And finally: La Fin! Thanks for reading. Even more thanks if you commented as well.
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Sara's mother is in the hospital. A bruised eye socket and a tendency for staying in bed till four in the afternoon. The blankets are scratchy blue against Sara's chewed cuticles.
When the doctor asks them what happened to Laura's eye both parents grip Sara's hands until she can feel her knuckles pop. The doctor doesn't notice. "She fell down the stairs," says Sara levelly. The doctor writes her mother a prescription for both painkillers and anti-depressants. When he leaves the room Laura lets go of Sara's hand. Sara shakes the pain out of her fingers like water, flung in droplets from the skin.
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Laura wiping blood from her hands… Just a body and a few small specks on her sky blue shirt- that's all that is left of Sara's father. The body on the floor is still- is six foot three- is broken by a bullet the size of Sara's pinky finger. Just the tip.
Until tonight Sara has never understood what it was like to be frozen solid. Nervous Sara with her thin hair, slanting mouth, long words too big for her tongue to hold so they tumble out in a mess. She never stops moving. She wakes up in the morning with her Gulliver's Travel's blanket kicked to the floor- tossing in her sleep. The house is always cold and she usually wakes up shivering.
While the men cuff Laura, her daughter is answering questions about gunshots and fistfights. "Hold my hand really tight okay?" says the woman in the suit coat and men's work shoes. Sara wraps her skinny fingers around the woman's wrist instead, imitating the way she has seen her father grip her mother when he doesn't want Laura to run away. Sara can't let go if she tries. As her and the older woman go past the body and out the front door, Sara doesn't turn to look. "That's not my father," she thinks. And again, outside in the noise and flash lights, "That's not my mother. That is handcuffs, that is, "Sara, you fucking little brat-", that is blood on the living room wall."
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Grissom dissects a fetal pig in his living room. He's been working non-stop in the lab for six days (six years). He dropped a beaker full of tap water this evening and stood a full five minutes observing the way the water spread over the floor (surface tension breaks invisibly- like fevers and hearts). When Mia went by and saw Grissom standing motionless she voiced her concern and Grissom promised to clock out.
He boils herbal tea and listens to classical music. The fetal pig has only one kidney. He checks the whole body cavity. He even phones Doc Robbins to get additional information.
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Doc Robbins isn't answering the phone. He's drinking single malt scotches one after another in a bar near the Tropicana. Robbins' even tips a stripper without getting a dance. Tells himself- "I appreciate symbolism- not subtlety."
"Poor strawberry blonde girl," he thinks. "You can't ever get out."
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It was thirteen years ago when Grissom called her on the first night in her new house. Ed was out, the house was big and he wanted to tell her about a shipment of hissing cockroaches that had arrived at the lab. Catherine's response had been a sleepy, "How fast did you say they go again?" and when he obviously couldn't sleep she had conceded, "Well, I was going too take Lindsey for a drive anyway. I swear she hasn't slept in a week."
He came to get her in his coughing Mustang and they drove through the darkness. Five miles across town just to see two thousand Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches packed into crates. The night was lit with orange glowing streetlights as they made the trip in silence- accept for the sound of Lindsey's gentle fussing, Catherine's low mumbling lullabies.
Hush little baby- butterflies
they'll be landing on your eyes.
We're gonna catch them up for you.
Grissom's gonna teach you something new.
So hush little girl cuz' we're CSI's.
We'll catch all of your bad guys.
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It takes Grissom until 12:12 before he dials her number into the cordless phone. She answers with a response that may be a, "Hello?" but is too exhausted to achieve the syllables.
"I've found a pig with only one kidney," he says into the receiver, waits. It's only a moment before he can hear her legs sliding to the floor with a muffled thump. Despite the storm outside and a bad connection, she knows a call for back up when she hears one.
Twenty minutes later Catherine knocks twice on his door. She's let herself in before he gets halfway there. "So," she says with some sort of make shift conviction, "lets see this pig."
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It's six weeks before Sara meets Cindy Barb, her foster mom. It is six days in Cindy's house before they find Sara unconscious on the sidewalk of some suburban street. Sara had taken her coat off and sat on the curb all night. At 8 in the morning she is stiff and cold on a strangers couch when Cindy arrives- squealing tires and too much lipstick.
"What the hell were you doing?" Cindy demands.
"Nothing," says Sara, "I was doing nothing."
Of course, she's much too young to be speaking literally.
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The doctors at the hospital treat her for minor Hypothermia- ("Jesus Christ child! It's January!") -and then for manic depression. "She isn't sad all the time," argues Cindy who doesn't want to get stuck with the bill.
"Depression means slow. Manic means... um... fast," Explains Sara, "so I'm probably only half sad." She remembers what Laura used to say when her medication wasn't working: "It's not easy being a contradiction."
They give Cindy a bottle of pills for Sara. The pills rattle noisily in the quiet room. Sara remembers the name of the pills from a year before: her mother's pills… her mother's daughter.
"I'm just like her," thinks Sara. "I'm already just like her."
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It's been two hours since Grissom sat behind tinted glass and said to a felon, "She offered you a new life- with her." Sara still feels electrified.
From the lab she takes the highway to her doctors office- tells him about night terrors, insomnia, difficulty breathing, and a persistent desire to down a bottle of Jack Daniels. Sara kind of loves the health system in America. Two hours is all it takes to be given enough antidepressant medication to commit suicide ten times over.
She isn't even sure she'll use any. Not yet at least.
Sara holds the small bottle in her palm. She counts the pills on her dining room table while she should be sleeping. She quit taking antidepressants when she was sixteen. She sold them to Billy Trenton for enough money to buy a telescope and a microscope from the pawnshop.
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Six days after Lindsey dies, Sara comes back into the kitchen pondering the calming effect of a microscope versus the calming effect of a telescope versus the calming effect of three little red and white pills. The ability to see things both infinitely small and infinitely large has always steadied her shaking hands. To have no desire for the universe at all?
She trails her fingertips along the hallway drywall. The light from the kitchen illuminates the hall in a listless glow. "I can do this," she thinks. She feels like ash- weightless, burnt free of its earthly potential. "It is my choice to do this."
She register's Greg sitting cross-legged on her living room carpet with a smirk and a can of whipped cream. "You are game for anything." marvels Sara before she sits down beside him. He smells like her shampoo. She finds it distantly terrifying:
He will lay her down on the living room floor (the second time in six hours) and slowly pull her t-shirt up up up until it catches on her underarms. He will straddle her and she will see chunks of bleached blonde hair falling into his eyes like star points. He will use stale whip cream to draw her flowers on her own stomach and his voice will be terrified when he jokes, "Come on Sidle, I'll teach you how to laugh at death."
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Warrick and Tina drink coolers in bed and she walks her fingers up his thigh beneath the covers. When she stretches one long arm down to the floor and chucks his jeans back up towards the headboard they clink heavily against his chest. The sound of nine dollars in quarters- gambler's bells.
It only takes a moment of startled silence before she's saying, "Baby, would you pass me my cooler- yeah, thanks." and she's scrambled back against his side again. She's got her cooler by the neck though and her fingers around it like a vice.
"Tina look, I'm not-"
"I know baby-""I mean it was a hell this afternoon but I wouldn't-"
"I know-"
"I promise I would tell you if I ever even-"
She gives him a firm push into the pillow- "I know, Warrick."
She kisses him into silence and her mouth is full of apple cooler. The pillow gets soaked but her mouth tastes sharp and sweet. When she pulls away she lingers to lick the sticky foam from his lips. He's still got worry lines in his forehead when he sees that she's smiling. "You know that whole 'me trusting you' thing? I wasn't kidding."
Eventually, maybe, he and Catherine will fuck each other in the women's bathroom at work with the "Out of Order," sign on the door. "Leave the desperate gasps and forays towards 'healing' for Grissom and Sara." Catherine will settle for just plain desperate.
She won't even bother with a condom, not that it's much of a worry at her age. When she sags into his chest, Warrick will lean her against the stall door and she will remind him, with sorrow in her voice, that he's been in the women's bathroom once before.
His lips will form the word. She'll laugh. But they're long past intimacy.
"Rush."
"Yes it is."
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When Lindsey's wrist bones fell apart in her hands Catherine didn't cry. She bit a whole in her lip. It will scar. But she didn't cry.
The first time Catherine cries is in Gil Grissom's living room- on her knees in front of him as if she's praying but the words are only obscenities.
When she follows him into his living room she is in a stencil t-shirt ("Drama Queen") and pajama bottoms. There are still traces of long wearing lipstick around the corners of her mouth. She takes one look down at the coffee table covered in newspaper and feels, for the first time, cold. "Miss Piggy." She is silent a moment. The room ticks.
"Gil that's- you cut open your pig." He hadn't counted on her noticing. When she does notice she falls- like deflating- to the floor.
"It was already dead Catherine."
If he could he would fall beside her.
He had wanted to do something painful. The pig had simply been there. Catherine is sobbing with her hands to her mouth like she's trying to swallow her fists. He's got a fifteen-year-old pig in pieces on the table, a fifteen-year-old friendship in pieces on the floor and of the two it's Catherine who is clutching her chest as though her organs are missing.
He puts a blanket over her and when she eventually stops quivering he falls asleep in a chair at the kitchen table. He realizes somewhere before dawn that Catherine is wearing Lindsey's shirt. When he wakes, his apartment smells like formaldehyde.
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Six days.
In Sara's purple living room her stomach is laid out in front of Greg like paper. "Now you're sugar coated," he says, "and I love you."
The last part is accidental.
Greg lies beside her until dawn, saying nothing else. The telephone rings at 7:30 AM and the way Sara holds the receiver, he knows. "Telemarketer," she whispers. Her voice crumbles on the fifth syllable. The horizon is bleeding out in a pool around them- the sun is a gunshot wound.
"You were hoping it was Grissom, right?"
If she breaks him when she nods then he doesn't show it. Her silent tears drip into a bowl of cereal. He makes her a happy face out of his cheerios.
They kiss and their mouths taste like milk.
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Nick spends a week getting drunk and Warrick volunteers his wife's coolers for at least one of these occasions. "Man, this crap tastes like soda pop."
Bras, ironically, consumes four pounds of deep fried pastries in three days and ends up in the hospital with a doctor telling him, "Gall stones. You're Gall Bladder will have to be removed." The humor is not lost on Brass who punches his fist through a vending machine in the lobby.
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Catherine leaves Grissom's house the next day because he won't offer to fold out the couch and she won't ask. Before she leaves he gives her a hissing cockroach in a jar to keep her company. She stands by the front door in rumpled pajamas and a floor length coat and asks him, "Why did you cut up the pig?"
He shrugs. "I needed a specimen."
Once she leaves he slowly carries vital organs to the garbage can. He considers Catherine's question in the context of ancient mythology. It's the same question he had impressed upon Warrick the day before.
"Why do people use destruction as an excuse to destroy?"
In fifth grade Grissom discovered the myth of the phoenix. He thinks perhaps the story was misleading. After all, it isn't the dead who burn. It is the tired.