Thanks for being patient, friends. I got a fair amount of hate for this piece, and I wasn't sure about continuing. Please be warned that although this does have a happy ending, all the trigger warnings do still apply.
tc
...
...
He thinks that maybe he shouldn't go any further, but he does.
Underneath him, she wakes up. She makes a sound, still half dreaming, still unaware. He pulls back a little to watch her eyes open.
It's the thing he likes the best, when her eyes open and focus on him. He's the only thing in the whole world then.
She makes him the only thing in the world.
"Stop," she says, her voice is so small in the darkness that he can pretend he hasn't heard it. He takes her hand and presses it against his chest so she can feel his heart, how hard it's beating against his ribs.
Only for her.
"Stop," she says again, a little louder. But he pulls her hand downwards, and he's so much stronger than she is that he could break her wrist if she resisted.
The thought makes him harder, makes him nearly breathless at the thought.
She is fifteen.
She is his.
"Garrett," she says, and he wants to press his lips to her tears. He does. Let her try to stop him. "Garrett," she says again, plaintive. "Please."
She's so small, so small and his, and when she tries to pull her hand out of his, he tightens his grip fast and she yelps and God…
It's fucking hot.
…
There is already someone at his sister's grave. He blinks a couple of times to make sure that she's a real person, and when she doesn't shimmer at the sides or fade like even his most vivid hallucinations, he approaches her cautiously.
"Hello," he calls when he is close enough for her to hear him. She turns to look at him, and he stops walking abruptly.
She is just a child, thirteen or fourteen years old, with long legs and blonde hair and deep, lovely green brown eyes. She is wearing a winter coat, last year's, Garrett thinks to himself. It is purple, puffy, and childish. When the other girl's at school see it, they will make fun of it, and she will go home and ask for a new one.
Garrett wonders if her parents will acquiesce.
"What's your name?" he calls to her, though he already knows. There is no other name for this girl to possess. There is no other reason for her to be standing at that gravestone.
She looks back at him, unafraid, and shoves her hands into her pockets.
"Grace," she says.
Garrett only nods.
…
He follows them to the park.
She's steadier on her feet than the last time he saw her, but if he were just the odd passerby, he would think that the man was her boyfriend. He keeps a protective arm around her shoulder. He turns his head to talk into her ear sometimes.
At the Starbucks, the man reaches forward to push some hair behind her ear and smile into her face, but she jerks away from him, breathing hard, shaking her head when he tries to reach out for her. They almost cause a scene. Garrett watches, nearly gleeful, as she stands with her hands out. He watches her jaw working with the effort not to scream.
But that man. He stands near enough to talk softly to her, without touching. He stays completely calm, and when a woman steps closer, to ask if she is okay, the man holds his hand out, and Garrett sees clearly when his mouth says the words "panic attack."
"And she was already calming down anyway," he tells Dr. Baumann at his appointment that afternoon. He'd left Jane and David safely ensconced in Dave's apartment on the lower east side in order to dash uptown to her office. She frowns as he recounts his day's activities.
"He bought her something there, at the Starbucks, something with whipped cream. And he sat so close to her…The woman, the one who asked if she was okay? I heard her tell her friend as they were leaving that she wished she had a boyfriend who was so attentive to her needs."
Garrett takes a deep breath, and goes to continue, but Dr. Baumann cuts him off smoothly. Her sharp blue eyes do not leave his face, and today they glint with something other than their normal curiosity.
"I think, Garrett," she says, "Now that you are back at school, and excelling, might I add, that it is time we begin working on your fixation with Jane Rizzoli."
"It isn't a fixation."
The doctor looks amused. "What would you call it?"
"It's…it's just a…I just have to make sure that she's not…I have to make sure that she's still…"
"Miserable?" Dr. Baumann suggests.
"Fine. Yes," he says, trying for defiance. "She's like, fucking better every day. What if she can use her hands again? What if she really comes back to school? My asshole of a father gave her enough money to do whatever she wants, but I get barely a dime."
This little diatribe makes the doctor lean forward a little in her seat. "Malcolm has cut your allowance off?" she asks, interested.
"Well, no," Garrett concedes. "But he-"
"Have you given any thought to sexual intimacy, Garrett?"
This jump in topics catches him off guard, and he sputters. "What?"
Dr. Baumann doesn't blink. "I think that it's possible that your obsession with Jane is stemming, at least partly, from the sexual relationship that she had with your sister."
"Hey," Garrett says, feeling that sick squirm in his stomach that usually happens when someone comes too close to that certain part of him. "Charlie was the one who…you know…did that to her. Not me."
"I'm not suggesting that you want a sexual relationship with Jane Rizzoli, violent or otherwise," Dr. Baumann says. "I'm suggesting that you feel such an extreme level of wrath towards her because she blocked a previously open path to the object of your desire."
Garrett stares at her. He doesn't know what to say.
"I'm asking what you have done, since the death of your sister, to relieve your built up sexual frustration."
"You mean have I had sex with anyone?"
"Yes, or have you sexually assaulted anyone since your return to the city."
"No!" Garrett's hands are slick with sweat, but he can't take the chance of wiping them on his jeans and confirming his guilt. "I mean…don't you have to report that stuff to the police…I mean, if I told you anything like that?"
Dr. Baumann frowns. She stares at Garrett for a long while, clearly doing some sort of psychiatrist mathematics that he can't understand. Finally, she takes her glasses off, and sets her pen aside.
"Garrett," she says slowly, "Do you remember our first meeting?" Garrett nods dumbly, and Dr. Baumann mimics the movement.
"Yes," she says, "so you remember when I told you that your parents purchased you something other than your freedom?"
Garrett nods again, trying to see where she is going with this walk down memory lane.
"Yes," Dr. Baumann says again. "I told you that your parents purchased me, Garrett. That means I have no other clients. That means I have no other obligations. That means I have no other job than to make sure that you do not repeat the actions of your past. Do you understand?"
Garrett opens his mouth to respond that no, he didn't before.
But now, he is beginning to.
….
…
"I'm named after her, you know," Grace says conversationally.
"Oh yeah?" Garrett pretends to look mildly surprised. "You knew her?"
"No," Grace says. "Did you?"
He can practically hear Dr. Baumann's voice in his head, from happier times.
"Yes. I just…" He swallows. "I just came to say good-bye."
The new Grace nods, as though this is the answer she was expecting to hear. "Took you awhile to get here," she says, and his head snaps around to look at her sharply.
"What did you say?"
She raises an eyebrow at him. "I said it took you awhile to get here," she repeats, enunciating the words a bit more clearly. When he still looks confused, she gestures to the headstone. "She died like, thirty years ago."
Garrett bristles a bit at this. "I didn't come to say goodbye to her like that," he says harshly. The girl doesn't flinch away from him the way other girls have. She will not scare as easily, it seems, and this makes him want to try a little harder. For a moment, he imagines the delicate bones in her wrist. How easily they might snap if she started fighting.
But then, the girl smiles. As Garrett watches, she smiles and then starts to chuckle softly, and almost all of his anger dissipates.
"What's so funny?"
The girl shrugs. "It's…kind of a long story."
Garrett pauses long enough to listen to the backdrop of the city behind them. "I've got time," he decides.
New Grace, this different, future Grace, with such beautiful eyes that she did not inherit from his sister, she turns to look at him now. She examines him, as though suddenly aware that she is alone with a strange man in the middle of an empty cemetery.
Yes, little girl, he thinks to himself. You should be afraid of me on any other day. Any other day but this.
"I've got time," he says, repeating. "I will have to go eventually…but…"
New and different Grace pulls her hand from her pocket to run it through her long hair. "Well okay, but if you have to go, just say. Or if I'm like…boring you."
"Deal," he says easily.
…
….
"What?" She says. And she props herself up on her elbow to look at him. This is the way he likes her the best' post intercourse, her red hair a little bed crazy.
"What do you mean?" she asks now, "We'll have to work something out."
Garrett is still lying on his back on the sheets, regaining his breath. "I mean now that Malcolm is gone," he says. This should be obvious. "He left me everything, in the end. And though I'm sure there won't be a problem, the execution will probably take some time."
He looks at the doctor, but she still seems baffled, so he continues. "I…mean. The payments will have to stop," he explains. "But only for a bit, and then of course I'll back pay you. With interest if you, uh, if you like."
Garrett stares at the doctor as she laughs. "Dr. Baumann?" he asks. "What's funny?"
The doctor gasps for breath as she tries to answer him. She stretches out her arm to brace herself on his bicep. "Oh," she says, when she's finally regained some control. "Oh, you arrogant, amazing, stupid, little boy!" she crows. "You think your father has gone on paying me all this time?"
….
…
"So anyway," Grace is saying. "I found all these pictures of my ma with this other girl. Like a previous girlfriend, you know? Which is…whatever, it's fine. But when I ask my mom about it, she tells me all soft that that's Grace. That I was named after her."
It takes Garrett a lot of control that he didn't know he had not to just reach out and wrap one hand around this girl's throat. He listens with half an ear as she talks, contemplating what her windpipe might do under his palm. Surely she would be easier to kill than, say, a doctor.
"I freaked out," Grace says, sounding ashamed. "Ma got home, and I totally freaked out on both of them. I said I thought it was totally fucked up that they named me after a dead girl. I said it was shitty of Ma to ask Mom to let her, you know? I was so mad it was like I was seeing only red."
"I know the feeling," Garrett says, distracted.
…
…
Garrett cannot stop staring at her. She stands at the foot of the bed, looking back at him like he is some sort of science experiment gone wrong.
"M-my dad doesn't pay you?" He asks, sitting up against the headboard.
She shakes her head, smile still on her face. He thinks it looks condescending. "Your father hasn't paid me since we started sleeping together," she says easily. "Surely you knew that."
He didn't. He looks at her, dumbfounded, and she can read the answer in his face.
"Remarkable," she says.
"Don't talk about me like I'm a specimen," he says, irritable. He doesn't know why this new revelation makes him feel so uncomfortable. It should make him happy. This means the doctor has been staying with him because she wants to. It should make him happy. And yet…
"You are as specimen," she says casually, turning her back on him to reach for a robe. "You're, well, there's no other way to say it, remarkable." The way she uses that word does not suggest it is a compliment. "I simply underestimated the depth of your fantasies."
"My what?" he sits up, irritability moving towards real anger now. "Sleeping with you isn't a fantasy," he says roughly, wondering even as he says it if this is the truth.
"Of course it isn't,' she says. "But your belief that you have me in your pocket is."
"Have you in my…" Garrett begins.
Dr. Baumann turn to face him, and her expression is harder. Her smile is more like a sneer. "Little boy," she says. "Do I have to lay it out for you? Do I have to tell you how appalled, how disgusted your parents were when I told them what you are? What you'll always be?"
The palms of Garrett's hands and the backs of his knees have gone slick with sweat. He looks back at the woman in front of her, rage and disbelief boiling inside of him.
"Honest to God, I thought Malcolm would kill you himself. And when Felicia heard there were others?" She shakes her head. Garrett's sweat turns to ice. "Well, they wanted nothing to do with you, and certainly nothing to do with me."
"But you kept seeing me."
Dr. Baumann nods. "Eventually," she says in the same casual voice, "You are going to make me famous."
…
…...
"Mama apologized. She said she'd call me Constance if I wanted her to. She said she loved me, and she loved mommy and James and Asher, and she'd never intentionally do anything to hurt me." Grace looks over at Garrett to see if he is still listening, and he has to jump his eyes up to her face quickly, so she doesn't catch him staring at her trachea.
"Mommy came and found me though, in my room later on. She said my name was
Grace, and she wouldn't call me anything else. Then she told me the story of this Grace."
"What's that story?"
"This Grace saved my mother," the girl replies, turning her attention back to the headstone. "She was just a kid when she died, a little older than me.
"How did she die?" Garrett asks.
New Grace. Jane's Grace looks at him like he's crazy. Like he should definitely already know.
"Her brother killed her."
…
…
"I didn't do anything wrong," Garrett says, and his lover, his psychiatrist, she laughs. She throws her head back and laughs hard.
"You snuck into her room, nearly every night, and you raped her," Dr. Baumann says, as though she's discussing the weather. "You think I don't know? You think it doesn't radiate off you like cologne. You think someone who doesn't have inappropriate sexual relations with his sister just kidnaps and tortures her girlfriend for no reason?"
"Jane killed Grace!" Garrett yells, "She made it so it was impossible for my sister to live!"
"YOU made it impossible for her to live," Dr. Baumann says, sobering. "You took away her childhood, and then you took away her freedom, and then you took away her savior. You deluded yourself into believing that you were the victim in all of it. You let a rapist with a fetish for brunette's take the fall for you…" Dr. Baumann's eyes glint at him from the foot of the bed. She is watching the effect her words have on him, gauging him, analyzing him. "You let Hoyt take the fall," she repeats. "And then you went right on hunting."
…
…
Stupid girl. She should have been afraid of him from the beginning. Forget the high that came from wrapping his fingers around his former Psychiatrist's throat. They don't compare to this moment, now, watching reborn Grace's beautiful eyes go wide and horror struck as he lunges.
"I'll tell you the truth," he says to her, pressing her down, back into the bench, loving the way her throat bobs under his palms. "I'll tell you the truth."
"I went into her room on the sixteenth day. It was so dark, I could only see her outline in the bed. She hadn't eaten for days, you know? That's how much she missed your mother. She hadn't eaten for days, and so she couldn't even put up much of a fight."
This tiny, almost Maura looking Grace, she struggles to speak, but he presses harder, and she cannot.
"It still felt so good. It still felt so right, being inside her. And she's crying. She always used to cry...sort of the way you are now. She's crying, and that's not new, but this time, she put her head against my chest and she begged for my help."
Garrett can see her. He can see it all there in front of him like it was yesterday.
"She begged for your mother. She said she'd do anything. Anything. If I'd just help her be with Jane again."
Little Grace's lips are blue. She looks up at him. Such wide, wide eyes. Her hands around his wrist are getting weaker. "And in the morning," he says, leaning down so he can whisper.
"In the morning, after I'd promised. After she did everything I told her to, and I promised. I went into her room, new Grace. I went in and I sat down next to her on the bed. And do you know what I said?"
He loosens his hands just a little bit, and the child's eyes flutter. She rasps one deep breath, fighting.
"I told her Jane would never, ever want her. Not after that. Not after what she'd done."
The hands around his wrist regain some strength, which is his cue to press again. This is an artform that he has mastered. She goes, when he says.
In the distance, in his subconscious, he recognizes one sound, and then two. But he pushes both of them away, focused entirely on his goal.
He leans down to press a kiss to the corner of Grace's eye, where a tear is forming. "I told her she was mine," he whispers. "It didn't matter what she wanted. There was no escape."
…
…
There is more blood than he anticipated, so this is the end of the road.
He picks the doctor up and puts her on the bed. Her head lolls to the side at an awkward angle, no matter how he tries to position it.
He gives up.
He paid for the room, for the room service, for the X-rated movie last night, and the hot stone massage this morning.
His fingerprints are all over the room, all over the champagne bottle shattered by the foot of the bed...All over the doctor's body.
He dresses, undresses, showers and re-dresses.
He leaves everything behind in the room, including the keycard, and on his way out the door, he looks back at her.
Her expression is one of open disdain. A scoff cut short is still in her throat, he is sure.
"Have fun being famous," he says, and he pulls the door shut behind him.
…
…
"Grace. Grace. Honey, wake up, baby please."
The sirens are blaring, growing louder and louder with each passing second.
Garrett lays on the ground where he has fallen, and watches through his blurry, sideways vision as an older, fiercer, mother looking Jane resuscitates his almost victim.
Maura, how lovely she still is, has her hands over her mouth. She is ashen faced, tear streaked. She has her eyes on her wife. Behind her hands, Garrett is sure she is saying Jane's name.
Quietly. Repeatedly.
Another, harder kick, is delivered to his crotch, and the world dims and darkens for a moment. He hears someone call "Asher! That's enough!" and when his vision clears a bit, he can see Fucking Hero Dave, his arm tight around a boy so brunette and angled, there can be no denying who he is.
Red washes over his eyes, and for a second, he is sure it is death. But no. Just a cop car.
Just the rumbling of an ambulance.
Just the coughing and the sputtering of a little girl as she gasps back into existence, crying, "Mama! Mommy! M-mama!" until they tell her to hush, or until her face is buried in the pianist's winter jacket.
"Garrett Fairfield, you are under arrest for the murder of Angelique Baumann. You have the right to remain silent."
One last picture, as he is hauled to his feet, the useless one that Fucking Hero Dave stomped to oblivion dragging behind him.
A picture of a family huddled on a bench. All holding onto each other. The twin boys, they look up as the police drag him away. Maura Isles (time has been so kind to her, hasn't it), she looks around too. She watches them stuff him into the car without any regard for the useless foot.
Jane and Grace are at the center. Arms around each other tightly.
They don't pay him any mind at all.
Two time Grammy Winner Turns Nightmare into Billboard Gold,
Headed to VMAs
There can be absolutely no doubt in anyone's mind that Grammy award-winning songwriter Jane Rizzoli has had enough heartache to last several lifetimes. So when her daughter, Constance Grace was nearly the last victim of serial rapist and murderer Garrett Fairfield three years ago, no one could blame the musician for taking some time off to be with her family.
"Grace and the boys mean everything to her," a close friend of the family told Rolling Stone last week. "She and Maura [Isles, Rizzoli's wife and former principle dancer for NYC Ballet] always make sure that the children come first. They are very family oriented."
Rizzoli & Isles took both 2013 and 2014 off in order spend time helping their daughter, who suffered a mild traumatic brain injury, recuperate, and to focus on their twin boys, Asher & James, who are making quite a name for themselves as soccer legends at their local high school.
Rizzoli won a Grammy in 2014 for her collaboration with P!NK on the chart topping song "Just Give Me A Reason." but she was not present to accept the award. P!NK's emotional acceptance speech on her behalf, calling out the realities of sexual violence and judicial corruption, received almost 2.2 million youtube hits in the 48 hours after it was posted.
Although no one would hold Rizzoli at fault if she decided to retire from the music industry entirely, this journalist is over the moon to say that both Jane & Maura are back on the scene. Their latest work, a collaboration with Alicia Keys on her new song and video "Holy War" is a phenomenal re-emergence.
"I will work with Jane whenever she calls," Keys tweeted last Tuesday, "and it is a double honor to work with the ever spectacular Mdme. Isles. #Coreodream."
The song "Holy War," has been nominated for a Grammy, though the video is also generating some serious VMA buzz.
When I reached Jane by telephone, to ask her about her hopes for Holy War's success, her exact words were: "I could not care less. I make music because it is inside of me, not because it wins awards."
When I finally screwed up enough courage to ask if she ever thought about Garrett Fairfield, and the reign of terror he'd managed to hold over her life for the better part of two decades (see article "Keys"), there was a long pause.
"I'm sorry," Rizzoli said after a moment. "Who?"