Chapter 3
Venus
I keep my exact arrival home a mystery, leaving room for diversions and excuses to get lost along the way. But tired and resigned, I don’t divert. I make all of my necessary flights and arrange a ride from the airport.
The driver drops me off in the small parking lot that borders our property.
We live on a public nature preserve dedicated to carnivorous plants.
We have a private driveway—a dirt lane that curves through the tall pines—but it’s easier for strangers to navigate the paved lot.
With no cars occupying any of the ten spaces, I assume Blake’s Carnivorous Garden is blissfully vacant until I spot two bikes lying carelessly on their sides at the mouth of the footpath.
I heft my overstuffed backpack and roll my suitcase behind me on the pebbled path that cuts through the pine grove, gazing at the informative placards that mark the journey. No need to read them—I have them memorized.
The Venus flytrap can only be found within a 100-mile radius of Wilmington, North Carolina.
Venus flytraps can go without eating for 1-2 months. They eat bugs and even frogs!
When digestion is complete, 5 to 12 days later, the trap reopens, and the insect’s exoskeleton falls out.
Venus flytrap leaves eat 3 or fewer insects in their lives before turning black, dying, and being replaced by a new leaf.
The trigger hairs of a Venus flytrap are sensitive enough to tell the difference between signals from living prey and non-prey, like raindrops or fallen leaves.
Please do not touch the plants.
Once, Henry and I covered the signs with drawings of oversized flytraps with exaggerated fangs, biting off limbs of park guests and spitting out the bones, with a final sign that read: Enter at your own risk.
Dad wasn’t pleased, though he said the artwork was quite commendable.
The distant sound of children playing pulls my attention to the property that borders ours.
Over the moss banks lining the path, through the chained link fence, and across a patchy, sandy lawn lies the elementary school that Henry, Ivy, and I attended.
The side closest to us is the cafeteria, a brown brick box with small, awkward windows that barely opened and never caught a breeze.
If inside those walls again, I’d likely find the same round, red seats that Henry and I occupied for most of second grade—the year we became friends. I still remember him plopping down in front of me with his carefully packed Batman lunch box in one hand and his inhaler in the other.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
He pushed up his glasses with his nail-bitten fingertip. “Eating lunch.”
“Why are you eating lunch here?” I clarified.
I’d known Henry as a classmate, but we hadn’t interacted willingly until a few days prior, when I assisted him with directions, and later, with a bully named Ruby Mack.
I enjoyed our brief encounter and fighting an injustice, of course, but I didn’t expect more to come of it. I didn’t have friends.
My question confused him until another classmate threw a banana peel over his head and onto my turkey and cheese sandwich, yelling, “Bomb’s away! Watch out for banana bombs, lice head!”
Laughter ensued. I rolled my eyes.
“What’s lice?” Henry asked.
Rolling the peel into a paper towel to take home for compost, I explained, “Phthiraptera—a parasitic insect that lives in hair follicles and causes severe itching and discomfort.”
“You talk funny.”
“I’m aware,” I said. “They’re itchy bugs that live in hair.”
“So, lice aren’t nice?” he asked with a grin as he tried to punch his straw through his juice box.
“They’re creatures trying to survive this world, like the rest of us.” I reached for his juice box to assist. “I don’t have them, if you’re wondering.”
He handed it over with a shrug and a smile. “Maybe he does since he knows about ‘em.”
Amused, I returned his successfully punctured beverage. “He might start calling you a lice head if you sit with me.”
“I don’t care. Uncle Jay told me that many great people in history were bullied,” he informed.
I was skeptical. “Name four.”
“George Washington, Albert Einstein, Rosa Parks, and Michael Phelps. He’s an Olympic swimmer,” he said with impressive quickness.
My brow quirked. “Name two more.”
“Teddy Roosevelt—he had asthma, like me—and Michael Jordan. He’s the greatest basketball player ever, and he’s from here,” he said with excitement.
Rarely did someone offer me information I didn’t already know, especially so willingly. “That’s unusual to know.”
“I like knowing unusual things.” He shrugged. “Besides, I’ve been called worse.”
He brushed off the concern and remained in his seat.
Much later, I learned the truth in his words.
His father, Dale, ridiculed him for not being “tough enough” because of his small stature and his asthma.
All the while, Dale worsened Henry’s condition by smoking in the house.
My understanding of a normal family was limited then—still is—but such a lack of consideration felt cruel.
“What do you know about anything, you damn orphan?” Dale’s voice echoes.
Though I’m not an orphan, I didn’t argue.
“Unconventional” is the term most frequently used to describe my family.
My father, Dr. Richard Blake, demonstrated his expertise in carnivorous plants in his early twenties, resolving the long-standing debate over how the Venus flytrap triggers its trap.
He concluded that an electric current produced in the plant’s cells mechanized the leaves—a veritable shock in the scientific community.
I enjoy wordplay.
He authored the definitive work on the subject and several books since, while becoming a tenured professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.
He purchased land in midtown, where a pre-existing bog the size of a football field provides a natural habitat for his beloved carnivorous family.
He built an A-frame house with extensive gardens and a greenhouse.
Then, looking up from his microscope one contemplative afternoon, he decided to start a family.
That he had no relationship or any desire for one didn’t deter him from his quest. Through lawyers, he found a surrogate—an Icelandic woman, hoping to finance her education and remain anonymous to the infant she delivered. Soon, my father had his firstborn. Me.
“The Venus flytrap is challenging to grow, somewhat intimidating, strangely beautiful, and refuses to sit idly by waiting for sustenance,” my father told me once when I complained about my name, “just like you, Venus.”
I should have argued that he assigned me the name before he knew me. Even now, I wish to debate him—did I become like the plant or is the plant like me? At the time, I asked, “Does that mean the dead parts of me will turn black and fall off, too?”
I was four.
He laughed.
But that’s what happened. My capacity to love and be loved has dried up and fallen away. My chest constricts with the thought—the absence—but it could be the heaviness of my backpack.
Ivy entered our family when I was two through another surrogate, an Italian woman named Marta, who wanted to give someone else a family and needed the money to help her own.
She stipulated her desire to maintain correspondence with her biological daughter.
The letters and packages started when Ivy was in preschool and haven’t stopped, even though Ivy is an adult, a registered nurse, and lives on her own in a townhouse.
A mother through correspondence is better than being called motherless.
Their connection grew exponentially once Ivy had a phone.
She texted and called Marta often, anytime she needed to talk, and Marta would drop everything to explain French braids, eyeliner, boy troubles, gelato, or whatever Ivy wondered about at the moment.
I didn’t have that, exactly. But I had Henry’s mom, Maggie. Sometimes.
The cobbled path toward home first spits me out onto the observation bridge overlooking the bog.
The land is recessed, a sandy pit of low-nutrient soil that’s perfect for carnivorous plants.
Tall, slender pitcher plants in green, burgundy, and purple stretch out across the landscape like children raising their hands in a classroom.
Lower, sticky sundews tangle like thick cobwebs.
And lower still, lie mossy patches of Venus flytraps.
The distinctive plants are difficult to see this early in the season and are smaller than people expect.
People expect monsters.
They aren’t, though. They’re misunderstood, which is arguably the best commonality between my namesake and me. Now, they cower. Their eerie, fanged marginal spikes pricking from their leaves, open and waiting, are the size of fingertips.
A dog barks, bringing my attention to the far right, where a middle-aged couple wearing bike helmets traverses the paver-marked paths in a slumped hunt.