Earth Angels by Bobby Hutchinson Page A

stormy light was faint, but it was enough so that she could see him clearly when she turned.
    She gasped. He lay on his back, wearing wrinkled trousers and what had once been a starched white dress shirt. His feet were bare. He turned to look at her but didn’t say anything, and for a moment she couldn’t speak, she was so shocked.
    He looked ravaged, his cheekbones standing out in stark relief. He hadn’t shaved in days and his eyes were sunken and haunted. His spectacles were on the bedside table, and he made no effort to put them on.
    His despair was obvious, like a thick cloud that almost crumbled her with its weight. She struggled for composure.
    “Joseph, you look terrible. Are you ill? Can I get you anything?” She moved closer to the bed, longing to throw herself down beside him, hold him in her arms, comfort him.
    He sat up and swung his feet to the floor. He looked at her, his eyes flat and blank, as if she were a stranger. “What are you doing here?”
    There was no warmth, no recognition in his tone, and she fought against the pain his indifference caused her. She forced a light note to her voice, forced a smile. “I’m worried about you. No one’s seen you in weeks. Gossip has it you’ve become a ghost, haunting the country roads at night.”
    “Go home, Emma. I don’t need your pity.” His dejected tone told her that her effort to be upbeat had been futile.
    “Contrary to what you might think,” he went on, “I can manage quite well on my own. Unlike you, I don’t need crowds of people around me all the time.”
    Hurt to the depths of her being, she persisted anyway. Her voice quivered, but she maintained the light tone. “It looks as if you could use a cook, Joseph. You’ve lost weight, you can’t have eaten, I’ll go down and—“
    “Get out!” He rose, standing beside the bed, and his roar penetrated her very pores. “Get the hell out of my house, out of my life! I don’t need you, I don’t need anyone!”
     
     
     

CHAPTER TEN

    Joseph saw the awful hurt on her face, but he was frozen inside: he couldn’t allow himself to feel. He heard the sound that came from her throat, the sound of a woman in mortal pain, but he couldn’t respond. He watched as she shuddered, her wonderful brown eyes wide, spilling over with anguish, her vivid features mirroring the new wound he’d made in her heart. But he was no longer a healer. He was poison, he couldn’t contaminate her.
    He watched as she whirled and ran, his mother’s shawl tight around her shoulders, her bright blue cape wet-stained, her golden curls damp and soft around her shoulders. Against his will, he remembered how soft those curls were to his touch, how they wound around his fingers the way her love had wound around his heart.
    He stood rooted as he listened to her feet pounding down the stairs. He heard the front door open and then slam behind her, and he knew it was the absolute end, the last time she would ever come to him.
    At that terrible realization, his despair and fear crumbled. Unless he went after her, he would surely die.
    “Emma!” The agonized cry tore from his throat. He moved, one step and then another, forgetting his spectacles and having to turn back and grope for them. Then he stumbled down the stairs, raced along the hall, heedless of broken glass under his bare feet. “Emma, come back!”
    When he went out the door and down the steps, the force of the storm took his breath away. The rain obscured his lenses and everything was a blur—puddles of water, a flash of blue cape, a small figure running into the field behind his house.
    “Emma!” He pounded after her, ignoring the stones that bruised his feet, the wind that tried to push him back.
    He finally caught her in the middle of the field.
    “Let-me-go-“
    She fought him like a wild thing with her fists and elbows and knees. Her face contorted, her sobs rattled in her throat, but he held on until at last she quieted in his embrace, her heart