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Chapter Twelve: In Margaritaville
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It was one in the morning when he stopped at a store and bought some clothes. Nothing cheap, because his father could always tell that kind of thing, but a damn expensive suit with all the cash he had tucked away in his jeans' pockets. He changed in the restroom of a gas station and tried to tame his hair. It was blonde now, and his father wouldn't like that, but he didn't have the time to buy some chestnut dye and get it back to the way it used to be. He just calmed it down, his hands shaking, and rinsed his face off in the rusty sink.
His face looked hollowed out, and he knew that it hadn't looked like that before.
I'm a skeleton, he thought. Dr. Robbins should have me spread out on his table any day now. But what would he decide was my cause of death?
The bathroom smelled like marijuana and bubble gum. This wasn't a place he could stay in forever. He had to tear himself away from the sink and go back to his beat-up Denali in the parking lot. Had to finish the drive to the Siesta Inn.
He was getting soap under his fingernails.
He tore his hands from the sink and his eyes from the mirror. The smooth fabric of his new clothes felt distasteful on his skin, like an unwelcome caress. They formed a shell around him.
He searched for paper towels, but the bathroom was empty. Back in the car, he dried his hands with fast food napkins and curled them up; tossed them into the plastic bag by the passenger's seat. His hands curled around the steering wheel, gripping it until his knuckles went white, but at the third red light, he managed to rip one away long enough to switch the radio on. He turned the volume up as loud as it could go, and screamed the lyrics hoarsely. The car seemed to tremble with the stereo.
The Siesta Inn was small and glitzy. Greg pulled into an empty space and leaned his head down against the wheel. His breathing came fast and hard.
This is going to mean something, right? It's going to mean more than anything else possibly could. He - - Grissom just doesn't understand. He doesn't get it, no matter how I tried to explain it to him. He doesn't even realize that one of the reasons I tried so hard to impress him was because, in the beginning, he reminded me of my father.
"We all have to make our own choices, Grissom," he said.
He hated how his words echoed.
He got out of the car, closing his door behind him, but not bothering to lock it. There was nothing in there that someone else wasn't welcome to steal. There was nothing in his life right now that he couldn't throw away - - like you threw away Grissom? - - without hesitation.
At the front desk, he looked like a model young man. Clean-cut, in his pretty suit, and charming, with his pretty smile. He told the clerk that he was meeting someone in the dining area, and asked so politely if he could wait there. She flushed when she looked at him, and told him that it wouldn't be a problem at all. She had dark curly hair and a gap-toothed smile, and looked more like Sara than Melissa Sharpe, so it was bound to be okay.
He ordered a frosty beer in the dining room, and waited.
After five minutes, his calm unraveled, and he started getting antsy. The fidgeting habits he'd lost with the coma came back in full. He pushed the beer far away from him so that he wouldn't drink it so fast, and the next time the waiter came by, he ordered. He had no idea what he'd said, only that the young man told him it would be about fifteen minutes before he got it. He thanked him, and drank a little more of the beer he'd been trying to deny himself.
It was twenty minutes before the food came. He was halfway through it before he discovered that it was a club sandwich. A smear of mayonnaise was on his left index finger. He excused himself to the bathroom and held his stomach like he was going to throw up, but the food stayed down, despite his nausea. He washed his hands, washed his face, and came back inside with a reassuring nod to the staff, telling them without words that he wasn't trying to slip off without paying.
Thirty minutes passed. There were people waiting in the lobby, and the waiter started offering to bring him a check. His hands were shaking again. He ordered dessert.
Fourteen minutes later, he accepted a check. He tipped well, because he knew that without that, he would have been a strange story to tell in gossip - - the pale, wide-eyed customer who sat for so long by himself in a hotel where he wasn't staying. The tip was compensation.
Five minutes later, he left the restaurant to stand in the lobby.
An hour later, a good Samaritan wearing that mantle of a bellhop asked him, cautiously, if he had a place to spend the night. He asked if a Nathan Sanders was staying in the hotel. The bellhop, with a nervous grin, said that he would check, and came back a few minutes later.
"No, sir. No one of that name is staying here."
"It won't mean anything - - this isn't going to turn out how you want, no matter what happens."
He had three hundred dollars in the pocket of his new suit.
"Can I have a room for the night?"
"I'll check the register," the kid said, brightening visibly. Here was a customer - - here was something he could understand, without unnecessary complications. He disappeared again and came back, like a Jack-in-the-box. "We have several available rooms. Do you have a floor preference?"
"It doesn't matter."
"Follow me, then."
He went to the desk and signed in. The name field was simple, but the address presented more of a complication. His apartment, which had been eerily vacant since the coma, or Grissom's house? He chose the apartment, because it was the one listed on his driver's license, and because he didn't think he could ever go back to Grissom's house.
The room was tiny and set off strange feelings of claustrophobia.
He read the Bible under the phone for two hours, and kept waiting for his father to show up, but nothing happened.
He read the story of the prodigal son, and then closed it.
With nothing left, he spread himself out on his bed without turning down the comforter first, and stared up at the cracks on the ceiling.
None of them even looked remotely like a spider-web.
He didn't turn the lights off, but eventually, he fell asleep anyway.