Part 3. Darker still. Buckle down.
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April.
It rains a lot but you honestly don't give a fuck about 'May flowers'. You dance all night and you read forensics texts from the library when you aren't too exhausted. Grissom left some of his old books but you never touch them. Getting over Grissom has become like getting over the dictionary. He taught you so much you can't even speak without feeling as though his hands are on your thighs.
A week after the break up you find a pair of his boxers in your drawer and you're shocked to discover you don't miss the sex.
Four months after the break up you find a thistle he has left pressed between the pages of one of your novels and you touch yourself in the shower for the next five days.
Grissom told you he would take the purple bloom out when it was soft. "You mean dry," you had corrected but he shook his head.
"If you press a thistle for just long enough the leaves soften and the barbs break off."
When you remove the small plant scrap from between pages 119 and 120 you hold it in your pale palm and think he must have been right. It isn't until you touch the end of one of the leaves that it pricks your finger. Some of the barbs remain.
You silently take the thistle to the window and throw it out into the windy afternoon. You watch it fall.
The next time you see him you tell him about the "non-platonic thistle"- wanting to laugh it off. "You mean, 'non-benign'," he says carefully. You mean platonic but let it go. "Last night I thought about you in the shower. I'm going fucking crazy." You can't possibly explain the vital difference.
---
October.
You dance for a man who says he's a music producer. He wears a nice suit, he tips well, and five months later it's Eddie checking you into the Quinten Runbar Rehabilitation Facility: a very long name for a place where junkies go.
The first time Grissom appears through the visiting doors it's like the second time you've met him all over again accept this time it's Tschaikowsky's 'Waltz of the Flowers' playing softly in the background instead of 'Pink Floyd'. It and five other songs play in a loop. After two hours you consider yourself schooled on the principles of classical music and wish for something from a recent century.
Grissom sits down on the arm of the couch beside you and the first thing you can think to do is joke, "It isn't fair. Strung out patients can't even remember the name of where they're staying."
"You remember," says Grissom, tracing the vine pattern on a couch cushion.
"Excellent," you bite sarcastically. You're angry suddenly so you don't fight it. "Fan-fucking-tastic for me Grissom!"
Everyone comes through the front doors of Quinten Runbar angry. It's the emotional requirement, like a number 2B pencil on a final exam. Grissom understands this and replies only, "Does Eddie visit you?"
"Eddie visits me every day."
"Good," he says in a low voice and it's an epiphany- the light-bulb-over-head kind of epiphany… 19 months ago you sat opposite Grissom in a Frankie's Diner and decided he looked at you as though he would one day have to take you apart. It never occurred to you then, that you were wrong. That he was preparing instead, to put you back together from only pieces.
Visiting hours are over already and as Grissom walks towards the exit you see that he walks bow legged. You laugh. In hindsight flaws become apparent. The waltz plays on in the background. You laugh and laugh. You feel saved.
---
A couple of times Grissom brings in closed cases from work. "I'm teaching you about death," he apologizes one evening before he leaves but you're emphatic.
"This is about life Grissom, not death." Your visiting hours are during the day and he doesn't mention that he's been moved to the night shift. He's as exhausted as you but you can't manage to ask him not to come. You and he sort through photos of blood spatter and autopsy reports and yo-yo's used to strangle children. He touches the ring Eddie placed on your finger at the end of your second date before you could collect your clothing from the floor. "It's no Wizard of Oz," you say and neither of you are sure if that's a joke.
You miss thanksgiving. Quinten has a dinner in the main hall but the turkey is dry and the stuffing is from a box. Eddie comes and swears the whole time because you aren't aloud to eat anything he brings you. He describes the Tupperware container full of white meat and cranberry sauce that they took away from him at the door ("It's my god damn checks they're getting every week!") you run your fingers through his hair and slip one skilled hand under the waist line of his pants when the resident attendant isn't watching.
You can tell he brushed his teeth before he came but he still smells like butterscotch schnapps- thick and sweet. You don't tell him that you hate cranberry sauce. He leaves after half an hour and as he walks away his stride is non-definitive. Grissom doesn't come.
---
Nine weeks in a recovery ward is overkill but Eddie insists. "Lets try to keep you clean the first time," he says on the sixth week, as though he's seen too many beautiful relapses already. You don't tell him about the three months before Grissom left- hot orange juice and ice-cold water and midnight conversations about everything accept your potential for failure.
Grissom brings in a case file about a dead baby in an icebox. When he won't tell you who the perpetrator is you turned your back on him and peer out the window. The strip is visible in the distance, already lit up against the gray fading sky. The city's colors are toxic- radioactive light projecting into the dark clouds. You think that instead of dieing from the radiation the people in the city have all developed superpowers; ones for gambling and stripping and putting drugs into their bodies.
"Follow what doesn't lie," says Grissom from the couch behind you. He is still cross-legged and intent on some detail of a stranger's death. All you can think about this is that it isn't fair. And it isn't rational because a 300-pound man can put his fat fingers into your G-string for a 20-dollar bill but it's Grissom and his searching voice that leaves you feeling invaded.
"Everybody lies Grissom, everybody fucking lies!"
You take his case file from his hands and throw it so the pages flap loudly like grass hopper wings. Seven weeks and you're still enraged, childish. You still want to inhale the fucking Arctic Circle up your nose in one long sniff.
He stands silently behind you where you can feel his breath ruffling your hair and he slides his fingers around the back of your skull as though he could hold its weight for you. Today he smells like cough medicine. "I'm sorry Catherine," he says and he never breathes a word about 'The Evidence'.
Grissom met you two years ago. He was buying Jim Brass coffee at the bar while you sat on a stool beside him and changed into pants and sneakers. You swore when your fraying shoelace broke of in your hand and without a word he knelt and removed one of his own. He placed it on the bar beside you and started back towards his drunken friend.
"Hey Mister! It's a slow night… you want a private dance?"
Good deeds in Vegas are like unicorns- all you had wanted was to thank him but he desired nothing from you. Not even skin and everybody in Vegas wanted some skin. You had another man's business card in your purse and he patiently allowed you to write your number on it before you slipped the card, and your hand with it, into his pocket. That first night with your fingers a little deeper against his leg than they had to be you thought you had never seen a man look so indifferent about a woman.
23 months later you sit in Quinten Runbar Rehabilitation Facility and in the evening shadows he looks exactly the same as that night, or a night in the desert with fireflies, or a night in a women's bathroom… Wide bewitching eyes.
Desperation in the straight line of his mouth.
---
Last Halloween there was a party at Jim Brass' house. Grissom came into the second floor bathroom looking for a towel to mop up spilt Vodka. You were already there, bent over the counter with a rolled up twenty between your fingers. You stood and wiped the powder from your nose. He had a fake bullet wound on his chest and one through each foot. He called it, "The Wentworth Case." You were clad in a tiny tweed skirt, tweed push up bra and a magnifying glass. The female Sherlock Holmes.
You watched his eyes travel from the remnants of white powder on the counter to your large black eyes and back again. You shrugged as though it was nothing and slipped past him into the hall. "Character acting Grissom, 6 solution, remember? Sherlock did it."
He watched you disappearing into the shadows of the hallway and he looked undeniably like a corps. The way a victim's eyes go wide as the end approaches. Every time he looked at you as if saying "Goodbye Catherine."
---
December 5th.
The night you leave Quinten Dunbar Eddie is called into work. "I can't get out of it," he calls to tell you. It's already 5:30 and you're release is at 6:00. "Fuck! Catherine, I'm sorry."
His voice is static over the line and you only get ten minutes a day on the community phone anyways. "Don't worry about it, I'll see you at the house." Then you call Grissom.
He arrives at 5:58. He's driven the company vehicle and he's got a bottle of water lying on the drivers seat for you. "Thank god! Something filtered." You stand in the windy parking lot for a moment and look out across the nearly abandoned ash vault. You are side by side and leaning slightly into each other so that the wind billows his shirt until you can hear it snap. You feel calm despite the rushing of air through the leaves on the pavement. You feel simple.
"Catherine, do you remember how many fireflies were in your jar?" Grissom is holding his hand against the cold metal of the car to steady himself. His hands are chapped from the winter air and you gently touch his cracking knuckles.
"Five." You say, "but one flew away."
"Do you think you're the one that flew away?"
And for all the lies you've told, he looks through strands of your swirling hair and into your eyes- "I can't solve another puzzle on my own tonight." You're fingers curl slightly against his knuckles. He is trusting you to tell him the truth.
"I think we are all that fifth bug Grissom, and it doesn't make us beautiful… just a hell of a lot more complicated than insects."
You and Grissom stand close together against his car and you know you still smell like the Methadone treatment they distribute in small paper cups. You wonder if he has ever cried for anyone in his whole life or if maybe he has been given aptitude instead of tear ducts. Either way his eyes are dry, watching yours.
Gil Grissom fed you plums in the desert. He taught you the name of every bone in the human body and he kissed each one of yours in turn.
"I think firefly lights don't go out in the distance, just because we can't see them anymore,"
You will try to be mended.
So you open the passenger side door like a barrier between you and with one of you on either side you hold his fingers to your lips. You want him to be able to feel you speaking. Finally you hold your own fingers to his mouth. "Close your eyes," you instruct and when the world is swallowed in the sound of the wind you whisper, "I think we're all leaving."
He smiles then, like a gift you can only feel.