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A long day, a long case, and finally Cragen sends him home to sleep. It's so late the house is dark when he gets there, doors locked, quiet. He loosens his tie as he walks inside, leaves it hanging untied around his neck as he checks the doors and windows. There are some award ribbons on the kitchen table, two blue, one red, from the kids' field day that he didn't make it to.
He looks in on all the kids - Dickie sleeping with one arm flung up over his head, Elizabeth with her teddy bear half hanging off the bed. Maureen and Kathleen both look so long under the covers. He wonders when that happened, when they got so tall.
When he slides into bed next to Kathy, her eyes blink open. "Hey," he says, his voice low.
She closes her eyes again and says, "You catch the guy?" Her voice is heavy and she doesn't move to touch him.
"No," Elliot says. "Maybe tomorrow." Maybe. Maybe not. He shifts and when he looks over again, Kathy's already asleep, the sockets of her eyes deep in shadow. He's so tired it's like his head is full of cotton, but he doesn't sleep for a long time. He lies there looking at the strange shape of his shirt, draped over a chair, and thinking about the dead victim's ripped pantyhose, tangled on the ground by her body, and thinks it's a wonder he ever sleeps at all.
***
The phone rings at 5:30, and he's got it to his ear before he even realizes he's awake.
"What is it?" Kathy asks as he hangs up, pulling on a pair of jeans. When he glances over at her, she looks sad.
"Break in the case," he says, and he's already half-dressed, looking for his other shoe.
None of the kids are awake when he leaves the house, and the whole drive to work he remembers being ten years old, watching out the window as his dad left while it was still dark. Remembers his father's uniform, the hat under his arm, the dark blue and the trim and the gun at his waist, the headlights of the car turning the corner and moving out of sight.
He thinks about quitting his job, going into security or private investigating, or transferring to another unit, Vice or Auto, something with better hours, and when he gets to work, Olivia's there.
***
The same day they book the rapist, Kathy begins to plant the garden. When he gets home from work with his sleeves rolled up and his tie crooked, she's outside in the yard in sandals, clearing the flower beds and loosening the earth. When she straightens up to look at him, she brushes some of the hair that's come loose from her ponytail out of her eyes with one hand and dirt smudges her forehead. It's seven o'clock, but it's still light out, a long summer evening with the light all red and gold, and he plays catch with Dickie and Elizabeth in the yard while she weeds. Her hair's curling at the temples where sweat damps it, and the soil looks black and rich under her hands, and he loves her. But it's easy to be in love with everything when another rapist's in prison, and your partner smiled for the first time in days, and even your exhaustion feels pleasant because you know you'll sleep tonight, like a log, like a baby, like a rock.
It's five days before the next case, five days of leisurely paperwork and reading the sports page at their desks, of Munch doing the crossword. They start to relax into it, lean back in their chairs. On the third day, Olivia laughs, and he's so surprised he almost jumps before he smiles back at her. She steals fries off his plate when they go to the diner for lunch, and he finishes her salad without asking.
He's home for dinner every night at six, and they talk about whether to plant tomatoes or strawberries or both. Kathy is putting geraniums in the beds in front of the house, and black-eyed susans, and snapdragons. No one has been raped in five days, and he sleeps the whole night next to his wife, and it's almost like there's no distance between them at all.
***
On the sixth morning, they stand in a dirty alley next to the body of a little girl, watch the ME make preliminary observations. Flashes go off, recording the way her body is splayed out, tossed down like a doll nobody wanted to play with anymore. The blood pooling under her chest is sticky and dark. When Warner's finished making notes she says, "Flip her," and they do, and she's just a little girl, in braids and a blue dress, small and still.
They split up to canvas the neighborhood; Munch and Fin take the north side of the street, he and Olivia the south. Olivia's shoulders are slumped, and in between neighbors, Elliot tries to talk about other things. The sports page, the crossword, the garden, where there are snapdragons and the tomatoes need water.
A heavy woman in a bathrobe IDs the girl from a picture. Kendra Wade. Elliot doesn't know how anyone can identify people from these photographs, their faces pale and stiff, like non-people, like mannequins. For a second he imagines Maureen in a picture like that, imagines Kathy, and has to push it away.
Elliot and Olivia notify the parents. Kendra's mother thought she was in school - she's just eight, but wanted to walk to the bus stop by herself. It's only half a block. She lost her second front tooth this week; she is learning to write in cursive. They have to take Mrs. Wade down to the morgue to identify her daughter's body, and when her knees give out, Elliot catches her. The dark circles under Olivia's eyes look like bruises.
They canvas and canvas, interview the five registered sex offenders in the neighborhood, even the ones who don't go for little girls. Warner finds a hair; they wait for the DNA results. They look for the five inch serrated blade that stabbed her seven times. When the squad meets around the white board, Kendra's third grade school photo taped up in front of them, a list of suspects written in blue marker, he and Olivia sit on top of his desk so close their sides are touching, pressed together so he can feel the heat of her arm.
He gets home at ten o'clock, after the sun has finally set, and leans against the car for a few minutes in the still-warm air, listening to the crickets and distant traffic. He can smell gardenias and freshly cut grass and asphalt.
He thinks about how dry the tomatoes had seemed yesterday, and when he checks the bed, they're even dryer than before. He goes to get the sprinkler, and screws it onto the edge of the hose. Typical, that no one else has watered them and he has to come home after a long day at work and be the one to remember.
Kathy comes out of the house as he's pulling the hose along to get the sprinkler close enough to the beds. "What're you doing?" she asks.
"Watering the fucking garden," he says, and then he's yelling at her for he doesn't know what. It's like he has no control over it, stuffed up all day, so much anger coming out that it frightens him a little.
If Olivia were his wife, she would yell back, but Kathy just stands there looking at him with her hands loose at her sides. She stands there looking at him, and as he's yelling, he thinks, she's going to leave me, and even so he can't stop, because someone murdered a little girl and dumped her like she wasn't anything, and because nothing good ever stays that way and the tomatoes are too dry, and Kathy's just standing there, looking.
When he's done she turns around and walks into the house without saying anything, and he's in the dark yard next to the sprinkler with his hands empty. When he finally turns the faucet, the water flies up in the dark with a hiss and he stands with his hands in his pockets and watches it soak into the ground. The sprinkler oscillates back and forth until the water begins to pool on top of the dirt and he turns it off, goes inside.
***
They don't close the case. They get two suspects in the box, but end up with no confessions and no evidence, and they're all out of leads with other cases looming. Eventually nothing left to do but box up what little evidence there is, and he watches as Olivia does it, leaning back in his chair with his hands behind his head. The five-inch serrated knife in its plastic bag (they found it in the sewer, wiped clean of prints), the clothes Kendra had been wearing, the hair, the files of DNA and case notes.
She puts the lid on the cardboard box and rests her hands on top of it, her nails clipped short, a cop's hands, practical. As she hefts the box to her hip, she says, "I hate this part."
When she comes back from evidence control, he's cleared off their desks. "C'mon," he says, and jerks his head towards the door. "I'll buy you a drink." For a second she looks like she might say no, but then she smiles the kind of smile that doesn't really reach her eyes, the smile they all smile too often, and they walk out together. They're in step without meaning to be, left foot, right foot, moving together like soldiers, and her heels click in the empty hallways.
The squad room had felt stuffy, the air conditioning halfway shot, but even so, when they hit the street the hot air hits them like a blow, sun reflecting off the concrete. It's low in the sky, almost setting, but the asphalt radiates back the heat it's been collecting all day, and the air is thick and humid and smells like the city in summer. Olivia takes off her jacket. Underneath she's wearing a tank-top, and her arms are bare and white, and when he looks over he sees sweat at the base of her neck.
The dim coolness of the bar is a relief, and they are halfway to plastered by the time Fin and Munch join them. Olivia is drinking bourbon, neat, and it looks like honey when stray fading sunlight from the window catches it. It's getting late, he should go home and see his kids, but he thinks of Kathy's face when the alarm had gone off in the morning, unhappy and closed off, and her face the night before that, and the morning before that, and tells Munch to get him another drink.
"I'm exhausted," Olivia says as Fin and Munch go to the bar, her finger tracing the rim of her glass slowly. "I could sleep for a week, you know?" He can tell she's thinking about Kendra Wade, her death contained in a box in evidence control, in a room full of boxes, a room stacked high with cardboard boxes.
"Yeah," he says. "Me too."
Munch and Fin come back to the table, carrying glasses in their hands, and Munch slides in next to him, hands him his beer. Elliot downs nearly half of it quickly.
"So," Munch says, settling in. "The Wade case?"
Elliot carefully puts his beer back down on its napkin, exactly in the center, and looks at Olivia across the table. She makes a wry face, just barely, a slight shrug of the eyebrows. "Yeah," he says.
"Too bad," Fin says. His tone implies a what're you gonna do. That goes for most of the things Fin says, actually.
"Murdered children," Munch says. "It's the worst. But you know, you can't let these cases get to you."
"Oh really," Olivia says.
"Yeah," Munch continues. "The trouble with you two is, you're too sensitive. You let things gnaw at you. You can't be a cop and let these things gnaw at you."
"Shut up, Munch," Elliot says.
"Listen to an old cop," Munch says, looking over the top of his glasses. "The little murdered girls, they're the hardest to shake, but you have to let it go. Let it go." He waves his hands in a shooing gesture.
Elliot looks at Olivia and she rolls her eyes, just barely. Get two more drinks into Munch and he'll be talking about Baltimore and drug wars and shots coming down from above in a hallway, and the name Adena Watson might come up, and they've heard it all before. Nothing worse than old cops and their war stories.
"Man, knock it off," Fin says to Munch. "Before I kill you myself."
"At least you've got a woman to go home to," Munch says to Elliot. "That's more than the rest of us have."
Elliot thinks of Kathy in the garden and the silence weighing them down in bed at night, and doesn't say anything. When he glances up, Olivia's watching him with a funny dark look, and sometimes he wishes she didn't always notice things.
"Speaking of which," he says, to avoid the conversation. "I need to call my wife."
Munch scoots to let him out of the booth, and he goes back to the hallway leading to the bathrooms, where it's quieter. At the house he just gets the answering machine, and as he hears the recording ("You have reached the Stablers! We're not able to take your call, but please leave a message and we'll call you back.") he remembers that they must all be at Elizabeth's softball game, and that he's supposed to be there with them, not at a bar more than half drunk with a dead little girl shadowing him.
He leaves a message, says that he's working late, that he'll be home late, and when he's done he folds up his phone and leans against the wall next to the men's room door, stares into space.
Someone turns into the hall and when he looks over, it's Olivia. She pauses a few steps in. "Everything okay?"
Still leaning against the wall with his head tipped back, he shrugs. He is starting to feel the alcohol making him loose and slow, and he wonders how many times she slept with Cassidy. Wonders if it started at this bar, if it'd been after a case, if she'd been feeling like this then, three-quarters drunk and sad.
"You get ahold of Kathy?" Olivia says, takes another couple of steps closer.
He shakes his head. "Nah, I think she's at Elizabeth's game. Which I promised I'd go to."
"Oh," Olivia says, mostly neutral, but he can tell from her expression that she's disappointed in him and trying to hide it. She's always been a little too invested in him being a good father, a good husband. Sometimes the weight of her approval gets to be heavy.
"Yeah," he says. "So."
Olivia reaches out and touches the bare skin of his arm, just below his rolled-up shirt-sleeve. "Elliot," she starts, "you can't st-…" and her hand is hot, and her thumb rests on the thin skin on the inside of his elbow, and suddenly his stomach drops, and when she looks at his face she stops talking mid-word.
He regrets kissing her before he does it, even as he's curling his hand around her neck, fingers in her hair, his other hand reaching for her waist, and her lips are cool and dry, and his wife is sitting on a set of bleachers somewhere in Queens, watching their daughter play shortstop.
There is a long moment of his mouth on hers, and then she breathes in like a sigh and opens her mouth, and fuck, fuck, he's kissing her, she's kissing him, together they taste like alcohol and long days and the station house, like the dry musty smell of a room full of cardboard boxes holding the dresses of dead little girls.
(The first time he kissed Kathy, it was at her locker before fifth period, with the edges of the biology textbook she was holding digging into his chest, and she had tasted like grape soda and peanut butter and jelly. He hadn't known where to put his hands.)
Olivia's hand braces against his shoulder, like she's about to push him away, but she doesn't press. She just rests it there as she kisses him, like a warning, her hand pressed flat between their bodies. He drops his hands to her hips and rests them there lightly, doesn't touch her too hard, and somebody is shaking but he can't tell who. Maybe it's him. They should be more surprised, the two of them, but they're not. He's not, anyway.
"Liv," he says when she pulls back, and his fingers clutch at her belt to hold her still, graze the skin of her hips, and he thinks he should apologize for this, but he doesn't. "Christ." She's left an aftertaste of bourbon and he closes his eyes for a second.
"Let go," she says, sounding dazed and unlike herself. She swallows, frowning, and when he lets go she steps back. He thinks she's going to just keep stepping backwards until she's out of the bar, but instead she stops and blinks and looks at him like a question he doesn't have the answer to.
He's drunk, he's drunk, and he wants badly to take her home.
"I don't…," he starts, but he doesn't actually know where he's going with that, so he just stops, and they look at each other. Her hair is mussed from his hands, and from working late and leaving cases open. He breathes, in and out, and then leans against the wall and thinks. What am I doing, what am I doing, what am I doing, and he sees Elizabeth in her green softball jersey, and Kathy in the bleachers, and Dickie in the driveway with his skateboard and Kathleen with her feet slung over the arm of a chair, talking on the phone, and how young Maureen had looked when they dropped her off at the dorms, and then he looks up and Olivia's in the dim bar light, more familiar than any of them, leaning against the dingy wall across from him like she's too tired to stand up straight, frowning and mussed, and what is he doing.
She rubs her forehead with two fingers and closes her eyes, and when she opens them again she doesn't look at him. "I should go," she says. There's a hopeless sort of edge to her face, like if she had the energy or if she were less angry, she'd start crying - a post-interrogation look.
When she pushes away from the wall, he opens his mouth to say wait, don't go, but she looks so pissed off he can't say it, and he closes his eyes so he can't see her walking away. When he finally goes back to the table, she's long gone.
**
Saturday, he fills the bird feeders, starts to build an eight-foot arch for the roses to climb. He sees Kathy watching him from the window and keeps hammering. When the arch is done, he'll paint it white - the roses will stand out against it, that way. Maybe it'll make up for everything.
Olivia gets a call over the weekend, but she partners with Fin and Elliot doesn't even know about it until Monday morning. When he walks into the squad room they're both already there, wearing jeans from getting called in after hours, their eyes blinking slow from staying up all night. He tries not to feel like a kid picked last for dodge ball, and she's not quite looking at him.
When she and Fin head out to see the ME, Munch catches Elliot as he's pouring coffee. "You sick over the weekend?"
"What?" Elliot says.
"Your partner poached my partner," Munch says, and grabs a sugar packet. "I figured you must've been sick."
"Nope," Elliot says, and goes back to his desk.
Later, he and Munch get sent to the hospital to try to talk a rape victim into pressing charges, but it's a losing battle. Elliot gives her his card and they go get lunch. Munch orders the BLT and won't share his fries.
When they get back to the house, Fin's sitting at his desk putting in eye drops, and Olivia's nowhere to be seen. "Where's Liv?" Elliot asks.
"Up in the crib taking thirty," Fin says. "Long night." The last two words widen as he suppresses a yawn.
Munch looks at Elliot with the look of a man who is about to make a smart remark. "Can it, Munch," Elliot says, and tries to go back to his paperwork, but he can't concentrate. Munch and Fin are arguing about the Yankees. He gets up to get more coffee, but who is he really kidding, so after a long moment he heads upstairs instead.
The crib's dim, just light from around the edges of the blinds and a rectangle from the door he's holding open, falling across Olivia's face. She's rolled up under a blanket, her hair mussed, and her mouth frowning even in sleep. He wonders what she's dreaming about.
"What?" she says without opening her eyes, surprising him, her voice rough, and he's tense already, muscles tight. He closes the door behind him and leans against it, watching her. The air conditioner in the window is clanking and wheezing and he can feel the cold air from across the room, and he can't think what to say.
Finally, "You didn't call me."
She breathes in and out, then rolls over and sits up slowly, rests her elbows on her knees and her forehead in her hands. It puts her face in shadow, and he can't make out her expression. "No," she says. "I didn't." The metal of the bed frame is dull.
"Liv," he says. "Look. About the other night."
She starts shaking her head, slow and tired and groggy. He can see the stream of cold air from the air conditioner ruffling the hair at the back of her neck, and her arms have goose bumps. "Forget it," she says with a deep, deep weariness, but he's started this conversation and he's going to finish it.
"I'm sorry," Elliot says, and her shoulders are slumped and she looks like she hasn't slept for days. "I don't know," he starts, and then the weight of everything comes crashing in on him, the silence in the middle of his marriage, Olivia's face after he'd kissed her, the white paint still under his thumbnail from the arch for the roses, the goddamn tomatoes. He realizes he's clenching his fists so hard his fingernails are biting into his palms. "I don't know why I did that," he says, and it's almost true.
She finally looks up at him, her eyeliner smudged, hair flattened against her forehead. He can see the lines on her face more clearly than usual, and her eyes are dark before they flick away from him, focus on one of the safety posters on the wall.
"Well," she says, and shrugs. "It was a bad day."
He holds very still, feeling like if he moves he'll break something fragile, and he can't stop watching her breathe. She rubs at her face, trying to wake up. "It was," he says, when it seems like he has to say something. He pauses. "It's a bad job." And after that he can't think of anything else to say. He wants to kiss her again - what is his problem?
"Yeah," she says, and they're just there looking at each other with the air conditioner making sounds like the world is ending and he still doesn't know what this is.
**
He wants to get the second coat of paint done, even with the heat, so as soon as he gets home he's out in the yard with his shirt off, trying not to drip paint on his shoes. The sun's getting low and into his eyes, and he can feel sweat beading on his shoulders, but he's nearly done. The arch looks good.
Kathy brings him a beer, cold, condensation on the outside, and he takes it from her without letting their hands touch. "Thanks."
"It looks good," she says.
"Yeah," he says, laying his brush carefully on top of the paint can. "Yeah, it's coming along." They stand there and admire it.
"How was work?" Kathy asks.
He thinks about Olivia and Fin leaving together to go to the morgue; a rape victim too scared to press charges; Olivia in the crib, just waking up, the shadows of her eyes. "Fine," he says.
"Good," she says. "That's good."
"How about you, how was your day?"
"Oh, fine," Kathy says.
"Great," Elliot says, and drinks his beer. After a minute, Kathy starts picking beetles off the rose leaves and he goes back to painting. The sun sets so slowly he doesn't notice it happening.