Best Left Unfinished

by Sara Jamieson

  ~~~~~

  Katherine was twenty when Caleb finally broke what had come to be referred to as the curse of lousy luck with roommates. It was kind of sad and pathetic (and yet strangely funny all at the same time) that he began his fifth semester of life in a dorm with his sixth roommate. It wasn’t, Katherine had reassured him often, him that was the problem. He wasn’t overly difficult to live with (and he even went out of his way to try to curb any activities that the variety of roommates might or might not have complained about). Caleb just had truly abysmal results with the luck of the draw roommate assignments that he received from the housing department. Although, in all fairness, there had been no real problem with the guy he had originally roomed with in the fall of their sophomore year. He, however, had pledged a fraternity and ended up moving into said fraternity’s house immediately instead of waiting for the end of the semester only to be replaced by a guy who had had a falling out with his previous roommate that culminated in intervention by campus security. Katherine was not aware of the specifics of that circumstance. She had, however, had a front row seat to his interactions with Caleb and would have been prepared to side with the previous roommate on principle as a result.

  Roommate number five had been impressively strange (even by Caleb roommate standards) with his apparent aversion to water -- an entire semester of close proximity to someone who neither bathed nor did laundry (not to mention the dishes -- Katherine would prefer not to remember those) had left Caleb spending most of his weekends with Katherine at her grandparent’s house.

  Drake Klausen would have only had to have been a nonhealth hazard who never woke Caleb up in the middle of the night by swatting him over the head with a textbook (roommate number two -- because it was really funny) to be at the top on the roommate ranking list. As it was, the sixth time turned out to be the charm for her best friend. The engineering major was civil, reasonably clean, and failed to demonstrate any compulsion to “borrow” Caleb’s boxers if he got behind on laundry (roommate number one).

  Caleb was not only able to get along with Drake -- the two of them hit it off well enough that they actually spent time hanging out and doing things together (something that had been missing from Caleb’s previous roommate experiences). Katherine approved whole-heartedly. After the semester of the no cleaning guy, she had begun to think that someone in campus housing had it in for her friend (and she had been petrified to think of what could possibly come next).

  There had been muttered talk of giving up on the dorm situation altogether, but Caleb’s scholarships paid for campus housing -- making him reluctant to give up on it. Drake settled things once and for all. He seemed to be as fine with living with Caleb as Caleb was living with him, and the two years remaining of his college education were looking up from the perspective of coming to the end of the revolving roommate exchange door.

  It was a couple of months into the satisfactory living arrangement when Drake asked if Caleb would be bothered by his brother staying with them for a weekend. Caleb had, of course, said that it was no problem. Drake cheerfully accepted Katherine’s presence in their room on a nearly daily basis; he wasn’t about to complain about Drake being the one to have company for a change.

  Katherine had admitted to them once (much, much later) that it wasn’t David who had set off her radar. She rather thought that she could have been casually acquainted with David or even hung out from time to time with him for years and not really noticed that anything was what she had come to refer to as “off” with him. (She didn’t tell anyone except Drake how comforting she found that fact. If she, who should know what it was she was looking for, wouldn’t notice something without it being pointed out to her via some other means, then Caleb should be safe from any casual notice from random bystanders who weren’t on the lookout for anything.)

  Drake was the one who had actually caught her attention with his behavior after he had introduced her to his brother. She had gotten just the vaguest of glimpses of it on that first weekend visit when they had all gone out for ice cream and a movie together. There was something different about the way that Drake was acting than what she had come to consider “normal Drake” in the time that she had known him. She brushed it off, at first, as seeing him in a different setting (him around his brother was, after all, not something for which she had any measuring apparatus for a normal quotient).

  It was a couple of days later (when she was working on transferring some pictures which always provided her with a certain amount of leisure for thinking) that she looked at one of the casual shots she had taken of their evening out and recognized the expression that Drake was directing toward his brother as one that she had felt herself direct at Caleb when she was concerned that he might have been treading a fine line on making someone else suspicious about the legion of things that he considered not discussible.

  She might be just as out of the loop on the details as the rest of the world, but she still was as wary of others invading Caleb’s privacy as his parents ever had been. She knew that look -- it was the look of someone who was worrying about who might have seen or heard or noticed something that she knew came under the heading of “different.”

  David Klausen was taking off “a year or three” to decide what he wanted to do with his life, but it was, apparently, not as diverting of an experience as he had expected it to be as he started appearing on Drake’s (and Caleb’s) doorstep every two or three weeks. Caleb had repeatedly assured his roommate that he didn’t mind (even as Drake muttered about campus housing rules, and David made an exaggerated show of rolling his eyes behind his brother’s back).

  Katherine had watched for a while and found nothing but confirmation about her impression of Drake as he related to his brother. With that in mind, she started watching David a little more closely. Then, she found herself wondering how it was that the likenesses hadn’t struck her earlier. She came to two conclusions. First, the things about Caleb that had always stuck out to her only did so because she had been so close to Caleb (Drake, after all, who also should have recognized what he was seeing had lived with him and not noticed). Second, Caleb and David may have had a lot in common (including a parentally taught compulsion to hide things), but they were very different in how they presented themselves. Caleb had always kept others at bay by being invisible in plain sight; David drew everyone’s attention to himself and then kept it focused on whichever direction he wanted it to take.

  David was the boisterous magician on a stage who kept you so focused on his brightly colored clothes and the grand gestures of his hands that you missed what he was really doing. Caleb was more like one of the stage hands dressed in black in the background that you never caught moving the set pieces because he blended in so well.

  Katherine spent a long time not knowing what to do with her new observations. She understood secret keeping. She understood feeling responsible for someone else. She even understood that other people’s secrets were not hers to tell. She also knew that her best friend got an expression on his face from time to time (had for as long as she had known him) that was still difficult for her to read even with everything that she knew about him, his thoughts, and his emotions. She saw a little bit of sadness, a little bit of longing, and a sense of otherness about him that hurt her heart to see. The older that they got, the more often that she saw that look on his face. She didn’t care for it, and she didn’t care for the increase of frequency that showed no sign of slowing. If she could help him find something that would mitigate that, then should she not?

  She wasn’t sure how long her internal debate might have continued if she and Caleb hadn’t ended up overhearing a conversation between Drake and David that was not meant for their ears.

  She and Caleb had been headed to the library to pull some resources for one of their classes when Katherine had reached for her cell phone to let Grammy Vance know that she wouldn’t be around for supper only to realize that it was missing. They had hea
ded back toward Caleb’s dorm where Katherine was fairly certain that they would find her phone on his desk.

  David had rolled in again the night before, so Katherine was not surprised to hear his voice as they got closer to the dorm room door that she could see was not properly closed. It wasn’t until she registered what it was that he was saying that she stopped short with Caleb barely avoiding running over her in the process.

  “There should still be a paper trail,” he was saying. Drake’s voice was lower and didn’t carry out into the hallway as well, but Katherine caught something with the word closed in it.

  “I know it was a closed adoption,” David’s voice was rising in agitation. “That just means that the records are sealed -- not that there aren’t any records in the first place. New Beginnings doesn’t even exist now. Do you think mom and dad know that?”

  Drake’s muttered response was completely lost to her, but David’s answer (while spoken more softly than his previous words) was not.

  She and Caleb stared at each other for a long moment with a strange mix of embarrassment from overhearing what was clearly not intended to be shared with them and a hefty touch of intrigue as they both had recognized the name of the agency through which Caleb’s adoption had been arranged. Katherine also saw that expression on Caleb’s face again -- this time it was touched with a dose of what looked like cautious hopefulness. That was all that she needed to see. The chance of erasing that expression from her best friend’s rotational display of emotions was what she, in that instant, decided was more important than any of the other considerations that had occurred to her in the time that she had been pondering her options.

  They were going to go into that room and admit to what they had heard. She wasn’t particularly looking forward to it. It was going to be awkward. It was going to be unpleasant. There was also a pretty good chance of both suspicious and angry coming into play before they got around to any clarity on the matter. None of that mattered.

  She reached over and grabbed Caleb’s hand giving it a small squeeze followed by a tug in the direction of the still slightly open door. Awkward or not, the four of them were about to have a heart to heart of nearly epic proportions.