The Butterfly Garden

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

After six months in the Garden, Inara has befriended most of the 20 or so other prisoners, but Lyonette and Bliss remain her closest companions. The trio’s hardheaded, no-nonsense acceptance of their fate has endeared them not only to each other but to the Gardener, who “adores” them. Generally, the prisoners of the Garden are allowed to roam freely because their captor can always track them down as needed with his many surveillance cameras; the girls are shut into their rooms only two mornings a week, mostly when gardeners are doing maintenance in the atrium. One evening, a sobbing Lyonette tells Inara that the next day is her 21st birthday, which, according to the Gardener’s stringent rules, marks his captives’ “expiration date.” 

After five years in the Garden, her time is finally up. She says she considered fighting back but doesn’t want her death to be a punitively painful one. Inara is devastated. The Gardener comes for Lyonette just before daybreak, and Inara describes him as an “elegant,” well-built middle-aged man with green eyes and immaculately groomed blond hair. The next day, Lyonette’s corpse, perfectly preserved, has joined the long gallery of Butterflies in the Garden’s hallway: Dozens of captives who, over the past 30 years, have either aged out of their “prime,” died accidentally, or shown themselves to be unmanageable. Encased in clear, hard resin, each of the dead girls is meticulously arranged in a lifelike posture, her intricate butterfly tattoo fully visible to the viewer. That day, the Gardener subjects Inara to another sexual assault, and she distances herself from the act by reciting a poem by Edgar Allan Poe in her head.

Returning to the present, Inara tells Victor about her previous sexual experiences, all with a gentle boy named Topher whom she met at the restaurant in New York and slept with a few times. Then she describes her parents’ acrimonious divorce when she was eight years old, after which she was sent to live with her grandmother, as neither parent wanted to be “stuck” with her. Her “Gran” had an alcohol addiction and lived in a big house cluttered with dozens of stuffed “dead things”: birds, armadillos, cats, and dogs. Inara rarely attended the dangerous, crime-ridden neighborhood school, spending much of her time fetching drinks for Gran while trying to avoid the maintenance man, who was a pedophile. During those years, her parents never once checked up on her. When Gran died, the 14-year-old Inara raided Gran’s secret cache of money (in a stuffed dog’s hindquarters) and fled to New York City with almost $10,000. After buying a fake ID, which listed her age as 19, Inara found work at the Evening Star restaurant and moved into the loft apartment with Sophia and the rest.

One night, a tycoon (the Gardener) reserves the restaurant to hold a fundraiser for a local production of the opera Madame Butterfly. He specifies that the (all-female) wait staff dress themselves in black gowns outfitted with large, silk-and-wire butterfly wings. Inara’s friends giggle about the host, whom they consider unusually attractive for a middle-aged man, but are repulsed by his son, Avery, who’s physically attractive but creepy and cruel-looking. The “charming” Gardener, who is from Maryland, pays special attention to Inara, praising the small butterfly tattoo on her ankle, which she got a few months before at the urging of her friends. Suavely, he adds that, like “most beautiful creatures,” butterflies are “very short-lived” (59). Later, in the staff locker room, Avery corners Inara and seems on the verge of assaulting her; fortunately, a brawny busboy named Kegs comes to her rescue and orders Avery to leave. A couple of weeks later, as Inara is walking home from the library, she is jabbed from behind in broad daylight with a knock-out drug. Barely 16 years old, she becomes the latest addition to the Garden.

The one exception to the Butterflies’ “expiration date” of 21 is an older woman named Lorraine, who, decades ago, proved herself so obsequious to the Gardener that he promoted (or demoted) her from a love object to a functionary. Usually, captives who obey the Gardener’s every whim are given a second butterfly tattoo, this one on their faces. However, Lorraine is a special case: The Gardener actually permits her to leave the Garden, to take college courses in medicine and cooking. Though she is now well into her forties, the Gardener still keeps her around as the Garden’s nurse and cook, which is a source of bitter frustration to her because the girls all despise her, and the Gardener no longer considers her part of his harem. Sometimes Inara sees Lorraine gazing at the dead girls in their glass tombs with a look of yearning, almost like jealousy. After all, the Gardener “loves” the girls in glass, whom he gave “immortality” by killing them at the peak of their beauty; Lorraine knows she will never have this honor bestowed on her.

Victor and Eddison listen to Inara’s story in shock. Each of them had different reasons for volunteering for the Crimes Against Children unit, but neither had expected cases like Inara’s. Victor joined the unit mostly because he was a father of daughters, but the unmarried, childless Eddison’s reasons have to do with his personal demons; i.e., a younger sister who disappeared at the age of eight and was never found.

Inara says that Avery often visited the Garden. Much more violent and unstable than his father, he enjoys raping, torturing, and sometimes killing the girls. As punishment for the latter, his father bans him from the Garden but never for long. The Gardener has been abducting girls since before Avery was born—for over 30 years—and because he never targets girls younger than 16, their lifespan in the Garden is at most five years. When Avery first encounters Inara in the Garden, he tells her spitefully that his father wants her all for himself. He then beats her and drags her into a private room where he keeps his torture devices. Another girl, Giselle, hangs in chains from the wall; she has died from Avery’s brutal rape and torture. As Avery proceeds to rape her, Inara recites Poe to herself. However, she angers Avery by not giving him what he wants: fear. When the Gardener learns what Avery has done to Giselle and Inara, he seems genuinely horrified and apologetic; the Gardener claims to “love” his girls and wants them to be happy.

Taking a break from the interrogation, the agents debate whether Inara is telling them the full truth about her possible collusion with the Gardener. They acknowledge that she’s highly intelligent, as well as possibly manipulative and deceitful (e.g., her fake ID), and it annoys them that she insists on telling her story piecemeal in her own way, rather than be led by their questions. They conclude that she’s the best witness they have because the other survivors are largely too traumatized to marshal a coherent account.

Inara continues her story of life in the Garden, where there is very little to do; the girls grapple with boredom and depression between the Gardener’s predatory visits. Because there are about 25 of them, each girl is raped approximately once or twice a month. Inara and Lyonette, prior to the latter’s death, help fill the time with therapy-like private talks with the girls who are the most distraught. In between, Lyonette works on her origami, Bliss makes clay figures, and Inara reads books from the Garden library. One day, during a rough-and-tumble game of hide-and-seek, a gentle, childlike Butterfly named Evita falls from a tree and breaks her neck. Evita was much loved in the Garden for her innocent, ever-serene optimism, and the Gardener tearfully mourns her for days—after carefully preserving her body in resin.

Eddison, arriving with a cot and blankets for Inara so she can spend the night in the interrogation room, brings the news that the Gardener’s son has died. Inara startles the agents by asking about which son is dead. It emerges that the Gardener has a younger son, Desmond, who presumably is still alive. Inara reveals that he, like the late Avery, knew about the Garden. To the agents’ surprise and wonder, her composure finally breaks, and she bites her lip, causing blood to run down her chin.