Best Left Unfinished

Best Left Unfinished

  By Sara Jamieson

  Copyright 2014 Sara Jamieson

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  On her tenth birthday, Katherine Vance got lost in the woods that bordered her new home. This (while a decided step down from her ninth birthday for which she and her father had spent three whole days at a beach together) was still, arguably, a better way to spend the day than her eighth birthday had been. Her current state (wringing water out of her hair and back toward the creek that had been at the bottom of the embankment which she had tumbled down) was merely unfortunate. Her eighth birthday had been a debacle. That, at least, was the word her Grammy Vance had used at the time. Katherine had decided to use the word herself for two reasons -- she liked the way that it rolled off her tongue when she said it, and it made it less lonely somehow to think that there was an actual word that described what had happened.

  Besides, her current predicament was entirely her fault (and Katherine was always calmer about dealing with the outcome of things that she had caused rather than things that simply happened to her). She might have spent most of her life as a city girl, but she wasn’t ignorant. She and her father had taken camping trips all her life -- she knew better than to walk off into an unfamiliar area and not pay attention to where she was going. She also comforted herself with the fact that she wasn’t really lost in the way that people usually used the word. There was a path that would lead her practically back to her new backyard. The problem was that she couldn’t manage to get back to the path. Her ankle wasn’t in the mood to cooperate. She was pretty sure that it was just sprained or strained or one of those other words that they used to explain a section of your body being suddenly disinclined toward normal use. It wasn’t as though there was a bone sticking out through her skin or anything. It just wasn’t up to her putting any sort of weight on it. Its rather angry protest at the attempt was enough to make her determine that it wasn’t worth it.

  Her father didn’t know where she was. That was going to be a problem. She had left him a note, but it had only said that she was going to go for a walk. She hadn’t gone into any details both because she hadn’t known where she was going when she left the house and because she had been very sure that her father was never going to actually read what she had written. It had been a just in case thing for the off chance that he got to leave work before he had expected.

  She had reconciled herself to the fact that she would be spending her birthday alone in a place where she hadn’t yet met anyone not a member of her immediate family. They had only arrived yesterday evening -- the new job had been a sort of a spur of the moment decision where they had needed her father to start as soon as he possibly could. They hadn’t even had time to pack up their old apartment themselves -- Grampa and Grammy Vance were overseeing hired movers to do that. For the next two days, it was just a sleeping bag, a suitcase, and a house that was a little disturbing in its emptiness. Her father had wished her a happy birthday on his way out the door and left money on the counter in the kitchen for her to find a way to the grocery store to buy “whatever the birthday girl feels like.”

  She hadn’t gone to fetch groceries. She had fished a granola bar out of the almost empty pack that had accompanied them on their road trip, scribbled her just in case note, and gotten out of the house. There had been woods with what looked like an easy enough to walk path, and she had taken it on a whim. Her camera had been hanging in its case from its strap across her shoulder -- she very seldom went anywhere without it. It had seemed like a good idea at the time to take some pictures of the place that she was going to learn to call home. Taking pictures was what she did. She wouldn’t think about being lonely or the house that didn’t yet feel like theirs. She wouldn’t fret about the lack of time that she had had to say a proper goodbye to her friends or second guess whether she should have taken her grandparents’ offer to stay with them for the rest of the summer while her father got settled.

  Everything made sense through a camera lens. You didn’t have to overthink things through a camera lens. You didn’t have to wonder about things or question things or feel things that you didn’t want to feel when you were looking through a camera lens. You just took the shots as they came and let the pictures do the feeling for you. The school guidance counselor at her old school hadn’t liked it when she tried to explain that. She had said a lot of words about escapism and using a buffer to prevent working through emotional trauma. Katherine hadn’t done much in the way of listening. It hadn’t been her idea to sit through the sessions. It hadn’t been her father’s idea either. The school had strongly suggested the appointments in light of the changes in her home situation, and they (she and her father that is) had chosen not to object.

  She never told Mrs. Hatter about her eighth birthday. She never told her details about her mother. She kept her answers noncommittal, shrugged her shoulders a lot, and made little comments about her mother working a lot anyway making it so things weren’t much different. It seemed to make Mrs. Hatter happy that she thought she was helping to “fix” her, and it had gotten her out of one session per week of what Hillside referred to as physical education. Katherine had always had her doubts about the accuracy of that name, and she hadn’t been willing to give up the free pass. Mrs. Hatter was preferable to the seemingly disproportionate amount of dodge ball that the course consisted of during the confined indoors months of the year. She was much easier to ignore than rubber balls being thrown at her head.

  It was Katherine’s personal opinion that all physical education teachers must have perfect vision. It was the only explanation. Anyone who had ever been forced to participate in an activity deemed too dangerous for glasses and then attempted to navigate partially blind through people throwing things at you would never willingly inflict the experience on another person. That, however, was only a long held personal grudge on her part. The point was that she had tolerated Mrs. Hatter and her sessions because it was the best of her options at the time. It wasn’t because she got anything out of them.

  She wasn’t broken (and it wasn’t because of any “fixing” from a counselor). She hadn’t been broken in the first place.

  She wouldn’t miss that about her old school. She would also not miss the necessity of wearing tights under her uniform skirt during the winter. Tights were never going to make her list of fun things to wear. This whole public school thing would be an adventure in and of itself. She would get to wear jeans when it was snowing outside. That was something she was looking forward to, and these woods were just waiting to have hundreds upon hundreds of pictures taken in them. There were plenty of things that were going to be good about this move despite her rocky start of failing to pay attention and sliding (although sliding implied a slightly gentler journey than the one that she had actually taken) into water that was a little too cold to be pleasant.

  She was currently busy being happy that her birthday was in June. August might have been better, but her birthday could have been in December. She would probably freeze to death in that case (which would definitely pull this down on the birthday scale). June wasn’t a bad month to have a misadventure with a creek in by comparison. That didn’t mean that she wasn’t chilly. She was -- enough so that she was reluctant to stick her ankle back into the water even though
she suspected that that would be a good first step for dealing with whatever was wrong with it.

  She was also pleased that her camera had been in hand and that she had had the presence of mind to drop it when her downhill slide started. Dropping it was usually something she avoided on principle, but it had seemed likely to be less destructive than keeping it with her. Given the state of her ankle and the multiple scrapes she had acquired that were beginning to sting, she was confident that she had made the correct decision.

  Her camera was safe; she just needed to find it. That was more than she could say for the state her glasses were in at this point. The lenses weren’t broken, but the right side had a nice scratch across it. In addition, the frame was bent so that they wouldn’t rest properly on her face. Her left earpiece seemed ready to snap at the first opportunity, but she could, at least for now, still use them well enough that she wasn’t trapped in an unfamiliar landscape that consisted of blurs of varying degrees of fuzziness.

  Glasses were easily replaceable. She was more concerned about getting her camera back. That required getting herself back up the embankment somehow (which she needed to figure out how to do anyway to get herself out of the woods). She could sit and wait for someone to find her, but that didn’t seem like a very practical way to go about things. Barring some massive change in plans, her father wouldn’t even get back to the house until after dark. Then, he would have to try to figure out where she had gone. He would end up having to call for help, and the whole thing just seemed like a massively unpleasant way to start life in this town. She would rather avoid that whole scenario where she became “that new girl who had to have emergency services mount a missing person search because she couldn’t manage to walk on a path” instead of merely “the new girl.” She also didn’t want to wait that long. She didn’t really care for being wet and chilly. She wasn’t really up for a large chunk of night spent in an unfamiliar outdoor setting. She didn’t want her dad to have to worry the way that he would end up worrying. She didn’t want Grammy Vance to do that disappointed tongue clicking thing when she heard about what had happened.

  Avoidance of the whole blow up that she was envisioning would be great. That, however, would require that she somehow manage to get herself home before her dad got off work. She did not think that was completely outside the realm of possible things; it wasn’t like she didn’t have plenty of time.

  Standing wasn’t a good idea. She tried it again just to make sure, but it was a really bad idea. Maybe she was just a bit of a wuss, but she wasn’t going to get anywhere trying to work with that. There would be no standing. Her knees seemed to be in okay shape (although she had a feeling that she was going to end up being rather sore all over as she hadn’t exactly gone hill rolling down an unobstructed route), so she ought to be able to manage crawling. She lifted a hand to push a piece of her hair out of her face and was startled to see that her fingers came back with blood on them. She stared at them for a moment. She knew that she had some blood oozing from some scrapes on her arms, but she hadn’t noticed that stinging feeling coming from anywhere on her head. She put her fingers back to see if she could trace it to the source and quickly regretted doing so. She could feel it now (maybe she shouldn’t have been pushing with her fingers quite so hard).

  She wouldn’t be hiding that cut. Her dad was going to have a cow. That was all the more reason to make sure that she beat him home. First, she was going to have to get back into the creek. She wasn’t looking forward to that. A bit of a breeze was rustling the leaves in the surrounding trees, and it wasn’t helping the chill that she was still feeling. She couldn’t take time to dwell on that. She got herself into this, and she would have to do her best to get herself out of it. The creek came first. Then, she would figure out the best way to get back on top of that ledge. Once she managed that, she was pretty sure that crawling back up to the path would be entirely doable. She balanced as best she could on one foot with the water running just a couple of inches shy of her knee. This was one of those occasions on which it would have been helpful to be not quite so short. The ledge she needed to be on top of was just above her shoulders and clumps of it kept breaking off under her hands as she tried to find a place to grab hold. Climbing back up was going to take some time.

  In the end, she had to give up on that spot. She just couldn’t make it work (and the whole standing in the none too warm water thing was getting to her). She didn’t want to leave that place. She had to be able to find her camera, but she decided that she would just have to look from the path for the place where someone had obviously crashed through the brush and look for her camera there. She hated leaving that to chance, but she just wasn’t getting anywhere. She decided to follow the creek and find a place where there wasn’t such a sharp drop off to get back up and hope that the path up above actually followed closely enough that she would still be able to find her way back to it. She could, she thought, always follow the creek back to this point again before she went back up the hill, but she had a nasty mental picture of that crumbly ground giving way under her when she found it with her having to start all over again.

  She kept herself busy as she crawled by focusing on two things -- hoping that she didn’t manage to drag herself through some poison ivy and praying really hard that God would see fit to make sure that she didn’t pull herself into any encounters with snakes. She really, really did not want to find herself face to face with a snake. She thought she had been altogether fairly composed about dealing with her day so far, but ending up eye level with a slithery reptile might just put her over the edge. She didn’t care for them on the best of days, and she didn’t feel like her current inability to run away would improve her opinion of them in the least. It was, on the whole, probably best if she didn’t encounter any woodland creatures at this point, but she thought she could probably manage to deal with most anything as long as it wasn’t a snake. She was making (she felt) an awful lot of noise which (she hoped) would have the dual benefit of warding away any nonhuman entities from her immediate vicinity and, perhaps, drawing the attention of any passing human ones.

  She didn’t want the cavalry called out to locate her in some bad real life impersonation of an after school special, but she wouldn’t turn down help if it presented itself. It had, after all, been a path that she had originally taken. That had to mean that other people used it, didn’t it?

  She was really bad at figuring elapsed time on the best of days, so she didn’t know how long she had been following the creek (although the awkwardly stiff way that her jeans were drying did clue her in that it had been a while) when she found a spot that looked promising. She paused to try to readjust her glasses yet again, and the earpiece gave up its last grasp of connectedness and fell off into her hand. Trying to wedge it into her front pocket was a struggle, and she wasn’t sure why she bothered. She very much doubted that there would be any repairing going on with the multiple injuries she had inflicted on them. She had not included her back up pair (something her father had always insisted on her having) with the things that she had brought with her. They would be somewhere in the boxes that came from her packed up room, and she would have to make due without until those arrived and could be unpacked and searched. Her dad wasn’t going to have any time in the midst of settling in to the new job to take her to find a new optometrist.

  She could worry about that later. She needed to focus. She took a long look at the route that she thought she could manage and tried to tuck as much of it into her memory as she could before hooking the remaining earpiece of her glasses on the collar of her shirt (which wasn’t working out so well what with the crawling and all, she was probably going to lose them altogether before this was over) and heading back to cross the still not nearly warm enough water of the creek.

  She thought she was about halfway back up to where she was hoping she would hit the path again when she thought she heard something that wasn’t t
he sound of the breeze. She was still making enough noise to drown out pretty much anything else, so she stopped where she was and listened.

  That was totally the sound of someone walking. She must be at least semi close to the path. She kept moving while pondering what would be an appropriate thing to call out to the person making the noise. She could try “Hello?” She could skip the pretenses and holler “Help!” She didn’t get a chance to decide. Someone else took the initiative in the conversation.

  “Are you alright?” A concerned voice asked her. She processed that the voice was male, and she decided he was not a grown up one while she tried to pull her glasses off her collar. It took her a moment because the earpiece had gotten tangled somehow on threads from one of the buttons. The sound of walking got closer, and her first impression was that she was looking at a blurry blond who seemed really tall from her position on the ground.

  “Sorry,” he was saying as she finally got her glasses perched well enough across her nose that she could actually see the boy in front of her. “That was kind of a ridiculous question, wasn’t it? Where all are you hurt?”

  “My ankle mostly,” she told him as he squatted down to her level and reached a hand out toward the place on her head where she was sure there was still a glob of blood. “Ouch.”

  “Sorry,” he repeated again. “I shouldn’t have done that. I guess I’m not so great at this rescuing thing. Oh,” he added as if it was an afterthought. “I’m Caleb.”

  “Katherine,” she answered back automatically.

  “This is the part where my mom always tells me that I should tell someone that it’s nice to meet them, but I’m not so sure I should. I’m guessing you’ve had better days.”

  Katherine blinked behind the scratched lens of her glasses at the earnest green eyes peering at her. He was completely serious. She couldn’t help it; she laughed. It was not at him so much as in some sort of weird it had been a really long and not so wonderful day on top of what had been a really long and not so wonderful week. Laughing just felt like the only option she had at that moment that didn’t end up with her in tears.

  “Yes,” she told him as she noticed the concern he was directing at her growing with each moment that she spent laughing. “I have had better days, but it’s still nice to meet you.” He looked maybe a little bit older than she was, but Katherine wasn’t willing to bet on that. She wasn’t very good at guessing people’s ages. She was forever having people guess that she was younger than she actually was by two or three years, so she didn’t put much faith into appearances. What she was sure about was that under the concern in his expression was also a decided lack of certainty that he wanted to be dealing with the strange (possibly hysterically laughing) bleeding girl that he had stumbled across in the woods.

  “Huh,” she observed as she looked beyond Caleb for a moment. The path was clearly visible maybe five feet behind him. She had been closer than she had thought. “Maybe I should have stopped and tried putting my glasses back on earlier.”

  “Huh?” He repeated mirroring the beginning of her sentence. She bit back the urge to giggle. The day was definitely getting to her -- she wasn’t usually much of a giggler.

  “The path,” she tried to explain feeling all the while that she wasn’t doing a very good job of it. “I was trying to find my way back to the path, but my glasses aren’t in the best of shape. I’m kind of not so good at the seeing thing without them.”

  “Which would kind of be the point of having the glasses,” he chose to add when she paused. She couldn’t decide whether he was trying to be smart aleck about it or not. That was interesting. If that was his sense of humor coming into play, then the two of them might just get along swimmingly.

  “True,” she was pleased to see the slight smirk that he gave her when she acknowledged his point. “So, anyway, the path is right there which means that I am officially unlost -- even though I technically wasn’t really lost in the first place because I always knew that the path was up the hill. It just took me a little longer than I wanted to get to it.”

  “You’re assuming that there’s only one path. You know that right?” She was pretty sure that he was teasing her.

  “Well, you’re here now, so I’m sure you can point me in the right direction.”

  “And you’re going to go in that direction how? You said your ankle was hurt, and I’m guessing you wouldn’t be down there,” he told her standing back up again, “if you could walk on it.”

  “I would totally accept help,” she told him doing her best to smile despite the fact that the being still was starting to direct her attention to the fact that she was exhausted and to the way that her ankle was throbbing. He held out his hands. She took them letting him do the work to pull her up to balanced on one foot. He was enough taller than her that his original attempt at slinging her arm across his shoulders so that he could help her balance left her arm at a really uncomfortable angle that didn’t work so well. They did, however, get back to the path that way.

  “I should go get my dad,” he told her as he guided her back to sitting down once they reached it. “This isn’t going to work. He can carry you. Or maybe it would be closer to get someone from wherever you’re staying?” He questioned.

  “Willow Lane,” she told him, “but nobody’s at the house. Dad’s working.”

  “Oh,” he blinked as he recognized the name. “Are you the ones who bought Mrs. Clayton’s house?”

  “I don’t know,” she answered with a shrug.

  “There are only three houses down Willow,” he told her. “It’s got to be Mrs. Clayton’s. Anyway . . . it might take me a bit to find my dad. I could try for Mr. Reynolds instead. He’s your new neighbor,” he offered as explanation when she raised an eyebrow at him. “He works evenings, so he’s probably home sleeping right now. But, if no one’s at your house, maybe you should come to mine. One of my parents can drive you to the clinic while we call your dad.”

  “Yeah, waking up the new neighbor when he’s sleeping might not be the best introduction to the neighborhood,” she commented. “If your dad wouldn’t mind getting me home, I’ll be fine. It’s just sprained or twisted or whatever,” she said gesturing toward her ankle. “I’ll put some ice on it and let my dad look at it later.”

  “Yeah, that’s so not going to happen after my mother gets hold of you,” he told her with a grin that she noticed made his whole face light up. “I’ll be back as quick as I can, okay?”

  “Wait,” she told him as he began to walk in the opposite direction of the one in which she wanted to be going (deciding that she might be pushing her luck but there were definite priorities that she had to at least attempt to put into practice). “Is this the right path for getting back to my house?”

  “There’s just one path,” he told her. “I was teasing earlier.” His expression darkened. “You aren’t thinking you’re going anywhere, are you? You need to stay put until we get back.”

  “But my camera is somewhere that way,” she made a sweeping gesture with her arm. “I can’t just leave it out here, and I dropped it as soon as I realized that I was going down. It should be close to the edge of the path.”

  “You can’t be serious.” He told her as his eyes widened with disbelief.

  “I’m always serious about my camera.” She responded doing her best to give him a pleading look. She knew her affection for her camera wasn’t something that most people understood, but she couldn’t just let it be lost. She wasn’t really her without her camera. She needed it, and it needed her. It was depending on her to rescue it from an untimely death by nature; she couldn’t let it down -- not that she was going to say anything like that out loud to a complete stranger no matter how helpful he seemed to be. She had already learned that lesson.

  “You know,” he told her biting his lip with an indecisive expression, “medical attention is supposed to be a priority in situations like these.
”

  “Which is why you’re going to go get your dad while I’m looking for it,” she offered with her best just trust me smile. It didn’t seem to work.

  “Yeah, like I’m going to let that happen,” he rolled his eyes at her. “I can’t believe I’m doing this.” Her pleading look must be better than she thought -- that or it made it harder to say no to someone when they looked as completely pathetic as she was sure that she did. “At least I should be able to see where you fell. That’ll give me a starting point. If it takes me longer than five minutes to find it, then I’m going for my dad and your camera can just wait.”

  “Yeah,” she said deciding that she had to be honest even if it wasn’t going to help her case any. “I’m not making any promises. I really need my camera.” She even sounded kind of pathetic. She wasn’t sure how she felt about that, but she decided it didn’t matter -- just as long as she got her camera back.

  “My mother is going to give me a lecture like you cannot even imagine,” Caleb told her sounding as if he was resigned to the fact. He offered her another one of those grins. “And I am so going to blame you even though that will probably just get me another lecture.”

  Settled in the passenger seat of the car as her dad drove the two of them back to their new house several hours later, Katherine reflected that this might have been one of her better birthdays. There was the rough start and all of the uncertainties associated with their move to figure in, but it all seemed to be balanced out by the better moments of the day. People she didn’t even know had let her spend hours on their couch with a freshly Ace bandaged ankle, carefully disinfected scratches along her arms, and a couple of butterfly closures on the side of her head. (Caleb’s mother seemed to be quite accomplished at first aid.) There had even been freshly baked brownies with ice cream and a birthday candle thrown in for good measure.

  Her eighth birthday could keep its debacle title. Today had been a good day. Mostly, she told herself as she ran her hand over the camera sitting in her lap, today was one of her better birthdays because she had met Caleb. This move was going to turn out okay -- she was positive about that now. Something told her that meeting the kind eyed boy who had helped her in the woods with his slightly snarky sense of humor and his willingness to go looking for the lost possession of someone he didn’t even know was going to be something that she would be grateful for for a long, long time to come.