The Butterfly Garden (The Collector #1)(53)
“What do you mean?”
“After keeping us, why do you keep us?”
He didn’t answer for a time, his fingers tracing nonsense symbols on my skin. “My father collected butterflies,” he said eventually. “He went hunting for them, and if he couldn’t capture them in good condition he paid others for them, and he pinned them into their display cases while they were still alive. Every one of them had a black velvet background, a little bronze plaque giving its common and proper names, creating a veritable museum of shadowboxes on his office walls. Sometimes he’d hang my mother’s embroidery between the cases. Sometimes they were single butterflies, sometimes entire bouquets, picked out in beautiful colors on the cloth.”
His hand left my thigh and traveled up my back, tracing the wings. He didn’t even have to look at them to know their shapes. “He was happiest in that room, and once he retired he spent almost every day in there. But there was a small electrical fire in that section of the house, and all the butterflies were ruined. Every single one, the collection he’d spent decades acquiring and working on. He was never quite the same after that, and died not long after. I suppose he felt as though his entire life had been burned away in that fire.
“The day after his funeral, Mother and I had to attend an Independence Day fair in town. They were presenting Mother with an award for her charity work and she didn’t want to disappoint anyone by not attending. I left her in the company of sympathetic friends and wandered through the small fair, and then I saw her: a girl, wearing a butterfly mask made of feathers and passing out little feather and silk rose petal butterflies to the children who came through the silk maze. She was so vibrant and bright, so very alive, it was hard to believe that butterflies could ever die.
“When I smiled at her and went into the maze, she followed me in. It wasn’t hard to get her home from there. I kept her in the basement at first, until I could build the garden to be a proper home. I was in school and I’d just taken over my father’s business, and before too long I was married, so I think she was very lonely, even once I moved her into the garden, so I brought in Lorraine for her, and others, to be her friends.” He was lost in memory, but for him it wasn’t painful. For him, it only made sense, was only right. Rather than bringing his Eve to a garden, he’d built one around her, and served as the angel with the flaming sword to keep her in. He rearranged me on his lap, tugging me against his chest until he could lay my head between his neck and shoulder. “Her death was heartbreaking, and I couldn’t bear to think that brief existence was all she would ever have. I didn’t want to forget her. As long as I could remember her, a part of her would still live. I built the cases, researched ways to preserve her against decay.”
“The resin,” I whispered, and he nodded.
“But first the embalming. My company keeps formaldehyde and formaldehyde resins on hand in the manufacturing division, for clothing if you can believe it. It’s easy to order more than they need and bring the rest here. Replacing the blood with the formaldehyde retards decay, enough for the resin to preserve everything else. Even when you’re gone, Maya, you will not be forgotten.”
The sick thing was, he genuinely meant it to be comforting. Unless an accident happened or I pissed him off, in three and a half years he would run formaldehyde through my veins. I knew just enough to know that he would stay with me the entire time, maybe even brushing my hair and pinning it into its final arrangement, and when all my blood was gone, he’d place me in a glass case and pump it full of clear resin to give me a second life no mere electrical fire could end. He would touch the glass and whisper my name every time he passed, and he would remember me.
And sitting in his lap left no illusions as to how he felt about all of that.
He gently pushed me off his lap, spreading his legs to make me kneel between them, one hand tangling in my hair. “Show me that you won’t forget me, Maya.” He pulled my head closer, his other hand busy at the drawstring of his pants. “Not even then.”
Not even when I was long dead and gone, and the sight of me would still be enough to make him hard.
And I obeyed because I always obeyed, because I still wanted those three and a half years even if it meant this man telling me he loved me. I obeyed when he damn near choked me, and I obeyed when he yanked me back onto his lap, obeyed when he told me to promise I wouldn’t ever forget him.
And this time, instead of writing someone else’s poems and stories against the inside of my skull, I wondered about the boy on the other side of the kitchen counter, listening to it all.
The thing that convinced me my long-ago next-door neighbor was a pedophile was more than the looks he gave me. It was the looks the foster children gave each other, the bruised, sick knowledge they shared between them. All of them knew what was happening, not just to themselves but to each other. None of them would say a word. I saw those bruised looks and I knew it would only be a matter of time before he put his hand up my dress, before he took my hand and put it in his lap and whispered about a present for me.
The Gardener kissed me when he was done and told me to make sure I got some rest. He was still pulling his pants back in place as he walked out of the dining room. I walked back to the other side of the counter, picked up the rest of my orange, and sat down next to Desmond, whose face was wet and shiny with tears. He stared at me with dull eyes.