My Name Is Venus Black(55)
Leo just grunts, which usually means yes.
Tony is always looking for father-son types of things to do with Leo. He discovered early on that Leo liked to play catch with a ball. Leo wasn’t good at throwing, but Tony always made sure he threw catchable balls. They started with a baseball and then later moved to a football. Tony wishes Leo could actually play sports at school, but he knows Leo couldn’t do that. Sports are complicated, and it would seem to Leo that people weren’t following the rules.
Once, Tony had mistakenly assumed that since Leo liked to watch bowling on TV—something they discovered when his brother, Marco, had it on at Christmas—he might like to learn how to bowl.
It was a nightmare. Every time Leo heard the sound of pins crashing, he covered his ears and moaned. Still, Tony had been determined, because with Leo you have to be. He can learn new things, but it takes repetition and a lot of patience. Which Tony had in spades, or so he thought.
Finally, when it became apparent that his gentle wrestling with Leo to try to get him to roll the ball was upsetting other patrons—the shoe guy kept glaring at him—Tony had given up. And Leo had continued to love watching bowling on TV.
Leo has a secret. He knows what a secret is because Tessa explained it once. Keeping a secret means you don’t tell anyone about something you know.
At the time, Leo didn’t understand why a person would do that. But now he’s pretty sure that’s what he is doing. Once, Tony told Leo about sex. And about how his body is changing and girls’ bodies change, too. So that’s not a secret, because Tony knows. But what feels like a secret is that Leo likes a girl at school. She is older than him. Her name is Sarah, and she has blond hair and she stutters. It used to upset Leo a lot every time she got stuck. He wanted her words to come out so bad that sometimes he would yell out the word she was trying to say. But this made the teacher mad. Leo couldn’t understand. He was trying to help.
Now it seems like Sarah stutters less. And she has grown what Leo knows are called “breasts.” He gets a weird feeling when he thinks of Sarah’s breasts or when he looks at them at school. He wishes he could sit by her in class, but the teacher says no.
Leo wants to tell Tessa about his secret. But if he tells her, then it won’t be a secret anymore. And maybe Tessa won’t like it that Leo likes Sarah’s breasts.
Leo decides he doesn’t like secrets at all. He hopes he never gets another one.
* * *
—
THE FOLLOWING EVENING, Tony sits in his truck, his heart beating out of his chest. He stares at the milk carton on the seat next to him. It features Leo’s face under the heading MISSING. He slams his fists on his steering wheel, saying, “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”
The name on the carton says Leo Miller, not Brown, but the date of his disappearance matches the time frame—he can’t remember the exact date—when Phil moved into the apartment. In this photo, Leo is much younger and his hair is buzzed short. Tony remembers when he looked like that. Now Leo’s hair has grown long, because he hates to have it cut.
So if you saw this picture, would you even make the connection? You might, he decides, for the simple reasons that the name is Leo, his strongly arched brows make his face distinctive, and he’s described as mentally handicapped. They turned his last name to Herrera to avoid questions, but they never changed Leo’s first name because it would have upset him. Plus, he might make mistakes when asked his name.
It stuns him to think that, after all these years, someone is looking for Leo. Someone misses him. And now Tony looks like a kidnapper. And who knows how many laws he broke when he asked a shady client to get him a fake Social Security number and birth certificate for Leo so they could enroll him in school.
Thank God Tony saw this carton, not Tessa! Since shopping requires a car, it’s always been one of the few chores Tony does, and it’s the one he likes to mention in case people think he lets Tessa do everything.
After Phil left, Tony suspected that Phil wasn’t actually Leo’s dad, or else how could he just abandon him? By now, Tony has come to love Leo as if he were his own son. But that still doesn’t explain the series of crazy decisions he made almost six years ago.
It started with a bizarre phone call from Phil, a couple of days after Tony had finished his tattoo. Phil thanked him and said it was healing up fine. Then he added, “But, yeah, man. There’s something else I gotta tell you. I was calling to let you know…Well, you know how you guys like Leo so much? I was hoping you could keep an eye on the kid for me…just for a while.”
“What do you mean, ‘for a while’?”
“Well, he’s been there a day and a half; I’m sure he’s doing fine. But I’m gonna be out of town a few weeks—”
“What? You left him alone? I’m sorry, but that’s not—”
“I’ll call back in a couple days to check in,” said Phil, and then he simply hung up.
Tony was so stunned it took him a moment to put together this call with the fact that he hadn’t seen Phil’s white Impala out front the last of couple days. He raced upstairs to Phil’s apartment and found the door unlocked. Inside, Leo was calmly watching TV, an open jar of Jif on the counter, along with a half-empty bag of Wonder bread.