I lift up the front cover, aware of Vic and Eddison pressing closer on either side. Sterling smiles and starts cleaning up the boxes. The first picture is of Inara, in those first few days after the Garden, the wings of the Western Pine Elfin emblazoned on her back in pale browns, jewel-like pinks and purples, her sides and hands cut and burned from the glass and explosion. She looks back over her shoulder, slightly, eyes narrowed at whoever else was in the room. On the opposite corner of the page, though, is a newer picture of her, topless and from behind, a few thin scars showing where the wounds used to be, a rainbow mess of full skirts heaped around her as she peeks over her shoulder. She’s teasing in this one, the colors of the wings only slightly faded, her arms crossed in front of her with just the tips of her fingers curling over her shoulders. Tiny butterflies and stacks of books decorate the blank corners of the page.
The next page is Victoria-Bliss, the brilliant blue and black of the Mexican Bluewing as dramatic as the rest of her coloring. Like Inara’s, the first picture was clearly taken at or just after the hospital, but in the second, she’s at a beach, wearing the bottom of a bathing suit, blue ruffled boy shorts, jumping off a squat rock into foaming waves. Her arms are up like she’s jumped from a greater height, her feet kicked up behind her.
There’s Ravenna, her leg swathed in bandages from a heavy chunk of falling glass, white and palest yellow and orange picked out against her dark skin. In the new one, maybe Ravenna, maybe Patrice, or maybe something wholly new delicately balanced between them, she’s dancing en pointe in cropped leggings, one arm crossed over her chest, the other arm and one leg fully extended. Strong, graceful, secure in her stance despite the pouring rain. There’s hope for her, with luck and the formidable attention of the Sravasti women.
All of the surviving Butterflies, then and now, healthy and mostly happy. Healing. The last of the first set of pages has Keely, just twelve years old when she was kidnapped. She wasn’t in the Garden long enough to be tattooed with wings, so unlike the other girls, her current photo is fully clothed. She struggled for a long time with the aftermath, not only with being assaulted and kidnapped when so much younger than the others, but with the widely varying public responses to her. Now, a few months shy of sixteen, she’s beaming in the photo and holding up her brand new learner’s permit.
This was Priya’s project this summer. I continue slowly flipping through pages showing the girls in parts of their new lives, and some where they’ve clearly gotten together for group shots. There’s one of Inara and Keely that makes my eyes burn with tears. Inara protected Keely in the Garden, and did her best to help her afterward, and here they are on the page, sprawled out on a blanket in the sunshine with eyes closed and mouths smiling.
Completely unaware of the water balloon about to land on them. That’s . . . that’s really a hell of a shot.
But it’s so normal and healthy, and God, these amazing girls have come so far.
The very last picture has all seven of the survivors, caught midjump in a yard or field, all of them wearing white sundresses and their hair down, with the filmy, brightly colored butterfly wings kids use for dress-up or Halloween catching the sunlight. They’re all laughing.
“Some of the others were getting frustrated,” Inara says, leaning against Priya. “Sometimes your recovery plateaus, and it was hard to convince them that they were still improving. Priya and I cooked up this idea, so they’d be able to see it. But we wanted it for you guys, as well. We’ve haunted you for a while, and you adopted us, and I think we’re the only ones who’ve been watching to make sure you heal, too.”
Victoria-Bliss balls up a napkin and tosses it at Eddison, purposefully shorting it so he doesn’t have to grab for it. “We’re grateful. We know you haven’t seen most of the others since just after the trial, when Mrs. MacIntosh told us about the scholarships she was setting up for us. So we wanted to give you new pictures, so you don’t only think of back then.”
“This is amazing,” I whisper, and I lose the battle with the tears that slide down my cheeks. But Vic has them, too, and even Eddison is trying very hard to look stoic.
“The second one, Mercedes, is just for you,” Priya says.
“Does that mean I should open it in private?”
“Up to you. I just meant the boys aren’t getting copies down the line.” She sticks her tongue out at Eddison’s fake pout. “No one else gets vacation photos from Special Agent Ken.”
“Although,” Inara muses, “his book is going to have a few extra pictures of when Special Agent Ken and my little blue dragon traveled to meet the girls.”
He looks both flattered and horrified. “Christ,” he wheezes.
All three girls give him wicked smiles.
Stacking the other book on top of the first, I open it and find a picture of eight-year-old Brandon Maxwell, the kidnapping victim in my very first case as an agent. He sits with his parents, teary but beaming, a bright green bear in his lap. Next to that is a new picture, a little grainy like it wasn’t entirely focused, of an eighteen-year-old in an orange-and-white cap-and-gown graduation set, beaming with a mouth full of braces and a battered, faded green teddy bear on top of his mortarboard.
“What is . . .”
Every page. Every page has a picture from our case files of one of our rescued children with their bear, and a picture from this summer. The kids range in age from twenties to single digits, and they all . . .
“We got permission from Agent Dern,” Priya says as I keep turning pages. “We weren’t sure if contacting the families was actually allowed, but she said as long as Sterling did it and no private information was shared, it should be all right.”
“Eliza?”
“It’s your ten-year anniversary with the Bureau,” she says with a smile and a shrug. “I told them we were putting something together for you, and if they were willing, if they still had the bear, would they mind emailing a picture of kiddo with the bear. We probably got about twenty-five percent. Pretty awesome, really. They emailed them and we printed them off.”
There are pictures of Priya in there, twelve years old and on the too-skinny edge of a growth spurt, blue streaks in her dark hair. There’s one where she’s sitting curled around the bear, scowling at the journal in her hands, a never-ending letter to Chavi. There’s another one her mother must have taken that perfectly captures Priya’s fury, Eddison’s shock, and the bear in midair on its collision course for Eddison’s face.
Eddison sighs, but it’s too fond to be convincing.
And then there’s the new picture, Priya at a restaurant table, her shirt cut at an angle below the bust so her tattoo shows bright on her side. The bear sits on a plate wearing a tiny white shirt with red lettering that says “I Survived Dinner with Guido and Sal.”
We didn’t give bears to most of the Butterflies; they were a bit too old for it, and we didn’t want to seem patronizing. We gave one to Keely, though, and she’s there in her mother’s car, the bear sitting on the dashboard.
There aren’t any pictures of the kids from the past month, and I am so, so grateful for that I can hardly speak.
Vic stands up and walks around the table, kissing their cheeks all in a row. “This is wonderful, ladies. Thank you.”
I nod, too close to bawling myself stupid to be able to form words.
“Okay-ish?” asks Priya, and I nod again.
The baby-faced agent who’s been taking minutes in the IA interviews sticks his head into the conference room. Erickson, that’s his name. “Agents? When you’re ready.”
We stop to put the albums in Vic’s office for safekeeping, then escort the girls out. All three give me tight hugs and murmured thank-yous, and if the trip down the elevator had me a little closer to composure, well that just knocks it right the fuck out of the park. Vic hands me a handkerchief without looking.
When we file back into our seats in the conference room, my credentials are on the table in front of what has become my seat over the past three days, the folder flapped back so the badge faces up. I sit down, wrap my hands around the badge, and inspect it.
Someone, probably Agent Dern, managed to get the blood out of the U. I’ve been trying to do that for four years, with everything from Q-tips to needles to dunking the whole damn thing in soapy water, and there it is, finally clean. There’s Justice, and the eagle, there’s where the gold is dull from being rubbed too many times, surrounded by where it’s too shiny from being touched a lot but not yet too much. For ten years, this badge has been a piece of me.