A Few Days—Laura's Story Chapter 1
Here is our story of Laura Sidle, Sara's mother, capturing a few days of what might have happened prior to Sara moving to Las Vegas.
Sara had worked a double, slept for four hours, and was driving a borrowed car into the less populated area northeast of San Francisco. She knew where she was going, having made this trip at least once a month for a year. Her work on the skull was finished; the remains had been delivered to the nieces she and Grissom had met. The official report was typed and on its way, along with the face model, to Terri Miller, who was already planning a presentation.
Driving alone, Sara had time to think—too much time she thought. She had returned to San Francisco after college because she missed the bay area, she was tired of cold winters, and she got tuition and fees scholarship to work on a master's degree.
Six months later, her mother's case worker contacted her. At an age when most young adults were learning to make decisions about their own life, work, and society, Sara became her mother's "responsible contact," in effect becoming a guardian for a parent who had been in state custody in varying degrees for more than a decade. Thanks to 'progressive' programs, her mother was released into a new world. She had not written a check, used a credit card, or made one purchase in a store in over ten years.
Barely old enough to be legal age, in addition to graduate work which came easy, Sara began a long learning process as the adult daughter of a parent who needed serious support to re-enter society. There were days when exhaustion gave way to misery or self pity. There were times of intensive anger at herself, her mother, a system that provided too little to late. Finally, resignation arrived.
Laura Sidle improved; the mother and daughter found shy companionship as distant kin often do. The mother could also be as obstinate as her daughter—insisting on living apart even if it meant an arrangement that was little more than a run-down rooming house and taking jobs that no one else would do. The older Sidle woman returned to organized church and its associated meetings, finding a society that accepted her without questions.
Sara found a career in forensics that kept her learning and a passion for solving puzzles. Her co-workers found she could work out a solution to a crime faster than most could develop a sentence. She kept her mother a secret. No one needed to know and her history was not on any record except one and those records were sealed by court order.
Today, she was meeting with a social worker, the one who called when Grissom was in her apartment. Her mother had been living and working for a year in a religious community. After three years of interrupted life, the nuns had managed to do what Sara could not. Her mother was at peace, even happy at times. She cooked, she cleaned, she grew vegetables, and she prayed. She had, in effect, become a nun as much as any other woman in the order—a lay affiliate, she acted, thought, and believed as a member.
The meeting would decide if she could remain in the community. Sara was sure the decision had been made; the meeting was official notification.
Sara drove the borrowed car remembering the last time she had driven this car. Gil Grissom sat beside her. He made her laugh; life felt right when he was around. He did not treat her as a freak—because she worked forensics, because she was smart or young or trying to live a normal life. He accepted her as she was and loved her in a way that no other person had ever loved her. She smiled.
Yet he did not know about her life—her father's terrible temper, the constant moving when she was growing up, and her mother's final desperate act. She could not tell her story knowing it would brand her as a murderer's daughter. It would be better to pretend there was no mother than admit the true story.
Tears had formed with her thoughts and she quickly blinked her eyes. If her life was to go on, she had to be happy, she thought. Sadness, anger, frustration had to be pushed aside.