Secrets in the Shadows
1
My Mother's Daughter
I sit by the window in the attic that looks out on the wooded area behind the Doral House, just the way I imagined my mother had done more than sixteen years ago when she was about my age. This year heavy March and early April rains had turned the trees and foliage so plush and thick in upstate New York that sunlight was barely able to reach the forest floor. While I sit here, I try to envision and understand what it was like to feel like a bird in a cage, especially a bird that had flown into the cage deliberately and then locked the door behind her, for that was what my mother had done. However, unlike a bird, she couldn't sing or flutter about too noisily.
My mother had turned herself into a silent prisoner, mute and ghostly, and even though I was created up in this attic, fathered by my grandparents' son, Jesse, while he and my aunt Zipporah hid my mother in this attic after she had killed her stepfather, Harry Pearson, I was, for all practical purposes, born without parents.
Almost from the first day I was nurtured and began my relationship with the people caring for me, the people ... read full excerpt from Secrets in the Shadows ebook
