The Butterfly Garden (28 page)

Or at least the one who made the attempt and me, because he thinks they tell me everything. How would I not know of such a plan?

“I’m sorry.”

What an asinine thing to say, under the circumstances.

I shook my head. “I’m just sorry you ever came here.”

Another sideways look, somewhere between hurt and amused. “Completely sorry?” he asked after a minute.

I studied his face in the moonlight. Twice he’d helped me through panic attacks, even if he only knew about one. He was fragile in a way his father and brother weren’t, someone who wanted to be good, do good, and just didn’t know how. “No,” I said eventually. “Not completely.” Not if I could figure out some way to lead him to usefulness.

“You’re a very complicated person.”

“And you’re a complication.”

He laughed and held his hand out between us, palm up, and I didn’t hesitate to take it, lacing our fingers together. I leaned into him, resting my head on his shoulder, and found a comfortable silence between us. He reminded me of Topher a bit, if more complex, and just for a little while, I wanted to pretend this boy wasn’t his father’s son, that he was my friend.

I fell asleep that way, and when morning sunlight struck my eyes, I slowly sat up to find that we’d curled together through the night, his hand on my hip and his other arm cushioning my cheek from the stone. The new girl wouldn’t be awake for a few hours yet, but Desmond had classes and at some point, a violin proficiency he’d pass without even trying.

Hesitantly, I reached out and stroked a comma of dark hair back from his forehead. He stirred and unconsciously followed the gesture, and I couldn’t help but smile. “Wake up.”

“No,” he mumbled, and grabbed my hand to shield his eyes.

“You have classes.”

“Skip ’em.”

“You have a proficiency.”

“Mm proficient.”

“You have finals next week.”

He sighed but it turned into a face-splitting yawn, and he grudgingly sat up to rub the sleep from his eyes. “You’re bossy, but nice to wake up to.”

I looked away because I wasn’t sure what was showing on my face. His fingertips, lightly callused from the strings, touched my chin and brought my face back to his, and the only thing there was a soft smile.

He leaned forward, then caught himself and started to pull back. I closed the distance between us, his lips soft against mine. The light touch on my chin moved back until his hand could cup my cheek and he deepened the kiss until my head was swimming. It had been so long since I’d actually kissed someone, rather than just allow them to force a kiss on me. The Gardener thought his son could love me, and I thought he might be right. I also thought love would prove a different motivation for the son than for the father. I hoped.

When Desmond moved away, he pressed a kiss against my cheek. “Can I come see you after classes?”

I nodded even as I silently acknowledged that my life had reached an entirely new level of fucked up.

“And the Gardener was happy about this?”

“Actually, he was. I mean, I’m sure there was a certain degree of self-interest in it—after all, if Desmond was emotionally attached to one or more of us, he was unlikely to risk anything happening to us. That had to be part of it, but I think most of it was that he genuinely enjoyed seeing his son happy.”

Victor sighs. “Just when I think this story can’t get more twisted.”

“It can always get more twisted.” She smiles as she says it, but he knows better than to trust it. It’s not at all a nice smile, not something that should be so easily displayed on a girl her age. “That’s life, right?”

“No,” Victor says quietly. “It isn’t. Or at least it shouldn’t be.”

“But that’s not the same thing.
Is
and
shouldn’t
are entirely different things.”

He’s starting to think Eddison isn’t going to come back.

He can’t really blame him.

If this is the twisted she’s admitting to, how much worse is the twisted she’s still hiding?

“How did things change after his finals?”

He was around more in the summer, except for an hour or so in the early afternoon when he walked with his parents in the outer greenhouse. If he came in the mornings, he stayed atop the cliff or in the library, respecting the privacy of my conversations with the other girls in the cave. Danelle had come to replace Lyonette as my balance in the more delicate of those conversations, just as she’d started taking the night shift with our new arrivals.

There wasn’t much to the night shift, given that they were in a drugged sleep, but still. I appreciated being able to get some space.

And despite the wings that spread across her cheeks and forehead, Danelle could be trusted as a sensible option. I’d grown used to her double set of Red-Spotted Purples, with their contrasts of deep, rich color and bright pattern breaks. I won’t say it suited her, any more than the ones on my back suited me, but she’d made them a part of her and learned from the experience. She and Marenka were the last to receive the wings on their faces; after that, they’d talked everyone else out of sucking up to that extent. There were some who came close, but they hadn’t crossed the line yet.

I took the earliest conversations and she traded with me once the new girl showed signs of waking. Danelle held back on actually meeting the new girls until they were more or less settled, just like the others with the wings on their faces did.

After the first session, I was actually in the room whenever the Gardener worked on the new girl’s tattoo. She hated needles, but if I read to her—and let her squeeze the ever-loving fuck out of my arm—she could lie still for it. It was by her request that I was there, rather than the Gardener’s, though I think he was pleased by it. As I read aloud from
The Count of Monte Cristo
and wondered if that counted as irony, I watched the brilliant ice blue of a Spring Azure spread across her porcelain skin, broken by occasional veins or fringes of silver-white and one narrow band of midnight blue on the tips of the upper wings.

Bliss brought an ice pack with the lunch trays to put on my now-perpetually bruised arm.

The Gardener didn’t touch me if Desmond was in the Garden, but his son’s interest in me roused a corresponding excitement in him. It was no secret among the girls that he liked me best—honestly, I think they were relieved—but he’d gone from coming to me two or three times a week to damn near every day.

He still went to the other girls, of course, but when he was with anyone else, he didn’t care if his younger son was in the Garden or not. And there was still Avery, but his fangs had been mostly pulled by the destruction of his playroom and the clear pride his father had in Desmond. With his younger brother as a strong example of how their father wanted us treated, it was hard for him to give in to the things he enjoyed.

I grew to hate lunch, because every single day, when Desmond went to share the meal and the early afternoon with his mother, the Gardener came to me with a need that made his hands shake. I started taking lunch in my room just so I wouldn’t have to suffer the indignity of him coming to the dining room and calling my name across conversations. Even though he knew Desmond hadn’t done any more than kiss me, just the thought that he could do more was enough to make the Gardener nearly mess his pants.

And dear fucking Christ, the possibility that he scoured the security footage hoping to see his son with me was enough to make my brain turn off completely.

At least those visits had a specific time limit, because he had to be up at the house by a quarter to two to meet his wife for their walk. While the family strolled along the square in the outer greenhouse, I spent the hour with the girl he rechristened Tereza. She was just shy of seventeen, the daughter of two litigators, and almost never spoke above a whisper. When she did, it was important, like her asking me to read to her while the Gardener inked her wings. She could also be drawn into conversation about music. She played piano, we learned, and wanted to be a professional pianist. She and Ravenna could talk for hours about ballet scores. She paid attention, noticed the undercurrents of any given situation, so she seemed to understand our precarious existence even before I showed her the display cases that first week.

For her sake, so she’d have a way to keep herself grounded, I asked the Gardener to give her a keyboard.

He installed an upright piano in one of the empty rooms, replacing the bed with a beautiful instrument and an entire wall of filing cabinets of sheet music. Except for meals, sleep, and putting up with her visits from the Gardener—numerous because she was new—she was in that room, playing the piano until her hands cramped.

Desmond met me in the hallway one afternoon, leaning against the Garden-side wall. His head was tilted to one side as he listened. “What happens if someone has a breakdown?” he asked quietly.

“In what way?”

He nodded in the direction of the doorway. “You can hear it in the music. She’s disintegrating. She’s getting choppy, changing the tempos, pounding at the keys . . . maybe she doesn’t talk, but that doesn’t mean she’s adapting.”

You never really forgot that he was a psych major.

“She’ll either break or she won’t. There’s a limit to what I can do to prevent that.”

“But what happens if she does?”

“You know what happens. You just don’t want to admit it.” He’d never asked why Simone hadn’t returned. Tereza’s arrival was greeted with consternation followed by an obvious, concerted effort to not think about it too deeply.

Desmond paled, but nodded to show he understood. Then he promptly changed the subject. If you don’t look at the bad thing, the bad thing can’t see you, right? “Bliss has some sort of project spread out over the rock. She told me if I sat on any of the clay, she’d shove it up my nose.”

“What was she working on?”

“I have no idea; she was still softening the clays.”

Summer afternoons were almost unbearably warm in the Garden, the heat soaking through the glass. Most girls spent the afternoons in the water or the shade to escape it, or in their rooms where they could actually feel the cooler air moving through the vents. I wasn’t going to disturb Bliss if she was working on something, especially if she was doing it in the hottest part of the Garden, so I took Desmond’s hand and led him down the hall. It was cooler in the back corner, where the base of the cliff stood directly against the hall glass and blocked the sunlight.

I turned in to my room and Desmond immediately began studying the shelf above my bed. He tapped the carousel to make it spin. “For some reason I don’t really see you as a carousel person,” he said, turning to look at me.

“I’m not.”

“Then why—”

“Someone else was.”

He looked back at the carousel and didn’t say anything. He couldn’t ask for more without hitting things he tried so hard not to think about.

“The gifts we give say as much about us as the gifts we get and keep,” he murmured eventually. He touched the muzzle of the sad little dragon, which now had a tiny pajama-clad teddy bear to keep him company. “Is it the things that are important, or the people?”

“I thought classes were over for the summer.”

He gave me a sheepish grin. “Habit?”

“Right.”

My room had changed a bit from that first day. My sheets were a deep rose, the blanket a rich, brilliant purple, with stacks of pillows in a pale fawn-brown. My toilet and shower were both concealed by drapes of a matching brown, rose and purple sashes hanging loose against the walls in case I wanted to clip them back for any reason. There were two short bookcases along one wall with the various books the Gardener had given me personally, rather than adding into the library, and the knickknacks spilled over onto these shelves, the most important—or at least the most personal—staying on the shelf above the bed.

Other than the knickknacks, it was hard to say the room reflected anything about me, as I hadn’t chosen anything about it. Even the trinkets were hard to pin down, really. Evita had once painted me a lovely chrysanthemum on a rock, but that showed her sunny personality, not mine. My keeping it just meant that
she
was important to me.