59 pages 1 hour read

The Butterfly Garden

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2016

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Part 2, Pages 139-192Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 2, Pages 139-192 Summary

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, kidnapping, sexual violence and harassment, and suicidal ideation.

The first time the Gardener leaves Desmond alone with Inara, he shares his doubts with her that his father has told him the complete truth about the Garden and its residents. Inara tries to gauge how he would react to the full truth, asking him what he would do if he learned his father had done something “inappropriate.” Desmond hedges, wanting to hear details; he suspects his father is “cheating” on his mother with the girls, but Inara, not trusting him, refuses to tell him more, despite his pleading. Inara feels that Desmond, who longs for his father’s respect, is too “scared” to ask him hard questions about the Garden, and that he might not go to the police even if he learned the truth. All the same, she ponders whether Desmond can aid in the Butterflies’ escape.

Inara backtracks to her arrival at the Garden, describing a pair of twins, Magdalene and Magdalena, who are quite different from each other. Maggie, the older twin, has a host of “allergies” and phobias; Lena, the more cheerful, stable one, constantly tries to keep her sister out of trouble with the Gardener, running interference however she can. One night, the Gardener announces his intention to dine with his “harem” en masse, and the Butterflies carefully groom themselves, as if for a school dance. However, citing her allergies, Maggie flatly refuses to join the party, despite Inara’s pleadings that her disobedience will endanger her sister as well as herself. Instead, she stuffs her clothes in the toilet, throws a tantrum, and peevishly refuses to eat or to talk to the others during the short dinner. Two weeks later, the Gardener adds both twins to his gallery of death.

Shuffling through the FBI’s photos of the dead girls in glass, Inara tells Agent Eddison that she knows the real names of some of them. Angrily, he asks why she kept this information to herself for so long, considering the girls’ families have been waiting years for any news of them. Inara scoffs that the news of their murders would be of any comfort to their loved ones, and in response, Eddison shows her a photo of his little sister Faith, who vanished without a trace 20 years ago. He says that not knowing if she’s alive or dead has left his whole family in a sort of limbo, constantly wondering, worrying, and saving up “reward money” for her possible return. “Not knowing is crippling” (153), he says. Studying Faith’s photo, Inara says that the Gardener kept photos of all of his captives, probably in a book or album. Victor calls CSU to have them search the Gardener’s house for a book of that description.

Inara tells of when Desmond began to make regular visits to the Garden, having been given an entrance code by his father. Desmond seems to know that the girls are his father’s prisoners, though he’s unclear on the details, which Inara refuses to provide. Inara needles him for his cowardice, pointing out that passivity in the face of criminality is itself a crime, and that his amoral longing for his father’s love and respect is weak and pathetic. As Desmond follows her retreating form, begging her to stay, he notices the butterfly tattoo on her back. In the privacy of the Garden’s kitchen, which is vacant due to the lateness of the hour, he examines her tattoo in detail, horrified. Just then, the Gardener appears in the doorway, noticing Inara but not Desmond, who is slouched behind the counter. The Gardener asks Inara how she (and the other girls) feels about Desmond, who, unlike Avery, would never hurt any of them.

He goes on to reminisce about his own father, who amassed a huge butterfly collection in middle age, then lost them all to a fire. He was a broken man after that, and died soon after. The day after the funeral, the Gardener went to a fair and saw a beautiful girl wearing a Mardi Gras-style butterfly mask. Following her into a maze, he forcibly abducted her and imprisoned her in his basement, until he could build a garden to keep her in. Her death, he says, was “heartbreaking” to him, so he began to research ways of preserving corpses, so as to keep the beauty of his lovely young prisoners intact long after death. The first step, he says, is to replace their blood with formaldehyde, of which he always has plenty on hand from his factories. “Even when you’re gone, Maya, you will not be forgotten” (164), he tells her tenderly. Inara wonders what Desmond, who is listening to every word in his hiding place, makes of all this. After the Gardener leaves, she notices that Desmond’s face is wet with tears. Nevertheless, she suspects that he will not go to the police. At most, he will just hate himself a little.

Inara recalls that Lyonette, like the Gardener, collected things. She grew so attached to the beautiful carousel horses that her father designed that when she had to leave them to go back home, she taught herself to make origami replicas of her favorite horses. After her abduction, she recreated these figures, complete with their little carousel, to keep in her room, just as at home; and after Lyonette’s death, Bliss made a replica of her carousel out of clay, as a way of mourning. Unable to bear the sadness of keeping it, she gave it to Inara, who tactfully told Bliss nothing about her own, traumatic childhood memory of being abandoned by her parents on a carousel.

After overhearing his father’s conversation with Inara, Desmond pays no visits to the Garden for a week. Inara busies herself caring for Simone, a Butterfly with an illness that might indicate pregnancy—a capital offense in the Garden. With Lorraine hovering in the doorway like a “vulture,” Simone takes a pregnancy test, while Inara reads her Hans Christian Andersen stories. That evening, the Gardener brings Simone a brightly hued dress: the usual pre-death ritual. Grimly, Simone tells Inara her real name: Rachel. Overcome with emotion, Inara walks to the waterfall, where she has a panic attack and finds herself unable to breathe. Fortuitously, Desmond appears on the scene, and nurses Inara out of her panic by helping her to control her breathing. As she recovers, Desmond admits to her that he is a “coward” and might be his “father’s son.”

Moved by Inara’s intense empathy for the other girls, Victor asks Inara if she considered them personal friends. She answers that, “Some of them are friends. All of them are family. I guess that’s what happens” (176). Despite her reluctance to become attached to those she fears she will lose, her loneliness in the Garden left her no alternative. She describes to him some of the other girls: Nazira, Zara, Glenys, Ravenna, Hailee, Pia, Marenka, Adara, Eleni, and the hard-to-know Sirvat, who has a detailed, disquieting knowledge of the “thousand” ways humans can die.

The day after Simone’s execution, the Gardener invites Inara to a fancy private dinner in his quarters, complete with champagne. Awkwardly, he raises the subject of Desmond, like a father broaching the facts of life, which Inara finds unnervingly surreal. Expressing bafflement that his son has not availed himself of the many sexual “opportunities” offered by the beautiful girls of the Garden, he notes that Desmond seems only interested in Inara, and asks if she would like to sleep with him. Noncommittally, Inara says she will do as she is told, as always. Aroused, the Gardener undresses her, and she wearily recites Edgar Allan Poe in her head. Afterward, he murmurs to her that she could be “so good” for Desmond. After he leaves, Inara, trembling with fear and disgust, thinks about suicide for the first time.

Returning to the present, Victor hears that some of the other hospitalized girls, who are mostly stabilized, are insisting on talking to Inara before answering the FBI’s questions. This has made Senator Kingsley highly suspicious of her, and Victor tells Inara that he might not be able to “protect” her from the senator much longer. He demands that she stop “dancing” around his questions and answer them directly, e.g., about Desmond’s complicity. Inara says that she began seeing Desmond regularly, mostly listening him talk about his psychology classes, while concealing her “hatred” of him for not figuring out the full truth about the Garden. One day, he brings his violin, which he plays with flair and passion. Tentatively, Inara begins the balancing act of trying to use his attraction to her to win him over, without antagonizing him by telling him too much. 

For now, Desmond is only able to acknowledge that the girls are his father’s prisoners, and that Inara’s butterfly tattoo arouses him. However, Inara thinks, Desmond shows a susceptibility to “hard truths,” unlike his father. The two of them nestle together and fall asleep. When they wake, the two of them kiss for the first time. Inara tells Victor that the Gardener was “happy” about her romance with Desmond because he genuinely wanted his son to be happy, and that the more Desmond cared for her and the other Butterflies, the less likely he’d do something that might put them all at risk.

Part 2, Pages 139-192 Analysis

During Inara’s questioning, she learns a little more about Brandon Eddison, the more prickly of the two agents, who lost his little sister in an unsolved kidnapping decades before. As well as learning to sympathize more with Eddison and others who have lost loved ones, Inara is intrigued to hear that Eddison was disciplined in college for an act of vigilantism; i.e., assaulting a suspected rapist who happened to be the police chief’s son. So, like the Gardener, the future FBI man went outside the law, perhaps to symbolically avenge a deceased family member. Ironically, this aligns with hints that the Gardener’s murderous Butterfly collecting is itself an unconscious act of vengeance—on the siren-like insects who enticed and doomed his father, who never recovered from losing his butterfly collection to a fire. That the police chief might have been unlawfully protecting his own rapist son alludes yet again to the evils of twisted family loyalties, which finds its latest example in Desmond, the Gardener’s younger son.

For months, Desmond is permitted to wander the Garden, and few of its secrets are kept from him: He even overhears his father confessing to kidnapping teenagers and embalming their youthful bodies, all for his personal delectation. Yet Desmond continually succumbs to a sort of Orwellian “doublethink”: Although not yet a full acolyte of his father’s mock-religious sanctification of youth and beauty, he still blinds himself to its horrors, persisting in seeing his father as a noble idealist and Inara as a possible love interest for himself, despite her “expiration date.” After all, he says, going to the police would doom his father, “kill” his sickly mother, and destroy the family “legacy,” all of which resonate with Biblical Allegory, Satire, and the Violence of Power.

In the first days of their acquaintance, Inara quickly sizes Desmond up. Her grim verdict is that, in his mind, “family” will always outweigh any affection or loyalty he might feel for her or the other girls, let alone the law or his own sense of morality. Ironically, family—his rivalry with his brother—is precisely the catalyst that will finally bring him to take action. Meanwhile, as she tries to leverage his infatuation with her, she finds herself trapped in a paradox: The more Desmond likes her, the less likely he might be to take any action to rescue her because it might mean losing her—either to her freedom or to her instant death at his father’s hands. 

Hence Desmond’s months-long passivity, which he hesitates to see as complicity with his father’s and brother’s crimes. Another irony is that the Gardener has been actively encouraging their romance, in hopes that it will help “normalize” his own deeds in Desmond’s eyes, so that eventually he’ll take up his father’s sacred legacy of serial kidnapping, rape, and murder. Inara must walk a very fine line, trying hard not to alienate Desmond (or his father) with too much pressure to act, while at the same time not letting him get too complacent with the Garden and its sanitized atrocities.

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