

  “And you’re still alive, and Mama always says, where there’s life there’s hope. I’ll hope.”

  “Just be careful with the hope,” I cautioned her. “A little is fine. Too much is crippling.”

  “Maya . . .”

  “So, New Girl, want to take a tour?”

  “I’m naked.”

  “Not so much a thing here. You’ll get used to it.”

  “Maya!”

  “Did you bring a dress?” I asked pointedly, and Lyonette flushed beneath her sickly pallor. “And I’m not letting her borrow yours; you’ve probably puked all down the front.”

  She hadn’t, but her black dress went all the way to the floor. No way tiny little New Girl was going to manage in that. I would’ve loaned her mine if it would be any better.

  “Wait here,” I sighed. “I’ll get something from Bliss.”

  Our friend wasn’t in her room when I got there, so I just grabbed something and returned to the new girl’s room, which was, as ever, studiously avoided by the other Butterflies. She made a face at the black fabric—even I had to admit it wasn’t a flattering color on her—but you learned to fear colored clothing in the Garden.

  When you were given something other than black, it was because that was the gown the Gardener wanted you to die in.

  She obeyed when I told her not to look in the hallway—even I wasn’t so much of a bitch as to show her that right off. She was at the far end of the Garden from my room, just down the hall from Lyonette’s, and bordering one side of the no-man’s-land that held the rooms we weren’t supposed to go in, the door to Outside that we were supposed to pretend didn’t exist. From that position, she was able to see the full breadth of the Garden in one look: all the rich, growing things, the vibrant flowers and white sand paths, the waterfall and stream and pond, the cliff, all the tiny stands of trees, the actual butterflies hovering over plants, and the clear glass roof that seemed so impossibly far away.

  She burst into tears.

  Lyonette lurched forward but pulled back immediately in a violent shivering fit. The flu probably wasn’t the best way to welcome someone to our verdant cage. I . . . well, I just wasn’t that maternal. As amply evidenced. I watched the new girl as she crumpled to the ground, curled into a tiny ball, as she clutched her arms across her stomach like this was a physical blow she could ward off.

  Eventually, when the heaving, soul-shattering sobs had trailed off into whimpers and gasps for breath, I sank down onto my knees beside her, one hand on her yet-unmarked back. “This isn’t the worst pain,” I told her as gently as I could. “But I think it’s the worst shock. From here on out, you can expect it a little.”

  At first I wasn’t sure if she’d heard me, because the whimpers continued unabated. Then she threw herself to the side, wrapping her arms around my waist and burying her face in my lap as her shock and grief deepened into full-throated sobs once more. I didn’t pet or stroke her, didn’t move my hand—she’d learn to hate that gesture from the Gardener—but I kept my hand against her warm skin so she knew I was there.

  “Do you still have the hallway pictures in here?” she asks abruptly, and the agents shake themselves from the spell of her words. It’s Eddison who hands her the stack, his fists clenched against his thighs as he watches her riffle through them. She pulls out a photo, stares at it for a moment, then places it face-up on the table where the men can see. “A Chiricahua White.” She traces a finger over the sharp delineation of white and black on the wings. “He named her Johanna.”

  Victor blinks. “Johann
a?”

  “I don’t know that there was a system to how he named us. I think he just looked through names until he found one he liked. I mean, she sure as hell didn’t look like a Johanna, but whatever.”

  Victor forces himself to examine the wings in the glass. She’s right, the girl was tiny, though her exact height is difficult to gauge from her position. “What happened to her?”

  “She was . . . mercurial. For the most part she seemed to settle in okay, but then suddenly she’d get these mood swings that sent a storm through the whole Garden. And then Lyonette died, and then the Gardener brought in a new new girl.”

  He clears his throat when she doesn’t go on. “What happened to her?” he asks again, and Inara sighs.

  “The walls came down so the Gardener could get the new girl for a tattoo session, but Johanna managed to stay out in the Garden. When the walls went up, we found her in the pond.” In one fluid motion, she grabs the photo and slams it face-down on the metal. “So much for mortal sin.”

  Sliding another stack of photos and papers before him, Victor silently sifts through them until he finds the one he’s looking for. It’s a young man, probably a little older than he looks, with artistically disheveled hair so dark brown it’s nearly black. Pale green eyes stand out sharply in a slender, pale face. He’s a good-looking boy, even in this over-pixelated likeness, someone who—at least by appearance—he wouldn’t mind Holly bringing home for him to meet. He should bring the conversation back to this boy.

  Not yet. Just a little longer.

  He isn’t sure if it’s for her benefit or his own.

  “When the Gardener noticed you in the trees.”

  “What of it?”

  “You said he came to talk to you over a stranger’s bed; was this the girl after Johanna?”

  It’s not a smile, more like a grimace to acknowledge his statement. “No. The one after that.”

  A little longer. “What did her name end up being?”