Anne Tyler - Searching for Caleb

"Oh, think of Justine. How will she ever forgive herself?"

Upstairs, cowboys sang lonesome songs around a campfire and the wind rolled tumbleweed across the desert with a howling sound.

At nine o'clock that evening, Caroline rose up in her pink silk gown and put on her feathered slippers. Before leaving the room she turned off the television set. She descended the stairs, stately and flowing; she crossed the front hall and went out the door. She drifted across the lawn and then onto the road, where she proceeded down the center with her arms out and her steps mincing and careful like a tightrope walker. To the first car that came, she appeared as monstrous and unexpected as a wad of pink bubble gum. The driver gasped and swerved at the last moment. The second driver was harder to surprise. "Do your drinking at home, lady!"

he shouted out the window, and then he slid smoothly past.

She had to wait for six cars, all told, before she found one that would run her down.

Duncan brought Justine a cup of beef broth and a silver spoon and a linen napkin. He found her sitting in the living room of Great-Grandma's house, all alone, staring into space. "Oh. Thank you," she said. She set the cup on the coffee table.

"I made it myself."

"Thank you."

"Ma said coffee, but coffee has no food value."

She smoothed her dress.

"Broth has protein," Duncan told her. "You can go without protein for months and feel just fine, never notice, but underneath it's doing you harm that can never be repaired. Protein is made up of amino acids, the building blocks of the-"

"Duncan, I can't believe you're saying all this."

"I can't either," he told her.

He waited for her to try the broth. She didn't. He squatted beside her.

"Justine-" he said.

But no, too late, the aunts had tracked them down again. "Justine? You mustn't sit like this, dear heart-"

They reminded him of ships. They traveled in fleets. Their wide summer skirts billowed and collapsed as they settled all around him, edging him out. But he didn't give in so easily. "We were just talking," he told them.

"She should be in bed."

"What for?"

"She doesn't look at all well."

She didn't. Even her hair seemed changed, hanging lank and lifeless around her face. In just four days she had developed a new deep hollow between her collarbones. She was already losing her country tan. If he could just carry her home, to the sunlit fields and their little house with its ridiculous damask curtains! But the aunts rustled and resettled, inching closer. "She ought to be left with us a while, Duncan. She just feels so sorry, you see. She's acting just like her poor dear mother did.

You can't take her back to sit all alone in the middle of nowhere."

"Alone?"

"She needs looking after."

"/ look after her," Duncan told them.

"Yes, but-and she could have her old room again, or maybe yours if hers would bring memories. You could go back to your cows or whatever and we would take good-Justine, do you like Duncan's room?"

"Duncan's? Yes."

"There, see?"

"Or she could come to us," Aunt Bea said. "At our house, you see, we have so much excitement, Esther and Richard rushing around and the twins so talkative, she'd just come out of herself in no time."

"Maybe she doesn't want to come out of herself," Duncan said.

"Oh, it helps to have a little company! All those young people making merry. Justine?"

Justine sat like a stone. The old secret, tucked-in smile she used to flash Duncan seemed gone forever. When he rose she didn't even look his way, and it seemed unlikely that she noticed when he left the room.

Now as she cruised through the darkening house she was aware of how everything here was attached to everything else. There was no such thing as a simple, meaningless teacup, even. It was always given by someone dear, commemorating some happy occasion, chipped during some moment of shock, the roses worn transparent by Sulie's scrubbing, a blond stain inside from tea that Sam Mayhew had once drunk, a crack where Caroline, trembling with a headache, had set it down too hard upon the saucer.

She went out the front door that was dented by Justin Peck's invalid's bed in the fall of 1905. She passed her grandfather's front porch, where Maggie Rose stood in the twilight waiting for a Model T. She climbed Uncle Two's front steps, surrounded by ghostly whispers and murmurs of love and scoldings and reproaches and laughter. Upstairs she found Duncan in his room among Erector Set machines he had built when he was twelve, a full-color poster of Princess Pet in the Land of the Ice Cream Star, the Monopoly board in which all seven cousins had played a thirty-eight-hour world series in the spring of 1944. But Duncan-oh, forever in the present!-was whistling "The Wabash Cannonball" and fiddling with a rectangle of lead-colored metal.

She didn't know how he could whistle.

When she came in the room he stopped. "Do you want to lie down?" he asked her. He began clearing his bed of everything on it, a jungle of wires and soldering irons, tubes of flux, glue, and paint. She sat on the edge of the mattress, but she didn't want to stretch out. It was barely eight o'clock. If she slept now she would lie awake for hours later on, as she had last night and the night before.

"Anything you wanted to say?" Duncan asked.

"No."

"I thought you might have come to tell me something."

"No."

"Well." He went back to whatever he was doing, but he didn't whistle any more. "This is a wire-bending jig," he told her.

She didn't comment.

"These pegs can be moved, see? Then you bend the wire around them any way you want. There are all kinds of curves and angles. I could make you a bracelet. Want a bracelet? Or a necklace, if you like."

She laid her fingers across her eyes, cooling them.

"I've got it," he said. "A nose ring. Want a nose ring?"

When she opened her eyes she found a curve of wire nearly touching her nose, giving off a gray smell, sharp at one end. She batted it away.

"What are you trying to do to me?" she said.

He looked surprised.

"Are you trying to get me angry on purpose?" she asked him.

"Well, not on purpose, no-"

"Why are you acting this way?"

"Justine, I'm not acting any way."

"How can you play around with little pieces of wire when both my parents are dead, and you're the one that took me far off and cut the telephone cord and laughed at Mama's letters and wouldn't bring me to visit?"

"Justine."

"Daddy warned me," she said. "He told me straight out you were marrying me to torment me."

"Oh, did he?"

"Either that, he said, or to lean on me, but I don't picture that ever happening."

"Well, he certainly thought of everything, didn't he," Duncan said.

He went back to bending his wire. He adjusted a peg on the jig and turned a right angle.

"I'm sorry," Justine said finally.

"That's all right."

"I just feel so-"

"It's all right."

"Duncan, couldn't we just stay here a while?"

He looked up at her.

"We could live in Great-Grandma's house," she said. "Wouldn't that be nice?"

"No, it wouldn't."

"Please?"

"I should have known," he told her. "I didn't really believe you would come away with me in the first place."

"But I feel I'm getting pulled. I hate to just go away and leave them.

And I can't stay here without you, but you wouldn't say a word against it when they brought it up."

"I don't want to pull you, Justine."

"But then they're the only ones doing it, and they'll win."

"Is that the only way you go anywhere? Being pulled?"

She was silent.

"All right," said Duncan. "I'd like you to come with me. It's important.

It's more important than they are."