My Name Is Venus Black(100)
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.
My name is Venus Black because my dad was Joseph Black, and because on March 4, 1966, my mother, Inez, just so happened to be watching a TV special about the Space Race when her water broke. She named me after the planet Venus.
It was no mistake, my birth. No chance happenstance. It had to be me. This is not something you can trace backward. It’s not something you can prove through science. It’s just something you know. Something only you can know. It comes to you in moments as simple as finding an eyelash on the tip of your finger.
The trajectory of my life was always leading me here. I know this when I see the particular green of Piper’s eyes. Or when I hear Leo play the color yellow on his cello. I give up trying to know why, and I arrive where I am all over again.
My naked eyes look out at the universe, and what I see is exactly as it appears. Out in the infinite black, a family of stars. Us blinking back at us. The picture in the sky doesn’t lie—we are all clearly related.
And God exists. He spies us with his wise eyes. He whispers too softly for human ears to hear. He spins the world like a top, stares into the turning. And sometimes, he rocks.
—Writing sample for Anna Weir
The story of Venus and her family is set in Everett, Washington, in large part because that is where I spent most of my growing-up years—including in a public housing project a few streets over from the Denney Juvenile Justice Center. Back then, we simply called it juvie. Both Denney and Echo Glen are real juvenile justice facilities, but changes in their facilities and policies during the past forty years made corroborating details for Venus’s experience a challenge. When I was unable to dig up the facts, I let my imagination serve the story.
A key event from my childhood mirrors Venus’s, but mostly our stories diverge wildly. Venus is her own character, and she came alive at that surprising juncture in fiction where a writer’s efforts end and some kind of magic takes over. More than once, while tracking her story, I thought, Where did these people come from?
With regard to the law, in 1977, Washington State passed the landmark Juvenile Justice Act. Among other reforms, the new legislation established standardized sentencing (while leaving judges some leeway), to bring juvenile courts more in line with the practices of adult court. In 1982, amid rising public concern about missing and runaway children, new laws changed police procedures. For example, in the case of a missing child under twelve, police no longer needed to wait for seventy-two hours before acting on a report. Two years later, in 1984, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children was established. Soon after, dairies across the nation began plastering photos of missing kids on milk cartons in campaigns that became the AMBER Alert Program of their day.
To the best of my ability, Venus’s story reflects both the legal realities and cultural assumptions of the era. An exception would be how police responded to Leo’s reappearance, and how that might have played out in 1986. For my telling of that event, and in the absence of certainty, I took some creative liberties while trying to keep the story as realistic as possible.