Searching for Caleb

"Justine, I don't feel so well."

She opened the door instantly. Her grandfather sat on his bed holding a sheaf of papers. His face was white and slick and the papers were trembling. "What is it?" she asked.

He passed a hand across his eyes. "I was standing over there, you see," he said, "just rearranging my files a bit. I was just standing there when I felt so-"

He trailed off and looked at the shaking papers.

"Lie down," Justine told him. When he didn't seem to hear she touched his shoulder, pushing him gently backward until he gave in. She bent to scoop his feet up and set them on the bed. Now he lay half on his side, half on his back, breathing a little too quickly. "Are you sick to your stomach?" she asked him.

He nodded.

"Oh, then. Probably just ... are you dizzy?"

He nodded.

"Well . . . but your chest doesn't hurt."

He nodded again.

"Does it? Say something."

"Yes."

"I see," Justine said.

She thought a moment. Then she went to the open window and leaned out.

Next door, Ann-Campbell stood in a wading pool wearing bikini underpants, tilting her face into the rain and singing, ) We are fine mermaids of high pedigree, We eat baby sharks and we pee in the sea . . .

"Ann-Campbell!" Justine called. "Go get your mother. Hurry. I want her to call the ambulance in Plankhurst."

Ann-Campbell broke off her song.

"Hurry, Ann-Campbell! Tell her to call Duncan too. My grandfather's having a heart attack."

Ann-Campbell darted off, all flashing angles and freckles and patches of peeled skin. Justine turned back to her grandfather. "A what?" he said, bewildered. "Having a what?"

"Well, maybe not."

He pressed a hand to his chest.

"Is there anything I can get you?" she asked him. "Do you want a drink of water? Or-I don't know, maybe you aren't supposed to. Just lie still, Grandfather."

He did not look capable of doing anything else. He seemed to be flattened, sinking into his mattress. Nevertheless, his neck was tightly strung as if he were determined to keep his head just slightly off the pillow; it was not dignified to be seen in a horizontal position. Perhaps he even wished she would leave him in privacy, but she couldn't. She paced around and around the tiny room, willing into him all her strength and her burning, aimless energy. She kept being drawn to the window, which opened onto the side yard and would not have shown her the ambulance even if it could come so soon. "Oh, I wish Caro Mill had a hospital of its own!" she cried.

"I would never agree to a hospital," her grandfather said. He closed his eyes.

Then the screen door slammed and Justine could breathe again. "Duncan?"

she called. "Is that you?"

But it was only Dorcas, clattering across the floor on her spikeheeled sandals. She stuck her bubbly head in the door and rounded her eyes at Grandfather Peck, who pretended to be asleep. "Justine honey, I called right away," she said. "They're sending an ambulance. Now I'm going to stand on the corner and wave it down."

"And Duncan? Did you call Duncan?" Justine asked.

Dorcas was already leaving, but her voice floated back. "He's coming too, he'll be here in a minute."

Justine went back to the bed and sat down on the edge of it. She laid a hand on her grandfather's cold, damp forehead. His eyes flew open and he gave her a look she had not seen him wear before: he seemed to be asking something from her. "What is it?" she said.

"Justine, I-there seems to be a considerable amount of pain starting up."

"Oh, where is Duncan?"

"I believe that I'm having a heart attack."

She picked up both his hands, which passed on their shakiness to her. His eyes withdrew and he thought something over in the gray of the ceiling.

"Well," he said finally, "I had certainly hoped for more than this out of life."

"Don't talk!" she told him. She jumped up and ran to the window again.

"Oh, where is-"

Then something made her turn, some sound much smaller than a click, and she saw that her grandfather had let his head rest at last and his hands were still and his face was calm and dead.

While she waited for Duncan she went into the living room, but it made her sad to abandon her grandfather and she returned to the bedroom. Even now, after all, there was that pinstriped collarless shirt and the silvery slant of hair, those perfect teeth glinting between the thin Peck lips, the waxy gray cord of his hearing aid and the deep-socketed eyes, closed but still leaking their blueness into the white of the lids. There was more to him than soul; there was this body, which would have looked different worn by any other man. She memorized the single stark line running alongside each corner of his mouth, drawn by pride and firmness of purpose. She willed his gnarled hands to press into hers, one more time, a bitter oval of horehound, but she did not reach out to touch him.