My Name Is Venus Black

by Heather Lloyd

  I park the Honda in a large garage in the vicinity of the building. When I get out onto the sidewalk, the air is heavy and warm. I adjust my purse on my arm, walk slower. I check my underarms to make sure there aren’t sweat stains.

  I cross the street to walk on the opposite sidewalk, where there is shade. I see my image in the windows of storefronts as I pass. I’m wearing a blue linen dress that falls just above my knees, along with huaraches. I think I look pretty. My hair is partly pulled back and clipped. I peek into a children’s clothing store. They carry a lot of cute designer clothing—stuff I’d like to buy Piper. I keep walking, knowing I should be getting close. I check the address numbers to be sure they’re getting smaller, not bigger. The building itself is unimpressive. A business building that houses dozens of different offices. I scan the reader board in the lobby to find the right one. Third floor.

  An attractive man with pale curly hair is also waiting for the elevator. He nods at me, says, “Hello.”

  “Hello,” I say. He’s already punched the UP button.

  There’s a ding and the doors slide open. Once inside, the man punches number 4. “Three, please?” I say. He punches the number. He smells good. I look at his hands. They’re good hands. Clean. He’s holding a briefcase. Lawyer?

  “Pretty day, huh?” he says.

  “Yes,” I say. “But hot.”

  “Pretty girl, too,” he says.

  I look at him in surprise.

  He smiles. “Yes, you.”

  I blush, look down. “Thank you.”

  When I step off the elevator, I’m met with a rush of cool air. The office I’m looking for is the second door down a long hall. It opens to a lobby decorated in a modern, fun style. Bright colors, smooth lines. Several pieces of modern art on the walls.

  Behind a big peanut-shaped desk is a blond receptionist. She looks too glamorous for a secretary. I approach. “I’m looking for Anna Weir.” I didn’t make an appointment in case I changed my mind at the last second.

  “Is she expecting you?”

  “No, not really.”

  “Okay, well, let me see if she’s available.” She disappears through a set of doors behind her and I nervously wipe my hands on my dress. I can’t believe I’m doing this. Moments later the receptionist returns with another woman. She’s dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt decorated with embroidery and sequins. She has light-brown hair, a broad, pretty face with no makeup. Her thick eyebrows make me miss my own. She’s thirtyish.

  “Hi, I’m Anna,” she says, extending a hand. “And you are?”

  I only hesitate for a second. “My name is Venus Black.”

  Two hours later, I leave the office with a manila envelope tucked under my arm. I feel like I have made a new friend. I walk back the same way I came. This time, when I reach the children’s boutique, I duck inside. The air-conditioning is wonderful.

  “I’m looking for something green,” I tell a saleswoman.

  “Green?”

  “Yes, something green for a girl with green eyes. She’s a girls’ twelve.”

  “Well, let’s see….”

  I follow her to a mannequin wearing a green dress with pink polka dots, a pink ribbon at the waist.

  “I like it,” I say. “But it’s a little too fancy.” I can’t picture Piper in it.

  “I see. Let me think.” I follow her to a more casual section. She pulls out a lime-green skirt I don’t like.

  I shake my head. “Why don’t I just look around?”

  She nods. “Let me know if I can be of help.”

  I wander through the racks, pulling out an item here or there. I finally choose a green bathing suit. It is exactly the right green, a cute little one-piece.

  I pay for the purchase and head back to the car. It is hotter now than it was before, and traffic is terrible, so I decide to wait out rush hour in a restaurant. Then I start on the drive back to Oakland.

  When I get home, it’s almost nine, but Inez is still awake, lying on the couch in the living room, watching television. I sniff the air. Inez has supposedly quit smoking, but I don’t entirely believe it yet.

  “Where have you been?” she asks. She uses the remote to lower the volume of the television.

  “Did it go okay with Leo?” I ask. “Bedtime?” I casually glance around for a wineglass. I don’t see one.

  “Yes. It went okay. And before I forget, Danny called.”

  My heart does a little flip. I called him while I was still back in Everett. We had a very awkward conversation as I tried to apologize for my rudeness while at the same time scolding him for not telling me the truth—that he knew who I was. “Let’s forgive each other,” he said, as if it were that simple. And in a way it was. We went on a couple of chaste dates and talked our heads off before I moved away. We laughed a lot, too. We held hands once, and lo and behold, I didn’t die. Now we’re trying to do a long-distance friendship, but it clearly has romantic overtones. So far, I’m surprised how much you can develop a relationship over the phone. My new therapist says it’s a good way to make progress with my men issues.

  Meanwhile, Danny has mentioned transferring to the Bay area. But I warned him not to do it just for me.

  “So where were you all day?” Inez asks again.

  I sit down next to her on the couch. “First I went to the admissions office at Oakland Community College.”

  She nods. She knows about my plans to attend school in the fall.

  “And then I went to Sacramento to see Anna Weir.”

  “What? Why?” She’s startled.

  “I decided maybe we should think about doing that book,” I tell her. “I actually really liked her, and it turns out she had a rough childhood, too. She even said I could help write it. She gave me an outline and some prompters.” I hand Inez the manila envelope.

  She stares at me wide-eyed while she pulls out the thin stack of papers. She meets my eyes. “I thought you hated this idea. You really think you’re ready for this?”

  “I think so,” I tell her. “I guess we’ll see. Anna says we don’t have to be in a hurry. She seems to think our story is important. I never thought of it that way, but maybe she’s right.”

  It had been Inez’s decision. After we got the room painted white, it still looked really bad, because we didn’t use primer and the knotty pine showed through. Even with the hole fixed and the walls painted, I couldn’t stay in that room.

  For the next couple of weeks I slept on the couch and wrestled with what to do. I knew I couldn’t just live there with Inez and babysit Leo all day while she worked. Plus, Leo was not adjusting the way we’d hoped. His therapist said he was traumatized by the move and she suspected he was regressing. He spent most of his time in his closet, hardly ever spoke, and we couldn’t imagine him going to school.

  One evening Inez sat me down. “Venus, this is no life for you.”

  “I agree,” I told her. “I can’t keep doing this.”

  “Do you still want to move to California?”

  “Yes,” I told her. “But how can I? With Leo…” I shook my head.

  “Leo isn’t doing well, obviously. And I’m scared for him,” Inez said.

  “Well, I am, too! But what do you recommend?”

  Inez pressed her lips together. “I’ve made a big decision,” she said. “I hope you’ll agree. I think you should move to California and get an apartment. I want you to call and see if those people—the Herreras—will keep Leo until I can sell the house and move down there, too. And then we’ll work it out. We can have some kind of arrangement where Leo can gradually get used to us again and hopefully, eventually, he can move back in with us. The Herreras could visit all they want. When I ask myself what’s best for Leo, that’s the answer.”

  For a moment, I was too surprised to speak. “I thought we hated the Herreras!
I thought we blamed them!”

  “There’s been too much anger, Venus. I’m so tired of rage and anger. It’s Leo who matters now. When you stop and think about it, all of us are to blame in some way. We were all doing the best we could at the time. I think very few people are truly evil.”

  “Not even you?” I asked.

  And she laughed. “Well, I don’t know about that….”

  “Not even me?” I added, smiling.

  “Oh, Venus,” she said. “Oh no. Oh, never…”

  After we briefly hugged—for the first time—I pulled away shyly. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

  * * *

  —

  WHEN I FIRST arrived in Oakland, I rented a three-bedroom apartment near the Herreras’ and got a daytime waitress job. Almost every evening, I went to see Leo at the Herreras’ house. In the beginning, he ignored me. He’d say hello in response to my hello. But all his attention seemed to rest on Tessa. Leo trailed her around the house. And I trailed Leo.

  After a couple of weeks of this, Tessa made it a point to run some kind of errand in order to leave me alone with Leo. At first, Leo got upset. But after a while, as I timed my visits to exactly seven o’clock, he came to expect them, to count on them, even.

  Once Inez arrived, it took many more weeks to gradually transition Leo from living full-time with the Herreras to here. Some nights, Leo still cries for Tessa. But ever since we convinced him to use the phone, it’s better. He calls her and Tony often, says a few words, and hangs up. It seems to help him.

  Inez is still not done unpacking, even though she joined me here in early May, after the house on Rockefeller sold. The rooms of the apartment we share are still dotted with boxes—the stuff you can live without, which it turns out is most of what my mother owns.

  In the meantime, Inez and I have an understanding. We need each other, and in having a common problem to solve—the problem of loving Leo—we manage to do together what we couldn’t alone. Leo is often upset and confused. He’s like one of those beetles that keeps tipping itself on its back and then wondering why it’s stuck—and we take turns tipping him right side up again.

  We have hard days, especially as Inez tries to stop drinking on her own. I keep telling her to go to A.A., but she resists. I think she is weakening, though. I noticed it really got to her the other day when I said, “Haven’t you let your pride get in the way long enough?”

  Yeah. Pretty funny, me giving Inez lectures on pride.

  I finally started reading You Can Heal Your Life, and I think it’s beginning to make some sense.

  I still can’t see a future with little miracles like butterflies floating around. But I can imagine being a beached starfish that, given a second or third chance, finally makes its way back into the welcoming sea.

  * * *

  —

  THREE DAYS AFTER my visit to Sacramento, Inez is making me a cake. “I told you that we don’t need to have a party, Inez! It’s three months late—and that feels dumb.”

  “I want to have a party,” she says, emphasizing want. “Heck, this is the first birthday party I’ve had for one of my kids in seven years! Why can’t you stop objecting and go along? It’s happening,” she says happily.

  “Okay, Inez,” I say. “But I still don’t get it.”

  “I told you not to call me that,” she says. It’s a joke with us. She pretends not to like being called Inez, but she knows I’m not going to start calling her Mom at this late date.

  “Okay. But let me frost my own damn cake.” I take her shoulders and forcibly move her toward a kitchen chair. She lets me. I’ve noticed she seems really tired lately, but she resists going in for a checkup. It could be that she’s just not sleeping, because she’s trying to quit drinking and she says without her wine she lies awake all night. I feel bad for her, but she needs to get sober. With all the stress around Leo, when she first arrived in California she was drinking vats of wine and was worthless by 7:00 P.M. every night.

  I pick up the spatula. It’s the same one from my childhood in Everett. It has a wooden handle with a white plastic top that is slightly bent from being burned in the dishwasher.

  “What time is Piper’s flight?” asks Inez. I could be imagining it, but I think she feels a bit of trepidation about meeting Piper. Maybe because she can tell Piper is so important to me.

  “She arrives at the airport in an hour,” I tell her. I still can’t believe Piper is coming for my belated birthday. We talk all the time on the phone, but it’s her first visit since I officially moved to Oakland back in March.

  Leo comes out into the kitchen. “The smell.”

  “The smell? It’s cake, Leo.”

  “Why?”

  “Remember, it’s Venus’s birthday,” Inez says.

  “Oh.” Leo flaps his left arm three times, a new quirk his doctor attributes to adolescence.

  “Do you want to help frost, Leo?” I ask him. Of course he won’t. He never does anything in the kitchen.

  He walks over to where I am frosting the cake. I see his eyes flit across my hands. “Like peanut butter?” he asks.

  I laugh. “Yes, it is just like when you put your peanut butter on the bread and try to cover up all the white.”

  He keeps staring. “Do you want to try?” I offer the spatula. He considers. Takes it. I am too stunned for words. I look over at Inez. This is the first time since we got Leo back that he has wanted to do something outside his normal routines.

  I watch Leo carefully dip the spatula in the frosting bowl. There’s about half a cake left to frost. I’ve done the bottom part. He slowly lifts the spatula with icing on it and touches it on the top of the cake at the very center. I’m guessing that’s how he’ll do it. Spiraling outward, like he does with peas.

  I turn on the faucet and start to clean up. The enchiladas I made earlier are in the refrigerator. I’ll put them in the oven when company starts to come.

  After the kitchen is presentable, Leo is still working on the cake, and given his rate of speed, it could take all night. I go to my bedroom and change. I pick out a new pair of jeans—the first I have bought outside of a thrift store since I left Echo. They’re white, fit like a glove, and they’re just the right length. As I pull them on, I flash back to that day of my release from Echo. The weight of my layers from the charity bin. The flash of cameras. How I covered my face and changed my name and tried to escape my past.

  The doorbell rings, but we know Leo will answer it. This is a new routine. Now he always answers the door in case it might be Tessa or Tony. It is Tessa. I hear Leo’s strange squawks of delight. It still stings a bit that he doesn’t do that when it’s me at the door.

  * * *

  —

  AS WE ALL hoped, the charges against Tony were reduced to interference with custody. He received a two-year suspended sentence, along with probation. The fraud charges—Leo’s fake birth certificate and Social Security card—were supposed to cost him six months in jail, but he got out after two.

  When Tony offered to pick up Piper, I was grateful because I still feel overwhelmed by airports. But I wasn’t sure how Piper would feel about being picked up by a stranger instead of me. She’s never met Tony. But Piper didn’t hesitate. “I get to meet Tony? Leo’s dad?”

  “Is that okay?” I asked.

  “Yes!” she said. “I want to! But how will I know…He doesn’t know me.”

  “He’ll be holding a sign that says ‘Piper.’ ”

  “Oh! That’s kind of cool,” she said.

  Piper doesn’t have a shy bone in her body.

  When Tony shows up at the door with Piper, I crush her in a hug, and I take the small package she is anxiously trying to give me.

  “Is this for me?”

  “Yes,” says Piper. “But you probably won’t like it.”

  “Oh
pooh!” I tell her. “Of course I will.”

  “But there’s another surprise,” she says, giggling and peeking behind her. She goes to the closed front door and opens it again. “Ta-da!” she says.

  Oh my gosh. I’m too stunned for words. Danny is standing right in front of me, looking as handsome as ever, in khaki shorts and a dark-blue button-down shirt. He grabs me into a long hug, and I don’t resist.

  I can’t believe he flew here just to see me for my belated birthday.

  After Danny’s been welcomed, we go to the living room, where Tessa is writing a card, probably to me. She slips it into a book from the coffee table as we enter. This is the first time Piper has ever met Tessa. When I introduce them, Tessa looks at Piper with that soft and probing way she has. I think Tessa’s impulse is to hug her, but she extends a hand to Piper instead.

  Piper shakes it awkwardly, flashing her gap-toothed smile. “I’m so happy to meet you,” she says. And then she giggles like it’s so funny.

  Sometimes I notice Tessa watching me. We get along well, but she is so quiet and almost mysterious. She’s clearly mature for her age. And yet so innocent. At times it seems like she’s older than me, even though she’s a bit younger.

  She’s also Leo’s favorite person in the world. Sometimes, when this bothers me, I remember the look of naked joy on Leo’s face the day I brought him back to the Herreras’. He did this really funny jig, jumping all over. It was both hilarious and beautiful.

  Now Inez hands Tessa the box of candles and I watch her carefully arrange them on Leo’s perfectly swirled frosting. When Tony leans past Tessa to light the candles, I see him wink at Inez. I think she has a crush on him. As they set the cake before me, I realize I don’t know what to wish for. I want to beg them to wait, to give me a few minutes to think.

  But it’s too late. While they all sing “Happy Birthday,” this is what we do: Leo plugs his ears. Tessa smiles shyly across the table at Piper. Inez wipes at tears. Tony leans back and belts it out. And Danny, standing behind me, places a hand on my shoulder. I still can’t think of a single thing to wish for. So I fill my lungs with air, let go all at once, and wish for everything.