The Butterfly Garden Read online

  The light through the ceiling was deep lavender and streaked through with rose and indigo—evening. It had been bright afternoon when I was taken, but somehow I didn’t think it was the same day. I turned in a slow circle, trying to take it all in, but it was too much. My eyes couldn’t see half of what was there, and my brain couldn’t process half of what I saw.

  “The fuck?”

  Lyonette actually laughed, a hard sound that abruptly cut short as though she were afraid anyone might hear it. “We call him the Gardener,” she said dryly. “Apt, no?”

  “What is this place?”

  “Welcome to the Butterfly Garden.”

  I turned to ask her what that meant, but then I saw it.

  She takes a long sip of water, rolling the bottle across her palms. When she shows no signs of continuing, Victor gently taps the table to get her attention. “It?” he prompts.

  She doesn’t answer.

  Victor pulls the photo from his jacket pocket, laying it on the table between them. “It?” he asks again.

  “See, asking me questions to which you already know the answer doesn’t make me inclined to trust you.” But her shoulders relax and she leans back into the seat, on familiar footing.

  “We’re the FBI; usually people think we’re the good guys.”

  “And Hitler thought he was evil?”

  Eddison lurches to the very edge of his seat. “You’re comparing the FBI to Hitler?”

  “No, I’m engaging in a discussion about perspective and moral relativity.”

  When they got the call, Ramirez went straight to the hospital, and Victor came here to coordinate the deluge of incoming information. Eddison was the one to tour the property. Eddison always reacts to horror with temper. And with that thought, Victor flicks his eyes back to the girl on the other side of the table. “Did it hurt?”

  “Like hell,” she answers, tracing the lines on the photo.

  “The hospital says it’s a few years old?”

  “You make that sound like a question.”

  “A statement seeking confirmation,” he clarifies, and this time the smile creeps out.

  Eddison scowls at him.

  “Hospitals are many things, but completely incompetent doesn’t tend to be one of them.”

  “And what the hell does that mean?” snaps Eddison.

  “Yes, it’s a few years old.”

  He recognizes the patterns now from years of asking his daughters about report cards and tests and boyfriends. He lets the silence hang for a minute, then two, and watches the girl carefully flip the photo over. The shrinks on the larger team would probably have a thing or three to say about that. “Who did he have do it?”

  “The one person in the world he could trust without reservation.”

  “Multi-talented man.”

  “Vic—”

  Without taking his eyes from the girl, Victor kicks the leg of his partner’s chair, jarring him. He’s rewarded with that suggestion of a smile. Not the real thing, not even a ghost of it really, but something like it.

  The girl peeks under the edge of the gauze taped around her fingers, fashioned like gloves rather than mitts. “The needles make a hell of a sound, don’t they? When it’s not what you choose? But it is a choice, because there is the alternative.”

  “Death,” Victor guesses.

  “Worse.”

  “Worse than death?”

  But Eddison pales and the girl sees, and rather than mocking him for it, she gives him a solemn nod. “He knows. But then, you haven’t been there, have you? Reading about it isn’t the same.”

  “What’s worse than death, Maya?”

  She scrapes a nail under one of the fresh scabs on her index finger, peeling it away so dots of blood blossom against the gauze. “You’d be amazed at how easy it is to get tattoo equipment.”

  For the first week, there was something slipped into my dinner each night to make me docile. Lyonette stayed with me during the days, but the other girls—of which there were apparently more than a few—stayed away. This was normal, she told me when I remarked on it over lunch.

  “The weeping thing stresses everyone out,” she said around a mouthful of salad. Whatever else could be said of the mysterious Gardener, he provided excellent meals. “Most prefer to stay out of it until we know how a girl’s going to settle in.”

  “Except for you.”

  “Someone has to do it. I can put up with the tears if I have to.”

  “Then how grateful you must be that I haven’t provided you with any.”

  “About that.” Lyonette stabbed a strip of grilled chicken and twirled her fork. “Have you cried at all?”

  “Would there be a point to doing so?”

  “I’m either going to love you or hate you.”

  “Let me know, I’ll try to behave accordingly.”

  She gave me a fierce smile, all her teeth showing. “Keep that attitude, but don’t do it with him.”

  “Why does he want me sleeping at night?”

  “Precautionary measures. There’s a cliff right outside, after all.”

  Which made me wonder how many girls had thrown themselves over before he implemented those precautionary measures. I tried to gauge the height of the man-made monstrosity. Twenty-five, maybe thirty feet? Was that high enough to kill someone on impact?

  I’d grown accustomed to waking up in that empty room when the drugs wore off, Lyonette sitting on a stool beside the bed. But, at the end of the first week, I woke up on my stomach on a bench with hard padding and the astringent smell of antiseptic thick in the air. It was a different room, larger, with metal walls rather than glass.

  And it had someone else in it.

  I couldn’t see at first, not with the drugged sleep still seaming my eyelids together, but I could feel someone else there. I kept my breathing slow and even, straining to hear, but a hand settled on my bare calf. “I know you’re awake.”

  It was a man’s voice, midrange and cultured with a Mid-Atlantic cast to it. A pleasant voice. The hand smoothed up my leg, over my ass, and along the curve of my back. Goose bumps prickled in its wake, despite the warmth of the room.

  “I’d prefer for you to lie very still, otherwise we’ll both have cause to regret it.” When I tried to turn my head toward his voice, the hand moved to the back of my skull to keep me still. “I would prefer not to bind you for this; it ruins the line of the work. If you feel you cannot remain motionless, I will give you something that will guarantee it. Again, I would prefer not to. Can you be still?”

  “For?” I asked, almost in a whisper.

  He tucked a glossy-smooth piece of paper into my hand.

  I tried to open my eyes but sleep meds always made them gunk up more than usual in the morning. “If you’re not going to start right now, may I please sit up?”

  The hand stroked my hair, the fingernails scraping lightly against my scalp. “You may,” he said, sounding startled. He did, however, help me sit up on the bench. I rubbed the crystals from my eyes and looked down at the picture in my hand, aware of how his hand kept caressing my hair. I thought of Lyonette, of the other girls I’d seen from a distance, and I couldn’t say I was surprised.

  Creeped out, but not surprised.

  He stood behind me, the air around him filled with a spicy cologne. Understated, probably pricy. In front of me was a full tattooist’s setup, the inks arrayed on a standing tray. “It won’t be the full design today.”

  “Why do you mark us?”

  “Because a garden must have its butterflies.”

  “Any chance we could leave that metaphorical?”

  He laughed, a full, easy sound. This was a man who loved to laugh and didn’t find as much cause to do it as he’d like, and was therefore always delighted by the opportunity. You learn things over time, and that was one of the biggest things I learned about him. He wanted to find more joy in life than he did. “Small wonder my Lyonette likes you. You are a fierce spirit, much like she is.”
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  I didn’t have an answer to that, nothing that made sense to say.

  He carefully hooked his fingers through my hair, pulling it back over my shoulders, and picked up a brush. He worked it through my hair until there wasn’t a single knot to be found, and even after. I think he enjoyed it as much as anything else, really. It’s a simple pleasure, brushing someone else’s hair. Being allowed to. Eventually he pulled it into a ponytail and wrapped it with an elastic, then coiled it into a heavy bun and secured it with a scrunchie and rubber-tipped pins.

  “Back onto your stomach now, please.”

  I obeyed, and as he moved away I caught a glimpse of pressed khakis and a button-down shirt. He turned my head to face away from him, my cheek pressed against the black leather, and placed my arms loosely at my sides. It wasn’t quite comfortable, but wasn’t direly uncomfortable either. When I steeled myself not to jump or flinch, he lightly slapped my rear. “Relax,” he instructed. “If you tense, it will hurt more and take longer to heal.”

  I took a deep breath and forced my muscles to unclench. I curled and uncurled my fists, and with each uncurl I released a bit more tension from my back. Sophia taught us that, mainly to keep Whitney from her periodic breakdowns, and—

  “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 o
f 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.