The Butterfly Garden by Dot Hutchison Page A

hall, but not before I saw her tears.
    The Gardener sat on my bed and brushed my hair until it gleamed like silk, running his fingers through it again and again. Then his hands moved elsewhere, and his mouth, and I closed my eyes and silently recited “The Valley of Unrest.”

    “Wait, what?” Eddison interrupts, a sickened expression on his face.
    She looks away from the picture, giving him a bemused look. “ ‘The Valley of Unrest, ’ ” she repeats. “It’s a poem by Edgar Allan Poe. ‘ They had gone unto the wars, trusting to the mild-eyed stars, nightly, from their azure towers, to keep watch above the flowers’ . . . I like Poe. There’s something refreshing about a man who’s so unabashedly morose.”
    “But what—”
    “It’s what I did whenever the Gardener came to my room,” she says baldly. “I wasn’t going to fight him, because I didn’t want to die, but I wasn’t going to participate either. So I let him do his thing, and to keep my mind occupied, I recited Poe’s poems.”
    “The day he finished your tattoo, was that the first time, uh . . . the first time—”
    “I recited Poe?” she finishes for him, one eyebrow arched mockingly. Victor flushes but nods. “No, thank God. I’d gotten curious about sex a few months before, so Hope loaned me one of her boys. Sort of.”
    Eddison makes a choking sound and Victor can’t help but be grateful that his wife has these kinds of discussions with their daughters.

    In any other setting, we probably would have called Hope a whore, except that Sophia—who actually had been a prostitute until her daughters were taken away by the cops—was a little sensitive about words like that. Plus, Hope was in it for the fun, not the money. She could have made a fortune, though. Male, female, pairs, trios, or groups, Hope was up for anything.
    And there really wasn’t any such thing as privacy in the apartment. Except for the bathroom, it was all one room, after all, and the curtains between the beds weren’t thick enough to conceal much. No canopies, anyway. They certainly didn’t make anything soundproof. Hope and Jessica weren’t the only girls to bring people home, but they did it with the most frequency, sometimes more than once in a day.
    Early exposure—no pun intended—to pedophiles had left me mostly uninterested in sex. That, plus my parents. It seemed a horrific business, not one I wanted any part of, but living with the girls gradually changed that. When they weren’t doing it, they were frequently talking about it, and even when they laughed at me, they answered silly questions about it—or in Hope’s case, decided to demonstrate how to masturbate—so eventually curiosity won out over the distaste and I decided to give it a try. Well, I decided to think about giving it a try. I backed away from a lot of opportunities at first because I still wasn’t sure.
    Then one afternoon when I didn’t have to go into work in the evening, Hope came home trailing two boys. Jason we worked with, one of the few males on the overwhelmingly female waitstaff, and his friend Topher was a pretty standard fixture in the apartment. They frequently dropped by whether Hope was there or not; we thought they were fun to hang out with. Sometimes they brought food. The three were barely in the door before Hope was busy pulling off Jason’s clothing, and the two of them were completely naked by the time they tumbled laughing through the curtains onto her bed.
    Topher at least had the grace to blush and kick the trail of clothing closer to the bed.
    I was on one of the couches with a book. One of the first things I did once I had a real address was to get a library card, and I made a couple trips a week. Reading had been an escape when I was younger, and even though I didn’t have anything I particularly needed to escape from anymore, it was still something I loved. When the clothing was more or less contained, Topher poured two glasses of orange