Innocence and Beauty Companion: Imaginary Matriarch
By: TriplePirouette
Category: angst
Disclaimer: They're not mine- I'm a poor college student having fun... take pity...
Distribution: please ask first :)
Summary: Companion to Innocence and Beauty- takes place after Chapter 36- a moment with Catherine
Author's Notes: Time to step back again and look at another character a bit outside of this little universe created. I'm not a huge Catherine fan... but sometimes you just want to get in her head, you know?
On another note, this is not meant to say that I want Lindsay to have the same problems/attitude she does in Harvest. I'm not quite there yet... but she can't be all that well adjusted with Catherine as her Mom, now can she?
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It's like Three's Company on crack meets the Cleaver family in here.
Sara and Grissom are being... normal. They move around the townhouse with ease around each other, winding down from their day as Emma's working up to hers. It's just all so surreal; the domesticity of it, the simplicity, hell, even the smiles on their faces.
I haven't seen any of them smile since Grissom up and left in the middle of a case almost a month ago. There's been no explanation from any of them except that there was a death, and though the office gossips were all too happy to keep Grissom's love life in the circuit, there was no way they were going to speculate about his sudden absence and Sara's unusually quick temper. A sullen Greg often caught my eye that week, but I brushed it off as a coincidence. Somehow he just doesn't fit into the equation. But now they're smiling.
I can't tell if I like it or not. I'd leave the creepily happy Grissom household, but I can't: I'm here for Lindsay, not me.
Ever since Emma and Lindsay had their impromptu ballet class at CSI she hasn't been able to stop talking about how cool Grissom's daughter is, and why didn't I know he had a daughter, and do I not tell people about her, and in her own pre-teen way brooded about it and dropped hints until she was blue in the face and I was tired of hearing about it.
Lindsay's time came, though. She bounded into the house, smile on her face, and told me all about her assignment to interview someone about something. I thought it was a vague assignment, but Lindsay said that the only requirement was that the someone not be in her family. So while my mind's working out the best way to ask "Uncle" Warrick or "Uncle" Nick to spend a few minutes with my daughter for a school project, Lindsay already has our phone book out and has opened the pages to the G's.
"Do you think Emma would want to do it, Mom?"
Of course she did, and that's how I ended up the fifth wheel on this surreal morning: me, standing to the side in the kitchen, watching the well-choreographed and sensuous dance of Grissom and Sara moving around the kitchen and Emma and Lindsay sitting in the living room, Lindsay furiously writing in her notebook as Emma talks. It's an odd sensation just standing here watching everything around me, and I get lost in watching Lindsay for a while.
"You sure you don't want anything to eat, Cath?" Grissom asks, moving up next to me and startling me out of my reverie.
"Uh, no, thanks." I look around, and Sara's suddenly gone, leaving only the four of us. I raise an eyebrow.
"She ran to the store." He says, his eyes fixated on his own daughter, watching as she stands and demonstrates a position, much to Lindsay's delight.
I fidget for a moment, watching as Lindsay, with hero worship in her eyes, gets up to mimic Emma, then sits back down again.
"This is quite domestic for you, isn't it, Gil?" I can tell I've shocked him, he stiffens up beside me. Hell, I've shocked myself.
He relaxes a bit. "Yeah, a little more than I've been used to the last few years, but nothing that's unwelcome." He watches the two girls, his hands fidgeting with his coffee cup.
"It's changed you." I say, not quite sure what I mean by it, and if it's positive or negative.
"It's revived me." He smiles a bit, and suddenly turns shy. "There was a me you never knew, Catherine. There was a me that no one knew, that I never thought I could be again. Try to imagine how you would feel if someone took Lindsay from you and there was nothing you could do. Then try to imagine how you'd feel if you got all of that back and more. It's... freeing."
In the living room Emma's holding Lindsay up as she tries to balance, talking her quietly through the position as she slowly removes her hands. Lindsay stays for a second in perfect position before she totters and Emma goes back to holding her up. She whispers a bit more, then lets go again. This time, when Lindsay begins to teeter, she lifts a little, changing her position, and comes down gracefully into another pose. The second both of her feet hit the floor she jumps up and down smiling, Emma just as jubilant. Suddenly I feel very deficient.
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At one point Gil Grissom and I were practically married. At least in my mind. For years when I was going back and forth with Eddie I used to ask myself why I couldn't fall for a nice guy like Gil. Nights when Eddie wouldn't come home, I'd pretend it was Gil not coming home because he was pulling a double instead of Eddie staying out because he'd found some new drug to try or new girl to try to get.
I always wondered what kind of father he would have been, and always came back to the stiffness in his movements that sad look in his eyes whenever he saw Lindsay, despite his easy manner. I used to brush it off as a bachelor's shyness around children. But now I know. Now I know he was missing his own daughter, and berating himself for his shortcomings. No wonder he always seemed to try so hard if I ever needed something for Lindsay.
I'd lie in bed at night and try to imagine how different my life would have been with Gil, what might have happened. He was smart, so we might have been able to actually hold an adult conversation. He was responsible, so he'd hold up his end of the marriage. I fantasized about him as a husband, as a lover, as a man outside of the lab. I had so many images of him in my mind that he never would have fulfilled them all if he'd ever been slightly interested and if I'd ever taken a chance.
But he wasn't interested, so I never asked. He never looked at me the way he looked at Sara. He never look at me the way he looked at any other woman. For him, I was categorized as strictly plutonic from the minute we met. Maybe that was a good thing. Sometimes it makes me mad that I never had a chance with a man that would have treated me decently. More often than not I'm happy, though.
After a long night, alone, dreaming of a life I'd never have, I'd come into the lab and find him playing with his bugs, or with his nose stuck in a book, or any one of another million asocial behaviors he has, and I'd be struck with the urge to change him. I'd want to mold him to my fantasy. Trouble was, it would have never worked, then I would have lost my friend, and my fantasy.
It's when Lindsay and I are driving home, her rambling in the back about Bailey, that I realize why I've been so out of sorts these last few months with Emma around. I have lost my fantasy. All at once Gil Grissom acquired a family for himself.
Somewhere along the line I'd allowed my fantasy to go dormant, convincing myself that I would never have a chance because that was not the kind of life that Grissom wanted: a wife, a dog, children... I would never have that life that I created with him for the simple fact that he didn't want it, or couldn't function in it.
So I created a fake life for us, a family at CSI that I could mother and he could father, a refuge from the real family problems that I had in a fake family that I wanted. It didn't solve things, but it hid the problem nicely. For years I played the matriarch: the sensitive, politically sound June to his oblivious, ridiculously gifted Ward while Nick and Warrick scurried under us like Wally and the Beave. I created this position fo myself in my mind, I insinuated myself in his life and imagined that I knew all there was to know about him. And I was happy in my little bubble, until it burst.
All of a sudden, I was proven wrong, and Gil Grissom was thriving in that life I only dreamed for us, but I was left out in the cold, still a single mother, sill clinging to the dream that I could have a descent man love me. Only this time, my descent man no longer had a face.
I'm acting like a spoiled brat, sulking around. But I can't help the feeling that something in me has died, some basic hope. How am I supposed to be that matriarch, that go to girl in our work family, if Sara is his first lady at home? Nick and Warrick and Greg cease being kids now, because Emma's filled that void. He no longer throws himself into his work, because what he's lived for has found him again.
Everything has changed, and yet nothing has changed. It's a very odd place to be in.
"Mom?" Lindsay asks as I'm putting dinner out on the table.
"Yes honey?" I put her plate in front of her, then slide across from her.
"Why don't you like Emma?" Lindsay looks down, playing with her macaroni.
"It's not that I don't like her..." And it's true: I don't dislike her. She's a very nice girl. How do I explain all that I've figured out?
"Then why do you act like you don't? She's really nice to me, and she said she'd help me with my dancing any time. She's smart, and she doesn't get in trouble. I thought you wanted me to hang out with people like that? Or do you want me looking for friends on the street?"
Her last sentence shocks me. "Lindsay!"
"You drive me crazy sometimes, Mom! Do you know that you're hypocritical? 'Do as I say, not as I do,' is that it? I don't know what I'm supposed to do around you anymore. I finally make a friend that seems like she really just likes me for me, and not because I have things or they want something, but you don't like her. What am I supposed to think?"
For a moment, Lindsay's the adult and I'm the child. I sit at the table, my pasta forgotten, taking in her rant for what it is. I've hurt my own daughter, and I've done it without ever meaning to. All the fantasies of happy families never helped me at all.
When I say nothing she storms away from the table. I don't blame her. I have a lot of thinking to do.