Deconstruction
Part 8 of the Diurnal Dreaming Series.
by maven
STANDARD DISCLAIMER: Characters owned by CBS Television, Jerry Bruckheimer and a few other production and distribution companies.
RATINGS DISCLAIMER: PG Rating. Catherine/Sara. Talking. Talk, talk, talk, more talking. A few bad words.
CONTINUITY DISCLAIMER: Season Five spoilers and setting. No real case specific spoilers.
CREDIT WHERE CREDIT IS DUE: This is the answer to Femvamp's snowbound challenge where Catherine is to fall back on her coke habit and Sara is to find out. Couldn't quite do that.
RESEARCH DISCLAIMER: I watch the show, I read an article in the Toronto Star and this website http://members.aol.com/remiped/csi-news-realcsi.htm. That's about it except for some story specific research detailed below.
STORY SPECIFIC NOTES: First thing; I love shrinks. This may be because, as some suggest, I should see one but, regardless, this run on sentence is to inform you that Catherine is absent for most of this instalment. An original character is around to be the second talking head as, apparently, I’ve sent Kim Legaspi to Australia. My love affair with psychiatrists doesn't mean that they're 100% realistic although I try not to have them do anything extremely out of character in terms of the professions ethics and purpose. They're about as realistic as most TV shrinks if that means anything. Next thing; research credits. If I'm going to make Sara the poster child for PTSD I'm going to research it. These are the sites I used: http://www.ncptsd.va.gov/facts/index.html, http://www.mentalhealth.com/dis/p20-an06.html and http://www.psych.org/public_info/ptsd.cfm. Final thing; a series name has emerged: Diurnal Dreaming. I figured it fit for a couple of people who were basically nocturnal. Plus, two Ds so it's doubly amusing to me.
FEEDBACK, COMMENTS AND FLAMES: Email at maven369@sympatico.ca
+++++ First Base +++++
I look up from my notes. They're rather spotty with more questions than answers. They include a report from a previous counsellor, employment performance reviews and a variety of disciplinary notices.
"Interesting reading," I say, glancing up.
She glares at me. "Shouldn't you have read that before my appointment?"
I smile. "I did. I just like to review it with you here. In case a question pops to mind," I explain. "Plus, it gives you an excuse for the squirming you're going to do whether or not I did my homework."
She looks taken aback but then smiles. "I’m nervous."
"So," I continue. "You saw one of my colleagues for a drinking problem."
"Nope," she says. She's not smiling but there is a mischievous glint in her eyes.
"But it says...?"
"I saw one of your colleagues because it was mandated when I got that DUI. But my drinking has never been a problem."
"It's not?" I say, letting all the disbelief I feel come out.
"Nope. It was a symptom, not the disease."
"And the disease?"
She looks at me for two minutes. I have a discrete clock positioned where I can see but that my clients can't so I'm able to time it.
"Not on our first date," she finally says. "Let's get to know each other a bit better."
"Fair enough. Can I ask you a question?" I ask and she nods. "You specifically asked for me. How come?"
"You were recommended," she says. A frown suddenly creases her forehead as if a random thought had just struck her. "Would that be conflict of interest for you?"
"Depends on who recommended me."
"Lindsey. Lindsey Willows."
I think back. Cute kid. Father murdered. Couple of sessions and then some follow up. "How do you know Lindsey?" I ask.
"I work with her mom," she says.
"Friendly co-workers if her daughter is recommending shrinks," I comment.
Again, no obvious smile but the mischievousness is back as she nods but doesn't comment out loud.
"Why did Lindsey think I'd be able to help you? Something similar happen to you perhaps?"
"Similar but not the same," she allows.
"You going to hold out until another date or do I get to second base now?"
She laughs. It's a nice laugh and I smile in response. "First base is the drinking to excess?" she asks. I nod. "Second base will have to wait, I'm not that kind of girl."
"What kind of girl are you?" I ask.
"Curious," she answers immediately. "Are you a psychologist or a psychiatrist?"
"Full fledged shrink with the prescription pad to prove it," I answer. "Does it matter?"
"No. Like I said, curious. Are you incompetent?" It's at this point that I realize that she's definitely playing me.
"My brothers taught me that, in sports, the best defensive is a strong offensive," I answer.
"You calling me offensive?"
I wait. I've rarely had a client that can stay quiet for more than two minutes. Obviously Sara Sidle is redefining benchmarks.
"I'm being offensive," she allows after five minutes. "I should have asked if you were a state employee because of preference."
"That's a little more diplomatic," I say. "Do you react more easily to people when they're mad at you?"
She looks taken aback. Not at the idea but that she's been called on it. "Yeah."
"All people?" I ask. I suspect not or her employee record would be a lot thicker.
"No," she says, thinking it through, "just people who I... People who have power over me."
"Your boss?"
"Not my immediate superior. The next idiot up the ladder though, he pisses me off by breathing."
"So you return the favour?"
"Pretty much," she says. I suspect she was described as an imp when she was younger.
"Anyone else?"
"My coworkers sometimes. Suspects."
I jot down a few words. "Suspects? How do they have power over you?"
"Knowledge is power," she says firmly. "They know what they did. How and where and why and when. I'm playing catch up the entire investigation."
"Must be frustrating."
"Yeah, it's..."
"But that'll have to wait until next session," I interrupt smoothly. She looks taken aback.
"But we just got talking."
"Maybe next time you won't waste your time with the sullen, silent treatment," I suggest.
She has the grace to look abashed. "I can come back?"
"Same time next week?"
+++++ Second Base +++++
"You never answered my question," she says as she sits down.
"Usually the deal in therapy is you answer and I ask."
"Yeah, well, consider me unusual. You work for the state, surely private practice would be more lucrative."
"Probably. But not nearly as..." I pause, considering my words.
"Frustrating? Challenging?"
"Rewarding," I counter. "My grandfather was a Chicago cop back in the time when police just kept a stiff lip and drank themselves into peace with their conscious and memories. Sound familiar?"
"I told you, my drinking isn't the problem." I wait. "Okay," she says after three minutes. "My drinking was becoming a problem."
"Why?"
"Why did I drink? Easier than finding a shrink with a prescription pad."
"Hell, yes. Why see a trained professional when your amateur method of self medication is working so well?" I say sarcastically.
She laughs. "I'm seeing you now."
"And how long did that decision take?"
She looks at me and, at first, I should start timing but she speaks before I can start. Obviously she's decided to be more time effective with the visits.
"Over twenty years," she says. "Or three months. It depends on what you considers the beginning."
"What happened three months ago," I ask. I figure that's bound to be the easier question.
She rubs her face briskly, "No," she says, "not today."
I sigh. "I assume you've had these little epiphanies before. Why was this different? Get you in here?"
"I've met someone. Actually, I met her a long time ago. But recently I looked at her like I was seeing her for the first time."
"And," I prompt after a few seconds of silence.
"And it made me look at myself. And I didn't like what I saw."
"What did you see?"
She flexes her left hand. "That I was hurting myself and others," she says.
There are whispers of white across her knuckles and I realize that the term hurting was literal. "What happened twenty years ago, Sara?" I ask.
"When I was a kid -not much older than Lindsey, really- anyway, my father was murdered." She shivers as if the temperature had just dropped ten degrees. "I don't want to talk about that anymore."
"Okay," I agree. "You want to discuss three months ago?"
"No."
"You want to discuss the woman?"
She suddenly grins, the pensiveness disappearing. "Absolutely, positively not."
I throw my pen backwards over my shoulder. "Fine. What do you want to talk about?"
"You want to ask me about my dreams?"
"If I do, will you talk about them?"
"Nope," she answers cheerfully. "C'mon, Doc. You got to second base."
"Tell you what," I say. "I'll put up with that today but if you want to continue you're going to have to at least pretend you give a damn about the process."
"Do you know how hard this is for me?" she asks, suddenly serious.
"No, I don't. I can empathize but I don't know. That's why you have to talk; so I can understand."
She regards me and, as unique as each person, as each case, as each situation is, it's an internal battle I've seen countless times before.
"I can't promise," she finally says, "but I can try."
+++++ Third Base +++++
"Lindsay's mom" she says as she sits down. I wonder if she's written down the questions from last session that she refused to answer. "Catherine Willows. She use to, um, she use to smoke. One day I caught her playing with a cigarette and we agreed that she'd give me the, uh, cigarette and if she wanted to smoke again she'd come to me and talk it over first. That was my side of the deal."
One of the true arts of therapy is not the discovery of the lie but when to accept it and when to call them on it. Cigarette my ass but Catherine Willows isn't my patient.
"And her side of the deal?" I ask.
"She, uh, took a bullet from my service weapon. Her deal was to hold it so if I wanted to do something stupid I was to talk to her."
I feel a cold knot in my stomach at her words. "What did she mean?"
"I think there's a pool at work. About me," she says, her serious look being replaced by a wry smile. "Sara caps a suspect is neck and neck with Sara caps Ecklie with Sara eats her gun a distant third." She shrugs. "Anyway, about a week later there was this bad scene," she trails off, lost in some memory. "Anyway, it struck a nerve and I was hitting this wall and Catherine showed up and stuff happened that I'll likely talk about more later but the thing that's important to me today is that she stayed with me for a couple of hours -just doing stuff with me that I could have done alone. And after shift she made sure I ate and got some sleep. That's what happened three months ago."
"Why was that important?"
"Usually, when I'm like that -people leave me alone. Or they ask what's wrong but don't really expect any detailed answer. She didn't do that. She didn't ask, she just did. It felt good. My dreams," she started. I nodded as she paused, giving her permission to answer in her own order.
"I don't remember them. I'll wake up suddenly in a cold sweat. I'm terrified, usually, sometimes crying. But I couldn’t tell you what happens in it. Wait," she says suddenly, "we're talking about nightmares or do you want to hear about the ordinary dreams? They’re just the regular dreams."
I shake my head and motion for her to continue. I'm afraid to interrupt again.
"Epiphanies. The first one was when I was around twenty-two. My first apartment. The bedroom window overlooked a side alley. It was a dump, really, but I was just out of university and it was all I could afford. Anyway, I had a night job where I slept during the day and so I didn't notice until my first day off. The business across the alley, it was a bar called Crimson Flames. God-awful signage. And some noise woke me and when I looked around my bedroom was bathed in blood."
"From the signage," I ask softly, trying to prod the memory rather than interrupt it.
"Yeah. Hadn't noticed in the day and hadn't thought it through. Lost my security deposit. Apparently nailing a sheet of plywood over the window breaks the lease. I remember hammering it to the sill and thinking that this reaction wasn't rational, that I needed to talk to someone."
"Why was there blood?"
"It was their bedroom. Blood on the walls and the bed. And his hands. He kept looking at his hands, like he couldn't figure it out, trying to push the blood back in. There was a dog barking. I remember that but no other sound. No screaming or crying or begging. It was like some really crappy art film where the only colour was red and the only sound some poor dog"
I wait and then ask softly, "You saw it happen?"
"He was stabbed in front of my eyes," she says. "Bled to death as we watched."
I can press but decide not to. Her voice and tone as she answered the questions had been even and calm but her body language had become progressively more tense and defensive. Any further and she'd be coiled into a ball on the chair.
"And this epiphany? The new person in your life?"
She blushes and hugs herself briefly before relaxing into a boneless sprawl. "Catherine," she finally says.
"Ah."
"I know what you're thinking. That I'm attaching to the first person who showed any concern toward me."
"I'm thinking that, am I?"
"Hell, that's what I'm thinking," she snorted. "I'm a disaster at relationships. I always pick someone unobtainable or emotionally distant. And I'm always surprised when they don't feel the same way."
"So you picked Catherine?"
Her brow creases as she thinks. "No," she says finally, as if to herself. "She picked me. She lets me know when she's ready to take it deeper and then lets me take it there."
"Serendipity," I say. "You were ready to listen when she was ready to see you. Leave the psychoanalysing to the trained professionals."
"Okay."
"Get out of here," I order. "You done good, kid."
She grins. "All the way to third base. But yeah, got a date for ice cream with Lindsey."
"Tell her hi from me if you feel comfortable doing that," I offer. I definitely do not get the impression that Sara Sidle is they type of person who'd broadcast the fact that they're in therapy. "See you in a week."
+++++ Home Run +++++
She’s more comfortable today. We chat about general things while the niggling little question rattles around my head. Although she hasn’t filled in the details there’s one glaring omission.
"When your father was stabbed, where was your mother?"
"She was holding the knife," she says. Home run.
She's obviously following the analogy because she smiles, "All the way. Was it good for you too?"
"Usually a bit more work is involved," I allow. "You've been practicing telling people?"
"Why do you say that?"
"Because nothing like that is in here," I say, holding up the file, "so it's not something you talk about. But you said it easily, almost glibly."
"I've told the mirror in my locker about six times this week. The mirror in my bathroom about a dozen."
"Why?"
"She needs to know. She's very protective about Lindsey. I just have to find the right way to tell Catherine."
"Sara, there is no right way. Only the honest way."
"She needs to know," she repeats.
"I'm not sure about that," I say. "But I am sure that you need to tell her."
"Want to. I mean, I think she needs to know but I want to tell her. Do you understand?"
"What do you usually do when you need to tell someone but don't want to?"
"I run. I hide," she says, burying her face in her hands. "God, I'm so fucked up."
I laugh. And then I laugh more when she looks at me with a bewildered expression. "Sorry, I'm not laughing at you. Everyone who sits in that chair eventually says that. Maybe without the profanity but they say it. Are you cured?"
"No. I can come back?"
"Of course. Even when you think you're better."
"Thanks. Is it okay if I bail early?"
"Go. Remember, honesty," I hand her a card with my pager number on it. "I'm here until six. Call me if you need to."
"I can do this," she says. And walks out of the past for the first time in over twenty years.
END
Next: Dénouement
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