Anne Tyler - Searching for Caleb

She was right, of course. The birth was easy. Justine didn't die, she didn't come close to dying. He had been angry for nothing, and on top of that he had an eighty-five-cent pattern now which would never be used, because he'd be damned if they would ever go through this again.

Justine wanted to name the baby Margaret Rose, which was fine with him.

But he was a little surprised. He had expected to have to argue against Caroline, or Lucy or Laura or Sarah, none of which he could stand. How long had Justine's fancy been taken by her runaway grandmother? Who was never mentioned, not ever, except by Sulie, who had loved Margaret Rose since first arriving to work for the Pecks at age thirteen. Certainly their grandfather never spoke of her. Duncan was curious as to what the old man would say now. Would he object? But no, when he came for a visit and they told him (Justine shouting it fearlessly into his good ear, which was turning bad like the other), he only nodded as if it meant nothing. Duncan should have guessed. Justine knew. In that family wrongdoers vanished without a trace, not even a hole to show where they had been.

They called the baby Meg for short. She was a blond, stocky, serious baby whose silvery eyebrows were quirked in a permanent frown. When she learned to walk, she trudged; if she laughed, it was only after a moment of study. Everything she did was laborious, even stringing wooden beads or feeding a doll or lugging around the large cardboard boxes that for several years she insisted on taking wherever she went. It touched Duncan to see her heaving her toys back into the toy chest every evening, unasked. As she grew older, as life became more hurried and scattered, she developed into a housewifely, competent little soul who always knew where things were, and what had been forgotten, and when they were supposed to be somewhere. By the age of six she had her own alarm clock, the only one in the house. For her seventh birthday she asked for a pop-up toaster. (She wanted to make toast like other people, she said, not in the oven.) She fixed her own breakfast, rinsed her own dishes, and hunted her own socks. Every afternoon when school was over she did her entire homework assignment without being told, her soft yellow head bent low, a pencil clutched tight in her fist. She asked to go both to Sunday school and church, neither of which her parents ever attended; she went alone, dressed in clothes from her grandmother, a bonnet and white gloves, clutching a quarter for the collection plate. Saturday afternoons she read her Bible assignment. "Meggie!" Justine would say, swooping down on her. "Come outside! Come play!" But Meg would have to finish and put everything away before she came. Then Justine took her out visiting other children, or hopscotching, or roller skating. If Justine stretched Meg's skates to the largest size she could wear them herself, and she demonstrated all she remembered from the old days. In a strong wind she stood still and was blown backwards, with her skirts pressed wide and flat. She leaned on the air like a figurehead, laughing, but Meg watched dubiously with her thumb in her mouth.

"This is a cricket," Duncan told Meg.

"Ooh."

"Do you want to know how he chirps?"

"No."

"Many people suppose that he does it with his legs but actually-"

Meg looked not at the cricket but at Duncan. Her eyes were transparent, and flat at the bottom.

He had not expected to feel like a father, but he did. Just the curve of her cheek could give him a wrench, or the blue veins inside her wrist or the stolid way she stood watching other children playing. But he was clearer-sighted than Justine, who thought Meg was perfect. He knew, for instance, that although Meg was of normal intelligence she had a mind that plodded and toiled, with narrow borders; that she was fiercely anxious for regularity, permanence, order. It seemed to him that he was the object of an enormous joke: he had feared all the genetic defects but the obvious one, total Peckness. She was more Peck than anybody, more even than stodgy Claude or the soft, placid twins. When she went to Baltimore for a visit she was the darling. There was not one facet of her that was foreign in any way. It was Duncan who was foreign. As she grew older she seemed to realize that, and more and more often the two of them found fault with each other, bickering pointlessly, defending their two worlds. Then Meg, silenced finally by his quicker tongue, would take on a closed, sad look, and he would be reminded of Justine as a child. He remembered how hopefully Justine would follow her cousins, her eyes anxious, her smile hesitant, her dress as carefully kept as when her mother had buttoned it in the morning. He softened, and gently tweaked a sprig of Meg's hair until she gave in and smiled.

But where was the child Justine had been? There was nothing hesitant about her now. She had become fast-moving, kaleidoscopic. There was a sort of dash to everything she did that surprised and fascinated him.

When she flew down a street people turned to look after her: an angular, frayed, pretty woman who looked as if she had no idea where she was going. She still wore the washed-out dresses from her girlhood, their hems adjusted belatedly half a dozen times, either raised to stand out like a spare tire around her knees or lowered and showing all previous levels like lines on ruled paper; and on her feet, Mary Janes with neat little straps; on her head that everlasting Breton, which Duncan had had to replace, twice, when the crown broke through from all the times she had clutched it to her head on her wild, careening journey through life.

Her days consisted of a string of unexpected events. Passing a crazy man talking to himself, for instance (whom Duncan pretended not to hear), Justine stopped to answer whatever question he had asked the clouds and ended up involved for years in the man's Houdini-like escapes from asylums. She was the only person Duncan knew who had actually had a baby left on her doorstep. (Later the mother changed her mind, but Justine had been prepared to keep him.) At any moment of the day he might catch sight of her driving seventeen third-graders in a fire engine down Main Street, or picketing a whites-only movie theater with the day's groceries still in her arms, or zipping past his shop window towed by two gigantic St.

Bernards when an hour ago she had owned no dogs at all. And she moved so easily from town to town! Oh, at first, of course, she was always a little reluctant. "But I like it here. We were just getting settled."

(She could get settled anywhere, he thought, in a cave or a coal mine even; she was like a cat.) "I don't want to leave all our friends," she would say. (Her friends, generally; Justine made friends by leaps and bounds while Duncan was more gradual. It seemed he had barely started getting close to people when it was time to leave a place.) "What do we have to go for, Duncan?" But it was plain what they had to go for-there he was, ever grimmer and bleaker, slogging through the days. "Oh, well," she always said in the end. "We'll move.

We'll just move, what's wrong with that?" Then the two of them grew light-headed, as if spared from some disaster they had been dreading for weeks. Justine went off too far ahead of time to pack-her favorite occupation, which became easier every year as they left more and more things behind. She had very nearly stopped cooking, stopped cleaning; she had given away her wedding saucepans as if just being were enough to take all her time and attention. For dinner she served whatever came to mind, forgetting to eat herself and opening a window instead to beg a street Arab to let Meg have a ride on his horse. "Oh, Mama," said Meg, who would not think of riding such an animal and wished that her mother would not embarrass her by hanging out windows. But Duncan drifted on this turbulence happily; during lulls he felt something was missing. When he came home and Justine was out the air seemed empty and dead. He plowed through the rooms calling her name. He went to neighbors. "Is Justine with you? She's not at home, I don't see her anywhere." Until, having tracked her down, he could heave a long sigh and sink onto the nearest flat surface. "I couldn't find you. I didn't know where you were. I didn't know what had happened to you." Then life zoomed into full speed again, the unexpected fluttered all around them like confetti, and Duncan felt peaceful.