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All The Way To Reno
Violet
"You've dusted the nonbelievers
And challenged the laws of chance..."
-R.E.M.
One time, she had left him. It wasn't because of a fight. They hadn't even really been lovers then, but she'd left him anyway.
She'd been dating Eddie for four months and she wasn't sure about him yet, so she was studying for her Histology final at Gil's place. In the back room of his ugly, undersized apartment, she lay on her stomach on the bed, chain-smoking and tapping ashes on a plastic plate while she stared into her textbook. She was trying not to hear him in the living room, but her eyes were starting to glaze over and he was loud, yelling at a college basketball game on TV.
The sixth or seventh time he shouted "fuck" at the top of his lungs, Catherine slammed the book shut and walked out, cigarette between her teeth. She went right past him and the squat orange sofa. She thought she would go see Eddie, or go home, but she didn't. Instead she rode the highway out for maybe three quarters of an hour, until it was her and the sand and the sky. She pulled off to the side of the road. While the daylight lasted, she pored over her notes, and only the occasional semi went by to distract her. Then it was late, and a chill set in. She drove back to Gil's for her jacket. He stood in the doorway, his words slurred together when he spoke.
"I would've come after you," he said. He'd tapped an empty green bottle against his hip. "But, uh, I didn't want to drive."
She started to shove her arm into the sleeve and then hesitated. "Who won?"
"Michigan."
Catherine closed her eyes and let the door swing shut behind her so she could lean on it. She thought of the final she had at seven AM and finished pulling the jacket on. "Okay," she said, and left him holding the door open as she waited for the elevator. He watched her until it arrived.
*
Stokes is peering into the microscope and muttering as he twiddles the knobs on its side. "Come on, you son of a bitch, where are you?"
"Grissom's down in the break room gargling with stale coffee," Sidle snickers, leaning on Stokes' shoulders. "But I don't think he'd appreciate the nickname."
"Funny girl."
"I'm moonlighting. Opening for David Cassidy."
Catherine watches them from the hall and wonders if they're sleeping together. "What're you looking for?" she asks, stepping into the lab.
Sidle cocks her head over her shoulder. "He thinks there'll be red fibers on the clothing from the suicide at the Grand."
"It wasn't a suicide," Stokes insists. "It was staged. The boyfriend staged it. Admittedly he staged it very well."
"Suicide," Sidle dismisses him, and stands up straight, turning to Catherine. "Anyway, the shift ends in ten minutes and I'm getting out of here, wild goose chase or no. You want to go get dinner or breakfast or whatever you call it when you get off work at eight in the morning?"
Catherine shakes her head. "Thanks. I've got--"
"There!" Stokes shouts, jumping in his chair. "Sara. Tell me that's not from Weldon's sweater."
Sidle bends down to the microscope and studies the sample "Big deal. So he hugged her before he went out to pick up showgirls." She tosses her head defiantly. "Look, we knew the guy was a jerk."
"Go on, make my point for me," Stokes says cheerfully, stretching as he stands up from the swivel chair.
"A jerk, but that doesn't make him a killer. The woman spent the last four hours of her life bawling her lungs out to a bartender. We know she was distraught--"
"Nick's probably right," Catherine hears herself say. They turn in unison and look at her. She shrugs. "Suicides are calm. They've made up their minds; everything's set in stone... Suicides are calm."
Stokes and Sidle glance at each other. Catherine decides not to care what they're thinking. She turns on her heel and walks out of the room.
*
At twenty-four, Catherine was the oldest female freshman in the Basic Pathology class, though there was an emaciated fiftyish man who sat in the front row of the lecture. In between taking notes and yawning, she looked at the scrawny old guy and tried to guess why someone beyond the midpoint of his life would take a sudden interest in the sick and the dead. Her lab for the class was at seven on Monday evening. She hated giving up ninety minutes of her night off, but it had been the last section with space. When the T.A. started talking, she thought she knew why.
He began by explaining how he wasn't supposed to be there. "I'm an entomologist," he kept saying. "I'm really not sure why they have me teaching this." Then he outlined his theory about the rates of digestion in maggots and earthworms. A handful of students turned green and left, and the ones that remained had to squeeze an hour's worth of petri-dishes into thirty minutes.
Catherine would never remember, afterward, what had made her linger as the rest of the students filed out. "You're a creepy-crawly specialist?" she'd said, stuffing her notebook into her red patent-leather handbag.
"Putting the finishing touches on my second Ph.D.," he told her proudly. "Also a biologist. What about you, uh?"
"Catherine." She shouldered her bag and smiled at him. "I'm not anything yet. That's why I'm studying."
"You must be something."
The lie she told her mother came quickly to her tongue. "Just a waitress. Um, Mr. Grissom--"
"Gil," he said, unexpectedly extending a hand to her across the teacher's desk.
"Gil," she heard herself repeat. They shook hands. She said, "I know this is weird, but let's go have a drink or something."
He frowned, or tried to frown, but his eyes didn't carry it. "I don't usually hang out with undergrads."
She laughed. "Neither do I."
The bar was cramped and quiet and not the kind of place that college students frequented. Gil put some song on the jukebox that Catherine didn't know, but the rough, dingy voice sounded right for the room. It sang: "When you walk through the garden/You gotta watch your back/Well, I beg your pardon/Walk the straight and narrow track/If you walk with Jesus/He's gonna save your soul..."
She'd been on her second double vodka when the Irish Catholic in her came to call. Gil had been on his fourth or fifth beer; neither of them were counting. She'd stared into her glass and swirled the liquid around and confessed. "I'm not really a waitress. I'm a dancer."
"Really." He tipped his chair back. "You, ah, you want to get to Hollywood someday, or Broadway?"
"I'm not an artist." Catherine laughed, partly at herself and partly at him for assuming the best, especially in Las Vegas. "I dance. For men. Without clothes on."
"Oh." Gil downed the rest of his beer in one gulp. "I work for the city Criminalists' Bureau."
He'd said it like there wasn't a difference between working there and at the French Palace. Catherine looked away from his blue eyes to watch the amber lights twinkle in her drink. The gritty voice sang on the jukebox: "We'll all be safe from Satan/When the thunder rolls/Just gotta help me keep the devil/Way down in the hole..."
*
She told Gil a lot of true things during the years she was in college. She told him about growing up in Montana, about stealing her mother's cigarettes and sneaking out with boys and lying to the nuns at her school. She told him about coming to Vegas with her high school sweetheart, and how quickly she'd lost both her money and the boy. She told him personal histories, her own and those of the girls she worked with and the drunken old men who whispered in their ears.
She didn't tell him about the coke. Not about the first time, when she was still in high school. She found the bag of ivory powder hidden in the toe of a boot in her sister's closet. She had tasted it and her tongue went numb, sniffed it and her world went bright. She didn't tell Gil about Bridget's married boyfriend from those days, who drove from Bozeman to Boise every weekend to score.
She didn't tell him about the back room at the Palace, where there were always parties, and where the friendlier girls were always sprinkled with freebies. Sometimes she joined in and sometimes she didn't. She didn't tell him that she was scared it was getting to be something like a habit. She didn't tell him about it at all.
They didn't sleep together for two years, just met on Monday nights or Sunday afternoons for beers and Mexican takeout. He got her through the hardest of her classes. The city started requiring CSIs to carry guns in 1990, and Catherine drove Gil out to the Nellis Small Arms Range. She taught him to shoot the way her father had taught her, guiding his hands with her own.
"This is ridiculous," he'd said. "I'm not a cop. I'm dealing with bodies that already have holes in them."
"Well, killers always return to the scene of the crime," she'd teased him.
"You've read too many Agatha Christie novels," he'd growled, but when he'd watched her put eight shots through the paper, tightly grouped in the kill zone, he'd shut his mouth. She'd put her hands on his, trying not to press herself against his back too much as she tightened his fingers on the trigger. She could feel his body heat through her blouse. But they didn't sleep together that day.
*
She wanders down the hall and finds Brown in the office, hunched over a computer keyboard. Scribbled notes in half a dozen handwritings are piled around him. He looks up as she comes in. "Paperwork," he sighs.
Catherine grins. "Bane of a CSI's existence, huh?"
"You know it. I'm putting together toxicology reports." He glares at the monitor. "Want to take a guess how many of our open cases involve drugs?"
"About two-thirds," she says automatically. "Seven of eleven, right?"
"You work too hard. Come to think of it, so do I." Brown drums his hands on the desk. "I gotta get out of here."
She points her thumb at the metal clock on the wall. "Five minutes. You can make it."
"I need a vacation." He stands up and stretches his arms over his head, rotating his wrists. "You could probably use one, too."
"Now, come on." Catherine opens her eyes wide to take in the small, cluttered room, the littered desk, the bookcases flooded with files and accordion folders, papers cascading over every surface. She picks up a sheet of carbon paper and fans herself with it. "Where else could I live this life of glamour?"
"That's us," Brown says. "High society. Only instead of hiring a French maid to dust the fine china--"
"Right, we're doing it ourselves and we're looking for fingerprints." She reaches out and touches his shoulder with two fingers. "Go home."
He glances back at the computer screen. "I gotta finish these up or they'll haunt me in my sleep."
Catherine watches as he drops back into his seat at the desk. His fingers clatter over the keyboard and he leans in close to see the type on the screen. She chuckles. "You keep doing that, Warrick, you're gonna go blind."
"Thanks, Mama," he calls as she heads down the hall.
*
It happened two months later, a long day in August. She worked all night and spent most of the morning on the phone with a machine, trying to register for the courses she needed for her junior year. Then there were leftovers from a private party. Then somebody knocked.
She smudged the powder off her nose and held her breath as she peeked out of the peephole. Then she opened the door a crack, leaving the chain on. "Hey."
"Hey." Gil rocked back on his heels as he spoke. He held up a six-pack and Catherine guessed that he'd already killed one, and it was only just past noon. "There's a soccer game on."
She blinked at him, trying to stand straight. "You watch soccer now?"
"Not sober." He gestured with the beer cans. "Can I come in?"
Catherine paused before she took the chain off and opened the door all the way. Gil walked into her tiny apartment and surveyed it, as he always did, as he did whenever he walked into any room. He looked at her coffee table and her carpet, down the narrow hall toward the bathroom, where the light was still on. He looked at her face and then at her bare feet. "When did you start getting high?"
She didn't ask how he knew. She thought about asking why he hadn't figured it out sooner. Instead she reached for the beer, detached a silver can from its plastic ring and plopped down on the couch. "You're not a cop."
Gil put the rest of the cans on the table, on top of a copy of People Magazine. He sat down next to Catherine and rubbed his hands together. "No," he said, and picked up the remote.
It might have been halfway through the soccer game, but she wasn't sure because she didn't know anything about soccer. She was watching, and then there were tears spilling down her face. She put her cigarette out in the ashtray that was already overflowing and chewed on her lip, and let the tears fall onto the fringes of her cutoff shorts.
Gil looked uncomfortable for a long time. He drained his beer and fiddled with the pop-top on the can until it broke off. Then he tossed it at the TV. "This sucks," he said. "I'm better with bugs. You can count on bugs."
She choked on a laugh in the middle of crying. "You can, can you?"
"No."
Afterwards, Catherine couldn't decide if he'd put his hand on her thigh intentionally, or if it had just come down and found her skin. She knew she'd reached for him on purpose, though. The sun was slanting in through every window and the heat was stifling as he followed her down the hall. Catherine forgot to worry about what he saw when they passed her bathroom, and Gil forgot to look around the bedroom because she was already pulling off her shirt.
She undressed herself, and then undressed him because he was moving too slowly. As she fell backward onto the bed, Catherine realized that she'd known him for two years and he hadn't had a girlfriend. It ought to have raised some questions in her mind. Gil flashed a smile as he picked up her knees, and she understood why it never had.
He moved his hands over her skin as if he was blind and memorizing her, pore by pore, cell by cell, breath by breath. She pushed them away long enough to extract a condom from the box in her night-stand's drawer. Her spine curved as he eased himself into her body, holding tightly to her hip, and she decided in the back of her mind to memorize him, too. She didn't close her eyes, barely even blinked as she lifted herself to quicken his pace.
Catherine made quiet, almost thoughtful sounds until she came in a bright flash, with a sudden cry. Gil was only a moment behind her, collapsing and groaning wetly into her collarbone. He slept, snoring softly, for the rest of the afternoon. Later, looking at her puffy-eyed reflection in the bathroom mirror, the thought rose in her mind that they'd never kissed.
*
Sanders leaps out of nowhere into the hall, his lab coat flapping out around his brilliant orange Hawaiian shirt. Catherine jumps and he drops a hand onto her arm. "Easy there."
"Easy here?" She catches her breath and scolds, "You nearly killed me!"
"You want to lie down?" He points over her shoulder and she sees an empty gurney standing a few yards back, a white sheet crumpled on top of it.
She sighs. "Bad joke, Greg."
"Yeah, you're probably right." Sanders runs his fingers through the rioting mass of his brown hair. "Who left that lying around, anyway? Looks like a morgue around here."
"Well, we're not that far removed," Catherine says dryly.
"Sure we are. We're not the Medical Examiner's Office. We don't do anything inside bodies, we just sort of poke around outside." He pulls a pair of latex gloves from his pocket and wiggles them suggestively. "We practice safe science."
Catherine cracks a smile and starts to edge past him. "Well, I'm on my way out."
"Ditto," he says, spinning to follow her. "Want to go for coffee?"
"No, thanks."
"A drink?" Sanders persists hopefully. "Pizza? Sushi? Pastrami on rye?"
"I'm going home."
"Oh." He squares his shoulders. "Well, that's all right. I'm actually working a double, so I'd be playing hooky."
"Better you than me." She laughs gently and continues on her way, leaving him to stand and look after her.
*
After that day in August, she called Gil every time she crashed. He was better than talking to Bridget, who usually persuaded her toward the easy solution, the hair of the dog. Sometimes he'd come over when she called, bring her glazed donuts and sugared coffee, pat her hair. They'd watch sports together, or cartoons.
Sometimes he'd come over when Catherine hadn't called, before the sun came up. It only happened on his nights off. It never interfered with his job, and he tried to keep track of her work and class schedules, her late nights and early mornings. She'd be in bed and then there'd be a crash downstairs, or a series of thuds and a shout of pain. Catherine would get up and find Gil at the bottom of the stairs. He always complained about her living in a walkup. He always smelled like dust and gin.
She gave him hot coffee or ice water and he'd talk, his voice stumbling and only half-comprehensible. He said names that weren't hers, names she didn't know, sprinkled between curses and blurry sentence fragments. He kicked her furniture until she threatened to throw him out in the cold, and then collapsed meekly on the couch. Sometimes she'd pretend he wasn't there and try to study. Sometimes they slept together. Sometimes they just slept.
Eddie walked into the club on a cold-as-death night in January, a couple months before Catherine's twenty-eighth birthday. She felt his gaze hit her as he sat down, wore it wrapped around her until closing time. He spent a lot of money, tipped like a high roller and kept his hands to himself like a gentleman. The flowers started arriving over the course of the next week. She laughed at them, mocked him to the other girls; everyone had their fans. She knew it was corny, but she couldn't help thinking it was also sweet. When Eddie came in again, a few days later, they both knew she was dancing for him. They both knew he'd take her home.
Catherine told Gil that Eddie was a decent guy, and convinced herself it was true. She let him find about what wasn't quite a habit, and he lent her the money for a two-week crash course in a detox program. That sealed things in the back of her mind. She aced most of her finals, squeezed through in Histology and Genomics, and got her Medical Technology degree. Five months after graduation, she was engaged to Eddie. She was also a tiny bit pregnant, she thought, although she hadn't taken the test.
It had occurred to Catherine, as her sister trimmed her hair, that her life was coming together. It didn't feel like something to celebrate. In spite of that, or because of it, she did a couple lines with Bridget after the haircut. Then they sat in the living room and looked at wedding magazines for an hour.
The high wore off and Catherine started to feel queasy. She got up and went to the bathroom, shutting the door but not locking it. She went to her knees, resting her head on her arms on top of the toilet lid. After a while, Bridget came in and rubbed her back gently through her pink cotton T-shirt.
"Pre-wedding jitters?" Bridget guessed.
Catherine shook her head. She let one of her hands move to her stomach and cringed, and decided she was going to stop, not just for nine months but for good. She drew a circle around her navel with one fingertip and thought: I'll make it up to you. I promise.
*
November first was the day. Catherine wore silver jewelry with her eggshell lace, and silver cowboy boots under the dress, and didn't mind too much when people teased her about them. There were jokes about Vegas weddings and honeymoons. There were vows. Then there was dancing. She glittered and laughed and wore herself out trying to keep her mother away from her friends.
Between the two of them, Eddie and Gil killed their body weight in champagne. Nobody but Bridget seemed to notice that Catherine didn't touch any. She wished she had, later, lying face-down on the fake velvet comforter that covered hotel bed. Eddie was wasted and rough and fumbling, and the room was too warm. Catherine looked at the corner of the night-stand, the gold hem of the blanket and the flowers he'd knocked to the tan carpet. She waited for the next morning.
The five-day honeymoon burned through their wedding checks and into their savings. Catherine set her mirror up in the bedroom at Eddie's place and looked herself over, wondering what she'd do about work when she started to show, when the rest of the money ran out. Eddie was working as a director then, if directing was defined as overseeing soft-core, barely professional porn. It didn't bring in enough to maintain the two of them, let alone a baby.
"But he's happy about it," she told Gil over brunch a couple weeks later. They'd met at a greasy-spoon on a Sunday, before each went to work. Gil was wearing dark sunglasses to blot out the daylight, but she didn't comment on them. "He'll be a good father. I know it. I just have to figure out how we're going to buy baby clothes and food and..." Catherine trailed off nervously.
"Kids're expensive," Gil agreed, stirring a second packet of sugar into his black coffee.
"You would know?" she teased.
"No."
Catherine poked at her fried egg with the tines of her fork. The wobbling of the yolk made her stomach turn, so she speared a mouthful of home fries instead. "You should get married," she said, still looking down at her plate. "You'd be a good father, too."
He scowled over the rim of his coffee mug. "I know what to do with a dead body. I do not know what to do with a live baby."
"Well, all I know is, this degree better get me a job soon or I'll wind up in one of Eddie's specialty flicks." She shuddered dramatically, finished her potatoes and reached for the laminated menu. "Do they have ice cream here?"
"Is this a craving?" Gil asked, one skeptical eyebrow arching.
"No, I just like the fudge swirl. But that's a pretty good excuse. Plus, I deserve something to compensate for the morning sickness."
"On that note," he said, and stood up. Just before he walked to the men's room, he dropped a crinkled sheet of notebook paper on the table next to her glass of orange juice. Catherine smoothed it out and scanned Gil's square printing in black marker. There was a date and a time, and an address she recognized, and the word 'interview.' Her eyes moistened. When Gil came back, she jumped to her feet and drew him into a hug.
"It's a late wedding present," he muttered, patting her back awkwardly. "Or early for Christmas. You decide."
She pulled back to look at him, grinning. "You're getting me nepotism for Christmas?"
"Well, it's the gift that keeps on giving." He settled back into the booth seat. "No, I can't promise you the job. I just--you know, I put in a word."
Catherine wiped her eyes on her sleeve and sat down. "I owe you."
Gil frowned at his coffee as it cooled. "No, you don't," he said, but she was sure she did.
*
She finds him now in the break room, kneeling to examine the cabinets under the sink. She stands just inside the room for a moment, and then folds her arms and clears her throat. "Looking for love in all the wrong places?"
Gil cranes his head to look at her. "I saw a fire ant."
"Oh, God." Catherine pushes her bangs out of her eyes. "So what, you don't have enough specimens at home? Now you're going to tear down the walls and gut the plumbing?"
He shrugs. "Gotta get 'em where they live."
"We're going to be washing up with Evian for a month," she groans.
"Well, you know how to work the vending machine." Gil stands and turns his back to her, cleaning the grime off his hands in the sink. He dries them on a paper napkin and slides them into the pockets of his gray jeans as he faces her. "So what's going on? Got a call?"
"What I've got is a watch." She rotates her wrist out to show him. "Let's get out of here."
"Let me see." He steps forward, tilting his head to read the time. She pushes up the cuff of her leather jacket to give him a better view. "Eight hours went fast," he observes.
"Twelve."
"Hmm?"
"You came in at eight," Catherine reminds him. "Remember? So you could go out to Garnet to get the McKee car."
"Ah, yes, that was today, wasn't it?" He looks past her, eyes focused on something invisible. "Megan McKee. Nineteen years old, perfect GPA, brand new Audi, ran a sixty-year-old man over on the way to buy herself some crystal meth. Makes you think, huh?"
"Not really. I think you're just glad you got to rip another car apart." She makes fists and rests them on her hips. "That's one of the perks, isn't it?"
"Sure. Just like you like to go spelunking in people's trash."
"I don't like it," she says, smirking. "I just have the stones to do it and the rest of you don't."
Gil chuckles. "I'll grant the point."
"Of course you will. So are you leaving, or are you going to camp out in here waiting for your six-legged soulmate?"
"Decisions," he says, and glances up toward the ceiling. "Maybe I could adjust the security camera to keep an eye on the drain."
"Maybe someone should just get in here with a can of Raid and go medieval on the place," she suggests.
His brows go up; his eyes twinkle. "You're cruel. Cruel and inhumane."
She spins away from him and steps out into the hall. "And brutal?"
Gil walks along with her, nodding at people on the morning shift as they trudge in the other direction. "Vicious," he agrees, and slips his sunglasses on just as they walk outside and the daylight blasts them.
*
Lindsey was born with ten fingers and ten toes and a heart that beat in a flawless rhythm. Catherine thanked the saints of her childhood for that. She looked into her daughter's face and knew that nothing, even the air she breathed, would ever be as it had been. And she looked at her husband's smile and believed in him, and she was even right, for a while.
Her salary as a cadet wasn't much, but she dug into her career with both hands, surprised herself and everyone by being damn good at the job. She earned a promotion and then another in rapid succession. They came with significant raises, and Eddie had a couple of windfalls. He told her, "You can find a cheap house pretty easy in your line of work," and she agreed, and did it. It seemed a little ghastly, but it fit the budget.
The baby kept Eddie at home for a while. She made it more important to keep the peace, made it easier for Catherine to ignore warning signs that might have appeared. It wasn't until Lindsey was four that things started to crumble. One night that fall, when he didn't come home at seven and he didn't come home at nine, Catherine packed Lindsey up with her toothbrush and her stuffed parrot and begged a favor from the neighbors. She didn't want her little girl in the house during the fight.
He didn't come home at midnight, and it was nearly three when he finally staggered in. In the dark, she watched him take off his shoes and tiptoe around colored plastic blocks in the foyer. He flicked on the stairway light and nearly fell over when he saw Catherine sitting motionless on the couch. "Hey," he said weakly.
She took in his rumpled hair and stained white T-shirt and smiled without humor. "Car trouble?"
Eddie took hold of the scratched post at the end of the banister to steady himself. "Jesus, Cath, I was just out with a couple of guys."
"A couple of guys. I see." Catherine stood up, hugging herself. "How long am I supposed to believe that for? Five minutes? Long enough for you to slink into the shower and wash the lipstick off your--"
"Where's Linze?" he interrupted, looking at the floor.
"I took her over to Betty's. She was, I might add, pretty upset that you weren't around to kiss her goodnight. Not that that's unprecedented with you." She threw up her hands. "Go take your shower, you smell like a hooker. I'm going to sleep. And in the morning, I'm going to pack."
Eddie laughed harshly. "I can't believe this. You're out of your mind."
"Am I?" Her voice dropped to a near-whisper.
"Yeah, yeah, you are." He approached her, wavering and gesturing unevenly. "You dump our kid on the neighbors in the middle of the night, just so you can bitch at me for being a little late? You're a psycho, lady."
She edged forward, her face inches from his. "Don't fuck with me."
He shoved her shoulder, not very hard, but enough to make her take two quick backward steps. She stared at him, paralyzed with rage, her eyes blazing. Faster than Catherine could react, Eddie had snatched her keys off the end-table and stormed out the door. In another second she shook off the shock and ran after him.
It was raining, oddly enough, and the drops raised goosebumps on her arms as she raced barefoot down the slick pavement. She caught up with him around the corner as he crossed the parking lot of the pharmacy. Not thinking of anything at all, she launched herself at his back. One of his arms went around his neck, nearly strangling him; she held onto his waist with her knees and grabbed a fistful of his hair.
"Fuck!" Eddie yelped, in pain and surprise and anger. He raised his arm and, before she could stop him, lobbed her keychain at the wall of the drugstore.
Catherine clawed at the back of his neck as the keys flew threw the air, hit the cinder-block and tumbled into the Dumpster. She fell off Eddie's back and into a puddle on the concrete, soaking her jeans and scraping the palms of her hands.
He stood over her, panting heavily. "Try leaving now, crazy jealous bitch."
"Fuck you," she snarled, clambering to her feet. "You think I'm just going to sit by and let you run around with some slut?"
"Yeah," he shouted back as he backed away. "What were you when I found you?"
Catherine took a menacing step toward him and he started walking faster. She lifted her chin, letting the rain splash her face. Then she looked at the Dumpster and at her ruined clothes, and caught her breath. It wasn't easy scaling the slippery wet metal to reach inside, but she managed it. Delving in the discarded cardboard and plastic and paper and the ill-smelling food particles, she noticed a few dried brown leaves. She wondered where in the desert they'd fallen from.
She thought she would drive to see Bridget, or to a motel, but she didn't. Instead she pulled up in front of Gil's building, honked the horn once and sat in the car, her hands still on the steering wheel. The Volvo's radio had started automatically with the engine, and she'd heard six or seven bland pop songs and a set of commercials by the time he came down.
"Something happened," he said, as he got in the passenger side.
She didn't turn her head. "You're always picking up on the details, aren't you?"
He blinked sleepily. "You don't smell very good."
"Please, please don't be helpful or anything." Her voice sounded strangely light in her ears. "I really don't think I could handle that right now."
"What'd he do?"
"Eddie..." She trailed off, a laugh bubbling into her throat and out of her mouth. "Eddie," she tried again, and giggled helplessly. "Eddie likes dancers."
Gil made a sound between sighing and yawning. "He's a son of a bitch."
"I know."
"Are you going to leave him?"
Catherine was distantly aware that she was gripping the wheel so hard that it hurt. Her hair fell in dripping strings over her eyes. "Lindsey's doing so great in preschool," she said.
Gil nodded. He reached over and pulled her right hand away from the wheel. It shook as he turned it over. The yellow light from the streetlamps filtered dimly through the glass. He studied the raw flesh of her palm and the shadows under her fingernails. "That's gonna sting for a while," he told her. "You ought to wash that with some iodine."
"You mean you don't carry a vial in your utility belt?" she cracked, wondering why he was still holding her hand.
"Fine," he said. "Get gangrene. See if I care."
Catherine was laughing again, but it felt and sounded like crying. Then she was climbing over the stick shift and straddling him. She knew she smelled like sweat and trash, and he smelled like beer and the sterile lab scent that always lingered under his skin. Gil did most of the work, getting her muddy jeans down, unzipping his own and shifting her in his lap. She was numb and didn't feel the sex so much as his mouth on hers, his teeth tugging gently at her lower lip. On the radio, a deliberately hoarse female voice sang: "I've been here before, and I'm locking the door/And I'm not going back again/Her eyes and arms and skin won't make it go away/You'll wake up tomorrow and wrestle the sorrow that holds you down today..."
The next morning was Saturday. Catherine drove back across town early and brought her daughter home. Eddie made pancakes, big airy ones drowning in syrup, and the three of them spent the day together as a family. She had to work that night, and she dreaded it, but Gil didn't avoid her eyes even once. But after that night she never knew him to touch alcohol again. She didn't take the credit, and she didn't take the blame.
*
"Two coffees, one black, one with extra cream and sugar--"
"Don't wrinkle your nose when you say that," Catherine says, elbowing his arm.
Gil ignores her and leans out the car window, closer to the speaker. "One egg and cheese biscuit, one egg, sausage and cheese, an extra order of hashbrowns--"
"What for?" Catherine interrupts again.
"You take mine every time," he claims.
She taps her fingers on the dashboard. "That's a lie. And even if it's true, I'm not paying for an extra order."
A voice crackles over the speaker. "Is that everything?"
"Uh, sorry." Gil glares at Catherine and continues. "Extra hashbrowns and an orange juice. And can you throw a couple extra sugar packets in there?"
"Sugar packets. Sure. $8.63 at the second window, please pull up."
"You're not going to sweeten your coffee?" Catherine asks as they roll forward. "After you sneered at mine?"
He shakes his head. "It's for the fire ants."
"Of course." She pulls a five-dollar bill from her pocket. "I should have figured that out. You're just soft when it comes to that."
Gil takes her money and matches it with his own, passing the cash to the teenage girl in the window. "A fair face will wither, a full eye will wax hollow, but a good heart, Kate, is the sun and the moon."
Catherine stares at him. "What on earth?"
"Shakespeare. Henry the Fifth. I've been doing some rereading from the Complete Works." He looks at her over the top of his sunglasses. "Get some culture."
She tips her head back against the top of the seat. "Bugs and the Bard. You're a sad, strange man. Hand me my coffee."
He does, and sets the paper bag full of food down at her feet. The girl holds out a handful of change, and Catherine stretches across the car and takes it. Gil scoffs at her as he sets his cup in the holder and pulls out of the drive-thru. "You're right, I'm too lenient," he grumbles. "I'm going to have to start enforcing some discipline in the ranks."
"Everyone already thinks you're a slave driver. Nick, in particular, thinks you have the power to make grown men weep." She blows on the coffee, sips and makes a face. "This is yours."
Gil takes it from her and drinks, driving one-handed. "You're not going to ruin my rep, are you?"
She grins as she takes the other cup out of the holder. "Your secret's safe with me.
*
Catherine held out for almost four more years. Then there was a night where she didn't stay home, where she left Lindsey with a sitter and tailed Eddie around the city. She found him behind a club, hands on the bare, golden thighs of an Asian girl who couldn't be long out of high school. Catherine looked at her husband with disgust, and at the girl with pity.
This time there was no argument, no appeal. She got the locks changed the next day. Though there were days he called her and hung up, and nights he tried to break the door down, Catherine didn't care. She had waited long enough that it was hard to feel any pain or anger or grief, hard to feel anything but finished.
By then, Gil had left his murky apartment for one that was larger, brighter, and he kept it spotless. Even the books and the specimen jars and ant farms were in order. He vacuumed. He dusted. He didn't drink a drop. And if it was possible, he worked more hours than he used to. Catherine spent some nights at his new place. He spent some afternoons at the house.
CSIs came and went. Some decided they couldn't take it: the blood and bone and bile, grieving widowers and bitter witnesses. More commonly, they got tired of Vegas, or went broke, or found someplace to pay them more. Whatever the reasons, it seemed that most people didn't last. Gil and Catherine had been there longer than anybody else.
She couldn't believe that he'd gone after Syd Goggle without backup. He wasn't a cop and it wasn't his job. But then, Catherine knew that about him, that he loved following the evidence mostly because he loved having the answers. When Stokes told her where Gil had gone, she'd practically flown out the door. She ran two traffic lights, loaded her gun as she raced through the apartment complex. She almost fell running down the stairs.
She was just in time.
"I just wanted to talk to him," Gil said, gritting his teeth and looking down at Goggle's body. Catherine knew that he could calculate the trajectory of all five shots, even though he'd been down on the floor when she'd fired.
"How's your arm?" she asked as they walked to the squad car.
"What?" He pulled up his sleeve and inspected the angry red welt, the outline of the wrench visible where it struck him. "Oh. That'll probably hurt tomorrow."
The next day, she told him, "Never doubt and never look back. That's how I live my life." He smiled, and she didn't feel the need to add what else she believed. Now, she thought, they were even.
*
Gil parks on the street, gets out of the car, and goes around to open Catherine's door. She hands him the food as she gets out, and checks her wristwatch. It's twenty after eight. "Oh, good," she says, and hurries ahead of Gil and into the house.
Lindsey is sitting on the couch, toying with her shoelace and watching Designing Women. "Morning," she says, not looking up.
Catherine sits down next to her. "Which one is it?"
"Charlene meets Bill."
"I love this one!"
"Me, too," Lindsey says, resting her head against her mother's arm. She glances up to where Gil is standing, just inside the open front door. "Hey, Bugman."
"Hey," he replies comfortably, removing his sunglasses. "Aren't you running late?"
"I am not," Lindsey says with a slight pout. "Mom always says I'm going to miss the bus, and I never miss the bus."
Catherine plays gently with Lindsey's hair. "Did you eat breakfast?"
"Mom..."
"Mom..." Catherine mocks, drawing out the syllable. "Did you?"
"I had a glass of juice."
"Not good enough, babe. Take something out of the fridge." She prods her daughter's shoulder gently. "Go. Or you'll miss the bus."
Lindsey gets up and drags her heels into the kitchen. She returns with a yogurt and a plastic spoon. "Okay?"
"Okay, but you better eat lunch at school. You need money?"
"I have your change from yesterday." She pats the pocket of her jeans and then shoulders her backpack. "Seeya later."
"Have a good day," Catherine calls. Lindsey flounces out, squeezing past Gil. Catherine clicks her tongue. "I worry about that. She doesn't eat enough. All that pressure on a little kid to be a waif."
Gil comes in. He sits down beside her and spreads the fast food out on the table. "Like Megan McKee," he says. "Trying too hard to be what other people wanted."
She shoots him a suspicious look. "Thanks, now I won't worry."
"She's a good kid," Gil says mildly. He frowns at their breakfast. "My coffee's already gone."
"Mine too." Catherine yawns and rubs her eyes. "I'll go put some on."
"It's an addiction," he says, and brushes his hand against her thigh as she stands. She inclines her head knowingly and walks out of the room.
In the kitchen, Catherine starts the coffee-maker and splashes some cold water on her face. She sniffs, hoping she doesn't smell too much like Luminol and print dust and formaldehyde. She drops to one knee and checks her reflection in the door of the oven. What she sees is acceptable, and she smiles as she pours their fresh coffee and carries the steaming mugs carefully into the living room.
Gil has fallen asleep, stretched out across the sofa. His head is pillowed on one arm; his other hand rests on the table, inches from his open carton of orange juice. Catherine chuckles to herself and shakes her head. She pushes his legs back and sits down on the edge.
Sometimes, these days, she feels like her body is old and tired and abused. He touches her, and she feels safe, or at least she feels sure. She wonders how he thinks about her, but she never asks. It's enough that he knows her to the marrow of her bones.
Catherine settles back against his legs. Gil snores a little, but it's muffled by the couch cushion. She eats his hashbrowns and drinks his coffee, watches television and lets him sleep. There's no reason she needs to hurry him awake. It is going to be a beautiful day.
Spark Fanfic
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All The Way To Reno
Violet
"You've dusted the nonbelievers
And challenged the laws of chance..."
-R.E.M.
One time, she had left him. It wasn't because of a fight. They hadn't even really been lovers then, but she'd left him anyway.
She'd been dating Eddie for four months and she wasn't sure about him yet, so she was studying for her Histology final at Gil's place. In the back room of his ugly, undersized apartment, she lay on her stomach on the bed, chain-smoking and tapping ashes on a plastic plate while she stared into her textbook. She was trying not to hear him in the living room, but her eyes were starting to glaze over and he was loud, yelling at a college basketball game on TV.
The sixth or seventh time he shouted "fuck" at the top of his lungs, Catherine slammed the book shut and walked out, cigarette between her teeth. She went right past him and the squat orange sofa. She thought she would go see Eddie, or go home, but she didn't. Instead she rode the highway out for maybe three quarters of an hour, until it was her and the sand and the sky. She pulled off to the side of the road. While the daylight lasted, she pored over her notes, and only the occasional semi went by to distract her. Then it was late, and a chill set in. She drove back to Gil's for her jacket. He stood in the doorway, his words slurred together when he spoke.
"I would've come after you," he said. He'd tapped an empty green bottle against his hip. "But, uh, I didn't want to drive."
She started to shove her arm into the sleeve and then hesitated. "Who won?"
"Michigan."
Catherine closed her eyes and let the door swing shut behind her so she could lean on it. She thought of the final she had at seven AM and finished pulling the jacket on. "Okay," she said, and left him holding the door open as she waited for the elevator. He watched her until it arrived.
*
Stokes is peering into the microscope and muttering as he twiddles the knobs on its side. "Come on, you son of a bitch, where are you?"
"Grissom's down in the break room gargling with stale coffee," Sidle snickers, leaning on Stokes' shoulders. "But I don't think he'd appreciate the nickname."
"Funny girl."
"I'm moonlighting. Opening for David Cassidy."
Catherine watches them from the hall and wonders if they're sleeping together. "What're you looking for?" she asks, stepping into the lab.
Sidle cocks her head over her shoulder. "He thinks there'll be red fibers on the clothing from the suicide at the Grand."
"It wasn't a suicide," Stokes insists. "It was staged. The boyfriend staged it. Admittedly he staged it very well."
"Suicide," Sidle dismisses him, and stands up straight, turning to Catherine. "Anyway, the shift ends in ten minutes and I'm getting out of here, wild goose chase or no. You want to go get dinner or breakfast or whatever you call it when you get off work at eight in the morning?"
Catherine shakes her head. "Thanks. I've got--"
"There!" Stokes shouts, jumping in his chair. "Sara. Tell me that's not from Weldon's sweater."
Sidle bends down to the microscope and studies the sample "Big deal. So he hugged her before he went out to pick up showgirls." She tosses her head defiantly. "Look, we knew the guy was a jerk."
"Go on, make my point for me," Stokes says cheerfully, stretching as he stands up from the swivel chair.
"A jerk, but that doesn't make him a killer. The woman spent the last four hours of her life bawling her lungs out to a bartender. We know she was distraught--"
"Nick's probably right," Catherine hears herself say. They turn in unison and look at her. She shrugs. "Suicides are calm. They've made up their minds; everything's set in stone... Suicides are calm."
Stokes and Sidle glance at each other. Catherine decides not to care what they're thinking. She turns on her heel and walks out of the room.
*
At twenty-four, Catherine was the oldest female freshman in the Basic Pathology class, though there was an emaciated fiftyish man who sat in the front row of the lecture. In between taking notes and yawning, she looked at the scrawny old guy and tried to guess why someone beyond the midpoint of his life would take a sudden interest in the sick and the dead. Her lab for the class was at seven on Monday evening. She hated giving up ninety minutes of her night off, but it had been the last section with space. When the T.A. started talking, she thought she knew why.
He began by explaining how he wasn't supposed to be there. "I'm an entomologist," he kept saying. "I'm really not sure why they have me teaching this." Then he outlined his theory about the rates of digestion in maggots and earthworms. A handful of students turned green and left, and the ones that remained had to squeeze an hour's worth of petri-dishes into thirty minutes.
Catherine would never remember, afterward, what had made her linger as the rest of the students filed out. "You're a creepy-crawly specialist?" she'd said, stuffing her notebook into her red patent-leather handbag.
"Putting the finishing touches on my second Ph.D.," he told her proudly. "Also a biologist. What about you, uh?"
"Catherine." She shouldered her bag and smiled at him. "I'm not anything yet. That's why I'm studying."
"You must be something."
The lie she told her mother came quickly to her tongue. "Just a waitress. Um, Mr. Grissom--"
"Gil," he said, unexpectedly extending a hand to her across the teacher's desk.
"Gil," she heard herself repeat. They shook hands. She said, "I know this is weird, but let's go have a drink or something."
He frowned, or tried to frown, but his eyes didn't carry it. "I don't usually hang out with undergrads."
She laughed. "Neither do I."
The bar was cramped and quiet and not the kind of place that college students frequented. Gil put some song on the jukebox that Catherine didn't know, but the rough, dingy voice sounded right for the room. It sang: "When you walk through the garden/You gotta watch your back/Well, I beg your pardon/Walk the straight and narrow track/If you walk with Jesus/He's gonna save your soul..."
She'd been on her second double vodka when the Irish Catholic in her came to call. Gil had been on his fourth or fifth beer; neither of them were counting. She'd stared into her glass and swirled the liquid around and confessed. "I'm not really a waitress. I'm a dancer."
"Really." He tipped his chair back. "You, ah, you want to get to Hollywood someday, or Broadway?"
"I'm not an artist." Catherine laughed, partly at herself and partly at him for assuming the best, especially in Las Vegas. "I dance. For men. Without clothes on."
"Oh." Gil downed the rest of his beer in one gulp. "I work for the city Criminalists' Bureau."
He'd said it like there wasn't a difference between working there and at the French Palace. Catherine looked away from his blue eyes to watch the amber lights twinkle in her drink. The gritty voice sang on the jukebox: "We'll all be safe from Satan/When the thunder rolls/Just gotta help me keep the devil/Way down in the hole..."
*
She told Gil a lot of true things during the years she was in college. She told him about growing up in Montana, about stealing her mother's cigarettes and sneaking out with boys and lying to the nuns at her school. She told him about coming to Vegas with her high school sweetheart, and how quickly she'd lost both her money and the boy. She told him personal histories, her own and those of the girls she worked with and the drunken old men who whispered in their ears.
She didn't tell him about the coke. Not about the first time, when she was still in high school. She found the bag of ivory powder hidden in the toe of a boot in her sister's closet. She had tasted it and her tongue went numb, sniffed it and her world went bright. She didn't tell Gil about Bridget's married boyfriend from those days, who drove from Bozeman to Boise every weekend to score.
She didn't tell him about the back room at the Palace, where there were always parties, and where the friendlier girls were always sprinkled with freebies. Sometimes she joined in and sometimes she didn't. She didn't tell him that she was scared it was getting to be something like a habit. She didn't tell him about it at all.
They didn't sleep together for two years, just met on Monday nights or Sunday afternoons for beers and Mexican takeout. He got her through the hardest of her classes. The city started requiring CSIs to carry guns in 1990, and Catherine drove Gil out to the Nellis Small Arms Range. She taught him to shoot the way her father had taught her, guiding his hands with her own.
"This is ridiculous," he'd said. "I'm not a cop. I'm dealing with bodies that already have holes in them."
"Well, killers always return to the scene of the crime," she'd teased him.
"You've read too many Agatha Christie novels," he'd growled, but when he'd watched her put eight shots through the paper, tightly grouped in the kill zone, he'd shut his mouth. She'd put her hands on his, trying not to press herself against his back too much as she tightened his fingers on the trigger. She could feel his body heat through her blouse. But they didn't sleep together that day.
*
She wanders down the hall and finds Brown in the office, hunched over a computer keyboard. Scribbled notes in half a dozen handwritings are piled around him. He looks up as she comes in. "Paperwork," he sighs.
Catherine grins. "Bane of a CSI's existence, huh?"
"You know it. I'm putting together toxicology reports." He glares at the monitor. "Want to take a guess how many of our open cases involve drugs?"
"About two-thirds," she says automatically. "Seven of eleven, right?"
"You work too hard. Come to think of it, so do I." Brown drums his hands on the desk. "I gotta get out of here."
She points her thumb at the metal clock on the wall. "Five minutes. You can make it."
"I need a vacation." He stands up and stretches his arms over his head, rotating his wrists. "You could probably use one, too."
"Now, come on." Catherine opens her eyes wide to take in the small, cluttered room, the littered desk, the bookcases flooded with files and accordion folders, papers cascading over every surface. She picks up a sheet of carbon paper and fans herself with it. "Where else could I live this life of glamour?"
"That's us," Brown says. "High society. Only instead of hiring a French maid to dust the fine china--"
"Right, we're doing it ourselves and we're looking for fingerprints." She reaches out and touches his shoulder with two fingers. "Go home."
He glances back at the computer screen. "I gotta finish these up or they'll haunt me in my sleep."
Catherine watches as he drops back into his seat at the desk. His fingers clatter over the keyboard and he leans in close to see the type on the screen. She chuckles. "You keep doing that, Warrick, you're gonna go blind."
"Thanks, Mama," he calls as she heads down the hall.
*
It happened two months later, a long day in August. She worked all night and spent most of the morning on the phone with a machine, trying to register for the courses she needed for her junior year. Then there were leftovers from a private party. Then somebody knocked.
She smudged the powder off her nose and held her breath as she peeked out of the peephole. Then she opened the door a crack, leaving the chain on. "Hey."
"Hey." Gil rocked back on his heels as he spoke. He held up a six-pack and Catherine guessed that he'd already killed one, and it was only just past noon. "There's a soccer game on."
She blinked at him, trying to stand straight. "You watch soccer now?"
"Not sober." He gestured with the beer cans. "Can I come in?"
Catherine paused before she took the chain off and opened the door all the way. Gil walked into her tiny apartment and surveyed it, as he always did, as he did whenever he walked into any room. He looked at her coffee table and her carpet, down the narrow hall toward the bathroom, where the light was still on. He looked at her face and then at her bare feet. "When did you start getting high?"
She didn't ask how he knew. She thought about asking why he hadn't figured it out sooner. Instead she reached for the beer, detached a silver can from its plastic ring and plopped down on the couch. "You're not a cop."
Gil put the rest of the cans on the table, on top of a copy of People Magazine. He sat down next to Catherine and rubbed his hands together. "No," he said, and picked up the remote.
It might have been halfway through the soccer game, but she wasn't sure because she didn't know anything about soccer. She was watching, and then there were tears spilling down her face. She put her cigarette out in the ashtray that was already overflowing and chewed on her lip, and let the tears fall onto the fringes of her cutoff shorts.
Gil looked uncomfortable for a long time. He drained his beer and fiddled with the pop-top on the can until it broke off. Then he tossed it at the TV. "This sucks," he said. "I'm better with bugs. You can count on bugs."
She choked on a laugh in the middle of crying. "You can, can you?"
"No."
Afterwards, Catherine couldn't decide if he'd put his hand on her thigh intentionally, or if it had just come down and found her skin. She knew she'd reached for him on purpose, though. The sun was slanting in through every window and the heat was stifling as he followed her down the hall. Catherine forgot to worry about what he saw when they passed her bathroom, and Gil forgot to look around the bedroom because she was already pulling off her shirt.
She undressed herself, and then undressed him because he was moving too slowly. As she fell backward onto the bed, Catherine realized that she'd known him for two years and he hadn't had a girlfriend. It ought to have raised some questions in her mind. Gil flashed a smile as he picked up her knees, and she understood why it never had.
He moved his hands over her skin as if he was blind and memorizing her, pore by pore, cell by cell, breath by breath. She pushed them away long enough to extract a condom from the box in her night-stand's drawer. Her spine curved as he eased himself into her body, holding tightly to her hip, and she decided in the back of her mind to memorize him, too. She didn't close her eyes, barely even blinked as she lifted herself to quicken his pace.
Catherine made quiet, almost thoughtful sounds until she came in a bright flash, with a sudden cry. Gil was only a moment behind her, collapsing and groaning wetly into her collarbone. He slept, snoring softly, for the rest of the afternoon. Later, looking at her puffy-eyed reflection in the bathroom mirror, the thought rose in her mind that they'd never kissed.
*
Sanders leaps out of nowhere into the hall, his lab coat flapping out around his brilliant orange Hawaiian shirt. Catherine jumps and he drops a hand onto her arm. "Easy there."
"Easy here?" She catches her breath and scolds, "You nearly killed me!"
"You want to lie down?" He points over her shoulder and she sees an empty gurney standing a few yards back, a white sheet crumpled on top of it.
She sighs. "Bad joke, Greg."
"Yeah, you're probably right." Sanders runs his fingers through the rioting mass of his brown hair. "Who left that lying around, anyway? Looks like a morgue around here."
"Well, we're not that far removed," Catherine says dryly.
"Sure we are. We're not the Medical Examiner's Office. We don't do anything inside bodies, we just sort of poke around outside." He pulls a pair of latex gloves from his pocket and wiggles them suggestively. "We practice safe science."
Catherine cracks a smile and starts to edge past him. "Well, I'm on my way out."
"Ditto," he says, spinning to follow her. "Want to go for coffee?"
"No, thanks."
"A drink?" Sanders persists hopefully. "Pizza? Sushi? Pastrami on rye?"
"I'm going home."
"Oh." He squares his shoulders. "Well, that's all right. I'm actually working a double, so I'd be playing hooky."
"Better you than me." She laughs gently and continues on her way, leaving him to stand and look after her.
*
After that day in August, she called Gil every time she crashed. He was better than talking to Bridget, who usually persuaded her toward the easy solution, the hair of the dog. Sometimes he'd come over when she called, bring her glazed donuts and sugared coffee, pat her hair. They'd watch sports together, or cartoons.
Sometimes he'd come over when Catherine hadn't called, before the sun came up. It only happened on his nights off. It never interfered with his job, and he tried to keep track of her work and class schedules, her late nights and early mornings. She'd be in bed and then there'd be a crash downstairs, or a series of thuds and a shout of pain. Catherine would get up and find Gil at the bottom of the stairs. He always complained about her living in a walkup. He always smelled like dust and gin.
She gave him hot coffee or ice water and he'd talk, his voice stumbling and only half-comprehensible. He said names that weren't hers, names she didn't know, sprinkled between curses and blurry sentence fragments. He kicked her furniture until she threatened to throw him out in the cold, and then collapsed meekly on the couch. Sometimes she'd pretend he wasn't there and try to study. Sometimes they slept together. Sometimes they just slept.
Eddie walked into the club on a cold-as-death night in January, a couple months before Catherine's twenty-eighth birthday. She felt his gaze hit her as he sat down, wore it wrapped around her until closing time. He spent a lot of money, tipped like a high roller and kept his hands to himself like a gentleman. The flowers started arriving over the course of the next week. She laughed at them, mocked him to the other girls; everyone had their fans. She knew it was corny, but she couldn't help thinking it was also sweet. When Eddie came in again, a few days later, they both knew she was dancing for him. They both knew he'd take her home.
Catherine told Gil that Eddie was a decent guy, and convinced herself it was true. She let him find about what wasn't quite a habit, and he lent her the money for a two-week crash course in a detox program. That sealed things in the back of her mind. She aced most of her finals, squeezed through in Histology and Genomics, and got her Medical Technology degree. Five months after graduation, she was engaged to Eddie. She was also a tiny bit pregnant, she thought, although she hadn't taken the test.
It had occurred to Catherine, as her sister trimmed her hair, that her life was coming together. It didn't feel like something to celebrate. In spite of that, or because of it, she did a couple lines with Bridget after the haircut. Then they sat in the living room and looked at wedding magazines for an hour.
The high wore off and Catherine started to feel queasy. She got up and went to the bathroom, shutting the door but not locking it. She went to her knees, resting her head on her arms on top of the toilet lid. After a while, Bridget came in and rubbed her back gently through her pink cotton T-shirt.
"Pre-wedding jitters?" Bridget guessed.
Catherine shook her head. She let one of her hands move to her stomach and cringed, and decided she was going to stop, not just for nine months but for good. She drew a circle around her navel with one fingertip and thought: I'll make it up to you. I promise.
*
November first was the day. Catherine wore silver jewelry with her eggshell lace, and silver cowboy boots under the dress, and didn't mind too much when people teased her about them. There were jokes about Vegas weddings and honeymoons. There were vows. Then there was dancing. She glittered and laughed and wore herself out trying to keep her mother away from her friends.
Between the two of them, Eddie and Gil killed their body weight in champagne. Nobody but Bridget seemed to notice that Catherine didn't touch any. She wished she had, later, lying face-down on the fake velvet comforter that covered hotel bed. Eddie was wasted and rough and fumbling, and the room was too warm. Catherine looked at the corner of the night-stand, the gold hem of the blanket and the flowers he'd knocked to the tan carpet. She waited for the next morning.
The five-day honeymoon burned through their wedding checks and into their savings. Catherine set her mirror up in the bedroom at Eddie's place and looked herself over, wondering what she'd do about work when she started to show, when the rest of the money ran out. Eddie was working as a director then, if directing was defined as overseeing soft-core, barely professional porn. It didn't bring in enough to maintain the two of them, let alone a baby.
"But he's happy about it," she told Gil over brunch a couple weeks later. They'd met at a greasy-spoon on a Sunday, before each went to work. Gil was wearing dark sunglasses to blot out the daylight, but she didn't comment on them. "He'll be a good father. I know it. I just have to figure out how we're going to buy baby clothes and food and..." Catherine trailed off nervously.
"Kids're expensive," Gil agreed, stirring a second packet of sugar into his black coffee.
"You would know?" she teased.
"No."
Catherine poked at her fried egg with the tines of her fork. The wobbling of the yolk made her stomach turn, so she speared a mouthful of home fries instead. "You should get married," she said, still looking down at her plate. "You'd be a good father, too."
He scowled over the rim of his coffee mug. "I know what to do with a dead body. I do not know what to do with a live baby."
"Well, all I know is, this degree better get me a job soon or I'll wind up in one of Eddie's specialty flicks." She shuddered dramatically, finished her potatoes and reached for the laminated menu. "Do they have ice cream here?"
"Is this a craving?" Gil asked, one skeptical eyebrow arching.
"No, I just like the fudge swirl. But that's a pretty good excuse. Plus, I deserve something to compensate for the morning sickness."
"On that note," he said, and stood up. Just before he walked to the men's room, he dropped a crinkled sheet of notebook paper on the table next to her glass of orange juice. Catherine smoothed it out and scanned Gil's square printing in black marker. There was a date and a time, and an address she recognized, and the word 'interview.' Her eyes moistened. When Gil came back, she jumped to her feet and drew him into a hug.
"It's a late wedding present," he muttered, patting her back awkwardly. "Or early for Christmas. You decide."
She pulled back to look at him, grinning. "You're getting me nepotism for Christmas?"
"Well, it's the gift that keeps on giving." He settled back into the booth seat. "No, I can't promise you the job. I just--you know, I put in a word."
Catherine wiped her eyes on her sleeve and sat down. "I owe you."
Gil frowned at his coffee as it cooled. "No, you don't," he said, but she was sure she did.
*
She finds him now in the break room, kneeling to examine the cabinets under the sink. She stands just inside the room for a moment, and then folds her arms and clears her throat. "Looking for love in all the wrong places?"
Gil cranes his head to look at her. "I saw a fire ant."
"Oh, God." Catherine pushes her bangs out of her eyes. "So what, you don't have enough specimens at home? Now you're going to tear down the walls and gut the plumbing?"
He shrugs. "Gotta get 'em where they live."
"We're going to be washing up with Evian for a month," she groans.
"Well, you know how to work the vending machine." Gil stands and turns his back to her, cleaning the grime off his hands in the sink. He dries them on a paper napkin and slides them into the pockets of his gray jeans as he faces her. "So what's going on? Got a call?"
"What I've got is a watch." She rotates her wrist out to show him. "Let's get out of here."
"Let me see." He steps forward, tilting his head to read the time. She pushes up the cuff of her leather jacket to give him a better view. "Eight hours went fast," he observes.
"Twelve."
"Hmm?"
"You came in at eight," Catherine reminds him. "Remember? So you could go out to Garnet to get the McKee car."
"Ah, yes, that was today, wasn't it?" He looks past her, eyes focused on something invisible. "Megan McKee. Nineteen years old, perfect GPA, brand new Audi, ran a sixty-year-old man over on the way to buy herself some crystal meth. Makes you think, huh?"
"Not really. I think you're just glad you got to rip another car apart." She makes fists and rests them on her hips. "That's one of the perks, isn't it?"
"Sure. Just like you like to go spelunking in people's trash."
"I don't like it," she says, smirking. "I just have the stones to do it and the rest of you don't."
Gil chuckles. "I'll grant the point."
"Of course you will. So are you leaving, or are you going to camp out in here waiting for your six-legged soulmate?"
"Decisions," he says, and glances up toward the ceiling. "Maybe I could adjust the security camera to keep an eye on the drain."
"Maybe someone should just get in here with a can of Raid and go medieval on the place," she suggests.
His brows go up; his eyes twinkle. "You're cruel. Cruel and inhumane."
She spins away from him and steps out into the hall. "And brutal?"
Gil walks along with her, nodding at people on the morning shift as they trudge in the other direction. "Vicious," he agrees, and slips his sunglasses on just as they walk outside and the daylight blasts them.
*
Lindsey was born with ten fingers and ten toes and a heart that beat in a flawless rhythm. Catherine thanked the saints of her childhood for that. She looked into her daughter's face and knew that nothing, even the air she breathed, would ever be as it had been. And she looked at her husband's smile and believed in him, and she was even right, for a while.
Her salary as a cadet wasn't much, but she dug into her career with both hands, surprised herself and everyone by being damn good at the job. She earned a promotion and then another in rapid succession. They came with significant raises, and Eddie had a couple of windfalls. He told her, "You can find a cheap house pretty easy in your line of work," and she agreed, and did it. It seemed a little ghastly, but it fit the budget.
The baby kept Eddie at home for a while. She made it more important to keep the peace, made it easier for Catherine to ignore warning signs that might have appeared. It wasn't until Lindsey was four that things started to crumble. One night that fall, when he didn't come home at seven and he didn't come home at nine, Catherine packed Lindsey up with her toothbrush and her stuffed parrot and begged a favor from the neighbors. She didn't want her little girl in the house during the fight.
He didn't come home at midnight, and it was nearly three when he finally staggered in. In the dark, she watched him take off his shoes and tiptoe around colored plastic blocks in the foyer. He flicked on the stairway light and nearly fell over when he saw Catherine sitting motionless on the couch. "Hey," he said weakly.
She took in his rumpled hair and stained white T-shirt and smiled without humor. "Car trouble?"
Eddie took hold of the scratched post at the end of the banister to steady himself. "Jesus, Cath, I was just out with a couple of guys."
"A couple of guys. I see." Catherine stood up, hugging herself. "How long am I supposed to believe that for? Five minutes? Long enough for you to slink into the shower and wash the lipstick off your--"
"Where's Linze?" he interrupted, looking at the floor.
"I took her over to Betty's. She was, I might add, pretty upset that you weren't around to kiss her goodnight. Not that that's unprecedented with you." She threw up her hands. "Go take your shower, you smell like a hooker. I'm going to sleep. And in the morning, I'm going to pack."
Eddie laughed harshly. "I can't believe this. You're out of your mind."
"Am I?" Her voice dropped to a near-whisper.
"Yeah, yeah, you are." He approached her, wavering and gesturing unevenly. "You dump our kid on the neighbors in the middle of the night, just so you can bitch at me for being a little late? You're a psycho, lady."
She edged forward, her face inches from his. "Don't fuck with me."
He shoved her shoulder, not very hard, but enough to make her take two quick backward steps. She stared at him, paralyzed with rage, her eyes blazing. Faster than Catherine could react, Eddie had snatched her keys off the end-table and stormed out the door. In another second she shook off the shock and ran after him.
It was raining, oddly enough, and the drops raised goosebumps on her arms as she raced barefoot down the slick pavement. She caught up with him around the corner as he crossed the parking lot of the pharmacy. Not thinking of anything at all, she launched herself at his back. One of his arms went around his neck, nearly strangling him; she held onto his waist with her knees and grabbed a fistful of his hair.
"Fuck!" Eddie yelped, in pain and surprise and anger. He raised his arm and, before she could stop him, lobbed her keychain at the wall of the drugstore.
Catherine clawed at the back of his neck as the keys flew threw the air, hit the cinder-block and tumbled into the Dumpster. She fell off Eddie's back and into a puddle on the concrete, soaking her jeans and scraping the palms of her hands.
He stood over her, panting heavily. "Try leaving now, crazy jealous bitch."
"Fuck you," she snarled, clambering to her feet. "You think I'm just going to sit by and let you run around with some slut?"
"Yeah," he shouted back as he backed away. "What were you when I found you?"
Catherine took a menacing step toward him and he started walking faster. She lifted her chin, letting the rain splash her face. Then she looked at the Dumpster and at her ruined clothes, and caught her breath. It wasn't easy scaling the slippery wet metal to reach inside, but she managed it. Delving in the discarded cardboard and plastic and paper and the ill-smelling food particles, she noticed a few dried brown leaves. She wondered where in the desert they'd fallen from.
She thought she would drive to see Bridget, or to a motel, but she didn't. Instead she pulled up in front of Gil's building, honked the horn once and sat in the car, her hands still on the steering wheel. The Volvo's radio had started automatically with the engine, and she'd heard six or seven bland pop songs and a set of commercials by the time he came down.
"Something happened," he said, as he got in the passenger side.
She didn't turn her head. "You're always picking up on the details, aren't you?"
He blinked sleepily. "You don't smell very good."
"Please, please don't be helpful or anything." Her voice sounded strangely light in her ears. "I really don't think I could handle that right now."
"What'd he do?"
"Eddie..." She trailed off, a laugh bubbling into her throat and out of her mouth. "Eddie," she tried again, and giggled helplessly. "Eddie likes dancers."
Gil made a sound between sighing and yawning. "He's a son of a bitch."
"I know."
"Are you going to leave him?"
Catherine was distantly aware that she was gripping the wheel so hard that it hurt. Her hair fell in dripping strings over her eyes. "Lindsey's doing so great in preschool," she said.
Gil nodded. He reached over and pulled her right hand away from the wheel. It shook as he turned it over. The yellow light from the streetlamps filtered dimly through the glass. He studied the raw flesh of her palm and the shadows under her fingernails. "That's gonna sting for a while," he told her. "You ought to wash that with some iodine."
"You mean you don't carry a vial in your utility belt?" she cracked, wondering why he was still holding her hand.
"Fine," he said. "Get gangrene. See if I care."
Catherine was laughing again, but it felt and sounded like crying. Then she was climbing over the stick shift and straddling him. She knew she smelled like sweat and trash, and he smelled like beer and the sterile lab scent that always lingered under his skin. Gil did most of the work, getting her muddy jeans down, unzipping his own and shifting her in his lap. She was numb and didn't feel the sex so much as his mouth on hers, his teeth tugging gently at her lower lip. On the radio, a deliberately hoarse female voice sang: "I've been here before, and I'm locking the door/And I'm not going back again/Her eyes and arms and skin won't make it go away/You'll wake up tomorrow and wrestle the sorrow that holds you down today..."
The next morning was Saturday. Catherine drove back across town early and brought her daughter home. Eddie made pancakes, big airy ones drowning in syrup, and the three of them spent the day together as a family. She had to work that night, and she dreaded it, but Gil didn't avoid her eyes even once. But after that night she never knew him to touch alcohol again. She didn't take the credit, and she didn't take the blame.
*
"Two coffees, one black, one with extra cream and sugar--"
"Don't wrinkle your nose when you say that," Catherine says, elbowing his arm.
Gil ignores her and leans out the car window, closer to the speaker. "One egg and cheese biscuit, one egg, sausage and cheese, an extra order of hashbrowns--"
"What for?" Catherine interrupts again.
"You take mine every time," he claims.
She taps her fingers on the dashboard. "That's a lie. And even if it's true, I'm not paying for an extra order."
A voice crackles over the speaker. "Is that everything?"
"Uh, sorry." Gil glares at Catherine and continues. "Extra hashbrowns and an orange juice. And can you throw a couple extra sugar packets in there?"
"Sugar packets. Sure. $8.63 at the second window, please pull up."
"You're not going to sweeten your coffee?" Catherine asks as they roll forward. "After you sneered at mine?"
He shakes his head. "It's for the fire ants."
"Of course." She pulls a five-dollar bill from her pocket. "I should have figured that out. You're just soft when it comes to that."
Gil takes her money and matches it with his own, passing the cash to the teenage girl in the window. "A fair face will wither, a full eye will wax hollow, but a good heart, Kate, is the sun and the moon."
Catherine stares at him. "What on earth?"
"Shakespeare. Henry the Fifth. I've been doing some rereading from the Complete Works." He looks at her over the top of his sunglasses. "Get some culture."
She tips her head back against the top of the seat. "Bugs and the Bard. You're a sad, strange man. Hand me my coffee."
He does, and sets the paper bag full of food down at her feet. The girl holds out a handful of change, and Catherine stretches across the car and takes it. Gil scoffs at her as he sets his cup in the holder and pulls out of the drive-thru. "You're right, I'm too lenient," he grumbles. "I'm going to have to start enforcing some discipline in the ranks."
"Everyone already thinks you're a slave driver. Nick, in particular, thinks you have the power to make grown men weep." She blows on the coffee, sips and makes a face. "This is yours."
Gil takes it from her and drinks, driving one-handed. "You're not going to ruin my rep, are you?"
She grins as she takes the other cup out of the holder. "Your secret's safe with me.
*
Catherine held out for almost four more years. Then there was a night where she didn't stay home, where she left Lindsey with a sitter and tailed Eddie around the city. She found him behind a club, hands on the bare, golden thighs of an Asian girl who couldn't be long out of high school. Catherine looked at her husband with disgust, and at the girl with pity.
This time there was no argument, no appeal. She got the locks changed the next day. Though there were days he called her and hung up, and nights he tried to break the door down, Catherine didn't care. She had waited long enough that it was hard to feel any pain or anger or grief, hard to feel anything but finished.
By then, Gil had left his murky apartment for one that was larger, brighter, and he kept it spotless. Even the books and the specimen jars and ant farms were in order. He vacuumed. He dusted. He didn't drink a drop. And if it was possible, he worked more hours than he used to. Catherine spent some nights at his new place. He spent some afternoons at the house.
CSIs came and went. Some decided they couldn't take it: the blood and bone and bile, grieving widowers and bitter witnesses. More commonly, they got tired of Vegas, or went broke, or found someplace to pay them more. Whatever the reasons, it seemed that most people didn't last. Gil and Catherine had been there longer than anybody else.
She couldn't believe that he'd gone after Syd Goggle without backup. He wasn't a cop and it wasn't his job. But then, Catherine knew that about him, that he loved following the evidence mostly because he loved having the answers. When Stokes told her where Gil had gone, she'd practically flown out the door. She ran two traffic lights, loaded her gun as she raced through the apartment complex. She almost fell running down the stairs.
She was just in time.
"I just wanted to talk to him," Gil said, gritting his teeth and looking down at Goggle's body. Catherine knew that he could calculate the trajectory of all five shots, even though he'd been down on the floor when she'd fired.
"How's your arm?" she asked as they walked to the squad car.
"What?" He pulled up his sleeve and inspected the angry red welt, the outline of the wrench visible where it struck him. "Oh. That'll probably hurt tomorrow."
The next day, she told him, "Never doubt and never look back. That's how I live my life." He smiled, and she didn't feel the need to add what else she believed. Now, she thought, they were even.
*
Gil parks on the street, gets out of the car, and goes around to open Catherine's door. She hands him the food as she gets out, and checks her wristwatch. It's twenty after eight. "Oh, good," she says, and hurries ahead of Gil and into the house.
Lindsey is sitting on the couch, toying with her shoelace and watching Designing Women. "Morning," she says, not looking up.
Catherine sits down next to her. "Which one is it?"
"Charlene meets Bill."
"I love this one!"
"Me, too," Lindsey says, resting her head against her mother's arm. She glances up to where Gil is standing, just inside the open front door. "Hey, Bugman."
"Hey," he replies comfortably, removing his sunglasses. "Aren't you running late?"
"I am not," Lindsey says with a slight pout. "Mom always says I'm going to miss the bus, and I never miss the bus."
Catherine plays gently with Lindsey's hair. "Did you eat breakfast?"
"Mom..."
"Mom..." Catherine mocks, drawing out the syllable. "Did you?"
"I had a glass of juice."
"Not good enough, babe. Take something out of the fridge." She prods her daughter's shoulder gently. "Go. Or you'll miss the bus."
Lindsey gets up and drags her heels into the kitchen. She returns with a yogurt and a plastic spoon. "Okay?"
"Okay, but you better eat lunch at school. You need money?"
"I have your change from yesterday." She pats the pocket of her jeans and then shoulders her backpack. "Seeya later."
"Have a good day," Catherine calls. Lindsey flounces out, squeezing past Gil. Catherine clicks her tongue. "I worry about that. She doesn't eat enough. All that pressure on a little kid to be a waif."
Gil comes in. He sits down beside her and spreads the fast food out on the table. "Like Megan McKee," he says. "Trying too hard to be what other people wanted."
She shoots him a suspicious look. "Thanks, now I won't worry."
"She's a good kid," Gil says mildly. He frowns at their breakfast. "My coffee's already gone."
"Mine too." Catherine yawns and rubs her eyes. "I'll go put some on."
"It's an addiction," he says, and brushes his hand against her thigh as she stands. She inclines her head knowingly and walks out of the room.
In the kitchen, Catherine starts the coffee-maker and splashes some cold water on her face. She sniffs, hoping she doesn't smell too much like Luminol and print dust and formaldehyde. She drops to one knee and checks her reflection in the door of the oven. What she sees is acceptable, and she smiles as she pours their fresh coffee and carries the steaming mugs carefully into the living room.
Gil has fallen asleep, stretched out across the sofa. His head is pillowed on one arm; his other hand rests on the table, inches from his open carton of orange juice. Catherine chuckles to herself and shakes her head. She pushes his legs back and sits down on the edge.
Sometimes, these days, she feels like her body is old and tired and abused. He touches her, and she feels safe, or at least she feels sure. She wonders how he thinks about her, but she never asks. It's enough that he knows her to the marrow of her bones.
Catherine settles back against his legs. Gil snores a little, but it's muffled by the couch cushion. She eats his hashbrowns and drinks his coffee, watches television and lets him sleep. There's no reason she needs to hurry him awake. It is going to be a beautiful day.
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