When Venus Fell (26 page)

“Vee,”
she replied sadly, shaking her head. “Please stop.
I am going to marry Carter Macintosh tonight.”

I felt as if my brain exploded with fear and frustration. I flung up my right hand.

And I slapped my sister.

Pop never struck either of us. Never. And I’d never dreamed I could be provoked into hitting Ella.

She didn’t shed a tear. That’s how horrible it was. She turned to stone and so did I. Her eyes were the only life in her for a few seconds—wounded, the pain showing in deep green shadows, but then forgiving. She made a mewling sound. I threw my arms around her and held her tightly. She wound her arms around me.

“I’m not deserting you, I swear,” she whispered.

“I’ll be here for you when it all falls apart,” I answered.

Ella Akiko Arinelli and Carter Walking Eagle Macintosh were married by Colonel Harold “Hoss” Cameron, Retired, in a plain civil service at the two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old Cameron Catholic/Scottish/Cherokee chapel, just before midnight on our parents’ thirtieth wedding anniversary.

I don’t remember many details because I could only concentrate on standing beside Ella in silent duty, dressed in a black silk tank top, black toreador pants, and five-inch stacked-heel black Mary Janes. In that getup I hoped I represented unsentimental pragmatism and the last gasping hope for our all but extinct family tree. My head whirled with the lamplight and the faint smell of burning oil.

“The bride and groom can kiss,” Hoss said at the end, and they did. I went dutifully to the creaky old organ and played something dignified, I can’t even remember what. When I finished I sat there until Gib finally took me by one arm and whispered, “Just hold on,” and I let him guide me from the chapel.

Back at the Hall he stayed beside me. We watched Ella and Carter accept champagne toasts from Hoss and Sophia, then Hoover Bird and Goldfish, and finally Olivia.

My sister was an ornament now. A Cameron possession. The latest in a long line of women and a few men who’d been bribed, coaxed, bullied, forced, or seduced into settling in the wild Cameron Valley.

She and Carter ate slices from FeeMolly’s two-tiered wedding cake with an impromptu decoration of fresh purple and white pansy blooms on top. Bo Burton snapped pictures. I played the theme from the late-sixties movie version of
Romeo and Juliet
on the baby grand in the music room. Gib leaned against the piano with a flute of champagne cupped in one brawny hand and his face starkly composed. He had changed into a charcoal-gray suit for his role as Carter’s best man. His expression grew darker as he listened. “Now there’s a happy wedding song,” he said drolly. “Lovers who kill themselves. I bet your next selection will be that happy little ‘They’ll never see each other again’ tune from
Dr. Zhivago
.”

“Did you know,” I said dully, “that the Japanese see the ending of
Romeo and Juliet
as the
only
correct way to tell the story? To them it’s a play about two people who disobeyed and dishonored their families. Romeo and Juliet
had
to kill themselves. It was the only way they could restore the balance.”

“By God,
there’s
a cheerful thought. You want that ending for Carter and your sister? Would that make you happy?”

“Don’t you dare—” I began, but he put a finger to his lips. Ella was headed our way. She was flushed and fluttering. Her eyes gleamed but were swollen from crying. I stood.

“We’re leaving now,” she told me. I felt the hush in the room, everyone trying to look away, to pretend not to listen. “We’ll be at Carter’s place tonight and come back over during the day, tomorrow. If you need me you can call.”

“You mean he has a phone?”

“Of course he has. Please, Sis, give us your blessing.”

All I could make myself say was, “I want you to be happy. I hope you will be. I’ll be here when you need me.”

Not if,
when
. Carter came to us and took her by one hand.
His eyes flashed. His mouth was tight. “Thank you for what generosity you’ve given us,” he said formally.

I stared at him and said nothing.

Ella hugged me hard. Against my ear she whispered, “I’m fine. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Use condoms,” I whispered back.

She kissed my forehead, began to cry again, then smiled at everyone and turned back to Carter. They left the room. I felt the blood draining from my face. It took all my willpower not to run after them and beg her to tell me this was a joke, that she’d changed her mind.

I walked numbly out one of the back doors and across the lawn, into the apple orchards, until I bumped into a wrought-iron bench and sat down. I folded my hands on my lap and gazed into the darkness.

What was I up against? Only one of the founding families of Tennessee. All-American aristocracy with a Native American bloodline to clinch the title. Revolutionary War heroes, Civil War heroes, you name it. Sitting squarely in an 1800s manor house that looked as if it belonged among the heather and lochs of Scotland.

The Camerons were everything Ella had always wished our family could be.

A minute later Gib spoke. “I’m here, just over here, nearby. No need to talk to me. Just so you know you’re not alone.” I couldn’t believe what was happening to us. After just a few days in their company I was being asked to accept the most intimate family ties with strangers. After years of trusting no one, I was suddenly expected to trust
everyone
.

Gib was wrong. I knew exactly how alone I was now.

She was radiant. When Ella and Carter finally strolled back to the Hall late the next afternoon, she was pink-cheeked and bright-eyed and unable to break the habit of admiring Carter with long, distracted looks. He returned the favor and held
her hand as if she were made of the most delicate crystal. Her glow faded only when her eyes met mine. I knew my scrutiny was merciless. When she hugged me, I could only think how separate she was from me now. That a stranger had come between us in every sense of the word. “Do we have your blessings today?” she asked.

“You know I want what’s best for you,” I said.

“That’s not a blessing.”

“It’s honesty. That’s better. You know you can always count on me.”

Ella regarded me with an aura of confidence that was blossoming more every minute. She tilted her head gently. Her hair slid across her left eye like liquid honey. She pushed it behind her ear. It was the most sensual and natural movement, as if she were finally, fully aware of herself as a woman. “I can’t discuss what happened between my husband and me because it’s sacred between a husband and wife. You know that. But I will say that he’s wonderful and it was beautiful.” She paused, smiling widely. “Every time.”

“What brought Carter to this spirit of sanctified privacy? A concussion? This is a man who was group-kissing women and dancing with a goat last week.”

Ella smiled as if I were teasing. “It’s important to me that you get past your doubts and accept my choice. I love you, Sis. What is it about
me
that you love?”

“That’s not important.”

“Why do you love me? I’m not very useful.”

“I love you because you collect feathers and believe in angels.”

“Is that all?”

“Because you love people. You believe in the goodness of people. You’re kind. Because you remind me of our mother.”

“If you love me, how can you find nothing to love about Carter?”

“Excuse me?”

“I love him, and you love me. I see qualities in him that I cherish. If you value my spirit then you should realize my spirit at work through the people I love.”

“You married a man like Pop. An outsider. That’s the attraction, isn’t it?”

She took my hands. “Oh, Sis. You’re so wrong. I didn’t marry a man like Pop. I deliberately married the opposite—a man who knows how to love people openly and wholeheartedly. A man who puts family ahead of everything else. Pop tried to make us think that we were everything to him, but he let us down, Sis. If you can’t bring yourself to give me and Carter your blessing, then you’re saying you’ve turned out just like Pop.” Tears crested in her eyes. “He was always embarrassed by me. I wasn’t smart enough, strong enough, talented enough. If you judge me the same way I can’t bear it.”

In for a penny, in for a pound. I’d thrown all I could at her. Now it was time to dig a trench and settle in. I had almost pushed her too far.

“I’ll put some faith in your choice,” I said carefully. “I’ll show you how much I agree with you on one point. I say we sell the RV. I expect we can clear ten thousand dollars on it. We’ll put the money in a joint account. You won’t have to ask Carter for money.”

She clapped her hands to her throat, looked at me in joyful disbelief, then threw her arms around me. “Sell the RV, oh, thank you, Sis,” she cried. “I knew you wanted to stay here. I knew it. Actually, Carter and I have already talked about the RV,” she admitted. “He has a plan. We’ll take care of it while we’re on our honeymoon.”

I stared at her dully. “I bet.”

That afternoon, Ella packed her bags. She kissed me on the cheek and said she knew I’d be fine for a few weeks with our new family. She and Carter planned to visit the rest of Carter’s kin in Oklahoma. Carter promised me she’d come home with the biggest diamond wedding ring he could find in Oklahoma City.

After Oklahoma they’d fly to Chicago, clean out the RV, sell it, rent a truck, and haul everything Ella and I owned back to Tennessee. We’d be a snail without a shell. Absolutely exposed—we wouldn’t have a home we actually owned ourselves. And Ella would be gone for upwards of a month.

A whole month. I thought I’d die from worry and loneliness before she even left. She and Carter went to the airport with Hoover Bird and Goldfish. I watched my sister drive away with strangers.

Shock, anger, and frustration boiled up inside me. I hated every Cameron in the valley. And yet I couldn’t leave, I couldn’t ignore them, and I couldn’t pour out my fury.

I was totally on my own in the mountains of Tennessee with a troubled family who collected in-laws like a hobby, and a man who knew how to torment me more than I tormented myself. Gib avoided me. I didn’t see him at all that day or the next. I stayed in my room.

I began to have nightmares about being stripped naked and deserted in the woods, so I wandered the hallways at night. I walked in the shadows of sepia-globed night-lights on rubbed chestnut baseboards, and portraits of long-dead Camerons watched me. One of the blue-eyed dogs kept me company, bumping my hand with his nose. Even the cats began to follow me.

I heard Dylan’s coo of sleep behind the closed door of the room he and Isabel shared downstairs. He slept in a mahogany crib that had been hand-carved as a wedding gift to a Cameron a hundred years earlier. Bea and Olivia shared a two-room suite. I heard the murmur of an aria from a radio inside the darkened anteroom, which was fronted by a pair of glass-paned double doors hinged by a brace of gold gooseneck handles.

Jasper didn’t sleep in the Hall. Since spring he’d camped in an old woodshed outside Carter’s houseboat. Bea explained to me that Carter kept an eye on him, and in stormy weather Jasper darted inside Carter’s place and slept on the
couch. But usually he slept in his father’s sleeping bag, using his father’s gear.

In the big master bedroom down the hall from mine, Min never shut the door. It had been her and Simon’s bedroom, and she said she couldn’t stand the loneliness behind a door at night. I let myself peek in on her one night, only once, feeling guilty and invasive, but the door was open. I craved evidence that other people were simple in their unguarded times.

Min slept sitting up in an old recliner, the moonlight showing her angular body and the delicate shape of her small breasts under a simple cotton nightgown. She had an opened Bible on her lap. Beside her a window let the soft night breeze come in, lifting sheer white curtains like slow wings. Kelly had abandoned her own bedroom to sleep with her mother in the past year. She made a question-mark shape under the coverlet of a broad bedstead. Snuggled alongside her were another of the blue-eyed offspring of the dog in the wedding photo and several of the friendlier cats, including a calico whose tail had been unnaturally bobbed by an angry fox, I’d heard.

We were creatures missing pieces, all of us.

The courthouse in Hightower was a large, modern brick building beyond the town’s tree-lined streets and turn-of-the-century town square. A small billboard had been erected on the lawn. Painted on it was a tall thermometer with cash amounts labeled up one side. The thermometer’s bright red level was stuck on $507,200.

What Crime Pays Back in Debt to Hightower County Citizens
, proclaimed a slogan in thick, satisfied letters. Smaller script underneath explained:
Dollar Values of Property Seized in Narcotics and Other Crimes
.

I got out of the hatchback and stood at the lawn’s edge, morbidly fixated on the billboard. No wonder Gib and Ruth
wanted Pop’s money out of their family. The shocked citizens of Hightower might have to raise the temperature on the thermometer of public righteousness. I walked up a brick path lined with hedges pruned into imposing square blocks of greenery. As I climbed a short set of steps to the lobby doors I passed a row of small newspaper boxes filled with stacks of local church pamphlets. So much for the separation of church and state.

Inside, in the two-story atrium lobby, one wall displayed high school students’ posters celebrating the start of the Hightower Highlanders’ new football season. Stomp the Attenborough Indians, one poster shouted in red paint designed to look like dripping blood. The lobby’s other wall contained a giant brass plaque listing the Ten Commandments.

I supposed at least one or two troublesome ACLU lawyers were buried in cement somewhere in the building’s foundation. I looked for Ruth’s name on a directory, then trudged up a wide staircase. A cleaning woman said, “Hello, there, ma’am,” as I passed her on the second-floor landing.

“What?” I snapped.