Disclaimer: All recognizable characters, places, and events are property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.
Montana was, at its heart, a paradox, one Lindsay Monroe had always understood intuitively. It was a state of sprawling, wide-open spaces that stretched as far as the eye could see and then some, and on clear days, you could turn your face to the sky and see endless swaths of blue tinged with the faintest wisps of white cloud. You could close your eyes and draw a deep breath and smell earth and parched green and sweetgrass that tickled your nose with the promise of a sneeze.
As a little girl, she'd done just that, stood in the sun with her arms spread and her face and palms upturned to its warmth. She would stand that way for as long as she could, until sweat prickled and beaded on her scalp and forehead or her mother called her inside. She would stand that way, feet planted in the dry dirt of her front yard, and think, Look, Mama, I'm growing. Just like the plants on your windowsill.
She'd felt like she was growing, too. If she concentrated, she could feel the furtive stretch and ripple of growing muscle and the more ponderous, patient creep of growing bone. The blood warmed and her fingers grew longer and longer, until she was sure she could touch the sun if she wanted. On her best days, days when her mother was too busy in the kitchen to scold her, she imagined that she had taken flight, that she had sloughed her body like old wool and was soaring among the cotton-candy clouds. Near the end, just before she opened her eyes and returned to earth and reality with a dull, bone-jarring thud, she'd stand on tiptoe and reach for the heavens until her back and calves were taut and thrumming with warning. She wasn't Lindsay; she was a linden tree, and she was beautiful.
There were wildflowers to pick and blades of sweetgrass to pluck and suck between your teeth until your mouth and tongue were gritty and bitter with it. There were creeks to wade in and fish to catch in the still pond on Farmer Milligan's back ten. You couldn't eat them-they were too small, and their meat was stringy-but you could waste an entire summer afternoon with your bare feet and the bobber from your cane pole floating dreamily in the murky, brown water. Most of the time, nothing bit, but if it did, you cut it loose and tossed it back in and left it to swim its unending circuit until the next time somebody wandered by with a hook and a pole and some time to kill.
If that didn't appeal, there was always the barn, cool and hot all at once. You could go in there and hide from the sun and watch the dust motes dance and spill secrets in their Divine, unknowable language. You could smell hay and horseshit and horsehide, and if you'd finished your household chores, you could saddle up and trot across the fields.
It was lonely, but it wasn't necessarily a bad loneliness. It just meant you had to learn to entertain yourself, to invent games for one and play three roles at once. Imaginations could grow strong and lush in Montana, as boundless as the land that had brought them forth and brought them up.
But…it wasn't quite true. The land that at first glance seemed so limitless was a patchwork quilt of fields and fences, barbed wire and rough-hewn wood posts. Titles and land deeds were sacrosanct, and those who failed to respect property lines learned to respect the end of a gun. When they weren't squabbling with each other or watching the government with ill-concealed unease, the ranchers were doing battle with the coyotes that skulked at the edges of their herds with teeth bared and bellies rumbling.
Montana folk were hard and craggy as the land on which they lived. The hot summers weathered their faces and turned their skin to cured leather, and the howling winters bent their backs against the wind. They were grim and practical, and they viewed anyone without calluses on their palms as suspicious. They went to church on Sunday without fail, and during her childhood in Bozeman, the feel of cotton was as familiar as the rough caress of denim on her knees. In Montana, there was a place for everything, and everything in its place, and there was no room for those who couldn't or didn't fit in.
Which is why you jumped at the chance to leave, said a voice inside her head that reminded her of her Aunt Ida, and in her mind's eye, she saw her standing at her kitchen counter, wiping her work-roughened hands on a dishtowel. Big as Montana was, it still felt small and provincial and cramped. Folks' skins had shrink-wrapped around their bones, stunted their minds. Their ideas were small, and too many folks lived life by rote, doing things because that's the way they had always been done, and they never stopped to wonder why.
They went to the same church their parents and grandparents did, passed down family recipes on yellowing index cards and dressed their subsequent children in the hand-me-down clothes of the first. They recorded deaths and births in the family Bible and promptly named children in their honor. Though the faces be forgotten, the names live on forever and ever, amen.
Boys played high school football and lived out the dreams of their fathers, who had hung up their dreams with their cleats and turned in their jockstraps for a welder's mask or a deputy's star. Girls vied for the glitter of the homecoming crown and shared lipstick and gossip in the school bathrooms, puckering their lips and batting their eyelashes in an invitation that would lead them to broad hips and stretch marks before they were twenty-five. The more daring ones wore stilettos and went parking on Friday nights with a six-pack and a pack of Luckies.
Those girls never got married. They wound up living in trailers on the city limits and working as cocktail waitresses in some sleazy liquor joint, serving beam to cowboys with dirty money and grabby hands. No, marriage was for the good girls, the ones who kept their knees closed until after graduation, or better yet, until the wedding night.
Girls were supposed to settle down and tend home and hearth. Community college was okay, provided you got a sensible degree, like a teacher's certificate or maybe even library science. If you were really gutsy, you could be a bank teller, but if you reached for anything more, people said you were getting above your raising and forgetting where you came from. People who did that died long before they quit breathing in the eyes of their neighbors. The infamous blue wall of silence has nothing on the impenetrability of small-town excommunication.
But you, my Lindy, you were different. Curious as all get out from the minute you figured out you could turn your head inside your crib. The world outside your baby bed fascinated you. So did the world inside it, for that matter. You studied your feet and toes as soon as you could lift them, and you spared no sense in your investigation. You mouthed them for taste and gummed them for texture, and for an extra bonus, you jammed your fat baby soles under your nose and sniffed. My old woman's hips still cry just thinking about it.
Once you started to crawl, there was no stopping you, and you were a nightmare on four limbs. You got into everything because to you, everything was a mystery to be solved, though back then, your forensic methods consisted of squeezing the evidence in your chubby fists or gumming it into submission. Once, you ate half a jar of vaseline before I got it away from you, and you were pleased as punch, grinning up at me from the floor with petroleum jelly slathered on your chin. I was in a panic and wanted to take you to the hospital, but your Uncle John just took one look at you over the top of his newspaper, scratched his chin, and said he guessed your mama wouldn't need to jam that infant suppository up your pipe anymore. I was furious, but you laughed and clapped your slimy hands, and damned if he wasn't right.
You always wanted to know everything, and there was no length you wouldn't go to in order to figure it out. You liked the library in town, of course, loved to curl up in the big, squashy chairs and flip through the pages of the encyclopedia, but you also liked first-hand experience. You liked to do as much as you liked to see, and if there was an experiment to conduct, you were quick to oblige.
When you were small, one of your first forays into scientific inquiry concerned mud and a pair of freshly-laundered socks. You wanted to see the difference between mud on socked feet and bare, and so you dressed one foot in your best church socks and trouped out to the mudhole behind your house. First one foot and then the other, over and over again. The mud was cool and squelchy between your toes, and strangely comforting. You scrunched them together and wiggled them apart and watched the mud and silt ooze between them. The sock was sodden and heavy, and you were watching the mud climb the fabric with its cool, liquid fingers to slip inside and slither against your skin when your mama caught wind of your doings from the back window. You knew you were in for it because she used your full name, but the spanking you got for ruining your socks was almost worth it, because at the end of the day, you knew something that you hadn't before.
The science fair was your favorite activity at school. It was your chance to show your teachers that you knew your stuff, that their lectures hadn't fallen on deaf ears. It was your opportunity to be the best in show, and that was what you wanted more than anything else-to be the best and know it. For the rest of the world to know it, too. The As on your report card were all well and good, but you didn't believe you'd really earned them until they were posted on the refrigerator for the family to see.
Your teachers admired your competitive drive and encouraged your pursuits. Not like home, where your mother viewed the independence of her only daughter with wary suspicion and did her best to remind you that you were different from your three older brothers, and as such, there was a different path for you. She filled your closets with frilly dresses and dainty shoes, and on church days, she thrust gloves onto your hands and a hat onto your head and paraded you to church like an awkward swan amid your gangly, bullish brothers. She pierced your ears before you had teeth, and from the time you could sit in a high chair, she was reading you books on how to be a lady. She showered you with dolls, and Christmases and birthdays were filled with perfumes and lip gloss. The day she took you shopping for your first bra was an ecstasy of maternal joy.
She tried to teach you cooking and sewing, and you tried so hard to please her. She was your mama, and you loved her, and you would have moved heaven and earth to see her smile at you. But the intricacies of the needle held no charms for you. How could they when you could see and hear your father and brothers playing football in the yard? Football was everything sewing was not-vital and frenetic and unpredictable-and you loved the impact of body on body and the gritty itch of dirt on your face.
It broke your mother's heart to see you roughhousing with the boys and flouting all the social delicacies she'd tried to impress upon you. Sometimes, you'd catch a glimpse of her pinched face through the kitchen window as you ran past with the ball tucked beneath your arm, and the guilt would come, sudden and piercing as an icepick, but it was never enough to make you stop. In fact, it only added to the thrill. You'd apologize as you ambled into the house with grass stains on your knees and drying blood on your upper lip, and you told yourself you meant it, but a smile always tugged on the corners of your mouth.
If you disappointed your mother, then you were the apple of your father's eye. He called you Little Bit, and when you were a baby, he carried you everywhere he went in the crook of his massive arm. To this day, the smell of warm flannel and the scratch of it against your cheek are two of the most comforting things you've ever known, and sometimes when you find yourself cold and lonely in the shoebox apartment you call home, you pull a flannel nightshirt from your dresser drawer and bury your nose in it to remind you of the safest place in the world.
Your father never held your sex against you. He took you hunting and fishing and camping right along with your brothers. You can still remember the way he laughed when it was your turn for target practice with his 30.06 and you fell on your ass from the unexpected recoil. It was a huge, guffawing belly laugh, all guts and throat in the quiet of the woods. He doubled over with his hands on his knees and howled until tears streamed down his blotchy face.
Goddamn, Little Bit, he'd sputtered between wheezing gales of laughter, and wiped a tear from the end of his nose with the back of his index finger. Oh, oh, Jesus.
It occurred to you that your father had taken the Lord's name in vain, and that was scandalous to your ten-year-old, Methodist heart, but of more immediate importance was the burning shame that settled in your cheeks and nape like the onset of fever. You were sitting on your ass in a pile of wet leaves, and your father was laughing at you while brothers smirked.
You opened your mouth to say something, to apologize, maybe, though God only knew how you were going to talk with that pebble lodged in your throat and the crushing weight of mortification on your chest. And then your father took off his sweat-stained hunting cap, scratched behind one ear, and said, That was the damndest thing I ever saw, Little Bit.
You blinked at him in astonishment. There was such pride in his voice, as though you'd just roped a bronco instead of flopping gracelessly onto your ass in the wake of a shotgun blast. You offered him a tentative smile, and then he was grasping you beneath the armpits with his big, bear-paw hands and setting you gently on your feet again.
He clapped you on the back and smiled at you with teeth stained yellow from years of pipe tobacco. You want to try again, Little Bit? he asked.
You squared your shoulders and nodded vigorously. Of course you wanted to try again. You were always up for a challenge, and besides, you were determined to prove to your brothers that you weren't a weak, sissy girl.
That's my girl, your father said approvingly, and ruffled your hair. No quit in you, is there?
He bent, picked up the rifle, and handed it to you. There you go, Little Bit. Just take your time and remember what I showed you.
You remembered, all right. It just didn't seem to do any good. You'd take aim, adjust for recoil, and brace for the inevitable, painful wallop of kickback, but the end result was always the same. The measured squeeze of the trigger was always followed by your uncoordinated exit stage left, legs akimbo. You tried a second time, and then a third, and even your patient father was ready to concede defeat, but you couldn't let it go. To stop, even temporarily, meant that you were admitting that you weren't better than your challenger, and you couldn't abide that. You couldn't, and you still can't. Not even when you should.
So you kept right on firing, never mind that your shoulder felt loose and shattered in its socket. You fired until the air reeked of cordite and your eyes smarted with gunpowder. But damned if you didn't manage to stand your ground. Sure, your shot was low and off-center, but you kept your feet, and that was good enough for government work. You went home tired and happy, and your father caught holy hell from your mama when you got home. You couldn't move your right arm for a week, but you had the satisfaction of knowing you could fire a 30.06 on your feet.
Your father thought everything you did was the damndest thing he ever saw, and he was the one who supported your dreams when your mama wanted to crush them flat in the name of saving your soul from the road to perdition. When you announced that you wanted to go to college-a real one, not the local juco, with its squat, stucco bunkers masquerading as classrooms-your father was tickled pink, and on the day you graduated from high school, he presented you with two things: An 18-carat gold crucifix and a University of Washington sweatshirt.
Ain't that the damndest thing you ever saw, Little Bit? he said, laughing, and lifted you off your feet to twirl you around. Your brothers crowded around for hugs and congratulations. Your mother sat stiffly in her folding chair and scowled at the cotton-and-polyester evidence of your fall from grace.
It was your father who had helped you fill out the applications to the various schools and apply for various grants and scholarships. He'd come in from the mailbox with his hands full of envelopes, and then he'd sit down at the kitchen table and sort through the pile. He mourned with you over each rejection and celebrated every acceptance letter, and he steadfastly ignored your mother's staunch disapproval as she washed the supper dishes in the sink behind him.
Your father was your most unflagging advocate, and you suspect it cost him dearly with your mother near the end of your days at home. He refereed the fight between you and your mama about college, and the one about where you would go. And the last one you ever had with your mother, of course, the one about you taking the job here in New York.
You knew she would object, but you didn't expect the vehemence, the shrill, hectoring desperation of her protest. You had moved away from home before, to Washington, and though she had sniffed and squawked and sidled behind her counter like a disgruntled hen at your gumption, she never got hysterical. It was just hurt, plain and simple, the last-gasp wail of a woman forced to realize that her baby was all grown up.
But when you mentioned New York, it was as if you'd suggested a day-trip to Sodom and Gomorrah with a stopover in Babylon. She set down a plate hard enough to make it wobble and bobble on the countertop.
You will not be moving to New York, Lindsay Monroe, she declared, as if she could stop you.
The argument only deteriorated from there, voices hard and sharp with anger. Old accusations and wounds were resurrected and opened anew with teeth and tongue, and before the dust settled, plates and hearts had been broken with teeth and wagging tongues. Family ties were irrevocably severed that night, and your father sat in the middle with his head in his hands.
He tried to smooth it over a few days later, came to the door of your house with hat in hand to apologize for your mama, but there was nothing to say. He came to see you off to New York that weekend, all smiles and hearty thumps on the hood of the station wagon as you drove away with your life inside cardboard boxes. He was so small in the rearview mirror as you drove away that you got a lump in your throat. Your father was doing what your mother couldn't: he was letting you go, and as excited as you were to finally be chasing the sun you'd always dreamed of touching as a little girl, the leaving hurt like hell.
You've tried now and then to call your folks, but each time your mother picks up the phone and realizes who's on the other end, the chill descends like December hard-frost, thick and endless, and the long, conciliatory conversation you'd planned to have gutters and dies in your throat and leaves a sour aftertaste in the back of your throat that reminds you of the smog you can sometimes taste on the air on still summer mornings. It never stops you from asking for your father, though, and she always gives you the same answer. He's out in the field, she always says, even when it's late at night, and you know she's lying because your father's routine hasn't changed since they day you were born. But fighting about it is pointless and takes more energy than you've got anymore, so you tell her you understand and that you love her, and you're never surprised when the only response to that is the click of the receiver and the hum of dead line in your ear. The home fires don't burn for you.
New York is a cesspool, Lindsay, full of degenerates, harlots, and thieves, and if you go there, you'll live to regret it. That was the last thing her mother had said to her during that fateful argument that had ensured she could never go home again. She had cast it at her like an accusatory stone, screamed it like a proclamation from on High. She'd laughed at her mother at the time, called her old-fashioned and superstitious and controlling. She'd dismissed it as the raving of a deposed tyrant, but now, almost a year later, she wondered if it hadn't been prophecy. Or a curse.
Nothing had gone right since she'd been here. The woman she'd been hired to replace had been murdered by a slimy bastard who had gotten away. The guy on whom she'd had designs had suffered the traumatic, de facto loss of his older brother at the hands of another loser. Another colleague had shot her psychotic boyfriend in self-defense and had spent the last few months lashing out at the world with bared teeth and flashing eyes and was walking with invisible hand grenades strapped to the soles of her feet. Now the All-American guy who represented all that was good and so wonderfully brash about the city was lying, broken, on a bed in a citadel for the dying.
If she were perfectly honest with herself-and now that she thought about it, nowhere were people more honest than in the face of Death's grinning possibility-things had been going wrong since long before Aiden Burn turned up a pile of ash and bone in the backseat of a stolen car. She'd gotten off on the wrong foot with Mac at the Central Park Zoo, and it hadn't gotten any better since. It had, to put it bluntly, been a clusterfuck.
She had thought at first that New York would be the perfect place for her, the one place in the world where she could fit in. It was, after all, the vaunted melting pot, the city where camera-blinded supermodels coexisted with Hasidic Jews and Taoist monks. On one block, you could buy fresh ginseng, and on the next, you could walk away with Albanian sausage still in its casing. There were synagogues and mosques, Methodist churches and Roman Catholic cathedrals, organic markets and delis that reeked of beef blood and pork fat. Life was carried on in haphazard order among the city's boroughs. It was a gaudy patchwork quilt whose squares sometimes blended seamlessly, one into the other, but that all too often displayed their seams with cocksure pride. Here, she'd thought as she'd driven into the city for first time with her head out the driver's side window and the spring wind in her hair. Here is where I can find my place.
But it didn't work out that way, did it? Aunt Ida commiserated. It never does. Instead, it was just like in Montana, but in reverse. You were still the odd duck, the duckling in a lake full of swans, but now you're weren't smart enough. There was always something you'd missed, an aspect of the city not covered in the tourist manuals you'd read. The others were born and bred in the city or had lived here long enough to call her their own, and they knew its quirks intimately, but you were a babe in an unfamiliar wood of concrete and brick.
Sometimes Flack and Stella would be talking in the break room, and it was like listening to a foreign language fashioned from English syllables, a code not meant for your ears. They referred to sections of the city or even certain blocks by names you had never heard and still can't say fluently. Their jargon was littered with dialectical phrases and case numbers opened and closed long before you dreamed of the bright lights of Times Square.
It wasn't intentional, their exclusion, and they would gladly explain if you asked. Flack always smirked when it was his turn, and if he was sitting, he would thread his hands behind his head, stretch his long, lean frame in the chair, and tell you a story liberally spiced with asides and tangents and laughter. If he was walking, he would quicken his pace to keep up with the story and write the narrative on the air with his gesticulating hands. Underneath his modern clothes, he was the old Irish beatcop of yore, equal parts mischief and hard-bitten cynicism.
Stella was just as animated when she told stories, but she drew in rather than spreading out over the room like Flack. She propped her elbows on the table and wrapped both hands around her coffee cup, leaned in as though she was telling you important secrets. She was always so put together, so cool, and though you prided yourself on your sense of style, you felt dowdy and plain next to her. If Flack was the gruff amiability of the city, then Stella was its chic heart, a blend of Fifth Avenue sass and Bronx toughness.
They tried to include you, but no matter how many stories they told over coffee and hot dogs, you would never be one of them. You would always be the new girl, the one who had taken Aiden's place under unhappy circumstances. Shared experiences had bonded them irrevocably, and you were an interloper. If they ever started to forget, there would always be a reminder. Danny Messer, for instance, was only too happy to remind you that you were not one of them and never would be. He's called you Montana since your first day on the job, and you never fail to note the hint of mockery in it. Montana. Outsider. Loser new kid who had no right to be here.
The distance between you should have closed by now, the wound left by Aiden's absence grafted by new skin, but it's only gotten wider. It became unbridgeable the day Hawkes shambled into Mac's office to tell him that Aiden was dead. You knew it by the way they all looked at you as they gathered around the plasma screen in the AV lab to gaze into the digitized face of irrefutable proof. Sidelong, wary, and damning. You were no longer just a replacement for an absent friend. Now you had stolen the honor of the dead.
You can pinpoint in your memory the exact moment you lost them all. For Mac, it was the day you overstepped your boundaries and nosed into his life outside the labs. Looking back on it, you realize how reckless and thoughtless it was to assume that Mac would welcome the intrusion of the professional into the private, but back then, you were fixated by the possibility of one-upping Messer and wiping that smug grin off his cocky damn face. It consumed you. You don't look before you leap, and the landings are often rough.
You'll never forget the expression on Mac's face when he caught sight of you in that smoky club. The music had made his face peaceful, but it hardened when he saw you. He did not return your bright smile, nor did he acknowledge your wave. You knew then that had made a dreadful misstep. Hindsight is twenty-twenty, yes. It is also too late. You lost your favored pupil status that night, and you've never been close to getting it back. And deep in your heart, you suspect you never will.
You lost Stella the day your predecessor came home to the lab in the backseat of a burned-out car. There was a time and a place to ask the questions you did of her, but you did not know them, and the same selfishness that inspired you to leave Montana over the protests of your mama and the sad resignation of your father reared its ugly head as Stella squatted beside the rear passenger seat and scraped what was left of her friend into evidence baggies with a dental pick.
I didn't-, she protested feebly.
You were always a selfish girl, Lindsay, her aunt insisted gently. You didn't mean to be, but you were the only girl and the apple of your father's eye, and you learned early that he could deny you nothing if you looked winsome enough. And school was no different. Success came easily to you, so you began to expect it as your right. When things don't go your way, you have a nasty habit of getting sulky and throwing a tantrum. You evaluate everything in terms of what it means to you, and only then do you consider what it means for others.
So don't you stand there and tell me you didn't know what you were doing when you hunkered down on your haunches beside that car and asked Stella what Aiden had meant to Danny, a junior high-schooler fishing for dirt on her schoolyard crush. You damn well did know. You just didn't care enough to stop.
Stella knew, too, and you wonder now how she could have been so composed in the face of such an insult. Her answer was moderate, discreet, and professional, and her voice was mild. Her posture stiffened, but her pick never faltered. She spared you a single, sidelong look as she worked, and you realized instantly that you were dismissed. Her eyes were cold and hard, shutters slammed against isinglass windows. You were chagrined, but you were also ashamed because the regret wasn't for what you had done, but for the fact that there would be no more Stella stories in the break room. And you were right.
You lost Hawkes that same day. Word travels fast in the contained environment of the labs, and Stella had no doubt vented her spleen to the mild-mannered doctor who faded so easily into the bland, steel and plastic background of the building. Hawkes had always been friendly, not long removed from his own stint as the newbie in the field, but that afternoon in the locker room the smile was gone, placed by an aloof wave and a murmured apology that he couldn't stay to chat. You can't remember when he last had time.
You nearly lost Flack this morning when Lessing blew that apartment to Kingdom Come in the name of preserving national security. The blast was so fierce that it blew you out of your shoes, and so deafening that you spent the rest of the investigation deciphering the insectile buzz that replaced human speech. For a few heartbeats after the roar of collapsing masonry, you were sure that you were back in the Montana woods with your father, and that the 30.06 had misfired and shattered into a thousand pieces. Then you tasted dust and blood on your lips and remembered where you were.
You were looking for your shoes when Messer ran up to ask if you were okay, and you could only blink stupidly at him and squint through the grit at his moving lips. And damned if your narcissism didn't strike again, because your only thought was, Messer is worried about me. It didn't occur to you what the explosion meant for the others until the paramedics rolled Flack out on a stretcher. Then you saw Stella momentarily come apart at the knees, and who knows how far she might have gone had Mac not emerged from the rubble with blood on his face and fire in his eyes? She sewed her guts back in for him and followed his charge. They all did, and they left you in the dust.
You never lost Messer, but that's because you never had him. He wrote you off before you ever set foot in the labs. You were the hotshot Montana prodigy who had replaced his partner, and that was all he needed to know. He avoided you when he could and ignored you when he couldn't, and when he could do neither, he laced every word with barely-concealed sarcasm, each designed as a stinging rejection.
That's why you're out here now in this parking lot. It's your last chance to show him that you're more than just a stuffy country bumpkin from Montana. You're not Aiden Burn, and you never can be, but you are Lindsay Monroe, and that's worth something, more than he thinks, anyway. You can't patch Flack, and even if you could, they wouldn't let you because you're not one of them. They made that abundantly clear when you showed up and they were all huddled around the wall to his room. They made room for Danny, an unconscious, amoebic parting of bodies, but they made no room for you. They simply re-knit themselves into that single and singular entity known as the Watcher.
So there you were, a square peg who not only failed to fit into the round hole, but who couldn't even fucking find it. So you looked over Hawkes' shoulder at the broken piece of the city's heart, and you wondered just what you were supposed to feel. Then Danny cracked and fled, and you followed him. If you couldn't fix Flack, then maybe you could keep Danny from falling off the edge of the world.
She wasn't so sure of that now. Danny was crouching on the asphalt and staring fixedly at the ground between his feet, as if he couldn't quite bring it into focus. One hand rubbed his nape, and the other was balled into a fist against his thigh. She opened her mouth to say something reassuring, then closed it with a snap. Suddenly, all her platitudes seemed limp and empty. She was tempted to squat herself, but she was afraid that if she did, she would simply sink to the ground and stay there until Mac or Stella or Hawkes found them in the morning, sprawled on the blacktop like exhausted children. So she flexed her toes inside her shoes and willed herself to keep standing.
Danny Messer was broken, all sharp angles and severe, narrow lines. The day had compressed him, spread him too thinly over his own bones, and she didn't know what to do. She'd read books on how to stitch wounds with catgut and stop hemorrhaging by applying pressure, but nothing had prepared her for this. There was no one right answer to make this all go away, and she felt dumb and lonely, naked and impotent in front of watching eyes she couldn't see. She wanted to touch him, to offer what meager comfort she could with a hug or an awkward pat on the back, but she was afraid he would cut her to ribbons.
This isn't right, her analytical mind insisted, and it wasn't.
If the narrator of her life had told her that one day she would see Danny Messer stripped of his carefully crafted armor of smartass and bravado, she would have laughed in their face. Danny was his ego, all mouth and attitude, and his image was precious. He was everything that was dangerous and enticing about New York, switchblades and cigarettes and bourbon on the tongue. He was everything her mother had railed against back at home and everything her body said she needed.
Sometimes when the lab was slow, she daydreamed about seeing behind the tough-guy façade he projected, but this was far different. In her fantasies, the vulnerability had been clean and soft, a softening of the eyes and lips, and she had rewarded his display of confidence by offering up the perfect turn of phrase, the mot juste that proved her cleverness and devotion. In the sweetest of them, his kiss tasted like nicotine and cinnamon gum, smoke and underground fire.
There was nothing soft about this. It was hard and ugly and infected beneath the surface. There was no movie moment, no epiphanous instant of healing. She would not be his savior, now or ever, and if there was a kiss, it would be bitter and dry-tongued and desperate as a last breath before dying, a last-ditch effort to pass down inarticulate knowledge from mouth to mouth. It would taste like sorrow.
"Danny?" Cautious and tentative.
He did not acknowledge her. He did not even blink. He simply hunkered on the blacktop, a golem that did not recognize the name it was to take. He had turned inward in an effort to escape the reality left behind in the rooms of Trinity Hospital.
Realities, her ever-pedantic mind corrected automatically. Remember, until a few months ago, his brother was on that same ward with his eyes taped shut and a ventilator down his throat. He's at the rehab hospital now, but being back here so soon must be a hideous déjà vu, the kind of Groundhog Day that would make Bill Murray eat a 30.06 with a smile.
Is that what he's thinking about? she thought as she watched him stare at the blacktop that had so inexplicably become a mirror. Or is it something else?
Do you really want to know? asked Aunt Ida. Everybody's got their secrets and their sorrows. Even you. Sometimes you sit by the window of your apartment and look at the lights across the street, and unpleasant memories flutter in the back of your mind like ash-winged moths. You've tried to crush them to dust between your fingers, but they always get loose.
Like the one about why you left Montana in the first place. That one most of all.
You got called to the scene one Sunday morning in September. Sheriff Caldwell and Deputy Holmes were already there, leaning against their squad car behind a line of police tape that swayed in the breeze. Caldwell was drinking coffee from a styrofoam cup gripped in one beefy hand, and Holmes was scrubbing his forehead with the back of one hand. You knew it was going to be bad when you saw his face, pale as whey beneath the wide, concealing brim of his hat.
You weren't reassured when Caldwell hitched up his pants and grunted, Gonna be a bad one as you passed with field kit in hand. He took a sip of his coffee and grimaced. Aw, shit, he muttered, and trudged from the crime scene to pour his coffee into the dirt like a sacrificial offering.
He was right. It was bad. The family had been dead only a few hours, so the smell of decomp and the flies it invariably attracted had yet to make an appearance, but the meaty, coppery tang of blood hung in the air, rich and cloying, and you put your gloved hand to your nose to smother the reek. Your partner, Robbie Cordero, did the same, for all the good it did. You still smelled it through the latex and powder, and it clung to your clothes long after you left the scene. Later that night, you burned them in the furnace and said a prayer for the first time since you left for college.
It didn't take long to put together what had happened. The occupant of the house, one Mr. Desmond, waited until his wife left for Sunday services at the Baptist church. When she was gone, he fixed breakfast for his two children and coffee for himself. Then, while they were eating Lucky Charms and cinnamon toast, he went into the bedroom, took his hunting rifle from the closet, and shot them in the back of the head at point-blank range. Cordero found clots of brain tissue in the cereal and the jar of Smuckers Jelly. After his children were dead, he went into the living room, sat down in his easy chair, smoked a Lucky Strike, and then smoked the end of his gun.
Mrs. Desmond came home while you were scraping samples of her husband's brain from the back of his chair. Caldwell and Holmes were supposed to secure the perimeter, but Caldwell was fifteen years past his prime, and Holmes was sweet, but not the sharpest tool in the shed. She came into the living room, eyes huge and disbelieving inside her bleached face. She was still in her church dress, and the ankle-length hem soaked up blood like a sponge, purity corrupted in the blink of an eye.
What's going on here? she demanded, as if it were all a prank that could be cleaned up with a bit of elbow grease.
You spun around, startled. Ma'am, you can't be in here. The specimen cup with her husband's brain fragment in it was in your hand, and you dimly realized you were holding it out like a grisly hors d'oevre.
Her eyes flicked from your face to your hand and then to the chair behind you, and you watched her eyes go blank with comprehension. She staggered drunkenly, and then her hands came up to clutch her face. Her purse dangled from one bony wrist. Her mouth opened wider and wider; impossibly wide. It made your eyes hurt to look at the endless expanse of tongue and gum and teeth like jutting bones.
She's The Scream, you thought in dumb, dull amazement. She's climbed out of the painting and is standing in the middle of the Desmonds' living room. Up close and personal.
She had sunk to her knees and begun to scream by the time Caldwell and Holmes blundered onto the scene like winded steer to haul her away. The image of her standing in the doorway with her hands clapped to either side of her face and her mouth open in a bottomless gape stayed with you as you were gathering your equipment. Hell, Lindsay, girl, it's still with you now. If you closed your eyes, you'd see it as clearly as you did then.
It was all you could see while you were offering condolences to Mrs. Desmond, crouching beside her while she sat in the patrol car with a blanket over her knees. Shock had aged her, made her skin brittle and translucent, and though you knew it was nerves or trick of the light, you could swear she was still screaming.
You put in for a transfer that afternoon because you were damned if you were ever going to look at that face again. Bozeman wasn't tiny, but it was small enough to guarantee that your paths would cross again. Maybe at the grocery store or in line at the utility company. You'd see her getting on with what was left of her life. Maybe she'd do well, find love again and make peace with the fact that her children were gone, or maybe grief would crush her beneath its sinking weight and etch lines and grooves into her face. Maybe she'd succumb to booze or pills or mindless fucking at the truckstop to keep the ghosts at bay. But however she turned out, it didn't matter, because you knew you'd only see her one way: as a living scream with both hands clapped to her face in a tableau of immortal horror.
You'd planned to go to Washington-Seattle, maybe, or Tacoma. You knew the area from your college days, and the weather was beautiful in the summer and fall. But Washington was booked solid, and then you got wind of the opening in New York. New York was glamour and excitement and exotic cases, and so you put in.
You never expected to get the nod, but you figured it never hurt to try. You assumed it would go to somebody home-grown, trained at Columbia or NYU. So when you got the letter asking for a preliminary interview, you read it three times before its meaning sank in, and then you did a giddy, fist-pumping jig in front of your mailbox. Two interviews and a psych eval later, you had your one-way ticket to Wonderland.
It's times like now that you wonder why you ever stepped through the looking glass.
She was jolted from her reverie by a sudden, "Fuck!" from Danny, who smashed his fist into the asphalt.
"Fuck!" he shouted again. "Fuck! Fuck!"
"Danny!" she said sharply. "Danny, stop! Stop it!"
But he didn't stop. He didn't hear her, of course. He was too far gone into a sorrow in which she had no part. She walked to him on legs that had gone wooden and squatted in front of him. His fist struck the blacktop again, and this close, she could see dark smears of blood on his knuckles.
He's bloodletting, she thought, and grabbed his wrist. "Danny, stop. Danny, it's okay."
When he looked at her, she froze, heart lodged in her throat. His eyes were perfect blanks behind his glasses.
It's Mrs. Desmond, she thought. She's followed me here to the land of Topsy-Turvy.
Then he jerked roughly away from her, and the illusion was gone. "The fuck it is," he snapped, and she grimaced.
Smooth, Monroe, she chided herself. So much for the fantasy of always knowing what to say.
"We should take you back inside, get that looked at," she ventured after a moment.
He shook his head. "Naw, I'm good. I'm fine." He flexed and closed his hand a few times to show her just how fine he was. "See? No big deal."
"Still, I think we should-,"
He cut her off. "I said no, all right? I'm not goin' back in there. It's not happenin'.
She knew better than to fight. Even dazed and wounded, Danny Messer was a stubborn bastard. She took a deep breath and squared her shoulders. "Fine," she conceded. "Then let me drive you home."
"I'm supposed to be drivin' you home, remember?"
"Yeah, well, plans have changed. You're in no shape to drive." She held out her hand for his car keys.
"Why?" he said defensively. "I'm not drunk."
"Danny," she repeated stubbornly, and advanced on him.
He fumbled inside his pockets for the car keys and dropped them into her upturned palm. "There. Happy now?" he asked.
"No," she answered dully, and trudged to the driver's side of the car. "I'm not."
There wasn't much to say after that. She drove him home in silence. Every now and then he would talk, mostly to tell her that it wasn't Flack in the bed back there. It couldn't be, dammit. It was desperate and pleading and heartbreaking, and it was bullshit. Not that it mattered. The truth was irrelevant at a time like this, and nine times out of ten, it only made things worse.
Still, the pragmatist in her couldn't let it lie. "Danny," she said carefully.
"Don't, Montana. Just don't. It ain't Flack back there."
Montana. Final, irrefutable proof that she was not one of them. For a brief moment after the explosion, differences had been forgotten. He had clutched her hands and called her Lindsay, and concern had been stamped on his face. Now it wasn't even Monroe anymore, and he had drawn away from her as much as he could, huddled against the passenger door with his face buried in the crook of his arm.
She let him persist in his delusion and bit the inside of her cheek to quash the urge to weep. It was ridiculous to be feeling sorry for herself when Flack was fighting for his life at Trinity, but the more she tried to rationalize the hurt away, the deeper it went, and so she did what she had always done when disappointment grew too bitter. She told herself that she was stronger and pretended that it was true.
She dropped Danny off at his apartment, and she was relieved when he refused her offer of company. She didn't think she could stand sitting awkwardly on his couch while both of them pretended that everything was fine, and that it was a meeting of good friends in a moment of crisis. The truth would tell. It would be in Danny's eyes, opaque as whitewashed mirrors, and in hers, dull with indisputable knowledge.
She left him standing in front of his building, and when she looked back a moment later, he was gone. She faced forward again and closed her eyes. She took a deep breath and imagined her arms reaching heavenward to stroke the gravid belly of the moon. Up, up, up, into the firmament and past the cold points of the stars. She wasn't Lindsay anymore; she was Little Bit, and she could do the damndest things. Her Daddy had told her so. If she thought hard enough, she could fly away to the land where everything made sense and she knew where she belonged.
"I'll fly away," she sang fervently under her breath. "Oh, I'll fly away."
But when she opened her eyes, her feet were still firmly on the ground. The burden of adulthood had made her too heavy to fly, had crushed her delicate wings beneath its weight. Sometimes, she realized, knowledge was a dangerous thing.
"I'll fly away," she whispered sadly. But she didn't. She just trudged to the subway station with her arms wrapped around herself for comfort.