Sara woke up at 5 o'clock that morning and couldn't get back to sleep, no matter what she tried. After 20 minutes of laying in bed with her eyes squeezed shut, pretending that she was still asleep, she finally gave up and rolled out of bed. The bedside clock told her that she didn't have to be at work for another three hours, and there was nothing to do with all the extra time except to perform her normal morning routine very slowly.
Her mind was still fuzzy when she got into the shower, and it was only after washing her hair that she began to really become conscious. Consciousness had always been a bother to Sara at times like this; for some reason all her deep thoughts and important decisions seemed to come to her while she was showering. Weird but true, and today was no different: the first thing her brain threw at her when it began to function was the fact that she was going to start a new job today.
No, not just a new job – a new, higher-up job in a new place, with new people. People who appeared to be a little worrisome already, and she didn't even know them yet! If the talk she'd had with Sophie was any indicator, she wasn't exactly sure what she was going to do with the four male CSIs other than Walter: Sam, Jack, William, and Mark. Despite her having met only one of them, the entire male contingent of her CSI shift had a preliminary black mark against them in Sara's book for taking advantage of a junior coworker's desire to please.
As she bent to shave her left leg, she sighed, wondering if this sort of thing came around regularly when one was a supervisor. Not that she couldn't handle it, she reminded herself quickly – it was just that she was just still working on the mental transition from "I do what I'm told" to "They do what I tell them."
Still pondering what she could say to the men to make it clear that their action wasn't to be repeated, she stepped out of the shower and shrugged on her bathrobe, twisting her hair with one hand to wring the water out of it. She'd just have to see how they behaved first, and adjust her plan accordingly.
Just as she stepped back into her bedroom, she heard the "ding" that indicated a new e-mail and stopped short. An e-mail? An e-mail! Was it from Grissom? No, she told herself, more likely junk mail or another garbled e-mail from Greg. Even as she thought this, though, her body was sitting down on the desk chair "just to make sure."
It wasn't from Grissom.
Sara sighed as she deleted fifteen spam messages and three listserv posts that were absolutely useless. Nothing from Grissom, nothing from Catherine, nothing from anyone at the lab. Were they going to stop speaking to her now that she'd decided not to go back there?
The thought of such a rejection zapped her brain into self-defense mode. Fine, she thought – if they wanted to be petty little kids and stop talking because they didn't approve of her taking charge of her own life for once, that was their prerogative. If they wanted that, it wasn't her responsibility or her fault; it just meant that they were asses.
Right.
Sure.
Exactly.
She wasn't going to feel bad about it, no way in hell! Nope, not this girl; she was an adult who knew her own mind, and the only person she was obligated to please was herself. Still, she found herself clicking on "Check for new message" every few seconds, in the hopes that maybe their e-mails were just in transit.
She managed to drag herself, still e-mail-less, away from the evil machine after a few minutes and determinedly set about getting dressed. This felt like the first day of school – a day when what you wore was the first basis for people's opinions of you. With that in mind, she carefully scanned her closet, finally selecting a pair of black trousers – can't go wrong with them, plus they don't show bloodstains – and a sapphire blue, sleeveless mock-turtleneck that she hoped would keep her warm enough. Just in case, she also dug out a black cardigan, the in-style kind that was buttonless and belted. On her feet, she wore the same ankle boots she'd always worn; she had simply never found anything that functioned better in her line of work.
At 6:30, already dressed and coiffed, she decided that, nearly two hours early or not, she couldn't sit around anymore. Preparing to leave, she gave her leather messenger bag a quick once over: pad of paper and pencil, check; cell phone, check; sunglasses and car keys, check. Did she need anything else? This required a moment's thought. Would she need a clipboard, or a change of clothes? Perhaps gum or a hairbrush?
She ended up including everything that she even suspected a chance of needing, resulting in her lugging a seriously overstuffed bag as she made her way to the rental car she'd hired until her own car, which was being shipped from Las Vegas, could arrive.
She had to sit behind the wheel for a minute, taking deep breaths, before she could convince her hand to turn the ignition key. "Who knew that starting over was so intimidating?" she wondered, which in turn made her wonder why she hadn't been this nervous about starting over in Las Vegas a few years ago. The answer, though she didn't want to think of it right now, was probably that she hadn't been nervous because Grissom had been there. Grissom, who she'd trusted implicitly to protect her and ease her transition.
But there was no Grissom here for her today, she reminded herself, and it was time to grow up and realize that she didn't need him. She was perfectly capable of doing this herself, and doing it well. This thought finally spurred her into movement, and she started the car and began the drive to her new office.
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By the time she parked her car outside the lab, the feeling of euphoria had dissipated and the anxiety had returned. The first thing she had to do was . . . gulp . . . claim her office. After years of having a cubicle at best, the thought of having an entire office just intimidated her, though she knew that it shouldn't.
After one final deep breath, she entered the building, nodding to assorted workers who greeted her, though she'd never met any of them. An office . . .
And suddenly she was standing in the doorway, surveying the empty space she was expected to personalize and make useful. God, it was big! . . . No! None of this weak, "oh, what shall I do?" act! She was going to walk into this office, set up the stuff she'd brought with her, and start acting like the boss she was supposed to be!
Sara did as the voice in her head ordered. Her first action was to pull out and examine the cushy desk chair she'd been provided; her second was to set up her laptop and check the to-do list she'd constructed in anticipation of her first few days here.
Seconds after opening the list, she heard that beep again. Another e-mail had arrived, and she tried to stop herself from rushing to see who it was from . . . an attempt which failed miserably, even though she really didn't expect it to be from any of the people she wanted to hear from. Then the "From" line appeared, and she blinked hard . . . then she opened it.
From: Gil Grissom grissomg@nevadaonline.com
Date: Wednesday, August 6th, 2003 7:02 A.M.
To: Sara ssidle@hotmail.com
Subject: I owe you some of these . . .
Sara,
I owe you some explanations, I know. That's why I'm writing this. I just want you to know first that in my last e-mail, I wasn't purposely being evasive – I guess I've just been doing it so long that it's part of my personality now. Between re-reading your e-mail and being verbally beaten by Catherine, I think my head's a little clearer now, and I'm sitting here writing this determined to answer as many of your questions as I can. I feel I have to warn you, though, that "as many as I can" doesn't mean *all* of your questions. There are some that neither you nor I can answer at this point, as I'm sure you've realized. I'm going to try to do this in an orderly fashion so I can keep track and make sure I don't skip anything I wanted to answer. So:
1. You want a better explanation of why and how I realized that I was treating you badly. Well, as you already know, the short answer is that I realized it after the night you asked me to dinner. The long answer has a bit more to it, though I'm not sure if it will clarify things much more.
The long answer, then. Well, it still begins with that night, the night I refused your invitation. Believe it or not, my "no" wasn't meant as much as a "No, I won't go out with you" as it was a "Ha ha, very funny, Sara. Nice try, but you're not distracting me that easily." Yes, I thought you were kidding at first. Don't take offense at that, please, as I didn't mean it in an unpleasant way. It was just . . . the way you threw it out there in the middle of us discussing your safety – well, I thought that you were trying to distract me from the tongue-lashing I was about to give you (which I still think you need to hear).
I realized immediately, by the expression on your face, that you hadn't been trying to distract me at all, that you had intended it as a serious question. Of course, being myself, I didn't apologize to you, just in case I was reading your face wrong after all. I did try to answer you better with my next comment, but I think I just managed to make things worse when I told you I didn't know what to do about our . . . thing. That, too, wasn't really a "no." I was . . . well, I was hedging. There are a myriad reasons why I know – or believe, if you prefer - that I would have been wrong if I had accepted your offer. Some of them may even be true!
But the bottom line, really, is that I don't think well on my feet. As we both know from experience, if you put me behind a desk and give me a problem to solve, I will usually come up with a suitable, even exceptional, solution. What you may not realize is that if you were to pose the same question to me, then look at me and wait for an answer, I'd come up with either a useless answer, or none at all. I can't sit here and say that if you had asked me the same question in a different way, that I would have given a different sort of answer, but I can say with 99% surety that if it had been asked in a different way that allowed me time to think, I would have come up with something that wasn't so . . . hurtful
Well, all that was the long way to the explanation I started to give you – I knew that what I said had come out wrong the moment I opened my mouth, and it was really one of the first times you'd stuck around long enough for me to see the hurt in your eyes when I said it. Your eyes are very expressive, Sara, especially when it comes to displaying pain, and I saw it in them that day. And thus my sad attempts to make amends, which turned out to be just as harmful as the way I responded to your question.
Yeeeah, and about those attempts . . . now that you've knocked me over the head with a reality check, I realize that my methods were weak at best, harmful at worst. I honestly did think I was going to make you feel better by bringing you that pizza, and, well . . . I can't make it better now, but I can promise you that I've learned from the mistake, and next time I offend you (and we both know I will, eventually), I'll give it more thought and try to come up with a woman-friendly way to apologize.
2. My . . . medical problem. Ok, let me take a deep breath before I do this . . . there, I feel slightly better. At least my answer to this question will be shorter than the novel I just wrote to answer your previous question. So the answer: I had – still have, really, I suppose – a disease called otosclerosis. You can find some information on it here: if you would like to look, otherwise I'll offer you a shorter explanation here.
Otosclerosis is essentially a condition in which the stapes bone, more commonly known as the stirrup bone, of "hammer, anvil, and stirrup" fame, hardens. As I'm sure you're aware, human hearing depends on these bones to transmit sound waves. The solidifying of one of them can cause major damage to one's hearing because it would absorb, but not transmit, the sound waves necessary for hearing.
To make a long story short, the stapes bones in both of my ears solidified to the point where I was experiencing persistent, extended hearing loss (So no, I wasn't ignoring you guys all those times; for half of them, I just couldn't hear you). I recently had a double stapedectomy, removing the solidified bones and implanting prostheses in their place, and thanks to that surgery my hearing is nearly back to normal (89%, to be exact, enough to negate the need for a hearing aid, at least currently).
Well, that answers the question of "What is it?" but I still owe you one to "Why didn't you tell me?" To tell you the truth, I don't really have an answer to this. I can tell you that it's not because I don't trust you, or because I thought you wouldn't care. And it certainly wasn't because I didn't think you deserved to know about it. I can easily tell you what it *wasn't* because of; I just don't know right now what it *was* because of.
3. My feelings. This is the hardest question for me to answer, because the answer is so intangible. I'm not really sure that I *can* clarify what I meant enough to satisfy you, but I'm going to try.
You ask why I said that I have feelings for you, then told you to take the job in New Jersey. At the risk of sounding melodramatic and soap-opera-esque, the answer is that I told you to take the job because I know that it's what's best for you right now. Were you to move back to Las Vegas right now, I suspect that the two of us would slip right back into our old habits. Okay . . . I suspect that *I* would slip back into *my* old habits. Meaning that I'm afraid that I might begin driving you away all over again. And trust me, that's the last thing I want to happen. That's why I made the suggestion of trying to become friends again long-distance.
I remember you telling me once that, "It's easy to wear your heart on your sleeve when you're not looking him in the eye." I think I understand now what you meant when you said that, and I'm hoping that we can make it work to our advantage.
I need to make this clear, though – I'm not saying that resolving things is a condition of our e-mailing; it makes me happy just to hear from you, even if you may be cursing at me the whole while. If you want to communicate simply as acquaintances, I'm willing to stay on that level. If you want to communicate as friends, I'm certainly willing to stick to that. If you'd like to, as you put it a few weeks ago, "see what happens" . . . well, then, you'll make me a happy man.
Speaking only for myself, I'd like to try the third option – but only if you're willing. I guess all those songs were right when they said that you never realize what you want until it's (or they're) gone. Your leaving made me come to my senses in many ways, and now that those senses are back, they're clamoring for me to make good.
I hope this answers some of your questions. If it doesn't, well, maybe we can work out more of the answers in future e-mails. I never realized how horrible I was at communicating with you until we started talking like this. No wonder you spent so much time angry with me! Now I want to prove to you that I *do* know how to conduct myself like an actually human being, so please give me the chance.
G