Best Left Unfinished Read online

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  She was thirty four years of age before she was willing to admit that she had made a mistake, and that admission was not one that came lightly. Cecelia Murray had been reared in a world where it was understood that she was to be above making such errant decisions. They were beneath her. She was capable of more and therefore should not succumb to the petty temptations of lesser mortals or some similar notion that her parents had attempted to sear into her brain from the time that she was capable of comprehending the spoken word. Her interpretation was, naturally, heavily paraphrased. She had never heard the phrase “lesser mortals” escape her mother’s mouth, but there was something about the way that her mother spoke that made the words feel as though they had been uttered even when they had not.

  Her parents would scoff were she to ever say such a thing to either one of them. They were snobs of the highest order, but they somehow managed to retain the conviction that they hadn’t any traits that could be defined as “snobbish” between them. Snobs, after all, were merely those that carried with them some sort of air because they felt that other people were beneath them. Cecelia’s parents didn’t feel any such thing -- they carried the full weight of conviction that it was so. Cecelia had never been inclined to disagree with them on that point.

  She had, however, been young and rebellious once. In consequence, she had found herself enjoying the opportunity to throw decades worth of teaching back in her parents’ faces. She was supposed to be too sensible for rebellion, but she could have told her parents that sense had very little to do with the thought processes that went into a young person trying to distance him- or herself from parental teachings. Presumably, her parents had never found it necessary to question their parents (or that was what she was to believe as she had never been provided with any evidence to the contrary). She had made it quite happily to her twenty fourth year before it had ever occurred to her to do any serious questioning of her own.

  If she had never met Edmund, then there may have been a complete lack of questioning that lasted to the end of her days. She could find it within her to regret that she hadn’t had the settled, focused years that she should have during the time that Edmund had been a part of her life. Her career had suffered a certain level of lack of attentiveness due to her involvement there that she could look back on and think of with a sigh, but she could never quite make herself regret actually knowing Edmund.

  Ed was Ed -- she had once tried to explain to her mother (at twenty five and young and untried enough to still believe that her mother was actually listening to anything that she was saying on the subject). Needless to say, that had been a failure of nearly epic proportions. Neither her mother nor her father could manage (or simply wouldn’t try) to see what was so wonderful about a man who was brilliant in his own right with goals, plans, and dreams who still managed to live a life in which he could always find something at which to laugh.

  Her chronically focused, ever serious parents had no appreciation for such a personality. She (chronically focused and ever serious herself) shouldn’t have, but she did. Sometimes, she caught herself thinking that she had married the man just so she could see her eternally composed parents lose their grip on what she had (at the time) been finding their everlasting (and maddening) calmness. She knew better. She had married Edmund because he had asked her to (and because she had wanted to say yes). It was as simple as that, and it was that complicated all at the same time. She had been days shy of her twenty fifth birthday and had realized that she had never before made any decision all on her own based simply on what she wanted at the time. Everything she had ever done in her entire life had been thought out and planned to death in order to fit its proper place in the bigger picture of her life within the scope of the bigger picture of how she fit into the Society.

  She hadn’t been foolish enough (her parents’ words, not hers) to try to bring Edmund into the Society. She knew better, and her parents had breathed a sigh of relief that she hadn’t gone “completely addlepated.” It was easy enough to pretend that she respected the years of work that had gone into building it up and that she had enough decorum as a third generation member to not attempt the inclusion of an outsider (her mother would say an underbred one). The truth was that she didn’t tell Edmund anything about the Society because she had an instinctive understanding that Ed wouldn’t have approved -- not that he wouldn’t have understood or that he wouldn’t have been capable of seeing the possibilities that the Society dedicated itself to bringing into being. He would have understood what they were doing and recognized the possibilities that they were bringing to be and would have been appalled.

  She hadn’t thought that it would be overly problematic. She worked somewhere that prohibited her from discussing her work with anyone outside the company. It was a simple enough explanation -- she was sure that there were thousands of people across the country who could say the same. It didn’t stop them from getting married and having happy little lives. If they could manage, then she most certainly should be able to manage as well.

  Her job had never been the problem in her marriage to Ed (as far as she could see). The problem was that she had been careless enough (and cossetting of Ed enough) to let there be a child. Katherine was the rock on which the smooth sailing of their marriage had faltered. If her parents had been disappointed at her marriage, then they had been nothing short of irate at the introduction of progeny to the picture. They called her Cecilia’s failed experiment, and Cecilia couldn’t find grounds to argue against the title. She knew that if Katherine had been a different sort of child, then her grandparents would have latched on to her as some sort of breakthrough (although there was a significant enough to note chance that they may have had wounded pride enough to dismiss her altogether as an unimportant anomaly). As it was, they latched on to her as a way to bludgeon Cecilia with how grave an error she had made.

  Each new failure of expectations was one more round of ammunition to be hurled at her. It was one more lever to use to try to pry her apart from her husband, and, in the end, it had worked. Acceptance of workplace secrets and aloof in-laws all faltered and disappeared in the face of her parents’ dismissal of his child. That Cecilia didn’t seek to censure them became a constant source of irritation between the two. Why should she? There was nothing they said of the child that wasn’t true. She wasn’t a prodigy of any sort. She didn’t display indications of brilliance. She couldn’t even manage to grow properly. She was chronically undersized for her age -- a throwback to Ed’s grandmother on his father’s side which he found cute without realizing that it just gave further fodder to her parents’ arguments about the absolute necessity of being sure of genetics. She was even the proverbial “blind as a bat” cliché to further demonstrate just how lacking in all positive attributes that she was.

  Cecilia had locked herself in the bathroom to cry the day that Ed remarked that their daughter had inherited his vision. Why had he never told her that he had had corrective surgery long before they had ever met? She had never been overly emotional, and that day taught her just how far off track she was allowing her life to become. Crying over a chance comment where anyone might overhear her just wasn’t done. It displayed a woeful lack of self-control, and Cecilia was always controlled.

  It began to grate on her nerves whenever Ed would refer to the child as “their daughter.” If she was “their daughter,” then where on earth was Cecilia in her? The fact that they shared hair color was hardly grounds for wanting to claim the relationship. She could see nothing of herself in Katherine. She could barely see anything of Ed. How could two people as obviously intellectually superior as the two of them have produced something so blatantly average?

  She had resented Katherine. She had resented her parents’ ability to use Katherine against her. She had resented Ed’s attachment to the little girl that she hadn’t been able to look at without seeing everything that was wrong with her. She h
ad, however, been stubborn. For eight years, she had tried to make her marriage continue to work despite the constant tension and never ending problems created by Katherine’s presence in their lives. Cecilia had attempted to be reasonable. It was hardly Katherine’s fault that she created chaos with everything that she touched. It was Cecilia’s fault that she was there.

  She supposed that her timing could have been better. It was rather uncouth to allow such internal family problems to be aired in the middle of an occasion such as a birthday party. There weren’t any persons outside of their respective families present. Other children that Katherine knew from her school were never allowed to be present on occasions when Cecilia’s parents were in attendance. Having Edmund’s parents in the same place at the same time as her own was enough of a hassle without adding further irritants to the mix. The Murrays and the Vances had no use for each other.