| 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. |
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| The continuing years of the Discovery Series storyline as the family gets ready for a big event. The family storyteller gathers up some photos and shares a perspective on the past. (including a "photo album" scrapbook) GSR/Yo!Bling/Etc. *Rated PG for Most Everyone. |
| LIKE IT WAS YESTERDAY |
| Part 9 - Of Beginnings & Truths |
| Walking through the house, it was odd for him to find not even a hint of activity. His entire life, there was not a single day he could recall that there was not something going on in that house. It felt strange, and he could not put a finger on why. He made his way to the kitchen and pulled out the juice from the refrigerator. Though there was no one to watch him, he took a glass from the dishwasher and poured the juice. In his experience, only when he was sure no one was around would be the time he got caught drinking out of the container. He was convinced his parents had hidden cameras all around the house. With a bagel firmly lodged in the toaster, he went in search of the cream cheese, somewhere in the vastness of their enormous fridge. He located it just as the toaster popped. Before he had a chance to finish making his breakfast, there was finally another sign of life in the house, and it came from sound out in the solarium. Quickly slapping the cream cheese onto the bagel, he scooped up his breakfast and made his way out there. When he cleared the damper on the doorway, he was instantly transported to a garden he only ever heard about; his grandmother’s. The moisture in the cooled air instantly filled his nostrils, along with the delicate scent of sweet peas. And seated at the table was the source of life for the entire house. “Hey, Mom…what’re you doing home?” Daniel announced his presence to his mother. “I could say the same to you.” She gave him an appraising look and asked, “Aren’t you scheduled for an ER rotation today?” As he took the seat opposite her at the table, Daniel shrugged. “Nah… I finally got busted for my hours, so I’m off ER rotation until next week.” “I hope it wasn’t your father.” Her concerned stare made him laugh. “Nope… It was Uncle Robert, actually. Pulled my hours to see if I could scrub in on a femur fracture graft, and went a little ballistic.” Daniel chuckled as he remembered his uncle coming unglued on the chief resident in the ER. “Remind me not to piss off Uncle Robert anytime soon, will ya?” “That’s a good plan all the time.” He laughed at his mother’s conclusion. As she went back to work, Daniel peered over her shoulder to get a better look at what it was that had her attention. He saw the old pictures and all of the supplies for affixing them to the pages, which told him exactly what she was up to. “How many more of those do you have, Momma?” She released a heaving sigh and begrudgingly admitted, “Far more than I care to think about this late in the game.” “That bad?” He wiped off his hands on his pants and started leafing through the photographs. “I’m afraid so. And your brother just sent me his two pages, plus he has some other page he’s going to bring with him when he gets here for the party. I swear that boy is trying to make my hair gray.” Daniel always found his mother’ s exasperation funny, and this was no exception. “Oh come on, Mom. It can’t be that bad. It’s looks to me like you have a lot of pages already.” He plopped the last bite of his bagel in his mouth and stood up to move around the table. “And you’ve just found yourself another pair of hands until Sunday night.” “Thank you, Danny, but this isn’t exactly your forte.” “Hey, I am qualified to perform a bowel resection, so I think I can handle cutting up a few pictures and do-dads for a scrapbook.” He scooted in beside his mother and waited for her to give in to his offer. When he bumped her with his hip, Stephanie laughed outright. “Okay, okay… If you’re sure?” “Absolutely… I can’t be the only one not helping with this thing.” Daniel smiled down at his mother before delivering his punchline, “Besides, if I help, then I don’t have to get Uncle Gil another tie he won’t ever wear.” “Good point… And we wouldn’t want that, for sure.” She gingerly picked up the page she had been working on and slid it across the table to Daniel. “Okay, use those sticky things to attach all of that to the page, just like I have it laid out.” “Sweet… I think I can handle that one.” He quickly returned to the other side of the table and got ready to work. However, when he looked down at the page, he was dumbstruck by what he found. All over the page was a young girl and woman that he was hard pressed to recognize. Once he finally got over the shock, he looked up and asked his mother, “Is this really Aunt Sara?” |
| She instantly laughed at his question. “Of course it is! Why would you ask a question like that?” Daniel shrugged and tried to explain his initial reaction, “Well, she just… I don’t know, some of these, they just don’t look like her.” “Well, we all have to start from somewhere, kiddo. And we all end up aging at some point.” “No, it’s not that…” He interrupted his mother and showed her a picture of a very young Sara, her hair short, and her fresh adult teeth showing through. “That’s not my Aunt Sara. She’s not even smiling. Not really. And this one…” He brought up a picture of a teenage Sara, her hair bigger than anything in nature and showed it to his mother. “She doesn’t even look like she’s really there in this one. And there’s not even a hint of smile on her face.” “Danny… You know that not everyone got to grow up the way you kids have, and your Aunt Sara was not quite as lucky as we were.” She took the large cutout picture of Sara from the center and showed it to her son, “This is how she looked when we met. She was always thinking, and this is how I like to remember her from that time.” Stephanie handed it to him and continued, “But that wasn’t how she always looked. In fact, she was pretty sad back then. Thankfully, that all changed when she and your Uncle Gil finally got together.” Daniel nodded, though he still wasn’t satisfied with the answer. “So, what about these?” He showed her the two from the top corner, where Sara appeared to be genuinely smiling. In one she wore a t-shirt and looked quite a bit younger than the one where she looked like she was leaning up against a wall. “I actually had to double check the dates on those.” His mother gave him that knowing smile he had always found comfort in. “The t-shirt one is from before she came to Las Vegas. I think she may have even still been in grad school.” “But that’s way before they got together, so why is she smiling like that?” “That’s easy… It’s from when they met. Your Uncle Gil took that picture when he was showing her around the San Francisco crime lab.” She smiled again and sat back in her chair. Daniel could tell the memories were bubbling up in her mind. “Man…I guess I just didn’t realize they’d known each other that long.” Daniel started gluing down the pictures, following the order his mother had laid out. Stephanie curiously asked, “Haven’t I told you this story before?” Daniel shook his head and answered, “Not that I remember. I’ve heard how you and Aunt Cath got them together, but not how they met.” “Me either.” Another voice joined them from the doorway. “I thought you were covering for me this morning?” Stephanie suspiciously asked her young charge. “I was, but David came in and told me to get lost. So, I thought I’d swing by to see if you needed any help.” Lilli crossed the room and pulled up a chair at the table. “But I’d much rather listen to story hour.” “Okay then… Let me just think for a second.” Before Stephanie could start again, her son interjected with, “That could take a while… Who else needs a drink?” With his drink orders in place, Daniel slipped out to retrieve the beverages. As soon as he was out of the room Lilli leaned over to get a good look at the pictures Stephanie was working on. |
| “Oh wow! Is that really you and Mom…BOTH pregnant?!” Lilli could not contain her shock. In all her life she had never seen a picture of her mother pregnant. It had long been one of the family jokes that her mother became a ninja when she was pregnant. “So, how is it that you have this picture and I’ve never seen it?” “Easy… Your mother is going to have me killed when she sees them in this book.” They both laughed at the joke. “Seriously, if it wasn’t for this book being for your father, she’d have my hide nailed to the shed for certain.” “Wait, there’s more than one?” She looked over the page and found the other culprit. In that picture her mother appeared physically larger than she ever imagined the woman could be. Lilli had always thought of her mother as larger than life, but seeing that picture was the first time she ever saw it in full clarity. “Oh…My…God! She’s HUGE!” “Yeah, it’s been nice to know you… Comments like that could seal my fate, kid.” Stephanie removed the picture from the page and looked at it closely again. “And the worst part…she was barely seven months when I took this one.” “Are you serious?! Jesus! How big did she get?” Lilli was entirely beside herself with that information. “Well, with you it wasn’t so bad, but this was when she was pregnant with Max. And let’s just say your mother wasn’t so much a ninja during that time, as much as she possessed a death ray glare that NO ONE dared to violate.” She returned the picture to the page and sat back in her chair. “Then how’d you get that one?” Stephanie chuckled as Danny returned to the room with their drinks. “Because the person who took the picture was sneaky and very lucky.” “Uh-oh… I think I know this one. Is this about that picture of Aunt Sara when she was preggers?” Daniel handed his mother a bottle of root beer as he asked his question. “Hey! How do you know about this picture and I don’t?!” Lilli indignantly took the glass of milk from Daniel’s grasp. Laughing as he finally took his seat, Daniel sat back and waited the perfect amount of time to irritate his cousin. “Don’t even try that Cheshire Cat thing with me Daniel Robert O’Halleran. Spill it.” “For somebody so damned smart, I can’t believe you don’t know.” Daniel laughed again, and gave his mother a playful wink. When he saw that Lilli was about to get out of her chair he finally held up his hands in surrender. “Don’t get your panties in a twist…especially since you’re the wisenheimer who took the damn thing.” “WHAT?!” Lilli instantly looked to Stephanie for corroboration. “Yeah, you must have been digging in my purse when we went out to this restaurant with Nick and R.J. one night. You somehow managed to completely change all of the settings on my camera, and then took pictures of your knees, Mikey’s elbow, your Dad’s ear and that one of your Mom on the black and white setting. I got the camera away from you when I saw it in your hands and then hid it away before your mother could see anything.” Stephanie’s face took on such a serene expression when she would recall the events of her children’s lives, and this was no exception. “Thomas and I must have laughed about those pictures that night for hours. He even woke up still chuckling in the morning.” “Oh wow…” Lilli found herself at a loss for words, which was a fairly uncommon occurrence for the young woman. She stared at the picture for a long while before she was finally able to ask another question, “But how does Danny know about this and I don’t?” “Because I was Jimmy’s and Max’s shadow, and they were going through old pictures with Momma one day. When they got to that picture, she told them the story, but swore us all to secrecy by making us promise that if we told,” Daniel looked over at his mother, who wore a devilish grin, before continuing. “She’d have us all on perma-ban from Uncle Gil’s lab, and she’d make us wear t-shirts with our pet names on them to school.” Stephanie only shrugged when Lilli looked to her for confirmation. “I think you would have been adorable with a Danner-Nanners t-shirt, especially if I put that picture of you eating your first banana on it.” Daniel cringed at the very thought of it, but still laughed with the others over the whole ordeal. As they laughed, Lilli exclaimed, “I would have killed to see Max wearing a shirt with Mushy Butt on it!” “And that’s exactly why the threats worked so well. And how I’ve managed to survive this long with that picture in my possession.” She reached out to pick up the photo again. “And why I am seriously thinking about putting it back in the box.” “No way!” Lilli and Daniel called out in unison. The two exchanged worried looks and then Lilli took over. “Steph, you gotta leave it in. Daddy will love it, and that means Mom will, too. She’ll get over the whole huge part the moment she sees those eyes get all crinkly when Daddy smiles.” Stephanie nodded her head and put the picture back. “Let’s hope you’re right.” Daniel went back to work gluing his page and decided a subject change was in order. “So, now that that’s settled…are you gonna tell us this story, or do we have to start begging?” When Stephanie looked up, she found two sets of over the top puppy dog eyes staring back at her. “Oh please! Like that ever worked on me.” “Hasn’t stopped us from trying yet… So, hand me the glue and we’ll work while you talk.” Taking the glue from Stephanie, Lilli turned to Daniel and said, “The bribery always works better, but it can’t hurt to keep our options open first.” “All right, ya little con artist… I’ll tell you the story.” Stephanie stretched out her legs as she leaned back in her seat again. “What story am I supposed to be telling again?” Daniel held up the picture in question, showing Sara in a t-shirt at some lab. “Oh yeah… When they met.” A pensive expression fell over her face. “Are you sure I’ve never told you guys this one?” “Nope… All Mom and Dad ever said was that they met at a conference or a seminar or something. And that it took them way too many years to figure it all out before they got together.” Lilli’s rapid fire summary of a very complicated relationship was enough to make Stephanie shake her head. “I wish it was that easy… No, your folks definitely did things the hard way. In fact, I’d be inclined to say that they got it totally backwards.” Stephanie chuckled as the memories started coming together. “Backwards? How do you do it backwards?” Daniel was completely confused by his mother’s analysis. “Mutual respect, attraction, falling head over heels, walking away, pen pals, co-workers, more distance, dating other people, even more distance, tolerance, comfort, sharing, respect, walking away, ever after…. Yeah, I’d call that backwards, at best. At worst, two of the most socially inept human beings on the face of the planet finally removing their heads from their collective asses in order to spend the rest of their lives together and make a couple of halfway decent mongrel children.” Daniel was beside himself with laughter by the time his mother was done with her little tear. He loved it when his mother went off, and even more when it was someone in their twisted little family. “Ooookay… You’re gonna have to explain the rest of that one to me some day.” Lilli shook her head with confusion. “But for now… How’d they meet?” “Fair enough.” Stephanie settled in to start her story. “Your Dad was in town for one of his infamous seminars. This time it was at Berkeley…” XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX His seminars were always the highlight of any visit with him. He would just get so excited when he could share with others something that he loved so much. While the entomological ones were the best, the forensic ones were always a crowd pleaser. The big draw was probably the chance to see dead bodies from crime scenes, but it also came from his enthusiasm when presenting the information. I had probably seen the same forensic entomology lecture a hundred times, and even recognized a few of the pictures from cases I’d read with him before. The lecture rarely changed, but somehow I always managed to pick something new out of it every time. When he presented it at Berkeley that time, I ended up learning a lot more than forensics. I’d gotten there a little late, because I had to re-route my bike path around some construction in the park. Fortunately, no one likes to sit up front at those seminars, so I didn’t have to search for a seat when I got there. I was, however, pleasantly surprised to see the lecture hall nearly filled. He always did better with a full house, because he was less self conscious about his work. At first I was concerned about him, because he didn’t seem to notice that I’d arrived, but then he looked my way and smiled. He told me once that having me at his seminars was always a boost for his confidence, so I made sure to never miss one, if I could help it. The lecture was fantastic, as usual, but it felt like he was distracted through the whole thing. From where I was sitting, I couldn’t see where his eyes kept drifting. During the lunch break I had to run down to the administration building to take care of some paperwork, so I didn’t get a chance to ask him what was up. It just meant that I’d have to ask him about it when we went out to dinner that night. His first night in the city, we always went to dinner for Chinese. There was this fantastic little place in the heart of Chinatown, whose owners thought that the moon and sun rose and set with his whims. It was just as important for him to visit with them, as it was to see me. But by the time we got to the restaurant, I had completely forgotten to ask him what he was so distracted about during the lecture that day. Second day of the lecture was always smaller, because all the people who came just to see the dead bodies had gotten their fill, and they weren’t really interested in listening to him talk about regression timelines and collection techniques. Personally, I thought it was the best part of the lecture portion in his seminars. One of the other benefits of the second day was that I usually had the entire first and second rows to myself. Well, that was the one thing different that time around, because there was this woman in the front row, sitting smack dab in the center of the room. It was especially odd, because I was usually the only person willing to engage him like that. I should mention, I was no longer allowed to sit in the middle, because of the time I sat there making faces at him through the entire lecture trying to get him to laugh. Needless to say, from that point on, he would only look at me during specific intervals of the lecture. However, this time was different, because he didn’t even look over at me during those intervals. Instead, he kept looking at the woman in the center of the front row, almost as though she was the only person in the room. That was when I realized I’d gotten my answer for the unasked question the day before. Strictly on appearances, she looked to be in her twenties, and probably not any older than twenty-two or twenty three, which meant she was most likely a grad student. She had this kind of untamed curly brown hair. It wasn’t messy, but it was definitely wild, and it was exactly something he would like. She was sitting down, so I couldn’t really see how tall she was, but judging from those legs hanging out of the lecture hall seat, I knew she’d be tall enough. Of course, those legs were probably the big draw for him. He was always a sucker for long legs. During the lunch break, I decided to slip out and head across campus to work in the chem lab. It was obvious to me that Uncle Gil was doing just fine in his seminar without me, and I was more concerned about an experiment that I’d been struggling with. On top of that, I was pretty sure he wasn’t even going to notice my absence after the break, simply from the way he couldn’t seem to pull himself away from the leggy brunette with the great questions. I have no idea what happened that afternoon, but when I called my mother from the chem lab, she said we’d be having dinner on our own. It would appear that Uncle Gil had some plans with, as she put it, “a colleague.” And no one knew better than me what that was a codeword for, Uncle Gil had a date. The next day, my curiosity about this “colleague” won out over my desire to discuss the physical properties of inertia, so I made my way back the lecture hall again. It was demonstration day, and that usually meant everyone moved down in the hall to be able to see all the good stuff. It also meant that I could sit in the back and observe the real action. Took me all of about ten minutes to know exactly who the object of his interest was, even though I still couldn’t see her very clearly. There were a couple of tall men between me and her, so all I could make out was her hair, but I knew it was her by the way Uncle Gil kept stealing looks in her direction. After about twenty minutes of seeing those looks, I decided it was time for me to split. After I stopped off at the library to pick up a couple books I’d been waiting on, I went for a workout, and then rode my bike all the way to my mother’s campus to meet her for lunch. When she asked me why I wasn’t having lunch with Uncle Gil, I just smiled and told her that I was pretty sure he wouldn’t be eating alone. When he called to tell her that he had other plans for dinner, we weren’t the least bit surprised. With the seminar over, I knew there was still two whole days before Uncle Gil went back to Vegas. I was more than a little disappointed to find him absent from the breakfast table that morning, so I just went to class. And when my father told me he had arranged for Uncle Gil to show some student around the crime lab, I skipped dinner and went up to study for a test. No one more than me wanted Uncle Gil to be happy, but I was still a little hurt by how easy it seemed to be for him to bail on our time together. And I probably would’ve continued to think that way if it wasn’t for my father. My father asked me if I remembered how Uncle Gil was when he had found that rare species of butterfly on one of our Redwoods trips. And I told him that he spent the next six weeks trying to track down their source, every free moment was in the woods crawling around after these butterflies, and how I hardly ever saw him. That was when it hit me, and my father started laughing at me. Pop just shook his head and told me one of those simple truths, “Doesn’t matter how many butterflies he goes chasing after, he’s always going to end up right back here, telling you all about it.” As usual, Pop was right, only this time I wish he hadn’t been. Uncle Gil was sitting at the breakfast table when I came down the next morning, but it wasn’t the same guy I’d seen in the lecture hall. And I spent the whole day feeling guilty about keeping him away from that “colleague.” I tried talking to him through lunch, but he would just smile and nod a lot, and I knew there was someplace else he’d rather be. I even went so far as to tell him that I had some homework I needed to do, and if he had something better to do I’d understand. But he just smiled and told me that he was where he wanted to be. After he went back to Vegas, I sat down with Mom and told her that I just didn’t understand men. Mom laughed, and asked me what inspired my frustration that time. So, I told her all about what I had seen and everything that happened on Uncle Gil’s last day. Momma just smiled and told me that Uncle Gil rarely belonged lumped into the same category as most men, but that in this particular case, I might have a point. When I asked her to explain, she would only say that even Uncle Gil had to fight the green-eyed monster sometimes, and he wasn’t used to being jealous of anyone fifteen years his junior. XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX “What the hell was Daddy jealous about?” Lilli had been slient through the entire story, but that nugget was just too much for her. Stephanie shrugged noncommittally, “I have no idea… I didn’t even find out that your Mom was that girl until their wedding reception.” “Wow! That’s just incredible.” Lilli held her head up with her hands, her elbows resting on the table. Putting the rest of the pictures and pages back into the boxes, Daniel winked at his mother as he said, “Yeah, Mom. That’s gotta be one of your best bedtime stories ever.” Lilli looked up at Stephanie and then back to Daniel, trying to decide if they were playing a prank on her. “If that’s just a tall tale, I am sooooo gonna throw a fit.” “How is that different from any other day?” Sara walked into the solarium and stood behind Stephanie. “But why are you throwing a fit this time?” “I was just telling them the story of the first time you and Uncle Gil met.” Stephanie bent her neck back to look up at Sara with a wide grin on her face. “Oh God… You didn’t?” When Stephanie only smiled more broadly, she knew that it was true. “Remind me to have your mouth sewn shut one of these days.” Sara rolled her eyes and looked around the table to see the boxes safely closed and not a single page in sight. “Have you gotten started yet?” “Don’t even try to change the subject now, Mom… Why was Daddy jealous when he left San Francisco?” Sara glared at Stephanie, realizing that once again she was responsible for leaving her fumbling for an explanation after the fact. “Well… I can’t say for sure, because only he can confirm that one, but…” “But what?” Stephanie was not about to let her off the hook and it earned her another steely glare. “But… He might have gotten the impression that I was flirting with someone at the lab when he had Steph’s father give me that tour.” Sara actually blushed slightly at her revelation. “Well, that’s just silly.” Lilli took the bottles and the glass from the table as she got up. “Thank you.” Sara was infinitely proud that her daughter saw things her way. Even after fourty years, Gil still gave her a hard time for that encounter. “Yeah, everyone knows your flirting doesn’t mean anything… You do it all the time.” It became quite obvious to Sara that Stephanie was indeed rubbing off on her daughter as she nonchalantly went into the kitchen after leaving her poor mother completely speechless. |