Children of the Storm

might.”
        “She doesn't speak for me,” Walter said, chuckling.
        “Why not?” she asked him. “I always have in the past.”
        The old man threw Ken a meaningful glance. “This woman,” he said, “has been my lifelong bane.”
        “And you hers,” Ken said.
        The old people laughed.
        “I'll be back,” he told them, when he had ascertained that they were comfortable.
        “Fifteen minutes!” Lydia called after him.
        “I heard!”
        Behind him, as he walked away, he heard Walter say, “Don't nag the boy, my dear. To us, he's still a child, but to the rest of the world, he's a grown man, more than a grown man.”
        He did not hear her reply.
        Upstairs, he sat down in his chair once again, pulled it up to the window and stared toward the edge of the palm forest, resuming his vigil.
        He thought about Saine, the Doughertys, Sonya… But because there was no new data, no new experiences, since he'd early thought of these things, he was covering ground that he had been over before and, in the case of Sonya, thoughts he had given way to a thousand times in the last couple of weeks…
        Before the fifteen minutes had passed, he began to feel like the village idiot, sitting at his watch-tower, waiting for an event that, in all logic, would never transpire. He was worrying his grandparents for no good reason. Though he didn't think that Greta would manage to rip Hawk House apart, it was possible that he could receive a severely lacerated face from the flying glass if the window before him should be broken-and that would be enough to have the old people in hysterics.
        Perhaps he needed more coffee.
        But he didn't want it.
        He fidgeted.
        He thought of Sonya again.
        Laughing…
        Riding the boat, hands gripping the rail, her blonde hair streaming out behind her…
        She was whiteness, he blackness. Together, facing the world together, what would they make of it, in such contrasting colors, half in pure white and half in gloomy black. The cynic in him answered that question with a sneer: they'd make gray together, unrelieved, depressing gray. He laughed bitterly at his ability to always bring himself back to the reality at hand, back to the moment.
        Sonya was not yet and probably never would be his responsibility, while, on the other hand, those old people in the storm cellar downstairs were definitely his responsibility. As he had once trusted in them to protect him from harm and make him comfortable, they now, perhaps unconsciously, had switched roles and depended on him to do the same for them. He must forget “what ifs” and tend to the “what is,” to Walter and Lydia and, yes, to Hattie.
        He stood up, abruptly convinced that nothing would be gained by remaining here and watching for a madman in a hurricane. He was a bit angry with himself for even having seriously considered such a ludicrously melodramatic development. He was the realist, after all. He was the cynic. He did not believe, as so many people did, in a life that was like a motion picture, where drama arose at the exactly necessary point…
        He pushed his chair back and drew closed one of the shutters.
        He took one last look at the lawn.
        Wind, rain, glowering clouds, dancing trees, nothing more.
        He swung the second shutter around in order to bolt it tightly to the first half that was already in place.

----

    THIRTY-TWO
        
        Jeremy came over the brow of the hill and, digging his heels into the mushy earth to keep from losing his balance and falling to the bottom, he started down toward the sea-flooded ravine, yet another of the watery obstacles which had become familiar and hated. He had gone a third of the way down the hill before, out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw something more than green vegetation and gray rain at the top of the next slope, beyond the pool. He looked up, gasped when he saw the woman, Sonya, standing with her back to him, holding one of the children.
        The other child was nowhere in sight.
        For a moment, he could not move.
        The sight of her made him realize he'd not really expected to catch them, no matter how hard he'd tried to convince himself that he would. And, coming upon her unexpectedly like this, his memory was jarred so that he could not instantly recall why he had been chasing her… He could not