Children of Light Read Online Free PDF

saw the dim figures fall still, listened to her little son’s protesting moan. They would be early to sleep. If she missed them that evening there would be only the shortest amount of time available for goodbyes in the morning. She and Lionel were to dine that evening at Walter Drogue’s casita. It was a courtesy—a farewell meal for Lionel—and there had been no chance of declining.
    When the children came up from the beach, Lu Anne led them into the bungalow and bent to them, holding each by the hand. They were only a year and a half apart; David was five and Laura seven. They had their father’s red-blond hair a shade darker, and their mother’s blue eyes.
    “You guys go with Helga and wash off all the sand and salt. Then you eat your dinners like good children and you can go see
The Wizard of Oz
in the suite.”
    Thus bought off, the children murmured assent.
    “Laura,” Lu Anne called after her daughter, “don’t forget your glasses, honey. Or you won’t be able to see the movie.”
    “If I had contacts,” the little girl said, “then I’d never forget them.”
    Going out, Helga and the children stopped to talk with Lionel, who had come up from the beach. She listened as he joked with them.
    “Who was it?” Lionel asked her when he came inside. He was over six feet in height and dramatically thin, with a long face and a prominent nose. His hair was thinning, the sun-bleached strands pasted across his tanned scalp. Lee was facing the dressing-table mirror; Lionel watched her in the glass.
    “Oh,” she said, “it just rang and stopped. It must have been the switchboard or something.”
    Her husband took off his bathing suit and stood beside her at the mirror rubbing Noxzema on his face and chest. Their eyes met.
    “Take your medicine, love?” he asked.
    There was a look he had when he asked about the medicine. A stare. It made him seem cruel and unfeeling although she knew perfectly well that he was neither.
    “Can’t you tell?”
    “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m like an old woman about it. I’ll stop.”
    She had stopped taking the pills ten days before. Held her breath and stopped. Sometimes her old pal Billy Bly gave her something to get her through the night. She felt quite guilty about it but she was convinced it had to be done. They were ruining her concentration. They were ruining everything.
    “You’ve seemed very well,” Lionel said. “I mean,” he hastened to add, “you’ve seemed happy. That’s what it comes to, I suppose.”
    “I’ve been working,” she said. “Nothing like it.”
    “It’s good, isn’t it? This.” He meant the film.
    “Yes. I mean I think so. Edna—I love her.”
    “Do you think she’s you?”
    “Are you asking me that as a doctor?”
    He had a way of seeming especially serious when he was joking. Sometimes it was hard to tell.
    “As a fan.”
    “Well, of course she isn’t me. I mean,” she said with a laugh, “things are tough enough as they are.”
    She looked up at him in the mirror and saw him smile. He reached out and touched her shoulder and she put her hand over his. After a moment, he went into the bathroom and she heard the shower go on.
    If he wanted to, she thought, he could count the pills. Then he would know. She looked at herself in the highlighted mirror, bent toward her own image.
    A month before, she had done a face-cream ad that was running in the women’s magazines. They had asked her because she was visible again, working. It was an over-thirty-five-type ad and doing it had proved to be a good idea because in it she looked smooth and sleek and sexy. She had given the photographer a face she associated withRosalind in
As You Like It
, whom she had played at twenty-three in New Haven.
    Lu Anne looked into the mirror at her Rosalind face, stared into her own eyes. There were people, she thought, who must be studying the magazine ad, looking into the eyes.
    There would be nothing compromising there. Rosalind was nothing if