The Butterfly Garden (The Collector #1)(17)
A year before, we’d gotten new neighbors across the street, a youngish couple who’d just had their first child. I used to love going over to see the baby, a beautiful little boy who wasn’t broken or fucked up yet. With parents like his, maybe he never would be. She’d always give me a plate of cookies and a glass of milk, and he taught me how to play poker and blackjack. They were the ones who took me to the bus station, who helped me buy my ticket with the money my parents had left on my nightstand the day before, the ones who helped me load everything under the bus and introduce me to the driver and help me find a seat. She even gave me a lunch for the trip, complete with oatmeal raisin cookies still warm from the oven. They were another family I wished I could be a part of, but I wasn’t theirs. Still, I waved goodbye to them as the bus pulled away, and they stood together on the curb, their baby held between them, and waved until we couldn’t see each other anymore.
When I got to the city where Gran lived, I had to take a taxi from the bus station to the house. The driver swore all the way there about people who had no business having kids, and when I asked him what some of the words meant, he even taught me how to use them in sentences. My Gran lived in a big, dilapidated house in a neighborhood that was moneyed sixty years ago but quickly went to shit, and when the driver had helped me unload everything onto her tiny front porch, I paid him and told him to have a great fucking day.
He laughed and tugged my braid, told me to take care of myself.
Menopause did strange things to Gran. She was a serial bride—and widow—when she was younger, but That Time convinced her she was dried up and halfway into the grave, so she holed up in her house and started filling all the rooms and halls with dead things.
No, seriously, with dead things. Even the taxidermists thought she was creepy, and you have to be really fucking bad to win that award. She had things she’d purchased premade, like wild game or exotics, things like bears and mountain lions that weren’t something you saw in a city. She had birds and armadillos, and my personal most hated, the collection of neighborhood cats and dogs that had been killed in various ways over the years that she’d taken in to be stuffed. They were everywhere, even in the bathrooms and kitchen, and they filled every single room.
When I walked in, dragging my things behind me into the entryway, she was nowhere to be seen. I heard her, though. “If you’re a rapist, I’m all dried up, don’t waste your time! If you’re a thief, I have nothing worth stealing, and if you’re a murderer, shame on you!”
I followed the sound of her voice and finally found her in a small family room with narrow walkways between all the stacks of stuffed animals. She was in an easy chair wearing a full-body tiger-print unitard and a dark brown fur coat, chain-smoking as she watched The Price Is Right on a seven-inch television whose picture wavered and frequently fell to discoloration.
She didn’t even look at me until the commercials. “Oh, you’re here. Upstairs, third door on the right. Be a good girl and bring me the bottle of whiskey on the counter before you go.”
I got it for her—why not—and watched in amazement as she poured the entire bottle into small dishes and bowls in front of the dead cats and dogs lined up on a couch that would have been hideous under the best of circumstances.
“Drink up, my beauties, being dead is no treat, you’ve earned it.”
Whiskey fumes quickly filled the room, joining with the musty scent of fur and stale cigarettes.
Upstairs, third door on the right led into a room full of so many dead animals they tumbled out when I opened the door. I spent the rest of that day and all that night hauling them out and finding places to stick them so I could bring up my things. I slept curled up on top of the biggest suitcase because the sheets were so gross. I spent the next day cleaning the room top to bottom, beating the dust and mouse droppings—and mouse corpses—out of the mattress, and putting my own sheets from home on the bed. When I had everything arranged as close to home as I could manage, I went back downstairs.
The only indication Gran had moved was her unitard, now a bright, shiny purple.
I waited until the commercials and then cleared my throat. “I’ve cleaned out the room,” I told her. “If you put any more dead things in there while I’m living here, I’ll burn the house down.”
She laughed and slapped me. “Good girl. I like your gumption.”
And that was moving in with my Gran.
The setting changed, but life didn’t. She had her groceries delivered once a week by a nervous-looking boy who got a tip almost as big as the grocery bill purely because that was the only way he’d come to our neighborhood. It was pretty simple to call the grocery store and have new things added to the staples. I was enrolled in a school that taught absolutely nothing, where the teachers wouldn’t even take attendance because they didn’t want truancy to stick them with these kids for another year. There were supposed to be some really good teachers in the school, but they were few and far between and I never got any of them. The rest were burned out and just didn’t care anymore as long as they got a paycheck.
The students certainly encouraged that. Drug deals went down right there in the classrooms, even in the elementary school, on behalf of older siblings. When I went up into the middle school, there were metal detectors on every outer door but no one gave a shit or investigated when they went off, which was frequently. No one noticed if you weren’t in class, no one called home to check up on students who’d been gone for several days in a row.