Come Back Home
by the stylus
A not my typewriter story.
Let's call it mid-third season, shall we?
All homage to Cappuccino Girl for an outstanding, fast beta. And my paragraph will buy you a diamond on its two month salary. Really.
"Go home, Catherine."
From the other end of the darkened lab she nodded absently at him.
"Catherine, it's 8 am. Go home." A nod. Her red hair shone dully and when she moved her head he could catch glimpses of the light from the dissecting scope reflecting off of her skin.
Gil stole a few steps into the darkness until he could make out the planes and angles of her face.
"Catherine, my leg was just chewed off by a rabid wildebeest." She nodded again and he thought he caught a soft "mmhmm" floating his way as well.
He touched her shoulder lightly and she jerked in surprise, banging her knees on the underside of the lab bench. Her large, startled eyes pinned him to the floor, the hand still on her shoulder.
She reached up to lightly touch him, as if to reassure herself. "Gil, my God, you scared me."
He jerked his head toward the open door. "I knocked. And I had a whole conversation with you on my way over here."
"Really? Was I good?" That crooked smile made his stomach and lower back knot together.
"The best." In spite of himself, he smiled back. "So are you going to?"
"Going to what?"
"Going to go home, like I told you to."
"Mmm. In a minute. I wanted to finish this first." Bone slices lay neatly scattered on the benchtop and one was mounted on the scope.
He was drawn in by her curiosity and by the challenge of the puzzle. He had long ago given up trying to pretend otherwise. "May I?"
"Be my guest." She pushed her stool back slightly so he could lean over her to stare down through the scope. The field swam and steadied as he adjusted the focus to compensate for his particular visual quirks. It was a fragment of long bone, neatly sectioned off for viewing and he studied it carefully, slowly noticing the irregularities that had Catherine so intrigued.
"This from the bag boy?" Some hikers had found a black plastic garbage bag earlier that morning. They hadn't recognized the stench until it was too late.
"Yeah. Humpty Dumpty was a Dumptyette, though." The body had come neatly sectioned, and Gil had passed the case off, telling Catherine she'd won it because of her penchant for puzzles--putting things back together again, he'd said.
"Interesting." He stood up, feeling every hour of his shift in the straightening of his back. She was studying him appraisingly, as if he, too, had been neatly sectioned off to be investigated.
"That's what I thought. There was some goo on one of the sections, too."
"Goo? Are you sure it wasn't part of The Blob?"
Her eyes crinkled around the corners. "Greenish unidentified matter. Goo. Greg said he'd have the mass spec on it for me sometime tomorrow. Maybe it'll give me a clue as to what made those striations."
"Great. So why don't you go home?"
She looked up at him wryly. "Since when are you such a mother hen?"
"Since this is the fourth night this week I've found you here after your shift ended."
"Pot. Kettle. Black." She touched him lightly on the chest, then herself as she said it. "Anyway, Lindsey's at Eddie's for a couple of days and I'm rattling around in the big empty house." She said the last part so lightly that he knew she hadn't quite meant to say it at all.
"Come to my place, then." He dangled the carrot in front of her: "I'll make you a green pepper and mushroom omelet."
"Really?" There was simple delight in her voice. She dismounted from the stool by somehow spinning around it and landing on her feet in front of him, all legs and leather and bright hair. "But Gris, store-bought mushrooms this time. No more of your amateur mycology experiments for breakfast."
They had been doing this for years, so long that the breakfasts of eggs and orange juice and vodka had become part of their unspoken shared mythology. The first time, Jimmy had brought her over with him, a long black coat that smelled of leather and sweat and her perfume wrapped over her dancing clothes. "My protégée," he'd called her, "the smartest dancer in Dirty Vegas," and Gil had caught the look she gave the other man and knew that she wasn't anybody's anything for long. She had been very blond then. He had been thinner and even more quiet around this exotic creature with kohl eyes a leonine strut in stilettos.
He went with Jimmy to watch her dance once, too. It was a nicer strip club, or so he supposed; he'd never been in one except to work. She'd wrapped herself in impossibly complicated shapes around the silver pole and then slowly worked her way over toward the burly cop, collecting money and admiring glances as she went. But no one tried to grope her like some of the more inebriated patrons were doing to the other girls. He wasn't sure if it was because they'd tried it in the past and found one of those sharp heels pointed right at their jugular--he wouldn't have put it past her for a minute--or if it had something to do with the way she seemed untouchable, even mostly naked under garish pink lights. She winked at Jimmy while she worked a man wearing a gold chain for every one of his forty years; but Gil would always swear she hesitated for a fraction of second when she saw him. Then she thrust her shoulders back and seemed to unstring her spine and right on cue with the music circled her hips in a way that made him glad for the darkness of the club and the ledge for drinks that was covering his lap.
She began coming over with Jimmy regularly, or she'd be at Jimmy's place when he went over or at the restaurant by the time he showed up. Something had happened to Jimmy--work or family, maybe it was the killing of Catherine's friend, Gil didn't remember--but slowly he been edged out of the breakfast routine. She and Gil didn't meet regularly, and for months he didn't even have her number. She'd simply turn up on his doorstep or call at obscene hours. Sometimes she woke him and he crawled into his clothes and they met at Manny's which was halfway between the club and his apartment. Sometimes he was still awake, coming down the other side of work's bright fluorescence, and he'd overbeat the eggs and swing her into the apartment when he met her at the door just to hear her laugh.
In the first few years she mixed his drinks too strong--he suspected on purpose--and it took him months to realize that there was never any vodka in her orange juice. In spite of his intensity at work, he had no idea she was using until Jimmy scornfully called her a 'head in casual conversation. Gil had hated him for that and for the look that had crossed her face. Stricken, maybe: like she wanted to kill Jimmy or herself, one. He hadn't really understood it so he'd chosen to keep ignoring it, which was easy over omelets and her smile.
"Gris? Gris, you're going to burn the eggs."
"Right." He slide the spatula under the omelet and flipped it with a trick of the wrist. Catherine was in her favorite chair under the large picture window, her legs thrown across one arm, her back cradled by the other. Her drink was in her hand and she sipped it thoughtfully.
Gil finished breakfast and slid it onto two plates, which he gathered along with his drink and forks. The morning sun washed over Catherine and made her skin nearly translucent. "Here," he said, handing her a plate.
"Thanks." She turned in the chair to face him, her feet finding the floor. They set to breakfast.
Only when the food was gone did he return to the bones. "Got any idea what made those marks on Humpty's bones?"
"Nope." She shook her head, sending her hair flying. "No knife I've ever seen. I'm hoping the goo will be the clue."
He mock-cringed. "Ouch."
"Yeah, well." She smiled all the way to her eyes. "How did your stiff stiff end up?"
"The usual. Heart attack while with a prostitute. She took the wallet, figuring 'why not?' He wasn't going to need it. The wife IDed the body." He chuckled, remembering. "I think if he hadn't been dead, she'd have killed him, anyway."
Catherine snorted. "Right. The usual." She made her hand into ASL "c" and jerked across her face and down. Freak. The cops called them that, mostly behind their backs; Jimmy, too. He'd tried to make Catherine into a beat cop, without success. It was better than "vampires," but not by much.
Gil never pointed out to police officers that people usually buried their dead in the full glare of the desert sun.
When his mother had gotten very ill he had moved her to a retirement home on the outskirts of town so that he could visit her. Catherine had asked him about it once and he'd invited her to come along. He was never sure whether she saw it as some sort of challenge she couldn't back down from, but she'd come.
She didn't sign then and his mother couldn't hear, but Catherine had sat there and held her hand for a long time the first morning. His mother had liked her; she'd told him so. She'd asked about the nature of their relationship and he could feel the blush creep up to the tops of his ears. Catherine had seen it: her sharp look told him that; but he'd refused to answer, even when she demanded. "What did she say?" He'd made up some remark about wanting him to work less. And the women had both known he wasn't being truthful, though they couldn't confer about it except with their faces.
She'd come to the funeral, too, in a black suit with a skirt that was just the other side of decent. He hadn't known how to thank her, hadn't been able to do anything but go home and sit in the dark with his memories. For a week she'd stopped in every morning after work with takeout and forced him to eat. One morning she'd simply barged in and opened every blind in the house, then collected the empty bottles and dumped them in the trash. He'd just watched from his seat on the floor in front of the couch. The sunlight had been foreign and harsh. From a brown paper bag she'd pulled two six packs of beer and placed them solidly on the table in front of him. "Enough," she'd said. "If you're going to drown your sorrows, you're going to do it in the light, in front of me. And you're going to have to be committed enough to doing it to drink beer."
He hated beer but he'd reached for one anyway and popped the top, downing half the can in the first gulp. It had been horrible and she'd broken out into a real belly laugh at the face he made. The wave of her laughter had been contagious and as it broke over him, he'd found himself starting to laugh and unable to stop. Even when the tears came, he had still been laughing. He had wound down, exhausted, with his head resting across her lap and her hand stroking his hair.
When his body began to protest the bare wood floor, he had moved up to the couch. Sitting there, his tears staining her jeans, he had finally though he understood the silences between them. He'd reached up and run his fingers through her hair, which was still damp around the temples from dancing; and then he'd leaned in a kissed her. She hadn't pushed him away but nor had she moved toward him.
When he pulled away, she touched his face and smiled, almost sadly. "Let's get you cleaned up and into bed."
She'd let herself out after he fell asleep, locking the door and sliding the key back under it.
"Are you going to see what's-her-name again?"
He still wondered at it sometimes, that of all the places she could be she would end up in his kitchen so many mornings, still smelling of the same perfume she'd worn the first morning he met her. The arrival of Lindsey had cut down on their mornings together, and she'd started mixing her own juice with vodka, too. But it was essentially an unchanged ritual.
"I don't think so."
"Why not? She was cute."
She had been: petite and brunette and dressed in a sleek suit he would have bet cost his month's salary. "Yeah, but I can't remember her name, either."
"Ooooh." She pursed her mouth and stretched out the sound. "That good, huh? What did you do, tell her about Maggot Man on the first date?"
"No, I did not." He tried to inject some indignation into his voice; he'd learned that lesson a couple of years ago when his date had turned as green as the spinach in her salad. "What about you? What's new and young in your life?"
She groaned and kicked her heels idly against the side of the chair. "I have a daughter and a job and a track record about as good as the Hindenburg and the Titanic combined. I've given up on love," she intoned, with a flick of her hand. "Plus, I'm getting old and it's hard to compete with the nubile young things pounding the pavement of the Strip."
He tried to choke back a laugh and failed. "And do you also have a bridge in Brooklyn you'd like to sell me?"
She fixed him with her gaze; it went through him like a hot poker. "As a matter of fact, there is this lovely little piece of beachfront property in Flagstaff..."
Gil found himself studying the backs of his hands.
He hadn't been able to make sense of Eddie for a long time after his name started to come up. Catherine had never made much of him in their conversations. He did notice the first time she showed up with dull bruises under what was left of her stage makeup. She waved away his concern with an offhanded explanation of the sort that wore thinner and thinner with the years.
She, too, got thinner. By then she was in school and still dancing most nights to make tuition. He was fitting his dissertation in around work and their breakfasts became occasional respites. She seemed to have more energy than ever, though. They had always had mornings of winding down together, but her energy level astounded him. She'd shimmy around his kitchen reciting her way through the bones of the body or molecular reactions while he watched in rapt fascination as her body moved like light in water.
The skin tightened over her frame until her collarbones were like knives. He would trace the new bruises with his eyes, occasionally with the pads of his fingers. When he dug into her shoulders to work out the kinks, he was afraid his hands would come through the front.
He thought later that he should have known, should have been able to do for her what she had done for him. He might have the morning he went to her place to find her silently huddled on the bathroom floor in a mess of blood and white powder, Eddie long gone to sleep away the desert sun. He might have, but people had never been his thing in the way that bugs were. He dressed her cuts and butterflied the deep one at her hairline since she protested at his suggestion that they go the nearby minor emergency clinic for stitches. Then he made her tea and while she sat on the couch wrapped in a blanket he'd finally found, he swept the shards of the bathroom mirror and the scattered coke into the trash and scrubbed the blood from the floor. The whole morning they didn't speak more than a few words; in retrospect he wasn't sure she'd said anything at all. Not until she fell asleep did he take the sharp tweezers from his car kit and dig out the tiny shards of glass which had embedded themselves in the bottoms of her feet.
He didn't notice her hand on his shoulder it until he caught the light ghosting off her skin in his peripheral vision. When had she stood up? And then her voice, too, appeared, half of the sentence already bitten off.
"...bank and to the store and get some sleep before I pick Lindsey up from school."
"Huh?" He craned his neck up. There was a small white scar on the underside of her chin that vibrated when she smiled. The hand on his shoulder moved up to tousle his hair.
"I've got to go. Places to go; things to see; people to do. Thanks for breakfast."
The line of her shoulders under the thin leather coat was the same as the first night he saw her. He found himself wondering how she learned to walk in three inch heels and why he'd never asked. It was a perfectly reasonable question and the sort of thing he could ask of only Catherine.
"See you tonight, then?"
Her crooked smile of genuine amusement crept up on him, the sheen of lipstick long gone. For a moment the girl she'd sketched in hints might have been looking back at him: denim and saddle soap in the gentle wash of Montana summer. She stretched it a little longer, slipping into sly. "Dark and early." She walked unselfconsciously with his eyes on her back.
"And Gris?" she paused, her hips canted at the angle between the couch and the door. Still, like the wishbone of his stapes. Her keys were in her hand; she always locked the door behind herself.
Her mind had always been mostly opaque. He was caught as usual between anticipation and confusion at the tenor of her question. "Yeah?"
"Breakfast at my place Friday. You're going to tell me what's been on your mind."
It didn't seem to require an answer.
"Bring some orange juice. I'm through watching you brood."
"G'night, Catherine."
"Good morning."
Fin
All characters are the property of their creators. The author makes no profit from this work.