~~~
Caleb was just as isolated now as he had been when she first met him. If anything, he was even more isolated now. There had been answers (after a fashion). There had been additions to what they knew in any case, but they hadn’t been helpful. The fact that he wasn’t “alone” had made him more alone than ever. It would have been some sad (in the depressing sense of the word) sort of irony if she was reading it in a story or watching it on film. It would have provided fodder for some deep philosophical discussion over brownies and ice cream (with the Caleb she had known before) about what the writers had been trying to say. Given that she was watching it happen to her best friend (and the slow destruction of him that it seemed to be accomplishing) playing out in front of her, the depth of analysis provided by the irony was rather lost on her.
Katherine was more caught up in the sad (in a depressing sense of the word) facet.
It all boiled down to the conundrum of everything Caleb had been and everything Caleb was being asked to be and his inability to be either in the face of the conflict between the two. The Caleb that had been would have told those asking him to be what he wasn’t to forget it. Except, he couldn’t do that with the opposing side dangling in front of him something that the man he had been couldn’t leave behind. Where did that leave him? He wasn’t what they wanted. He was too much as he had been raised to be to be comfortable with what they were asking or to embrace what they wanted him to become.
Katherine found herself wondering more and more often if they even realized that someone who embraced all the things that they were trying to teach him wouldn’t be susceptible any longer to what they were using to keep him “in line.” She wondered if they figured that it wouldn’t matter any longer once he had crossed that line. That he would go rogue and take out his frustrations on them in any manner that he could did not seem to occur to them, but she wasn’t exactly in a position to see how those who were doing the actual string pulling were deciding which ones to pull.
She wondered (not for the first time) what it was that kept Devon tied to what they wanted, why it was that David stayed put, and what they had done to Eris that left her so determined and single minded when it came to doing what she had been told. (Actually, in Eris’s case, what she often found herself not so graciously wondering was just how many times the woman’s infancy had been interrupted with falls on her head to leave her so all the things that she was.) She could admit that Eris brought out her catty side. She blamed defense mechanisms -- she could ignore a lot of damage when it only applied to herself. It was a lot harder to let things go when they hurt people that you loved.
Answers weren’t something that was forthcoming in Katherine’s current environment. They were actually rather shockingly sparse. In a way, they knew all of the answers to how the puzzle pieces fit that Katherine (and Caleb as well) had wondered about for so long. There had even been information overload in some cases, but the puzzle still didn’t look complete. It was as though a number of pieces had been snapped together into a form that left you to realize that what you had been working on wasn’t the whole puzzle at all -- it was merely a section that had come together that showed you that it was a part of a bigger puzzle for which you didn’t even know where to begin to look to find the pieces.
Katherine could make guesses; she could offer assumptions. That wasn’t really her style. Katherine didn’t like to guess. She wanted to understand. She wanted to know. She wanted the picture laid out in front of her so that she could know which places were the weak spots that she could target to make the whole thing fall apart -- because that was where she was. It couldn’t be allowed to stand uncontested. What was happening to Caleb couldn’t be allowed to continue. The things that Caleb was being asked to do couldn’t be allowed to be. The problem with that was that Caleb was running in reaction mode (and Katherine was doing her figuring blind). This was far too serious for guessing. This was far too important to be left to chance. Katherine needed to know the bigger picture. She needed to be able to see how to fight back.
Katherine was hardly perfect -- she had suffered from the same insecurities in her interpersonal relationships that every other teenage girl on the planet was prone to, and there had been moments when she was so steeped in seething over being angry that Caleb just wouldn’t come straight out and tell her the answers to all of her wonderings that she could barely hold herself back from picking up a phone and giving him an earful. Strangely, she knew that if she had ever truly succumbed to the impulse to be the instigator of such a conversation, then the words would have been exchanged over the phone. Somehow, the bouts of anger (with one very memorable exception) never seemed to happen when she was in Caleb’s presence. It was awfully difficult to be angry when he was standing there in front of her being the best friend she had ever had. Besides, she was never quite certain just with whom it was that she was angry. She thought, in calmer moments, that it wasn’t fair to be angry with her best friend for not answering questions that she never came out and asked. It might be that she was angrier at herself for never doing the asking.
In the end, it didn’t really matter because the angry moments always ended, and being Caleb’s friend had always remained more important than any amount of irritation that came along with the package. She had found out later on that all of the confusing puzzle pieces that she sifted through and tried to make sense of were just as much puzzle pieces from Caleb’s perspective as they were from hers. He hadn’t actually had much in the way of answers to offer (even if he had been so inclined during their younger years) because he knew hardly anything more than what Katherine had put together for herself. It still would have, she would maintain no matter how many years went by, been easier on the both of them if they had acknowledged the elephant in the room much sooner. Katherine had had her annoyances and angry moments, but she couldn’t ever dwell too much on that when presented with what it must have been like to be Caleb during that time -- to be every bit as confused about himself, to have every question and idea and maybe scenario that Katherine had ever thought of (and probably many that she hadn’t) trapped on a replay in his head, and to be too afraid to admit any of it to anyone (even his best friend).
There had even been a time when Katherine had been inclined to resent Caleb’s parents for putting all of that secrecy pressure on him in the first place, but she had gotten over that a long time ago. Spence and Ruby Twist had (in all honesty) been every bit as lost as Caleb was. All they had really been guilty of was being willing to take a child into their home without asking too many questions. Katherine couldn’t really fault them for that -- she had seen the pictures of the day that they brought Caleb home, and the fact that both of the Twists were already completely enamored of the toddler with his bright green eyes fairly leapt off the paper at you.
What else were they supposed to do? They had been told to keep things quiet. They had been warned not to draw attention. They had completely rearranged the way that they lived their lives so that everything revolved around what was necessary to try to accomplish that for the little boy that they had decided to love wholeheartedly. Looking at what Caleb had been drawn into the middle of in their present, Katherine could do nothing but agree that all of their seeming over cautiousness had been the best option.
She didn’t want to think about them finding Caleb earlier. She didn’t want to think about what her best friend would be like if he hadn’t had years and years of being raised by the Twists with a solid sense of self before they had gotten to him. They were slowly breaking him as it was. Would he have even stood a chance if he didn’t have all of that to fall back on?
She let her gaze fall on Devon (who from what she understood had only been eight or so when they located her) before turning her head slightly to focus on Eris. She had (as best Katherine could tell) never gotten away from them at all. She couldn’t suppress the shudder that went through her as she contemplated Caleb in that posi
tion. She told herself that he would not have been her Caleb in that case; he would just be theirs. No, she couldn’t fault the Twists -- not really. They might not have known much about what was going on, but they had always known that there was something out there on the lookout for their son. She couldn’t blame them for acting accordingly.
“Do you have a problem with me?” Katherine suddenly found herself accosted by the words as Eris appeared a lot closer to her than she thought she had been. She had let herself get distracted. She had (accidently) been staring at the other woman as she had pondered her best friend being raised in similar circumstances, and Eris had noticed the look (and likely what had probably been a somewhat horrified expression on her face).
Eris usually spent her time going to great lengths to pretend that she didn’t notice Katherine’s existence. Katherine wasn’t sure whether the glaring and under breath muttering with occasional pointed insults peppered in her conversation at the others (because the other woman never really spoke to as much as at anyone) were so instinctive that she didn’t notice that she was doing it. It might just never have occurred to her that it all sort of negated the pretension that Katherine was beneath her notice.
That she was seemingly about to provoke a direct confrontation was new and a little disconcerting, and Katherine found herself thinking that it would have been rather helpful if she actually knew what it was that the others had been talking about in their little huddled enclave.
The first time that Caleb had celebrated a birthday after they met (otherwise known as the October day that he turned eleven) Katherine had been invited to attend a birthday party at his home. There had been nothing strange about that. Birthday parties had been the social event of choice among the students at her previous school and party invitations had been somewhat a matter of course. That Caleb was so excited when he handed her the carefully handmade invitation had left her amused. Caleb on a normal day was calmly happy -- bouncy when excited had never been an aspect of her new friend’s personality that she would have anticipated, but excited he most definitely was as he bounced on the balls of his feet while he waited for her to open the envelope and read the details inside. The smile he had given her when she had assured him that she would be there had seemed all out of proportion to the occasion, but she had shrugged it off and gone about her day.
Years of experience and many confessions later, Katherine knew that what had seemed all out of place to her at the time had been how eagerly Caleb had looked at her -- as if he was getting something that he had waited for for a very long time and was half afraid that someone was going to take it away before he actually had it in his grasp. That was, actually, close to what he had been thinking. His eleventh birthday was the first time that his parents had ever okayed him inviting anyone into their home for the family celebration. It was his first actual “party” even if it had only consisted of her, and he had been all caught up in the enjoyment of the normalcy of the occasion.
He had told her once that he had successfully lobbied his parents by arguing that she was around him all the time anyway. What difference did it make if she spent that time at their house? Katherine had never asked the elder Twists what they had thought of her in the early days of her and Caleb’s friendship. She imagined that there must have been times that it had been terrifying for them to have their carefully secluded family world invaded by a little girl that they knew nothing about. The way Caleb had latched onto her (and vice versa) must have caused them a vast deal of consternation.
Looking back, she could recognize that that birthday party marked a change in her relationship with the whole family. The Twists had never been anything but nice to her (her impromptu tenth birthday party being a prime example), but in the months that followed, they had never really actively encouraged her to be around. Something had shifted the day they broke their pattern and let Caleb have his party (whether it was genuine acceptance at the time or merely their acquiescence to what must have appeared inevitable), she, from that day forward, might as well have become the fourth member of their household with the amount of time that she spent hanging around their property.
Those thoughts were catching up with her at the moment because there was something lurking behind the surface anger and annoyance always displayed in Eris’s expression that was bizarrely like that eager look Caleb had had when he invited her over for his birthday. Whatever it was that was about to happen, the other woman had been waiting for the opening for a long time. Katherine rather knew what that was like herself.
The Twists were just different. That wasn’t a judgment call or a negative observation despite what it might sound like -- it was just the reality of the situation. There was something about the Twists that anyone paying the kind of attention that Katherine had paid to them in those early days would have described as “off.” For people who had spent their entire lives in the same relatively small town, there seemed to be a decided lack of people who actually knew them. Practically everyone knew of them, but that wasn’t the same thing. It was just another of those things that made its way onto Katherine’s list.
Why?
Why the carefully held at arms’ length policy with nearly everyone they encountered? They weren’t naturally shy or retiring. There were plenty of people in town who had stories about Spence and Ruby in their high school days and early adult years. It hadn’t taken long for Katherine to figure out who in town liked to talk and would be willing to bend the ear of anyone who would sit still for long enough. To have a pleasantly complimentary listener who could plead that they were helping her learn about her new home wasn’t going to be passed up by someone eager for an excuse to talk. She sat through enough information for ten or twelve books on town history and sorted out the pieces that were relevant to what she wanted to know.
There were mentions of Mr. Twist (or Spence as she had later learned to call him) getting sick his senior year of high school. There were approving comments about the now Mrs. Twist (Ruby) sticking with him through it. Things were said about them “mellowing” and “growing up fast,” but Katherine didn’t think the timelines quite matched up in her head. It seemed to her that there were plenty of what one of her sources referred to as “social butterfly Ruby” stories to be heard right up until the time that the couple brought home Caleb. Maybe being a parent made the difference, but other people seemed to become parents without quietly moving everyone else out of their lives.
Katherine knew what it looked like when adults were purposefully keeping other people at a distance and trying not to look obvious about it; she had watched her father do it every day since her mother had walked out of their lives. If that wasn’t what the Twists were doing, then they were doing a marvelous job of mimicking it. The difference was that she knew exactly why her father did it. She just couldn’t seem to find a reason for the Twists to do the same.
She had finally decided that the why of the situation was irrelevant. Whether Caleb had pushed back so strongly against his parents that their admittance of her to their circle was the only option that they had had or they had decided that she was somehow a safer option because they recognized in her family people with enough cloudiness in their own past that they would never ask, it all ended in the same way.
The Twists let her in to their closed circle. Her, Katherine Vance, with all her attendant quirks and idiosyncrasy was welcomed with open arms without whispers or voiced wonderings over her family situation. It was, after all, reciprocated. She had found something in the Twists that she appreciated that was likely a mirror to what they saw in her. They didn’t ask her questions either -- not the prying kind. They never asked where her mother was.
Caleb never commented on the lack of pictures of the woman in their home. That might, at its surface, have made him seem like he was lacking as a friend -- that he was unobservant or merely wasn’t interested in her enough to want to know. That wasn’t the truth. He noticed -- she could t
ell. She saw the awareness and recognition in the expression of his eyes. She saw the questions flicker behind them and just as quickly be tucked away in the back of his mind. He noticed, but he didn’t ask. She knew that he had to see something similar each time some new observation about him and his family came to her notice. They both knew things. They both wondered. They both knew that the asking wouldn’t be appreciated. They both valued each other enough to leave it unsaid. That was why they worked.
Neither one of them was ready for sharing when they met. Neither one of them was ready for sharing for years afterward. Strangely (or perhaps not so strangely depending on how one looked at it), the willingness to let that rest between them would be what made them willing to trust with confidences later. It was a pity, Katherine sometimes thought, that they had let the habit of not telling stand for so long after they were ready with that trust. Some confidences exchanged a little earlier might have left them a little better prepared for what they had found themselves in the middle of -- but it might not have helped at all. After all, just how much overlap there was in their stories wasn’t obvious to either of them until the whole thing had been practically laid out on a platter in front of them.
Besides, the seeming lack of trust that they had both demonstrated by not spilling their life stories to each other early on was a rather limited view of what trust looked like. Katherine liked to think that with that recognition of similarness that the two of them had early on shared came a different kind of trust -- an implicit trust that neither one of them needed to put on a show for the other. The fact that there were things that they were not telling simply was between them. They didn’t hide that fact, they didn’t lie about it to each other, they had both trusted the other with the knowledge that there were things that they were not telling (explanations that were not going to be offered), and they both stuck around anyway. Wasn’t that a level of trust all on its own? They trusted each other with the knowledge that they didn’t trust lightly. They let each other see beyond the carefully crafted “nothing to see here” facades that the both of them already had in place at the age of ten.
Katherine supposed it didn’t really matter. Someone with an “appropriate” background would likely have a field day writing some sort of psychology treatise on the two of them. She and Caleb simply worked. They had from that first day in the woods and that was far more important than any whys or hows or what if they had done it this ways.
Far away from where they were now, was a little stack of journals filled with her list of all things Caleb. Her twelve year old sprawling handwriting covering the beginning and bleeding into the smaller, neater hand that it had become as the years went forward chronicling all the unasked questions and all the potential answers that had ever occurred to her. She had never shown it to anyone -- not even to Caleb. No one else would ever see it. She had made sure of that. She could have filled it with answers now, and her fingers sometimes ached for the habit. Even if she could indulge the impulse, the list still wouldn’t be finished. It would still have just as many questions as it had now; they would just be different ones. She had come to realize that that was what life was (everyone’s life, not just Caleb’s). There were always questions; there would always be questions -- about her, about Caleb, about David and Devon and every other person on the planet (even Eris).
The difference was that she and Caleb had someone willing to stick with them through trying to figure it all out (or even to back them up when they decided that they were finished looking) and not everyone had that. A sudden jolt of sympathy for Eris welled up inside her at the thought that the other woman had likely never had anyone in her life that really cared to help her to go looking for her answers, but Katherine shook it off nearly as quickly as it came. That was truth, but it was equally true that Eris was actively choosing to be where she was (even though Katherine strongly suspected that it had never even occurred to her that there was a choice involved). David had chosen this. Devon (as difficult as she was to read) was choosing this. She had even chosen this. While Caleb had, at the end of the day, chosen this as well, it was done under duress and threat, and that meant that Caleb was the only person in the room who was here because (being Caleb) there wasn’t any other choice for him to make.
That was why she wasn’t going to let any sympathy for the rather depressing view of Eris’s life that she had cause her to give the other woman any slack. She was part of the lack of choices for Caleb, and she had no qualms about wielding anything that she could to push him further. Sympathy could wait for a time when the other woman was no longer a threat. Also, Katherine reflected, it could wait for a time when the other woman wasn’t hovering over her looking like a lion that had just spotted a wounded gazelle being left behind by the herd. This was not the time for sympathy.
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