Leo is thirteen now, and he likes to tell people this. Thirteen is really old, Tessa says. Now he waits at the bus stop next to Tessa for his bus to come. He is wearing his blue backpack and carrying his cello. Every day he takes these two things to school. He wishes he could wear his backpack all the time, but Mrs. Langhorne says no.
The bus that is the wrong yellow comes two minutes after it is supposed to. Leo says goodbye to Tessa, like he’s been taught. Then he boards the bus and sits in the spot where he always sits. Once, another boy sat in his seat and Leo got mad. Then the driver got mad and there were red feelings everywhere.
On the way to school, he looks for blue things and names them aloud. Mr. Taft, his speech therapist who makes him talk a lot, wants Leo to make sentences with blue things in them, but he mostly just likes to find blue things. He looks out the window and sees a blue car in the next lane. “A blue car goes fast,” he begins. Then, “I like blue houses.”
Leo hears the boy sitting behind him saying the same blue things he says and then laughing. Leo doesn’t mind if other people say blue things.
After a while, he forgets about looking for blue and stares at the ribbon in the hair of the girl in front of him. It is just like Tessa’s. It is yellow and purple stripes. Purple and yellow are his new favorite colors. Leo sees these colors a lot when he’s at school. Tessa says they’re the school colors, even though the school is brown.
When the bus stops, Leo makes sure he has the two things before he stands up. Backpack. Cello case. Inside the school, he goes to the classroom where he belongs. He puts his cello in the back corner. He takes off his coat and hangs it on a knob. Then he slides his backpack under his desk and sits down.
His teacher says, “Good morning, Leo.”
He says back, “Good morning, Mrs. Langhorne.” He likes his teacher because she smells like lemons, and lemons are the right yellow and they even smell like yellow. But not to eat! One time, Leo took a bite of lemon and he spit it out. Tony laughed and Tessa got mad at Tony.
While he waits, Leo plays his cello in his head until the other kids make too much noise. The one called Stan talks too much and he gets to ride around in a silver chair with really big wheels. Leo is jealous of his chair and he wants one just like it, but Tessa says no. Mrs. Langhorne says no, too. Leo doesn’t like when people say no.
Mrs. Langhorne says it’s time for spelling. Leo looks at his watch. It is 8:32. Spelling should not start until 8:35, but he won’t get upset. He is learning not to get upset as much. But no matter when it starts, Leo hates spelling, because the words always break the rules.
After spelling comes science. This week they are on a chapter about the stars and planets. When he looks at the solar system in his book, he gets upset. He shakes his hand, like he’s been taught.
His teacher says, “Yes, Leo?” And Leo shouts, “Venus is not yellow. Venus is red!”
“Okay, Leo,” she says. “If you want Venus to be red, it can be red. I’ll even let you fix it in your book.”
While Leo uses a colored pencil to make Venus red, he names the planets like he used to with Venus.
“Well, that is very good, Leo!” she says. “You already know all the planets’ names and their order from the sun.”
When Leo continues to say them, Mrs. Langhorne wants him to stop. She shushes him and asks him to remember the other students. People at school always interrupt you. They want you to answer questions, and then when you are asking questions or talking, they tell you to stop.
* * *
—
TESSA STABS THREE potatoes with a fork, placing them in the microwave on a paper towel. She should have started dinner sooner.
She goes to tell Leo it’s almost time. He’s watching bowling, his longish blond hair hanging across his face. Tessa thinks, as she often does, that at a glance you would never know about Leo’s differentness. You’d just think he was a handsome thirteen-year-old boy.
After six years, she still has moments like this—where, for just a second, it doesn’t seem far-fetched that Leo should look up and smile and ask if he can help make dinner.
“Leo,” she says.
He grunts.
“Ten minutes.”
He grunts again. The ten-minute warning is a fairly new routine. She blames herself. With Leo, you have to be very careful not to do the same thing the same way too many times in a row, or he’s bound to notice and then turn it into yet another requirement.
She goes out to the back porch to check the steaks on the hibachi. Now that they have an actual private deck, it’s her favorite way to make dinner.
They rented this house—a humble rancher in a so-so Oakland neighborhood—shortly after Leo came to stay. They needed another bedroom, and with rental rates skyrocketing, her dad realized he could afford to let out both apartments above the tattoo shop and rent a small house for them.
She lifts the lid and checks the steaks, but they’re thicker than usual and not near done.
Leo won’t be happy if she’s late getting them on the table. But at least he doesn’t throw tantrums all the time anymore. He’s really matured in the last six years.
Still, all the routines and demands have made her life harder. Whenever she resents this, she reminds herself how sad it was before he came. How she and her dad were just two lonely people and their biggest connection was the shared gap where her mother should be. Adding Leo made it three, more like a real family.
For a long time, Tessa thought if she just loved Leo hard enough, he would get better—all the way better, meaning he would be more like a regular boy. She used to pray to Mary for a miracle, too, but it never came. He still makes a strange humming sound when he’s happy, but she’s never actually seen him smile or heard him laugh. She wishes he would look her in the eye and share his feelings. But no matter what special gifts Leo has or what he learns to do—converse, follow directions, read, and even play music—part of him is still trapped somewhere Tessa can’t reach.
What hurts most is that Leo doesn’t seem to care.
Yet she knows that in his own strange way, Leo does care about people. Whenever she—or anyone, really—is upset or sad, if Leo is nearby, he will start to gently rock. Her dad says Leo has empathy.
Tessa turns the steaks, sees they still need time. She absently thinks about a boy she wishes would ask her out. She’s seventeen now, and she’s been allowed to date since she was sixteen. It’s beginning to embarrass her that she hasn’t gone on a single date. At the same time, she’s pretty sure her dad isn’t going to like it if she gets too busy with a boyfriend, because he still needs her at home a lot.
A breeze comes up and she zips her sweatshirt, grateful for the small rise of her breasts. Because she was a late bloomer, she’s still getting used to the idea of looking and feeling like an actual woman. It makes her feel closer to her mother, almost like she’s becoming her.
As she continues to wait for the steaks, she notices a single star in the dusky sky. She guesses it’s probably Venus.
Sometimes she still feels a twinge of guilt about not telling her father that Leo might have a sister named Venus somewhere. That first Easter, when Phil had let Leo come to their apartment for dinner, Tessa had been anxious to get Leo alone and learn more. Leo had said, “My sister is Venus. Venus is red.” But he had refused to answer her questions about Venus—or, for that matter, anything in the past. To this day, he’s made it clear that nothing makes him madder than being asked to “remember.”
He always blurts out, “I don’t know before.”
But Tessa does know. And as hard as she tries to pretend it doesn’t matter, the truth is like a tiny splinter lodged in her conscience that hurts when she touches it.
* * *
—
TONY IS STANDING in the doorway, waiting for dinner to be ready. He should go help Tessa, at least set th
e table, but a patch of winter sun is slanting through the front window onto his face and he can’t make himself move. He studies Leo, who is watching bowling on TV. With Leo, you can do that, watch him. Tessa would never allow it.
As usual, Leo is tipping his head to the left. The doctor says there’s nothing wrong with his neck, it’s just a quirk of Leo’s. But at least they eventually managed to break him of pulling on his hair. Now it’s long and blond and hangs in his eyes. Tony thinks a man pony is a good idea—like father, like son. But Tessa says it makes him look like a girl. “His face is too pretty,” she says.
On a whim, Tony asks Leo if he remembers when he took him bowling.
Leo just grunts, which usually means yes.
Tony is always looking for father-son types of things to do with Leo. He discovered early on that Leo liked to play catch with a ball. Leo wasn’t good at throwing, but Tony always made sure he threw catchable balls. They started with a baseball and then later moved to a football. Tony wishes Leo could actually play sports at school, but he knows Leo couldn’t do that. Sports are complicated, and it would seem to Leo that people weren’t following the rules.
Once, Tony had mistakenly assumed that since Leo liked to watch bowling on TV—something they discovered when his brother, Marco, had it on at Christmas—he might like to learn how to bowl.
It was a nightmare. Every time Leo heard the sound of pins crashing, he covered his ears and moaned. Still, Tony had been determined, because with Leo you have to be. He can learn new things, but it takes repetition and a lot of patience. Which Tony had in spades, or so he thought.
Finally, when it became apparent that his gentle wrestling with Leo to try to get him to roll the ball was upsetting other patrons—the shoe guy kept glaring at him—Tony had given up. And Leo had continued to love watching bowling on TV.
Leo has a secret. He knows what a secret is because Tessa explained it once. Keeping a secret means you don’t tell anyone about something you know.
At the time, Leo didn’t understand why a person would do that. But now he’s pretty sure that’s what he is doing. Once, Tony told Leo about sex. And about how his body is changing and girls’ bodies change, too. So that’s not a secret, because Tony knows. But what feels like a secret is that Leo likes a girl at school. She is older than him. Her name is Sarah, and she has blond hair and she stutters. It used to upset Leo a lot every time she got stuck. He wanted her words to come out so bad that sometimes he would yell out the word she was trying to say. But this made the teacher mad. Leo couldn’t understand. He was trying to help.
Now it seems like Sarah stutters less. And she has grown what Leo knows are called “breasts.” He gets a weird feeling when he thinks of Sarah’s breasts or when he looks at them at school. He wishes he could sit by her in class, but the teacher says no.
Leo wants to tell Tessa about his secret. But if he tells her, then it won’t be a secret anymore. And maybe Tessa won’t like it that Leo likes Sarah’s breasts.
Leo decides he doesn’t like secrets at all. He hopes he never gets another one.
* * *
—
THE FOLLOWING EVENING, Tony sits in his truck, his heart beating out of his chest. He stares at the milk carton on the seat next to him. It features Leo’s face under the heading MISSING. He slams his fists on his steering wheel, saying, “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”
The name on the carton says Leo Miller, not Brown, but the date of his disappearance matches the time frame—he can’t remember the exact date—when Phil moved into the apartment. In this photo, Leo is much younger and his hair is buzzed short. Tony remembers when he looked like that. Now Leo’s hair has grown long, because he hates to have it cut.
So if you saw this picture, would you even make the connection? You might, he decides, for the simple reasons that the name is Leo, his strongly arched brows make his face distinctive, and he’s described as mentally handicapped. They turned his last name to Herrera to avoid questions, but they never changed Leo’s first name because it would have upset him. Plus, he might make mistakes when asked his name.
It stuns him to think that, after all these years, someone is looking for Leo. Someone misses him. And now Tony looks like a kidnapper. And who knows how many laws he broke when he asked a shady client to get him a fake Social Security number and birth certificate for Leo so they could enroll him in school.
Thank God Tony saw this carton, not Tessa! Since shopping requires a car, it’s always been one of the few chores Tony does, and it’s the one he likes to mention in case people think he lets Tessa do everything.
After Phil left, Tony suspected that Phil wasn’t actually Leo’s dad, or else how could he just abandon him? By now, Tony has come to love Leo as if he were his own son. But that still doesn’t explain the series of crazy decisions he made almost six years ago.
It started with a bizarre phone call from Phil, a couple of days after Tony had finished his tattoo. Phil thanked him and said it was healing up fine. Then he added, “But, yeah, man. There’s something else I gotta tell you. I was calling to let you know…Well, you know how you guys like Leo so much? I was hoping you could keep an eye on the kid for me…just for a while.”
“What do you mean, ‘for a while’?”
“Well, he’s been there a day and a half; I’m sure he’s doing fine. But I’m gonna be out of town a few weeks—”
“What? You left him alone? I’m sorry, but that’s not—”
“I’ll call back in a couple days to check in,” said Phil, and then he simply hung up.
Tony was so stunned it took him a moment to put together this call with the fact that he hadn’t seen Phil’s white Impala out front the last of couple days. He raced upstairs to Phil’s apartment and found the door unlocked. Inside, Leo was calmly watching TV, an open jar of Jif on the counter, along with a half-empty bag of Wonder bread.
Tony’s first instinct had been to immediately call the police. The only reason he hesitated—his first mistake—was because Tessa would be home from school in fifteen minutes. He didn’t want her to panic at the sight of police cars, especially if they took Leo away in one.
When Tessa got home and saw Leo on their couch watching TV, she acted more guilty than surprised. Then Tony took her into his den and gently explained what had happened with Phil. “We have to call the police right away, honey.”
He knew she wouldn’t like it, but he hadn’t anticipated how upset she’d become. “Daddy, you can’t call the police!” she wailed. Then she barraged him with questions about what would happen to Leo. Tony admitted he’d most likely get put in foster care, at least until they could locate Phil.
“But Phil didn’t abandon him,” Tessa argued. “He asked us to babysit! And his mother was a drug addict and didn’t even want him. So Leo has no one!” she screeched. “You know it’s true, because why else would Phil leave him here? He said he would call. I’m sure he’ll come back like he said. Just a few weeks.”
Tony pointed out that parents aren’t allowed to do what Phil had done and that authorities have people who know how to handle kids like Leo who have special problems.
“But they’ll be strangers! And Leo will start having a tantrum and hitting his head…and they won’t know what to feed him or what he likes to play! I know what he needs even better than Phil….” Tessa trailed off, realizing she’d given herself away.
“What do you mean? How could that be?”
Tessa confessed she’d been secretly visiting Leo for months. Tony could tell she thought she was going to be in big trouble for using the master key to trespass. But of course that didn’t matter now. “If you found a way to help Leo and figure out what he likes, so would the professionals,” he had argued. “Plus, they may even let you pass on key information.”
But Tessa wouldn’t see it. “I promise I’ll take care of him, Dad!” she pleaded. “You won’t ha
ve to do anything. I’ll do everything.”
“He’s not a stray dog, Tessa! He’s a little boy.”
“If he’s not a dog,” she yelled, “then why do you want to treat him like one and call the pound?”
Tony had never been in this kind of fight with his daughter before—and he saw flashes of her mother Maria’s stubbornness. Which made him weaken. Made him say what he should have never said. “He can stay two weeks maximum, and then we call the police if there’s no word from Phil.”
Tessa was jubilant and set about turning their large laundry room into a small bedroom for Leo. She decorated it and used her allowance to buy things she knew he liked. Tony could see her becoming more and more attached to Leo.
After fourteen days, Tony sat her down, planning to be firm. Two weeks ago he had told Tessa it was non-negotiable. They would call the police and she had agreed. How could she argue with him now?
Easily, it turned out. Having heard nothing from Phil, they’d agreed it was hard to believe he was ever coming back for Leo. Now Tessa’s case was simple. They should make Leo part of the family.
She pointed out that no one else was even aware of Leo’s existence, other than Tony’s brother, Marco, and his fiancée, Maureen. “And you know M and M would think it was the right thing to do, too!” she insisted. “You know they would. And we could get Leo in school and just say that he’s my cousin and his parents died and he’s come to live with us.”
This was the moment when Tony should have laid down the law. Remembered that he was the adult, the parent. Explained to Tessa that her idea was madness. He should have let Tessa go ahead and hate him for an evening, or a week, or whatever it would have been.
My Name Is Venus Black Page 17