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He hears now only in his dreams.
Always it is her voice. It isn’t the same conversation, not exactly, and most of it fades in and out, the warped sound like a damaged tape recording. But the last words are clear, and the same every time: too late.
Little movements startle him now. He can’t set aside this vigilance, this hyper-awareness of all motion around him. Like his nerve-endings are too close to the surface of his skin. In the throbbing silence, he sees everything, he feels everything.
Catherine approaches him from behind; he senses her shadow and flinches, turning his head sharply to see her. She smiles apologetically and offers him a steaming mug of tea.
He takes it, letting the ceramic scald his fingertips. Distracting. Catherine grabs the notepad on his coffee table and writes, u ok?
Grissom sips the tea. It boils the flesh of his tongue. He nods.
Catherine gives him a soft, worried look. Scrawls, it’ll be alright, gil.
In the absence of her voice, he feels that he can see everything on her face that she doesn’t mean to say: that she does not think it will be alright. That Gil Grissom, supervisor of the night shift crime lab, died on that operating table.
Grissom nods again.
She cleans his house and cooks him dinner, like his deafness has made him an invalid. Grissom knows he should be grateful for her kindness but gratitude is as far from what he is feeling in this moment as imaginable. He feels anger and despair and shock, but mostly he feels tired.
Go , he mouths at her as she leans forward to take his empty dish. Seeing the surprise in her eyes, he adds, thank you.
He can speak, of course, but it is so jarring to feel the vibration of his throat without any accompanying sound that he does not. He worries that his voice will sound strange, too loud or too soft. He knows how it will sound in the next months and years: like his mother’s, distorted, blurred like a runny oil painting. It sounds right in his mother’s soft tones, but wrong for him, not at all the crisp and rhythmic cadence he spent so long mastering in his youth.
He has not told his mother yet. He knows she will be sad for him, but glad, also. He will still live in Las Vegas and she in California, but in a truer sense of the word, she will know he has come home to her.
After Catherine leaves, Grissom spends hours reading, losing himself in the pages of his favorite books. In his empty home, the silence feels familiar, feels chosen, not the smothering blanket of total isolation when people speak to him soundlessly.
He has jerry-rigged a lamp by the entrance, extending the cord under his front door with a button at the end so people can flash a light when they arrive. Grissom is startled to see the flash well into the evening. He was not expecting any visitors.
Through the peephole he sees her: tall and rangy and a little unkempt, wearing a t-shirt and shorts that reveal her long legs. He opens the door with some reluctance.
Hi , she says, looking up at him. He can’t decipher her expression, her wide eyes moving deliberately over him.
He steps aside so she may enter.
She turns and faces him again, worrying her hands. Catherine told me, she says, then trails off, gesturing vaguely towards her ear. She frowns. Is it better that I speak? Or write?
Grissom stares at her for a moment, then steps around her and picks up the notepad. I can lipread some of your words, but I’ll miss a lot, he writes.
She glances over his note and then nods. He can see she is trying not to stare around his townhouse and catalogue all that she sees.
He writes again: why are you here?
It’s rude, he knows, ruder than he’d be with Catherine or Brass or even one of the other subordinates. But he seems to always find himself speaking this way with Sara: rough and raw, too honest, too emotional. She takes the pen from his fingers. I don’t know.
Grissom stares at the small phrase scrawled in her uneven handwriting. Something about her handwriting pleases him against his own will - it’s just so damn messy - as messy as her voice, the way the sound would undulate over her words, as messy as her mind, brilliant and fast and loose like a ferrari on a joy ride.
Blinking, Grissom realizes he will never hear her voice again. All amusement at her handwriting withers away. I’m tired, he writes.
Sara narrows her eyes, then makes her way defiantly to his book case. She looks over her shoulder, mouths or speaks something; Grissom catches only a few of her words, and she goes instead to write it down. When will you be back?
The lab, she means. Grissom shakes his head. Writes: I’m resigning.
She reads. Frowns. Why?
He gives her a look of angry exasperation. Because I got tired of criminalistics and decided to become a lounge singer, Sara, he writes.
Sara presses her lips against her smile. Takes his pen. Somehow you write my name with the same amount of annoyance as you say it.
He shrugs off this remark, irritated at the affection in it. He doesn’t want her affection. He doesn’t want her.
He finds his manners without looking for them, slouching into his kitchen and waving a beer in her direction. She nods.
They sit together on his couch, both facing the black screen of his television. She sips her beer. He sips his. Finally she turns and slowly, slowly touches the shell of his right ear.
The sensation sends shivers ricocheting up and down his spinal column. Grissom is aware that he’s giving her a wide-eyed look, but he can’t force his face to reflect any censure. He is too amazed.
Look at them, he reads on her lips, they are perfect.
Grissom lifts one hand to touch his own ear lightly, brushing his fingers against her fingers as he does so. Touching them is strange, he says aloud before he can stop himself, feeling the vibration of his voice in his chest. He looks at her face to see if he is speaking oddly, but her expression betrays only that she is listening intently. Because I can’t hear anything, but I can feel your... touch. They’re so… sensitive.
She smiles. Lets her fingers drift down from his ear to the hinge of his jaw and then his shoulder, where they rest, innocuous. It feels excruciatingly intimate. Grissom’s palms are sweating.
Sara rises and grabs the notepad from the kitchen counter. Returns to sit as she writes. I’m kind of excited to learn sign language.
Grissom stares at the sentence written in her spidery hand. Finally writes back: why would you learn sign language?
Sara frowns, shaking her head slightly at him. Grissom writes on: I won’t be your boss any more.
Sara shrugs. Mouths, you’ll still be my friend. Writes: How else will we talk?
Grissom tosses the pad away, pressing his thumb against the seam of his closed lips. He doesn’t want her to see how distressed he is, how unbalanced. He feels raw and vulnerable in the worst way, and she’s only making it harder. You should go.
He doesn’t look at her, so he doesn’t know if she says anything, what her face might betray. He smothers his flinch as her hand touches his hand, but he does look as she presses his palm against her chest, between her breasts, over her hot, soft skin. His lips part in surprise. She is staring right, right at him. I want to be here for you, she says, and he feels the vibration through his arm, tingling against his fingertips. Let me.
He pulls his hand away sharply. I already know ASL, he replies.
She nods.
Take a class, then, he says. Stands up and heads to open the door. I’m tired, he says for the second time.
Sara sighs. She makes her way out peacefully, giving him only one final look in the doorway. Not of pity, he doesn’t think. But of sadness.
He is reminded of her voice, last night in his dream:
Too late.
~*~
Grissom goes on a blind date arranged through Dr. Gilbert from the College. The woman is a children’s book author, and Deaf, of course. An artist. A little too like his mother, perhaps, but Grissom feels like he’s just trying to get back in the game, get used to conversing in ASL and living in the Deaf world, so he doesn’t worry.
The woman is kind and funny and patient with him as his fingers trip awkwardly through his sentences. They eat lightly and he politely declines an offer to come up to her place for a drink because his hands are starting to shake. Nerves, maybe. Or just a terrible sadness.
Grissom is home and glad to be alone when the light flashes by the door. He knows it’s Sara by some undefined extra-sensory perception, is already rolling his eyes as he opens the door.
I already ate dinner, he writes on the dry-erase board stuck to his refrigerator door, resignedly gathering ingredients. This is highway robbery.
Ate without me? she writes beneath.
Sara has been showing up unannounced at his house for the past few weeks, ostensibly to ‘help him out’ but in reality to loaf around on his sofa playing his records while he cooks her dinner. He had discovered on her first charity visit that she hadn’t eaten anything that day except a piece of toast and half an apple, and a brief, targeted round of questioning unveiled that she couldn’t cook anything beyond hard boiling an egg and subsisted on food she could prepare in the microwave or have delivered. Realizing this explained not only her tendency to ask for his lunch leftovers when they worked together in lab but also explained why she toed the waifish side of thin, Grissom determined she required supplemental nutrition. He was pleased to see after only a couple of weeks of regular meals from him she was starting to look a little healthier, her skin glowing and the deep carve of her collarbone softening.
Today she is wandering through his living room, trailing her fingers over the spines of his books. Watching her long, slender fingers brush along his favorite volumes turns him on so suddenly and intensely that Grissom pivots on his heel and begins aggressively chopping onions.
He pauses after finishing three onions, wiping at his eyes, and writes back on the board, I was coerced into a blind date.
It takes Sara a while to circle back to the white board. She is smiling as she starts to read, and he sees the smile die off her face. Feels a sharp pull of remorse and also grim satisfaction. She takes the pen. He watches as she brings it to the slick surface of the board, biting at her lower lip. Hesitates. Grissom feels his heart rate pick up. She writes: Did it go well?
Grissom exhales. Catches her eye, and shrugs. Sara tries to smile and mostly fails, leaning back against the counter, glancing towards the door like she’s regretting coming over. Grissom curses himself for bringing up the date - it was a foolish, cruel thing to do - and takes the pen to write: I’m happier to be here.
This softens her, at least enough that she doesn’t leave. Grissom is sauteing his onions when she taps his shoulder. He turns to find her very slowly, very clumsily signing, “what is for dinner?” She glances down at her hands as she signs, and doesn’t have the finger shapes quite right, and Grissom realizes he’s never actually signed with someone who wasn’t fluent before - it’s odd, he’s always been the learner, working to keep up, and now he’s trying to piece together her stilted, disjointed gestures - and Grissom sets down his spatula to face her fully.
“I’m making chile rellenos,” he replies, fingerspelling the food name since he doesn’t know the sign. It’s a recipe his mother taught him that reminds him of Los Angeles and doesn’t include meat. Sara’s eyebrows knit together as she tracks the movements of his fingers, and he spells the word again, more slowly so she can follow. “C-H-I-L-E R-E-L-L-E-N-O-S”
She chews her lips, nodding. Spells out, very slowly and meticulously, her eyes furiously fixed upon her long pale fingers, “V-E-G-E-T-A-R-I-A-N?”
Grissom stares at her fingers, annoyed beyond belief that after three weeks of making her home-cooked dinners she is still checking if he knows her only dietary preference, but before he can express his outrage he is laughing - out loud, he figures, since he can feel it bursting in his chest like fireworks, and Sara is starting to laugh too - and since things are already completely lost, since his world is already off the rails, since life has already ended, he takes her beautiful slender hands in his and kisses them. Signs to her, very quickly, “I’m afraid of falling in love with you,” knowing she can’t understand.
~*~
He still has a hard time falling asleep in total silence. It’s an eerie, vulnerable feeling, like as he closes his eyes he shuts off the world, and something could come around the corner at any moment without him having the slightest warning. He concentrates on the feel of his cotton bed sheets against his stomach as he rolls over to sleep, the softness of the pillow and the firmness of the mattress. His mind drifts idly to his day, the visit from Brass, who sweated awkwardly in his living room for fifteen minutes before writing a few short, stilted questions on the dry erase board - how r u, gil? - after which the detective excused himself to go back to follow up on a lead for a case Grissom would have been running, had he not lost his hearing and now, it appeared, one of his oldest friendships. Not that Brass held any ill-will, or meant to abandon Grissom in his time of need. But they no longer shared the same world.
Sara had arrived just before sundown wearing a sleeveless cotton dress - it was her night off - that cinched around her narrow waist. Tall and lanky and gorgeous. Grissom was in a foul mood by the time she got there, but she only pursed her lips at him and hiked up an eyebrow like it was her house and he was an unfriendly guest. She’d kicked off her flip flops and put her long legs up on the arm of his couch as she’d leafed through one of his entomology texts, apparently heedless of how the skirt of her dress had ridden up her thighs, apparently heedless of his eyes devouring every inch of exposed skin from the safety of his kitchen, positioning the counter between himself and her delicious runner’s legs like a barricade in a trench war.
Grissom presses his face into his cool pillow, feeling himself getting hard and also getting annoyed. He doesn’t know why he is so attracted to young, tempestuous Sara Sidle, and he doesn’t know why he fights it so vociferously.
Well, on that second count, maybe he did - he knew the attraction would only build the more it was indulged, and he didn’t want that to happen, didn’t want to get tangled up in her life any more than he already was. She was hot headed and emotional and unpredictable and exactly the kind of thing to up-end his stable existence, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to draw any lines with her, not once he’d crossed the first line. She’d be in him like heroin in a vein.
And, god, like heroin, it would feel fucking fantastic as he came up on the high of her: Grissom knows it would. Kissing her, talking to her, sharing his life with her… making love to her. It is the latter that occupies his thoughts now, all the many, many ways he could explore that delectable body.
Grissom grunts unhappily, pushing his forehead down into his pillow, creating a dark pocket of air for his nose and mouth. He snakes his right hand down under the waist of his pajama pants, his hips bowing forward as he grips himself. There can be no deception here in the quiet black of the night, alone, soundless. No question of what he so desperately wants. He lets himself make noise as he gets himself off, enjoying the feel of his moans vibrating in his chest, growling, swallowing heavily. He imagines if he had stepped around the kitchen counter, sliding his fingers up over her knee, higher, higher, her legs parting like a smile, settling himself between the cradle of her thighs, pushing in. The thought of sliding inside of her has him ejaculating into his fist.
Grissom doesn’t bother going all the way to the bathroom to clean up - he’s too comfortable - so he just pulls off his pajama pants and chucks them off the bed, feeling debased but grimly satisfied.
~*~
His mother makes her way very deliberately through the townhouse, examining every piece of furniture, every item of decoration or sentiment with a wary skepticism.
Betty Grissom doesn’t intend it to be intimidating - or at least Grissom doesn’t suppose so - but he can’t help feeling nervous, twitchy, like in high school when she’d change his bed linens and he’d sweat and cringe as he waited for her to notice the stiff stains dried into the sheets. She never said anything, but he never stopped fearing that she might.
“You look healthy,” she signed to him suddenly, turning from the cased butterflies she’d been inspecting. “It’s good to see you looking so rested.”
Grissom sighs. “I’ve been cooking at home more,” he explains. “And sleeping at night.” Betty nods approvingly.
He had thought it might be a relief, to converse with someone who can effortlessly understand him - who can communicate to him in a language where he is on even playing ground, not desperately trying to decipher with only a fraction of the needed cues available to him. But he’s reminded of how that is not true, really, with his mother; though they share a common language, there is so much they don’t know how to say to each other.
Betty bought him a door alert that flashes a strobe light when the button is pushed. It flashes now, and Grissom wheels around, realizing in a rush of horror that it is 6pm, and he had not told Sara she shouldn’t come over.
Fuck , he mutters with feeling.
“Who is that?” his mother asks, looking very disgruntled. Understandable - she has never met any of his friends or colleagues, not since he was in college.
Grissom ignores her question, going to the door and cracking it open. He blocks the entrance with his body.
Sara is there on the other side, a box of what looks like croissants in one hand, rocking back and forth from her heels to toes. She looks up as he glowers down from the doorway. “Hi,” she signs, blinking warily at whatever she sees in Grissom’s face.
It’s not a good time, Grissom replies in English.
The color drains from Sara’s face, as though she just walked in on him with another woman. Which she has, sort of, but she couldn’t possibly know that. Oh, she speaks. Oh, I - I’m so sorry. She continues to speak rapidly, and he misses most of it, eyes riveted to her nervous mouth. I’m sorry, he understands. And, I’ll go.
She begins walking backwards, pale and horrified, and Grissom realizes very starkly that if she leaves like this she won’t ever be back. His stomach twists, but he is frozen, unable to stop her retreat - to explain.
He feels the door open behind him. His mother worms past him, curious, insistent. Hello? she says aloud.
Sara stops, staring without expression at the older woman glaring suspiciously at her. Hello.
Who are you? Betty turns to her son. “Who is that?” she demands.
“She’s a… a former colleague,” Grissom signs fumblingly. He can feel his ears reddening. “S-A-R-A.”
His mother frowns at the girl. Are you involved with my son?
Sara, who had been a moment ago bone-pale, now flushes an alarming shade of red. I - no! No. No, I’m not - no. She casts a guilty look towards Grissom.
Grissom, meanwhile, feels his stomach bottoming out somewhere around his knees, and he knows the redness in his ears is creeping rapidly down his neck. It shouldn’t be possible for his mother to embarrass him this much - he is a grown man: an experienced professional, respected in his field.
As his mother turns her calculating eye upon him, he feels like a naughty little boy.
Stay for dinner , Betty says sharply to Sara, and she sounds more like she’s meting out a punishment than an invitation.
Sara’s face twists in apprehension, but Grissom is powerless to overrule his mother. The three of them shuffle back into the townhouse.
Grissom busies himself fixing up a tortilla soup, and he tries not to watch Sara and his mother interacting in the living room. Sara admits, with great chagrin, that she is trying to learn sign language; this softens his mother somewhat, Betty never having been a woman to discredit good intentions.
Betty helps herself to correcting Sara’s fingershapes and expressions, which Sara takes with good grace, her face assuming the serious mask of a woman determined to absorb every detail of information presented to her.
Grissom follows along from the kitchen, glancing over every few seconds, and sees that Betty is asking Sara when he and she met - oh, a conference! What was Gil teaching? How lovely. And you stayed in touch? - and Grissom felt beads of sweat wetting his temples, knowing that his mother was on to him.
His mother is not disapproving of the women in Grissom’s life, not exactly - but she has well-developed opinions about what kind of woman was worthy of her only son. And Sara, Grissom knows too well, would not meet her standards.
It is with a mixture of embarrassment and protectiveness that Grissom intervenes as Betty circled in towards Sara’s family background. His mother is a good-hearted woman, beyond a doubt, but she would not understand or accept Sara’s unwillingness to discuss her past. Grissom reckons that he knows Sara about as well as anyone, and he did not know anything about her upbringing other than that her parents had owned a bed and breakfast in the Bay Area before she’d gone into foster care at some point.
Sara, Grissom says aloud, would you come help me in the kitchen?
She comes at once, looking relieved. Sara chops cucumbers and carrots, frowning down at the cutting board.
Grissom opens a bottle of wine, figuring they’ll need it. Sorry , he mumbles to her, his face angled away from his mother’s watchful eyes.
She shakes her head, not looking up. She says something, but he can’t see what it is; a moment later she remembers and lifts her chin to meet his gaze calmly. It’s fine. I’m sorry to intrude.
Grissom waves off her apology. She hasn’t met anyone I’ve worked with in… years. She hasn’t even met Catherine.
Sara eyebrows climb in surprise.
Grissom sighs, lowering the temperature on his broth as he stirs in more spices. S he probably thinks we’re halfway to the altar.
Sara looks stunned for a moment and then laughs a little, clearly pleased. Sara reaches into her back jeans pocket and pulls out her little notepad and pen; she’d begun bringing one with her so she wouldn’t have to look around his house for the ones he’s stashed in drawers and on shelves. You’ll have to explain, Sara jots down in her squirrely hand, still smiling, that I’m just a very persistent mooch.
Grissom nods. This is funny, of course, because it isn’t true. While Grissom had never expressly approved of their having dinner together most nights of the week, he’d become attached to the ritual and, in small unspoken ways, encouraged it. He’d begun buying the chardonnay she preferred, and keeping his meat in a specified fridge drawer. He’d check with her each evening about what she’d like him to make the next night. She would bring things most days; flowers or pastries or sometimes little gifts, like a puzzle or some strange item she’d picked up from a store. They’d eat together and drink wine and sit around talking - lately, mostly signing - until 11:30pm, when Sara would leave for work. Grissom would go to bed soon after; tired, yes, and also wound up, on edge, wishing she didn’t have to go and hating himself for it - wishing he was going with her.
Today, Sara leaves soon after dinner, making excuses about getting to work as Betty half-heartedly entreats her to stay for another glass of wine. Grissom is relieved to see her go, but slow to turn from the doorway and face his mother.
“She’s not Deaf,” his mother signs immediately. “How do you expect that to work?”
Grissom raises his eyes to the ceiling, praying for strength. “What do you mean, work?” he replies, deliberately playing dumb, but then defeats his own strategy by adding: “Dad was hearing.”
“He spoke Sign, and was comfortable in the Deaf world.”
Grissom shrugs, gathering their plates. Sets them on the counter and turns to her to sign, “You taught him to sign.”
“She doesn’t really know you as a Deaf person. She will always think of you as hearing, and wish you were still that way.”
Grissom closes his eyes, leaning against the counter for a moment before turning on the faucet to clean the dishes. “Maybe,” he replies. His mother was probably right. But then again, Grissom himself wished he was still hearing, so who was he to judge Sara? “It doesn’t matter. We’re not involved that way.”
“That’s a lie,” his mother signs.
“What?”
His mother leans towards him, signing emphatically, “it’s a lie. I am your mother. I know you, your eyes, your face. And she couldn’t be more obvious, fawning all over you. You are involved with this girl.” Seeing her son freezing up, Betty softens, stepping forward to touch him tentatively. Grissom prickles a little; they are not really a touchy family. “I am only trying to protect your heart, Gil,” she continues. “This girl… she won’t mean to hurt you. But you are not who she imagines you are.”
The truth - the bitter truth. Grissom feels a hard knot of sadness thickening against his throat, climbing up and burning dangerously at his eyes. Only his mother could affect him so staggeringly in so short a speech. “She knows me,” he argues feebly, feeling beyond pathetic. “She’s known me for years.”
His mother’s brows draw together in sympathy.
Grissom turns away from her, wiping down the kitchen counters.
Betty pulls the cloth out of his hands, turning him towards her. She tilts his chin up, and he notices the familiar smell of her hand lotion. “You love her?” she signs cautiously.
Something withers inside him. Grissom shakes his head once, sharply. Uh--no, he says aloud, so startled he forgets to sign.
Betty scrutinizes him for a moment more. “Good,” she signs at length. “It wouldn’t make either of you happy, in the end.”
Grissom turns away from her again, signalling the end of the conversation. He takes his time drying his dishes, hoping to calm himself before facing his mother once more.
~*~
“You look tired, Gil.”
Dr. Gilbert smiles as she signs this, sympathy in her face, perhaps, but something else as well - a soft sort of annoyance, or maybe disappointment. Grissom considers, hands tucked neatly behind his back, chewing his lip for a moment. “Not tired,” he signs at length. “I think… a little unbalanced.”
Dr. Gilbert nods. “I can’t pretend to know what it’s like,” she replies. “I was born deaf. But I know…” Her fingers pause, her eyes narrowing thoughtfully. “I know that there is a difference between a man who has no hearing, and a Deaf man. It is a choice, you know. You have a whole world at your fingertips,” she signs, giving him a slight smile as her eyes flick meaningfully to his hands, where he has them clasped nervously together once more, unmoving. “A world of people who will embrace you. A culture, a rich history. We could find you good work at the College. You could have a life here - a beautiful life.”
Grissom shifts his jaw uneasily. He feels suddenly suffocated, the Las Vegas sun overhead too bright, the trees of this serene park leaning in too close. “Thank you,” he fumbles.
“We would love to have you work for us,” she presses. “We need somebody to teach the undergraduate biology courses. Possible graduate work too, if things go well.”
Grissom scrutinizes Dr. Gilbert’s expression for a moment, tilting his head. “That’s a wonderful offer,” he manages. “I’ll consider it.”
They part ways awkwardly not long after, and Grissom can’t help but feel like he’s missed an important opportunity, like he’s succeeded, yet again, in alienating somebody who only wanted to help him. He trudges home in the unpleasant afternoon heat, his shirt sticking his chest and under his arms with sweat, his eyes squinting against the glaring sun.
Inside the cool dim of his condo, Grissom considers, for an irrational moment, calling Sara. He hasn’t seen her in three weeks; after his mother left, he did not feel like he could bear it, and ignored the two emails she sent asking him how he was and whether she might drop by. She’d stopped emailing after that, and he had not reached out, even deciding to go to the crime lab late into the day shift when he had to clear out his office in order to ensure he wouldn’t see her.
But now, Dr. Gilbert’s wondering face emblazoned in his mind, he finds that he deeply misses Sara. The feeling is like swallowing on a parched throat, and Grissom reaches for the phone he still has in his living room before stopping, realizing, with a sink of embarrassment and sadness, that he can no longer use it.
Jesus, he breathes aloud, and, deciding he likes the sensation, shouts: DAMN IT ALL! The words shock through his chest.
Grissom makes his way to the shower, disliking the heavy silence of his empty apartment, somehow so different from the vibrant silence of the world outside. The water on his skin is pleasantly cool, and he lets it sting his eyes, pour into his mouth.
He should email her, he thinks decisively.
He sits at his desk staring at his macintosh computer for several long, motionless minutes, staring at the last email she had sent. Hey, she had written, just wondering how you’re doing. Let me know if you feel like company - I got some cinnamon rolls from that bakery by the station.
Two weeks ago. He wonders what she did with the cinnamon rolls she’d bought for them - had she eaten them all? He doubts it. Shared with the lab perhaps? Or just thrown them out, waiting for his reply until they became stale and hard as rocks? Grissom chews his lip, tapping his fingers against his desk top.
At length he begins to type:
Sara,
He stops, sighing. I wanted to - backspace, backspace.
Sara,
Grissom rubs his fingers into his eyes. Backspace.
Sara,
Dinner wednesday? Bring wine.
- G
Grissom frowns, feeling his ears prickle with heat, and hits send before he can delete the whole email draft.
He limits himself strictly to checking his email only once per day, in the evening; not a small accomplishment for an unemployed, friendless eccentric who’d already read every book on his shelf. She replies ten or eleven hours later, probably checking her email before going in to shift.
He sees the bold letters indicating her response, and is annoyed with his shaking fingers as he clicks the envelope icon.
Grissom,
See you then.
Sara
Her words wash over him like a cool breeze on a blistering summer afternoon, and Grissom sags with relief. Yeah, he thinks to himself, grinning helplessly, see you then.
~*~
You’ve changed.
Friday night finds Grissom staring down at her loopy, elegant handwriting, fighting a scowl. Yes. I’ve gone deaf.
She accepts the notepad, reads it with a slight purse to her painted lips. Looks up at him from beneath kohl dark eyelids. Not what I meant, her eyes say.
Grissom sits back, turning his head slightly, indicating he will not accept her observation nor further reply to it. He sips lightly at his cup of tea. She always makes it precisely as he prefers.
They sit in silence for several long minutes, not awkward but not comfortable either. The silence is a pressing thing, a living thing - Grissom has learned this in the past few months. Silences are not all the same: they have the infinite variety and textures of any organism. This one is vibrant, electric; it pushes into his ears like water at the bottom of a pool; it hums along his skin, scratching at any weakness it finds.
She sets her teacup very carefully in its saucer, takes the notepad, and writes. Grissom does not watch her hand as it moves over the page, does not notice the deep-sea blue of her fingernail polish, does not compare Heather’s calm, attentive gaze with her face, how she would be frowning as she writes or grinning, how she’d chew at a lip or pull at her hair, always in motion, her slender body always whirring and shifting with her thoughts like a whirligig in the wind.
Heather hands him the pad.
Something has happened, she wrote. You’re here instead of somewhere else. And you’re angry, which is perhaps an expected response to the grief of your hearing loss, so people haven’t noticed it yet - but your anger is something more. It’s a distraction. To keep people from sensing whatever it is that you’re trying so desperately to avoid.
Grissom stares down at her analysis, all fluttery cursive letters, written like it might be an old-fashioned dinner party invite. Replies, who are all these ‘people’ you’re imagining, I wonder?
Heather smiles slightly as she reads. You tell me, she speaks, facing him and speaking so he can read the words off her lips. Catherine?
Grissom blinks, expressionless.
Heather tilts her head, curious. That detective? No. Someone else.
Silence. Heather has reached the end of her ability to guess without further information - Grissom must now do the work, must decide whether he will accept her intimacy or deny it. He waffles in that indecision for only a moment. Sara, he speaks. Her name is Sara.
Heather nods minutely, indicating he should proceed.
She works - she used to work for me. His soundless voice feels strange in his chest, hollow, like a remembered echo of something that was once real. Now we’re… friends. She visits with me. We - I had her for dinner a couple of days ago. It… didn’t go well.
Heather’s eyes glow, cat-like in the candlelight of her living room. One of her fingertips rubs against the plush suede of her couch, sultry, sensual, and it turns him on a little to watch. He can’t imagine touching her, even though he already has - it hasn’t been three months since he’d kissed her in the hallway nearest her bedroom, tasted her lipstick, felt her soft breaths against his cheek, as warm and alive as any other woman - but somehow he is convinced if he were to touch her again, he’d find her skin cool and smooth as marble. Grissom suddenly wishes he would lean forward now and kiss her, but he can’t bring himself to want to, can’t find the energy inside his body to move.
She’s in love with you.
Grissom smiles slightly, humorless, the grimace of a corpse. Yes. That’s why I sent her home.
Heather nods. And now you don’t know how to move on.
Grissom says nothing.
So you’re here, Heather speaks, smiling, beginning to laugh, hoping you can stoke the flames between us. That I’ll distract you. Maybe I will: kiss me, and find out.
Grissom does not move.
Heather rises from the couch like a mist off water, fanning over him, her eyes swirling. Grissom resists an urge to turn his face away. Her lips are cool and soft on his; he opens his mouth slightly, and as she kisses him, slow and skillful, her hands tracing delicate shapes over his cheeks and neck and chest, he feels himself becoming aroused. It is an odd, detached sensation, almost objective; Grissom shifts, his erection pressing against the seam of his slacks, aware of a numbing kind of sadness pooling in the path of Heather’s fingertips as she memorizes the buttons of his shirt.
Heather breaks from his lips for breath.
Stop, Grissom whispers, and Heather retreats immediately, rearranging herself onto the sofa across from him as though this was precisely the outcome she was anticipating.
Well? asks Heather. Are you distracted? Or just comparing me to the taste of her?
There’s nothing about her, Grissom says suddenly, sharp and irritated, worth comparing to you - she’s - He tilts his head, mouth open, brows narrowed. His brain clicks urgently through possible descriptors, hungry to reveal the edges of her. She’s childish and moody and overly emotional. I’ve been telling her no for years but she’s relentless.
Heather laughs outright. Grissom can almost hear it. So, stop having her over for dinner.
Grissom purses his lips, scowling, shifting his eyes to glare sullenly at his tea cup.
Heather composes herself, though amusement glitters in her eyes, not entirely kind. She lifts her pen and begins writing on the notepad with a flourish. Or you can accept that falling in love is not an intellectual process, Grissom reads once she’s handed over her missive.
I just - Grissom cuts himself off, clearing his throat. I just want to know what it was. I can’t remember any specific moment. I don’t know if it was something she said or - or something she did or maybe just some look --
Gil, writes Heather in reply, This isn’t a homicide. You won’t be able to deduce a moment of impact or analyse the splatter to trace the angle of the blow.
It’s not what I wanted, Grissom protests. This feeling. Or even her.
Heather writes, You don’t get to sit behind your desk and decide one day to fall in love with a woman that meets your ideal criteria, somebody who would love you for the man you wish you were, rather than the man you are. If you could, you would have chosen me. It’s the chaos of an expanding universe, Gil. You’ve been struck by lightning. There is no asking ‘why’.
Grissom glances up at Heather, coiled comfortably on her sofa like a mountain lion on a high tree branch. Grissom thinks there is something indescribably feline about her, something animalistic. She is exactly the kind of woman he’d always thought he was looking for. You love me for the man I wish I was? he asks.
Heather sighs. If she were inclined to trivial habits, she’d take this moment to drag off a cigarette; as it is, she only drags in a breath, wearying of his obstinance. Grissom, I don’t love you at all.
~*~
He is her last stop of the night.
She thinks of being here as a sort of desperation, a last resort. If it had been as it was before, this would be a night for work - double or even triple shift, pouring over the casefile, reanalysing evidence already combed through. Pale beneath the scorching fluorescent lights of the lab, a lonely ghost, not leaving a trace of herself behind; not even a fingerprint. Grissom would’ve been there too, of course. He sometimes left before her, sometimes, but he held a sort of a captain-goes-down-the-ship mentality about his subordinates’ overtime.
Catherine had been long off the clock, and Nick was back at the lab, wrapping up a case to submit to the DA. Warrick had the night off. Which left only her, only Sara, aside from the dayshift - but she couldn’t hand the case over, hadn’t even considered it. So instead she spent four hours in the rain processing Susanna’s corpse, sprawled out like a rose with a broken stem upon the cold concrete of her parents’ driveway.
Sara went home after, showered, put on her pajamas. Watched some television. She couldn’t tell you what she’d seen. She brushed her teeth and thought about taking a Benadryl with a shot of tequila but stripped off her pajamas in exchange for her jogging shorts and took to the streets instead. She is a short-term form beneath the cones of light from the streetlamps before fading back into the shadowy dim. After the run she tries to read and and she tries to survive inside her own skin and finally she takes her car keys and winds up here.
On his front stoop, her t shirt sewn to her skin with the lashing rain. She doesn’t know what she’ll say. She’s got no reason to be here, no justification, and he’ll know it as soon as he sees her.
She presses his doorbell. Sara can see the faint flash of the light it is attached to. She presses it again. She hears his shuffling footsteps, clumsy, probably louder than he realizes. There is a whole world of perception to which she is involuntarily a member and he is involuntarily excluded. It doesn’t feel like she has an ability he lacks. It feels more like he is a creature of the sea and she is of the land but she wants to spend her life breathing underwater with him anyway.
He opens the door. His face is unreadable in the backlight of the lamp he’s flicked on in pursuit of her call. His hand on her shoulder is real though and welcoming enough, pulling her inside, and he signs to her rapidly, more rapidly than she can understand. She gets what he’s trying to say, though.
He vanishes back down the hallway towards his bedroom and the master bathroom, reappears armed with several towels and what looks like a pair of ratty sweatpants. He towels her down like she’s a doll he’s left outside overnight, rubbing vigorously at her hair, rattling her teeth in her head. Strips off her wet clothes and heaps them on the floor. She’s almost surprised he doesn’t have an evidence bag to seal them into.
She finds herself in his old sweatpants and a UCLA t shirt and on the couch and under a blanket in about two and a half minutes. That’s how fast it feels, at any rate. She watches him set his tea kettle on the stove, transfixed by the tightening notch between his eyebrows.
He lifts his head to regard her with an expression of no surprise. Hungry? he signs.
Sara shakes her head.
He resumes his work in the kitchen, retrieving two mugs, parceling out little heaps of chamomile into each. A dollop of honey. She wonders where he buys his tea, loose leaf, the good stuff. She knows he’ll have a lot to say about it if she asks at the right moment, but not tonight.
He sits on the armchair perpendicular from the couch, out of striking distance. He’s afraid of her, afraid of what she might try to do. He was clearer than glass about how little he was interested in her last time she was over here, but she supposes he doesn’t trust her to back off. Sara leans her head against the back of his couch and closes her eyes.
They sit together in the quiet for several minutes. Sara knows she should open her eyes so she can see if he wants to sign to her, but she doesn’t, focusing instead on the beat of her heart in her ears, on the yellowish glow of her eyelids from the soft light of his lamps. She can smell the distinctive smell of his home, leather and paper and dish soap and the faint aroma of whatever he cooked that evening, something with meat. She feels her body releasing all its constant terror, though she does not instruct it to. Somehow it seems impossible that anybody hurt her here.
“I’ve been thinking of taking a position at the Deaf College.”
Sara lifts her head as though it weighs thirty pounds. He is sitting with his elbows on his knees, staring down into his tea mug. His face is very serious. What teach? she signs.
“Biology,” Grissom replies, not bothering to correct her grammar, or perhaps not daring. “Undergrads, mostly. A good position though.”
Sara nods.
“Catherine’s not looking after you.”
Sara frowns, sitting up a little more. She feels a bolt of indignation and also embarrassment, sitting here on his couch swaddled in his blankets, only a week after he told her there would be nothing between them, ever. Of course he’d find her pathetic. Don’t need her, she signs. Not a child.
Grissom slowly shakes his head. “I know,” he says. His voice has changed a little these past few months, rougher and softer, something she’d want to hold and rub against her skin. He looks at her, and his eyes are heavy and unreadable in the dim light. “What do you need from me, Sara?”
The question is very frank, and it makes Sara’s heart pulse out of rhythm. Though it seems unwarranted, her eyes fill with tears. Nothing, she signs, obstinate and childish. I should go.
“I don’t think you should,” Grissom says. “Stay here tonight.”
Sara wipes at her tears, trying to steady her breathing. You think I am - p-a-t-h-e-t-i-c. What is the sign?
Grissom shakes his head. “I’m not - Sara, I don’t think that. I’m not judging you. Just - you can sleep on the couch. Or in the bed. Your choice.”
Sara stares at him for a moment. “With you?”
His eyes follow the flutter of her mouth, itself a beating heart. “I’ll be sleeping in the bed, yes.”
It’s less awkward than perhaps it should be, climbing into bed with him. He is solemn and slow moving, his grey eyes giving away no feeling other than a deep kind of sadness that makes her feel strangely warm. The bed is very large, much larger than hers, and as Sara slots herself between the comforter and the smooth sheets, she feels like she’s floating on her back in a pool, weightless, unmoored.
Grissom folds his glasses neatly and sets them on his bedside table. “Ready for me to turn off the light?” he asks politely.
Sara nods. The room extinguishes into darkness.
She listens to the noises of him settling himself in, reminded of a hamster adjusting its nest. When she gathers the courage to look over the cool chasm of mattress between their bodies, she sees him lying on his back, his eyes drooping closed, one arm bent at the elbow and tucked beneath his pillow beside his head.
Sara has an irrational impulse to approach him and gratefully follows it. She moves like a horizontal inchworm until her leg is brushing the fabric of his pajama pants and she is holding up her head to avoid laying it on his bicep.
Grissom continues gazing drowsily at the ceiling as though he has not noticed.
“Will this ever go away?” she asks, hoping he will not understand.
But he turns to look at her, and struggles through the words on her lips. “Will what go away?”
Sara touches her fingertip lightly against the left side of her chest, just above her breast, and then drifts that fingertip to touch the fusion where his rib bones meet. Grissom looks up at the ceiling again. “I hope so,” he says.
Did he feel it too? But she did not dare ask. Instead, Sara makes her horizontal inchworm way the last small space between them, laying her head carefully against his chest, as though he may buck her off. She sets her hand down on his opposite side very slowly. Grissom lies acceptingly beneath her, not squirming away and not drawing her in. She settles against his warm and breathing self.
As her ear seals against his t-shirt, she can hear that his heart is beating very fast.
~*~
As she sleeps through the afternoon, warm and bony where she’s gathered up against his side, he takes the opportunity to think things through.
It’ll be difficult, he acknowledges, to move their relationship backwards from this moment of intimacy. They haven’t kissed, though, which is an important point to remember. No inarguable lines have been crossed. She’s only sleeping, as innocent as a lamb, each of her soft breaths clouding against his throat. He thinks he ought to rise before she wakes. He thinks that this time of them tangled together like shoelaces ought to remain deep in the wells of her subconscious. Otherwise she may ask it of him again, and he doesn’t think he could manage it without completely losing his grip on things.
He can’t quite bring himself to regret the decision to hold her through her dark night. She’d been a little bit shattered, standing there on his doorstep in the pouring rain. There’d been something in her face he’d never seen before. Something dark and deep down, like an infection that festered far below the surface of the skin.
There are things he doesn’t know about her, that much is clear. Things he must never know. Grissom senses it would be impossible to learn her most vulnerable parts and remain in any way detached from her.
As it is, he had felt compelled to shield her, to throw his wing over her huddled body, keep her warm and dry until the storm passed. He feels angry and helpless, knowing that Catherine was not seeing what he had seen as her supervisor. Knowing that Catherine would not be able to keep her safe or look after her like she needs. He will have to do his best from his position outside her professional life. It makes things trickier, since he lacks the helpful parameters of work; there are no natural boundaries, no right to be close to her without giving her also a right to be close to him. But Grissom feels confident he will find some middle ground.
Sara stretches and sniffs, sighs. Grissom feels her long limbs sliding against his side and the gust of her breath and it sends a prickle of sensation up and down his torso. He decides it is time to extricate himself before his hormones get the best of him.
He manages, with dexterity and patience, to disentangle himself without waking her. He shuffles to the bathroom, willing his erection to subside quickly. He cleans himself up with brisk efficiency, brushing his teeth and shaving with cold water. He wants to appear composed and unruffled when she rises from the warm messy sheets of his bed.
He retrieves some clothing to change in his office, and then checks his email. Catherine has written him to complain about the duties of being supervisor and request that they get happy hour drinks next week. His mother has emailed an article about a James Dean pop up museum in LA, remembering, apparently, the little boy who’d so loved a handsome rebel. Al Robbins sent a brief note to describe a very unusual finding he’d discovered on autopsy last week, and to ask him over to dinner with Robbins and his wife.
Grissom makes his way to the kitchen. He puts the kettle on for more tea, and rifles through his fridge to get a sense of what he could make that Sara would eat. He’d been planning on using some leftovers for a soup, but it wasn’t vegetarian. He will make a frittata instead.
It is two more hours before Sara wakes. Grissom makes it about a third the way through a novel he picked up last week about an adolescent boy with autism who solves mysteries. It sounds hokey but the author’s rhythmic prose appeals to him. There is something comforting and perhaps familiar about the protagonist setting the lines of his thinking at slightly perpendicular angles against the world.
She appears unobtrusively into his living room, pulling her hair out of her eyes, rumpled and blinking in the creaking slowness of waking. This is what it would be, Grissom thinks. This would be what life was like, if he opened it to her; her eyes, clay brown as the earth, her slender body framed in the back lighting of his living room window. A beautiful life, and it terrifies him. Beauty has always terrified him.
“Thirsty,” she signs, and he sees she is losing the rigid formality of people who are new to the language. Her gestures are beginning to become her own, inflected with her personality just as he knew her speech to be: characteristic, distinct, signature, like a well crafted perfume.
Grissom nods towards the cup of tea he’s left out for her. It’s cold, but Sara takes it anyway and takes a long drink. She sets the cup down a moment later and then crosses his living room to slouch onto his sofa next to him. Grissom tracks her movements like a gazelle would track a lion through the grass.
“Book?” she signs.
He resists a smile at her simple way of communicating and avoiding the unintuitive grammar rules of a visual language. He shows her the cover. “About a boy who is investigating the murder of his neighbor’s dog.”
Sara nods. “I read.”
Grissom purses his lips. “You’ve read this already?”
She nods again.
Grissom is aware that she is leaning closer and closer to where he is seated. He is against the armrest already and can escape no farther. He can smell her, salty and rain-washed. He debates an impulse to stand up but can think of no excuse for doing so.
She reaches forward and touches her fingertips to the page of the book where he marked his spot. “I liked it.”
Grissom stares down at the page as though it contains some vital information. “You’re feeling better?”
She sighs. He can’t hear it but he feels it against the shell of his ear. He doesn’t look up, so he can’t see her reply.
She taps his shoulder. He turns slowly, reluctantly, his eyes inching up towards her. He knows it is going to happen. He’s known since she sat down. Possibly since she arrived at his home, or perhaps since she arrived in Las Vegas, or perhaps since she took her seat in that lecture hall in 1998.
She doesn’t lean forward. He doesn’t either. They sit there, looking at one another, neither moving but both understanding the inevitability of movement. Grissom is reminded of watching a vase tilting on its side, knowing it will crash to the ground. Grissom is the vase. He is about to be unmade.
Just one, he says aloud, feeling the raspiness of his rarely used voice. Just one.
She nods, looking neither disappointed nor accepting. Tilts forward and seals her lips to his.
~*~
Later, Grissom does some absent minded calculations and determines it lasted approximately forty minutes. The kiss, that is. With breaks, obviously. Little pauses to breath and stare at one another in solemn wonder.
It didn’t progress to anything more, though Grissom was sure that Sara felt his erection on at least two occasions as they fumbled and squirmed around together on his couch. It was interesting to kiss in total silence. He appreciated how able he was to focus on the taste and feel of her as he closed his eyes, shutting out all the rest of the world. He appreciated how she tasted, how she smelled, he appreciated the vibrations of her soft noises against his lips and tongue, he appreciated the weight of her body as she leaned into him, the feel of her ribs beneath his palms, the tickle of her hair as it slipped from its bun and trailed against his cheek. Appreciated is a word for it. Loved is another.
But he had done well. He had managed to loose himself from her, to struggle to the surface of the murky waters. Leaning away, looking away, drawing a breath. “Your shift starts in two hours,” he’d signed to her.
Sara had tucked her hair behind her ears, nodding. She leans over to the coffee table and picks up a pen and note pad. Are you going to avoid me for weeks now, like you did after I met your mother?
Grissom clenches his jaw unconsciously, then deliberately relaxes it, running his tongue along the uneven ridges of his molars. “I have a hard time keeping my boundaries with you,” he signs. She looks into his eyes uncertainly; he fingerspells B-O-U-N-D-A-R-Y.
Sara rubs at her eyes tiredly. And you need these boundaries, she speaks.
It is cruel, insisting he study those lips he’d tasted only moments ago. Sara, we’ve been over this…
She withers. There’s no other way to describe it. Like a flower left in the baking sun. His words: scorching her, draining her of vital essence. That’s what he had done to her, he knew. All along. Ensnared and entangled her, lured her away from the lush cold sea spray of her homeland into this hot, arid place, thirsty and desolate and alone. He’d trapped her here, friendless, isolated, a creature of night and shadow, trapped her with false promises of love and loyalty. And now a kiss which was more than a kiss - a kiss which was a wish, a kiss which was a door to a world that he had sworn for so long did not even exist. A life. A beautiful life. A life he would not have with her.
“Why not?” she signs.
He fears for a moment she has read his mind, and then, reminding himself that is impossible, he studies the binding of his book, holding onto the threads of his composure. “It’s… too much,” he signs.
Sara frowns. “What is?”
He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t have to.
He watches the blooming redness stain her cheeks, spilled wine, dappling her neck and chest, lower, past where he can see. He imagines the flush of his rejection spreading like the fingers of a hand across her milk white breasts, her stomach, the flare of her hips. “Me,” she signs, and her hand is trembling. “I’m too much.”
There isn’t much he can say. It’s true, and it’s not true, at the same time. She is too much: too loud, too bright, too wonderfully alive. She infuses him with sensation like one of his roller coasters, thrilling and unpredictable, makes his body vibrate with feeling, makes his head spin. She has refused to abandon him even as he has become pointless, a freshly deafened man who cannot do his job or fulfill his purpose or really even be much of a friend. Somehow, she still thinks she wants him. Somehow, she is still convinced he will make her happy. He cannot bear to prove her wrong.
All he wants is to keep her at a distance, just far enough that he can survive, just far enough that a few of his basic structures will remain intact when she realizes what he is and what his future holds. When she realizes that they live in completely different worlds, that they were born in completely different decades, that they no longer even share a common language. She lights him on fire, and when she leaves him he will burn and burn until he burns himself out. He can’t imagine the pain. He’s only trying to stay alive.
He sees she is crying, and Grissom begins to feel desperate, knowing that he is ruining everything. “We can be friends,” he signs.
She must see something of how frantic he is feeling because she looks at him for the first time like maybe she doesn’t actually know why he won’t give her what she wants. She raises her hands to say something more and then lowers them. She leans forward and kisses him again.
He takes her face in his hands and tries to show her with his teeth and tongue what he can’t seem to find the words for. She is the one this time to break away. “I don’t want to be your friend,” she signs.
Forty minutes. Hardly any time at all. Grissom locks the door after her when she leaves.
He checks his email every day. Three weeks in, she hasn’t written a word.
~*~
It isn’t until it’s been about a month since he’s heard from her that he screws up the courage to send an email. Short, to the point: Would you like to come over for dinner?
Seven days later, he accepts that she does not intend to reply.
He accepts the position offered to him at the Deaf College. He will not begin until next year, but he begins acquainting himself with the curriculum, and devising his syllabus.
The days are quiet and long. He ignores emails from Catherine, from Robbins, from his mother. He has trouble falling asleep at night, thinking strange thoughts in the darkness. He blames the adjustment from so many years of graveyard.
It takes him a while to recognize it, but it comes together all at once, like solving a crime: there is a drilling point of sorrow in his chest that feels almost like a slow motion heart attack. It radiates numbness down his arms and legs, slowing his movements. It swathes his head in cotton, so that he feels he is always on the brink of unconsciousness. Like he is moving underwater.
It occurs to him he may never see Sara again. It occurs to him this is probably what is best for her. As these realizations settle from shock into knowledge, the sadness in Grissom rises, such that he sits on his couch one afternoon and realizes he cannot endure his own future. Day after day after day. Teaching, maybe. Making friends at the College, perhaps, gaining a reputation. Getting dinner with Catherine every month or so, less as time goes by, until they are nearly strangers. A pointless, changeless life, stretching on and on and on until at last he fades like dying embers and is no more.
That evening, Grissom decides to get a dog.
He must ask the man at the shelter three or four times to repeat himself before the man realizes Grissom cannot hear and they begin writing back and forth on a sheet of paper. The man makes him fill out a long application, surprisingly thorough.
What kind of house? the man writes.
Townhouse.
Square footage?
Grissom blinks, recalling. 1500, give or take.
Yard?
Patio.
Fenced? Grass?
Fenced, concrete.
How do you plan to exercise the animal?
Grissom looks up at the man, wondering if this is some kind of trick. A walk?
The man gives him a considering look. Employment?
Grissom hesitates for only a moment. Professor.
Other pets?
No.
The man nods. Follow me.
He brings Grissom into the back, unlocking a door and stepping into a narrow hallway lined with cages. It is rather like visiting county jail. The dogs howl and whimper and groan, lending it an asylum edge that Grissom did not anticipate.
The man leads him through the pleading, desperate animals to a kennel towards the back. There is a large flop eared, snub nosed dog with several bouncing puppies at her feet.
Pups, Grissom reads off the man’s lips. 9 weeks.
Grissom crouches down. One little male puppy approaches the grate, his long pink tongue slipping through to lap at Grissom’s fingers. The only taste of freedom this young fellow perhaps has ever known. His breath smells of milk and his eyes shine like dark marbles.
I’ll take him, Grissom says.
~*~
The puppy has grown in size by a third when he sees one morning an email from her sitting in his inbox.
He forces himself to finish preparing his coffee before he clicks the bold letters of her name.
Grissom,
Catherine alerted me that she hasn’t heard anything from you in weeks. Lab wondering if you’ve died or moved to alaska etc. All ok?
P.S. went to Bodies exhibit at Luxor. Not sure if ethical. Interesting though.
- S. Sidle
Grissom reflects that he should wait a day or two before responding, so as not to appear desperate. He manages to make it thirty five minutes. He writes:
Sara, meet Hank:
And inserts a photo of the boxer puppy chewing enthusiastically on one of Grissom’s slippers, a mess of clown-shoe paws and floppy ears.
For the ball player, a hero of my youth. Hoping he may grow to be as graceful.
Bodies exhibit poses interesting ethical dilemmas. So much of scientific knowledge steeped in histories of oppression and exploitation.
Hard to know sometimes how to repair our mistakes and move forward so we don’t lose things that are important to us.
Not in Alaska.
Grissom
~*~
Grissom, comes the email, two days later,
He’s adorable. I always suspected you were a dog person. More photos please.
Re: ethics. Is it so hard? Seems to me the first step is always to hear the voices of those who have been wronged. Who knows what reparations are needed, if not them?
- Sidle
~*~
The photo this time is Hank in the park, a tennis ball far too wide set in his youthful jaws, ropes of saliva hanging from his jowls as he lopes towards the camera.
Beneath the tableau, two words:
I’m listening.
~*~
Grissom,
You told me the last time we spoke that I was too much for you. I think what was so hurtful about that is realizing that it was true. I am too much for you. For most people, for most of my life. Maybe part of what attracted me to you is that with you, I felt more contained. I felt like the ground was a little steadier under my feet. I’m wondering now if perhaps that was a sign that I was using you as a crutch rather than valuing you as a person.
When I was a child, I grew up in a house that was too much. Too much screaming, too much hitting, too many lies and things said that could never be unsaid. My father used to tell me I was too loud, I talked too much, I ate too much. My mother used to tell me I was too tall, too smart, too angry. I always assumed it was all the ways I was too much that made things so bad. It wasn’t until my mother murdered my father I realized there may be more to the story.
I think I’ve been hungry my whole life to feel sane. For a long time I thought it was just validation I was looking for, to be good, to be smart and accomplished. But that isn’t it, really. I’ve never doubted that you think highly of me as a CSI. Not really. What I realize now is that I’ve doubted whether you trust my rationality. Whether you trust my judgment, not as an investigator but as a human being. I’ve never trusted anybody in my whole life the way I trust you. It’s only very recently occurred to me that feeling may not be mutual.
I’m sorry that I’ve pushed you so hard. I’m sorry I’ve been too much between us. I realize now I’ve been selfish. I was so dead-set on having you as the partner in my life that I refused to be there for you as a friend. I let you down, and that was wrong of me.
I want to say this once now so it can be done between us. I love you. I think I’ve loved you since the moment I met you. I’m not the type to believe in those kinds of things but I have no other explanation for it. Maybe you are right to doubt my rationality.
I hope this can clear the air between us. Let’s be friends.
- Sidle
~*~
He reads the email, and prints it out so he can hold it in his hands as he reads it again. He finds himself hooked and snared on so many different sharp edges, on the images in his own mind, on her words, as clear and strong as a punch to the gut.
He paces and mutters in his voiceless voice and takes many many hours before he replies.
~*~
Sara,
Would you like to come over for dinner?
Grissom
~*~
Dinner goes well. It’s true. No dramatic confessions of undying love, no, nor instant resolution to the awkward delicacy they embody with one another, tip toeing careful movements, two porcupines trying not to get too close and prick.
She kisses Hank and wrestles him and strokes his wriggling body. Grissom feels like the puppy embodies him in a surreal but satisfying way. Like all the feelings which defy the norms he has striven to uphold his entire life are dissociated into the wiggling, yipping, nipping, joyful creature that is held so warmly in Sara Sidle’s arms. My heart, he thinks. She is holding my heart.
~*~
He invites her over again the next week and she arrives. She’s dressed in her work clothes though she’s told him it's her night off. He realizes as she droops through the pasta that she hasn’t slept, and he is not surprised when she dozes off against his shoulder while he watches an episode of 60 Minutes she’d claimed to be interested in. He lets her sleep.
~*~
The knowing has come on him slow, like coming down with a cold. And then it’s there and he can’t remember exactly when the knowing started, only that he knows now, and he can’t imagine not knowing.
How foolish, he thinks. How foolish am I. Writhing and wriggling like Hank, never sitting still enough to get exactly the touch I am desperate for. How foolish am I, fighting my own life, how foolish, not listening when she is the only thing in the world left that I can hear.
He emails her a poem by an author he loves but never quotes. She writes back, it’s beautiful . She’s cautious. She can be no other way, with all that he’s done and said between them.
Grissom emails Heather next. Asks, what do I do, though? as though they’d been in the middle of a conversation.
Just let her in the door, the Lady replies.
So when Sara knocks that evening for dinner, Grissom opens. He tries to infuse the gesture with meaning as he does so. The puppy bounces up to her kneecaps. As she straightens, Grissom follows an errant impulse to pull her into a hug.
It’s a bit like hugging a coat hanger for the first few seconds. Then her hands are patting his shoulderblades, and then he feels her skinny arms wrap around him, surprisingly strong. She sets her bony chin on his shoulder. She rubs her cheek against his cheek.
He pulls away, and she speaks, what was that for?
Grissom considers. I’m trying to open the door, he says, tilting his head.
Sara frowns. To where?
Grissom purses his lips. He won’t lie and say that he feels courageous. The sensations he’s experiencing at the moment are something closer to paralyzing terror. He lifts his hands and taps his chest above his left ribcage.
Sara only stares.
I was wrong, he says. Her eyes fix, wide and wary, on his face. You’re not too much, Sara. There’s nothing too much about you. I don’t ever want any less of you in my life again.
Oh, she says.
“I think it was never that you were too much,” Grissom signs. It’s easier, the gestures. They feel more real to him. He has always felt his love and his sorrow in his own body, never in the hollow space of air that spoken words hold. “I think I was afraid I was too little.” He motions to his ear. “Deaf. Old. Eccentric. Unemployed, for a time. I don’t have much to give you.” He sighs, and tries to fight the trembling in his fingertips. “But whatever I do have - it’s yours, if you want it. It’s always been yours.”
There are tears in her eyes, shimmering like glass. “Slow down,” she signs. “Again, please.”
He starts over and repeats himself slowly. She wipes at her eyes.
“Again,” she signs.
He laughs a little. Signs it all over again. She touches his fingers as though to feel the meanings there.
“Too little,” she signs. “You. Too little.” She laughs, looking up at the ceiling as though there’s some explanation there that’ll put this all neatly together. You’re all I’ve ever wanted, she says to the roof.
“I’m afraid to disappoint you,” he signs. Sara shakes her head at him, solemn, almost grim.
You’ve kept me at arms length for years, she says, and I haven’t given up on you yet.
Grissom dips his head, acknowledging. Smiles just a little. “That’s true,” he replies. He shuffles a little closer to her. She turns her head so she can keep his eye, and he likes that, he likes bumping his chin lightly against her cheek, letting their shoulders brush and nuzzle. Will you stay with me? he mouths into her skin.
Yes, she says, I will.
~*~