Rhythms by Donna Hill

Author:Donna Hill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group
Published: 2011-03-04T00:00:00+00:00

Cora didn’t know where Emma went in the afternoons when she finished work. Almost every day for weeks she’d return near dark, say she wasn’t hungry, and close herself up in her room.

More than once Cora inquired of her whereabouts, and Emma would quietly inform her, in that superior tone of hers—as if she was the mother and Cora the child—“I was out walking,” she would say. “No need for you to concern yourself with me.”

But Cora was concerned, although she had long ago accepted that part of her that couldn’t show it. She couldn’t expect Emma to share her life, her thoughts, and dreams with her now. Cora had put a seal on that part of their lives, more to protect herself and her heart than to hurt Emma. Although it did. She believed that the less they spoke, the fewer questions Emma asked about her life, the less chance there would ever be about revealing that dark corner of shame that lived in her soul. The shame that stained her, ruined her marriage, broke the spirit of the man she loved, turned the town and church against her—that stood before her day in and out with those green eyes that begged for answers she could not give, that reminded her of all the things she wanted to forget.

So many nights she lay awake wanting to love Emma, show her the love her parents had given her. But she couldn’t, and she hated herself for it. Emma didn’t ask for this life. It was thrust upon her. Each night for eighteen years she’d prayed for answers, prayed for a path to right the wrongs. At times she could almost feel her heart soften, her spirit open, when she’d stand in the doorway of Emma’s room and watch her sleep.

Emma really was quite beautiful. She had Cora’s slight body frame, but she was taller. Her features were close to her grandmother Pearl. Emma even had some of Pearl’s ways, the cut of an eye in warning, the curve of her mouth on the rare occasion when she smiled. Sometimes in the velvet embrace of night, Cora would kneel by Emma’s bedside and tenderly stroke her hair, brush a feather of a kiss on her butter soft cheek, and ask her forgiveness in a silent whisper. One day maybe she’d be able to face her child and ask her in the light of day. Maybe.

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