The Butterfly Garden (5 page)

One of the nice things about New York was that no one ever asked questions. It’s just one of those places people go to, you know? It’s a dream, it’s a goal, it’s a place you can disappear amidst millions of other people doing the same thing. No one cares where you came from or why you left because they’re too focused on themselves and what they want and where they’re going. New York has so much history, but everyone in it just wants to know about the future. Even when you’re
from
New York City, you can still go to ground somewhere else and they may never find you.

I took the bus to New York with everything I owned in a duffel bag and a suitcase. I found a soup kitchen that didn’t care if I slept in the clinic upstairs as long as I helped serve food, and one of the other volunteers told me about a guy who had just made him papers for his wife, who was an illegal from Venezuela. I called the number he gave me and the next day I was at the library, sitting under a statue of a lion and waiting for a complete stranger to approach me.

He didn’t inspire much confidence when he finally appeared, an hour and a half after we’d agreed. He was average height and skinny, his clothes stiff with salt and other stains I didn’t want to identify. His lank hair was in the process of matting into dreads and he sniffled constantly, his eyes darting around each time before he lifted a sleeve to rub at his cherry red nose. Maybe he was a genius at forgery, but it wasn’t hard to guess where the money went.

He didn’t ask me my name, or rather, he only asked the name I wanted. Birth date, address, license or ID, did I want to be an organ donor? As we talked, we walked into the library to give us an excuse to be quiet, and when he reached a banner with a swath of clean white, he stood me up against it and took my picture. I’d taken extra care before coming to the library to meet him, even bought some makeup, so I knew I could pull off nineteen. It’s about the eyes, really. If you’ve seen enough, you just look older, no matter what the rest of your face looks like.

He told me to meet him at a particular hot dog cart that evening and he’d have what I needed. When we reconvened—he was late again—he held up an envelope. Such a little thing, really, but it’s enough to change a life. He told me it would be a grand, but he’d knock it down to five hundred if I slept with him.

I paid him the grand.

He walked away in one direction and I in another, and when I got back to the hostel where I planned to spend the night—a good ways from the soup kitchen and anyone who might remember a girl being told about illegal papers—I opened the envelope and got my first good look at Inara Morrissey.

“Why didn’t you want to be found?” he asks, using a pen to stir the creamer into his coffee.

“I wasn’t worried about being found; to be found, someone has to be looking for you.”

“Why wouldn’t anyone be looking for you?”

“I miss New York. No one asked these kinds of questions there.”

Static crackles in his ear as one of the techs opens a line. “New York says she got her GED three years ago. Passed with flying colors but never registered for the SAT or asked for the scores to be passed on to a college or employer.”

“Did you drop out of high school?” he asks. “Or did you get your GED so you wouldn’t have to produce a diploma?”

“Now that you have a name, it’s much easier to dig into my life, isn’t it?” She finishes off the cake and sets the plastic fork at a neat angle across the plate, the tines down. Paper crinkles as she tears open one of the sugar packets and empties it into a pile on the plate. Licking the only fingertip not covered in gauze and tape, she presses it against the sugar and sticks it into her mouth. “That only tells you about New York, though.”

“I know, so I need you to tell me about what came before.”

“I liked being Inara.”

“But that isn’t who you are,” he says gently, and anger flashes through her eyes. Gone just as fast as her almost-smiles or her surprise, but there just the same.

“So a rose by any other name isn’t still a rose?”

“That’s language, not identity. Who you are isn’t a name but it is a history, and I need to know yours.”

“Why? My history doesn’t tell you about the Gardener, and isn’t that what it’s really about? The Gardener and his Garden? All his Butterflies?”

“And if he survives to come to trial, we need to provide the jury with credible witnesses. A young woman who won’t even tell the truth about her name doesn’t cut it.”

“It’s just a name.”

“Not if it’s yours.”

That not-quite-smile twists her lips briefly. “Bliss said that.”

“Bliss?”

Lyonette stood outside the tattoo room as ever, her eyes politely averted from me until I could put on the slinky black dress that had become my only piece of clothing. “Close your eyes,” she told me. “Let’s take this in stages.”

I’d kept my eyes closed so long in that room that the thought of being voluntarily blind again made my skin crawl. But Lyonette had done well by me so far, and she’d clearly done this before for other girls. I made the choice to trust her a bit further. Once I closed my eyes, she took my hand and led me down the hall in the opposite direction than we usually went. It was a long hallway, and we turned left at the end of it. I kept my right hand out against the glass walls, my arm flopping free whenever we passed one of the open doorways.

Then she directed me through one of the doorways and positioned me where she wanted with gentle hands on my upper arms. I felt her step back. “Open your eyes.”

She stood in front of me, off-center in a room nearly identical to mine. This one had small personal touches: origami creatures on a shelf above the bed, sheets and blankets and pillows, pumpkin-colored curtains hiding the toilet, sink, and shower from sight. The edge of a book stuck out from under the largest pillow and drawers lined the space under the bed.

“What name did he give you?”

“Maya.” I staved off the shudder that came from saying it aloud for the first time, from the memory of him saying it over and over while he—

“Maya,” she repeated, and gave me another sound to hold on to. “Take a look at yourself now, Maya.” She held up a mirror, positioning it so I could use it to look into another mirror behind me.

Large portions of my back were still pink and raw and swollen around the fresh ink, which I knew was darker than it would become once the scabs flaked off. Fingerprints were visible on my sides where the fabric gapped, but there was nothing to obscure the design. It was ugly, and terrible.

And lovely.

The upper wings were golden-brown, tawny like Lyonette’s hair and eyes, flecked through with bits of black, white, and deep bronze. The lower wings were shades of rose and purple, also marked through with patterns of black and white. The detail was astonishing, slight color variations giving the impressions of individual scales. The colors were rich, almost saturated, and they filled almost my entire back, from the very tips of my shoulders to a little below the curve of my hips. The wings were tall and narrow, the outer edges just barely curving onto my sides.

The artistry couldn’t be denied. Whatever else he was, the Gardener was talented.

I hated it, but it
was
lovely.

A head popped through the doorway, quickly followed by the rest of a tiny girl. She couldn’t have topped five feet with her shoulders back, but no one could see those curves and think her a child. She had flawless, frosty-white skin and huge blue-violet eyes, framed by a haphazardly pinned profusion of tight black curls. She was all striking contrasts, with a button nose that leaned toward cute rather than beautiful, but like all the girls I’d glimpsed in the Garden, she was nothing less than stunning.

Beauty loses its meaning when you’re surrounded by too much of it.

“So, this is the new girl.” She flopped down on the bed, hugging a small pillow to her chest. “What’d the bastard name you?”

“He might hear you,” Lyonette chided, but the girl on the bed just shrugged.

“Let him. He’s never asked us to love him. So what’s he call you?”

“Maya,” I said in time with Lyonette, and the word got a little less hard to hear. I wondered if it would continue to be that way, if in time the word wouldn’t hurt at all, or if it was a tiny shard that always would, like the piece of a splinter you can’t reach with tweezers.

“Huh, that’s not too bad then. Fucker named me Bliss.” She rolled her eyes and snorted. “Bliss! Do I look like a blissful person? Ooh, let’s see.” Her fingers made a twirling motion, and in that moment, she reminded me a little of Hope. With that in mind, I slowly spun to show her my back. “Not too bad. The colors flatter you, anyway. We’ll have to look up what kind that is.”

“It’s a Western Pine Elfin,” Lyonette sighed. She shrugged at my sideways look. “It’s something to do. Maybe it makes it a little less awful. I’m a Lustrous Copper.”

“I’m a Mexican Bluewing,” added Bliss. “It’s pretty enough. Awful, of course, but it’s not like I have to look at it. Anyway, the name thing? He could call us A, B, or Three and it wouldn’t matter. Answer to it but don’t pretend it’s somehow yours. Less confusing that way.”

“
Less
confusing?”

“Well sure! Remember who you are and then it’s just playing a part. If you start to think of it as you, that’s when the identity crisis hits. Identity crisis usually leads to a breakdown, and a breakdown around here leads to—”

“Bliss.”

“What? She seems like she can handle it. She isn’t crying yet, and we all know what he does when the ink is finished.”

Like Hope, but much smarter.

“So what does a breakdown lead to?”

“Check the hallways, just don’t do it after you eat.”

“You’d just walked through the hallways,” Victor reminds her.

“With my eyes closed.”

“Then what was in the hallway?”

She swirls the remainder of the coffee in her mug rather than answer, giving him a look that suggests he should already know.

Static crackles in his ear again. “Ramirez just called from the hospital,” Eddison says. “She’s sending pictures of those the doctors expect to make it. Missing Persons has had some luck. Between them and the ones fresh in the morgue, they’ve got about half the girls identified. And we have a problem.”

“What kind of problem?”

The girl looks at him sharply.

“One of the girls they identified has some important family. She’s still calling herself Ravenna, but her fingerprints matched to Patrice Kingsley.”

“As in Senator Kingsley’s missing daughter?”

Inara settles back in her chair, her expression clearly amused. Victor isn’t sure what she finds funny about what promises to be a hell of a complication.

“Has the senator been informed yet?” he asks.

“Not yet,” answers Eddison. “Ramirez wanted to give us a heads-up first. Senator Kingsley has been desperate to find her daughter, Vic; there isn’t a chance in hell she won’t push into the investigation.”

And when that happens, any privacy they may be able to offer these girls will be out the window. Their faces will be plastered on every news network from here to the West Coast. And Inara . . . Victor rubs wearily at his eyes. If the senator learns they have any suspicions about this overly contained young woman, she won’t rest until charges are filed.