The Butterfly Garden

Butterflies are short-lived creatures, and that too was part of her reminder.

His fingertips brushed against the darker veins of brown against the fawn-colored upper wings, stretching as the lines splayed outward into the delicate chevrons. I stood perfectly still despite the goose bumps that crawled down my spine at his tentative exploration. He hadn’t asked, but then, he was his father’s son, I supposed. My eyes closed, my hands curling into fists at my sides, as his fingers moved lower into the bottom wings of roses and purples. He didn’t follow the lines down, but in, toward my spine, until he could run a thumb up the entire length of black ink that ran down the center of my back.

“That’s gorgeous,” he whispered. “Why a butterfly?”

“Ask your father.”

Suddenly his hand was trembling against my skin, against the mark of his father’s ownership. He didn’t move it away, though. “He did this to you?”

I didn’t answer.

“How badly did it hurt?”

What hurt most was lying there letting him do it, but I didn’t say that. I didn’t say that it hurt so fucking badly to see those first lines appear on each new girl’s back, didn’t say that the skin had been so raw I hadn’t slept on my back for weeks, didn’t say that I still couldn’t sleep on my stomach because it made me remember that first rape on the tattoo bench, when he drove himself into me and gave me a new name.

I didn’t say anything.

“Does he . . . does he do this to all of you?” he asked shakily.

I nodded.

“Oh, God.”

Run, I screamed silently. Run and tell the police, or open the doors and let us tell the police ourselves. Just do something—anything—other than stand there!

But he didn’t. He stayed behind me, his hand against the map of ink and scars, until the silence became a living, gasping thing between us. So I was the one to move away, to open the fridge again and pretend there was anything normal about this moment. I pulled out an orange, swung the door closed with my hip, and leaned against the part of the counter that ran perpendicular to the rest. It wasn’t quite an island, but it created a waist-high separation between the kitchen and the dining room.

Desmond tried to join me there but his legs gave out, and he slid to the floor next to my feet, his back against the cabinets. His shoulder brushed against my knee as I methodically peeled the orange. I always tried to get it off in one piece, a perfect spiral. So far I never had. It always broke partway through.

“Why does he do it?”

“Why do you think?”

“Shit.” He brought his knees up and hunched over them, his arms crossed against the back of his head.

I freed the first wedge and sucked it dry, setting the seeds on the peel as I found them.

And the silence grew.

When all the juice was gone from the wedge, I popped the whole thing in my mouth and chewed. Hope used to tease me about how I ate oranges, saying I made boys very uncomfortable. I’d stuck my tongue out at her and told her boys didn’t have to watch. Desmond certainly wasn’t watching, anyway. I moved on to the second wedge, then the third and the fourth.

“Still awake, Maya?” came the Gardener’s light voice from the doorway. “Are you feeling well?”

Desmond looked up, his face pale and stricken, but he didn’t stand or say anything to announce his presence. Sitting on the floor against the cabinets, he wouldn’t be seen unless the Gardener came all the way to the counter and looked straight down. The Gardener never came into the kitchen itself.

“I’m feeling fine,” I answered. “I just decided to get a snack after rinsing off in the falls.”

“And didn’t want to be bothered with clothing?” He laughed and entered the dining room, sitting down in the large, padded chair that was reserved for him. So far as I knew, he’d never seen the rough crown Bliss had scratched into the back. It was vaguely throne-like, I’d given her that, with a deep cushion of dark red velvet and nearly black polished wood rising into ornate scrolls above his head. He pushed it back, one elbow resting on the edge of the table because the chair had no arms.

I shrugged, picking another wedge from the orange. “It seemed a little silly to worry.”

He looked strangely casual, sitting in the shadows wearing nothing but a pair of silky pajama pants. His plain gold wedding band gleamed with fractures of light from the stove. I couldn’t tell if he’d been sleeping in his suite or if he’d been with one of the other girls, though he didn’t generally sleep in our rooms. Unless his wife was out of town, he usually spent at least part of each night in the house I’d never seen, couldn’t see, even from the tallest tree in the Garden. “Come sit with me.”

At my feet, Desmond pressed his fist against his mouth with a pained look.

Leaving the rest of the orange on the counter with the peel and seeds, I obediently came around the counter and crossed into the shadows to join him at his table. I started to lower myself onto the nearest bench, but he pulled me into his lap. One hand stroked along my back and hip, something he did without thinking, while the other clasped one of my hands against my thigh.

“How are the girls reacting to Desmond being here?”

If he’d had any idea how here Desmond was, I doubted we’d be having this conversation.

“They’re . . . wary,” I answered finally. “I think we’re all waiting to see if he’s more like you or Avery.”

“And hoping for?” I slanted him a sideways look and he actually laughed, pressing a kiss against my collarbone. “They’re not afraid of him, surely? Desmond would never hurt anyone.”

“I’m sure they’ll all adjust to his being here.”

“And you, Maya? What do you think of my younger son?”

I almost looked toward the kitchen, but if he didn’t want his father to know he was there, I wouldn’t give him away. “I think he’s confused. He doesn’t really know what to make of all this.” I took a deep breath, gave myself a moment to convince myself that the next question was for Desmond’s sake, to give him another view into the reality of the Garden. “Why the displays?”

“What do you mean?”

“After keeping us, why do you keep us?”

He didn’t answer for a time, his fingers tracing nonsense symbols on my skin. “My father collected butterflies,” he said eventually. “He went hunting for them, and if he couldn’t capture them in good condition he paid others for them, and he pinned them into their display cases while they were still alive. Every one of them had a black velvet background, a little bronze plaque giving its common and proper names, creating a veritable museum of shadowboxes on his office walls. Sometimes he’d hang my mother’s embroidery between the cases. Sometimes they were single butterflies, sometimes entire bouquets, picked out in beautiful colors on the cloth.”

His hand left my thigh and traveled up my back, tracing the wings. He didn’t even have to look at them to know their shapes. “He was happiest in that room, and once he retired he spent almost every day in there. But there was a small electrical fire in that section of the house, and all the butterflies were ruined. Every single one, the collection he’d spent decades acquiring and working on. He was never quite the same after that, and died not long after. I suppose he felt as though his entire life had been burned away in that fire.