Best Left Unfinished Page 20

  ~~~~~

  “It isn’t like that,” Caleb had told her sounding plaintive, hurt, and saddened all at the same time. Her initial reaction was to lash back with angrier words, but she took a deep breath and remembered that this was still Caleb (and no matter what was happening or how they seemed to be disintegrating, Caleb was her Caleb). She pushed the angry words and the desire to lash out away from the front of her consciousness. She looked up at him. She took another deep breath. She let her own hurt and sadness color the tones of her voice as she offered him a suggestion.

  “Why don’t you tell me what it’s like?” To her surprise, his response was to sink down onto the side of the path. He folded up on himself and seemed to shrink (as if the underbrush had reached out and pulled him down so that he was slowly being absorbed by their surroundings). She couldn’t say why that particular image struck her so forcefully (except that Caleb looked so much as though he wished he could disappear). His arms wrapped around his knees where his legs were stationed in front of him. His head tucked against his knees, and he looked so altogether miserable that Katherine found herself sinking to her knees beside him and reaching out a hand to place on his shoulder.

  They were quiet -- the sound of Caleb’s overly heavy breathing the only noise not naturally occurring in the woods discernable to her ears.

  She knew her Caleb. She knew when he was in distress. She knew when he was struggling to put the usually unvoiced into words. She knew when he didn’t know where to begin. Stronger than the anger, stronger than the disappointment, and stronger than the hurt was the desire to help him when things for him were hard -- despite the counter voice in the back of her mind telling her not to bother. That voice was telling her that it was his doing that they had gotten themselves into this mess. It was saying that he could be the one to start to dig them out of it (or they could just not dig their way out of it at all). She let the impulse (the one that screamed that she couldn’t let her best friend suffer without doing something to try to alleviate it) win.

  “You are my best friend,” she began giving a small squeeze with the hand that still rested on his shoulder. “You’ve been my best friend for a very long time -- there are some things that just sort of go along with that status. You cannot really think that I’ve been around you this long -- that your family has let me in as much as you all have -- without me noticing that there are things that don’t make sense.” She felt him tense up under her hand, and she switched to patting in an attempt to keep him both calm and not inclined to interrupt her yet. She wanted him to talk -- she wanted him to talk and give her something she could work with to salvage their friendship, but now that she was talking, she wanted to make it clear that there was no room for pretense between them. She needed them to be on the same page about that, or she wasn’t sure that there would be anything left to salvage.

  “I’ve noticed things, Caleb. I’ve seen things, and just because I’ve always had enough respect for your privacy that I’ve never pushed you or pressed for answers or confronted you about it doesn’t change that.” She wasn’t sure how to say what she wanted him to understand, so she closed her eyes and went for it (and prayed that the words would end up being the right ones). She let her hand slide from its place on his shoulder and drop back to her side thinking all the while that they probably made a very odd picture huddled as they were in the overgrown grass that lined the edges of the pathway that bridged the way between their homes. She needed the both of them to find the right words to bridge the space between them (and she needed both of them to be willing to hear what the other was saying -- which was becoming more possible the longer she pushed her anger out of the way and pushed forward her determination to find clarity).

  “There are things that I know, Caleb; things that we never talk about. There are more things that I suspect that I’ve never asked you because I know you well enough to know that if you had an answer that you wanted to give me, then you would have done it already.” She reopened her eyes and found herself staring at the top of her best friend’s blond head where it remained bowed down over his knees. “There are answers you could have pushed me for as well, you know,” she reminded him. “And you’ve never done it. Am I right that you did that because you knew I didn’t want to talk about it? Or did you just never pay enough attention to me to know that those touch me not points were there?”

  His head snapped up so hard she half expected a cracking sound to accompany the motion. “Of course I . . .,” he trailed off as she offered him a small smile.

  “Did you really think that I never noticed?” She prompted. He sighed and ran his hand through his hair brushing it back from his forehead.

  “It wasn’t that,” he told her sounding strangely far away from her as he did so. “I just hoped that . . .,” his attention was suddenly focused directly on her. “There are things that I shouldn’t tell you.”

  “Have I ever given you the impression that that is something with which I had a problem?”

  “You’ve been doing a great impression of it lately,” he countered with the faintest twinge of annoyance.

  “I’m okay if there are things that you can’t or won’t or for whatever reason don’t tell me,” she countered in turn. “What I’m not okay with is when you decide that it’s okay to lie to me about it.”

  “I was tired of not having any answers to give you,” he tried to explain.

  “And you thought that really lame lies that insulted my intelligence were the way to go?” She asked. “Let me just say -- not your best move ever.”

  “They weren’t that lame,” she heard him mutter. She let the chuckle that came bubbling up in her escape as her response.

  “Okay,” he conceded, “they were lame. As you might have mentioned, I’m not very good at this.”

  “I don’t really want you to be,” she acknowledged.

  “It’s not about not trusting you,” he told her reaching over and squeezing her hand. “I trust you. I’d trust you with my sister.”

  That might have sounded silly or out of context to anyone else, but Katherine knew exactly what those words meant to Caleb. She squeezed his hand back.

  “No more lying to me,” she stated (wanting to summarize and make sure that they were on the same wavelength once again). “You can keep all the secrets you want. You can not tell me whatever you think that you shouldn’t tell me, but you can’t lie to me. Deal?”

  He raised a hand in the air like he was taking an oath. “I may not tell you everything, but I will not tell you lies,” he paraphrased her request (in a much pretty upped manner she noted). It felt solemn somehow, perhaps because of the gravity of the subject matter or because of how close the two of them could sense that they had come to losing what they had. She decided that the moment called for a promise of her own. She mimicked his posture with a raised hand and repeated “I may not tell you everything, but I will not tell you lies.”

  They grinned at each other for a few moments; Katherine couldn’t seem to make the grin go away (what with the utter conviction she felt down to the depths of her soul that something completely dreadful had just been narrowly averted). It was Caleb who broke the silence.

  “Are we okay now?” He inquired, and Katherine slowly shook her head back and forth.

  “No, we probably aren’t,” she told him honestly. “I imagine we’ve both got some hurt feelings to drudge up at some point. But, we will be okay, because we both want to be, so we’ll get there eventually.”

  They had. It hadn’t been instantaneous -- they had both had weeks of awkward pauses around each other as something or other touched on the near breakdown of their friendship that they had suffered. Friendship was something fragile at times, Katherine had decided, and this had been one of their fragile moments. They had gotten a crack (or maybe a chip even), but instead of tossing away the cracked dish that was their relationship, they had opted to go to the trouble of mending it. Th
ere were some false starts and some confusion; the space where the crack had opened up would always be visible, but they were stronger now for the glue that had pieced them back together (not least of which because they both were now certain that the other was willing to work through the mending).

  Thus, they had finished out their senior year with their friendship intact and more each other’s family than they had even been before. By the time that Katherine’s eighteenth birthday rolled around in the early days of summer immediately following their graduation, the two of them had decided that the path of after high school partings, drifting apart, and the dwindling of friendships into nodding acquaintanceships was not one that the two of them would tread.

  Katherine was going . . . she hesitated to use the word home even though her grandparents described it as such. The city itself wasn’t home -- it hadn’t been for eight long years filled with living.

  She would be living with her grandparents and attending classes in the city (the thought of living in a dorm with strangers was something that she found lacked appeal, and Grammy and Grandpa Vance had been ecstatic to have her sort of to themselves for a bit). Caleb would be accompanying her there (following her Grammy Vance had said with an admonishment that she let herself have enough room to breathe and see what other friends might be lingering on the sidelines and waiting to come to be). Caleb would, of course, be staying in the dorms. He was strangely excited (and couldn’t name the why himself) about the thought of so many strangers, and Katherine thought it might be because he saw it as a way of being anonymous without all the careful effort that remaining mostly anonymous where the both of them were now from required from him on a daily basis.

  They would be going to school together still -- both double majors. They had one in common and one that was their own (and Grammy Vance rolled her eyes and sighed in a half amused and half in consternation way while she muttered about not being able to tell whose apron strings who was tied to). They didn’t pay much attention to anyone’s commentary on the subject. That was the plan, and the both of them were happy with it.

  It wasn’t like they needed to spend all of their time together. It wasn’t like they needed to live in each other’s back pockets. They could function perfectly well without each other; they just happened to not see the point. They were going to miss their parents. They were going to miss Sylvie. It only made sense to stick somewhat close to the one that they wouldn’t have to be missing. They had each other’s backs -- Katherine would talk Caleb through his first night of not being around to read his sister a bedtime story, and Caleb would distract Katherine through her first Friday night in what felt like forever in which she didn’t have Seth Reynolds in tow.

  They took their first official steps into on your own (or as on your own as you can be when living the somewhat between the worlds lives of college students with grandparents and campus housing standing between you and the big, bad world at large) adulthood in the way that they had taken to doing most things in their lives -- together.

  Things fell into a pattern -- lunches together in the campus cafeteria, seats next to each other in the classes they had in common, project partners when possible, sounding boards for papers and project ideas for the courses they didn’t share, and evening study sessions whenever they felt like it (which always ended up being more often than not). It wasn’t as though they didn’t encounter other people. It wasn’t as if Caleb didn’t strike up conversations with other guys that lived down his hall (his roommates were a different story altogether, one that was best avoided in Caleb’s not so unbiased opinion). It wasn’t as if Katherine didn’t chat for the few minutes between her arrival and the start of her English class with the girl in the next seat over. If either of them were missing out on the addition of new people to their lives by the sheer amount of time that they spent with each other, then they didn’t notice. It was their normal. It had been their normal for a rather long time, and there was nothing to miss when you didn’t feel like you were missing anything.

  Grammy Vance clucked her tongue upon occasion, but she never really objected (and Grandpa Vance always clucked his tongue right back and told her to mind her own business and let the children be). Phone calls home were frequent. Sylvie was in a phase where she was obsessed with getting mail and so letters were sent home nearly as frequently. If Katherine cried a little bit the day she got mail back where Sylvie had oh so proudly scrawled the word Sis across the top, well, there was nothing at all wrong with that.

  Homesickness hit them both (but luckily never at the same time), and they always had each other to comfort over missed people, places, and things. They muddled through the transition of their first semester tolerably well, finished off their second like pros, and were a nicely mixed balanced of happy to go home and a little reluctant to leave their new found freedoms when summer came back around.