When Venus Fell, Page 2

  “Be right back,” she said, then hustled toward the kitchen. I gently slapped Ella’s cheeks and rubbed her hands. She opened one eye, then whispered, “Do you see him heading backstage?”

  “Not yet. We’ll hide here a minute and then we’ll run for the back exit.”

  She sighed. “The other day when I really was sick I saw the most beautiful kaleidoscope aura before the pain started. I wanted to float away. I wish that rainbow place existed. You and I could go there and take every lonely, needy, homeless person in the world with us.”

  That afternoon I’d caught her giving fifty bucks to a bum outside our camper. Ella didn’t give a dollar, or even five dollars, the way I did sometimes. No, she gave lifetime endowments, even when we could barely pay our own rent. I yelled, “Give me that money back, you parasite,” then wrestled the fifty out of his hands. Ella turned white as a sheet. “He said he needed it for his baby,” she moaned.

  I should have known. The nightclub owner in Detroit had proposed to my sister, given her a huge diamond ring, then skipped town with the IRS hot on his heels. The ring, as it turned out, had belonged to a former fiancée of his. That last bit of news made my sister scream and double over with cramps. I rushed her to the hospital. She lay on a gurney in the emergency room with blood and clotted tissue seeping between her legs.

  She had miscarried a month-old fetus before she even realized she was pregnant. A loss that might have seemed like a practical blessing to some women was devastating to my sister. She’d grieved for that baby ever since.

  “Rainbows,” she repeated now. This was a typical Ella reaction to stress—she went window-shopping for ethereal visions. “Just stay here on Earth,” I ordered wearily, then cradled her head on my shoulder. I smoothed her hair and rocked her as if she were a child. “Maybe the man out front just likes alternative nightclubs,” she murmured. “I hope we don’t have to pack up and leave. I like this job. Lesbians are so polite.”

  I heard heavy footsteps striding along the tile floor in our direction. My stomach churned. I felt as if I’d lost the energy to get up again. I bent my head and whispered into Ella’s ear, “Let me do the talking.” She shivered inside my arms. Tears squeezed from under her closed lids.

  “Let me help you with her,” a deep male voice said. It’d been years since I’d heard a southern drawl thicker than our own. The voice belonged to him, of course—the watcher. I glared at him but a knot of fear formed in my chest as he dropped to his heels beside us. “She has a lot of these nasty headaches, doesn’t she?” he asked.

  I went straight into my cornered-junkyard-dog-with-pups attitude. “You’re freakin’ brilliant. Let a woman faint in front of you and you deduce she’s sick. Great work, Sherlock. Get stuffed.”

  The worry lines deepened across his high, pale forehead. I noticed a slip of gray in a forelock of his dark brown hair. He didn’t look old enough for the gray or the lines. He clucked his tongue at me. “You were raised to behave better than this. You could at least tell me to get stuffed in French or Italian. You speak both.”

  He continued absurdly, “Or you could at least make a curtsy when you tell me to get stuffed. Your dad taught you when he put you onstage. You weren’t more than four years old. Barely out of diapers. You could play Mozart and you could curtsy. Now all you can do is bang out mediocre pop songs in an all-girls club and tell people to get stuffed.”

  “Okay, you sonuvabitch. What are you? FBI? Justice Department? Is there ever going to be a day when you people stop dropping into our lives for these little chats? It must be a slow day in the goon-squad headquarters. I’d think my sister and I would rank below your fun cases—like harassing old dopers and trying to catch congressmen taking bribes.”

  “I was in the Boy Scouts once,” he said sarcastically. “Does that count as a fascist arm of the government, too?”

  “It’s a paramilitary organization designed to indoctrinate children, so yes, it counts.”

  Ella moved weakly in my grasp. “Who?” she moaned. I smoothed a hand over her forehead. “Sssh.”

  He nodded toward Ella, frowning. “She needs help. I can carry her out to your car. It’s running today, isn’t it?” He arched a dark brow. “You know, I never thought a car that old could start without a crank on the front.”

  He even knew about the ancient, undependable hatchback. My mouth went dry. “I don’t need your help. Or your bullshit. Just go back and report that as usual, we’re minding our own business and trying to get along. We pay our bills, we pay our taxes. Believe it or not we are still not consorting with the type of people you government SOBs assume we might consort with. So leave us alone.”

  “I wish to hell I could leave you alone, but it took me months to find you. I give you credit—you’re an expert at keeping out of sight. You were a challenge, even for me. And I have sources most people don’t have.”

  The implication made me stare at him in genuine fear. The manager ran back with a washcloth and a cup of water. I helped Ella sit up and wiped her face, then forced myself to speak calmly. “It’s okay, El. Relax. I’ll get your pills.”

  She sipped from the cup, then coughed and gagged. I guided her head off my shoulder, then gave him a frigid stare. “I know you guys get your jollies bullying innocent citizens, but would you mind coming back when my sister feels better?”

  “I want to get this over with. I have to leave town tonight.”

  “Too bad. You can talk to me when hell freezes over.” Ella groaned, leaned her head back on my shoulder, then shut her eyes. I dabbed her forehead. He waited patiently through all this, and I noticed he had the good grace to avoid looking at her. I could have done without his narrow-eyed scrutiny on me, however. “You know,” he said evenly, “it’s not that much fun tormenting somebody who’s already got so much trouble on her hands. Even if you do fight back pretty well.”

  “What a compliment.”

  “Look, let’s stop this. I’m not what you think I am. I’m not a friend, but I’m not an enemy, either.”

  “Oh, really. How mysterious. Look—either tell me what you want or get out of here.”

  Frowning, he pulled a dog-eared black-and-white photo from his shirt pocket and held it out. For the first time I noticed his right hand. I froze. Whoever he was, something awful had happened to him.

  His ring finger and little finger were gone, as well as a deep section at their base. His middle finger was scarred and knotty. Lines of pink scar tissue and deep, puckered gouges snaked up his right forearm. Grotesque and awkward, the hand looked like a deformed claw.

  Suddenly I was aware of my own fingers, flexing them, grateful they were all in place. He wasn’t an invincible threat. He was very human, and more than a little damaged.

  “Enjoying the view?” he asked tersely. I jerked my gaze to his face. Ruddy blotches of anger and embarrassment colored his cheeks. He quickly transferred the photo to his undamaged left hand and dropped the right hand into the shadows between his knees. “Have you ever seen a copy of this picture before?”

  I took a deep breath and looked at the photo. A solemn, handsome young boy gazed back at me from my parents’ wedding picture. There was only one copy of the picture, I thought, and I still had it. “Where did you get that?”

  “It’s been in my family.”

  “Who? What family?”

  “The Camerons.”

  I leaned toward him. “Who are you?”

  He pointed to the boy. “Gib Cameron,” he said. “Does that mean anything to you?”

  My head reeled. When I was a child I’d decided I’d never meet Gib Cameron in person but I would love him forever. That childhood memory had become a shrine to all the lost innocence in my life.

  But now the shrine was real. He was real. “I remember your name,” I said with a shrug.

  “I remember yours,” he said flatly. “And it’s not Ann Nelson.”

  “Why are you here?”

  He smiled with no humor. “I’m going to make you
an offer you can’t refuse.”

  It was appropriate that Gib Cameron knew who I really was. After all, he’d helped my mother name me before I was born.

  Two

  As long as I could remember, I knew we Arinellis of low-country Louisiana had a special bond with the Camerons of high-country Tennessee. I put a voodoo love spell on Gib Cameron the year Mom retired from her singing career and our family settled in New Orleans. I was six years old. Mom wanted to stay home with us and be the kind of Donna Reed-type mother she had wished for hopelessly when she was a girl.

  Pop would have given her the moon if she had asked. New Orleans and Donna Reed were easy then. I believed my father could accomplish anything. He was a very successful composer and all-around brilliant jazz man. Although he was half-Japanese, with black hair and golden skin, he stood over six feet tall and his eyes were gray. As a kid I watched as restaurant maître d’s called for Max Arinelli then did double takes when Pop stepped forward. He was raised Catholic but he had no god he would speak of. He brought up Ella and me in the Church only because Mom wanted it that way.

  Mom was the blond daughter of a hard-drinking Louisiana truck-stop guitar player named Big Jane Kirkelson. Big Jane died young and my mother, a southern nobody with the strangely redneck-Nordic name of Sherry Ann Kirkelson, was taken in by a Catholic foster home, which turned her loose at eighteen, a loving, morally determined girl with a pretty singing voice and ambitions. She got a job with an early-sixties ditty-bop girls band then moved to New York, where she managed to earn a respectable career as a backup singer by the time she met Pop. By then, Sherry Kirkelson had become Shari Kirk.

  We had plenty of money when we moved back to Mom’s home state. Pop bought a nightclub in the French Quarter and began remodeling it. He created elegant dining rooms and fine jazz music, champagne brunches and smooth blues. I think his combined devotion to Mom, Ella, me, and the nightclub would have been enough to protect him from his demons for the rest of his life.

  Ella and I had Pop’s soft black hair and slightly hooded eyes, but the color was green, like Mom’s. People might imagine our Asian grandmother peeking out through our eyes if they tried hard, but my sister and I were more mysterious than exotic. We felt perfectly secure among the heat-steamed blossoms of New Orleans nightclub society, where our mixed-race father fit in easily with the Cajuns and Creoles and Africans and other varieties and mixtures of humanity that made that world so exciting.

  Our house in the old-money Garden District was filled with luxuries I took for granted, with joy and passionate music that was as much a part of me and my family as the blood in our veins, and with fervent left-wing political meetings that would have gotten Pop blacklisted for life during the McCarthy era.

  Pop’s fire-breathing friends would have been stunned to know about Mom’s long friendship and correspondence with Gib Cameron’s family. Even Pop cherished that bond, deep down, though he never admitted it. He couldn’t bring himself to say he respected and admired a family so all-American they must bleed red, white, and blue.

  I think he feared we would always be measured against standards the Camerons epitomized. Compared to them and their two centuries of pioneer Scottish American history we barely deserved to pledge allegiance to the flag. Cameron ancestors had settled the colonial wilderness of Tennessee’s mountains, built themselves an estate of enduring grandeur, and were the centerpiece of social and civic life in the southern heartlands. We homegrown Arinellis were a twentieth-century creation, scraping for acceptance, only one generation removed from all things foreign and exotic and therefore vaguely notorious.

  When I was a child Mom happily told and retold the story of her and Pop’s wedding at Cameron Hall. In 1968 my parents were on tour in Nashville, Tennessee, with a Top 40 show called Dance Parade, which was sponsored by Decca Records. Mom and Pop heard about an inn that had just opened high in the mountains east of Nashville—wild, beautiful, difficult territory that the lowland world still regarded with awe and, occasionally, fear.

  Mom didn’t confess that she and Pop weren’t married when she called to reserve a room, and Gib’s family never thought to ask. Those years in the late sixties were the last gasp of social innocence—or at least the pretense of innocence.

  The Camerons took my parents in as if they were kinfolk, a welcome my mother never forgot, because she had no family, and neither did Pop. Pop proposed to her there, and the Camerons organized a quick wedding in their own family chapel.

  It was amazing that Mom and Pop married at all; Pop always said he wouldn’t let the government sanctify any part of his life, and he considered marriage certificates one more way the government sought to regulate people. Yet he married Mom and loved her dearly, just as he loved my sister and me. I’ve never doubted that.

  Mom and Pop wrote a song on their wedding day titled “Evening Star,” which hinted, of course, at my name. Venus. The song was the only top-ten single Mom ever recorded.

  I was born not quite nine months after the wedding.

  So I was probably conceived at Cameron Hall.

  That was the closest any Arinelli had come to being a pioneer.

  I started picking out songs on the piano when I was two. By the time I turned three I could—with Pop’s excited coaching—struggle through one or two simple little concertos. I couldn’t recall a time when I didn’t play the piano. Pop never forced music on me, though. I was addicted to it, and when I was alone in our music room I practiced at my gleaming black Steinway and chatted happily with Gib, who posed in Mom and Pop’s wedding photo atop the baby grand in a silver frame.

  I practiced piano for several hours each day and had lessons three times a week with the famous concert pianist Madame Le Ong; it was an enormous honor for her to accept me as a student. She called the wedding photograph a distraction but Pop let me keep it on the piano anyway.

  In it Gib was a handsome, solemn, dark-haired boy, about five years old. He perched at the top of stone steps that led up to the Cameron chapel. The chapel sat atop a small hill covered in grass. Ivy graced its stone walls and flowers vined across the carved beams of its porch. Sunlight gleamed on the copper bell cupola. Enormous round mountains jutted up in the background.

  His family—a much older brother and the brother’s wife, two baby sisters, and two peculiar-looking middle-aged aunts—posed around him. But Mom and Pop stood in the center of the small group in front of the chapel’s doors.

  Mom wore a pale minidress and carried a bouquet of wildflowers; her hair was set in its perfect flipped-up style. Pop was the handsomest man in the world, tall and straight, his black hair gleaming.

  In his dress shirt and crisp dark trousers, Gib looked equally handsome. He had one arm draped over a big, light-eyed dog with a large, jaunty bow tied around its neck. Since the picture was in black and white, I had no idea of Gib’s hair or eye color, or the color of the dog. I wondered endlessly what Gib thought of Shari Kirk and Max Arinelli, a perky pop-song singer and her exotic-looking bandleader, who had suddenly decided to marry when they visited his home.

  “Someday, when I take you to meet the Camerons, you’ll see how pretty their valley in the mountains is,” Mom told me every time she recited the wedding story. “It’s the most beautiful place in the world. It’s magical. It worked magic on your daddy. And on me. And the magic created you. An angel put you under my heart the very first night. Right there in the middle of the Tennessee mountains. She followed the light of the evening star and glided right down into the Camerons’ big house and gave you to your dad and me.”

  “With a whole bunch of Camerons watching?” I’d always ask, because it made Mom laugh, and nod.

  “I want you to have something very special,” Mom said on my sixth birthday. “Gib Cameron gave it to me when your daddy and I got married. It’s a piece of a star. It’s your namesake. It fell into a beautiful pond of magic water, and Gib found it there.”

  She handed me a walnut-sized chunk of white quartz from her jewel
ry box. “He told me I could wish on the evening star and it would hear me, because I was taking care of one of its babies.” She held out the rock. “I wished for a baby of my own, and I got you.”

  “How’d he know that would happen?” I blurted.

  “I think he knew you’d be his friend,” Mom said solemnly. “I have to tell you something sad about him now that you’re old enough to understand. Not long before your dad and I went to Gib’s home and got married, Gib’s parents passed away.”

  “He’s got no mom and pop?”

  “That’s right, sweetie. They passed away.”

  I was given to Pop’s pragmatism, even at six. In Mom’s gentle world people passed away. In Pop’s brutally realistic world they died, usually in some gruesome way that Pop blamed on The System. “Did the gov’ment kill Gib’s mom and pop, too?” I asked urgently.

  “Oh, no, sweetie, where’d you get that idea … No, I promise you the government does not make people pass away on purpose.”

  “But Pop says the gov’ment killed Grandmother Akiko. He said her heart was broke by gov’ment bastards.”

  “Don’t say ‘bastards,’ sweetie. I know you got that from your daddy, but he’s allowed to say bad words. He’s grown up. He learned to speak that way before he was old enough to know better.”

  “But what happened to Gib’s mom and pop? I have to know. I just have to. I bet Pop knows.”

  Which meant I’d ask him if she didn’t tell me. She knew I would. Mom sighed. “They didn’t pass away near here. They passed away in a hotel in England. All the way across an ocean. Far, far away. When Gib was only about five years old.”

  “I used to be five!”

  “It has nothing to do with being five,” Mom said frantically. I made strange leaps of logic, much like Pop when he talked politics. “It had to do with England, so you don’t have a thing to worry about.”