The Butterfly Garden (3 page)

“Sophia? Whitney? These are some of the girls?” Eddison interrupts.

“They’re girls, yes. Well, Sophia probably counts as a woman.” The girl takes another sip, eyes the quantity left in the bottle. “Actually, Whitney would too, I guess. So they’re women.”

“What do they look like? We can match their names to—”

“They’re not from the Garden.” It’s hard to interpret the look she gives the younger agent, equal parts pity, amusement, and derision. “I had a life before, you know. Life didn’t begin at the Garden. Well, not this Garden anyway.”

Victor turns the photo over, trying to calculate how long such a thing must have taken. So large, so much detail.

“It wasn’t all at once,” the girl tells him, following his eyes to the pattern. “He started with the outlines. Then he went back in over the course of two weeks to add in all the color and detail. And when it was done, there I was, just another one of the Butterflies in his Garden. God creating his own little world.”

“Tell us about Sophia and Whitney,” Victor says, content to leave the tattoo for a time. He has a feeling what happened when it was done, and he’s willing to call himself a coward if it means not hearing it yet.

“I lived with them.”

Eddison tugs the Moleskine from his pocket. “Where?”

“In our apartment.”

“You need—”

Victor cuts him off. “Tell us about the apartment.”

“Vic,” Eddison protests. “She’s not giving us anything!”

“She will,” he answers. “When she’s ready.”

The girl watches them without comment, sliding the bottle from hand to hand like a hockey puck.

“Tell us about the apartment,” he says again.

There were eight of us who lived there, all of us working together at the restaurant. It was a huge loft apartment, all one room, with beds and footlockers laid out like a barracks. Each bed had a hanging rack for clothing on one side, and rods for curtains on the other side and at the foot of the bed. It wasn’t much for privacy but it worked well enough. Under normal circumstances rent would have been hellish, but it was a shit neighborhood and there were so many of us that you could make your rent in a night or two and call the rest of the month spending money.

Some even did.

We were a strange mix, students and hoydens and a retired hooker. Some wanted the freedom to be anyone they wanted, some of us wanted the freedom to be left alone. The only things we had in common were working at the restaurant and living together.

And honestly? It was kind of like heaven.

Sure, we clashed sometimes, there were arguments and fights and occasional pettiness, but for the most part those things blew over pretty quickly. Someone was always willing to loan you a dress or a pair of shoes or a book. There was work, classes for those who took them, but otherwise we had money and an entire city at our feet. Even for me, who grew up with minimal supervision, that kind of freedom was wonderful.

The fridge was kept stocked with bagels, booze, and bottled water, and there were always condoms and aspirin in the cabinets. Sometimes you could find leftover takeout in the fridge, and whenever social services came to visit Sophia, and see how she was improving, we made a grocery run and hid the booze and condoms. Mostly we ate out or had things delivered. Working around food every night, we generally avoided the apartment kitchen like the plague.

Oh, and the drunk guy. We were never sure if he actually lived in the building or not, but in the afternoons we’d see him drinking in the street and every night he’d pass out in front of our door. Not the building door—our door. He was a fucking pervert too, so when we came back after dark—which was pretty much every night—we took the stairs all the way up to the roof and then came down one floor on the fire escape to come in through the windows. Our landlord put a special lock on there for us because Sophia felt bad for the drunk pervert and didn’t want to turn him over to the cops. Given her situation—retired hooker–drug addict cleaning up to try to get her kids back—the rest of us didn’t push.

The girls were my first friends. I suppose I’d met people like them before but it was different. I could stay away from people and usually did. But I worked with the girls and then I lived with them, and it was just . . . different.

There was Sophia, who mothered everyone and had managed to be completely clean for over a year when I met her, and that was after two years of trying and slipping. She had the two most beautiful daughters, and they’d actually been kept together in the same foster home. Even better, the foster parents fully supported Sophia’s goal of earning them back. They let her come see the girls pretty much whenever she wanted. Whenever things got rough, whenever the addiction started screaming again, one of us would stuff her in a taxi to see her girls and remind her what she was working so hard for.

There was Hope, and her little stooge Jessica. Hope was the one with the ideas, with the vivacity, and Jessica went along with everything she said and did. Hope filled the apartment with laughter and sex, and if Jessica used sex as a way to feel better about herself, at least Hope showed her how to have some fun with it. They were the babies, only sixteen and seventeen when I moved in.

Amber was also seventeen, but unlike the other two, she had a bit of a plan. She got herself declared an emancipated minor so she could get out of the foster system, took her GED, and was taking classes at a community college to get her AA until she could figure out a major. There was Kathryn, a couple of years older, who never, ever talked about life before the apartment. Or about much of anything, really. Kathryn could sometimes be prevailed upon to go with the rest of us to do something, but she never did anything on her own. If someone lined all eight of us against a wall and asked who was running from something or someone, a person would point to Kathryn every time. We didn’t ask her, though. One of the basic rules of the apartment was that we didn’t push on personal history. We all had baggage.

Whitney I mentioned, she of the periodic breakdowns. She was a grad student in psychology, but was so fucking high-strung. Not in a bad way, just in an “I don’t react to stress well” kind of way. Between semesters she was fantastic. During semesters we all took turns getting her to chill the fuck out. Noémie was also a student, getting one of the most useless degrees known to man. Really, I think the only reason she was going to college was because she had scholarships and getting an English degree gave her an excuse to read a
lot
. Luckily, she was very generous in sharing her books.

Noémie was the one who mentioned the apartment to me my second week at the restaurant. It was my third week in the city and I was still living at a hostel, bringing all my worldly possessions to work with me every day. We were in the tiny staff room, changing out of our uniforms. I kept mine at the restaurant just in case my stuff got stolen while I was sleeping, so at least I’d still be able to work. Everyone else changed there because the uniform—a long dress and heels—just wasn’t the sort of thing they pranced around in on their way home.

“So, um . . . you’re pretty trustworthy, right?” she said with no preamble. “I mean, you don’t stiff the busboys or hostess, you don’t steal anyone’s stuff from the staff room. You never smell of drugs or anything.”

“Does this have a point?” I pulled on my bra and fastened the hooks behind me, rearranging my breasts to fit. Living in a hostel gave you a certain lack of modesty, one reinforced by the tiny staff room and the number of female employees who had to change there.

“Rebekah said you’re just a step up from the street. You know a bunch of us live together, right? Well, we’ve got an extra bed.”

“She’s serious,” called Whitney, fluffing her red-gold hair out of its braided bun. “It’s a bed.”

“And a footlocker,” giggled Hope.

“But we’ve been talking about it and wondered if you’d like to move in. Rent would be three hundred a month, includes utilities.”

I hadn’t been in the city that long but even I knew that was impossible. “Three hundred? The hell you get for three hundred?”

“Rent is two thousand,” Sophia corrected. “Share of rent would be three hundred. The extra is what covers the utilities.”

That sounded about right, except . . . “How many of you live there?”

“You would make eight.”

Which wouldn’t make it that different from living in the hostel, really. “Can I stay with you tonight and see it, and decide tomorrow?”

“Sounds great!” Hope handed me a denim skirt that looked barely long enough to cover my underwear.

“That’s not mine.”

“I know, but I think it would look really cute on you.” She was already one leg into my overlarge corduroys, so rather than argue, I shimmied into the skirt and decided to be very careful in bending over. Hope was curvy as hell, running a little to plump, so I could pull the skirt low on my hips for a little extra length.

The owner’s eyes lit up when he saw me leaving
with
the girls. “You live with them now, yes? You be safe?”

“The customers are gone, Guilian.”

He dropped the Italian accent and clapped me on the shoulder. “They’re good girls. I’m glad you’ll be with them.”

His opinion went a long way toward convincing me even before I saw the apartment. My first impression of Guilian had been hard but fair, and he proved me right when he offered a trial week to a girl with a duffel bag and a suitcase beside her at the interview. He pretended to be native Italian because it made the customers somehow think the food was better, but he was a tall, heavyset ginger with thinning hair and a moustache that had eaten his upper lip and was now seeking to devour the rest of his face. He believed a person’s work was a better judge than their words, and he appraised people accordingly. At the end of my first week, he simply handed me the schedule for the next week with my name inked in.

It was three in the morning when we left. I memorized the streets and the trains, and wasn’t nearly as nervous as I should have been when we walked into their neighborhood. On feet aching from hours of high heels, we trudged up the many flights of stairs to the top floor and then to the roof, weaving through various patio furniture, covered grills, and what looked to be a flourishing marijuana garden in one corner, and down one flight on the fire escape to the large bank of windows. Sophia worked the key into the lock as Hope giggled her way through an explanation of the drunk pervert in the hallway.

We had a few of those at the hostel.

It was a huge space, open and clean, with four beds lining each sidewall and a group of couches clustered together in a square in the center. The kitchen had an island counter to separate it from the rest of the room and a door led off to the bathroom, which had a huge open shower with ten different heads facing different directions.

“We don’t ask questions about the people who lived here before,” Noémie said delicately when she showed it to me. “It’s just a shower though, not an orgy.”

“You convince maintenance of this?”

“Oh, no, we fuck with them all the time. That’s half the fun.”

I smiled in spite of myself. The girls were fun to work with, always tossing jokes and insults and compliments around the kitchen, venting about irritating customers or flirting with the cooks and dishwashers. I’d smiled more in the past two weeks than I could ever remember doing before. Everyone dropped purses and bags on their footlockers and many of them changed into pajamas or what passed for them, but sleep was a long way off yet. Whitney pulled out her psychology textbook while Amber pulled out twenty shot glasses and filled them with tequila. I reached for one but Noémie handed me a tumbler of vodka instead.

“The tequila is for studying.”

So I sat on one of the couches and watched Kathryn read through Amber’s practice test, one shot glass for each question. If Amber got the question wrong, she had to drink the shot. If she got it right, she could make someone else drink it. She handed the first one to me, and I tried not to choke on the nasty-as-shit mix of tequila and vodka.

We were still awake when daylight came, and Noémie, Amber, and Whitney all trundled off to class while the rest of us finally crashed. When we woke up early in the afternoon, I signed the agreement they had in place of a lease and paid my first month from the past two nights’ tips. Just like that, I wasn’t homeless anymore.