The Butterfly Garden

“Ask me for one thing, Maya.”

There was a challenge in his eyes, layered through his voice. He expected me to ask for something impossible, like freedom. Or maybe he expected me to be like Lorraine, to ask for something that could have gotten me out of the Garden but wasn’t freedom at all.

I knew better than that. Like throwing away well-intentioned phone numbers, I knew better than to ask for things I clearly couldn’t have.

“Can this one camera be disabled without another one going up in its place?” I asked promptly, and watched shock pass across his shadowed face. “No cameras, no mics?”

“That’s it?”

“It would be nice to have one place that’s genuinely private,” I explained with a shrug. It almost felt strange to have my hair shifting across my back and shoulders with the gesture. “You can see us everywhere else we go, even watch us on the toilet if you had a wish to. Having just a single place devoid of cameras would be beneficial. A mental-health exercise, in a way.”

He watched me for a long time before answering. “Something that benefits all of you.”

“Yes.”

“I tell you to ask for anything, and you ask for something that benefits all of you.”

“It benefits me too.”

He laughed again and reached for me, pulling me against his chest so he could kiss me. His hands moved over the fastenings of my dress, and as he lowered me to the mist-damp stone, I closed my eyes and let my thoughts drift off to Annabel Lee and her grave in the kingdom by the sea.

I didn’t think angels would ever be jealous of me.

It’s astonishing how much of a question she can answer without ever actually answering the question. There’s a small, inappropriate part of Victor that would love to put her on the stand right now and watch both sets of lawyers tear their hair out in frustration. Even when she seems forthcoming, her answers almost always veer sideways, providing something like substance without giving away the heart. Ask about the boy and she starts there, or seems to, and somehow it ends in a completely different conversation, and the boy is barely glimpsed. Yes, the lawyers will hate her come trial. He shoves the impulse aside and takes the picture of the boy from its stack, setting it on the table so she can see it right-side up.

She looks away at first, eyes flicking to the mirror, to the floor, to her burned and cut-up hands, before a sigh shudders through her body and she turns her face to the photo. She lifts it gently by the edges, studying the unenhanced blowup from his driver’s license. The glossy paper trembles in her grasp, but no one mentions that.

“You get used to things in the Garden,” she says pensively. “Even the new girls coming in are something you just get used to, something you expect when another one dies. And then, suddenly, everything changes.”

“When?”

“Just shy of six months ago. A few days after Evita died.”

Maybe it was that Evita was one of those people you couldn’t help but love. Maybe it was that her death was an accident, nothing we could have prepared for. Maybe it was the Gardener’s reaction, the openness of it.

Whatever it was, the Garden stank of despair in the days following Evita’s accident. Most of the girls kept to their rooms, and Lorraine had to put all the meals on trays and bring them to us, and God, didn’t that piss her off to no end. Of course, she was in a mood same as the rest of us, though for a different reason. We mourned Evita. She mourned another filled display case that didn’t include her.

Sick fuck.

I left my room at night, unable to bear the four walls and silence. We weren’t coming into a weekend, so I didn’t have to worry about maintenance or the solid walls coming down. There wasn’t a reason in the world I couldn’t spend the night wandering around. Sometimes the illusion of freedom, of choice, was more painful than captivity.

It’s not like the Gardener couldn’t find me if he wanted me, though he was with someone else.

At night the Garden was mostly silent. There was the waterfall, of course, and the babble of the stream, the hum of machinery and moving air, and the muffled sound of girls crying from scattered points on the perimeter, but compared to the day, it was close enough to silent. I took my book and book light up the cliff to sit on one of the large rocks. I called it the sunbathing rock.

Bliss called it Pride Rock, and laughed when I dared her to find a lion to dangle off the edge.

She made one from polymer clay, and when I’d managed to start breathing again from laughing so hard, she gave him to me. He lived on the shelf above my bed, along with the other things most precious to me. I guess he’s there still, or was, until . . .

Bliss joined me up on the cliff around midnight, tossing me a figurine. I held it under the book light to discover a dragon curled around itself. It was dark blue, his head hunched into his shoulders, and somehow the shape of the brow ridge over huge black eyes gave him the most pathetic look a clay figure could possibly have. “Why is he so sad?”

She glared at me.

Right.

The dragon’s home was next to Simba, and where the lion was just a joke, the dragon actually came to mean something.

But that day he was new and sad, and Bliss was angry and sad, so I rested him on my knee and went back to reading Antigone until she felt up to saying something.

“If my room is intact, do you think there’s a chance of my getting the figures back? And the origami menagerie? And the . . . well, all of it, really.”

“We can ask,” Victor hedges, and she sighs.

“Why Antigone?” Eddison asks.

“I always thought she was pretty cool. She’s strong and brave and resourceful, not above a certain level of emotional manipulation, and she dies, but on her own terms. She’s sentenced to live out the rest of her days in a tomb and she says fuck that, I’m going to hang myself. And then there’s her betrothed, who loves her so much that he flips his shit at her death and tries to kill his own father. And then, of course, he dies too, because come on, it’s a Greek tragedy, and the Greeks and Shakespeare really love killing people off. It’s a great lesson, really. Everyone dies.” She lays the photo down and covers the boy’s face with her hands. Victor can’t be sure she even realizes she’s done it. “But I might have picked something else if I’d known Bliss was going to join me.”

“Oh?”

“It seemed to inspire her.”

She paced around me as I read, snatching leaves off plants and shredding them as she walked until you could follow her progress by the slaughter of green bits on the rock. She snarled and swore with every step, so I didn’t bother to look up until she fell silent.

She stood on the very edge of the false cliff, her toes curled over the rock, with her arms spread wide beside her. Her pale skin glowed in the moonlight where it showed through the gaps in her knee-length black dress. “I could jump,” she whispered.

“But you won’t.”

“I could,” she insisted, and I shook my head.

“But you won’t.”

“I will!”

“No, you won’t.”

“And why the fuck not?” she demanded, spinning to face me with her fists planted on her hips.

“Because you can’t guarantee that you would die, and if you were injured, it might not be badly enough for him to kill you. It’s not that high a fall.”

“Evita fell from lower.”

“Evita broke her neck on a tree branch. You have luck like mine; if you tried, you’d fuck it up and be fine except for a few bruises.”

“Godfuckingdammit!” She flopped beside me on the stone, her face buried in her arms as she wept. Bliss had been there three months longer than I had. Twenty-one months, for her. “Why isn’t there a better option?”

“Johanna drowned herself. Think that’s less painful than an uncertain fall?”