“I’m looking for a guy who used to live around here and might have worked as a cook in a tavern or restaurant.”
“I’ve been here for ten years,” Gary says. “So shoot. What’s his name?”
“Name’s Tinker Miller.”
“Doesn’t ring a bell. Sounds like a fairy. Tinker Bell.”
“Sometimes he goes by Phil Brown,” Tony explains. “His real first name is Thomas.”
The bartender pretends to think. Shakes his head. “Can’t help you there.”
“I think he was related to that same Miller guy who got shot some years back by a teenaged girl,” Tony blurts out. Was that too much too soon?
But the reference grabs Gary’s attention. He grins. “Shit, yeah,” he says, suddenly animated. “That was fucked up.” Tony notices Gary’s got a big lump behind his lower lip. A plug of chewing tobacco.
“Yeah?” Tony is hoping for more without having to pry. He also wishes Gary would turn down the Kiss song that’s blaring from an overhead speaker.
“Take it you’re not from around here.”
Tony shakes his head. “From California. Tony’s my name,” he says, extending his hand like he would to a customer of his own.
Gary shakes it, but Tony can tell he thinks it’s weird.
Before Tony can think of how to get more details, Gary proudly offers them on a platter. “Yeah. Man, when word got out what happened—the town went crazy with gossip. Story was the stepdaughter shot her stepfather, blew his brains out all over their garage.”
“Aw, c’mon,” complains a guy sitting two down from Tony. “Some of us are trying to drink here.”
“She claimed he was abusive, so some people think she did a good thing. I think she should have fried for it.”
“Wow. So what happened to her?” Tony wishes now that he’d taken the time to wade through the microfiche to see what eventually happened to the unnamed thirteen-year-old.
“Hell, they just sent her to some kiddie prison, is what I heard. She’s already out, too. Was a big article in the Herald a while back. Lots of folks still think she should have got tried as an adult, locked up a lot longer.”
This is interesting. Maybe tomorrow, Tony can go back to the library and read more-recent stories.
For now he tries to steer things toward Leo’s mother. “What about the Miller mother? Any chance you know what happened to her?”
“I know their kid went missing. I doubt she stuck around.” Gary pauses then and cocks his head at Tony. “You got a lot of questions, fellow. For being new to town.” Then he goes around a corner, and Tony hears him spit.
“Just trying to find my man,” Tony calls out. He gulps at his beer. It’s time to back off. When Gary reappears, he asks, “Motel around here where I can land?”
“Lots of bedbug traps,” offers Gary. “But the Pacific Hotel is nice, and not too far from here.” He gives Tony brief directions. At first, Tony worries it will be too expensive, but once he flirts with the desk clerk, the price isn’t as bad as he feared. The last thing he needs is something itching. He hadn’t even realized bedbugs were real.
Inez wakes up on Friday wishing she could sleep in for once. Her work starts at 9:00 A.M. but she’s always awake by 6:00. It looks nice outside, but she knows it’s probably freezing, at least in the low thirties. When she opens the front door to get the Everett Herald, a blast of frigid air cuts right through her robe.
She grabs the newspaper off the porch steps and hurries back inside. She turns up the heat, sets the paper on the kitchen counter, and proceeds to make coffee. While she waits for it to brew, she allows herself to read only the front page. The rest must wait until she takes her coffee to her reading spot in the living room.
This is just one of many routines Inez has developed for herself since she lost her family. She likes to think that in this small way she’s become more like Leo. She understands better now the comfort of having a few small things you can count on to stay the same.
Leo is always on her mind, but this week more than ever. It’s been a week now since his face was first featured on milk cartons across the country. She’s been told not to put too much hope in the project, but they needn’t have cautioned her. After six years of searching, waiting, and wondering, Inez isn’t easily carried away. She was both gratified and angry when Congress passed the Missing Children Act of 1982, which did away with the seventy-two-hour wait to declare a child missing.
The law was a no-brainer. But it left Inez wondering how differently things might have gone for Leo had it been in place sooner.
She’s grateful for the milk-carton project, an initiative of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, established in 1984. But she doubts a six-year-old grainy photo of Leo at age seven is going to do much good. She didn’t even rush out to get a carton of her own, figuring that would make it one less carton circulating. But if she’s honest, another reason might be that she hates seeing the word MISSING above Leo’s face. Even back when she was plastering the state of Washington with MISSING posters, the word made her feel exposed and ashamed, like she had misplaced her child the way you might lose your car keys.
She has gone over that night in her head so many times. If only she’d insisted on keeping Leo with her. If only she hadn’t become so hysterical. If only she had called a neighbor. But most of their neighbors resented the Miller family, because Ray kept the junky cars he was working on out front of the house. And so, under threat of having Leo put in the care of children’s services, Inez had phoned Shirley Cavanaugh, a friend from work who’d watched Leo a few times. She had rushed right over with curlers in her hair to get Leo.
Later that night Inez had packed a bag for herself, too—and eventually joined Leo. Her home was a crime scene and they couldn’t stay there. Of course, she now regrets choosing Shirley’s. And not being there when Leo disappeared. According to Shirley, he’d been happily playing in the sandbox just outside her glass slider while she was watching TV. “He was so happy in the sand. But I could see him—he was right there!”
Inez should have wanted to strangle this woman, but for reasons she can’t explain, she’s never held Shirley personally responsible for “losing” Leo. Maybe there was already so much hate and blame going around that she couldn’t deal with more. Eventually, she found herself accepting Shirley’s desperate pleas to help her look for Leo.
She still thinks it was a smart move, since Shirley’s enormous guilt made her more motivated to find Leo than anyone else in the world—apart from Inez, of course. But Shirley did more than help her hang a zillion MISSING posters of Leo. When Inez was immobilized by grief and depression, it was Shirley who kept her from disappearing into her couch. It was Shirley who visited several evenings a week and knocked on her door until Inez opened it.
Still, given Shirley’s culpability, Inez was as surprised as anyone when their casual friendship deepened. It was as though working in tandem to find Leo forged a bond between them strong enough to save them both. Inez still thinks of Shirley and herself as the guilt sisters.
At times, she knew Shirley was worried Inez would take her own life, but the option of suicide was never on the table, a fact Inez almost resented. She had no choice but to go on—just in case Leo came home. When people told her she was brave, or wondered aloud how she managed to keep going in the face of so much heartache and loss, she wanted to scream. Brave had nothing to do with it. It was hope that held her hostage.
Her coffee ready, Inez pours a cup and takes the paper to the couch in the living room, where one cushion is noticeably sunken and worn. She reads several pages but doesn’t get far before her phone rings. Who would be calling so early on a Friday morning? She won’t even let herself believe someone has reported seeing Leo.
Her heart is racing as she sets her coffee on the side table and rushes to the kitchen. When it’s only Shirley,
Inez is annoyed. “Seriously? You’re calling me at seven in the morning on a Friday?”
“Well, I knew today meant a week without hearing…I just wanted to check in with you. The carton and all.”
“I’m fine,” she tells Shirley.
“Have you finally got one? A carton?” she asks.
“No,” Inez says. “I told you I’m not sure I even want to see it.”
“I understand,” Shirley quickly replies. “And if you don’t want to see it, there’s nothing wrong with that. It doesn’t mean you aren’t glad they’re out there or that you can’t hope it works.”
“I’m just trying not to get my hopes up. It’s such an old picture. And after all these years…”
“Well, I’m worried they’re not doing a good job, Inez. Yesterday I had to go to several stores to find a carton with Leo on it. Albertsons had it. But why doesn’t everyone?”
Inez sighs heavily. “It’s not all brands, you know that, Shirley.” She can’t help sounding exasperated.
“Yeah, honey. We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want.”
Shirley almost always says the right thing.
“What I actually need to focus on is getting the house ready,” says Inez.
“There’s no hurry,” says Shirley.
“Yeah, but in a way there is. That realtor, Melissa Lansing? She’s kind of pushy. I came home last night and found a Century Twenty-one COMING SOON sign in my yard.”
“Are you shitting me? Didn’t you tell her you weren’t a hundred percent sure?”
Inez hesitates. “I don’t know. Maybe I acted more certain than I feel.”
“I get it,” says Shirley. “It’s a huge, scary thing to consider. But just keep in mind that you don’t have to do anything in a hurry. And Melissa Lansing is not in charge when it comes to your house.”
“Everyone thinks I should move.”
“I think it’s a great idea, but I’m not responsible for your decisions. You know that, right?”
Inez has taken a lot of flak over the years from people who worry or act alarmed about her staying at the Rockefeller house. Even Shirley asks why she doesn’t move and why she keeps Leo’s room exactly as he left it. “Are you sure that’s healthy for you?”
Inez couldn’t understand it. How could people think she’d take apart Leo’s room or move away when any minute she could get a call telling her Leo had been found safe and alive? And so she stayed, tracking each year by Leo’s age, assuming she wouldn’t move until he was eighteen.
What has changed Inez’s mind is that she wants to get the equity out of the house so Venus can go to college. Although Venus turned her down, Inez hopes that someday she’ll change her mind and want the money. Once she realizes how hard it is to make a life for yourself from scratch.
After chatting a few more minutes with Shirley, Inez is restless, her routine blown. “I need to go, Shirley,” she announces. “My coffee is probably cold by now, and you know how I am about—”
“No problem,” Shirley interjects. “Call me if you need anything today. Seriously.”
Inez hangs up, retrieves her coffee from the living room, and puts it in the microwave to reheat it. Every morning she makes only two cups, so she can’t afford to just dump the cold one.
While she waits, she gazes at the photo of Leo she keeps on the counter near the sink. It was near impossible to get Leo to make eye contact, so all the pictures of him appear spontaneous. You’d never guess she was begging him to look up at her.
Ever since Venus got released, Inez has become more conscious of the fact that there aren’t any photos of her daughter anywhere. It’s not that she doesn’t love Venus as much as Leo. It’s just that given how much Venus still hates and blames her, she can’t bear to see her face every day.
She stupidly allowed herself to hope that once Venus was out of jail, she might soften, might even forgive her. Maybe she’d find it in her heart to have some semblance of a relationship. But what happened at the doughnut shop snuffed out any hope of that. With her hair pulled back in that braid, Venus’s angry blue eyes had eviscerated Inez like a knife.
But there was no knife sharp enough to make her not love Venus.
Their encounter brought back memories of the first time she saw Venus after the shooting, when she was still at Denney. Venus had refused to speak a word, and it had seemed to Inez like her little girl had turned overnight into some kind of monster, which had made it hard for Inez to remember that Venus was also a victim in all this. She may have killed Ray, but she was still a thirteen-year-old girl, terrified and lashing out.
Two years into her sentence, Venus had agreed to do some counseling with Inez and her counselor, Sharon. At the time, it seemed like they were making progress. Inez begged Venus’s forgiveness for all the ways she screwed up in regard to Ray. She also apologized for telling Venus it was her fault about Leo. “What a terrible thing that was for me to do!” she’d admitted.
She thought Venus was finally softening. But then Inez made the dumbest move ever. She suggested they sell their story to a writer named Anna Weir. And that’s when all hell broke loose and Venus stood up and swore her head off at Inez, declaring she didn’t want her blood money and that she should never, ever come back.
Venus’s eruption had stunned Inez. After that session, Sharon took Inez aside and suggested that perhaps Venus’s refusal to reconcile was a coping mechanism. If she were to forgive Inez, then she’d have to face her own guilt in ways she just wasn’t yet prepared to do. “In other words,” she said, “Venus needs a scapegoat, and unfortunately you’re it.”
Inez suspected Sharon was right. And so she’d let go. She quit pushing to see Venus, not as a way to give up on her but as a way to love her. But it was hard. She understood that Venus needed more time to heal and she should take as long as she needed. As Shirley put it, “It takes what it takes.”
But what if it takes forever?
The microwave beeps, and Inez brings her coffee back to the living room. But it’s no use. She’s not interested in the paper any longer, so she goes to the utility cupboard and finds her bran flakes. It’s also her ritual to eat while sitting at the kitchen table reading the funnies and the horoscopes.
She turns to the comics, but her mind is still stuck on Venus. How much she misses her. What she wouldn’t give to be forgiven, and how unlikely that still seems. She wonders for the hundredth time why she was spared in the first place, why Venus didn’t just shoot her, too.
Saturday morning, Inez gets an update from the folks at the center. Though they’ve taken lots of calls, so far there’s nothing “actionable,” meaning no strong leads or suspects. Turns out a lot of phone calls have come in from children who are scared of disappearing or becoming missing. Hearing this makes her feel horrible.
She spends the morning in a funk, watching old movies, unable to get off the couch. Earlier, when Shirley called to tell her that bowling practice had been canceled—because three people, including her, had the flu—Inez wanted to scream. She had really been looking forward to it.
Next to Shirley, bowling is what Inez credits with helping to save her sanity. Shirley was already in a bowling league when they met, and eventually she convinced Inez to join. After a while, Inez came to see the benefits. It gave her something to do when she got off work. And, unlike so many other sports or pastimes, you could actually drink while doing it.
Not long after Leo was finally declared missing, it came out that Shirley was a bad drunk—even had a reputation for making scenes in bars. But Shirley swore she hadn’t been drinking the day Leo went missing, claiming over and over that she only drank at night. Since Inez drank the same way, she was inclined to believe her.
A few weeks later, Shirley told Inez she’d joined A.A. Inez figured guilt drove her there, but she supposed she was glad for her. In time, she n
oticed positive changes in Shirley’s outlook and energy level. But, still, Inez wouldn’t be caught dead walking into an A.A. meeting. Unlike those folks, Inez mainly drinks wine and just enough—in her opinion—to wind down from her current job as a secretary in the administration offices for the Everett School District.
The irony that she doesn’t have a child enrolled in school isn’t lost on her. She regrets now that she didn’t do more to see about getting Leo into special-ed classes. Shirley has it easy because she continues to work only part-time at Penneys because of her late husband’s pension. Inez forgives her this, since Shirley does so much for her—including driving her to and from the Tyee several nights a week, allowing Inez to drink as much as she wants.
She can only imagine Venus’s disgust if she knew Inez hangs out at the Tyee Lanes. She was always so embarrassed that her mother had met Ray while working at a “disgusting bowling-alley bar.” But truth be told, Inez has found a sense of community down at the old Tyee. The people in her league are caring and funny. They never bring up the past or ask questions about her children.
Secretly, Inez is convinced she bowls better when she’s a little tipsy.
* * *
—
BY NOON, INEZ is tired of watching Shirley Temple movies and decides to venture out. It’s been years since she visited Mukilteo and walked the beach. It’s a stupid thing to do in winter, she knows. She’s going to freeze her ass off. But something compels her to go anyway.
She wears a heavy coat and brings a blanket, along with some wine and a goblet.
As one would expect, the beach itself is pretty much deserted. But despite the cold temperature, she abandons her shoes. She wants to feel the hard sand—wet but firm—against her feet. Maybe the cold air and waves and the familiar smells of the Sound will give her some kind of peace or courage.
For tomorrow. Tomorrow is the day she plans to go into Venus’s room and clean, pack it up, and make sure it’s ready to show on Monday. Melissa Lansing has remarked several times that a basement bedroom with a three-quarter bath could be a big selling point. But she’s been wise—or maybe sensitive—enough not to ask to tour the basement herself.
My Name Is Venus Black Page 20