Anne Tyler - Searching for Caleb

and he would read out some passage too loudly and too quickly for them to follow. A jumble of extravagant Russian prose, where emotions were stated outright in a surprising way and a great many extreme adjectives were used and feverish fancies kept darting and flashing. Paragraphs were layered and dense and complicated like chunks of mica. "Did you hear?" he shouted. His parents nodded and smiled, their embarrassed expressions giving them the look of sleepers dazzled by bright light. "Well then!" he would say, and off he spun, up the stairs. His parents stared at each other. His father went to talk to the grandfather, who understood it no better. "But I thought he was scientific!" he said. "What is he reading for?" And then, "Ah well, never mind. At least it's the classics, they surely can't hurt him."

But that was before Easter Sunday. On Easter Sunday, at the dinner table, the aunts were discussing Mrs. Norman Worth's extensive collection of eggshell miniatures. The uncles were arguing the details of a hypothetical legal problem: If a farmer, while turning on the water to irrigate the fields, accidentally startled another farmer's mule, which, in turn, kicked down the fence enclosing a prize-winning Angus bull, who thereupon . . .

"Neither of these subjects is fit table conversation," Duncan said.

Everybody thought about that for a minute.

"But what's wrong with them, dear?" his mother said finally.

"They're not real."

Great-Grandma, who had lived longest and was hardest to shock, poured more ice water into her tumbler. "To you they may not be," she said, "but I myself find eggshell miniatures fascinating and if I didn't have this tremor I would take them up myself."

"You owe us an apology, Duncan boy," said Uncle Two.

"You owe me an apology," said Duncan. "I've spent eighteen years here growing deader and deader, listening to you skate across the surface.

Watching you dodge around what matters like painting blue sea around boats, with white spaces left for safety's sake-"

"What?"

"Can't you say something that means something?" Duncan asked.

"About what?" said his mother.

"I don't care. Anything. Anything but featherstitch and the statute of limitations. Don't you want to get to the bottom of things? Talk about whether there's a God or not."

"But we already know," said his mother.

What was so terrible about that? None of them could see it. But Duncan stood up, as wild-eyed as any Russian, and said, "I'm leaving. I'm going for good."

He slammed out of the dining room. Justine jumped up to follow him, but then she stopped in the doorway, undecided. "He'll be back," Uncle Two said comfortably. "It's only growing pains. Ten years from now he'll talk the same as all the rest of us."

"Go after him," the grandfather said.

"What, Father?"

"Well, don't just-somebody go. You go, Justine. Go after him, hurry."

Justine went. She flew out the front of Great-Grandma's house and paused, thinking she had already lost him, but then she saw him just coming from Uncle Two's with a cardboard box. He crossed the lawn and heaved the box into the back seat of the Graham Paige. Then he climbed in himself.

"Duncan! Wait!" Justine called.

Surprisingly, he waited. She ran up out of breath, clutching her dinner napkin. "Where are you going?" she asked him.

"I'm moving."

"You are?"

She looked at the back seat. It was like him to leave his clothes behind and take his box of tools and scrap metal.

"But Duncan," she said, "what are we going to do without you?"

"You'll manage."

"What if we need you for something? Where will we find you?"

By now other members of the family were straggling onto Great-Grandma's porch. She could tell by the look he flashed over her shoulder. "Bye, Justine," he said. "I've already got a place, beside that bookstore on St. Paul, but don't tell the others."

"But Duncan-"

"Bye, Justine."

"Bye, Duncan."

At first the family assumed he would be home in no time. It was only his age. Everybody eighteen expected deep things of people, but it never lasted. Yet the days stretched on and there was no word of him. They began to question Justine more closely. "He's all right, he's got a place to stay," was what she had said earlier, but now that wasn't enough. Had he told her where? Because this was not some childhood game any more, surely she was mature enough to realize that. Wasn't she?

But she had promised Duncan.

Aunt Lucy said Justine was cruel and selfish. Justine's mother said there was no call for that sort of talk, and then Aunt Lucy broke down and cried. "Now look here. Get a hold of yourself," the grandfather said, which made her turn on him. Why couldn't a person let loose a little, after all? Where was the sin? How come a forty-four-year-old woman didn't have a right to cry in her own house, and state her feelings as she pleased, without a bunch of Pecks crowding around telling her she was not sufficiently dignified, and elegant, and tasteful, and respectable?

"Why, Lucy Hodges'." said Aunt Sarah.

Aunt Lucy gave her a look of pure hatred, there was no other way you could put it.

Justine was miserable. She would much rather tell and be done with it.

But even if the grownup rules were different, Duncan was still playing by the old ones and he would be furious if she told. She hoped he would come home by himself-"turn himself in" was how she thought of it. Or that Uncle Two, strolling the Hopkins campus with false nonchalance during class break, would run across Duncan on his own. But Duncan didn't come and he wasn't seen on campus, and Uncle Two didn't want to ask at the Dean's office outright and involve other people in family matters. "You owe it to us to tell, Justine," he said. His face was tired and gaunt and there were shadows under his eyes. Aunt Lucy wasn't speaking. Even the cousins looked at Justine with a new edginess. How had she got herself into this? All she wanted was for the family to be happy together. That was the only reason she had run after Duncan in the first place.

She felt like someone who takes a single short step on solid ice and then hears a crack. She was halfway onto a drifting floe, one foot pulling out to sea and the other still on shore.

Then her grandfather said, "Have you been to see him?"

"Oh, I don't think he'd like me to. Grandfather."

"Why not? You're his cousin."

"I know."

"Yes, well," her grandfather said, and he pulled at his nose. "Well, never mind that. Go anyway. It's the only way we'll get any peace around here."

"Go visit him?"

"You didn't promise not to do that, did you? Go ahead. Don't worry, nobody will follow you."

But Justine half hoped someone would follow. Then life could get back to normal.

She knew the address because she had often gone with Duncan to the bookshop he mentioned-a cluttered place with creaky floorboards and great tilting stacks of used technical books. To the left of the shop was a paper sign, orange on black, saying ROOMS. When she opened the door she found narrow wooden steps, and at the top of the steps a dark hall with a toilet at the end. The doors reminded her of school, all thickly painted with scuff-proof brown and marked off with curly metal numbers. But she should have brought a flashlight to read the nameplates by. She moved down the hall very slowly, hunching her shoulders against a feeling of unknown things at the back of her neck, peering at the names scrawled on scraps of ruled paper or adhesive tape: Jones, Brown, Linthicum, T. Jones. No Peck. Only a door to her right with nothing at all, no name in the slot. And that, of course, would be Duncan.

She knocked. When he opened the door she held onto her hat, like someone who has just pressed a fun-house button with no notion of what to expect.