The Butterfly Garden (The Collector #1)(47)
There was a set of twins there when I first arrived. They looked identical, right down to the wings tattooed on their backs, but they were very, very different people. Magdalene and Magdalena. Maggie, the elder by several minutes, was allergic to life. Seriously, she couldn’t even go out into the main Garden because she couldn’t breathe out there. If you ever needed help falling asleep, all you had to do was ask her to list her food allergies. Lena, on the other hand, wasn’t allergic to anything. In one of his rare lapses into insensitivity, the Gardener kept them in the same room and always visited them at the same time.
Lena liked to run around in the Garden, and as often as not ended up soaked and muddy and covered in plant bits. This created a rather large problem when she tried to go back to the room to shower. Even if Maggie was in the dining room, she’d come back later, find a shred of grass on the floor, and freak the fuck out. Maggie was allergic to the first twenty or so soaps the Gardener provided, and even then she complained about how dry her skin was, how lank her hair was, and always, always how she couldn’t breathe and why her eyes were so blurry and none of us had any sympathy for her, oh holy fuck.
Maggie was used to her parents falling over themselves to make her comfortable at every step.
I liked Lena, though. Lena never complained—even when Maggie was at her most annoying—and she explored the Garden just as much as I did. Sometimes the Gardener even hid little treasures for her to find, simply because he knew she would. She loved to laugh and seized on any excuse to do so, creating one of those relentlessly cheerful outlooks that would be irritating if you didn’t know she knew the gravity of the situation. She chose to be happy because she didn’t like being sad or pissed off.
She tried to explain it to me, and I sort of got it, but not really, because let’s face it: I’m not that person. I don’t choose to be sad or pissed off, but I don’t exactly choose to be happy, either.
Maggie never ate with the rest of us because she said just being in the same room with things would make her have a severe reaction. Her sister nearly always had to take her a tray of specially prepared food, then swing by to pick it up before the next meal. But then, Lena had the time for that, because you could put any meal before her and she’d suck it down under five minutes. Lena would eat everything without a complaint.
And Lena was one of the very few people in the Garden I genuinely feared for, because most of us understood that if the Gardener kept the twins as a pair in all other things, he would in death as well.
They’d been there for six months when I got there, with Lyonette running careful interference between Maggie and the rest of our little world, and fortunately the Gardener seemed more amused than anything else with Maggie’s need for special attention.
At least until he wasn’t.
I was there when that change began, and there was no more Lyonette to run interference.
Every so often, the Gardener felt the urge to dine with us en masse, like a king with his court. Or, as Bliss put it, the Sultan with his harem. He had Lorraine inform all of us during breakfast that he’d be there for dinner that night, I suppose so we could take extra effort with our appearances.
That afternoon found me in Danelle’s room with a bowl of water in my lap so I could carefully rewet her hair each time I needed to run the brush through it. She sat in front of me on the bed twining ribbons through sections of Evita’s hair before she twisted them up into a mass on the back of her blonde head. For Danelle, I braided small sections of hair to drape between two high buns, and others to fall down her back. They were too thin to obscure the wings, but they were her small defiance. Hailee sat behind me doing something with brush and pins, while Simone stood behind her with ribbons and twists and oil.
I’d never gone to a school dance, but it might have looked like we were preparing for something like that, something fun and wonderful, something to look forward to, and at the end of the evening you’d have a whole set of memories to cherish. Not so much here in the Garden. With the presence of the water and the chance for spilling, none of us were wearing more than underwear, and no one was giggling or chattering like girls off to a dance probably would be.
Lena walked in, still dripping from a shower—or a dip in the pond, knowing her—and dropped onto the floor. “She says she’s not going.”
“She’s going,” sighed Danelle. I finished the last braid and let it drop against her back.
“She says she’s not.”
“We’ll take care of it.” She patted the back of Evita’s head and slid off the bed with the brush. “Sit up.” She sank to her knees behind Lena, who promptly obeyed.
It should have been the end of it, especially once Danelle got to Maggie’s room, but as the rest of us dressed and gathered in the hallway, we could hear them arguing. Something shattered against a wall, and a minute later a pink-cheeked Danelle stalked out. Only parts of the handprint showed through the red and purple wings. “She’s getting dressed. Let’s go.”
The Gardener wasn’t yet in the dining room when we arrived, two by two like Madeline and her classmates. Danelle and I hung back to let the others enter, twitching dresses to hang correctly, fixing a pin here or there. When they were all in and seated, I leaned against the wall.
“Is she actually getting dressed?”
She rolled her eyes. “God I hope so.”