My Name Is Venus Black(70)

She hurriedly dresses in old jeans and a T-shirt. She puts her long hair in a ponytail. She gathers boxes and cleaning supplies in a bucket. At the end of the kitchen, she stands at the basement door, hesitant to put the skeleton key in the lock. When she finally does, the door swings open with a long squeak, like you’d hear in a horror movie, she thinks.



She flips on the light and tosses several empty boxes ahead of her down the wooden stairs. At the last second, she remembers to grab several large trash bags for garbage.

Inez begins to descend the stairs when a memory hits, and it’s not the kind she’s expecting. She remembers how Venus used to love to call for Inez to come downstairs and then she’d hide in the space under the stairs and jump out and scare her. She made Inez wet her pants once doing that.

She finds the door to Venus’s room hanging partly open. Inez swings her arm inside to flip the light switch before she enters. Everything is covered in dust, of course. But she hadn’t anticipated so much of it or that the moist basement air would have turned it to layers of scum.

Her plan is probably cowardly. But there’s a difference between being willing to face something and being willing to see it up close.

The plan is simple. Do not look. Don’t look. Don’t look. Don’t look at the hole, she tells herself. Whatever you do, don’t look at that wall. Don’t let your gaze fall on it. There is plenty else to see, she reminds herself. There is no reason to glance in that direction.

Part of the plenty to see is the giant mobile and all the pasted stars on the ceiling. How could she have forgotten?

Well, pretty easily, she realizes. Even before the shooting, she rarely went down to Venus’s room. She often set her laundry near the top step. Hard to miss, you’d think, but how many times had Venus chosen to not pick it up?

She decides to start with the dresser, a garage-sale find that Venus hated until Inez suggested she spray-paint it whatever color she wanted. Venus went for orange and added decals to the drawers. Inez opens the top one to find socks and a jumble of panties for a young teen—labeled by days of the week. The second drawer contains nighties and a couple of bras. Venus had taken after Inez and was a solid B cup by the time she was twelve.



It is this, the sight of Venus’s bras, that makes Inez catch her breath and become aware of the hole in an entirely new way. She imagines Venus coming in from the shower, dropping her towel. Opening her dresser drawer to get her bra. And feeling watched without knowing why.

Over the years, Inez has often tried to put herself in Venus’s shoes. But now, standing in her room, imagining her own husband’s eye at that hole, she feels a visceral sense of horror on a whole new level.

With a sinking heart, she realizes it’s going to be like this the entire time she packs up and cleans down here. She will get to know what it’s like. The hole will follow her every move around the room. And it will demand that she remember.



* * *



—

BY THE TIME Venus found the hole so cleverly disguised in the knotted wood, Inez already had some niggling concerns. A few months earlier, she’d had some reason to go to Venus’s door and was surprised to discover she’d stopped using her skeleton key to lock it—and had stuffed the keyhole with gum instead.

She never asked Venus why, even though it seemed odd to her that Venus—who guarded her privacy so much—would rather have gum in her lock than be able to lock people out. Now it would seem that Venus must have suspected something but thought she had solved the problem.

Why didn’t she say something? Or maybe she had, but Inez had brushed it off. Could it be? Over the years, Venus’s complaints about Ray had come to seem like the constant whine of a mosquito. Bothersome but not alarming. Yes, Venus had made accusations of Ray creeping around, trying to be too close to her. Sometimes she claimed he hurt her and Leo physically. But she also complained that Ray was too nice to her and her friends.



Once, Inez told Venus to make up her mind. Was Ray a brute or was he way too nice?

Done with the dresser, Inez decides to remove the stars from the ceiling. For that, she’ll have to get a chair to stand on. While upstairs, she pours herself two glasses of wine and steadily gulps them down.

But, of course, the wine can’t keep the truth at bay. As she stands on the chair and slowly peels the stars from Venus’s ceiling, she’s confronted with another damning memory. The time Inez had gotten off work early and, pulling into the carport off the alley, she’d almost run right over Ray. He’d been lying facedown on the cement, looking through the basement window into Venus’s bedroom. Ray’s explanation had been that he’d come out the back door and dropped a screw. It had fallen into the window well, and he’d been looking for it.

She had chosen to believe him. But did she? No, she had chosen to pretend she did.

Oh my God. How could she explain to Venus now—or ever—the blinding power of denial. How could she expect her to understand that sometimes the hardest truths to see are the ones staring right at you?

Now she takes some solace—not that she deserves any—in the fact that she is absolutely certain the discovery of the hole that terrible day would have been the final straw. It had been the end, in Inez’s mind. Even as she put Venus off, even as she struggled to breathe through the terror at her throat, she knew it was true. Her marriage was over, and Ray had been exposed as a pervert.