Fourteen: The Blue Bottle in the Bell Jar

Trying and yet failing miserably to keep her present fear at bay, Sara poured over the day's scant evidence collection. Neatly laid out as it was atop the vast light table, the effort appeared even more pitifully meager, particularly considering all the hours and energy that had been invested. Even more particularly as none of it revealed in the least what they were all so desperate to know: where Gil Grissom was.

To his wife, however, each and every item spoke volumes.

Despite all her years as a criminalist handling similarly bagged and tagged and red evidence tape sealed materials, Sara found it strange to find his things neatly encased in thin translucent plastic.

Like the donning of latex gloves in her own apartment, it just felt wrong, wrong to have all these pieces of him, of her husband, bundled, arranged and catalogued like the evidence she knew all too well they were.

Through the bag, Sara fingered the frames of his reading glasses, recalling how often she had retrieved them and pairs like them from the end of Grissom's nose when he fell asleep reading on the couch. How of all his things, they were the only objects he ever seemed to habitually forget or misplace. That and how much she rather enjoyed teasing him about how his having to wear them was an indicator of just how old he was getting.

The last time she had mentioned as much he had merely quipped, "Even butterflies wear bifocals."

Which Sara knew was true. And Grissom knew she knew, not above using her fondness for flutterbies to his own advantage. Although lepidopteran imagoes really did possess built-in separate distance and near vision systems, admittedly slightly imperfect ones, as butterflies did tend towards the myopic in any case which wasn't a big deal really when it was color and not eagle-eye precision that mattered most in their finding their way in the world.

As for his own need for vision correction, Grissom did occasionally take a moment to remind her that it wouldn't be too much longer before Sara would need them herself. An intimation she knew held the promise of Go ahead and tease me today, just remember later turn about is fair play.

However fool-hearty, that knowing did little to put a stop to Sara's ribbing, about his spectacles or that odd misshapen weather-beaten old Panama hat of his they'd recovered from the park bench - Grissom's hat.

Yes, she would know it anywhere. And as there was no hope of ever separating said man from said hat, Sara opted to accept it as just one of those things, like her husband's penchant for quotations, habit of keeping specimens in jars and appetite for chocolate covered insects, something quintessentially Gil Grissom. She couldn't help it. Grissom was ever Grissom and she would (at least most of the time) have him no other way.

Perhaps Robert Frost had a point when he had claimed, "We love the things we love for what they are."

Sara certainly preferred this quote of the famous poet's to Hannah's hauntingly intoned "Fire and Ice."

Besides, there were just far too many memories intertwined with that hat. That time out at the Sugar Cane Ranch where out of the blue, he had told her she made him happy. That day he equally unexpectedly turned up in the Costa Rican rainforest. Or when they had ended up having to tromp through a knee-deep river in pursuit of said hat when their mostly innocent bit of fly-fishing had gone awry. There had been, too, that time she had spotted him, or rather that hat, in the Gare de Nice-Ville, both looking out of place amongst all the French immaculate composure and yet so very much like home all the same. And none of that took into account any of their various canoeing misadventures. Or just everyday normal life.

At least she had had the chance to convey as much to him not all that long ago while the two of them had been lingering beneath the starry sky of Sainte Chappelle's lower chapel during the intermission for a rather curious concert being held in the great cathedral above.

For while music concerts were nothing new to the space, Sara was fairly certain they did not usually include a live orchestra playing alongside recorded whale song. While a far different sort of sacred sublime, the mashup proved inexpressibly beautiful, as if one could imagine a humpback above them in the soaring space, as if ocean had suddenly met air.

It was there as they sipped at aperitifs that Sara recalled the small hastily wrapped package she'd placed in her purse only a few hours before.

With an almost shy murmur of "It made me think of you," she pressed it into his palm.

"Well," Grissom began as he examined the silver medallion in his hand, "I guess I should be happy it wasn't Saint Jude this time."

Sara simply shook her head at this. Slipping her arm through his, she leaned her head against his shoulder to say, "You've never been a lost cause, Gil. Quite the contrary."

"Just lost," he agreed. "Hence the Saint Anthony medal. Patron Saint of Lost Things," he supplied.

"And found ones," Sara insisted.

"And found ones," he echoed with a smile of his own.

Back in the lab's layout room as she glimpsed the same medallion affixed to his keys, Sara sent out all her hope into the universe that her husband might be found again.

Returning to the objects at hand, Sara found his wallet lying atop its plastic sleeve, as if awaiting further processing. Tugging a latex glove from the box in the center of the table, Sara used it to flip the leather open, a little curious as to the contents.

It wasn't like she regularly rifled through his wallet. There had never been a need. So she was more than a little surprised and taken aback to discover what she did inside. There were the usual credit, debit, club and loyalty cards of course, his various on land and on the water licenses, a couple of business cards and two pockets of photographs.

Of course Sara already knew of Grissom's old school habit of keeping actual photographic prints even in this digital age, but then Gil Grissom had always ended towards old school and Sara equally always had rather liked and respected that about him.

But from their well-worn edges and the equally well-worn groove in the pocket, it was obvious these weren't a recent addition. That and the fact that upon closer inspection nearly all of them predated the divorce.

There was one of the two of them beaming at each other before the Trevi Fountain in Rome; a snapshot from Costa Rica, them all decked out in their field gear inscribed Us 2008 on the back. Beneath this, she found a photo of just herself at the beach, watching the waves curl about her feet, the same picture Sara was certain she had once insisted Grissom delete as she had been wearing little more than a semi-modest swimsuit at the time. So much for her husband having done as she had asked.

There was, too, a more recent photo of her aboard his boat, sitting on deck, pants rolled up and bare legs draped over the side, her sun hennaed hair all wild in the wind, and Sara captured in mid laugh as Hank attempted to slather her with sloppy kisses. However familiar the time and place of it, Sara couldn't quite remember the photo ever having being taken.

In a separate sleeve, she unearthed a copy of one of their new wedding pictures the Captain had forwarded on. While Sara had no clue when Grissom had found the time or the place to print one, she was pleased that he had, touched, too, to find beneath the photograph the neatly folded sheet of San Francisco Hilton stationary on which he'd carefully written out his Iris Murdock quote as well as his own wedding vows.

Sara half wondered if he chose to carry them so that he might better never forget his promises from that day. She certainly would never forget her own, even if until death do us part didn't at this moment, seem all that far away.

But it was the clothes, his clothes, which ultimately cut her to the quick. She'd heard they'd found them, where they'd found them, left behind in the abandoned cargo van.

They were definitely his. She didn't need to bring up Hannah's latest photo of the day to be certain of that. Sara, herself, had bought him the shirt, thinking the color brought out the blue of his eyes. And Grissom just wouldn't be Grissom without his ever-ubiquitous jacket.

Even though she knew she shouldn't, she snapped the tape from the top of a bindle, the better to bury her nose in the white softness of his undershirt, to breathe in deep that warm, clean scent of him.

Although all too soon the momentary comfort gave way to chest tightening, gut wrenching grief. She had to clench her eye shut tight to keep back the swell of tears.

The greater you had to lose, the greater the grief, Sara knew, knew, too, she had everything to lose: her husband, partner, lover, best friend.

She'd lost him before and that had hurt like hell. If she lost him now, there would be no finding their way back to each other again. Sara didn't want to have to live with that fact. She didn't want to have to live without him. Not ever again.

Sara thought back again to that day out at the Sugar Cane Ranch and Grissom in that hat of his telling her she made him happy. She should have said the same to him so many times over the past few months. For he had and he did. He made her happy and a million other feelings she didn't quite have the words for. She begged and hoped and prayed she'd still get the chance.

Yet every minute, every hour that passed with nothing and nowhere to look next, the chance of success in finding and bringing him home safe and sound shrunk smaller and smaller and smaller.

It was growing harder and harder to stay hopeful.

Thus preoccupied, Sara didn't register Catherine Willows' presence in the doorway until the woman let out a quiet, "You're still here."

Caught red-handed, Sara startled. Catherine only gave her a sad, understanding half smile.

"Yeah, I wouldn't want to go home either."

Reluctantly resealing the plastic bag, Sara returned it to the table with the others before turning to the lab's current director.

"I see you drew the short straw. Any news?"

Catherine shook her head. "Whoever said No news is good news was full of it."

"Dunno," Sara replied. "Gil could probably tell you."

"You... uh, hanging in there?"

It was Sara's turn to shrug. "I've never been good at doing nothing."

"You know what he'd say if he was here."

"'Sometimes the hardest thing to do is to do nothing,'" Sara sighed. "Yeah. He's right." Then with a wry half smile she added, "Sometimes a little too much."

Patience had certainly never been one of Sara Sidle's virtues. Something they all knew all too well. While she never had morphed into the loose cannon Ecklie had once warned Grissom she would become, Sara equally had never managed to master her husband's practically preternatural ability to sit and wait quietly.

Catherine's hint of grin at Sara's comment faded fast as she took in the meager contents of the table. It may have been more than a decade now, but Catherine could still recall the sight of Eddie dead on the slab. Eddie who had probably deserved everything he got and then some. Eddie Willows who had been her ex-husband after all. Still, there had been tears and ache even for the man who had only ever succeeded in breaking her heart and who had done nothing good with his life apart from giving her Lindsey.

For Sara to lose Grissom and like this -

No, none of them were going to let that happen. No way were they going to let that happen.

True, Catherine and Sara hadn't always seen eye to eye. Heck, she and Grissom hadn't exactly either, but they'd been friends as well as colleagues. Family even. However chronically dysfunctional. How could they not be after all the years and everything they'd been through?

And family took care of family.

They'd get him back. Somehow, someway, they would. Until then -

"I... I have something I thought you might -" Catherine began, reaching into her jacket pocket. "It's... It's what I want... if... if it were me."

Grissom's wedding ring glistened in her open palm.

"Lab guys are all finished with it," she continued, extending the band. "No point in keeping it in evidence as -"

"As Hannah can always claim she 'accidentally' found it," finished Sara.

"I thought you might like to hold on to it. Like I said, it's what I'd want."

Sara grasped it gratefully, noticing as she did that someone had taken extra care to thoroughly clean it. The gesture both heartened and hurt. Sure, all hints of fingerprint dust and chemicals had been washed away, but so had any last remaining trace of him. The ring positively gleamed now almost a little too new. Like it hadn't spent the last week on his finger at all.

But before Sara's thoughts could wander too far down that road, Catherine held out something else to her.

"And this -" she offered, extending a familiar small notebook, the one Sara knew to be Grissom's sketchbook. For while he'd long ago filled the first book she had given him for Christmas six years before, Sara had been the one to first encourage the practice.

Although she had seem him with this particular volume plenty over the past few months, and while she may have peered over his shoulder as he scribbled or drew a time or two, Sara hadn't flipped through its contents since her first night aboard the Ishmael.

Not that she hadn't been tempted, sorely tempted, truth be told. But upon repeatedly reassuring herself that if he had wanted her to take in the book's contents he would have gladly shown her himself (which he had done and more than once), for the most part, Sara had resisted the temptation to snoop.

From the sheepish look Catherine was currently giving her, Catherine hadn't been able to resist.

"I didn't log it into evidence. Didn't think the others needed to go through it," a somewhat penitent Catherine offered by way of explanation.

Sara couldn't fault Catherine's curiosity, or Catherine having technically tampered with evidence, as she had been doing much the same mere moments before. But she could and did appreciate Catherine's discretion.

"Thanks," Sara said and meant it.

Catherine let out an intentionally light, "Who knew the man was such an artist? But then he always was full of surprises."

Sara almost chuckled. "You have no idea."

"Sara -"

"Yeah?"

Expectantly, Sara lifted her gaze from the book in her hand back to Catherine's face and waited.

The reply never came.

However wanting to tell Sara they were going to find Grissom, that everything is going to be okay, Catherine couldn't quite seem to heave what very soon might prove a lie past the knot in her throat.

No matter how hard that truth might be to swallow, Sara respected Catherine for this.

"Yeah," she nodded.

As Catherine turned to go, Sara stopped her with a question of her own. "What was the book?"

"Book?" echoed Catherine.

"The book Hannah was reading when they picked her up. It's not here."

Catherine paused to consider this. That detail hadn't seemed all that particularly important then or now.

"It was some sort of classic. Something strange..." her voice trailed off as she continued to think about it.

"Moby Dick," she finally replied. "Definitely strange for a chemistry post doc."

Not that strange, Sara thought but did not say.

Or coincidence either. Not that anyone but her - and Grissom - were likely to know that.

Recalling all too well the crux of Melville's famous tale, Sara wondered if Hannah and her white whale would find the same fate.

xxxxxxx

Ostensibly needing to stretch her legs and clear her head, Sara took the long way to the locker room. No matter how bone weary she might be, she didn't want to sit still, stand still, stop. For if she did, she knew all the dismay she had labored all of that day to keep at bay would at last engulf her.

Dread possibilities would give way to fear. There would be no breathing then. No choking back tears. The losing would begin.

Hugging herself against the chill, far more emotional than physical though it might be, Sara paced the halls, eying everyone else hard at work: Greg and Hodges in the garage, Archie still reviewing CCTV footage, Henry in DNA. Mandy bent over her computer screen.

It was hard, so hard, to stay on this side of the glass. Hard not to be able to do anything but watch and wait and worry. Hard not to be short, to resist the urge to rush things along.

Especially as Sara couldn't quite recall tests ever taking this long before. She knew they took time, of course she did, despite what one might see on TV these days. Only it felt like time they didn't have.

If they still had any time at all.

And maybe, just maybe, they might be chasing their own tails, always ending up with little more than dead ends, but at least the others could do something.

Sara desperately wanted to be out there doing something, even if she didn't have the faintest of ideas of where out there was.

Eyes, no hands. Catherine's instructions had never felt so claustrophobically restrictive. Ever since they'd brought Hannah in, Sara had felt trapped, trapped on the other side of the glass and never more impotent in her life.

Perhaps that explained the horrified look Grissom had worn that day when he'd been locked on the other side of that door while Adam Trent had pressed a shard of pottery against her neck. And why not long after he had shown up at her apartment desperate to find his fears and nightmares unfounded.

Even trapped under that damn car there had been something Sara could do. Not like now, when there was nothing.

It was as if she were one of those blue bottle flies, the ones whom despite the window being open, continued to persevere in beating their heads against the glass.

Sadly, it wasn't an entirely foreign feeling. The months after Natalie happened had been filled with days and weeks spent feeling much that same way. When she couldn't seem to breathe - or think - or be - or anything.

She had told Grissom this once, in an attempt to explain why she had gone; why she had stayed away for so long.

For his part, Grissom had simply nodded and murmured "Blue bottle" in reply.

"Blue bottle?" Sara echoed.

"You ever watch a blue bottle fly trapped in a room? Even if you open the window, he'll keep trying to fly through the glass. He keeps beating his head, beating his head, beating his head and getting nowhere and nothing but a headache."

"Insects as the source for all wisdom," Sara half scoffed.

Grissom recited knowingly, "'God in his wisdom made the fly. And then forgot to tell us why.'"

"Your point, Gilbert?"

"Simple," he replied. "Sometimes you have to stop in order to find your way out."

Only in the here and now, Sara didn't feel like the fly tilting against a window pane, but rather the blue bottle in the bell jar with no way out at all.

Having finally reached the locker room, she banged open her locker with every bit of her pent up blue bottle futility. Which ultimately served no purpose at all except to cause the few pictures left taped inside to shudder and nearly fall.

In a hurry as she had been in at the time, Sara hadn't bothered to stop to clean out her locker before rushing off to the airport more than two months before. She had meant to while back in Vegas for the trial; she just hadn't gotten around to it yet.

Thus the space remained exactly as she had left it, vest, spare change of clothes, photos and all. The empty spaces, too, remained from where the pictures of her and Grissom had once hung pre-divorce. She'd never managed to find the time to fill them. But the sight struck her hard, as if the last few months had never happened.

Part of her wondered as she stood there, if it would it had been better if they hadn't. If she hadn't gone and brought him back.

Then Hannah would have never had the chance -

He could be safe on his boat right now. Perhaps missing her and she'd be missing him, but at least he wouldn't be...

Be what exactly?

Hurt?

Missing?

Dead?

Yet Sara found herself too selfish to readily wish away those last few past precious months.

Taking a deep breath to still her racing thoughts, she peered down at the slender volume, the one she had come to put away.

Despite it being right there in her hands, she couldn't bring herself to peer inside. Not that she thought her husband would mind; she knew he wouldn't. But she couldn't handle seeing the world through his eyes, not now, not knowing it might be the last of him she'd ever get to hold.

Still, she clutched it to her, wishing with all her heart she might be holding him instead.

Sara considered secreting Grissom's wedding ring in her tote along with the book, but she wanted to keep it - and him - close.

Then she recalled the simple chain and pendant she had absently put on that morning and how back in Costa Rica before they had been married the first time, she had worn Grissom's grandmother's ring about her neck. At least this way she'd get to keep a part of him close to her heart.

Only her hands shook so bad as she tried to string the simple band on the chain that it slipped through her fingers and began to roll along the floor. Swiftly dropping to her knees, Sara scrambled after it, hoping to catch it up before it could lodge itself into a corner out of reach.

Grasping the cold metal hard in her hand, Sara settled exhausted against the lockers.

Part of her wanted to sob; part of her wanted to scream. Neither she was certain would do any good. It didn't matter that tired of trying to hold it all together, all Sara really wanted to do was fall apart.

God, she really needed him right now.

It took every bit of strength she had left not to burst into tears.