The Butterfly Garden

“Keely, this place is called the Garden. There’s a man and his two sons who take us and keep us here. They make sure we have food and clothing, that we have what we need, but they don’t let us go. I am so sorry that you were kidnapped and brought here, but I can’t change that. I can’t promise that you’ll ever see your home or family again.”

She sniffled and I slid my arm around her shoulders, hugging her against my side.

“I know it’s hard. I’m not just saying that, I really do know. But I promise you that I will take care of you. I won’t let them hurt you. Those of us who are kept here form a kind of family. We argue sometimes, and we don’t always like each other, but we’re a family, and family looks out for each other.”

Bliss gave me a crooked smile; even though she didn’t know much, she knew that wasn’t how I’d been raised.

But I’d gotten a taste of that in the apartment, and I’d learned the rest of it here. We were a fucked-up family, but a family nonetheless.

Keely looked at Danelle and shrank against me. “Why does she have a tattoo on her face?” she whispered.

Danelle knelt down in front of the bed, taking both of Keely’s hands in hers. “This is another thing you have to be brave for,” she said gently. “Do you want to hear it now, or do you want to wait for a little bit?”

Biting her lip, the child gave me an uncertain look.

“It’s your choice,” I told her. “Now or later, you can choose. If it makes it easier, I promise that it’s not going to happen to you.”

With a deep, shaky breath, she nodded. “Now then.”

“The man who keeps us? We call him the Gardener,” Danelle said simply. “He likes to think of us as Butterflies in his Garden, and he tattoos wings on our backs because it helps him pretend. When I was first brought here, I thought that if I made him like me more than anyone else, he’d let me go and I could go home. I was wrong, but I didn’t learn that quickly enough, and he did the wings on my face to show others that he thought I was happy with what he did.”

Keely looked up at me again. “You have wings too?”

“On my back, yes.”

Her eyes flicked over to Bliss, who nodded. “But you won’t let him do that to me?”

“I won’t let him touch you at all.”

We took her out into the Garden in the early afternoon, Bliss going ahead of us to warn the other girls. Normally most of the others stayed away from the new girl until she was settled. Keely was different. Singly or in pairs, as nonthreateningly as possible, every girl but Sirvat came to say hello, to introduce herself, and, maybe most importantly, to promise that they’d help protect her. I was okay with Sirvat absenting herself from that.

Marenka knelt down and let Keely trace the white, browns, and black of the wings on her face so she wouldn’t be scared anymore. “I’m going to move my things so you’ll be right next to Maya,” she told her. “That way if you get scared or don’t want to be alone, you won’t have to worry about getting lost. You’ll be right next to her.”

“Th-thank you,” she managed.

Lorraine roused herself enough to put together a cold lunch for us, though she was crying the entire time. I wanted to believe that maybe she’d finally realized just what the Gardener was, that she was horrified that a child so young had been taken, that she was mortified over how she’d been mooning and jealous of dead girls. I really wanted to believe that little bit of good of her. I didn’t, though. I didn’t know why she was so shocked and upset, but I didn’t think it was for anyone’s situation but hers. Maybe buying the wig—or, more likely, Bliss not getting in trouble for the attack—finally made her realize that the Gardener was never going to love her again.

We took our lunches up on the cliff, where the sun was warm and the space around us open. Keely still didn’t have much of an appetite, but she ate to humor us. Then she saw Desmond walking up the path and she buried herself against me. Bliss and Danelle moved in close, as well, protecting her from all sides.

Desmond wasn’t the threat, but he was a male. I understood the impulse.

He stopped a safe distance away, kneeling down on the rock and spreading his arms wide. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he said quietly. “I’m not going to touch you, or even come any closer than this.”

I shook my head. “Why are you here?”

“To ask her name and where she came from, so I can do what’s right.”

I started to scoot off the rock, but Keely’s arms tightened around my waist. “It’s okay,” I whispered, hugging her close. “I’m just going to go talk to him. You can stay right here with Bliss and Danelle.”

“What if he hurts you?” she whimpered.

“He won’t. This one doesn’t. I’ll be right back. You’ll see me the whole time.”

She slowly released me to transfer her grip to Danelle. Bliss was soft and curvy, but she was not cuddly.

I walked past Desmond to the very edge of the cliff and, after a moment, he followed me. He stood a foot or so away, shoving his hands deep in his pockets. “What are you doing?”

“What’s right,” he answered. “I’m calling the police, but I need to know her name. There’s got to be an AMBER Alert out for her.”

“Why now? You’ve known about the Garden for six months now.”

“How old is she?”

I glanced back at her over my shoulder. “She and her friends were hanging out at the mall to celebrate her twelfth birthday.”

He swore and studied his feet, the toes of his shoes a little over the edge of the rock. “I’ve been trying so hard to convince myself that my father is telling the truth, that even if you’re not here by choice you at least came from something he could rescue you from.”

And still, in the face of this twelve-year-old girl, he was deluding himself.

“The streets, maybe, or bad families,” he continued. “Something that made this just a little bit better, but I can’t . . . I know it was Avery who took her, not Father, but this has to stop. You’re right: I am a coward. And I am selfish, because I don’t want to hurt my family, and I don’t want to go to jail, but that girl is . . .” He stopped, panting with the force of his words and the tangle of emotion behind them. “I kept telling myself that I needed to learn to be braver, and Jesus, what a stupid thing to think. You don’t learn to be brave. You just have to do what’s right, even if it scares you. So I’m calling the police with as many names as I know and telling them about the Garden.”

“You’re really calling?” I asked.

He flashed me an angry look.

“Yes, I’m asking, because I can’t go tell that girl that help is on the way if you’re going to back out or bury your head back in the sand. Are you really doing this?”

He took a deep breath. “Yes. I’m really doing this.”

I reached out and lightly touched his cheek to bring his eyes to mine. “Her name is Keely Rudolph, and she lives in Sharpsburg.”

“Thank you.” He turned to walk away, then stopped, walked back, and pulled me into a searing kiss.

And then walked away without another word.

I returned to the rock. “We need to stay in my room for the rest of today,” I told the girls. “Go ahead without me, I’m just going to tell everyone else.”

“Do you really think he’s going to do it?” Bliss asked.

“I think he’s finally going to try, and God help him if it doesn’t work. Go, quickly.”

It was like the ultimate game of hide-and-seek, tracking down each girl and telling her to stay in her room. I didn’t care if they were in their own rooms, just that they were out of the Garden proper, because as soon as the Gardener learned about that call the walls were coming down, and I didn’t even want to think about what would happen to any girl he found outside of them. Every word was whispered because I didn’t know how strong the mics were and didn’t know if the Gardener had already heard what his son intended.