The Butterfly Garden

“I think your wife is sick.” I rarely lied to the Gardener; the truth was the one thing that could always be mine. “I think she’s scared of Avery and doesn’t want to show it, and I think she dotes on your younger boy. I think she treasures those walks with you as the only time she has your undivided attention.”

“All that from a stand of trees?” Thank God, he looked more amused than anything. He settled his back more comfortably against the headboard, one arm bent behind him to act as a cushion for his head.

“Am I wrong?”

“No.” He looked down at the girl in his lap, then back at me. “She’s been struggling for years against a heart condition. It isn’t severe enough that she qualifies for a transplant, but it causes a significant drop in quality of life.”

So his wife was a kind of butterfly too. “That’s one.”

“And she does dote on our younger son. She’s quite proud of him. He keeps perfect grades, is always polite, and is a treat to hear on the piano and violin.”

“That’s two.”

“Between the Garden and my business, and her own charitable functions and planning, our schedules are often in conflict. We both make time for our afternoon walks unless we’re out of town. It’s good for her heart.”

“That’s three.”

And all that was left was the hard one, the one no parent wants to admit.

So he didn’t. He left it unsaid, and in the silence there was truth.

“You pay a great deal of attention to things, don’t you, Maya? To people, to patterns, to events. You find more meaning than others.”

“I pay attention,” I agreed. “I don’t know that I find more meaning.”

“You observed a walk in a greenhouse and made it mean all that.”

“I didn’t make it mean anything. I just noticed body language.”

Body language was one of the things that told me my next-door neighbor was a pedophile long before the first time he exposed himself, long before the first time he touched me or asked me to touch him. It was in the way he watched me and the other kids in the neighborhood, in the bruised looks of the foster kids who lived with him. I was prepared for his advances because I knew they’d be coming. Body language warned me about Gran’s lawn guy, about the kids in school who would try to beat you up just because they could. Body language was better than a flashing light for warnings.

And body language told me that as much as he wanted to seem perfectly relaxed right now, he couldn’t.

“I don’t intend to tell anyone, you know.”

There it was. Not all of the tension left his body, but most of it. Except when his lust got the better of him, he was a remarkably self-contained man.

“We don’t know about them . . . and they don’t know about us, do they?”

“No,” he whispered. “Some things . . .” He never did finish that thought, not out loud at least. “I would never willingly hurt Eleanor.”

I didn’t know his name, but now I knew his wife’s.

“And your son?”

“Desmond?” He actually seemed surprised for a moment, then shook his head. “Desmond is very different from Avery.”

Even then, all I could think was Thank God.

He lifted the girl’s head from his lap and eased off the bed, extending his hand to me. “I’d like to ask you something, if I may.”

I wasn’t sure why asking me something would involve moving, but I obediently stood and took his hand, leaving the book on the stool. The girl wouldn’t be awake until morning, so I wasn’t strictly needed at her bedside. He walked us through the hallways, absently touching each occupied display case as he passed. If I’d had a mind to, I could have asked him to name them, and he could have. Every single name, every single Butterfly, he knew and remembered them all.

I never wanted to know.

I thought he was taking me to my room, but he turned aside at the last moment and led us into the cave behind the waterfall. Except for the moonlight that filtered through the glass roof of the greenhouse and fractured through the falling water, the cave was completely dark.

Oh, and the blinking red eye of the camera.

We stood in silence in the darkness, listening to the waterfall hit the stream and the decorative rocks. Pia, who’d been there about a year longer than I had, had a theory that there were pipes in the bottom of the pond that kept the water at a certain level by draining it and funneling it through another pipe way up to the tiny pond atop the cliff that fed into the waterfall. She was probably right. Given that I couldn’t swim, I never tried to go down to the bottom of the pond to see for sure. Pia liked to poke at things and figure out how they worked. When the walls came up to reveal Johanna in glass, Pia went to the pond, and said there were sensors along the edge now.

“I’ve wondered about what draws you to this place,” he said after a time. “The cliff top I can almost understand. It’s open, it’s free, the height gives you a sense of safety. But this place . . . what can this cave offer you?”

The ability to say whatever the fuck I want to without worrying about reprisals, because the roaring of the waterfall was strong enough to obscure whatever the mics might pick up.

But he was looking for something more personal than that, something with the meaning he thought I gave everything. It took me a minute or two to come up with that answer for him, something close enough to truth. “There’s no illusion in here,” I said finally. “It’s not lush and green and growing and waiting for death and the possibility of decay. It’s just rock and water.”

Here the girls and I sat face-to-face and knee to knee, and it was usually easy to pretend there were no Butterflies. The suck-ups had the wings marked around their eyes like Carnevale masks, but even then, in the misty dimness of the cave, it was easy to think it a trick of the shadows. We’d take our hair down, put our backs against the rocks, and there were no fucking Butterflies. Just for a few moments.

So perhaps there was illusion in here after all, but it was our illusion, not one he’d manufactured for us.

He dropped my hand and then he was pulling out all the pins that kept my hair up in its braided crown, until it fell in a crimped mass to my hips. Hiding the wings. It was the one thing he never did, unless he was brushing it out. But he just left it down around me, tucking the pins into the breast pocket of his shirt.

“You are quite unlike any of the others,” he said eventually.

Not entirely true. I had a temper like Bliss, only I didn’t let it go. I had impatience like Lyonette, which I did my best to spread out. I read like Zara, ran like Glenys, danced like Ravenna, and braided hair like Hailee. I had bits and pieces of most of the others in me, save for Evita’s sweet simplicity.

The only thing that made me truly different was that I was the only one who never cried.

Who never could.

Fucking carousel.

“You put requests for books on the lists but never overtly ask for anything. You assist the other girls, you listen to them, calm them. You keep their secrets, and apparently mine as well, but you give no one else secrets to keep for you.”

“My secrets are old friends; I would feel like a poor friend if I abandoned them now.”

His low chuckle echoed around the chamber before the waterfall swallowed the sound. “I’m not asking you to share them, Maya; your life before is your own.”

She gives Eddison a pointed look, and Victor can’t help but laugh. “I’m not going to apologize,” Eddison tells her bluntly. “This is my job, and we have to know the truth to put together a strong case against him. The doctors are fairly confident he’ll survive to stand trial.”

“Pity.”

“A trial means justice,” he snaps.

“In a sense, sure.”

“In a sense? It—”

“Does ‘justice’ change any of what he did? Any of what we went through? Does it bring the girls in glass back to life?”

“Well, no, but it keeps him from doing it again.”

“So would his death, and without the sensationalism and tax money.”

“Back to the waterfall,” Victor announces over the beginning of Eddison’s protest.

“Spoilsport,” mutters the girl.