| Chapter 11 |
| Any comments, suggestions or questions can be directed to the author. Thank you for taking the time to read and I hope you found something that you could enjoy. Disclaimer: I do not own anything in relation to C.S.I., Alliance Atlantic, CBS, William Petersen, Jorja Fox or any other characters contained herein... I just like playing with them now and then while stretching my writing muscles. And if you think there's any money to be gained by suing me, you're in for a horrible disappointment. |
| Check out All the Author's Works in Progress at FanFiction.net |
| Before the end of the shift Catherine had probably told me to snap out of it at least a dozen times. After all that, I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised when she finally declared that I was not welcome in the lab until I could have a civil conversation. Actually, she told me that until I could talk to anyone without acting like a jackass, I might as well stay home. She was right, and so I did. However, it did not improve my mood. Hank had gotten into some trash I mistakenly left in the office, and there was a notice on the door from the HOA reminding me that dues had increased as of the first of the year and I failed to send them the proper funds, so they were kind enough to assess a late fee for my ignorance. It was almost as though the universe had decided to punish me for being a mindless moron. I spent the day checking the computer every five minutes to see if Sara came online or sent me an email. I also started another few dozen emails, only to get frustrated with myself and my stupidity before deleting each and every one of them. Reading proved pointless after I read the same paragraph a half dozen times before I closed the book and tossed it back onto the coffee table. I hadn’t been able to read more than a case file since Sara left. I just didn’t have the patience, nor did I have the desire. The act of reading in the house had inextricably become a team sport over the course of our relationship, and without her there, I simply wasn’t interested. Once I gave up the idea of reading, I decided to work on that new terrarium for the spider in my office. He had outgrown the original, and I had been putting off making the new one for far too long. However, I found myself standing in the doorway to the garage trying to remember exactly why I had gotten up to go out there in the first place. It would appear that my mind was entirely somewhere else. As I stood there wracking my brain to remember what I had gone in search of, the phone began to ring. I wasn’t in a mood to talk to anyone, so my initial reaction was to ignore the sound, but when the answering machine kicked on it immediately clicked in my head that it wasn’t my cell ringing; it was the land line. I spun around on the steps and bolted inside. In the process I managed to rip a toenail off on the top step as I tried to run in my bare feet. I reached the end of the hall as the machine turned over from the greeting to begin the beep for the message. I knew if I didn’t reach the phone in time I would never get another chance, but in my mad dash I failed to remember that Hank had taken up residence by the phone, and I tripped over him as I tried to grab the receiver. When I regained my balance and went to lunge for the phone I heard her voice, and if I had not already been having a heart attack, the desperate sound of it would have broken it in two. “Gil? Are you there?... I guess not… I just wanted to ta-” “SARA, DON’T HANG UP!” I hadn’t meant to yell quite so loudly when I finally got hold of the receiver, but my own desperation took over the volume control for a moment. “Sara? Are you still there?” “Yeah.” Her voice sounded so terribly small and infinitely far away. “I’m sorry, but I was on the other side of the house and I had a little trouble getting to the phone in time. I didn’t mean to shout like that. Are you okay?” I was still out of breath, which made holding it in incredibly difficult, but my chest still felt like restraining the air. “Yeah.” Whatever made her call was obviously not a good thing. Sara never spoke with one word answers. “Are you?” I was on autopilot by that point and answered without any thought as to the conditions in which we were currently operating, “I’ m fairly certain that I’ve shaved a few years off of my life, that toe I left on the garage steps is probably going to start throbbing at any moment, and I think the dog is going to run whenever I come near him for at least a week, but other than that…I’m absolutely miserable.” When I finished rambling on through my answer I was met with perfect silence. For a moment I was sure Sara’s phone must have dropped the call, but when I was about to ask the now clichéd phrase I heard it, faintly; Sara was crying. Swallowing back the fear and the pain, I was barely able to croak out, “Sara, what’s wrong?” And still, there was nothing; nothing but her strained sobs. Any hopes I had about emerging from this conversation in one piece were lost as I gripped the receiver in my white-knuckled hand and tried to wait for her to speak. The anticipation quickly became too much. “Sara… Honey, what is it?” I could hear her sharp intake of breath as she struggled to regain some semblance of control. After several more painful moments of waiting, she whispered through a rasped breath, “I can’t do it.” My heart leapt straight into my throat with the raw emotion in her distressing admission. Forcing it down, I could only ask, “What?” Her sniffles carried over the line with perfect clarity, and I knew that her tears had not subsided. “I can’t go back, Gil. I just can’t.” I fought against the wild conclusions my frightened mind was concocting from her words, and struggled to get a clearer answer. I simply could not allow myself to believe that it was over, not yet, not ever. “Go back where?” Her choked sob came through when she said, “That house… I just can’t do it again.” Closing my eyes tightly, my jaw firmly clenched, I resisted the urge to scream with the agony ripping through my soul. “Sara, tell me what’s happening, please?” There were several deep breaths, and I listened patiently as she fought to get the words out. “I didn’t know that’s what it was… Not when I picked it, I swear I didn’t. I didn’t even recognize it when I got here. It looks so different, Gil. But this morning, I saw it. It’s still there.” I was thrown into complete confusion as her frightened rambling continued, until I finally realized that she was talking about something else entirely. “Why would they leave that there? I don’t understand these people. And my god, the things she said. I was sure that I was going to just-… I don’t know what I would’ve done. I don’t want to know.” Her sobs took over again and I felt every one of them in my heart. Sara’s pain was very real and I wanted nothing less than to take it all from her, and protect her from anything else. Just when I was about to try speaking again, she cried out, “I can’t do this anymore!” Those words froze me to the core. Sara was breaking down, and I couldn’t do a damn thing about it but stand in my bare feet with the phone held tightly in my grasp as she fell apart six hundred miles away from me. With every ounce of control I could muster up, I held back all of my own fears and reached out to her. “Sara, try to breathe,” I could hear the sound of air being drawn into her lungs as one more sob stuttered from her throat, “and start over. Where are you right now?” She sniffed again and softly said, “I’m in the car.” With her very brief and vague answer, I knew it was going to have to go slow if I had any hope of salvaging this mess. “Okay, and where’s the car?” I could hear her breathing slow down from the heaving gasps of her sobbing. “At the bottom of the hill.” It was like a giant spotlight had just been shown into my eyes, as the realization hit me with the same kind of impact; Sara was talking about the house she grew up in. “Sara, are you at your parents’ old house?” There was a single sniff and a timid word of confirmation before I heard her feeble control evaporate into another fit of sobbing. I closed my eyes to keep my own tears at bay and struggled through the torture of hearing her in so much pain. I had to stay strong. If there was one thing that I could do for Sara, I had to do this. “Sara?” She didn’t respond, and I was even more worried about her state of mind. I poured every ounce of calm into my voice as I spoke in a clear, level and assertive tone, “Sara, I need you to do me a favor. I need you to take a deep breath and answer me, okay?” When I heard her slow, stuttering intake of breath I knew that she heard me, and I waited for her answer. “Yeah.” “Just answer my questions, yes or no, and we’ll try to figure this thing out afterwards, okay?” I wasn’t sure where the calmness came from, but just hearing my own words helped me to stamp down the panic raging through my brain. “Yeah.” Whatever I was doing, it seemed to work. My first priority was to determine her exact location. “Are you in Tomales Bay?” “Yes.” As she answered I took the phone with me into the office, Hank close at my heels. Even the dog could sense that there was trouble. “Are you parked in the car somewhere in Tomales Bay?” I flipped the monitor back on and proceeded to pull up a map of the area. “Sort of, yeah… It’s actually Inverness, but it’s on the Bay.” That was good; Sara was processing information with more than monosyllabic answers now. “Right…” The first time she mentioned the place I had looked it up, and discovered that Tomales Bay was actually just a series of smaller towns around the bay itself, instead of its own town. “But you are parked somewhere safe, correct?” “Yes. I’m down the street at the bottom of the hill where-…in a parking lot.” I heard the falter in her voice and while it confirmed my earlier suspicions, I still needed to know for certain where she was at. “Sara, are you down the street from the place your parents once owned?” Previously, after Sara had revealed to me the nature of her upbringing, I researched her background more thoroughly. I had seen the property records for the house once owned by her father’s family, as well as the eviction and property sale records from 1976. I knew exactly where to point the map to next. She sniffed twice, and I knew she was fighting back the tears once again, but she remained calm enough to answer, “Yes.” It was all beginning to make sense to me; Sara’s wild exclamations, the location, her unbelievable pain. She must have mistakenly reserved a room in the same establishment her parents once operated, and something happened while she was there to trigger the memories. I suddenly wished I had gone to Sara’s mother when I had to chance to question her about their past. There was so much that I just didn’t know, and she was likely the only person capable of answering any of those questions. Despite Sara’s assertions that the woman claimed not to have those memories any longer, I felt certain that she would answer my questions, even if she would not answer Sara’s. I swallowed my regret and asked another question, “Sara…is that where you stayed last night?” The tremble in her voice had grown, but she was still holding on, “Yes.” Drawing in a deep breath, I slowly expelled it and some of the tension building in my shoulders before forging on ahead. This was dangerous territory, and I had to be very careful with the things I said and asked. “Do you want to tell me what happened this morning?” “No.” Her answer was eerily cool, and I knew this would be a fight. “Then can I as-” “But I will.” I was frozen mid-word by her quiet declaration. “Only if you think you’re ready, Sara… I don’t want to you to force it.” I needed this to be her decision alone. She needed to know that I was willing to live with whatever she offered. I knew that now Sara needed to know my feelings for her were without limits or conditions. After several moments of silence, broken only by her deliberate breathing, she began, in that voice that told me she was trying to distance herself from the things she said. “I didn’t recognize it when I got here. I drove in from San Francisco and went straight to the house, so I never went on the hill. They’ve done a lot of work on the house; different color, different trim, an addition, redone the porch, the whole works. But it was weird, because when I walked inside to check-in, it felt…off. Like there was more to the place than I was seeing.” There was a long pause as she gathered her thoughts again, and I simply waited with my heart in my throat. “Went to my room, slept through the night, and woke up really early. All the time changes have really messed with my sleep schedule. When I got up, I looked out of the window in my room, and I suddenly felt this horrible, weirdly familiar gnawing in my stomach. I thought it was because I hadn’t eaten in a while, so I went to the closet to get my suitcase out.” She stopped there, and I heard her hands fumble with the phone. I assumed that she was trying to wipe away the tears from the sounds coming through the phone. I knew that the next thing she said was going to rip my heart out of my chest. “It was still there. Like no one had ever seen it, or thought about covering it up or anything.” Her soft sobs were the next thing I heard, and it tore me up. I wanted to be able to reach out to her, cover her hand with mine, gently pull her into my arms, and wipe all of her hurt away. Instead, I only had the tenuous connection of the phone line. My voice was my only tool, and I had to use whatever I had to reach her. “I’m still here, Sara, and all of this is in the past, Honey. You just need to get it out. Let it go, Sara. Tell me what it was.” “It was…the same closet.” I held my breath waiting for her to finish. My mind was a swirling mass of scenarios, none of them good, and I just needed to know so that I could try to comfort her from this pain. “The closet Jack used to lock me in when- …when it started getting really bad. I was in Jack’s room.” “I always thought it was my safe place. Nothing bad could get me in there. I could sleep without nightmares. I could read my books in the window and see the water. I could draw and paint my pictures, and they would never get torn up or ruined. I could cry and no one would tell me to stop being a baby or yell at me. But when it got…bad, it was the only place I could…hide.” In my mind, I saw a scared, fragile little girl, hiding away from the waking nightmares of a violent home, buried in the back of a dark closet, locked away from the screaming, the hitting, the agony, and of a brave little boy desperately trying to spare his little sister from the torment, and that was when my tears would no longer hold back. Choking back my emotions, I painfully asked, “Sara, what was still the closet?” That eerie quiet was back, and I waited as Sara struggled with what she had to say. “One night, not long before we moved, Jack locked me in there, but he didn’t have time to give me my flashlight, so it was really dark. I used to be scared of the dark, but I was more scared of what was outside. The only thing I had was the little penknife Jack gave me for my birthday that week. Nervously, I took it out and started tracing on the floorboards the words that I kept repeating in my head, over and over.” I didn’t want to know what had been her little girl mantra, but I had to know. “What were the words, Sara?” It took a few more moments before she whispered with a rehearsed slowness, “Please don’t kill us.” There was nothing left for me to do, and so I cried. Six hundred miles between us, and we cried together for the little girl who feared for her life, and for the life of her brother. We cried for the innocence she was never allowed to have. We cried for the pain she endured. We cried for all of the pain that followed and all of the pain that continued to affect her life and our lives together. We cried until it seemed like the tears would never stop again. When I finally felt the pleading eyes of our beloved dog as he tried to sneak his head in under my hand, I realized that our combined pain was palpable enough for even Hank to feel. I crouched down on the floor beside him and held Hank the way I could not hold Sara right then. Once I had calmed myself enough to let go of my whimpering companion, I wiped the last tears from my eyes and cleared my throat. Now was time to help Sara. My pain would be healed when she was able to return, this was about helping her. “Are you okay?” I could hear her struggle to regain control of herself as she blew her nose and wiped away the tears once more. “I’m still here… Does that count?” There was an uncomfortable laugh that followed her question, and I felt relief at her ability to try and find some humor. “It counts… It counts a lot.” I knew it was ridiculous, but I thought I could actually hear her smile with my comment. “Thank you.” I had a pretty good idea about what, but I still asked, “What for?” “For everything. When I called, I just wanted to forget the whole thing. I wanted to come home and pretend like none of this was real. It works for my mother, so why not just leave it alone and never think about it again.” She heaved a huge sigh and I could tell that she was feeling stronger. “I thought I would tell you I was coming home and all was well. I honestly thought I could lie to you, to myself, and go on like none of this mattered. But-” The tightness was back in her voice, and I waited for her to finish. “But then I heard your voice. You sounded so very far away. Like my life with you was a million miles from where I was, and then you started talking. I knew that I owed it to you to finish. That I’ve already put you through so much, and to lie to you now would be the biggest mistake of my life.” “Sara, I-” “Let me finish…” I heard her draw in a sharp breath, and I held mine as I waited for her to continue. “I’m sorry, but I need to get this out. When I’m done you can tell me all the things I did wrong, okay?” Hearing her accusation cut me to the quick, and I realized that we both still had a lot of work to do in this relationship. “Sorry, that didn’t come out right. I just need to say this before I lose my courage.” My pride sufficiently in check, I gave my consent. “Go ahead.” “Thank you.” She stopped for a moment, and I knew she was working against her frustration to continue. I was still trying to figure out that careful balance of when to say something, and when to just listen. And when it came to Sara, I was even worse at making that decision. “I know I’ve hurt you. And a few times, it was probably on purpose. Those times are the ones that scare me more than anything. To know that I can inflict that kind of pain on another person; that such blackness can exist in me. That’s why I left when I did. I saw just how black the inside of my heart had become, and I was afraid of what that meant for us, for me. I didn’t want you to see that in me, I didn’t want to see it in myself, but the thought of exposing that darkness to you was the most frightening thing I could think of. I was sure that if you saw it, even once, I would lose you forever. It seems irrational now, but that was how I felt.” My arms ached to wrap around her and show her with their strength that I was never going to leave her, but my head knew that there was so much more left to be said, and so I waited. “Gil, I’ve spent my whole life trying to live down my past. Even as a child I had to deal with that. The looks of pity on the faces of the guests after one of my parents’ fights got too loud to ignore. The teachers in Modesto that asked me why my parents never showed up for school conferences. The nurses in the ER who would shake their heads while one of us was being patched up. The kids in school who never invited me to their parties. They all knew, they all saw it, and they did nothing. And then I saw the guilt on their faces when I was taken out of the house that night. I had to live all of that shame, that guilt, that pity down. Even when people didn’t know about my past, it was still there, like a ghost, driving me on.” She stopped for a moment, but I was too afraid to speak, and so I waited. “By the time I got to Berkeley to finish grad school, I thought I had gotten past all of that. I thought I was living my life, free from the past. I had friends, I had my studies, I had a good job, but it was all a lie. I knew it was a lie, but I didn’t care anymore. I just wanted to be normal. Well, as normal as an over-achieving clean freak insomniac could be. I didn’t want to be that girl anymore; that girl with the tragic past. And then I met you.” I heard the deliberate swallow through the phone and I prepared for the worst. “You made me realize how much more there was out there, that I could use my skills, or talents, or whatever to help people. I could actually prevent another little girl from being that silent witness. I could bring to justice the people who stole their innocence. I could be a part of the solution, and that made me want to break out of my carefully constructed shell of emotional isolation. The problem was…that shell was protecting me from a lot of things, not just my past. It protected me from the truth, too.” There was a deep sigh, and I waited for her to be ready to continue. “The other night, before we talked on the computer… I had dinner with an old co-worker. It was nothing special, just a couple of old friends meeting at an old hangout. The problem was that it was the same hangout all the old crew met at, so we ran into this jackass who managed to weasel his way into a supervisor’s job. Anyway, he started going on and on about the lab there and then he said something that knocked me over. Apparently there was some kind of pool going when I started there about how long before our boss chased me off, because he only ever hired women he wanted to nail. All this time I had been operating under the assumption that I was hired based on my abilities and this bastard tells me that I was just another piece of ass. Then he tells me that if I think I’m gonna get hired back now, I’d better switch teams to get the job, since the new boss was a woman. But the worst part, the person I was having dinner with laughed right along with him. How could I have ever trusted people like that? How could I have never known that people thought that way about me? It was a really hard pill to swallow. To know that I was so blinded back then, that I wouldn’t have seen that. So, when you told me about how we met, I think I overreacted. It just hit a little too close to home, and I was suddenly afraid that I’d been wrong about you, too. When I had time to think about it, as I drove out here, I knew I was wrong. I know your heart, and you could never be so cold, or that cruel. I was writing you an apology when I fell asleep last night, but I wanted you to know that I am sorry about cutting you off. I hope you can understand.” I felt relief and regret all at the same time. I was relieved to know that I had not done anything to hurt Sara, but I hated the fact that I could do anything that would put me in the same league as such a callous and insensitive person. “It’s okay. I was just worried I had done something wrong. And regardless of what that idiot told you, I know for a fact that you were not hired as a conquest. The director of the lab called me personally to ask about my letter of recommendation.” It was all that I had to offer in the way of comfort, but I hoped it would be enough. “Thank you for that. It still hurts, to know that it’s what people were thinking, but the truth feels a lot better.” The sigh she released then was like a balm to my heart. But I knew there was more to come, and so I waited. “At the same time, the truth also scares me to death. I keep thinking about how ready I was to turn my back on the truth, and just pretend the past wasn’t there. I said before, that it seems to work for my mother… Well, that’s a lie. It doesn’t work for her. “When I stay with her in San Francisco, it’s not any different than staying at a hotel. She’s there, but she’s not. She goes to work, she eats, she sleeps…and she drinks. If I’m lucky, she says more than five words to me in a day, and even those I have to drag out of her. About once a year, I’ve tried to get her to talk to me about…before, but it always ends with me walking out and not seeing her again for another year. I can’t even tell her about Jack and the girls and Melissa, because she doesn’t hear me, she won’t hear me. Jack is part of the past now and she doesn’t do the past.” The pain I heard in those last words was unbearable. It hurt me to know that Sara was facing all of this on her own, and that there was nothing I could do about it. “For a few minutes, I honestly thought I could do it, just shut down my connection to the past and go on like nothing ever happened. Your voice, your words, they reminded why I could never do that, and I just lost it. It was all coming down on me, all at once, and I was so afraid. Afraid of what I could have done to me; to you. Without even thinking or trying, I nearly became my mother. I almost brought that hell into our home, and just the thought of that broke me down.” The tears were back, but the tone of her voice was somehow different; stronger, more certain. “I know now… I have a lot more work to do. I have to move on and to do that, I have to make peace with the past. I need to figure out what it is that makes me want to shut it all out, because if I don’t, I’ll truly become the one thing that has haunted me my entire life; my mother.” My heart pounded in my ears as I listened to the silence that followed her explanation; her declaration. It felt like she was leaving me all over again, only this time she was already gone, and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. I fought to push aside the knot in my stomach, as well as the lump in my throat in order to speak. “Sara… I-” “There’s nothing else to say right now. Thank you for not letting me give in to the fear. Your words…your strength…they’ve always meant so much to me, Gil. I know I’ve not always been very good at expressing that, or accepting it for that matter, but they have always been important to me.” She moved around in the car, and I heard the bells as she turned the key in the ignition. “I need to go back to the house, get my things, and give that horrible woman a piece of my mind.” Suddenly filled with desperation, I was forced to ask, “Sara, what are you doing? Where are you going?” “I’m not sure yet. But I need to figure this stuff out, and until I do, I don’t think I’m really going to know anything for certain. I hope you can understand. I just can’t keep running from these ghosts. I know now that they will never rest, so I guess I need to find a way to live with them, if I’m ever truly going to live. Thank you, for everything. I love you, Gil. That will never change.” “Sara, I lov-” As I hurriedly spat out the words, I heard the click on the phone and knew that it was done. I had helped Sara to overcome her fear of that place, of her past, and in doing so, I released her into the world to find her place in it. There was nothing else I could say, nothing else I could do, and so I waited. It was my turn, and no matter how long it took, I would wait for her. However, I needed to move on as well. I could no longer afford to mourn for her, because she wasn’t really gone. I needed to continue my life, my work, and hope that one day she would return to me and we could begin again. All I had to do was wait. |
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