My Name Is Venus Black(4)

After the nightmares, I visit the community bathroom down the hall and use cold water to splash my face and try to dry my body with paper towels. In the mirror my eyes look buggy and wild. I look like a deranged person. Like someone who could do what I did.

Back in my room, I change into regular clothes. I strip the wet sheets and try to sleep on just the plastic. While I lie there shivering, I remember how the planet Venus rotates backward as it orbits the sun, while Earth and most of the other planets rotate forward, in the direction they’re going. That’s how I feel, like all of a sudden my life is turning in the opposite direction of where I want to go.



* * *



—



HERE’S WHAT I keep thinking. None of this would have happened if my father hadn’t died when I was five. It was a freak factory accident, they said, where his belt buckle got caught on a piece of machinery. So if Joseph Black had only worn a different belt to work that day, he’d still be alive. And then Inez would never have taken a job tending bar at the Tyee Lanes. And she would never have met Raymond Miller the night he rolled six strikes in a row and strolled into the bar to celebrate.

In the coming years, Raymond loved to recount how he met Inez—leaving out the fact that my dad’s body was barely in the ground. He’d linger on the bowling part of the story, and then he’d pat the cigarettes in his shirt pocket and joke that it was his “Lucky Strikes” that led him to Inez.

Now it’s weird to think how it would have been better for everyone if only Raymond had been a little less lucky that night.

The morning after the strikes, Raymond showed up at our crummy place in the projects with flowers for Inez and Pop-Tarts for me. Being only five and having only seen Pop-Tarts on TV—to save money, Inez usually fed me gross hot cereal with powdered milk—I thought Pop-Tarts were amazing, like getting to eat candy for breakfast.

Over the next few weeks, Raymond kept it up, trying to buy us with small gifts. Things like a gold locket for Inez and a Skipper—Barbie’s little sister—for me. I can’t remember all the other presents, but I’m pretty sure it was the four-holed toaster—four pieces of bread at a time!—that sealed the deal for both of us. They got married six weeks later.

That’s the problem with being just a kid. You let the littlest things impress you. You have no way of knowing that if this man marries your mother, the gifts will dry up, the Pop-Tarts will stop, the Rainier beer will kick in, and you’ll never feel at home in your own home again.



I still don’t know Inez’s excuse.

Just as soon as I was old enough, I came to hate Raymond with my whole heart, though I couldn’t have explained why. At seven, I started biting and clawing and kicking if he tried to spank me. At eight, I made a rule that he couldn’t hug me. I think I was nine when I began arranging the cereal boxes on the kitchen table to block my view of him sitting there smoking in the mornings while I ate my Lucky Charms.

After I started middle school, I began mocking him from across the dinner table. I’d copy the way his teeth clicked when he chewed. Or I would imitate his habit of jiggling his pinky finger in his left ear. That would set him off. But how could I help it if my ear just so happened to itch right after his?

Nine times out of ten, Inez took Raymond’s side.

At least they never made me call Raymond “Dad.” But, then, Inez never taught me to call her “Mom” or “Mommy,” either. She swore it was a women’s lib–type thing to do at the time—“preserving one’s identity,” as she put it. Later, she changed her mind and tried to change mine. But it was too late.

Now you couldn’t pay me a million dollars to call her “Mom.”





On the fourth day, I develop a new theory for how I ended up here. What if I never had a choice?

When I was in third grade, our teacher showed us a large wooden frame with fabric stapled over the top. She set it on a table and told us to roll marbles from one end to the other. Easy-peasy, of course. Then she put a heavy stone in the center and asked us to roll the marbles straight again. This time—duh, Ralph—they rolled toward the rock.

She was trying to show us how the pull of gravity inside a black hole is so powerful it sucks everything into it and nothing can escape, not even light. I’d been reading astronomy books since I was six, so this was old news to me. But I hadn’t yet learned that smart kids shouldn’t be show-offs, so I made sure everyone knew this.

Now the concept of black holes sparks a new idea. Up to now, as my life whirled by, I thought I could at least decide where I wanted to go, could choose my next step. But what if all along I was like that second marble and my destiny was like a black hole, sucking me toward recent events, and I was helpless to resist?

It seems like that should make me almost innocent.

Later that morning, when I try to explain this to Officer Andy, he totally doesn’t get it. “You don’t deny you’re guilty, Venus,” he says. “So what do you mean you might be innocent?”



“I mean, what if it was just my destiny and there’s nothing I could have done to change it?”

“Well,” he says. He removes his wire-frame glasses and rubs his eyes like I’m making him tired, when all I’m doing is sitting here. “Maybe that’s true in some way,” he offers. “I guess we all have a destiny. But it doesn’t change the law. And the law says you have to take responsibility.”