The Butterfly Garden (6 page)

“Tell Ramirez to hold off as long as she can,” he says finally. “We need time.”

“Roger.”

“Remind me how long she’s been missing?”

“Four and a half years.”

“Four and a half
years
?”

“Ravenna,” Inara murmurs, and Victor stares at her. “No one ever forgets how long they’ve been there.”

“Why not?”

“It changes things, doesn’t it? Having a senator involved.”

“It changes things for you, as well.”

“Of course it does. How could it not?”

She knows, he realizes uneasily. Maybe she doesn’t know specifics, but she knows they suspect her of some kind of involvement. He measures the amusement in her eyes, the cynical twist to her mouth. She’s a little too comfortable with this new information.

Time to change the subject, then, before he loses the power in the room. “You said the girls in the apartment were your first friends.”

She shifts slightly in her seat. “That’s right,” she answers warily.

“Why is that?”

“Because I hadn’t had any before.”

“Inara.”

She responds to that tone of voice the same way his daughters do—instinctively, grudgingly when she realizes it a moment too late, and just a bit sulky. “You’re good at that. You have kids?”

“Three girls.”

“And yet you make a career in broken children.”

“In trying to rescue broken children,” he corrects. “In trying to get justice for broken children.”

“You really think broken children care about justice?”

“Wouldn’t you?”

“Never really did, no. Justice is a faulty thing at the best of times, and it doesn’t actually fix anything.”

“Would you say that if you’d gotten justice as a child?”

That not-quite-smile, bitter and gone too fast. “And what would I have needed justice for?”

“My life’s work, and you think I won’t recognize a broken child when she sits in front of me?”

She inclines her head to concede the point, then bites her lip and winces. “Not entirely accurate. Let’s call me a shadow child, overlooked rather than broken. I’m the teddy bear gathering dust bunnies under the bed, not the one-legged soldier.”

He smiles slightly and sips his rapidly cooling coffee. She’s back to dancing. However disconcerting Eddison might find it, Victor’s on familiar ground. “In what way?”

Sometimes you can look at a wedding and realize with a certain sense of resignation that any children produced in that marriage will inevitably be fucked up and fucked over. It’s a fact, not a sense of foreboding so much as a grim acceptance that these two people should not—but definitely will—reproduce.

Like my parents.

My mother was twenty-two when she married my father; he was her third marriage. The first was when she was seventeen and married the brother of her mother’s then-current husband. He died in less than a year from a heart attack during sex. He left her pretty well off, so a few months later, she married a man only fifteen years older than her, and when they divorced a year later, she came off even a little better. Then came my dad, and if he hadn’t knocked her up, I doubt the wedding would have happened. He was good-looking, but he wasn’t wealthy and he didn’t have prospects and he was only two years older, which to my mother was an insurmountable series of obstacles.

For that we can thank
her
mother, who had nine husbands before early menopause made her decide she was too dried up to remarry. And every single one of them died, each faster than the one before. No foul play about it, either. Just . . . died. Most of them were ancient, of course, and all of them left her with a tidy sum of money, but my mother was raised with certain expectations and her third husband met none of them.

I will say this for them, though: they gave it a try. For the first couple of years we lived near his family and there were cousins and aunts and uncles and I can almost remember playing with other children. Then we moved, and the ties were cut from one end or the other, and it was just me and my parents and their various affairs. They were always either visiting their latest lovers or holing up in their bedrooms, so I became a pretty self-sufficient kid. I learned how to use the microwave, I memorized the bus schedule so I could get to the grocery store, I staked out the days of the week when either of my parents were likely to have cash in their wallets so I could actually buy things at the market.

And you’d think that would look strange, right? But whenever anyone at the store asked—a concerned woman, a cashier—I’d say my mom was out in the car with the baby, keeping the air running. Even in winter they believed that, and they’d smile and tell me what a wonderful daughter and sister I was.

So not only was I self-sufficient, I came to have a pretty low opinion of most people’s intelligence.

I was six when they decided to give marriage counseling a go. Not a try, a go. Someone at my dad’s office told him insurance would cover counseling, and counseling looked better with a judge and helped speed up a divorce. One of the things the counselor told them to do was take a family trip, just the three of us, somewhere fun and special. A theme park maybe.

We got to the park around ten, and for the first couple of hours things went okay. Then the carousel. I fucking hate carousels. My dad stood at the exit to wait for me to come off, my mom stood at the entrance to help me get on, and they just stood there on opposite sides of the thing and watched me go round and round in circles. I was too small to reach for the iron rings and the horse I was on was so wide it made my hips hurt, but round and round and round I went, and I watched my father walk away with a petite Latina. Another time around and I saw my mother leave with a tall, laughing ginger in a Utilikilt.

A nice older kid helped me down off the horse after he lifted his little sister down, and held my hand as we walked to the exit. I wanted to stay with that family, to be the little sister of someone who went on rides with you and held your hand while walking, someone who smiled down and asked if you had fun. But we got outside the carousel and I thanked him, waving at a woman paying attention to nothing but her cell phone so the boy thought I’d found my mom, and I watched him and his sister walk back to parents who were delighted to see them.

I spent the rest of the day wandering around the park, trying not to get noticed by security, but sunset came and the park closed and I still hadn’t found either of my parents. Security noticed and hauled me off to the Hall of Shame. Well, they called it the Lost Parents Place. They cycled a list of calls over the PA system, asking parents missing their children to come claim them. There were others there, too, other kids who’d been forgotten or just wandered away or had been hiding.

Then I heard one of the adults mention child services. Specifically she mentioned calling child services for anyone who wasn’t claimed before ten o’clock. My next-door neighbors were a foster home and the thought of living with people like them was horrific. Fortunately, one of the younger kids pissed himself and sent up such a squall that all the adults started fussing over him, trying to calm him, and I managed to sneak out the door and back into the park.

It took some searching, but I finally found the main gate and got out without being seen, attaching myself to the rear of a school group that had gotten stuck for a while on one of the rides, and out into the parking lot. From there it took over an hour for me to walk through all the parking lots to a gas station that was still brightly lit for all the folks heading home. I still had most of the snack money my dad had shoved in my pocket before the carousel so I called their cell phones, and then I called the house phone, and then because I couldn’t think of anything else to do, I called my next-door neighbor.

It was almost ten o’clock at night, but he hopped in the car and drove two hours to come pick me up, and another two hours home, and there were no lights on at all in my house.

“Was this the neighbor who was a foster father?” Victor asks when she pauses to lick her chapped lips. He reaches for the empty bottle of water and holds it up toward the one-way mirror, not putting it down until one of the techs says Eddison is on his way.

“Yes.”

“But he got you safely home, so why was the thought of living with him so horrific?”

“When we pulled up in front of his house, he told me I needed to thank him for the ride by licking his lollipop.”

The plastic bottle shrieks a protest as it crumples in his fist. “Christ.”

“When he pulled my head toward his lap, I stuck a finger down my throat, and made myself throw up all over him. Made sure to hit the horn, too, so his wife would come out.” She opens another sugar packet and tips half of it into her mouth. “He got arrested for molestation a month or so later, and she moved away.”

The door slams open and Eddison tosses a new bottle of water at the girl. Protocol says they’re supposed to remove the cap for them—choking hazard—but his other hand is occupied with a sheaf of photo papers that he drops onto the table, along with the bag of IDs in the crook of his elbow. “By not telling us the truth,” he snarls, “you’re protecting the man who did this.”

Inara was right; it is different seeing it than just reading about it. Victor lets out a slow breath, using it to push down the instinctive revulsion. He shifts the first picture off the pile, then the second, the third, the fourth, all depicting portions of the hallways in the ruined garden complex.

She stops him at the seventh one, easing the paper away so she can look at it more closely. When she sets it back down on top, her finger pets a tawny curve near the center of the image. “That’s Lyonette.”

“Your friend?”

Her bandaged finger gently moves along the line of glass in the picture. “Yeah,” she whispers. “She was.”

Birthdays, like names, were best forgotten in the Garden. As I got to know the other girls, I knew they were all fairly young, but ages weren’t something you asked about. It just didn’t seem necessary. At some point we’d die, and the hallways provided daily reminders of what that would mean, so why compound the tragedy?

Until Lyonette.

I’d been in the Garden for six months, and while I’d become friendly with most of the other girls, I was closest to Lyonette and Bliss. They were the most like me, the ones who really didn’t feel up to the high drama of weeping or bemoaning our inevitably tragic fates. We didn’t cower before the Gardener, we didn’t suck up to him like becoming favorites would somehow change our fortunes. We were the ones who put up with what we had to and otherwise did our own thing.

The Gardener adored us.

Except for meals, which were served at specific times, there was never a place we had to be, so most of the girls room-hopped for comfort. If the Gardener wanted you, he’d simply check the cameras and come find you. When Lyonette asked Bliss and me to spend the night in her room, I didn’t think anything of it. It was something we did all the time. I should have recognized the desperation in her voice, the edge to her words, but that was something else the Garden numbed you to. Like beauty, desperation and fear were as common as breathing.

We were provided with clothing for the daytime—always in black, always things that left our backs bare so the wings could be seen—but were given nothing for sleeping. Most of us just slept in our underwear and wished for bras. The hostel and the apartment had been good practice for me; I had far less modesty than most of the other girls had had coming into the Garden, one less humiliation that might break me.