Part Eight: Nebraska – God
The morning dawns chilly in Nebraska, and she snuggles deeper under the bleach-scented motel bed linens. She dreams of long, unending roads and wakes with a now familiar feeling. Optimism. She showers quickly. She can't wait to get on the road.
The trip she was second-guessing in Utah has become, for her, a godsend. Her adventures have healed her, in a way, and now when she thinks about the lab and Grissom she doesn't feel the painful twist in her tummy like she once did. It all seems like a miracle, like childhood Christmas mornings, when all of her memories are in black and white with fuzzy edges.
She doesn't believe in God, not the way that your average churchgoer believes in God. After what she sees every day, it's hard for her to accept deity at all; but her hippie parents taught her well.
God is all around us.
She stops at a state park to eat lunch and stretch her legs. She walks along a hiking trail. She hears a rushing sound, like water, and realizes that the Platte is nearby. She concentrates on the sounds her boots make on the trail, sticks snapping and dirt crunching underfoot, and on the sound of the water. She feels a little like she's communing with God, and while the scientist part of her scoffs at the notion, her mother and father's daughter finds it a perfectly natural. Logical, even.
There is sacredness in everyone, in everything that lives or was alive. This is part of her belief system that she still subscribes to. It helps her to deal with the gruesome discoveries she makes on a nightly basis. Seeing a victim as a divine person, a sacred thing, helps her to see beyond the gore. Helps her to find justice for them.
Her thoughts flow easily now. She sees patterns in past behavior, both on her part and on Grissom's. She sees mistakes and hurts with honest eyes. She fears that things won't be so clear back home, in the lab. There they are close together, indoors, with deadlines and personal issues. Life is like a vacuum in the lab; nothing exists outside of it except crime scenes. Nothing exists inside of it except for the pursuit of the truth and a sprinkle of personal drama added to spice things up a bit.
She thinks there is something ironic about her relationship with Grissom. Their job is to uncover the truth for the victims. All Grissom and Sara do is feed one another lies. Why? Why lie to one another? It all seems so futile now. She thinks about all the wasted time, and wasted effort. All for not. All to just make more mistakes; cause more pain; tell more half-truths or outright lies; deny themselves something that could save them both.
In her every day life she can never get her mind to slow down enough to listen to the silence. Her brain is never really silent anyway. Whatever it is she's doing right now is helping, she thinks.
She feels better.
Thank God.