My Name Is Venus Black(19)
He cries and rocks and counts until he is asleep. When he wakes up, he is not in bed. He is in the wrong closet. His neck hurts. He remembers the man with the orange hair. He smells bacon. Bacon is what his father ate.
* * *
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AFTER SCHOOL, TESSA sits at the little white desk her dad got her for her tenth birthday. Sitting here doing her homework always makes her feel more like a grown-up. Every now and then, she glances at the framed picture of her mother on the corner of the desk. She’s known since she was very little that her mother died when Tessa was born.
Her father says it’s not her fault, but Tessa has never felt sure.
Right next to the picture of her mother is the small statue of the Virgin Mary that belonged to her mom. Her dad says it was her favorite thing. “She was strong in her faith,” her father liked to say. Tessa wishes he talked more about stuff like the dates they went on.
A half hour later, she is deep in thought, doing work for math class, when she hears a strange knocking sound. She quickly decides it’s coming from the other apartment. They share a wall and sometimes Tessa hears noise from the neighbors, so she isn’t surprised. The father and son moved in last night, but she had to go babysit at the Smiths’ house, so she missed it.
Now she decides they must be hanging a picture, even though the dad didn’t look like the type. She wonders if the boy sleeps in the same bed with his father or if he has to sleep on the hide-a-bed in the front room. She hopes the boy doesn’t find out the Herreras’ apartment is way bigger and nicer than theirs.
After dinner, Tessa’s father tells her he has to work late again, which is always a disappointment to her. He went right back down to the shop after he finished the spaghetti Tessa had cooked for him. “You’re such a good girl, Tess,” he tells her, pulling her in for a hug. He always says this whenever he works at night.
Tonight, while she fills the sink with soapy water, she feels a little lonely. Her dad might be right about her needing more friends. She has her best friend, Kelly, at school, and sometimes Tessa spends the night over at Kelly’s house. But she doesn’t really like to have friends stay over at her house, since there’s no mom to make things feel homey or like a family.
After Tessa has cleaned the kitchen, including the Ragú sauce stuck under the stove burner, she sits down on the couch in the front room and looks at her book of horses for a long time. Then she goes to her room to study spelling for tomorrow’s test, even though she knows she’ll get an A. But before she starts to study, she hears the same steady knocking sound she heard earlier. The neighbors must have a lot of pictures to hang—but how many pictures can you hang on one wall?
At 8:00 P.M., she turns the TV on to watch Little House on the Prairie. She loves this show so much it usually makes her cry. Not because it’s sad, but because she wants to be part of the Ingalls family. Of course, Tessa never cries if her dad is around. He might think she’s not mature, after all.
The show ends at 9:00 P.M., which is when she thinks her mother might want her to go to bed if she were alive. She does that a lot, tries to imagine her mom’s wishes, in case she’s watching from heaven. After she prays on her knees and climbs into her carefully made bed, the pounding noise starts in again. She sits up and looks around the room. The moon has come out and the walls look bluish, even though they’re plain white.
She gets out of bed and goes over to the wall and puts her ear to it. The nailing is coming from behind her dresser, way down low on the wall, not where you’d hang a picture. She moves her dresser out, scraping it along the wood floor. She kneels down and listens. Before she can think why, she impulsively knocks on the wall. The knocking stops. She knocks again, softly. Three times. And three knocks come back. She smiles but feels confused. It must be the bratty boy knocking, but why would he do that?
She sees herself squatting there, her white nightgown pooling around her on the floor in the blue light. Silence. Suddenly she’s embarrassed. She decides not to knock again and climbs back in bed.
The silence lasts.
The man with the wrong orange hair is not here. Leo doesn’t know when he left. It was after Leo was watching the TV for a long time. Not Gilligan or Speed Racer, but a show with fuzzy white and black and gray squiggles. Leo liked staring at it. The man had stood near him and said something. Once, the man changed the channel. But when Leo started yelling, he changed it back.
Now Leo goes to the room where there is a closet. He curls up on the floor and starts to rock. He wants Venus. Why won’t she come? He sees her in his head like at night when he sleeps. He sees her room, and he hears her voice counting stars and saying the planets.
He wants his mother. She always gets his purple blanket for him. She never yells at Leo for being in the closet. But sometimes his father opens the door and yells, “Goddamn it, Leo!”
Leo knows the word damn. It’s a red feeling. And when his father says it, Leo gets scared his father might hurt him.
* * *
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TINKER FINDS A job the first day out. Not surprising, since he is a skilled fry cook. One of the few good things that came out of his stint in prison. Whenever he wants a job, he finds a place that needs a short-order cook and offers to work three nights for free. They always keep him, despite the huge gaps in his application.