My Name Is Venus Black(77)

Inez’s eyes go wide with surprise. “You want to take my car?”

“Yes,” I tell her. “Don’t you have a friend who has a second car?”

“Shirley still has her late husband’s truck….I’m sure she’d let me borrow it.”

A plan is forming in my head. And within a few minutes, I can already see myself hunting down this asshole.

“But you’d go alone?” Inez asks, concern in her voice. I realize she’s gotten older, more cautious in the last six years.

“Yes.” I don’t want Inez along for the ride. She’d only slow me down. I remind myself that we’re still estranged. “You have to work anyway, right?”

She nods.

“I saw the milk carton, and you need to be here in case something turns up. You can’t be driving around California.”

“I guess you’re right,” she says.

“It’s not as hard as you think to find people,” I tell her. “Look how quickly you found me.”

She begins insisting I stay the night and go to the bank with her in the morning. I balk at first, but it makes some sense. I have no car and by now it’s raining like hell. What with all the transfers, it took me almost three hours to get here from Capitol Hill.

“You can sleep in Leo’s bed,” she offers, tentative.



“No way,” I tell her. “I could never.” So she makes up the couch for me. Funny how neither of us acknowledges my old room downstairs.

Even if it had never been a crime scene, I doubt she would keep my room the way she’s kept Leo’s—like it’s a memorial. I know this in my gut the same way I know she wishes it were me instead of Leo who went missing.



* * *



—

DESPITE ALL THE wine she drank with her daughter, Inez doubts she’ll sleep a wink. She still can’t believe that Venus showed up. That she stayed. What does this mean? She’d swear Venus is softening toward her, but she doesn’t want to get her hopes up.

Now she pictures Venus on her couch in the living room, and it seems too good to be true. Even with the blinds closed, she knows the streetlamps make it bright enough to see out there. All of a sudden she’s tempted to go steal a look at Venus sleeping. Surely she must be knocked out by now, given how much wine they drank. Her tolerance would be so low, compared to Inez’s.

She debates herself, but in the end she simply can’t resist the chance to look at her daughter without fear of saying the wrong thing or otherwise arousing her anger. She glances at her bedside clock and sees it’s almost 1:00 A.M. She slips from her bed, feeling strangely giddy and nervous.

At the end of the hall, she peeks into the living room and sees Venus lying still, sleeping on her back, softly snoring. The wine, perhaps. Inez tiptoes closer and pauses. She gets on her hands and knees and crawls around the coffee table in her nightgown, aware of how ridiculous she must look. To whom? God?

No. God would understand. Who knows? Maybe God does something similar when we’re mad as hell at him.

And, ah, there she is. Inez notices that Venus’s eyebrows are plucked, which makes her face look somehow softer, more open. Her prominent, sculpted nose is a thing of beauty, though Inez knows Venus doesn’t like it. Her lashes are thick and long—she probably doesn’t even wear mascara. Doesn’t need to. As always, her hair is like Medusa’s—an enormous tangle of black curls spread out on the pillow.



For several moments, Inez continues to ponder the miracle of her daughter’s presence in her home. She wishes she could touch her face, stroke her cheek at least. Instead, she prays for Venus, that she will find peace. That she will come to forgive Inez. That she will find her way to a happy life despite all that’s gone so horribly wrong.

Before she’s done, it dawns on her that she’s finally praying on her knees.





The next morning, I wake up early with an excruciating headache and a sore neck because the couch is too small for me.

I sit up and get reoriented before I go to the kitchen to start some coffee. I open the blinds and see that it’s drizzly and miserable again. I can’t wait to get out of Everett, out of the rain, away from the smell of rotten eggs that can come from the city’s pulp and paper mills.

It was a small sawmill on the Everett waterfront that took the life of my father. Inez tried to sue, but I guess my father had violated too many safety rules—so nada. Sorry, ma’am.

After using the bathroom and getting my cup of coffee, I sit down in the living room on the side of the couch that isn’t sunken from Inez’s bottom. I still can’t believe what happened last night. That I got drunk with my mother, for one. That I signed up to be a detective, for two.

When Inez gets up, I hear her call in sick to work. After a quick breakfast, we go to the bank, where she withdraws eight hundred dollars. The teller stares at me instead of at Inez. She obviously knows the story and exactly who I am. I look away, wishing I had just stayed in the car. What was I thinking? Of course being with Inez is a dead giveaway.



I remember Piper saying “Take a picture, it’ll last longer,” and wish I could be so childish toward the teller. Thinking of Piper, I feel a familiar stab of loss. Piper. Where is she right now? We agreed to phone calls twice a week and when her aunt brings her to visit her uncle Mike in Seattle—of course I’ll be there.