When Venus Fell Read Online Free PDF Page B

of Pop’s ideological dragons. I couldn’t imagine it meant more than that. Whatever dark childhood fears I’d had about his eccentric and controversial ideas, I lived a pampered life.
    I dressed like a poster girl for upper-class preppies—a lot of plaid, a lot of khaki, and my hair straight, shoulder-length, and still a soft honey shade, like Mom’s. When I was a teenager I rolled my eyes at Pop’s outdated ideas about prejudice against Asian Americans, but did as he told me to do. I looked in the mirror and saw a green-eyed blond with large, slightly hooded eyes. I was exactly who and what Pop told me to be.
    Safe behind his wall of hate.
    •   •   •
    Pop watched proudly as I won the most prestigious classical pianist competition in the Southeast, the preliminary auditions for the Van Cliburn International competition. I was moving swiftly into the kind of adult acclaim given to only a few pianists in the world.
    I’d travel to Texas to compete in the finals with about thirty of the best young pianists in the world. I was the first female finalist in the history of the Van Cliburn—if I won or even placed at the silver or bronze level I’d be guaranteed concert tours, recording contracts, international recognition. Pop was convinced I’d take the gold medal. So was I. Confidence ran deep in our family then.
    Until the day of the finals. When I glanced into the wings as I bowed to applause, I saw my sister sobbing hysterically in the matronly, peach-clad arms of the public-relations woman, while the competition’s program director motioned wildly for me to hurry.
    I bolted from the stage as gracefully as possible in a billowing satin gown. Ella fell into my outstretched hands. She was a daisy-like sixteen-year-old who looked much younger. “Pop’s in some kind of trouble,” she cried. “The police took him away! It has something to do with the murder of that judge!”
    “It’s a mistake,” I said loudly, but my heart pounded violently. Not the police, I learned a few minutes later. Federal agents. FBI. Men in crisp dark suits walked up to Ella and me, and flashed their badges, and said a lot of soothing, fatherly things to us—at least for the first few hours. That was before they had charged Pop with a long list of federal crimes that included conspiracy to murder a federal judge.
    When I finally saw him the next day, his high-priced, long-haired, mob-connected defense lawyer shadowed him at a court hearing. Pop searched me out and I saw somethingin his eyes that was tragic apology but also something that was rage.
    “I swear to you on your mother’s grave,” he said to me when we were allowed to meet in an interview room, “I had nothing to do with the Billings arson.”
    “I never thought you did,” I said. It was that simple. I don’t know if I believed my own words or not, but I never considered saying anything else.
    “I’m going to fight this. I’ll clear my name. I swear to you.”
    “I know, Pop.” I didn’t cry; it was as if we’d both always known I was tough like him, that I’d absorbed his nature.
    “Dear God,” he murmured, his eyes vacant, searching. “What have I done to you and your sister?”
    It was the closest I ever heard him come to uttering a prayer. The lapse of pure control terrified me. I think he knew that what he’d dreamed for us—for me, in particular—was ruined already, and he’d betrayed the faith our mother had put in him before she died. He’d broken our hearts and his own.
    The last time I saw him he was in handcuffs. I couldn’t even get close enough to touch him when he was taken out of the courtroom. I remember Ella sobbing.
    He died that week of a heart attack, in a jail cell, alone.
    My father came full circle in a system that betrayed him, dying in government custody. I went to the morgue and took his elegant, golden hands in mine, and my mind was open and blank as an empty song sheet.
    I absorbed his rage and sorrow from his cold