The Butterfly Garden (21 page)

“Don’t you think that’s a question you should put to your father?”

“I’d rather put it to someone who might tell me the truth.”

“And you think that’s me?”

“Why not? You’re a very direct sort of person.”

I smiled in spite of myself. “Direct doesn’t mean honest. It could just mean that I’m very direct and straightforward with my lies.”

“So you plan to lie to me?”

“I plan to tell you to ask your father.”

“Maya, what is my father really doing here?”

“Desmond, if you thought your father was doing anything inappropriate, what would you do?” Did he have any idea how important his answer could be?

“I would . . . well, I would . . .” He shakes his head, scratching at his slightly overgrown hair. “I guess it would depend on what that inappropriate thing was.”

“Then what do you think he’s doing?”

“Besides cheating on my mother?”

Point.

He takes another deep breath. “I think he comes to you all for sex.”

“And if he is?”

“He’s cheating on my mother.”

“Which would be your mother’s concern, not yours.”

“He’s my father.”

“Not your spouse.”

“Why aren’t you giving me a direct answer?”

“Why are you asking me, instead of him?”

“Because I’m not sure I can trust what he says.” He blushed, like questioning the word of his father was somehow shameful.

“And you think you can trust me?”

“All the others do.” His gesture took in the whole of the Garden, the handful of girls allowed out of their rooms when Desmond was there.

But all the walls were down on the girls who used to suck up in hopes of release, their second sets of wings displayed on their faces. They were down on the weepers and the listless and—except for Bliss—the chronically bitchy. They were down over all those dozens of girls in glass, and the scattering of empty cases that weren’t enough to hold the current generations, and no one knew what he was going to do when he ran out.

“You’re not one of us,” I said flatly. “Because of who you are, what you are, you never will be.”

“Because I’m privileged?”

“More than you can ever fathom. They trust me because I’ve proven to them they can. I have no interest in proving that to you.”

“What do you think his reaction would be if I asked him?”

“I don’t know, but he’s coming up the path, and I’ll thank you not to ask him in front of me.”

“It isn’t easy to ask him for anything,” he murmured.

I knew why that was true for us. I thought it cowardice that it was apparently true for him.

His father rejoined us then, standing over us with a smile. “Getting along well enough, Desmond?”

“Yes, sir. Maya’s very pleasant to talk with.”

“I’m glad to hear it.” His hand twitched as if to touch my hair, but at the last second he brought it up to rub at his jaw. “It’s time for us to join your mother for dinner. I’ll check in on you later, Maya.”

“Of course.”

Desmond stood and brought my knuckles to his lips. Seriously? “Thank you for your company.”

“Of course,” I repeated. I watched them make their way back through the Garden. Soon they’d be sitting down in a dining room with Eleanor and Avery, a perfectly normal family conversing over a meal, never mind the lies that hovered over the table like fog.

A few minutes later I heard Bliss come up beside me. “What a tool.” She snorted.

“Maybe.”

“Will he go to the police?”

“No,” I said reluctantly. “I don’t think he will.”

“Then he’s a tool.”

Sometimes it was hard to argue with Bliss’s logic, such as it was.

But sometimes, tools could be used.

“Why didn’t you think he’d go to the police?”

“For the same reason he wasn’t going to ask his father those important questions,” she answers with a shrug. “Because he was scared. What if he went to the police and his father’s explanation was actually true? Or worse, what if it wasn’t? Maybe he wanted to do the right thing, but he was barely twenty-one. How many of us know the right thing at that age?”

“You haven’t even reached that age yet,” Eddison points out, and the girl nods.

“And I don’t claim to know the right thing. He wanted to believe his father. I’ve never had anyone I wanted to believe that badly. I never felt that kind of need for someone to be proud of me.”

She smiles suddenly, soft and sour and slightly sad. “Lotte worried about that, though.”

“Lotte?”

“Sophia’s younger girl. I remember one time, after we’d worked till three in the morning, Sophia was at the girls’ school at eight-thirty in the morning so she could see their class plays. She told us about it after she’d gotten a nap in.” The smile spreads, deepens, and for a moment Victor thinks he sees the real Inara Morrissey, the girl who found a home in that strange apartment. “Jillie was fearless, confident, the kind of kid who could throw herself into anything, no hesitation. Lotte was . . . not. Girls with older sisters like Jillie probably never are.

“Anyway, there we were around the coffee table, sitting on the floor to eat a crazy assortment of food from Taki’s, and Sophia’s too tired to bother getting dressed. She just pads over in her underwear, her hair covering most of her ink and not much of her tits, and plops down to eat. Lotte had been fretting about her line for weeks, practicing it over and over again with each of us when we went with her mother to visit, and we all wanted to know if she’d remembered it.”

Victor’s been to those class plays. “Did she?”

“Half of it. Jillie shouted the rest of it from the audience.” The smile shifts, fades. “I’ve never been an envious person, never really saw a point to it. Those girls, though, what they had with each other and Sophia . . . they were worth envying.”

“Inara—”

“You could get anything at Taki’s,” she interrupts briskly, flicking her burned and sliced fingers as if to dismiss the sentimentality. “It was between the station and our building, never closed, and he’d make anything, even if you bought the stuff at the bodega next door. Working in the restaurant, none of us ever wanted to cook.”

The moment he could have pushed is gone as quickly as it came, but he makes a mental note of it. He’s not naïve enough to think she trusts them. Still, he doesn’t think she means to reveal this much emotion. Whatever she’s hiding—and he agrees with Eddison, she’s hiding something important—she’s so focused on it that other things are starting to slip.

He likes Inara, and he sees his daughters every time he looks at her, but he has a job to do. “And the Garden?” he asks neutrally. “I think you mentioned Lorraine had orders to make only healthy food?”

She makes a face. “Cafeteria style. You stood in line, received your meal, and then sat down at these tables complete with benches to make you feel like you were back in grade school. Unless you wanted to take the tray back to your room, which you could pretty much do whenever you felt like it as long as you brought it back at the next meal.”

“What if you didn’t like what was being served?”

“You ate what you could off the plate. If there was an actual allergy involved, there was forgiveness, but if you didn’t eat enough or if you were too picky, things didn’t end well for you.”

There was a set of twins there when I first arrived. They looked identical, right down to the wings tattooed on their backs, but they were very, very different people. Magdalene and Magdalena. Maggie, the elder by several minutes, was allergic to life. Seriously, she couldn’t even go out into the main Garden because she couldn’t breathe out there. If you ever needed help falling asleep, all you had to do was ask her to list her food allergies. Lena, on the other hand, wasn’t allergic to anything. In one of his rare lapses into insensitivity, the Gardener kept them in the same room and always visited them at the same time.

Lena liked to run around in the Garden, and as often as not ended up soaked and muddy and covered in plant bits. This created a rather large problem when she tried to go back to the room to shower. Even if Maggie was in the dining room, she’d come back later, find a shred of grass on the floor, and freak the fuck out. Maggie was allergic to the first twenty or so soaps the Gardener provided, and even then she complained about how dry her skin was, how lank her hair was, and always,
always
how she couldn’t breathe and why her eyes were so blurry and none of us had any sympathy for her, oh holy fuck.

Maggie was used to her parents falling over themselves to make her comfortable at every step.

I liked Lena, though. Lena never complained—even when Maggie was at her most annoying—and she explored the Garden just as much as I did. Sometimes the Gardener even hid little treasures for her to find, simply because he knew she would. She loved to laugh and seized on any excuse to do so, creating one of those relentlessly cheerful outlooks that would be irritating if you didn’t
know
she knew the gravity of the situation. She chose to be happy because she didn’t like being sad or pissed off.

She tried to explain it to me, and I sort of got it, but not really, because let’s face it: I’m not that person. I don’t choose to be sad or pissed off, but I don’t exactly choose to be happy, either.

Maggie never ate with the rest of us because she said just being in the same room with things would make her have a severe reaction. Her sister nearly always had to take her a tray of specially prepared food, then swing by to pick it up before the next meal. But then, Lena had the time for that, because you could put any meal before her and she’d suck it down under five minutes. Lena would eat everything without a complaint.

And Lena was one of the very few people in the Garden I genuinely feared for, because most of us understood that if the Gardener kept the twins as a pair in all other things, he would in death as well.

They’d been there for six months when I got there, with Lyonette running careful interference between Maggie and the rest of our little world, and fortunately the Gardener seemed more amused than anything else with Maggie’s need for special attention.

At least until he wasn’t.

I was there when that change began, and there was no more Lyonette to run interference.

Every so often, the Gardener felt the urge to dine with us en masse,
like a king with his court. Or, as Bliss put it, the Sultan with his harem. He had Lorraine inform all of us during breakfast that he’d be there for dinner
that night, I suppose so we could take extra effort with our appearances.

That afternoon found me in Danelle’s room with a bowl of water in my lap so I could carefully rewet her hair each time I needed to run the brush through it. She sat in front of me on the bed twining ribbons through sections of Evita’s hair before she twisted them up into a mass on the back of her blonde head. For Danelle, I braided small sections of hair to drape between two high buns, and others to fall down her back. They were too thin to obscure the wings, but they were her small defiance. Hailee sat behind me doing something with brush and pins, while Simone stood behind her with ribbons and twists and oil.

I’d never gone to a school dance, but it might have looked like we were preparing for something like that, something fun and wonderful, something to look forward to, and at the end of the evening you’d have a whole set of memories to cherish. Not so much here in the Garden. With the presence of the water and the chance for spilling, none of us were wearing more than underwear, and no one was giggling or chattering like girls off to a dance probably would be.

Lena walked in, still dripping from a shower—or a dip in the pond, knowing her—and dropped onto the floor. “She says she’s not going.”

“She’s going,” sighed Danelle. I finished the last braid and let it drop against her back.

“She says she’s not.”

“We’ll take care of it.” She patted the back of Evita’s head and slid off the bed with the brush. “Sit up.” She sank to her knees behind Lena, who promptly obeyed.

It should have been the end of it, especially once Danelle got to Maggie’s room, but as the rest of us dressed and gathered in the hallway, we could hear them arguing. Something shattered against a wall, and a minute later a pink-cheeked Danelle stalked out. Only parts of the handprint showed through the red and purple wings. “She’s getting dressed. Let’s go.”