My Name Is Venus Black(65)
Shirley almost always says the right thing.
“What I actually need to focus on is getting the house ready,” says Inez.
“There’s no hurry,” says Shirley.
“Yeah, but in a way there is. That realtor, Melissa Lansing? She’s kind of pushy. I came home last night and found a Century Twenty-one COMING SOON sign in my yard.”
“Are you shitting me? Didn’t you tell her you weren’t a hundred percent sure?”
Inez hesitates. “I don’t know. Maybe I acted more certain than I feel.”
“I get it,” says Shirley. “It’s a huge, scary thing to consider. But just keep in mind that you don’t have to do anything in a hurry. And Melissa Lansing is not in charge when it comes to your house.”
“Everyone thinks I should move.”
“I think it’s a great idea, but I’m not responsible for your decisions. You know that, right?”
Inez has taken a lot of flak over the years from people who worry or act alarmed about her staying at the Rockefeller house. Even Shirley asks why she doesn’t move and why she keeps Leo’s room exactly as he left it. “Are you sure that’s healthy for you?”
Inez couldn’t understand it. How could people think she’d take apart Leo’s room or move away when any minute she could get a call telling her Leo had been found safe and alive? And so she stayed, tracking each year by Leo’s age, assuming she wouldn’t move until he was eighteen.
What has changed Inez’s mind is that she wants to get the equity out of the house so Venus can go to college. Although Venus turned her down, Inez hopes that someday she’ll change her mind and want the money. Once she realizes how hard it is to make a life for yourself from scratch.
After chatting a few more minutes with Shirley, Inez is restless, her routine blown. “I need to go, Shirley,” she announces. “My coffee is probably cold by now, and you know how I am about—”
“No problem,” Shirley interjects. “Call me if you need anything today. Seriously.”
Inez hangs up, retrieves her coffee from the living room, and puts it in the microwave to reheat it. Every morning she makes only two cups, so she can’t afford to just dump the cold one.
While she waits, she gazes at the photo of Leo she keeps on the counter near the sink. It was near impossible to get Leo to make eye contact, so all the pictures of him appear spontaneous. You’d never guess she was begging him to look up at her.
Ever since Venus got released, Inez has become more conscious of the fact that there aren’t any photos of her daughter anywhere. It’s not that she doesn’t love Venus as much as Leo. It’s just that given how much Venus still hates and blames her, she can’t bear to see her face every day.
She stupidly allowed herself to hope that once Venus was out of jail, she might soften, might even forgive her. Maybe she’d find it in her heart to have some semblance of a relationship. But what happened at the doughnut shop snuffed out any hope of that. With her hair pulled back in that braid, Venus’s angry blue eyes had eviscerated Inez like a knife.
But there was no knife sharp enough to make her not love Venus.
Their encounter brought back memories of the first time she saw Venus after the shooting, when she was still at Denney. Venus had refused to speak a word, and it had seemed to Inez like her little girl had turned overnight into some kind of monster, which had made it hard for Inez to remember that Venus was also a victim in all this. She may have killed Ray, but she was still a thirteen-year-old girl, terrified and lashing out.
Two years into her sentence, Venus had agreed to do some counseling with Inez and her counselor, Sharon. At the time, it seemed like they were making progress. Inez begged Venus’s forgiveness for all the ways she screwed up in regard to Ray. She also apologized for telling Venus it was her fault about Leo. “What a terrible thing that was for me to do!” she’d admitted.
She thought Venus was finally softening. But then Inez made the dumbest move ever. She suggested they sell their story to a writer named Anna Weir. And that’s when all hell broke loose and Venus stood up and swore her head off at Inez, declaring she didn’t want her blood money and that she should never, ever come back.
Venus’s eruption had stunned Inez. After that session, Sharon took Inez aside and suggested that perhaps Venus’s refusal to reconcile was a coping mechanism. If she were to forgive Inez, then she’d have to face her own guilt in ways she just wasn’t yet prepared to do. “In other words,” she said, “Venus needs a scapegoat, and unfortunately you’re it.”
Inez suspected Sharon was right. And so she’d let go. She quit pushing to see Venus, not as a way to give up on her but as a way to love her. But it was hard. She understood that Venus needed more time to heal and she should take as long as she needed. As Shirley put it, “It takes what it takes.”
But what if it takes forever?
The microwave beeps, and Inez brings her coffee back to the living room. But it’s no use. She’s not interested in the paper any longer, so she goes to the utility cupboard and finds her bran flakes. It’s also her ritual to eat while sitting at the kitchen table reading the funnies and the horoscopes.
She turns to the comics, but her mind is still stuck on Venus. How much she misses her. What she wouldn’t give to be forgiven, and how unlikely that still seems. She wonders for the hundredth time why she was spared in the first place, why Venus didn’t just shoot her, too.