My Name Is Venus Black

by Heather Lloyd

  Then I realize I have made progress. I’m not blaming Raymond or Inez. Sharon would be so proud.

  * * *

  —

  ONE WEDNESDAY IN early January, Julie goes home sick and I get off work extra late. When I get home, it’s almost four. I call out for Piper, but there’s no answer. She’s supposed to leave me a note on the front door if she goes somewhere—to her friend Amy’s, or out riding her bike.

  I strip off my wet windbreaker. My hands are red. I wish we had a fireplace. The house is too cold. The wood floors too bare. I wish we could find a huge, warm rug at a garage sale.

  Felix follows me, rubbing up against my legs. Curtis has left his coat here. It’s hanging on the back of the couch. I pick it up and put both it and mine in the coat closet just inside the front door. For some reason, the closet looks less full than usual.

  I go into the kitchen and I’m getting a drink of water when I notice that the side door to the garage is open. It’s flapping in the wind. I go out and shut it. When I come back in, I feel like something is wrong. I go upstairs to double-check for Piper, and her room looks bare. The few stuffed animals on her dresser are gone. I open a drawer—it’s empty. I open the closet door—the few dresses Piper owns are missing.

  I fly down the stairs and call Mike at work. He sounds like he’s expecting my call. “I’m sorry, Annette. It’s about Piper.”

  “Duh!” I say. “Where the hell is she?” My legs grow weak, and my mind races.

  “I’ll explain when I get home.”

  “What the hell?”

  But he hangs up. By the time he gets home, I’m stalking around the house, swearing, conjuring worst-case scenarios.

  “You need to sit down,” he says. I stubbornly refuse.

  Despite his Rocky Balboa build, Mike suddenly looks shrunken, diminished. And it scares me to death. There is no sign of the cheerful Olan Mills photographer.

  “Is Piper okay?” I can hear the fear in my voice. “What’s going on?”

  “Sit on the couch, Annette,” he orders.

  This time, I obediently sit down. He pulls his recliner halfway across the room so he can sit across from me, which is somehow the scariest thing he could have done. “I was going to tell you sooner,” he starts. “I just didn’t expect…I thought she’d give me a few more days. At least a heads-up. I’m so sorry that you didn’t get to—”

  “What the fuck, Mike?” Now I’m angry as well as scared. “What are you telling me?”

  “Piper is gone. She went to live with her aunt Sue, in Spokane. I couldn’t help it. I told Sue that you two were attached now and Piper seemed happy here. It wasn’t supposed to happen until next Saturday, and I was going to tell you, but then Sue had business in Seattle today and she didn’t want to make the drive twice….”

  “Oh my God!” I screech. “For how long? What are you saying?”

  Mike looks up at me, his eyes full of tears. “You don’t get it. Didn’t you hear when I told you Sue has custody? This whole arrangement was never going to be permanent. I told you that when you first moved in here. I guess I didn’t make it clear to you. And maybe not clear enough to Piper, either.”

  I stand up, because I’m way too upset to stay sitting. I can’t take this in. “So you’re telling me Piper has already moved to Spokane, so my services as her babysitter are no longer necessary and who knows if or when I’ll ever see her again? And I don’t even get to say goodbye?” I yell this last line, because I can’t imagine this could be true.

  Mike keeps talking. “Sue came early. She didn’t care about you because she doesn’t understand your connection to Piper. You don’t have to move out. You can still stay here. And Piper will come visit me on some weekends and you can see her then. She’ll be back, I promise. And I won’t even raise the rent back up.”

  “Oh my God! How generous of you.” I slam out the front door and start walking, tears streaming, trying to absorb what just happened. With every step, I remember the sound of Piper pedaling behind me.

  * * *

  —

  AFTER PIPER GOES, I am too furious to stay at Mike’s, but I’m too cheap to move right away—not with rent being so reasonable. I decide to stay until I can save enough to put down money on a junky car and move to California. That’s always been the plan anyway, right? To be in a warm place where the chance of being recognized would be so much slimmer.

  Of course, I talk to Piper on the phone several times a week. The first time, she cried a lot, because she missed Mike and me. Plus, she was devastated when Aunt Sue refused to let her bring Felix. “Cats and babies don’t mix,” she’d told Piper. After a few weeks pass, though, Piper begins to sound like she’s adjusting, partly because she is so in love with her twin baby cousins. Isn’t that every girl’s dream? To have real babies to take care of?

  Every time we talk, she tells me she is praying for Leo. Apparently, Aunt Sue is some kind of Christian. “I’m praying for Leo to come home so you won’t be alone,” she says. I want him to come home, too. But the surprising truth is that Piper left a space in my heart only she can fill. Why did I let that happen? I should have seen this coming.

  Meanwhile, Mike is wrapped up with Curtis, so he’s rarely ever home. Which means I rarely ever eat dinner, and now I’m so skinny I look freakish—yes, even spider-like. I spend my afternoons and evenings lying on the couch like I’m sick, watching TV to numb my brain. I know I’m in trouble when I start to watch really dumb game shows.

  On my day off on Monday, I get to watch soaps. Amazing how you can still follow the story watching just one day a week. My favorite is All My Children, perhaps because Tad Martin makes me think of Danny. The quirky confidence, the flirty sense of humor.

  I still fantasize about finding a way to fix myself.

  After a while, I feel guilty just lying around the house all the time, so I set up a system to survive my own lethargy. Every commercial break, I force myself to get up and do something useful, like wash the dishes, or make my bed, or make progress on a cleaning project around the house. And there are so many of those. I put new Con-Tact paper down in the kitchen drawers and under the sink. I find paint in the garage to patch up all the dings and marks on the walls. I ask Mike for money to replace the ratty drapes in the living room, but he says he doesn’t have it.

  Bumping around that house alone, looking for projects, I keep thinking of Inez. She was always trying to find a new, cheap way to decorate. Because my bedroom was in the basement, it didn’t have a rug, so she used small carpet samples and double-sided tape to create a patchwork rug. Leo would only step on the squares that were solid colors and avoided the ones with shag mixes.

  One of the worst ideas Inez ever had was when she covered an entire wall in the foyer with a mural—basically a giant photograph you paste on like wallpaper. It featured a small waterfall among ferns.

  “I don’t get it,” I told her. “Is this supposed to look real? So people will think you have a waterfall just inside the house?”

  She frowned at me. “It’s okay if you hate it, Venus,” she said. “I think it’s really nice. It’s supposed to make you feel refreshed and happy to see nature.”

  “But isn’t nature supposed to be outside?”

  She blew. “For God’s sake, Venus! Would you prefer blank walls everywhere?”

  Ha. It’s funny now to think how her suggestion totally came true at Echo Glen. Five and a half years of blank walls without a single fucking waterfall has brought me around to her point of view.

  It’s January 28 and I’m at work when it happens. I’m filling an enormous order for a woman who is angry that we are out of maple bars. “It’s only eight-thirty!” she declares. “How can you already be out of such a basic, important thing?”

  I explain that we are just a little behind and more maple bars will come out from the oven soon, if she wants to wai
t. In the kitchen, we have a portable TV that’s rarely turned on, but this morning Julie and Gus, the baker, want to watch the launch of the Challenger shuttle. I’m too bitter about my own life to care.

  The angry maple-bar woman continues to frown at me while I wait on other customers. When I get the chance, I go check on her maple bars—and happen to glance at the TV. A news anchor is reporting that the Challenger blew up shortly after takeoff. All day, every channel keeps showing the astronauts, the launch, and the sickening explosion. Over and over, the teacher Christa McAuliffe and the astronaut Judith Resnik and all the others explode into thin air.

  All day, I feel a small worm of guilt about the jealousy I harbored toward the women on that crew. It strikes me as the saddest kind of tragedy possible. To have your big dream come true—only to have it turn into your worst nightmare. Not that they even knew what hit them.

  * * *

  —

  BY EARLY FEBRUARY, I’m so depressed that I struggle to see a future, much less want it. Sunny California seems closer at hand than ever before, given my savings. But with Piper gone, and with Danny out of my life—I feel so alone it aches as if a heavy stone is hanging from my rib cage.

  I think of Anita and Arabella, two spiders NASA sent to space in 1973. It was an experiment to see if they could spin webs without gravity. It seems Arabella had trouble at first, and she spun sloppy webs. However, by the third day, both she and Anita were spinning webs just like those back home. Today, both of their spider bodies are on display at the Smithsonian.

  When I first learned of the spiders back in grade school, their determination struck me as magical. Now I wonder what would have happened if there’d only been one spider in the first place. Would Arabella have gotten her groove back without Anita spinning next to her?

  That’s kind of how I feel with Piper gone. Without her by my side, it’s harder to breathe, the air feels heavy, and I struggle for a reason to keep going through the motions of life.

  One morning, I come downstairs in the dark and grab the Cheerios from the cupboard. I go to the fridge for milk and I’m pouring it over my cereal when I freeze. I set the carton down, disbelieving my eyes. The room begins to spin as I read what it says under Leo’s picture:

  Missing: Leo Miller

  From: Everett, Washington, February 9, 1980

  DOB: August 7, 1972

  Hair: blond

  Eyes: gray

  Estimated Height: 5'0"

  Note: mentally handicapped

  I think I might be sick or faint. None of this information is new, but still, here is proof that people who don’t even know us think there’s still a good-enough reason to hope that Leo is alive to go to all this effort.

  The picture of Leo is painfully familiar. He is sitting among piles of wrapping paper the Christmas before it all happened. You can’t tell from his face that he’s happy, since Leo never smiled. But I know he had just opened up a new Lincoln Logs set that was the “right” brown and he was making his happy humming sound.

  Then I realize something else. Mike bought this milk two days ago at least. How could I have picked it up and not even noticed my own brother’s picture on it?

  Because I wasn’t looking for it, of course. Because I haven’t been looking for Leo. I’ve been out of jail for months now, and I haven’t once been brave enough to check up on his case or do a damn thing to help look for him, just in case he’s alive.

  The Cheerios sit there, getting soggy. When I try to put the milk back in the refrigerator, I can’t. Instead, I empty the carton into a pitcher. Then I rinse the carton, open it out flat, and take it upstairs, where I put it in my bottom dresser drawer.

  At work, I somehow manage to get through the Dipper’s morning rush. During my break, though, when I take a minute to catch my breath, Inez’s words from six years ago ring in my ears again: If something has happened to Leo, it’s because of what you did.

  It’s a truth I’ve been working hard all these years to avoid: If I hadn’t killed Raymond, Leo would still have a father. And he would never have been at Shirley’s house to begin with. All those years in Echo Glen when I worked so hard to pretend Leo was dead—it wasn’t because I couldn’t afford to hope, it was because I couldn’t afford the guilt.

  My mood grows blacker after that. I feel darker and more depressed every day that goes by. Sometimes I laugh to myself like a crazy person, recalling how I honestly thought that after I got out of jail, I would be so happy. Instead, I’m so unhappy that Julie asks me if I can try harder to be friendly toward customers.

  Maybe I’m feeling reckless or want to sabotage my life that isn’t a life. Or maybe I do it for Piper, in her memory. But one day out of the blue, I reach behind my back and pull the band from my braid. At work, I have to at least tie it back loosely because of food-safety rules. But otherwise I wear it loose every day. I tell myself it’s safe now, because after all these months at the Dipper, no one has come close to recognizing me—except Gloria, who doesn’t count.

  But, of course, I should have known better. I should have known I couldn’t trust my hair not to betray me all over again. This time, it was through a Polaroid that Piper took at Christmas.

  I learned only later that some of the pictures she’d snapped of us had traveled to school for a holiday show-and-tell. Since Piper never even got the chance to clean out her desk, she’d left several behind, tucked in a spelling book. Weeks later, a teacher’s assistant tasked with emptying Piper’s desk found them. She thought the woman with wild black hair in Piper’s photo looked a lot like that crazy girl who killed her stepfather in Everett.

  I guess she grilled the teacher about whether she knew anything about the woman in the picture. Since I had donated doughnuts to the class more than once, the teacher just so happened to know where Piper’s “babysitter” worked. The nosy mother excitedly informed a reporter friend.

  And so one cold Tuesday in February a reporter shows up. At first, I’m not positive she’s with the press. But I notice her studying my face in a way that sets off alarms in my brain. She’s wearing black slacks and pumps, a gray blazer, and she has a thin briefcase with her. She takes her coffee and sits where she can watch me.

  After a while, I realize she’s waiting for me to go on a break or finish my shift. My hands start to sweat and I beg the God who doesn’t exist to help me. Of course, I might as well be praying to a chair. This woman isn’t going anywhere.

  But then, to my great surprise, it dawns on me that I’m not going to run, slip out the back door, or try to avoid this confrontation. Maybe I’m sick of hiding. Or maybe I am too depressed to care. Or maybe I’ve finally realized that a fake ID will never set me free of being me.

  I take some deep breaths. I decide this won’t go down like before—with me acting scared and hiding my face in my hair. It’s going to happen on my terms. I think about Piper—how she’s so brave and bossy. Piper would never run from a reporter.

  As soon as the order counter is empty of customers, I tell Julie I need to take a break. I calmly hang up my apron and approach the woman. She is petite, has her brown hair in a top bun. Because she is sitting, I feel like a giant looming over her. “You’ve been sitting here for quite a while,” I say. “Is there something more you want?”

  “Yes, Venus,” she says with an apologetic smile. “And I’m really sorry it’s not a doughnut.”

  “Why do you guys have to hound me like this?”

  “Why do you assume you’re being hounded?” she replies. “No one is hounding you, Venus. I would just like to have a friendly conversation.”

  “Yeah, right,” I say. “I’m guessing it’s not about movies, boys, or books.”

  “It might be.”

  “Can you wait until I get off work? I’ll meet you at the bottom of the tower in Volunteer Park at two-thirty.”

  She looks
doubtful. I can tell she doesn’t think I’ll show. But what is she going to do? Follow me when I get off work? Continue to chase me around? I doubt a picture of me hiding my face again is enough to make a story.

  I don’t wait for an answer. “I’ll see you there, bottom of the stairs,” and then I go put my apron back on. Julie says nothing about how I cut my break so short. But I can feel her watching me for the rest of my shift.

  A few minutes before I’m off, she approaches me. “Did I hear that woman call you Venus?”

  I nod.

  “Was she a reporter?”

  “I guess so,” I say. “You heard the conversation?” I must have been so distracted by the reporter that I hadn’t registered Julie’s whereabouts.

  “I heard enough,” she says in a soft voice, cocking her head. “So, are there going to be a bunch of people coming in here to get a look at you? Are you Venus Black?”

  “Yeah,” I admit. “I can’t fucking believe it, but I am.” I tear off my apron and hang it up for the last time. “I’m sorry I didn’t say so sooner,” I tell Julie, pulling on my coat and readying to leave. “I’m sorry I lied. I was trying to start over. I understand you’ll want to fire me.”

  Julie gets a shocked look on her face. “Oh no!” She puts an arm around my shoulder, which makes me realize I’m shaking. “Fire you?” she says. “That’s the last thing my mom or I would do. Don’t take this wrong, but it might even bring more customers in.”

  “Oh. Great,” I say, letting out a half laugh. “Customers can come look at me like a monkey in the zoo. But, hey, I guess it will mean more tips for everyone, right?” I can’t hold back the tears that threaten. I hurry off to use the bathroom before I go.

  Looking at myself in the mirror, I can see my future. For the rest of my life I’ll plaster a smile on my face and fill breakfast orders for rude people. I will never have friends. I’ll never have a real boyfriend, much less get married. I’ll never go to college or pursue any of the old dreams. I’ll die a broken, bitter old spinster fondly remembered by no one, famous for being the nice, straight-A kid who put a bullet in her stepdad’s brain.