The Butterfly Garden (18 page)

“I get so sick of this place,” she whispered, and even though we weren’t in the cave—the one place we were truly private—I thought she’d probably said it softly enough to avoid getting picked up. None of us knew if he went back through the recordings, never knew if it was safe to talk even when we knew for a fact he wasn’t sitting at a monitor.

“We all do.”

“Then why can’t I make the best of it, like you do?”

“You had a happy home, right?”

“Right.”

“That’s why you can’t make the best of it.”

I’d been happy in the apartment, which had eventually become home, but I’d lived through bad things before getting there, so I’d lived through bad things before coming here. Bliss never had, or at least, not nearly to the same extent. She had too much good to compare this to.

“Tell me something from before.”

“You know I won’t.”

“Not something personal. Just . . . something.”

“One of my neighbors had a weed garden on the roof,” I said after a moment. “When I moved there it was just a corner, but as time went by and no one reported it, it expanded until it covered half the roof. Some of the children from the lower floors used to play hide-and-seek in it. Eventually, though, someone tipped off the police, and he saw them coming, panicked, and set the whole damn crop on fire. We were all a little bit high for a week, and we had to wash everything we owned multiple times to get the smell out.”

Bliss shook her head. “I can’t even imagine.”

“That’s not a bad thing.”

“I’m forgetting things from home,” she confessed. “I was trying to remember my street address earlier and I couldn’t remember if it was a road or an avenue or a street or what. I still can’t. One-oh-nine-two-nine Northwest Fifty-Eighth . . . something.”

Which was really what all the fuss came down to. I shifted to lay one of my hands over hers, because there was nothing I could say.

“Every morning when I wake up and every night before I fall asleep, I tell myself my name, my family’s names. I remind myself what they looked like.”

I’d seen Bliss’s family, a collection of clay figures. She made so many figures that there was no reason to give this set any special significance, unless you noticed the glossy parts where her fingers had worn the clay smooth, or that they were positioned in such a way that they were the first and last things she saw in a day.

Maybe the Gardener was right, and I do give everything a meaning.

“What happens when that isn’t enough?”

“Keep reminding yourself,” I told her. “Just keep doing it, and it’ll have to be enough.”

“Does it work for you?”

I never memorized my address in New York. When I had to put it down on a form, I asked one of the other girls, and they laughed at me every time but never actually made me learn it. I never changed my license from the fake one because I didn’t know how well it would stand up to real scrutiny, or if the DMV would do more than a cursory check of the information.

But I remembered Sophia, the faded plumpness she grew into after she kicked the addictions, and Whitney’s red-gold hair, and Hope’s laugh, and Jessica’s nervous giggle. I remembered Noémie’s gorgeous bone structure, from a Blackfoot father and a Cherokee mother, remembered the way Kathryn’s smile could light up a room on the rare occasions she gave it. I remembered Amber’s bright, flashy clothing, the patterns never working together and yet always working, because she loved them so much. I didn’t remind myself of them, didn’t strain to keep them in my memory, because they were indelibly written there.

Just like I could have gladly forgotten my mother’s and father’s faces, my Gran’s stretchy unitards, almost all the people from before New York. But I remembered them too, and in a misty way I even remembered aunts and uncles and cousins, and running around in convoluted games I never understood, and posing for pictures I never saw. I just remembered things, remembered people.

Even when I would rather not.

We sat up at the same time, propping ourselves on our elbows, as a door opened and a flashlight beam swept into the far end of the Garden.

“The fuck?” Bliss whispered, and I nodded in silent agreement.

The Gardener was in Danelle’s room, seeking comfort and ostensibly giving her comfort as well for being the one to count in Evita’s final game of hide-and-seek. Even if he was leaving, he never needed a flashlight. Neither did Avery, who was banned from the Garden for another two weeks for breaking Pia’s arm, or Lorraine, who was either asleep or crying herself to sleep at this time of night. There was a button in the infirmary that buzzed in her room and the kitchen if she was needed in her capacity as nurse.

The figure was dressed all in black, which might have seemed like a good idea until he stepped onto one of those white sand paths. He moved cautiously, the cone of light sweeping before every step, but we could tell from his posture that he was gawking at everything.

I never questioned that I immediately labeled the intruder as male. Something about the way he walked, maybe. Or the idiocy of bringing a flashlight if you’re trying to sneak around.

“Which do you think would get us in more trouble?” Bliss breathed against my ear. “Finding out who he is, or ignoring him?”

I realized I had a pretty good idea of who the intruder was, but I’d told the Gardener I wouldn’t tell anyone. Not that a promise to a serial killer holds a great deal of weight, but still. I pretty much never made promises, simply because then I felt bound to keep them.

But what the fuck was the Gardener’s younger son doing breaking into the inner greenhouse complex? And what did it—could it—mean for us?

The first question answered itself almost as soon as it crossed my mind, because it was the same reason I climbed those trees almost every afternoon to catch those glimpses of a real world Outside the glass. Curiosity, among other things, for me. Probably just curiosity for him.

The second question . . .

There were girls who could die if we chose the wrong thing to do. If he was just in the Garden itself that would be fine—it was a private garden space, who cared?—but if he explored the hallways at all . . .

Maybe he’d see the dead girls and call the police.

But maybe he wouldn’t, and then Bliss and I would be left explaining why we saw an intruder and did nothing.

Swearing under my breath, I slipped off the rock, crouching low to the ground. “Stay here, and keep an eye on him.”

“And do what if he does something?”

“Scream?”

“And you are—”

“Giving this to the Gardener to deal with.”

She shook her head but didn’t try to stop me. In her eyes, I could see the same awareness of being stuck. We couldn’t risk everyone’s lives on hoping this boy would be better than the rest of his family. And it wasn’t like seeing the Gardener with someone would be a first for me. He usually went for the privacy of a room, but every now and then . . . well. Like I said, he was a remarkably self-contained man, until he wasn’t.

I nearly crawled down the path on the far side of the cliff, where there was actually a slope rather than a mostly sheer face. The sand muffled my steps when I reached the ground, and by moving slowly I was able to step into the stream without a splash. I ducked behind the waterfall and moved quickly down the back hall to Danelle’s room.

The Gardener had pulled his trousers on but not his shirt or shoes, and he sat on the edge of the bed working a brush through Danelle’s auburn curls until they fluffed into a mane all around her. More than any of the rest of us, Danelle loathed his fascination with our hair because it always made hers unmanageable.

They both looked up when I slipped into the room, Danelle’s confusion echoed but edged in anger in the Gardener’s face. “I’m sorry,” I whispered, “but it’s important.”

Danelle cocked an eyebrow at me. When she’d first come to the Garden four years ago, she’d thought sucking up to the Gardener would get her home and had the inked wings on her face to show for it, a mask of red and purple. She’d mellowed through the years, though, and graduated to the “let him do whatever, just don’t participate” way of thinking. I knew what she was asking, but I only shrugged. Whether or not I told her would largely depend on what actually happened.

Stuffing his feet into his shoes and grabbing his shirt, the Gardener followed me out into the hall. “That—”

“There’s someone in the Garden,” I interrupted as quietly as I could. “I think it’s your younger son.”

His eyes widened. “Where is he?”

“Near the pond when I came to get you.”

He shrugged into his shirt and gestured for me to button it while he ran his hands through his hair to get rid of the dishevelment. He was kind of screwed on the funky smell, though. When he set off down the hallway, I followed. After all, he didn’t tell me not to. Well, at least not until we got to one of the doorways and he could see the boy for himself, still waving around the silly flashlight. The man watched his son for a long time in silence, and I couldn’t read the expression on his face. With a hand on my shoulder, he pointed down, which could have meant either sit or stay.

I was the wrong kind of bitch for sit, so I chose stay, and he didn’t argue with me.

From the hallway, I watched him walk out into the Garden, openly and without apparent hesitation. His voice broke the near silence like a gunshot. “Desmond!”

The boy’s head whipped around and he dropped the flashlight. It bounced off a rock with the sound of cracking plastic, and when it fell to the sand the light flickered and died. “Father!”

The Gardener’s hand went into his pocket, and a moment later the walls came down around me, locking the other girls into their rooms and hiding the display cases. And left Bliss and me somewhat stranded, her up on the rock and me in the hall. And I hadn’t exactly told the Gardener she was up there. Shit.

I leaned against the wall and waited.

“What the hell are you doing here? I told you the inner greenhouse was off limits.”

“I . . . I heard Avery talking about it, and I just . . . I just wanted to see it. I’m sorry I disobeyed you, Father.”

It was hard to put an age to his voice. It was a light tenor, which had the effect of making him sound young. He was uncomfortable and embarrassed, clearly, but he didn’t actually seem scared.

“How did you even get in here?”

And could a Butterfly use it to get out?

The boy—Desmond, I supposed—hesitated. “A few weeks ago, I saw Avery pull aside a panel by one of the maintenance doors,” he said finally. “He closed it again when he saw I was there, but not before I saw a punch pad.”

“Which has a security code, so how did you get in?”

“Avery uses the same three passwords for everything. I just tried those.”

I had the feeling Avery was going to have to create a fourth password pretty soon. We weren’t supposed to loiter near the main entrance. That stretch, a little to either side of that locked door, had Lorraine’s room, Avery’s playroom before it had been dismantled, the infirmary and kitchen/dining room, the tattoo room that led into the Gardener’s suite, and a couple of rooms we didn’t know the purpose of, but could guess. Whatever he did in those rooms, that was where we died. All things we weren’t supposed to pay excessive attention to, minus the kitchen, and neither the Gardener nor Avery left while there was a Butterfly who could see them do it.

“Just what did you think you were going to find?” asked the Gardener.

“A . . . a garden . . .” the boy answered slowly. “I just wanted to see why it was so special.”

“Because it was private,” his father sighed, and I wondered if that was the reason he’d actually removed the camera and mic from the cave behind the waterfall. Because he valued his privacy enough to let us pretend we had ours. “If you truly wish to become a psychologist, Desmond, you will have to respect people’s privacy.”

“Except when that privacy forms a block to their mental well-being, in which case I’d be professionally obligated to urge them to talk through those secrets.”

Funny, Whitney had never mentioned that kind of ethical jiggering when she talked about her psych seminars.

“You will then be professionally obligated to keep those secrets to yourself,” the Gardener reminded him. “Now, let’s go.”

“Do you sleep here?”

“Occasionally. Let’s go, Desmond.”

“Why?”

I bit my lip against a laugh. It was a rare treat to hear the Gardener truly flummoxed.

“Because I find it peaceful,” he eventually answered. “Pick up your flashlight. I’ll walk you back to the house.”

“But—”

“But what?” he snapped.

“Why do you keep this place such a secret? It’s just a garden.”

The Gardener didn’t answer right away, and I knew he had to be thinking through his options. Tell his son the truth, and hope he buys into it, keeps it secret? Lie to him and risk the truth being found out anyway, because a son disobedient once might prove disobedient again? Or was he thinking something worse, that somehow a son could be just as disposable as a Butterfly?

“
If
I tell you, you must keep it an absolute secret,” he said finally. “You cannot breathe a word about it outside these walls. Don’t even speak about it to your brother. Not a word, do you understand me?”

“Y-yes, sir.” It still wasn’t fear, but there was something there, something a little hard-edged and desperate.

He wanted to make his father proud.

A year ago, the Gardener had told me that his
wife
was proud of their younger son, not necessarily that he was. He hadn’t sounded disappointed, but maybe against his mother’s easy-shown pride, his father’s was harder to detect. Or perhaps his father simply withheld praise until he felt it had been earned. There were any number of possible explanations, but this boy wanted to make his father proud, wanted to feel a part of something greater.

Stupid, stupid boy.

There were footsteps then, growing softer, moving away. I stayed where I was, stuck until the walls lifted. A minute or two later, the Gardener stepped into the far end of the hall and beckoned to me. I obeyed, like I always did, and he absently ran a hand over my hair, now back in a messy knot. He was seeking comfort, I guess.