Free When Venus Fell by Deborah Smith

mineral water. “If we keep our expectations low we’ll probably have a decent enough visit,” I said, to which my sister replied, with her eyes shut dreamily, “My expectations have been growing wings for so long, I want to fly.” She stroked a white goose feather she’d attached to the rearview mirror.
    I didn’t tell her I thought her expectations had molted pretty badly over the past ten years. On a map Gib Cameron had sent, I set course for an area that appeared to be no more than a handful of remote roads crisscrossing the green splash of the Great Smoky Mountains of eastern Tennessee.
    Tennessee. Land of riverboats and mountain lions, Elvis, Davy Crockett, blues, bluegrass, hillbillies, honky-tonks, antebellum mansions, log cabins, moonshine liquor, fine bourbon, and a huge share of the music business.
    And Camerons.
    Ella ceremoniously placed Gib’s driving directions on a clipboard I’d super-glued to the car’s fading vinyl dashboard. She arranged several of her prize feathers around it. We looked at the bizarre little shrine fixedly.
    Thirty years earlier, almost to the day, our parents had visited an inn that had just opened in the mountains. Cameron Hall. They’d married there, written “Evening Star” there, and, on a whim, selected a name for their first child there. Me.
    Now Ella and I were going there to represent what was left of our family’s pride. I put on dark rhinestone-outlined sunglasses and tried not to hope for the best.
    •   •   •
    Around noon the next day we crested a ridge on a nearly deserted two-lane road, passed a sign that welcomed us to Tennessee, the Volunteer State, and gasped in unison.
    The low-country bayou gals had arrived at the top of the world. “Toto,” I said in a small voice, “we’re not in Kansas anymore.”
    Ella gave a soft, stunned sigh. “This has to be the Emerald City.”
    They are ancient and awesome, those Appalachian Mountains. Round and lush and green. From our vantage point looking out over them, the view startled and mesmerized me, too, because it was like suddenly flying over a cliff into sheer space. My hands trembled. I pulled off to one side of the road and got out of the car. Ella came to stand beside me.
    The wind was warm but fast; the scent was green earth, blue sky, and waterways hidden in deep valleys we couldn’t see. There were hawks and songbirds in the blue sky, and an unending, amazing, unsettling symphony of majestic wilderness. Somewhere down in one of those wild, secluded places was the chapel where Mom and Pop had married, and the room in the Cameron mansion where they had slept and made love on their first night of sanctified intimacy, and where I had come into being, no matter how small and casually biological. I had come to exist in these mountains.
    “Can you imagine?” Ella whispered respectfully, “how the first settlers must have felt when they crossed this spot and saw the view?”
    Oh, yes.
    “Vee?” Ella said softly. She was crying. “Mom suspected she wouldn’t live to be old! She knew it and she tried to find friends for us! Even before we were born she tried to make sure we’d always have someone besides Pop! She must have been so afraid he’d lose his way if she wasn’t beside him! Oh, don’t say it, don’t say I’m imagining things! And I think Pop couldn’t bring himself to completely forget what the Camerons meant to Mom. That’s why he trusted Simon Cameronwith our money. Oh, Vee, we were right to come here! It was meant to be!”
    She cried with the lilting joy of relief and celebration. I took deep breaths, not wanting to stomp on her hopes. I wouldn’t shout Praise Mary and rouse the saints. I was a lapsed Catholic and nobody’s fool. Ella hurried along the roadside, bending down. “A wild turkey carcass!” she called happily. When she straightened she shook a ratty brown feather at me happily. “We were right to come! Our lives are on the right path!”
    “I don’t know,”