I set my kit and purse down and stand in my doorway for a second too long.

“You get to have Christmas off,” Catherine said. As if I wanted it. As if I haven’t worked every Christmas of my life since I was sixteen. Some days I hate her coiffed hair, her deliberate, dramatic toughness.

I get to have Christmas off, and hey, I can do a lot of things. I can handle liquid decomp without flinching. I can become a ghost in a house of twelve children. I can work my way through Harvard. I can work a week’s worth of doubles.

I can’t have Christmas off. I simply don’t know how.

Quiet, dark, and empty in here. I painted the walls a dark deep purple in brighter days when I thought it would look good. Now it's just dark. Cold, too.

Grissom is gone. To Florida, he says. Don’t know if he’s there working or racing cockroaches or banging some woman who isn’t me. Doesn’t matter. There is a tenor of loneliness in the city without him here, slightly different from the loneliness when he is here.

Christmas Eve. I hate this time of year. I truly do. Not because it’s something for other people, that I can accept. It’s fine if I busy myself with projects. If I can fool myself into thinking that it means working all day and night. If I can tell myself it’s time to paint my whole apartment. For a long time it meant it was time to cram for finals. I guess I should go back to school.

But this, well, Cath just sprung this shit on me. It’s Christmas Eve, and there’s nothing to do.

What do people do on Christmas, anyway? Warrick’s family is getting together at his grandmother’s house. I imagine a gaggle of black cousins and nieces and nephews, and church where they all dress in their best, the older ladies in hats and shoes that match their dresses, and a big turkey. Nick’s in Texas, and I imagine a similar scene, whiter, perhaps more secular. Cath is working swing then taking Lindsey to a spa, since she is at an age to appreciate it.

Our whole lab's schedule is screwed up. I've been floating from shift to shift like a ghost. Ecklie went off to Bermuda, leaving chaos in his wake.

I try to remember Christmas with my family. My real family, and I can’t. It’s a memory I’ve grasped at for years, and in the process it has become worn and blurred. I remember Christmas lights, and a certain candle smell, and a red blouse of my mother’s. Sensory blips, no meaning.

The other memories are clearer. Group homes and foster homes and Christian homes, all with a singular thing in common - they were not homes.

Sometimes the foster families had real Christmases, and I got to watch. It was the closest thing I ever got to a perfect field experiment. I was the variable, the odd factor, but my presence didn’t seem to change their lives at all. I got an idea of what other people did. I was six and I got a good view of a real Christmas. Evette got three Barbies and books and even some Hot Wheels, and I got a knockoff Barbie doll from my social worker. That wasn’t the worst house. Better than the ones that tried to make me feel like I was their own daughter. Where the air was heavy with pretending. I wouldn’t know what to do with three Barbies. They would get stolen at my next stop anyway.

I know self-pity isn’t becoming, but fuck it, it’s Christmas, and I get Christmas off. Cath said so.

How old was I when I decided that if I was tough enough and smart enough and stoic enough I could win the prize? I don’t know, but I worked and worked and worked and managed to graduate from the best school, penniless. I knew what my niche was the second I heard of it: the poor scholarship student, with no one, nothing but exacting perfection. So I worked and worked and during winter break when the dorms closed I hid out inside, eating rations like a refugee and trying not to get caught by campus police.

How old was I when my subconscious decided to attach all the glory of The Prize to a bowlegged middle-aged entomologist, in the form of Being In Love? Was I really stupid enough to think I could have him, and above all, that if I had him, it would change me? That it would change my life? That it could change the series of false homes in which I’ve lived, and still inhabit?

The stupidest thing yet is that I could probably go out and have something approximating that life with someone else. Definitely not with him, after all, he’s proven himself to be deficient in more ways than I can count. Of course my stupid heart wouldn’t allow it. I’d rather rot alone than have something with someone else, because that’s just how I am. One of the few things I remember my mother, my real mother, saying. She’s stubborn like that.

Damn straight, lady. Damn straight.

I turn the heat up. Lay down on the sofa, but don’t take my coat off. It’s cold. I’m cold. I have always hated being cold. It’s the only way I can tolerate the gaudy flash and sizzle of Vegas. Temperatures of a hundred and four or five or twenty. Not that it does much good when the sun goes down and temperatures plummet. But, like that bitch Laura Sidle said, I’m stubborn like that.

I think of other lives I could have, discreet and unique as that series of foster homes. I could go to Africa and join the peace corps. I could start up a meth lab. I could move to Wisconsin and become a housewife. I could go to Australia and hang out with the Aboriginal people. They are all random, and most are silly, but they are no more resonant with who I am than this empty life I’m living now.

One time I had the job confused with a reason for being. Once I was fired up about what I did. It was me. Bringing justice to a corrupt world, science geek style. Once, it was enough.

I close my eyes and wonder: if I were a normal person, would I be sleeping now?

It’s a recurring and fanciful theme of mine - Sara Sidle as Normal Person. If I were one of them, would I be living alone? Would have I married down in intellect, or up in wealth? Maybe marry someone like Nick with a teeming family and graft myself in there?

It’s sometimes a blessing - normal people wouldn’t jump at the chance to work on Christmas. More often, it’s a source of self-abasement, like a nattering mother. Normal People wouldn’t be working night shift. Normal people would have some friends. Normal People this and that and the other. If I were normal, I’d be calling family, or some foster family even, maybe one of the better ones who cared, trying to forge some arbitrary tentative connection between them and myself.

I think of it as a billboard. If you were normal… you’d be home by now. But I know better.

I wake up and it’s dark and I get up to make coffee, then I remember.

I’d probably have killed myself by now but my birth mother said it right, I’m stubborn that way. To bust my ass to be the scholarship girl, to work, through high school and Harvard and all of it, all just to lay down and die? It doesn’t make much sense. Death, anyway, could be just another pseudo-home, a final interminable stop in a series of many.

Julia is probably my one true friend, and I could certainly spend Christmas with her and Ron. God knows, Julia has spent rough Christmases with me, when she was sick with ovarian cancer and needed me. I could take from her just as she did with me. But they have a baby, a tiny little girl, and it hurts when I hold her. It hurts when I see Ron play with the baby, with the three of them laughing together, a happy family.

I could reach out, but I won’t. It would hurt more.

Rage comes in a wave, high and powerful. I hate Grissom for what he has done to me. I hate myself for still loving him, for being stuck on him like glue. I hate him for not being able to risk it and for that little speech he gave Dr. Lurie. I hate Catherine for assuming that Christmas off work is some kind of favor to me. I hate Hank Peddigrew for making a fool of me, and of myself for not realizing that I was just some stupid bitch he fucked on the side. I want to hate Julia and Ron, but I can’t.

I just die a little when I think of the babies I don’t have, month after month, lost chances that bleed out of me like clockwork, every twenty-nine days, a wound that stops but never heals.

I don’t know when that particular desire surfaced in me. It was never me.

Who am I kidding, I know exactly when it surfaced. When a starved little boy patted my shoulder, and I held him close. The sweetness of it lingered in my dreams. He was locked away in the dark, and I was him and he was me. He clung to me, and this part of me that had been dormant tingled and woke and came to life, making me ache every time I think about the passing of time.

God, I hate being a cliché. Bitter angry middle-aged woman, I’m quickly becoming. I feel like a character in a Cathy cartoon strip. All I need is three cats and a Ben and Jerry’s habit.

I have choices. I could get pregnant. I could adopt. That would require me to quit my job, but I could probably afford it, at least financially. I could enter into a relationship with someone other than Grissom (David, Greg, whoever, it doesn’t matter, because not Grissom is not Grissom.)

But the bottom line is that I’m too depressed to do any of that.

I remember something I learned somewhere in college. An experiment they did with dogs. The dogs were in a cage and were given a shock every so often. There was nothing they could do to stop it. This went on until they exhibited sighs of depression, until their spirits were broken.

Then the cage doors were opened, and the dogs could escape, but they didn’t. They call this phenomenon learned helplessness.

Am I really that depressed dog? Or is it that I’m holding out any glimmer of hope for Grissom?

Of course my problems run deeper than loving the wrong man. I should probably be in intensive therapy, addressing my childhood, the way I don’t eat enough and work too much, the compulsion that never dies: to be better, to work harder, to win.

I think of things I haven’t won, and they lead me back to Grissom. The promotion I didn’t get taps in to every bit of hurt I ever felt. Striving, wanting, is who I am.

To be punished for wanting it too much smarts, until my whole psyche resonates with it. To this day it is still the thing that hurts most, of every knock and blow I’ve received in my whole life, the top of the sad pile. I didn’t trust him with my heart, but I did trust him to be a fair judge of things professionally. He can’t know how profound his betrayal was. The depth of it still shocks me, a year later.

My face itches and I realize it’s because of the trickle of tears. I let them soak into the couch cushion and pull the blanket around me, tight. Maybe I can sleep through this whole holiday, if I try hard enough.