The Butterfly Garden

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of kidnapping, death, rape, child abuse, emotional abuse, physical abuse, and sexual violence and harassment.

At FBI headquarters, Special Agent in Charge Victor Hanoverian studies a young woman, perhaps still a teenager, through a one-way mirror. She is one of several girls who have just been rescued from a catastrophe, one that killed a number of other girls. So far, the agents have had difficulty learning the names and backstories of the rescued girls, but all of them share a peculiarity: a colorful design on their backs, each one slightly different. The girl behind the glass, whose left arm and both hands are thickly bandaged, has been quarantined for special questioning by the FBI, mainly because the other girls seem to regard her as a “leader”; another reason is that she refuses to open up about her past. This makes Agent Hanoverian wonder if she might be an accomplice rather than a victim. Special Agent Brandon Eddison, Victor’s gruff second-in-command, brings the news that the other survivors refer to the girl, whom he calls a “tough nut,” as “Maya.”

Maya, a “beautiful girl” with “golden-brown” skin, shows no fear of the agents and cuts off many of their queries with puckish sarcasm. She refuses to tell them where she lived before being kidnapped but offers that the man who abducted her and the other girls was known only as the Gardener. She begins her story by describing her waking up, with a splitting headache, in a mysterious place called the Garden. A beautiful, “Amazonian” woman who calls herself Lyonette presses a cool cloth to her head and offers her a painkiller. She, too, is a captive of the Gardener, and in the hours that follow she gives Maya a brief tour of a part of their prison. 

Maya’s room has thick glass walls, with tracks outside the door where opaque, soundproof walls come down periodically to trap the prisoners in their rooms; beyond is a hallway leading to a cave, which looks out onto a rapturously beautiful garden full of flowers and butterflies. A manmade cliff and waterfall loom over a trickling stream, which meanders into a sylvan pond ringed by stretches of sandy beach that lead to other caves and rooms. The vast atrium is solidly enclosed on all sides by glass, like a gigantic greenhouse. Sadly and wearily, as if she has given this tour many times before, Lyonette welcomes Maya to the Garden.

Maya, treating her FBI questioners with cagey distrust, continues to fend off their more pointed questions, a tendency Victor recognizes from his own teenage daughters. Finally she tells them that the large tattoo that covers her back, which the FBI techs have determined to be a “few years” old, is the work of the Gardener himself. During the weeks that he tattooed it onto her, she was lightly sedated and did not see his face. Warning her to remain very still throughout the torturous procedure, the Gardener explained that he was “marking” her because “a garden must have its butterflies” (16). 

Maya now backtracks and tells the agents about her life just before her abduction. She was sharing a big loft apartment in a dangerous neighborhood with seven other women, a “strange mix” of teenagers, college students, and a retired sex worker. The latter, a woman in her thirties named Sophia who had two young daughters, was a motherly figure for the rest. These girls, Maya says, were her “first friends,” and she worked with most of them at an Italian restaurant, where they were waitresses. Maya evades Victor’s questions about how she ended up in the big city at such a young age and continues her story of her imprisonment in the Garden. For the first few weeks, as the Gardener puts the finishing touches on Maya’s elaborate tattoo, he never allows her to look at him. Finally, when the tattoo is finished, he groans with satisfaction; christening her “Maya,” he says that she is his and rapes her.

The interview is interrupted by Brandon Eddison, who draws Victor aside to show him a large collection of IDs and driver’s licenses belonging to the abducted girls, found among the Gardener’s belongings. One of them, a New York ID, is Maya’s, showing her name as Inara Morrissey; however, it is a clever forgery, with the Social Security number of a long-deceased child. However, the ID has the address of her loft apartment, and tax records reveal that Inara worked at the Evening Star restaurant in New York City for two years prior to her abduction. As Eddison returns to the task of identifying the other girls from their IDs, Victor interrogates Inara about her fake ID and the Evening Star restaurant. Mostly hiding her discomfiture, Inara says she bought the ID from a professional forger for $1,000. She says she loved the anonymity of New York, where people with troubled pasts can lose themselves, and no one asks many questions. When Victor gently probes her about her past, she shows a flash of anger, then stubbornly returns to her story about the Garden.

Shortly after Inara’s rechristening and rape by the Gardener, Lyonette invites her into her room, which is almost identical to her own, but furnished with numerous origami creatures that Lyonette has made. With a mirror, she shows Inara the “terrible” but “lovely” butterfly tattoo on her back, which she says is a Western Pine Elfin butterfly; her own tattoo, she adds, is a Lustrous Copper. All of the girls are forced to wear backless black dresses that leave their tattoos visible. Soon another captive joins them, a girl only five feet tall but, like all the Gardener’s prisoners, “stunningly” beautiful. Named “Bliss” by the Gardener, she is notably less resigned than the gentle Lyonette and shows a caustic sense of humor. She advises Inara not to forget her real identity, to always remind herself that’s she’s just playing “a part” for the Gardener, as a way of keeping sane. She tells Inara to “check the hallways” (35) for a sobering reminder of what happens to captives who fail to adjust or who have a mental health crisis. 

While identifying the rescued girls, Victor and Eddison discover a new problem: One of them is Patrice Kingsley, the missing daughter of US Senator Kingsley, who will undoubtedly push her way into the investigation and create a media frenzy—which could threaten the victims’ privacy at a very vulnerable time for them. Moreover, if the senator discovers that Inara is a person of interest in the case, she could insist on charges being filed. Returning to their questioning of Inara, they finally get her to open up about her past. Her father, she says, was her mother’s third husband, and their marriage was dysfunctional almost from the start, with constant fighting and extramarital affairs. Inara was forced to do the grocery shopping and other errands at a very young age. When she was six, her parents took her to a theme park far from home, then thoughtlessly abandoned her on the carousel so they could each go off on a spontaneous fling with a random pickup. Not wanting to go to a foster home, Inara phoned her next-door neighbor, who drove two hours each way to bring her back home, then tried to molest her in the car. Escaping from him, she returned to her unhappy home.