“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”

- Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier

- -

Lindsey sees him again at her mother’s funeral.

She’s nineteen, and on the sidelines. She crosses her arms over her faded denim jacket, and watches her mom’s coworkers grieve. It’s a detached lesson in human psychology, and she feels like she’s standing outside of her own skin, taking notes on the way the Vegas sun reflects of the sheen of sweat on the minister’s forehead, and the way Nick Stokes curls his hand possessively over the handle of the casket, as if he’s the sole pallbearer instead of just one of the four. She analyzes Gil Grissom and Sara Sidle as they stand too close together and occasionally touch fingertips, and she watches Warrick Brown brush tears onto the coffin’s pale, sleek wood.

She ought to be the one in the center, giving the speeches. She’s not. These people knew her mother better than she did, anyway. So she stands slightly apart of this tightly-knit circle, and stares at other people crying.

Still, he’s so invisible that it’s not until he steps forward to fulfill his role as second-pallbearer-on-the-left that she realizes Greg Sanders is even there.

He isn’t crying. He looks haggard. He turns to look at her and a small, half-smile forms on his face, and it looks so horribly misplaced amid the tears that she feels like she should back away from it, but she doesn’t.

Greg comes up to her after everyone is leaving, and she takes her hands out of her pockets, expecting that he wants something from her, like they all do. Some kind of vital reaction; a handshake; a hug. Proof. Here is evidence of her grief.

He does nothing. He says, “You look like a rock star in that jacket,” and offers her a cigarette.

She takes it. It feels delicious, lighting up next to her mother’s fresh gravestone. “How did you know I smoked?”

“I didn’t.”

He has a vicious smile, a wolf’s smile. He isn’t who she remembered him to be.

He takes the cigarette away from her and slides his own lips around it, dragging in the smoke, and hands it back to her, exhaling as he does. She takes it after a slight hesitation. No one has ever done that before, not with her. He’s still looking at her.

“Where are you going to school?”

She gives him nothing. “Upstate.”

“Let me drive you back.”

“I’ve got a car,” Lindsey says, and doesn’t know what to do with her cigarette. She drops it into the fake grass after a slight hesitation, and grinds it out with the sole of her shoe. “And it’s a long way.” It’s not. She might not even go back. She struggles with her own apathy, and Greg takes advantage of the moment.

“It’s okay,” he says. “I’m on vacation.”

She looks at the frayed sleeve of her jacket instead of at him.

“Fine.”

“Good,” he says, and takes her arm, like someone out of an old-fashioned movie, and leads her to her car. She starts to ask how he knew it was hers, but snaps her mouth shut when she realizes it must be the only one, to him, that is unfamiliar. She unlocks the doors, and Greg, for some reason, takes the keys.

“I want to drive,” she says, sounding petulant and childish, like it’s not her car, when it is. When she paid for it after months of being a waitress even though her mother had the money to buy her one.

Greg looks at her for a second, and tosses the keys over the hood of the car. They crash against the red paint and chip it, but she doesn’t swear at him. She just looks at the discarded paint flecks against the green grass, and stares at them until they look like drops of blood. The keys are cold when she takes them into her hand.

No one is watching them. She never had the power her mother was born with. Never could make everyone stare.

“Let’s go,” she says, and slides inside. Her skin sticks to the leather.

Greg gets in next to her. He’s smaller than she thought, just an inch over her head, and his bones seem fragile and compact, covered by nothing but skin.

“Where are we headed?”

“North.”

He says, “You’re not as talkative as I remember.”

“Neither are you.”

“Point taken,” he says, and stares out the window as Lindsey heads out of the parking lot. It’s good to watch the fake grass fade away and be replaced by the natural, if dull, sands of the desert. She wonders if Greg’s thinking the same thing. She wonders why she cares.

“So what happened to you?” he asks.

She’s snotty. “My mother died,” she says, like he’s insensitive, and should know better. And it’d be a good answer if it wasn’t a lie. “What happened to you?”

He draws a cigarette from his pocket. “Your mother died,” he says.

He doesn’t sound like he’s lying. She drives.

- -

Lindsey stops at a motel at midnight and, when she stops, thinks that she’ll practically have to push Greg out of the car with her foot to get him to wake up. He hasn’t said anything in hours, even when she skipped the expressways to find a more convoluted, nonsensical route. But when she turns the keys and stares at his still figure in the dark, he says:

“I’m awake.”

She covers her surprise as best she can. “Good. Get out of the car.”

“This motel is trash,” he says as he opens his door and climbs into the air. She stands in time to watch him wipe sweat from his cheekbone.

“It’s affordable trash,” she says, and tries to prioritize, remembering that he has no extra clothes, and she only has an oily tee in the backseat. “We’ll sleep, shower, and leave in the morning, and you can drop me off at school.”

“Can I?”

He sounds smug. He’s making fun of her. Maybe.

She ignores him. He’s a gnat on the Wonder Bread of her subconscious. Something Zen, anyway. “Do you have any money?”

He turns his pockets inside-out, like he’s even younger than she is. “Not a cent.”

“Cards?”

“Not on me,” he says. “Just tell them that you’re famous.” He’s not near enough to put his hand against her jacket, but she knows that he’d be doing that if he was. He’d brush his fingers over the spangles and pull at where the sleeve was frayed.

“I’ll pay,” she says.

“Good plan.”

She hesitates again. He’s making her hesitate too much. He’s throwing her off-balance. She never hesitated before. Whatever she wanted, she could take.

She’s a very pretty girl.

“One room,” she says, and thinks about tacking on some excuse, about not being able to afford two, or about him reimbursing her later, but she doesn’t. She presses her lips together and tastes cherry gloss as it works its way onto her tongue.

He’s looking at her. It’s too dark to see his expression.

“Lindsey,” he says, like he’s tasting her name. He says it slowly, silkily, smoothly, and lets it fade away into the darkness. She shivers and wraps the jacket tightly around her. “Lindsey Anne Willows.”

She doesn’t have a middle name, but she likes the way it slides off his tongue, so she lets it pass. Lindsey Anne. It sounds pretty, if a little antique. Like the name of an old-fashioned doll, dressed in cotton and lace.

She steps around the front of the car and is suddenly too close to him, because he’s been walking, too. His hand is on her wrist, and he’s feeling the jacket like she knew he would, but then he pushes up the cuff and his fingers are against her bare skin.

Then he’s letting her go.

“You look so much like her.”

She doesn’t make the connection right away. She thinks it’s a line, though she should know better, because he hasn’t given her a line all night. She’s waiting for him to tell her she looks like an angel, or a movie star.

“Who?”

His eyes are all over her in the dark. “Your mother. Catherine.”

If he’d said Lindsey’s name like he was praising it, it was nothing to how he said Catherine’s. There were years of anticipation and disappointment, frustration and want, love and need, locked into that single word, and Greg said it so desperately into the dark that Lindsey knows the night’s over before it even starts.

She isn’t going to love a man who loved her mother first.

- -

The one room has two beds.

They stare at them for a while and then Greg sits down on the one next to the window. The bedspread is faded and natty, the color of rotting grapes. Lindsey sits down on the one across from him, and watches the new-falling rain make shivering patterns on the window. They should turn the lights on, but she doesn’t want to get up again. She smokes.

He’s still staring at her. She has to undress. She could sleep in her clothes, but it’s awfully warm in the room. The air conditioning must be broken.

Greg says, “I wish I had a toothbrush.”

She laughs; presses her hands to the pillowcase. It feels rough to the touch. “This isn’t the kind of place that’s going to give you one gratis.”

“You know how much semen’s on that pillow? I mean, probably?”

Lindsey’s heard it before, but she pulls her hands off, anyway. Her mom used to talk shop all the time. It was what she loved. Lindsey had a childhood with vaginal clocks squeezed in between readings of Goldilocks. She was a big hit at recess.

She asks anyway. “How much?”

His eyes are unfocused, like he’s drunk, but he hasn’t touched a glass all night. “A lot. I don’t remember. I never got out in the field.”

She has no idea what he’s talking about.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

He laughs. “Fieldwork. Getting out of the lab. Your mom used to call me for it, get me out of bed at three in the morning, and tell me to get over to some scene. And I’d get dressed and show up, and she’d smile at me. I’d bring orange juice. Coffee. I brought her a 7-Eleven slushee once. Work so close to her all day that I could smell her hair.”

“But you never got out in the field.”

“No,” he says. “I never did.”

“Why not?”

She can’t see his face behind the veil of smoke she’s creating. She’s glad. She’s blushing. This is, after all, the man who’s in love with her mother. And, fifteen minutes away from offering to sleep with him, they’re sitting on opposite beds, talking about her.

He’s silent. She wonders if he’s even heard.

Then he says, “She stopped calling.”

Lindsey sleeps with her clothes on. She doesn’t dream.

- -

Greg wakes her up at eight in the morning. He’s showered, and she can smell the clean, piney scent of the soap on his hand as he sends it flying to land on her shoulder. When she washes up, his damp towel is hung neatly over the doorknob. She doesn’t shower, because there’s something eerily intimate about getting naked into a shower where the moisture from Greg’s shower has yet to fade away. The mirror is still framed with pearly steam.

She brushes her hair and frowns, because her hair is long and looks like her mother’s. She’s particularly glad now, with the new sensibility of the morning, that she didn’t sleep with Greg. In the dark, he could have pretended that she was her mother, and she didn’t know what she would have done if he had whispered the wrong name at the wrong moment.

He’s sitting on the bed and drinking a Coke when she comes out. For the first time, she wonders how old he is, and she can’t guess. Mid-thirties? Late thirties? He seems ethereal. In the right light, he would look her age.

She flicks water at him off the edges of her fingers. The droplets splatter against his cheek.

“You’re a mermaid,” he says.

“Last night I was a rock star.”

He touches his tongue to the wet aluminum of the can, and grins at her with his mouth open like that. She doesn’t want to like it, wants to think that he looks like a puppy with his tongue lolling out like that, but it is cute.

“You look pretty.”

“I look disgusting,” Lindsey says, and threads her hair through an elastic band. It gets it out of her faith, and it pulls her mom’s ghost away. She waits for him to look disappointed in the change, saddened that she’s really Lindsey and not Catherine, but his thoughtful, teasing expression doesn’t change.

“Pretty,” he says again, and drinks some more Coke.

She wants a beer and he’s sitting there, old enough to buy, and drinking Coca-Cola.

“I’m thirsty,” she says.

He tilts the can towards her, and she shakes him off. Shrugging, Greg drains the rest of it and sets it down on the table beside him, instead of in the trash just a foot more away. That half-sheepish, half-evaluating look was still in his eyes, and it’s making her uneasy.

“Thought you didn’t have any money,” she says. “How’d you get it?”

“I turned a trick with the salesman in the next room,” he says. “He’s got a mascara fetish and a wallet stuffed full of twenties. I’ll pay for gas on the way home.”

For a second, she believes him, and even thinks that she can see the worn shadows of the mascara around his eyes, but she shakes it off. He’s smiling. The black lines near his eyes are nothing but dark circles. He probably didn’t sleep at all.

“Seriously.”

“Took some out of your jacket. I was hungry, too, but this place doesn’t have any donuts downstairs.”

“Been up for hours?” she asks, instead of questioning why he thought he had the right to drag money out of her clothes.

“Been up all night,” he says, confirming her suspicions. He pushes a pillow at her over the bed, but with no real force. “Sleepyhead.”

She doesn’t think that he was her mom’s type. He makes too little sense. Lindsey has the sneaking suspicion that her mother could never have dated anyone she didn’t understand, and Greg looks like he would reveal all anyone asked, but his revelations might not be translatable into any recognizable language. He’s more than she remembered him to be, and probably more than her mother wanted him to be. He’s teasing and obliging and insinuating and he must have been so much in love with her.

“I used to wake up early every morning to run in and see her when she got home,” Lindsey says. “She would have been home while I was still sleeping, but she never could leave on time. You know how her job was.”

That’s the closest she gets to accusing him. He is, after all, one of the reasons her mother never made it home on time. Greg, Grissom, Nick, Warrick, Sara - - she can’t keep track of all the names, and she can’t keep track of all the reasons she hates them. They stole her mother away, after all, had the Catherine that Lindsey should have had, and now they have, in effect, killed her.

Dead is dead, and lost is lost.

But she isn’t going to tell Greg that it’s his fault she doesn’t love her mother, and Greg, in return, isn’t going to say that it’s her fault her mother didn’t love him.

She knows that he senses the compromise.

“I’ll buy you donuts down the road,” she says. “I think there’s a Krispy Kreme on the way back to school.”

Once they get on the road, she does. She buys him three frosted, with sprinkles. He sits on the passenger side of her car and licks icing off his fingers. The sun melts the sugar and it falls in drizzles down his napkin. When he’s done, he crumples up the paper bag and sticks it under his seat.

“Want my milk?”

“You should always drink your milk,” she says, not taking her eyes off the road. It took her two years to learn how to drive, and she still has the bad habit of weaving in her lane. A thought comes to her, and waits until he’s done slurping at his milk to ask. “How are you going to get home?”

“I’ll catch a bus,” he says.

“You don’t have any money.” She’ll give him some, if he asks, but he hasn’t asked for anything yet, and she suspects that he never will.

“An ATM,” he says.

She feels stupid for not thinking about it. “Sure.”

“Unless you want me to stick around for a while,” Greg says suddenly. She looks at him a little; sees the shine of icing is still on his lips. “I could get a little apartment in some complex made out of adobe. Decorate it with potted plants and cheap fiesta cookware. And sometimes I could buy you lunch and we could pretend that I didn’t know your mother.”

The fantasy is too real. It surprises her, and she’s tempted to say yes.

She can imagine it too. If he comes back with her to their version of Manderley, they can maybe drive away her mother’s ghost. They can stay up late at night talking about Mexican cooking and second-rate rock bands, and if she wants, she can fall in love with him, and not worry about the repercussions. But she knows that it isn’t real, and that it can’t be real. She knows, in her heart, that the two of them will only amplify Catherine until she fills all of their empty spaces. They will make her mother, and lover, until the day Greg says the wrong name at the wrong time, and they will both be unable to pretend any longer.

“Sounds good,” she says, “but it wouldn’t work.”

“Probably not,” he says. “I’d screw it up somehow.”

- -

“It’s green,” he says. “Kinda fake-looking, don’t you think?”

Lindsey agrees with him, but doesn’t say so. She wants another cigarette, but he hasn’t offered her one since the last time they stood on artificial green grass. She guesses now that it was just a way to get her in the car. A boon. She stares down at his faded dress shoes instead, looking him up from the cuffs of his dark charcoal pants to the strange, wilting smile on his face.

“I hate saying goodbyes,” he mutters.

He’s just a tad bit ridiculous, this man, older than her, dressed in formal, funeral clothes and standing on a college campus with a dab of chocolate icing on his lower lip, hating to say goodbye. She wants to ask Greg if he said goodbye to her mother, but the question is stupid, and she’s felt stupid around him too many times over the last two days.

“Get it over with, then,” she says, and offers him her hand.

He takes it with a smile. His is tanned, and warmer than hers, although not much bigger. She can still see the glint of her sapphire birthstone through his fingers, and then his mouth trembles, and Lindsey knows she’s going to get the tears now that she didn’t see him shed at the funeral.

Because first he lost her mother, and now he’s losing her.

He’s awfully close for a second, but it turns out that he doesn’t cry. She raises up a little on her toe and kisses his cheek. She can taste aftershave, and her lips are rough against the faint brush of stubble. He brushes his hand over her hair.

“I wish you hadn’t known my mother,” she says.

Greg strokes her hair again, and then traces his fingers down her neck and shoulders. It’s almost a caress, but not quite.

“Yeah,” he says. “Me too.”

She almost says, Come on, come with me, stay with me, we’ll make a go of it. We’ll make her go away. She never loved us well enough anyway. Why does it matter now? I’ll love you, and if at first, you only want me to be her, you’ll forget soon enough what she was like, and you’ll just think about me. You’ll love me, even, and I can be a rock star, and you can be my geeky scientist boyfriend and make lame jokes about turning tricks for extra cash. And I’ll never ask to understand you, and you’ll never ask why I don’t care. And we’ll live happily ever after.

But she’s her mother’s daughter. She has Catherine’s smile and Catherine’s eyes and Catherine’s hair and Catherine’s taste in men, and somewhere inside her, there must be even more of Catherine, a deeper sense of her mother, because she bites her tongue against all of this and she doesn’t ask Greg Sanders to stay.

She doesn’t want to live in anyone’s shadow.

“Do you ever have the feeling that you’re missing out on something really wonderful?”

He looks at her. “I know I am.”

“It wouldn’t make any difference,” Lindsey says, and doesn’t like the idea of having to explain it to him, but she knows he deserves an answer, because she could love him, yes, she can feel how easy it would be. “There’d always be someone else in the room.”

“I’m sorry about this, Lindsey,” he says, and offers her another cigarette.

They’re right back where she used to be, and she takes it, and standing on the bright, sweet-smelling lawn of the college campus, she breathes in the scent of smoke and bursts into laugher, although she doesn’t know why.

- end -