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He looks worse than she’s ever seen him. His eyes are bloodshot and his hair is mussed and he is as pale as a corpse, but the heartbreak that’s making him squint and draw harsh breaths is a very living thing.
He stops when he sees her and sags against the doorway.
“Hey,” she says, still staring through the one-way mirror into the empty interrogation room.
He doesn’t look at her. “It’s over, Sara.”
Sara closes her eyes. Yes, she thinks. Yes it is over. “Let me drive you home. You haven’t slept in two days.”
It isn’t a question. His mouth trembles a little, a facsimile of his usual sternness. He follows her to the parking garage in silence.
They don’t speak on the drive home, don’t speak even as she parks and he unbuckles and climbs out. An impulse she couldn’t justify compels her to get out and cross the car and stop in front of him. “Grissom,” she says, staring right into his exhausted, anguished face. “You’ll be okay.”
He leans away from her, like looking at her is burning his eyes. “Yeah,” he says. “I know.”
He steps around her to go into his townhome, and she turns to return to the car; the hand on her elbow surprises her, and then he’s turned her around and she only catches a glimpse of his expression before he presses his forehead to hers and breathes once, twice, like he’s struggling to stay afloat in rough waters. He pulls away abruptly and leaves.
At work the next day, they pretend as though nothing has happened.
~*~
The first day:
It is 12:52am on a Tuesday when he gets the call. He remembers the precise time because he looked at the clock as he answered the phone. It is one of those small details that will be impressed upon his memory for the rest of his life.
“Grissom.”
“Hello Mr. Grissom. I’m a nurse at Desert Palms Hospital. We have a patient here who is an employee of yours. We haven’t been able to make contact with her next of kin. Her name is Sara Sidle.”
Grissom sets his pen down carefully on the case file he was about to sign off on. “Yes, I’m her supervisor. What’s happened?”
“I’m afraid Ms. Sidle was in a car accident several hours ago. She was brought in and is in emergency surgery right now. We’ve been trying to reach her family. Do you have some information about how we can get in touch with them?”
“She doesn’t--” He notices there is an ink splotch on the paper he was going to sign. He notices the clock ticking on the wall. He notices his heart, louder than it should be, pulsing in his ears. “She doesn’t have family.”
A pause. “Well, if there’s anyone who should be informed… I’m afraid Ms. Sidle’s condition is very serious.”
“Okay. I’ll be there soon to see her.”
“Alright. Thank you Mr. Grissom. I’m sorry to give such bad news.”
Grissom thinks - he’ll need his wallet, which is in his pocket. His cell phone and his pager. He grabs his car keys from his desk drawer. A jacket. He should - Catherine can be in charge - she’s on a scene. He could call. No.
He finds Warrick in the break room. “Hey boss,” says the younger man, his brows bending down in a look of concern. “You okay? You look like you seen a ghost.”
“Emergency,” says Grissom. Is that really his voice, tinny and distorted? Or the voice of some other robot? “I need to go to the hospital. You take care of things til I get back.” He tries to say her name, to tell Warrick what’s happened, but words are like broken glass in his throat.
A slight widening of Warrick’s eyes - shock. “Um, okay--”
Down the hall. Elevator is delayed - press the button, again again again. The long ride down. The dark garage.
His hands are sweating and trembling against the steering wheel. He thinks he can track down her mother if she dies. Will he speak at her funeral? Is that what she would want? He feels something in his gut or maybe it’s his heart - it’s cold and it - it hurts -
pull over on the freeway and roll down the window and breath, Gil, just remember to breath -
the hospital parking lot, mostly empty. Pull a ticket from the kiosk. Park on the third floor. Don’t forget which floor you’re on so you don’t have to look for the car later.
The hospital smells like nothing. The woman at the front desk looks up and Grissom isn’t the first shattered person she’s ever seen.
“Who are you here to see, sweetie?”
“Sara Sidle.”
Clicking the keys - a slight frown ( oh dear her face says no wonder he looks so upset ), “she’s in intensive care, sweetie. Third floor, second right. The nurses there will give you more information.”
Another elevator, this time going up. Slow and slow and slow. The nurses kiosk. Sara Sidle. The nurse escorts him like he’s visiting an inmate.
The curtain -
she’s alive, he reminds himself. This is better than dead, Grissom tells himself. It’s Tuesday and she’s alive and you’re breathing and she’s alive.
There’s a tube inserted down her throat and it wheezes and gasps like a dying animal. Her heart rate is slow. Her blood pressure is low. Her oxygen is within normal limits.
A doctor appears soon. A woman with calm green eyes. “You’re her family?”
“No,” says Grissom, and his voice shouldn’t be this hoarse; he’s not the one with a plastic tunnel rammed down his throat.
The doctor pauses. “You’re a friend?”
“Yes.”
A nod. “Ms. Sidle was in a car accident. Her injuries are very serious. We’ve managed to stabilize her but it’s touch and go for the next couple of days. Does she have family who are on their way?”
“No. No family.”
“Okay. Okay. We have her sedated while she’s on ventilation. She’s having trouble breathing on her own because of damage to her lungs. We did surgery to help her lungs and stop the internal bleeding but she is very critical. I… you may want to stay here with her, or have somebody else here with her. We’re not sure what these next few hours may bring.”
Silence. Silence.
“She may die,” the doctor says gently, like her words are laying down a child to sleep. “So if you can be with her. That’s… ideal.”
“Yes,” he says. “Yes, I’ll stay.”
“Okay. Alright. I’ll have a social worker come by soon to tell you about where to get food and all of that. Do you need some tissues?”
“No, no. Thank you.” He wipes at the tears on his face, licks them off his lips. “Thank you doctor.”
The social worker comes. He doesn’t remember most of it, but he remembers that she tells him it is important that he speak to Sara, and he holds on to this in his mind because it is the first useful thing he has heard.
His cell phone is ringing. He turns it off.
“Sara,” he says. He rests his hand next to her hand, studying the IV port between her metacarpal bones. “Sara. It’s me. They told me to talk to you.” He pauses to breath, feels the air shaking in and out of him in rhythmic characteristic patterns that are not sobs if he makes no sound. “You’re… you’ve been in a car crash. I’m here with you waiting for you to get better.”
Waiting, he thinks. I’m here waiting. I’ve been waiting my whole life.
~*~
The second day:
He goes home to shower and change. He pauses as he dries off in the bathroom and looks down at the tiled floor of his shower and thinks of Debbie Marlin, folded like a doll, the fine arc of blood splatter on the glass walls like a Jackson Pollock. He touches his floor tiles: cooling, slippery. He wonders what Sara’s body will look like. He hadn’t touched Debbie, not once, had Catherine do all the work of questing fingers and examining, too afraid to feel that cold rubbery flesh chafing the latex of his gloves.
He wonders if he will touch Sara after she has died.
Nick is sitting at her bedside when Grissom gets back to the hospital, leaning over her with his head against his clasped hands like he’s praying. He jerks up at Grissom’s arrival, not bothering to hide the tears streaking down his face.
“No change, boss.”
Grissom studies the woman dying on the bed before him. She has mottled blue and purple bruises over her face, sinking black smudges pressed like inked fingerprints in the corners of her eyes. Her mouth is wrenched open and the tube exudes from it, serpentine. Her arm is broken. Her leg.
Grissom lets himself breathe for a moment, just sit and breathe with it, and he thinks - this is it - this is the actual physical feeling - this is my heart breaking.
The nurses had told him to talk to her, so after he sends Nick home he reads her poetry. “This is a poem by Marvin Bell,” he says, unfolding the piece of paper where he’d copied it out by hand that morning after his shower. “He wrote it for his wife:
“You are not beautiful, exactly.
You are beautiful, inexactly.
You let a weed grow by the mulberry
and a mulberry grow by the house.
So close, in the personal quiet
of a windy night, it brushes the wall
and sweeps away the day till we sleep.
A child said it, and it seemed true:
“Things that are lost are all equal.”
But it isn’t true. If I lost you,
the air wouldn’t move, nor the tree grow.
Someone would pull the weed, my flower.
The quiet wouldn’t be yours. If I lost you,
I’d have to ask the grass to let me sleep.”
~*~
On the third day he says nothing to her at all.
~*~
On the fourth day the doctors say she is showing signs of improvement. They remove her breathing tube and she goes on as she began: alone.
He rests his finger against her finger. He is very relieved that her skin is warm.
“They say you’re getting better,” he tells her, because he’s already read her all his favorite love poems. “You’re breathing on your own again. But you look so still.” He pauses. He has always been inadequate at finding his own words; for that he has stood on the shoulders of better men than he. “I had a dream last night. In the dream you and I were working a scene together. It was a house. There wasn’t any blood anywhere, no signs of struggle. But I knew something awful had happened there. I found a body in the bedroom. I leaned down and saw that the body’s lips were moving. I tried to listen to what the body was saying but I couldn’t understand the words. You came into the room with me. You bent down to listen and you started to cry. I asked you what the body had told you. But you only looked at me and said, ‘You see me every day.’ ”
~*~
On the fifth day Catherine comes and pets his hair and rubs his back and he feels almost like he is a little boy again. “I didn’t know,” she says into the crown of his head, tucking him against her shoulder and rocking so slightly back and forth. “You never said.”
“I know,” he says, his hands fists against his trousers. “I never said.”
~*~
On the sixth day she wakes up.
She is in and out for an hour or so, not speaking, her eyes loose and unfocused. Then she blinks a few times and looks right, right at him. “Gris,” she rasps. “You… look like shit.”
He laughs, short and sharp and amazed. “Sara,” he says, not sure if he remembers any other sounds in the English language, “Sara.”
She blinks at him again. There’s something like a smile on her face. “Got you worried, did I?”
There’s so much he has to tell her. He exhales a long breath, shifting his jaw. His hand rests next to hers, and she moves her fingers over and touches his fingers. “I thought you were going to die,” he says.
She closes her eyes. “Not before you give me that promotion to the key position.”
He lowers his forehead to rest against her uninjured leg. She raises her hand and rustles her fingers through his hair.
~*~
The seventh day:
“What did you do all day at my bedside? Crossword puzzles? Pictures of DBs spread out all over my lifeless body?”
Her gallows humor hits him like a fist in the stomach. Grissom winces, and she looks apologetic under all her yellow and brown and blue bruises.
“Sorry. Really, though. What did you do?”
He rolls his shoulder. “I read you poems.” Grissom turns a small styrofoam cup in his hands, empty but for the grains of burnt coffee crusted around the bottom, turns it around and around and around.
“What poems?”
Grissom draws in a ragged breath and looks to the side, out the window to the courtyard below. They have moved her to a small private room on the fourth floor. Recovery ward. She will be here for weeks. “They said you can start physical therapy tomorrow.”
“Sounds painful.” He looks at her, her pale eyelids closed, her eyes flickering underneath them. “Grissom.”
“Mm,” he says, setting his coffee cup aside. He wants to pace but doesn’t. He wants to go home. He wants to stay by her side forever.
“Grissom, look at me.” He looks. She has turned her head and she is staring at him like he’s a song she can’t remember the words to. “You don’t have to stay here.”
“Actually,” Grissom says, wishing somebody had written a poem about this, “I do.”
~*~
The eighth day she gets a fever. He runs a cool rag over her forehead while she sweats and moans. The doctor reassures him she’s going to be okay. Warrick brings flowers. Greg brings Thai food.
Sara vomits Tom Khar soup for an hour. Grissom sits, elbows on his knees, head hanging low, and listens to the sounds of her being alive.
~*~
On the ninth day he strokes her hair back and she sobs and he doesn’t mutter any comforting words because he can’t think of any. “It hurts,” she says, “it hurts it hurts it hurts.” She is in and out of dreams, feverish and doped on painkillers, and in her half-waking moments she begs him not to hurt her and she begs him not to kill her daddy and she begs him to take her home.
“I’m here,” he says to her, because it’s the only thing he has to offer.
~*~
Day ten:
“Yard time,” she says, sarcastic and pleased. The physical therapist helps maneuver her into the wheelchair.
“Mr. Grissom said he’ll push you around. Only twenty minutes or so, okay?”
“Yeah,” says Sara, looking up in doeish innocence. “Of course.”
The courtyard is full of cool autumn breezes and families hunched together around concrete picnic tables. He pushes her into the shade of a tree.
“Why are you here?”
Grissom sits on the bench he’s arranged her next to. “Sara,” he sighs.
She leans her head against the backrest of her chair and closes her eyes. She looks too weary for one so young. “Then tell me about a case. If you refuse to talk about this enormous elephant in the room.”
“I care about you,” Grissom says, feeling like he’s trying to reach down his own throat and pull up an organ. “I… I can’t be anywhere else. I’ll be visiting you every day until you can go home again. I don’t know how else to say this.”
Sara shakes her head. She wipes the back of her hand against her cheek, smearing a salty tear.
He is only another source of pain.
~*~
He doesn’t see her on the eleventh day or the twelfth. A triple homicide involving a child.
~*~
The thirteenth day he slips through the door to her room and folds himself into the chair like a sinner in church.
“Warrick told me about the triple. What’re you doing here?”
“Stop asking me that.” He knows he shouldn't be short with her but he hasn’t slept in thirty hours.
She sits up a little in bed. “Well if you insist on wasting your time here at least walk me through the case. I’m going nuts here with nothing to do.”
She makes him go through every little tiny piece of evidence, describe the scene (he should’ve brought the casefile), describe the bodies. He doesn’t really register when he lays his head on her leg and he doesn’t notice when he closes his eyes; she’s still asking questions and he’s still answering; he does notice her fingers tracing his eyebrows and his nose and around his mouth.
“Sleep,” she says. “I’ll be here when you wake up.”
There’s no reason for that to make him cry - he blames it on the sleep deprivation.
~*~
The fourteenth day he wakes up with her shaking his shoulder. His neck is in a spasm.
“Come up here,” she says. “You can’t sleep all day like that.”
He isn’t sure whose arms and legs these are, climbing up into her hospital bed, unfurling beside her like a ribbon. He isn’t sure whose hand it is taking her hand and resting it over his heart.
She is looking at him, her eyes moving up and down his face. “I don’t understand you,” she says. “Here you are lying in my hospital bed with me. You’ve been reading me poetry while I was in the ICU and bringing me muffins and acting like we’re already married.” She looks up at the ceiling and sighs. He thinks she is trying not to smile. “And all I wanted was to go out to dinner.”
~*~
Fifteen:
“Recite me a poem.”
He hasn’t brought any, but she knows him well enough to know he has a few dozen memorized line for line. He got off shift an hour ago and has been sitting and working on his crossword while she does her exercises.
“It’ll distract me from how fucking painful this is,” she says as she stretches her arms carefully up and over her head.
Grissom sighs, and sets aside the newspaper. He thinks of Eliot, or even Byron. But when he begins to speak he makes the mistake of looking up at her, his eyes tracing the angle of her jaw as the sun filters in and casts her in a golden glow and what he says is this:
“here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)”
~*~
On the sixteenth day he gets stuck on ‘close familiarity or friendship’, eight letters, six down. Sara interrupts by asking him what will happen when she is released from the hospital.
“Well,” he says, “you’ll still need a few weeks off work to recover. And then lab duty for another few weeks after that. Fieldwork is a long way off, Sara.”
Sara’s expression as she looks at him is a soft kind of disappointment that makes the back of his tongue ache. “That’s not what I’m asking, Grissom.”
Ah. Ah. He folds his newspaper over his finger and looks out the window at the sycamore tree with its branch sweeping in the dry desert wind and the children walking hand in hand to visit somebody they love and he thinks that he wasn’t made for this, this is not what he got his doctoral degree in, there is no entomological or forensic precedent for describing to somebody how you want share a life. “I…”
“It’s okay,” she says, breaking him off like she is pulling a pot off the stove before it boils over and burns her. “Just forget it. It’ll be fine.”
He struggles in her rebuff, looking down at his newspaper as she stares resolutely at the TV she is not watching. But she has nowhere to escape to and he wants to be good at this, for once, or at least to survive it intact. “I want to… let you know me.”
He waits several seconds before he forces himself to look at her, and she is gazing at him in open wonder. “Tell me what that means, Grissom.”
He breaks against the rocks of her, shaking his head mutely, pleading with his eyes. She extends her hand and he wonders for a moment she wants him to kiss it - he will - but then realizes she’s asking for his crossword puzzle.
She stares down at the open squares and then back up at him. “Intimacy,” she says, like she can’t believe she has to say it. “It’s intimacy , Grissom.”
He fills in the letters carefully, square by square. “Maybe we could go on a date,” he says.
He feels her touching his hair, tugging slightly. He looks up and her fingers trail down his cheek. “If I didn’t love you,” she says, “you would drive me crazy.”
This time he does press that kiss to her hand.
~*~