The Butterfly Garden

She didn’t show anyone what she was working on and none of us asked, letting her work through her grief in her own way. She was unusually focused on this project. Honestly, as long as it wasn’t a Lustrous Copper figurine, I wasn’t too worried. She’d done that for a few of the other dead girls and somehow I found those two-inch-tall butterflies more macabre and disturbing than the girls in the glass.

But then the new girl’s infection reached a critical point—her tattoo was never going to heal properly. Even if the infection didn’t kill her, the wings would be hopelessly flawed, and that was something the Gardener couldn’t accept. Not when beauty was why he chose us.

The doors had come down in the dark hours of earliest morning, like they would have for her normal tattoo session, but when they came up, she wasn’t in the tattoo room or her bed. She never appeared in the display cases. There was no goodbye.

There was just . . . nothing.

There was literally nothing left of her, not even a name.

Bliss was in my room when I came back from looking, sitting cross-legged on my bed with a wrap skirt draped over a bundle in her lap. Dark shadows bruised the pale skin under her eyes and I wondered how much she’d slept since Lyonette had said goodbye to us.

I sank down next to her on the bed, one leg curled under my body, and leaned my back against the wall.

“Is she dead?”

“If not, she soon will be,” I sighed.

“And then you’ll sit through another new girl’s arrival and tattoos.”

“Probably.”

“Why?”

I’d wondered that myself over the past week or so. “Because Lyonette thought it was important.”

She pulled the fabric away from her lap, and there was the carousel.

Lyonette had made another origami carousel when she came to the Garden; it had been sitting on the shelf above Bliss’s bed since her death. She’d reproduced all the patterns and designs and colors, and so had Bliss in her own medium. The golden poles even had the spiral ridges. I reached out and nudged the red pennant on top and the whole thing spun just a little.

“I had to make it,” she whispered, “but I can’t keep it.”

Bliss broke into furious, heartbroken sobs on my bed. She didn’t know about my carousel. She didn’t know that I’d sat on a black-and-red painted horse and finally understood that my parents didn’t love me, or at least didn’t love me nearly enough. The day I finally understood—and accepted—that I wasn’t wanted.

I lifted it gently out of her lap and nudged her knee with my toe. “Shower.”

She hiccupped and slid off the bed to obey, and while she washed away two weeks of grief and rage, I studied the horses to see if any of them matched the one that I’d splashed with the last of my tears ten years before.

And the answer was almost. This horse had silver chasings instead of gold, and it had red ribbons tied into its black mane, but otherwise they were very, very close. I shifted onto my knees and placed it on the shelf next to Simba, next to the origami menagerie and the other polymer figures, next to the rocks Evita had painted and the poem Danelle had written and all the other things I’d somehow managed to accumulate after six months in the Garden. I wondered if I could have Bliss make a tiny girl with dark hair and golden skin to sit on that black-and-red horse and spin and spin and spin on the carousel and watch all the rest of the world walk away from her.

But if I’d asked, she would have asked why, and that little girl didn’t need the sympathy so much as she needed to just finally be forgotten.

Bliss came out of the shower, body and hair wrapped in violet and rose towels, and finally slept curled against me like one of Sophia’s girls. I kept one arm behind my head and I stayed against the wall, and every now and then I reached out and gave the carousel a little nudge so I could watch the black-and-red horse glide just a little farther away.

He wishes he could let her have that distraction. Let the conversation derail, let her avoid the train wreck he has to put her through.

But Victor sits forward in his chair and clears his throat, and when she turns her miserable eyes on him, he nods slowly.

She sighs and folds her hands in her lap.

For the next week, Desmond stayed out of the Garden completely. He didn’t use his codes, didn’t come in with his father, he just stayed away. Bliss was the one to ask the Gardener about it, in her usual appallingly blunt fashion, but he laughed and said not to worry, his son was just focusing on his upcoming finals.

I was okay with that.

Whether he was hiding, staying away, or just thinking through things, I didn’t mind the absence of another male to entertain. I appreciated the space to think.

Avery was back in the Garden, after all, which meant a constant, subtle interference had to be played to protect the more fragile girls from his interest. Running it all from Simone’s bedside just made it more difficult.

She’d noticeably lost weight in the past week and a half, unable to keep anything down longer than a half hour or so. During the days, I stayed with her, and during the nights, when Danelle came to relieve me, I went into the Garden and slept out on the sun rock, where I could pretend the walls weren’t closing in and time wasn’t running out.

I liked Simone. She was funny and wry, never buying into the bullshit but making the best of it anyway. I helped her back into bed from another toilet dive and she clutched my hand. “I’m going to have to take a test, aren’t I?”

Bliss said Lorraine had stayed at breakfast, asking questions. “Yes,” I answered slowly. “I think you will.”

“It’ll come up positive, won’t it?”

“I think so.”

She closed her eyes, one hand pulling away the sweat-damp hair from her forehead. “I should have realized sooner. I saw both my mom and my oldest sister go through pregnancies and they were sick for two months solid.”

“Want me to pee on the stick for you?”

“What the hell is wrong with us that that is a declaration of love and friendship?” But she shook her head slowly. “I don’t want us both dead, which we both know would be the result.”

We sat in silence for a while, because some things just don’t have an answer.

“Can you do me a favor?” she asked eventually.

“What do you need?”

“If we have the book in the library, can you read it to me?”

When she told me what she wanted, I almost laughed. Almost. Not because it was funny but because I was relieved that this was one thing I could do for her. I retrieved it from the library, settled next to her on the bed with her hand in mine, and opened the book to the proper page so I could start to read.

“Most terribly cold it was; it snowed, and was nearly quite dark, and evening—the last evening of the year. In this cold and darkness there went along the street a poor little girl, bareheaded, and with naked feet.”

“What book is that?”

“Part of a book,” the girl corrects. “It’s ‘The Little Match Girl’ by Hans Christian Andersen.”

Victor can almost remember it, something from a ballet his daughter Brittany did when she was much younger, but it’s lost to memories of The Nutcracker and The Steadfast Tin Soldier.

“It’s the kind of story that makes more sense in the Garden than in the real world.”

I went on to other stories when that one was done, but fell silent when Lorraine walked in. She had a tray with two lunches on it and sitting between them was a pregnancy test kit.

“I have to be here when you take it,” she said.

“No shit.”

Sighing, Simone sat up against the headboard and reached for her glass of water, downing it all in one go. I handed her another glass off the tray, this one of fruit juice, and she drank it down as well. She made a good attempt at lunch, which was just soup and toast, but most of it went untouched. When the water finally got through her system, she grabbed the kit off the tray, stalked to her little toilet, and tugged the curtain to conceal herself.

Lorraine hovered in the doorway like a vulture, her shoulders hunched and her eyes on the fabric screen.

Simone leaned forward to catch my eye, then jerked her head toward the bitch in the doorway. Nodding, I took a deep breath and started reading “The Steadfast Tin Soldier.”