Part Two: Utah – Stone
The first night of her trip she pulls off the interstate at a clean, cozy looking motel advertising low rates, cable television and air conditioning. She checks in for the night and then walks up the road to a convenience store. She buys frozen macaroni and cheese and microwaves it on the premises. The clerk gives her a strange look. She takes her supper outside and sits on the curb, listening to the hum of the traffic while she stabs at the noodles with a plastic fork.
It suddenly strikes her that her grand adventure is kind of depressing.
She wanted to put distance between herself and Grissom. She may have wanted to hurt him, just a little. And yet here she is, eating a cheap frozen dinner alone, like always.
Some adventure. She wonders if her life is her job and vice versa, and while she believes that the answer is probably yes, she is at a loss about how to correct this. How does one get a life, she wonders. Grissom wanted her to get a life, and so she did.
Right?
Was the problem that the life had been with another person, and not a life of her own? What was the difference, anyway? Either way it was a life, right? And he had punished her for it.
Men are such assholes.
She picks up a stone from the pavement. It is smooth and polished, like a treasure. She thinks perhaps a child has dropped it. It's a dappled stone, blues and grays, swirled with white. It makes her think of him. It is cool in her hand, and it makes her think of his coolness toward her, and the way he waved his hand between the two of them when he said he didn't know what to do about "this." The color of the stone is like his eyes, the way they change from gray to blue with his mood or a different shirt.
She sighs, and while she's tempted to throw it out onto the street to be run over, repeatedly, by cars, she slips the stone into her pocket instead. She rolls her eyes and brushes the hair out of her face. She feels pathetic.
She thinks about the ribbon of road that stretches and tangles out in front of her, and she smiles. So she's a little depressed. Her grand adventure may seem pathetic now, but why worry? There's plenty of road left.
After dinner, she selects some magazines and walks back to the motel. The two cable TV channels are showing professional wrestling and scrambled porn. Well, she's not all too certain that it's porn, but there seems to be plenty of flesh-colored blobs and a lot of moaning. She turns off the television and picks up a magazine. The cover promises that she'll be blown away by ten new summer hairstyles. She wonders if perhaps, in their enthusiasm to sell magazines, the publishers of this particular title are a little overexcited about hair. After all, it's just hair.
She wishes for the first time that she were more like Catherine. Catherine could have any man she wanted. Most men were wrapped around her little finger before she even opened her mouth. And Catherine was interested in things like hairstyles. Yes, there was no denying that Cath was good at her job. But underneath the job, she was all woman. Not science girl, like Sara. She wonders, not for the first time, if there's something wrong with her, biologically; If she's missing some all-important, yet somehow easily overlooked, particle of DNA that turns girls into women. She may be 31 years old, chronologically, physically, but emotionally - -
She wonders if maybe she's just not – quite there. If maybe she were – there, she would be more appealing to Grissom. If she were closer to him in age, or if she were more of a woman and less of a girl…maybe there would be a chance for her. Because obviously, she decides, he's not interested at all in what she is.
Suddenly she feels very lonely, but not for Grissom, which strikes her as odd, because she's in love with him and he hurt her and she feels very needy all of a sudden. She pulls her cell phone from her bag and dials a familiar number.
"You've reached Nick Stokes with the Las Vegas Crime Lab. I can't take your call right now, but please leave a message and I'll get right back to you."
"Hey, Nicky, it's Sara. There's no emergency or anything. I just – felt like calling. Maybe I'll call again in a few days. Take care. Bye."
Her only real friend at all is little more than a kind, dependable coworker. There are all sorts of people that she knows, a little, but they are acquaintances, not friends, and she feels as though her so-called life isn't really a life at all.
She sighs, and reads the article with the hairstyles and then a couple of articles about being more spontaneous in bed. She likes a couple of the shorter hairstyles and thinks about cutting her hair as part of her grand adventure. And she thinks perhaps she will be more spontaneous in bed, someday, when she has someone to go to bed with.
She falls asleep on the first night of her trip, sad and alone, and the grand adventure hasn't provided her with any life-altering insights yet.
But in the morning when she wakes up she has a voice mail from Nicky, with a funny story about Warrick and Catherine and an encounter with a pronghorn antelope who stumbled upon a crime scene, and she's not sad or alone anymore.
For tomorrow is, after all, another day.