Children of the Storm

reveal himself once more. She was confident that he would not see her, for the room was dark behind her. Then, with a start, he stepped from the tree and seemed to gaze up at her, though his face was in shadows, and she could only suppose it was she who had attracted his sudden interest. She realized that, in the light of the large moon, her white pajamas must have shown up like a signal flag.
        The stranger-if he was a stranger-turned away from her and abruptly walked off into the sentinel pines.
        In an instant, he was lost to sight.
        She stepped back from her window, as if what she had seen was part of an illusion and that, if she turned away from the screen on which it had been played-her window-it would cease to be true and real. She wondered, briefly, if she should report this to Rudolph Saine, but she decided that she really had nothing to report, nothing that meant anything. She had seen a man standing in the shadows of the palms, near the house, watching the house at night. And he had gone away. What good would that information do anyone?
         Where had he gone?
        Who knew?
         Who was he?
        She couldn't say.
         What did she think he was doing there?
        She didn't want to think what he might have been doing there. She had come here to get away from ugly thoughts, old fears, tension, anxiety. She didn't want to have to face anything like that.
        And since she could not answer any of the questions Rudolph Saine was most likely to ask, she could see no sense in dredging up the mess. She would appear to be nothing more than a slightly hysterical young woman, still upset over her encounter with two sharks during the afternoon, sleepy, seeing things in the night, illusions, deceptions of shadows. She could do no good whatsoever by crying wolf at every little incident that disturbed her, for then, if the real trouble came, she would find them slow to react to her cries for help.
        That was logical, wise.
        Refusing to consider the import of her observation, refusing to dwell on the memory any longer at all, having convinced herself that she was right to keep her silence, she went to the large bed and got beneath the sheets, snuggled down and buried her bright, blonde head in the fluffy pillows. She would sleep… sleep… Then everything would be fine. In the morning, all of this sense of onrushing trouble, this fearful anticipation would be gone. In the morning. It would all be fine, then. Just fine. She slept…
        
        In the morning, of course, nothing had improved.
        At the university, a year earlier, a boy named Daryl Pattersen, whom she had dated for a while but about whom she had never been serious, told her that he liked her so much chiefly because of her ability to ignore all of the unpleasant things in life. “I mean,” he told her, “you don't just grin and bear it when trouble strikes. You actually ignore it! You seem to forget about the disaster two minutes after it's happened. When you get a bad test grade, I've seen you toss the paper away and go about your business as if you'd just gotten an A.”
        Naturally, Lynda Spaulding, Sonya's roommate, a pessimist from the word “go,” did not look upon this personality quirk as an attribute, as Daryl did, but she saw it as a fault, a weakness, a dangerous inadequacy that had to be watched carefully. “Life isn't all roses, Sonya, as you should know by now. You try too hard to be happy, and you work too hard to forget the things that've made you unhappy.”
        “My own private psychiatrist,” Sonya had said, slapping her forehead with an open palm.
        “See, you know I'm telling you the truth. You're trying to turn what I say into a joke, so you won't have to think about it.” Later, she said, “You surround yourself with friends who're always jovial and in a good mood; sometimes, you make friends with the biggest phonies on campus, just because they're always smiling.”
        “I like people that smile,” Sonya had said.
        “But no one should be smiling all the time!”
        This morning, on Distingue, Sonya had forgotten all of those exchanges with Lynda Spaulding. If she remembered anything, it was Daryl's sweet and charming remarks.
        Still, the air was filled with expectancy, tense, waiting.
        In the next few days, there was no lessening of that tension. She began each workday at ten, with the children, going over