Shopping for Sara
Chapter 11
Leaving Vegas
The knife—the knife—her eyes could not focus; her mind filled with illogical images. Someone said her name.
With a child's eyes she saw the knife protruding from her father's back; no, it was not her father but a woman. A woman bleeding from a knife wound.
Her father had died, gurgling blood forming at his mouth. The woman talked.
A knife—a knife—she actually felt her body falling into a black hole before she was jerked back.
"Sara—Sara—Sara" someone—her mother's voice—no, it was Ronnie's voice—saying her name again and again.
She shook the fog from her brain and left the crime scene. Someone would report it; she would have to talk to Ecklie again. He had never liked her—she had to get out. Her brain played the scene over and over, deviating, converging, shape-changing from her father to the woman. The knife—a kitchen knife had killed her father. She had to get out.
By accident or chance, the murkiness in her mind lifted when Mandy caught her in the hallway.
"The one that got away." Marlon West. Hannah West.
Sara did not sleep; she did not eat. Relentlessly she searched for evidence. The tooth in the hand; Hannah at the scene. The brother's cooperation. Nothing. Nothing trapped Hannah.
If Sara closed her eyes, she saw the knife. Her eyes were not shut when she saw Marlon West in the cell. Her eyes did not close when she confronted Hannah—another little girl left with no one. And, Sara knew, Hannah would never find an Ernie Dell or Gil Grissom.
Peace would never come to Hannah. Peace and quiet, sleep, would never come—to Sara. She sat in her car and began writing. The ghosts of her past—her father, a dead teenager, a dying show girl, a starved foster child, a college student—a merry-go-round turned slowly in her brain. All of them were dead—some surprised, others horrified, a few stoic faces—as they went round and round on a carousel of death.
She wrote a note—a letter—trying to explain what she was doing but she had no idea what that was. She loved Gil Grissom more than life, but he did not want to see her self-destruct. He had said that once about Heather Kessler. Sara did not want him to see the same in her.
…The hardest thing he had ever done for Sara was paying for a ticket on a flight so she could leave Vegas. At the same time he reserved a rental car. While doing this, he kept wiping his eyes with the back of his hand; he had not cried in front of her and he forced himself to swallow the thickening lump in his throat.
He had found Sara. After reading her letter, he left the lab in a trail of whispers. Everyone—Hodges had seen to that—knew of Sara's bewildering kiss, knew she had torn her name from her vest and left without a word.
"I couldn't leave without seeing Hank," she whispered when he sat beside her.
"Sara, why are you leaving?"
"I have to leave, Gil. I can't stay here. Everywhere I look I see the dead. I can't close my eyes without seeing their faces—and sometimes it's my father's face. I think I'm going crazy."
Dark brown eyes glistening with tears looked at him. He pulled her closer.
"No, you are not. What can I do, Sara?"
"I can't stay here."
"Where will you go?"
Tears fell from her eyes and ran down her face.
"I'm going to see my mother. Maybe we can give my angry ghosts a proper burial—make them guardian spirits."
She had not resisted when he had given her a sleeping medication. He had removed her clothes, talking to her as he did so. Saying nothing important, just speaking to fill the emptiness he saw in her eyes. She had not resisted because he promised to put her on an airplane to San Francisco; she was adamant about going alone. For a while he stayed with her waiting for deep sleep to come. Strangely, as he undressed her, she appeared frail; somehow he had not noticed how thin she had become.
Reading her letter again, he almost cried as he heard the heart-breaking plea for help in her words. And he felt powerless.
He talked to Brass who told him about Marlon West. Ecklie agreed to approve extended leave. The department's nurse gave him two names of physicians who worked with work-related medical conditions.
Checking on her every ten minutes, he cooked—cutting up carrots, leeks, potatoes, celery for soup. He grated three different cheeses for sandwiches. He found so much food he knew Sara had eaten even less than he thought. By the time he talked to Sara's mother, finally getting the name of her case worker, he was almost hyperventilating. He left a brief recorded message, knowing the man was probably overloaded with clients with special needs.
If Sara was going to San Francisco, he would also find her a place to stay. They had gone once to visit Sara's mother; he had sat in a plastic chair in the building's lobby while Sara brought her mother downstairs. It had been a beautiful, cloudless day and they had driven north, across the Gold Gate Bridge, for lunch. Everyone agreed it had been a perfect day. They had stayed in a small hotel near her mother's facility; he dialed the number and made a reservation.
Grissom had lived with his mother's hearing loss almost all of his life, yet Sara had struggled with her mother's mental illness for decades. He leaned his head against the refrigerator and brought his fist against its surface. Why had he not seen this coming, he asked himself, softly beating his clenched hand over and over. A shuddering sob broke from his chest and he cried into his fists.
She would return, he told himself. She needed time to lay her ghosts to rest, talk with her mother, and learn about her father. He had convinced himself of all of this, agreeing with her as she packed a small bag and ate his soup. Again, he asked to go with her; she refused, insisting she needed to do this alone, as an adult, to face her past so she could have a future.
He walked her to the gate and watched a ghost of Sara Sidle pace until her flight was called. She promised to call, to eat and drive carefully. She waved goodbye from the jet way, and he knew his heart would not break, but the ache he felt was dangerously close to the organ that pumped his life's blood.
She needed to go, she insisted, to see her mother, to visit a grave, to see what she could learn about an event over two decades old. She took one bag, two necklaces, and a small blue marble; the rings remained closed inside their blue box.
Grissom said he understood when he really did not. He blamed himself—he should have recognized her deteriorating condition. He could have insisted she get professional treatment; he would—he would try to understand what had happened. With a deep, distressful sigh, he returned to his vehicle and waited until Sara's plane roared overhead. He stopped at his quiet house and took Hank to the dog sitter's and returned to work.
…The thundering emptiness that caused her to leave Las Vegas did not disappear in San Francisco. Broken shards of thoughts and conversations that had been with her since the night Natalie closed her in the truck of a car stayed with her as she walked the streets from her bed and breakfast hotel to the institutional building housing her mother. On her daily walks she heard the chatter of happy people who had never seen a dead body or experienced a night and day of hell in a desert. Once inside the care facility where her mother lived, the black hole that had started in her mind that night opened inside her. She could see it when she looked inward, wide, deep, and without light. She could see herself, on hands and knees at the rim of it trying not to be sucked into its darkness—into the very place where her mother had hidden for twenty years.
With her mother, as with Grissom, she tried to think herself free of this confusing-mind numbing daze. But the black hole inside kept pulling, dragging her into its depth. Another week passed and each day when she talked to Grissom, she managed to convince him she was forcing the pathetic image of herself to disappear.
Anything—everything seemed to slam Sara back into the desert, under the car, trying to walk to safety. Every night, while watching the news, her mind turned to war, plague and pestilence, famine and genocide, and the rape of women in the Sudan. And the hole that had opened within her grew deeper than Pandora's Box.
A simple art class in the large day room of her mother's facility whipped her back into that night—a sudden flash of the sun hitting a shiny surface as someone opened a window, a small model of a car laid on its roof by the man who was painting it. The abrupt and vivid memory pushed her back into her chair, her hands covered her face. If she made a sound, she did not hear it but suddenly there were people surrounding her.
A few minutes later, she was staring at a doctor—not a medical doctor, but a psychologist who had his office on the first floor and who saw the residents, or clients, who lived in the building. Instantly, Sara knew he was the state-paid shrink referred to by her mother as Doctor V.
"How do you feel?" he asked.
"I feel fine," Sara said, attempting to look self-confident even if she could not remember how she had gotten from the big room where everyone was painting or working with clay or building models to this office. Doctor V smiled slightly. "It must have been the sun—I didn't sleep well last night." She said as an explanation.
She did not want to talk to this man. Her mother liked him, trusted him. But Sara had been unable to trust anyone like him before in her life. She trusted Gil Grissom. She clamped her mind down; she wasn't going to cry in front of him either.
"May I call you Sara?" He asked, quietly, removing his glasses and pinching the bridge of his nose in a manner that was eerily familiar to her. His voice was surprisingly gentle.
"Yes." She managed to find the word.
"Your mother talks about you every week when I see her. She's delighted you have come for an extended visit—an emotion that is often difficult for her." He rolled his pen between his fingers. "What happened in the day room?"
She did not answer his question, not to be rude, but because she simply did not remember.
His voice remained soft, calm, so peaceful in his small gray office when he said: "Sara, you just had a classic episode of post-traumatic stress."
Her confusion showed in her face.
"You don't remember, do you?"
She shook her head.
"Has this happened before—that you can remember?" When she shook her head again, he continued. "I know you were kidnapped."
When she made an audible gasp, he said, "Your mother gets a newspaper from Las Vegas every day. When she learned you were kidnapped—by then you had been found—I called the hospital and finally got an update on your condition from…" he opened a drawer and flipped through papers. "Gil Grissom. He's the same person who called to tell your mother you were coming."
Suddenly, the anger eating from inside her gushed out. New tears filled her eyes; she could feel her mouth opening in the cry of a child. She was imploding, exploding, her body was turning inside out as a dam broke, her bones melted, her spine curved. Mucus poured from her nose and mixed with a deluge of tears.
The doctor was around the desk, hand outstretched offering a box of tissues to her. His face showed genuine concern and pain for her suffering. She had misjudged him; his hands were closing on her for an embrace. The deep black hole inside her opened and she felt herself tumbling into it. Somewhere in her brain she knew this kind-hearted man could help her. There was no magic bullet, no genie in a bottle, no ghosts to bury. He would let her say the words in her confused mind. The black hole was her brain and the longer she kept her thoughts there, the deeper the abyss became. She choked on a rising cry.
An hour passed. People came to his door and were waved away. Someone brought in bottles of water. Another box of tissues appeared.
Sara had no idea what she was saying. She didn't want to think about anything but she couldn't stop her brain from exploding like Mount St. Helens as she formed words describing the images of the night of her kidnapping and the day of walking in the desert. At some point she talked about her father, her mother, and the night her parents disappeared from her life.
"Is this the first time you've—you have talked to someone?" Doctor V asked; it had remained the same calm voice each time he spoke.
In that moment, Sara could not remember if she had talked to anyone else or not. She remembered what had happened-broken bones, wounds, bruises, the aches and pains of recovering physically. But as she stared into the face of this man, she could not remember.
Softly, he continued, "On Wednesday afternoon, I am here for appointments for people living outside of this facility." He opened up a flat black notebook on his desk. "You do need help—if not me, you need to talk to someone. Post traumatic stress syndrome is very real. You are having nightmares, uncontrollable thoughts about your recent event, flashbacks, which bring back memories of the death of your father."
He took the wad of soggy tissues from her hand. "This is an event in your life—you are experiencing common reactions to trauma. You may not want to talk about this, about your father's death, but getting help can help you recover. You do not have to live with this the rest of your life."
Sara caught new tears with fresh tissues. "I've lived with the ghost of my father for so long I don't think I even know the truth, Doctor."
"Sara," he said softly, "I've talked with your mother for years. Your father was killed by a woman with severe psychosis, undiagnosed at the time. She's schizophrenic and, with treatment, she's been able to live in a supportive environment. She is not the same woman who killed your father."
Sara agreed to return on Wednesday. She would talk to this man whose down-to-earth appearance belied his nature and knowledge. In the grip of emotions she had been afraid to show to anyone else, she saw the fine lines from worry and too little sleep in his face. He cared for people. He was not deceptive, no pretentiousness in his simple office or its furnishings. He was so very familiar to the person she loved most. As she left the building, she looked up. Sun rays glinted and sparkled off the windows of skyscrapers in the distance. For the first time in weeks, she felt the warmth of the sun on her skin as she walked.
She actually ordered food and ate her sandwich near the ferry terminal, watching people as they left work. As night came, Sara's hold on her fragile resolve continued. She talked to Grissom and heard a smile in his voice as he talked about work and she giggled, a true laugh that he recognized.
"I'm staying here a while, Gil," she said. He became silent. "I think I can talk with my mom's doctor—about everything."
There was a long silence before he spoke. "That's good, Sara. That's good."
A/N: We got Sara to San Francisco...more to come. Now review and our story continues. Thanks!