Best Left Unfinished

by Sara Jamieson

  ~~~

  Some mistakes are made and moved on from; other mistakes come back to haunt you at inopportune moments for the rest of your days. Katherine seemed to be the latter type of mistake. Cecilia had managed to go for years without so much as hearing the child’s name and here she was showing up in unexpected places (that she had no business being) adding additional complications to what had already become a far more complicated endeavor than Cecilia was comfortable with facing. Why was she there? Why now? How had she ever managed to end up in the middle of it?

  The questions were unwelcome; they opened up old wounds that should have been well healed long ago.

  Tristan Murray would have some mildly sarcastic comment to make about being faced with coping with the fallout of the decisions of a recalcitrant child. For all of the man’s pretension of how they had all moved on after Cecilia “rectified her mistakes as well as could be hoped for,” he never displayed any indication to allow an opportunity to remind her of his opinion on the matter to pass by whenever such an occasion arose. Her father would find it amusing that she was troubled over Katherine’s reappearance as an entity in her life. It would never occur to him that there would be any reason for concern -- beyond that of potential embarrassment on Cecilia’s part of past choices being revisited by her colleagues.

  Her mother would choose not to hear were Cecilia to ever mention that Katherine had managed to get herself involved in Society business. Her father might choose to revisit the past on his terms and at his leisure, but Greta Murray did not share her husband’s habit. She was liable to respond with some variation of the phrase “Katherine who, dear?” Greta Murray never allowed past unpleasantness to cause her dismay. She saved all of that focus for the present. As far as Cecilia’s mother was concerned, pieces of the past that were better off forgotten should be (and she stuck to that with a stubbornness that told Cecilia exactly which parent had provided her the opportunity to inherit the ability to display an unshakable single-mindedness in the face of opposition).

  Given this knowledge of her parents and their predictability, Cecilia kept the information that had come into her possession of the reemergence of Katherine Vance on Society radar to herself. She had no desire to participate in a pointless, time consuming conversation with either her mother or father. She had no desire to once again listen to her father gloat. She had no desire to watch her mother pretend that she had no idea what she was talking about. It was, she thought, a little sad that a woman who was only weeks shy of her fiftieth birthday still allowed so much of her time to be absorbed by consideration of what her parents would think or say, but she reminded herself that they were not merely her parents -- they were partners in a cause.

  They all had their parts to play; they all had their individual pieces of the plan for which they were responsible. Her time would be better spent focusing on what she was supposed to be doing.

  Katherine’s presence (or disappearance or continued interference or anything to do with Katherine for that matter) had nothing to do with Cecilia or her work. In the normal course of events, such information would never have come to her attention. She wasn’t responsible for the rounding up of missing subjects. She wasn’t responsible for the direction of subject activities. Cecilia wasn’t involved in working on present projects. She was far too busy handling her own affairs (the future was her province and she preferred it to remain that way) to worry about looking over other people’s shoulders to ensure that they were taking care of theirs.

  It was such a Randall thing to do to drop the information in her lap and step back to see what she would do with it -- that man was such a . . . .

  She didn’t bother to finish that thought; there wasn’t any point. She had learned a long time ago to keep her thoughts about Randall to herself. It wasn’t worth even thinking the thoughts inside her head; they were pointless. Randall was the future of the Society (as she had been told often enough). Everyone was in chronic raptures over the man’s “sense of vision” and “ability to produce results.” Cecilia had never seen the cause for fascination. There was nothing overly special about Randall. He was every bit as lacking in breeding as her parents had always insinuated that Edmund had been. He just happened to be on their side. While Cecilia understood how important it was that the Society recognize and utilize allies whenever possible, the fervor over Randall had always seemed strangely out of proportion.

  She had enough honestly to admit (never to anyone else because it, quite frankly, was no one else’s business) that she resented the difference with which her parents had treated the two men. Edmund Vance had been dismissed out of hand. It didn’t matter that he was so many things that the Society claimed to value, encourage and plot to continue into future generations. His intellect was unimportant. His talents and skills were unimportant. He was first, last, and always someone from outside who would never be accepted or even more than nominally tolerated.

  Randall had also been an outsider. He had no connections to the Society. He had no background worth noting. He may have been brilliant and talented, but that (Cecilia knew) was not nearly enough to garner acceptance -- let alone the push toward leadership that had been steady in coming. At the end of the day, her parents (and the Society as a whole) had been won over not by any of the independently valued traits that they all claimed to place above all. Randall had swept in and displayed a devotion for what they were doing that left all other considerations abandoned by the wayside. He was a zealot that left those born and raised within the tradition looking like mildly committed hobbyists.

  Randall was accepted because he provided assurance of their beliefs. He held up a mirror that reflected exactly what the members of the Society wanted to see within themselves. He patted them on the back and left them feeling superior in their understanding. They lapped it up, and Cecilia (privately) blushed for them at how easily they let themselves be manipulated in such a manner. It wasn’t that she suspected that Randall wasn’t the zealot that he purported himself to be; she had no doubt that he wanted what the Society wanted and would do everything in his power to make it so. She just simultaneously believed that he knew exactly what would get him (as an individual) exactly where he wanted to be within their structure and acted accordingly.

  She wasn’t faulting him for that; it was the same manner in which she would have chosen to act if she had been confronted with similar circumstances and opportunities. Not being Randall, she had no desire to be enmeshed in the day to day details of coordinating all the facets of operations that being the chairman of the board entailed (Randall was more than welcome to that chronic headache), but she found it insulting that it had all been so easy for him to accomplish. She wondered, at times, whether she was the only one who had noticed that contrast between the teachings that she had grown up with and the ease with which the current chairman had been adopted into the fold and elevated to the position.

  It might be that Elliot’s decisions had left them all a little more vulnerable than they were comfortable feeling. They may have reached out for the strength in conviction that the new face in the organization had represented. There might have been a lesson there if any of them had been inclined to learn it. Elliot had been a part of things since birth and look what a fiasco (still being cleaned up to this day) he had made of things. Cecilia wasn’t privy to every little detail (and didn’t care to be), but things had been nothing but steady and progressing since the introduction of the previous outsider to the helm.

  She didn’t notice anyone openly acknowledging those lessons any more than she noticed anyone acknowledging the real reason she had met with such censure over her decision to “take up with” Edmund. For all of their self-assurance and posturing amongst themselves over the necessity (and fundamental rightness) of both their ideals and their means of obtaining them, the Society had no tolerance for anyone who might question them or flat out tell them that they were wrong. It had never mattered
much to Cecilia; she had been far too confidant in what she knew and believed to be bothered by exposure to the ignorance and lack of foresight of others. She had had no trouble with Edmund’s lack of knowledge and differing views. She was untouchable and unshakable and had always operated under the premise that what Edmund didn’t know should remain what Edmund didn’t know.

  What did it matter? His lack of participation or understanding or even awareness that there was something that he didn’t know wouldn’t and hadn’t changed anything. It wasn’t as though Cecilia were unable to compartmentalize. The others had never understood that (or at least they had pretended that they hadn’t). Cecilia had eventually decided that they wanted nothing to do with Edmund (and wanted Cecilia to have nothing to do with Edmund as if his existence was some sort of communicable disease by which she might be the means of infecting the others) because they didn’t want to deal with someone who carried convictions in opposition to theirs since they were not capable of dealing with said someone on any type of personal level. Someday, when she was in her dotage and could claim the eccentricity of the aged, Cecilia thought she might find it quite pleasant to demand of all of her colleagues what it was that petrified them so at the thought of being disagreed with on a face to face level.

  It was weakness on their part. It was a fundamental flaw that entrenched itself in a group that made it their business to seek the eradication of fundamental flaws. No one else, sadly, seemed to see it as a flaw. They believed that the doubters, the questioners of their methods, and the “others” who were not a part of what they were building would eventually cease to be -- why should they worry about the manner in which those of actual significance were capable of dealing with them in the meantime? Cecilia thought they were getting a bit ahead of themselves.

  It had taken them a near century to move things along as far as they had; it wasn’t as though their goals would be reached in a timespan of days. They should learn to handle outsiders better. They should understand that displaying such dismay at the prospect of exposure to them on a personal level indicated an uncertainty of purpose that should be first on their list of things which must be eradicated. No one asked Cecilia her thoughts on the topic. She was merely Cecilia Murray -- geneticist, third generation Society, and the one who had gotten all caught up in a man of no redeeming qualifications and wasted nearly a decade of her life pursuing unapproved paths. There would be no one coming to ask her what she thought about grander schemes and bigger pictures. She was tainted with the brush of “history of poor decision making.”

  That just made it that much stranger that she should be in possession of the file that had oh so casually been left for her to peruse. Randall wanted to provoke some sort of a response from her, but he would be disappointed. She had no response to offer him. She simply didn’t care. She had put Edmund behind her. She had never had much interest in Katherine (even at the very beginning). She wasn’t going to be drumming up any now. She wasn’t her problem. She was Randall’s problem now, and he was welcome to her. She closed the file and casually placed it back on the corner of her desk. She wouldn’t take it back to him. She wouldn’t speak to him about it or question why he had decided she should see it.

  Her silence should speak enough of her indifference. She didn’t care to play whatever game Randall was seeking to start up with her. She missed the way that Elliot had handled things. He didn’t find it necessary to try to muddle up others with what were clearly items within his own purview. Elliot, of course, hadn’t exactly been working in a manner that would have been conducive to much in the way of oversight.

  She wondered for the thousandth time what the others could possibly see in Randall that allowed them to overlook his lack of decorum and ability to behave properly. After all of the lectures on the importance of breeding and what its lack caused that she had been subjected to over the years, that her mother would think that that slimy man with his infernal childishness and need for constant prodding at others was a shining example of what the future should hold was far beyond her ability to rationalize.