The Butterfly Garden by Dot Hutchison Read Free Book Online

fix anything.”
    “Would you say that if you’d gotten justice as a child?”
    That not-quite-smile, bitter and gone too fast. “And what would I have needed justice for?”
    “My life’s work, and you think I won’t recognize a broken child when she sits in front of me?”
    She inclines her head to concede the point, then bites her lip and winces. “Not entirely accurate. Let’s call me a shadow child, overlooked rather than broken. I’m the teddy bear gathering dust bunnies under the bed, not the one-legged soldier.”
    He smiles slightly and sips his rapidly cooling coffee. She’s back to dancing. However disconcerting Eddison might find it, Victor’s on familiar ground. “In what way?”

    Sometimes you can look at a wedding and realize with a certain sense of resignation that any children produced in that marriage will inevitably be fucked up and fucked over. It’s a fact, not a sense of foreboding so much as a grim acceptance that these two people should not—but definitely will—reproduce.
    Like my parents.
    My mother was twenty-two when she married my father; he was her third marriage. The first was when she was seventeen and married the brother of her mother’s then-current husband. He died in less than a year from a heart attack during sex. He left her pretty well off, so a few months later, she married a man only fifteen years older than her, and when they divorced a year later, she came off even a little better. Then came my dad, and if he hadn’t knocked her up, I doubt the wedding would have happened. He was good-looking, but he wasn’t wealthy and he didn’t have prospects and he was only two years older, which to my mother was an insurmountable series of obstacles.
    For that we can thank her mother, who had nine husbands before early menopause made her decide she was too dried up to remarry. And every single one of them died, each faster than the one before. No foul play about it, either. Just . . . died. Most of them were ancient, of course, and all of them left her with a tidy sum of money, but my mother was raised with certain expectations and her third husband met none of them.
    I will say this for them, though: they gave it a try. For the first couple of years we lived near his family and there were cousins and aunts and uncles and I can almost remember playing with other children. Then we moved, and the ties were cut from one end or the other, and it was just me and my parents and their various affairs. They were always either visiting their latest lovers or holing up in their bedrooms, so I became a pretty self-sufficient kid. I learned how to use the microwave, I memorized the bus schedule so I could get to the grocery store, I staked out the days of the week when either of my parents were likely to have cash in their wallets so I could actually buy things at the market.
    And you’d think that would look strange, right? But whenever anyone at the store asked—a concerned woman, a cashier—I’d say my mom was out in the car with the baby, keeping the air running. Even in winter they believed that, and they’d smile and tell me what a wonderful daughter and sister I was.
    So not only was I self-sufficient, I came to have a pretty low opinion of most people’s intelligence.
    I was six when they decided to give marriage counseling a go. Not a try, a go. Someone at my dad’s office told him insurance would cover counseling, and counseling looked better with a judge and helped speed up a divorce. One of the things the counselor told them to do was take a family trip, just the three of us, somewhere fun and special. A theme park maybe.
    We got to the park around ten, and for the first couple of hours things went okay. Then the carousel. I fucking hate carousels. My dad stood at the exit to wait for me to come off, my mom stood at the entrance to help me get on, and they just stood there on opposite sides of the thing and watched me go round and round in circles. I was too small to