Part 2. Read on. Blah, Blah. Thanks.
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Day four:
One shift's worth of requests for everyone to, "Please not talk about the accident." Another 24 hours worth of hissed threats to, "Shut the hell up, everyone." Everyone blames their curiosity on Grissom.
"Why do you think he's letting her stay at work?"
"Overtime mentoring?"
Nick and Warrick try to take Catherine out for breakfast at the end of shift. They order too much food and eat almost nothing. The eggs are greasy; everything is greasy. Catherine is still chewing painfully around a piece of toast when her Orange Julius is set down.
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Sunday morning. Lindsey was three and a half- already babbling a flood of words. Catherine finds toys in the couch like evidence of an angel and knows: her and Ed and midnight bedroom fights and broken china on the kitchen floor- it was all worth it a hundred times over.
Lindsey calls Sunday 'The Mommy Morning' because Catherine's off work. "Juice!" says Lindsey "Please!"
They're drawing rainbows at the kitchen table. "What comes after orange?" wonders Catherine and Lindsey giggles wildly- "Lemon! Lemon!" When Catherine reads the color label on the crayon it says 'Lemon' in small black print. Lindsey is three and a half. She can't read but she can read 'Lemon'. Catherine asks her again the next day with a flash card.
"Lemon! Lemon! Lemon!" squeals Lindsey.
Catherine never mentions it to Grissom. Some mysteries are more valuable unsolved.
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In the diner Catherine looks at her Orange Julius. Wedged onto the rim of the glass is a slice of lemon. "Yellow," thinks Catherine. She leaves the table awkwardly, knocking over the saltshaker without even noticing.
Of the two men, Warrick agrees to go after her. "I'll square up at the counter," says Nick and heads for the till. He pays with a twenty five percent tip because any math above basic percentages is eluding him. "Excuse me, where are your washrooms?"
Nick locks himself in a bathroom stall and presses his forehead against the door. "Deep Breaths, Stokes." The stall is three feet by four feet, is eight feet high. Nick shudders, swallows down greasy eggs- remembers ants.
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Catherine's in the diner parking lot, pre-dawn, when someone from the strip wanders by. "Heard about your daughter," says this older man, eyeing her legs. She can't even remember if he was an old friend or someone she once danced for. She isn't sure there's a difference.
"It's like being haunted by the wrong fucking ghosts,"says Catherine. (Her ghosts are all alive. By association she feels closer to death.) She is standing with a cigarette in her fingers, smoke coiling elegantly into the atmosphere.
"You sure as heck never get the right one's" he answers her. He's beyond understanding what he means. Maybe this is how Grissom feels.
He can tell by the way that she's standing, legs apart, hips thrust out, "Fucking funeral tomorrow," that she doesn't believe there is any remains of Lindsey watching. He tries that appeal anyway, takes the cigarette and grinds it out with his black-soled shoe.
"What would Lindsey say, Cath?" she shivers and the hairs on her arms stand up, glistening in the pale sunlight. He puts his coat around her slender shoulders.
"Past that," drawls Catherine. She wishes they would just let her pull her body apart in peace.
When Warrick does up the front zipper it is with her arms crossed inside of the leather like a straight jacket. She doesn't facilitate or protest. His hands are clumsy in the morning cold and his fingers accidentally brush the space between her breasts. Her eyes- for their part- stay locked on the corner of the parking lot- half focused. Such close contact- it isn't the first time Warrick forgets Tina all together. Catherine doesn't look at him when she says, "Would you like to come back to my place?"
He'll say no, of course. He'll kiss her gently in the parking lot where, through the diner window, even Nicky can see. In place of vow breaking and a stuttering of "Oh God- Damn! Please!" there will be a brushing of tongues and noses (she smells like all sorts of yellow flowers). When they pull away she will turn towards the car and he will follow.
Catherine has the keys. Nick is the only one who bother's to wonder if that's safe.
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Day five:
The funeral. Everyone comes, of course, but no one stays. "No one who matters anyway," says Greg to Nick, eyeing the crowds of Swing Shift strangers. "Outsiders," mutters Nick, but quietly- repeating his words from three nights ago.
Catherine is the first to leave. Striding amidst headstones over the dew soaked lawn in her black shoes. The heels stick into the soft ground like a knife into a body.
Sara and Grissom stand over the indentations left behind and contemplate filling them with plaster. Then pretend they aren't the kind of people who come to their friend's daughter's funeral and think about work.
Sara watches Catherine get behind the wheel of a company car.
DUI. DUI. DUI.
"Under the influence of what?" Sara considers the vague government terminology. She thinks that Grief can often be as inebriating as Crown Royal. She turns to Grissom and knows by the resignation on his face: In a kidnapping the first 24 hours are golden. In Catherine's case they're running on 110. They will not be bringing her back from this.
Sara wonders aloud, "Grissom… what's she like?"
Grissom looks up from his divot. They are standing between headstones belonging to the Walton's and the Warner's. They worked the Warner case three years ago- Second-degree murder. Patricide.
"Who? Catherine?"
"What's she like waking up?" and then casually, "Waking up to?"
Grissom looks out across the windy horizon. Chimes are audible in the distance. "Do you think I know the answer to that Sara?"
Sara smiles bitterly and tucks hair behind her ear. "Yeah, I do."
Grissom sighs. His hands always shake when she intrudes like this but he's got them deep in the shadows of his pockets and hidden from the searching brunette beside him. "Catherine is… vital."
Sara blinks, tugs at several various hemlines, and smiles a sneer. "Thanks Grissom, I really needed that clarity." Her long fingers are digging through her purse, the inside pockets of which are cast in shadows. Grissom can't see what she carries with her- but then, how is that a change? Funeral or no, today has twenty-four hours. People are committing crimes. It's mostly the same.
She finally takes a pair of tweezers from one of the shadowed pockets- kneels to the ground but keeps her eyes on his a moment, making it clear: "Tell me more."
"Catherine is a person, Sara- she isn't anything like-" he breaks off.
Sara pulls something rubber and U shaped from the ground. The small treaded cap from a stiletto heel. Sara Sidle in the only plunging neckline he's ever seen her wear. "I had to borrow a dress last minute from some rental thing," she had said- apologizing for her own body. Twenty minutes later she pulls Catherine's missing heel from the muddy earth and when she draws a strap back onto her shoulder she leaves a muddy fingerprint behind. He would be made breathless if he weren't already. They are both too tired for this to be happening.
"She isn't like what, Grissom? Me?"
Grissom kicks the grass, scuffs his shoes. They were scuffed already anyway. "Us."
The winter wind has stripped them both colorless but Sara can at least manage a sneer for this. "There is no 'Us'." She drops the rubber heel, dirt and all into her purse and swallows down grief, which tastes like salt. Grissom watches the muscles moving in her neck. He wants to lick the pain out of her throat. To fall asleep in the evening for once and whisper into the dark tangle of her hair on his pillow, "You're a ghost Sara Sidle."
As though he isn't already much too late. Standing in a graveyard in the company of a woman who eludes syllables. "How many of these body's have we investigated?" she wonders aloud. He can smell the lab on her, even now, under all that funeral perfume.
Greg comes over and suddenly it's, "Hey Grissom," and Greg's got his hand on Sara's shoulder. Bare skin- bare fingers- transfertransfertransfer.
"Hello Greg."
It doesn't have to mean anything- Greg's hand obstructing his view of Sara's freckles- the innocence of touch. But Greg is calm and Greg is intent- he follows Sara's shoulder down. "It's like watching an electric current," thinks Grissom. "Entering there where the strap of her dress creates a border-" Greg's fingers sliding- "down her bicep to her elbow where the cuff of her black glove begins." The whole timeSara never takes her eyes off Grissom. The fingers of her left hand twitch, involuntarily, like a cat hunting in its sleep.
"What I told Sara goes double for you Greg. If you need some time off-"
"I got it-," says Greg. "Thanks Gris."
Grissom ends the moment, like closing a case- he can do this- has done this. He's already five steps away when he hears Sara's lilting voice. "Let's just go." She speaks her words forcefully pronounced into Greg's ear but the wind catches them and scatters them like dry mowed grass. Grissom has interrogated a thousand suspects- more. He knows that sound, the droop of surrender in a female voice. "Greg, let's just go."
He doesn't turn to watch as Sara exhaustedly lets the young lab tech search through her purse for her keys. Now Greg knows Sara better than Grissom does.
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Catherine's locked in the public washroom of Marty's Diner. She's sixteen blocks from St. Gabriel's Graveyard. She parked her car four blocks down and started walking. It wasn't until she was crossing from 63rd Street onto "Drug Deal" Boulevard that she found what she was looking for.
The man wore nice clothes but they were dirty- Catherine could see the places where his nose had been broken. Fist, pipe, two by four, kick to the head. Catherine took one look at 'Frank the Dealer' and all his external scars. She decided that all pain led to fundamentally the same place.
"How disappointing," thinks Catherine, "it only took thirty five seconds to exchange a fifty dollar bill for some powder I've been avoiding since the god damn Jurassic period." It's been thirteen years since she bought- (her mother was sick, Ed was fucking another woman, Catherine was stressed) and it's been fifteen years since she's used- ("One more, Eddie, Christ! - Please?") Eddie fixed the line, held her head and checked her into a rehab facility the next day.
She buys an ounce from 'Frank' who grabs her ass once they've made the switch. Then she makes her way down the block to the diner. She runs the taps in the washroom to drown out the sucking sound.
When she lowers her head over her compact mirror, the reality of the situation is all too strange: high-heeled women going nose to nose with their own reflection when isn't that the thing that terrifies them most? Fucking crow's feet.
Time slips away with the graying of hair.
She can see the smooth even rim of her own eyeliner in the magnified compact mirror. The soft wrinkles around her eyes like off roads on a map. She sniffs half a line before she chokes on dust and her own swallowed tears. She pours the rest down the toilet and wipes her nose with the shaking tips of her fingers before she leaves.
It wasn't even enough to get high.
It wasn't even enough to get anywhere.
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Grissom finds Warrick in some run down shack half way into the city. He sees the Tahoe and goes in under the pretense of protecting the lab's equipment.
Daryl's Den used to be a convenience store with a bar next door. Now it's a bar with a casino next door. The whole place smells like damp tar and violence- the sweaty drunken kind.
"Yeah, well I figured this was as good a place as any for falling off a wagon." Warrick puts a loonie into the slot, pulls the lever, loses. Grissom spends 4 minutes watching Warrick put small circular discs into a noisy slot machine. Warrick spends 20 dollars in loonies and wins back eight in quarters.
That's 3960 dollars a day and now Grissom knows why Catherine watches Warrick as though she's building a case- as though he's a suspect and she's looking to get him for life: "Human relation. We like what we can relate to."
"Six billion people and at least six billion wagon's." Grissom finally says. He speaks in the same careful voice he uses while pinning moths to Styrofoam. "Why do people use destruction as an excuse to destroy?"
A woman with a feather boa and eye sockets like chipped egg cups puts her gold lamee purse down at the next slot machine. Grissom watches the woman speaking under her breath, muttering about menthol cigarettes and 'big money'.
"It's called roll with the punches Gris," says Warrick at last. When he stands to leave his pockets clink against his legs with the silver weight. "Shit head," spits the woman with the boa, as though Warrick had stolen money from her purse.
Warrick gives Grissom his keys ("You should drive.") and Gil Grissom holds the jagged metal scraps as though they were answers.
They drive in silence through traffic with the windows up and the radio off. "It is wrong," thinks Grissom, "that eight dollars in quarters should weigh more than twenty dollars in loonies."
Warrick taps a coin on the door handle. It's the only noise in the large cab.
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Warrick lets himself into the house and finds his wife in the bathroom with a towel around her body. He watches Tina through the clouds of steam as she brushes her damp hair. The brush pauses a moment when Warrick finally speaks.
"Hey."
"Hey baby, how was the funeral?"
"It was good-" faltering- "um, God no- I didn't mean good, just…" and he sees himself force a chuckle in the foggy mirror, "it was alright."
"Well, at least it's over," says Tina. Her brow wrinkles under the weight of her empathy. Then she undoes her mint colored towel from around her breasts and presses her naked body against him. Tina is still slightly damp from the bath water and his fingers stick to her skin as though he and she are made of different material.
They make love in the bedroom in the king size bed Tina brought with her when she first moved in. most of his clothes are still on while hers are off. She does all the screaming and he is silent; eyes wide.
Finally he softly bites her ear and when she looks into his eyes, bewildered, he whispers, "You smell like Narcissus Pseudonarcissus." A shadow passes behind her eyes and he realizes she never learned Latin. She smiles anyway, of course, but that doesn't change it. Catherine and her blonde hair like fire, is the opposite of his wife. Often, he finds himself speaking to the wrong woman. In a dead language he tells Tina of yellow flowers- Daffodils.
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Day six:
Two minutes after midnight on the sixth day. Sara gets up from the couch where she has been lying on top of Greg. He stretches his sore legs and tells her that she needs to get a futon. "Who actually makes it to the bedroom anymore?" he sasses and Sara just runs her finger back and forth along her jaw line slowly. "Drink?"
From the funeral they went back to the lab, still in their crisp ironed clothes. "I need to submit some prints," said Sara, forcefully shifting gears.
"And I need to process some prints," said Greg. He rolled his window down and held his suit-clad arm out into the air. "It's starting to rain."
The windows in her car are made of safety glass- "I have incriminated thirteen car thieves this year in Vegas alone." That morning she watched it rain, clear drops hitting like bullets from a pellet gun and their moisture bleeding down the windshield. She held her hand up to the pane while driving. Greg was watching her across the cab. She could smell his formal cologne like damp pine needles.
"Story of my life," she said- her fingers splayed over the glass.
It was five o'clock before he met her in the hall outside DNA with his coat in his arms. There was a moment of silence before Greg's face cracked and he teased her, "Don't you have some chandelier earrings kicking around here somewhere?" It was absurd. Who wore crushed velvet in a lab full of mucus samples and larvae?
He was going home, she wasn't but she agreed to take a break and they headed out the side doors to where his car was parked. They didn't talk much- didn't talk at all about the flavor of O negative blood and mirror dust or about the dead little girl whose name was in the corners of everyone's mouths.
Eventually Greg looked at his watch and suddenly it was, "Yow. I…uh, really have to get outta here."
After fifteen minutes in the rain Greg's shirt was slicked to his chest. He looked like a sculpture made of wet clay- something beautiful there- and Sara made a decision: Six years away from the ocean. Pieces of it fall from the sky like homesickness tears on the night Sara decides she's too tired to keep loving a ghost.
There was thunder rumbling when she took the keys from his wet hands and said she was driving them to her house.