Chapter 5-- Midnight Rambler
"Sara...hey you." He snaps his fingers in front of her face before turning off the television completely.
"Hey…I was watching that!"
"Don't you get enough of this stuff at work? You don't need to go home, watch hour after hour of Court TV and call it research." She tries to snatch the remote out of his hands. "No, you need to get some sleep. Go on, it's late."
"Fine." She, reluctantly, gets up and heads towards the bathroom. "You know, I can sleep on the couch so you can have your room back." She peeks her head out of the bathroom doorway, her sounds muffled by blue minty foam and a toothbrush in the corner of her mouth.
"No, you are a guest. Nana Pernilla always said, 'it's not polite to make your company sleep on the couch', And I don't intend to." He pulls a nicely folded stack of blankets out of the hall closet. "Plus, knowing how stubborn you are, you'd probably turn the TV back on and stay up half the night learning how important forensic earprints can be in certain cases or what not. You can't fool me. I know all the tricks in the book."
As Sara slips under the comforter of her bed, Greg makes his own on the couch. He knew that this case bothered Sara. Every case bothered Sara, especially those in which the victim was a young woman. Though this was the murder case of a father and daughter with the wife and mother mysteriously no where to be found. It made no sense to him, but many things Sara had done before managed to leave the same impression on him.
Ever since she had gotten suspended her after she was "disrespectful" towards Catherine and "unprofessional" with a suspect, she hadn't really acted out while working on a case. When she was working her way there, Gil was a lot easier on her, but Greg figured that could have beenfor more personal reasons.
He has been asleep for nearly fifteen minutes when suddenly he's awaken from his dream by a deathful scream emerging from inside his room. He bounds off the couch and hurries to her side to see what possibly could be wrong.
"Sara...hey, it's just me." He places a calming hand to her right cheek as she tries to catch her breath. "Shh...You're okay. Shh..." He whispers with a finger to his own lips before brushing a strand of chestnut hair out of her face. He sits down on the edge of the bed beside her. "What's wrong?" Looking into her dark tear-stained eyes, he can still see the terror deep in them. "Was it a dream? What did you see?" He whispers into her hair as he holds her close to his chest.
It wasn't like she was a five year old little girl again. It had to be something serious. He had never really seen Sara cry before. She was known to get over emotional, but she'd just get angry instead of letting other people see her tears.
"Sorry, I didn't mean to wake you up...again." She says pulling herself free from his arms and quickly wiping away her own tears.
"No...No, don't worry…You didn't." He lies, but only a little one.
She starts to crawl back into bed and rolls over away from him.
"What is wrong, Sara? You don't just wake up screaming and shaking for no reason." She doesn't move. "Come on, I know you're not asleep, Sidle!" He rolls her by the shoulderback over to face him.
"What!"
"You can tell me. Is it the case getting to you? Because after my first, I couldn't sleep. Every time I closed my eyes I--"
"Do you want to know why I'm always so angry; what makes me act the way I do?" She sits back up, her knees pulled close to her chest, giving him room to sit.
"You mean the kind of stuff that got you suspended?" He moves from where he sat at her feet, to a top the pillow beside her.
"It just brings back a lot of old memories, ones I don't really want to remember. I mean, yes, there's a lot that I have forgotten, but it's the strangest things that get imprinted in your mind."
"You don't need to…only if you really want to tell me." As she begins telling the story, he notices the tone of her voice sounding reluctant to go on. But she doesn't listen to him.
"I remember how the air smelled. I was baking cookies with my dad for the school bake sale, when she came into the house yelling at dad. She sent me to my room so she could 'talk things over with him'. I didn't...I didn't listen to her. I hid behind the couch in the living room. Of course, I should have been used to it..." Greg doesn't say anything, only keeps her company with open ears and her hand comfortably in his.
"I thought they were fighting because of me. She never liked me to be in the kitchen because I always made too much of a mess." Greg watches as tears that had been forced to stay in the corners of her eyes start to slowly roll down her flushed cheeks.
"Then there was silence. It was the most silence I've ever heard in one room before. I looked around the couch...to see...my mother put a knife into my father. All the fights, the bickering, the occasional trips to the emergency room. I thought it was normal, like every family had those problems, but when I saw blood spattered on the walls and my father lying on the floor in a pool of blood mixed with the bag of flour I had spilled, I knew I couldn't have been more wrong."
"Oh God! Sara, I'm so sorry." He wipes away a tear with his thumb, and brings her hand still in his other up to his face. "I shouldn't have asked."
It isn't like Sara to open up and tell someone exactly what is on her mind. He, for the first time, is speechless. He doesn't know what to say to help. Knowing him, it wouldn't come out as he intended and she'd take it the wrong way.
"Is that why you became a CSI?"
"I don't know, maybe." She takes her hand back from his. "After I moved in with my foster family, the kids at school still talked about me, 'the girl whose mother killed her father'. It was like they were afraid of me, like what my mom did was genetic. So, as a result of having no friends, I just studied because my new family always said how smart I was and how proud I made them. The more I see at work now, the more I can actually understand what was going on in her head, why she just snapped. I saw all that he did to her. She'd lie to me whenever I'd ask about the bruises on her arms. One time she said she was trying on a pair of heels for wedding and fell...or she fell off the step ladder when she was repainting one of the rooms in the B&B. I'm not trying to justify what she did, but if anyone ever put me through what she had to live with…there's no telling what I might do."
She starts laughing, laughing for no better reason than to stop herself from crying. It was like any other time, and when she got to this point she knew she had really lost it. It was then when she'd usually turn to her friend at the bottom of a bottle and only hope that eventually she'd pass out and she wouldn't have to think about all it anymore. She was alone then, trapped in her apartment with nothing else to do but meet with her brown glass friends in the refrigerator, and couldn't find anyother way around it. But she knew he wouldn't let her, and she couldn't be more greatful for that.
"I'm so sorry, Sara." He pulls Sara's near lifeless form to his shoulder, but she pushes him away.
"Just stop it, stop saying you're sorry! I didn't tell you to make you feel sorry for me. I told you because I knew you'd listen." Between sobs her words come out with more of an angry tone than she had intended. She was relieved Greg was by her side and she didn't want to push him away now. If she was alone in her own apartment right now, she knew she wouldn't have further to fall before hitting bottom and he wouldn't be there to catch her.
"Sara, I just don't know anything else to say. Does Gil know about this…know about your family?"
"My first day of suspension he came over to check up on me…wanting to know why I was always so angry. I had never really talked about it before then. Why?"
"You know it took him a while to call you to the crime scene. That's why I was there before you. Don't you notice anything in particular about this case? He was trying to protect you. He knew how you would react. Why else would he think to call on me, a trainee, before you?" He pauses awhile to let what he said sink in, gently rubbing her shoulders as he does. "You think you'll be okay?"
"I think."
"Now, you…" He says getting up from the bed. "...try to get some sleep." He bends down and kisses her forehead. "Good night…again." As he starts to walk away from her she grabs his arm to stop him.
"Can you stay...please?" She rolls back over to face the windows glowing from the outside light as Greg lies down beside her without another word uttered between the two.
He stares up at the ceiling unable to get what she had confessed out of his mind. When he started in the field, he never really imagined what it would be like if anyone he new was ever the victim in one of his cases. For Sara to see that first hand and then have to relive it day after day at work, it's no wonder why she acts the way she does.
He always admired Sara. She was always so focused on work, so dedicated, determined, all the things he never could be. Along with the good, always comes the bad. She had her flaws, more than her fair share, and none of which he really cared about. But of course she cared. She was self-destructive and had constantly put the blame on herself for everything that ever went wrong with her life when, in reality, most of it was all out of her hands. Taking her work so seriously was just an attempt to make up for everything she never could control. He said before that she wasn't the Super Sara he once thought, but he now realized she was for reasons he had never once imagined.
Just thethought of her hiding behind the couch scared for her own life as she watched her mother take away her father's haunted him. He couldn't bear to think that her mother could possibly have done the same thing to her own daughter as she did to her husband. The sight of Sara's body at nine years old laying lifeless on one of Doc Robbins' shiny silver tables pained him to even think about. It's a good thing he still had plenty of his sacred Blue Hawaiian coffee stashed because he could tell he wouldn't have the easiest of times to get to sleep.
He looks over to Sara who was already well on her way to dreamland. She is curled up in a ball with one arm underneath her pillow and a faint snoring sound coming from her lips. She looks so peaceful; her hair tousled lying underneath his sheets. Greg had always wondered what it would be to share a room with Sara, but never once did he think it would involve tears and horrifying childhood memories.