Just Guilty
Again, I am back in my car feeling the sun beat through the glass, but even this fails to warm me. This time, however, I am not watching the clock. There is no need to now.
What's done is done and cannot be undone.
And I am but left to wonder that if Natalie was guilty, but not responsible, does that make me not guilty, but responsible?
For no matter how hard I may have tried to protest to the contrary in that hearing room, there had been nothing random in Natalie's choice to take you, not like there had been when Walter Gordon took Nick. And it certainly wasn't simply because we were coworkers, you and I.
I knew that the moment I saw those photographs.
That was when the full horror of just how long she must have been watching really hit me. She watched us - first me, and then you. Learned our habits, our means and methods, worked out our patterns until she found just the right ones to best exploit.
I suppose it was bound to have happened, for someone to have seen something for we were frequently working together in those days, you and I. And somehow it was easy, perhaps all too easy, to forget that while I was with you, I wasn't alone with you. That even the most innocent of things could give it and us away.
I didn't even think about it, that simple caress, not when I did it, not afterwards.
It was just a simple act, a moment, a single moment barely longer than a breath, that would turn out to change everything in ways I could never have imagined. Most certainly not then.
When I think back on those months after I came back from Massachusetts and in particularly upon those days right after the murders in Green Valley, I remember most of all, that even if it was only for a little while (too short a time, far too short a time) that I had wanted nothing more than to show you what I couldn't find the words to tell you.
So I let my guard down when it was just the two of us on a case, allowed my personal life to bleed into the professional one, permitted those perfectly erected barriers to slip more and more.
It had happened at the end of yet another long investigation, after hours of having to piece together what had happened, only to have to face the conclusion that sometimes matters of life and death were purely arbitrary. I suppose that is why accidents sometimes seem to be far harder to deal with than premeditated crimes. Accidents have a capricious hollowness to them, a feeling of the fickle finger of fate that makes the resultant loss of life seem even more poignant and pointless, particularly when it is a case of human stupidity that has occasioned it.
By the time we were wrapping things up, the sun and the heat and the exhaustion had begun to set in. Plus, you hadn't really been sleeping well, if much at all, at the time. So, it had almost been instinctual, that one caress. Simply born out of the private intimacies we have shared, out of my desire to convey in some small way, a measure of quiet comfort and care and some semblance of reassurance.
The funny thing was that I wasn't even supposed to be on that morning. I had been scheduled off, but came in to help partly because we were swamped as usual and partly because even if it was work, working a case with you seemed a better way to pass the time than at home alone with Hank.
Even now, I still wouldn't take it back. Not even knowing what I know. I would not take back that moment, that touch.
No, I am not sorry for what happened that day.
Sorry?
It is hard to believe Natalie's claims of being sorry. She certainly isn't sorry the way I am sorry.
Besides, those three words I am sorry, don't really offer any real comfort, do they?
What does it mean to be sorry anyway?
Heather once spoke of apologies as just words. I think I finally understand what she meant.
How hollow those syllables feel; impotent. For no matter how well meant, they can't change what has happened; they can't undo what's been done.
So I wonder if being sorry is enough?
Is contrition enough to warrant forgiveness?
For I am sorry, Sara, I am.
For blame and guilt and responsibility for what's happened -- and not -- they don't just lie with Natalie, but more so with me.
I became so wrapped up in all those little things that I missed the big signs. Got lost in them like I always seem to do.
Those who don't learn from their mistakes it seems really are condemned to repeat them.
It is true, too, what they say about the devil being in the details and if Vegas has taught me anything over the years about Faustian bargains, it is that the devil always gets his due.
They should have gone up on the fish board along with all the other unsolved cases, but I just couldn't let those miniature killings go. I guess I thought that if I kept working on them, kept looking, didn't stop, that I would find the one thing that would make it all make sense. And if I could just make it all make sense, then perhaps I could keep it from happening again.
Something I have been doing all my life it seems, trying to make sense and order and meaning out of chaos. Even after all those years, I hadn't realized how futile the endeavor really was.
But here and now with no pretense to distance myself, with no kit in hand or gloves or science to separate me from the world, no method to keep the madness at bay, the futility feels all too real.
I had been so relieved, so thankful when you turned out to be alive, that I did not even pause to think for a moment that it was just the beginning of things rather than the end.
I suppose that I treated those cases as something that never happened in some foolish hope that thinking so could make it so.
While we were both away, I had Warrick pack up all the minis and ship them off to evidence storage. I wanted them gone. Even the one I had made of my office. Yes, I had wanted them gone, gone far away so I didn't have to ever look at them again, so they didn't become some daily reminder of just how close my own obsessions had brought me to losing you, how they had probably cost me you in the end.
I just wanted to be left alone. For you to be left alone. For us to be left alone.
Ecklie had been bad enough. There had been no need to put you or I or us on public display.
What would it have proved? What good would it have done?
Just like what good would it have done for you to be here now?
For the first time, I feel the flush of relief that you aren't here. That you are thousands of miles far, far away where Natalie can't touch you or hurt you or cause anymore harm than she already has.
But I didn't need ADA Nichols or DA Monroe or Natalie's constant invoking of your name to be aware of just how absent you really are. I already wake up in the bed we once shared to you gone and to the fact that the nightmares that once plagued me right after you returned from the hospital are now a reality.
Sara –
Your name is the one I could not, cannot, seem to utter. Perhaps out of fear of what those two syllables would convey.
I have to wonder if what I said to Natalie and there in that hearing room is how I really feel or if it is just how I think I should feel or what I think other people want or what I want them to hear. If they have been but the words I should say; the things I have done, merely what I should do.
I am not sure that if I let myself feel what I really feel, that I could contain it, control it and not let it control me like it did in the interrogation room that day.
Frustrated. Yes, I had been frustrated and frightened and furious then, not just at Natalie, but at myself, and what I had and could have done.
Would I have really beaten your location out of her, if I could have? I wonder.
Was it just frustration or fear?
Or guilt and grief then, too?
I suppose that in some ways, she succeeded, Natalie did, in completing that final miniature. You may not have died out there in the desert, but you are just as gone. The only person I ever really loved. Just like she wanted.
Yet, I know that she is neither the only person, nor even the right person to blame. Although it would be so easy to say that it was all her fault, the way everything had managed to turn out.
But wasn't that precisely what she had done, Natalie? Blamed Dell's suicide on someone else, on me, rather than accept her own culpability.
No, I can't blame her for my own choices -- or lack thereof.
Natalie may have been the catalyst for your leaving, but she wasn't the cause. And like all catalysts in chemical reactions, it seems she was the only one who wasn't used up or diminished by her role in what happened.
Even if we were -- you and I.
