70. Tears on my pillow

Beckett finds that her cheeks are soaking and there is a damp trail on her shirt. She blows her nose, but can’t stop the tears and consequent sniffing at all, no matter how hard she tries.  Once she’s started crying, she simply cannot stop at all.  She’s still crying as she cleans off her ruined make-up, still crying under a scalding shower that doesn’t warm her up in the slightest, still crying as she slides into bed, still crying as she shivers with the weight of her memories, and still crying as she sleeps.

Her sleep is heavy and unrefreshing, and for once she makes generous use of the snooze button on the alarm, only rising when she has to. She isn’t sick, and she won’t call in sick when she isn’t, but she doesn’t want to go in.  She dresses to shore up her fragile emotions, and reaches her desk only minutes ahead of start of shift.  Ryan and Espo are already there, but don’t seem to notice her sneaking in.  She gets everything running, and goes to make herself an extra strong coffee.  She needs the caffeine hit.

While she’s waiting for it to brew, breathing in the familiar, consoling aroma, the thought worms its way into her head that she would have loved to have been able to talk about her mother, without every possibility and every memory being tainted by a covering of whisky, grief and alcoholism.

Behind her, Esposito considers his phone and considers Castle’s number, sitting there just waiting to be dialled. Beckett arriving after him is unusual.  Beckett arriving after Ryan is almost unheard of.  Beckett leaving it till two minutes to shift start to arrive at her desk is a surprise comparable only to having no new bodies for a month, or him, Special Forces Sniper Esposito, missing the bulls-eye more than once a year.  She looks ill, and without a new body or some developments in the cases Castle isn’t going to turn up.  This is a problem.  He watches Beckett emerge with a steaming coffee mug and decides to leave the problem to fester for a while.  Self-preservation has a lot to do with that choice.  He does notice that the coffee improves her, and puts off the decision for longer.

A trickle of results from the footage requests enlivens the morning. Ryan is set running through them – if he has square eyes already he might as well use them – and then phone records arrive.  Beckett takes those herself, and details Espo to harass the lab.  Phone records don’t require her to interact with anyone else for a while, and she has a headache which two Tylenol with her shower this morning have failed to cure.

Esposito is not hugely impressed at being left with harassing the lab. He’d rather be out bringing in suspects and then interrogating them with a main course of intimidation and a side order of scary.  On the other hand, it would get him out the bullpen, which is winding him up right now, what with Ryan sucking air through his teeth every five minutes as he stares at the footage and Beckett looking like someone broke her favourite doll.  On the downside, he’ll have to deal with Lanie Parrish, and dealing with Lanie Parrish is not currently at the pleasant end of his to-do list.  He weighs up the options, and decides that being out the bullpen is the best of a bad lot.

The morgue and the labs are cool and quiet. Espo finds them deeply tedious and (though he understands all the words and technical terms just fine) long-winded.  Although, he thinks with a small amount of relief, at least it’s not Perlmutter.  Perlmutter doesn’t even have the advantage of being in any way good to look at.  Lanie certainly does.  Twice over, between neck and waist.

“Espo?” arrives from behind him, just as he’s considering Lanie’s looks. “What’re you doing down here?”

“Hopin’ for some results, an’ avoiding staring at camera footage. You got anythin’ for us?”

“No. Still dealing with all the corpses that came in before yours.  We’re pushing them through as fast as we can but there’s only so much we can do.”

“How long?”

“Another day, anyway.” Lanie looks at Espo slightly sidelong.

“Okay. I gotta get back.”

“Not so fast, Espo.” Esposito’s heart sinks into his boots.  He’s faced war, dammit, and terrorists, out in the desert – and Lanie Parrish is more terrifying than both, and more pertinently she’s right in his face.  “What’s up with Kate?”

“No idea,” Espo blanks the question.

“Don’t give me that. You’re there in the bullpen seeing her every day.  Is she okay?”  Fatally, Espo hesitates.  “She’s not okay.  Why didn’t someone tell me?”  Lanie’s voice is rising.  “I’d have helped.”

Espo really doesn’t want to be here. This is about to become a complete clusterfuck and he’s the one standing on the cluster bomb.

“If Beckett wanted to tell you she would’ve,” he equivocates.

“Kate’s not telling me anything,” Lanie says bitterly. “Nor are any of you.  What am I, chopped liver?”

“She’s your pal,” Espo points out bluntly. “Maybe you shouldn’t’ve yelled at her in the bullpen.  Bet she didn’t like it.”

Lanie glares at him. “You tell Kate that she can’t keep hiding from me.  I wanna help.  Just because she’s running round with Writer-Boy doesn’t mean she needs to drop all her friends.”

“You want me to tell her that? You really think that’s gonna make things better?  You’re outta your mind.  You want to tell her anything, do it yourself.  I ain’t your messenger boy.”

He turns to leave, and then turns back for a parting shot. “Maybe if you wanna be pals you oughta stop acting like a flat track bully an’ try listenin’ to her, not yellin’.  An’ maybe think why Castle’s her best pal now an’ not you.”

He leaves Lanie gobbling like a Thanksgiving turkey as the chopper approaches its neck, and thinks that he’s just screwed any chance of getting friendly with Lanie himself. He shrugs.  Plenty of other fish in the sea, and he’s never had a problem with catching them.

When he gets back he says absolutely nothing about Lanie’s comments on Beckett, listens while Beckett casts vile imprecations on every other precinct’s queue-jumping corpses until she dissolves into a mud swamp of grumbles, and notes with some discomfort that she still doesn’t look good at all. On the other hand…

“C’mon, Beckett, sparring time.”

“Okay.”

She’s not really on her game, though. It’s all too easy for him to drop her every other move, and he quits trying after twenty minutes. 

“You ain’t got your head in the game, Beckett. Not throwin’ you round the mats if you’re not with it.  ‘S not a fair fight.”

“It’s never a fair fight with you, Espo.”

“I’m just that good,” he preens. “Anyway, I’m not sparrin’ with you when you’re not up to it.  Time to tap out ‘n’ get some lunch.”

He struts to the showers and considers, again, whether to tag Castle. In the end he doesn’t, being quite keen on living his current life with a full set of limbs and other items.  If Castle hasn’t turned up it’s because Beckett hasn’t called him, so if he does turn up Beckett will clock that one of them has called him, and while shoving all the blame on to Ryan would be funny, and suitable revenge for Ryan having given Lanie the nod the other night, he’d be found out pretty sharply and then he’ll be dead.  And that’s not necessarily a figure of speech.  Still, by the end of shift he’s wondering if he’s made the right call. 

His conscience gets the better of him as Beckett leaves, and he’s calling Castle as she’s going down in the elevator.

“Castle, you seein’ Beckett later?”

“Maybe.”

“Think you should make that definitely. She ain’t been right all day.”

“Okay.”

And that’s that. His twinging conscience fully appeased, Esposito takes himself off to his own gym and spends a pleasant evening working out, capped when he beats his personal best with the weightlifting bar.

Castle is not happy to receive Espo’s call. Mostly, this is because he’d wanted to go to the Twelfth and forced himself not to, because he really needs to get some writing done before the wrath of Gina (which is worse than the wrath of God) descends upon his head.  However, he wasn’t exactly happy about doing so, and he’s worried about the gaps and hitches in Beckett’s non-explanation of why she hadn’t wanted him to come with her last night because he is absolutely, totally certain it was to do some thinking prior to therapy, which he knows is going to have upset her because every single therapy session has upset her.  He stops his brain running on in that ill-disciplined fashion, and looks at his watch.  It’s shift end.  He has already been invited round tonight, and he has no intention of missing that, but she’s got therapy first so she’ll already be packing up, if not leaving.

Still, he’s deeply unhappy that Beckett’s been miserable all day and not got in touch. Then again, how was she going to deal with an undoubtedly emotion-provoking call in the bullpen?  Answer, naturally, she wasn’t – certainly not under Espo’s beady eye.  But he wishes that she had, even though she’s seeing him (at her request) later.

Beckett had thought about calling Castle more or less from the moment she’d finished her first coffee. Then she’d remembered that he was coming tonight, which is one big ask, she now thinks, because it’s going to be a rough session and she is hardly going to be fluffy and fun after it.  (How often is she ever fluffy and fun anyway?  It’s not her nature to be anything other than hard shelled and brushing off the important things with snark and snippiness.  Deep feelings get you hurt.)  And there’s the second reason.  She couldn’t stop crying last night and she is not, emphatically not, going to get into that in the bullpen.  If she calls, she’ll have to say what’s wrong, and while being wrapped up in Castle’s broad bulk is very comforting, it’s not possible in the precinct and into the bargain it’ll take him half an hour to get here.  She can’t spend that long in the restroom without Montgomery asking some very awkward questions all over again.  She can’t bear to be benched, all over again.

So she grits it out. She sends Espo to the lab, and Dr Parrish, praying that he’ll be impervious to Dr Parrish’s probing and prying.  He looks pretty ruffled when he gets back, and not a little cross, but there’s an undertone of told-her-so into which Beckett does not enquire.  She does, however, notice his sideways glances and his fingers fidgeting and tapping at his phone.  Since he doesn’t appear to dial, and Castle doesn’t appear, she doesn’t make anything of it, even when she epically fails to spar properly.  She just can’t get into it.  Every time she tries to get her head focused on anything, she sees Dr Burke’s door, and has to force back the tide of memories.  She’s almost glad when it’s time to go.  Anticipation of the guillotine is so much worse than facing the reality.

Dr Burke’s door is almost overwhelmingly terrifying. She does not want to do this.  She really doesn’t want to do this.

She plasters on a poker face and does it.

“Good evening, Detective Beckett.”

“Hello.”

Dr Burke surveys Detective Beckett. She appears to have had significantly less sleep than required.  The signs of stress and upset are evident to his experienced eye.  He concludes, quite correctly, that she has undertaken at least a proportion of the work that he had requested that she do, and had been profoundly distressed by her thoughts. 

“Detective Beckett, where would you like to begin?” The flash of expression across her face suggests that her first response to that question might well be nowhere.

“I would have liked to talk about Mom,” she says flatly, and snaps her mouth shut. Dr Burke allows the silence to extend for a few seconds.

“Why did you not?”

There is a much more extended silence.

“He cried,” comes harshly from her throat. “I couldn’t stand to see him cry.  I couldn’t make him cry more.  So I just left it.”

“Your father was overwhelmed by his grief?”

“Yes.” Another bitten off word.

“To whom did you talk, at the time?”

“The counsellor, back at college.”

“Not to family?”

“There wasn’t any other family to talk to.”

“None?” Detective Beckett is completely devoid of other family?  Had she no other relatives?  That is very unusual, even in these days of smaller families.

“The only one was Aunt Theresa. We…didn’t get on.  And my cousin Sophia, but we’re not close.  She’s much younger.”

“So you could only talk to the counsellor. Mm.”  That is profoundly unsatisfactory.  “Did you talk about your mother to anyone at a later time?”  He is not hopeful of a positive answer.

“No.” How disappointingly predictable.

“Why not?”

Detective Beckett fails to answer. Her mouth opens, but then closes.  It appears, for a moment, that she had not thought further than the simple concept that she would have liked to be able to talk about her mother with her father.

“Everything was spoiled,” she says bleakly. “No-one would have understood anyway: it was all family jokes and memories.  No-one would have got them.”  Her voice is frighteningly controlled.  “No point.  It wouldn’t have been the same.”

Dr Burke considers this response. “Mm,” he says non-committally.  “Did no-one ask?”  He acquires the very strange impression that the first answer that should have been given was not more than once.

“Not really.”

There is a slight pause, in which Detective Beckett’s normal extreme reticence is on full display. Dr Burke deduces without the slightest difficulty that her reticence is linked to the fact that she had been unable to talk about her mother without her father reacting badly, and that Detective Beckett had dealt with this simply by taking the lesson that to discuss anything which might be painful should be avoided.  This is not a helpful trait. 

Dr Burke remembers something.

“Detective Beckett, you have just said that everything was spoiled. In a previous session, you have said that you take the Christmas Day shifts each year.  In what way was Christmas spoiled for you?”

“My mother was murdered,” Detective Beckett bites out. “What more do you need to know?  It’s hardly a happy memory.”

Dr Burke simply gazes at her until she drops her eyes. “How did your father behave at Christmas after your mother died?”  Ah.  He has uncovered a point of conflict.  Detective Beckett has flinched.  Really, this would be so much easier if Detective Beckett were not so rigidly controlled and so incapable of voicing her thoughts.  He supposes that this is yet another symptom of her particular issues.

“He got drunk. Every year.  Got drunk and stayed drunk until it was all over.”  She hesitates, stands up sharply and paces, not looking at Dr Burke.  “The first year, he drank Christmas lunch, starting Christmas morning.  I cleaned up and put him to bed.  Then we did it again, the next year.  He vomited in the presents.  I stopped bringing them before the day.  All he could talk about was Mom, and how much he missed her.  Couldn’t decide if he wanted me to leave ‘cause he couldn’t bear to see me, or stay because I looked like her.”  She looks ready to snap, or weep.  “You want a short description?  Badly.”  She picks up a Kleenex and blows her nose.

“And has he made amends for any of those Christmas Days?”

“He apologised. Once he got dry.”

Dr Burke raises an eyebrow. “That is not quite the same thing.  Have you ever told him how he behaved.”  There is yet another silence.  “Detective Beckett?”

“No. There was no point.  He didn’t remember and I didn’t want to hurt him.  Don’t know why I bothered,” she adds bitterly.  “He didn’t care about hurting me.”

Detective Beckett begins, finally, to weep. Almost immediately upon the first tear, she turns away to the window of Dr Burke’s consultation room.  It takes less time than he would have preferred for her to turn back, dry eyed once more.  It is unhealthy for her to repress her emotions in this way and to this extent, and whilst he has no doubt that this has stemmed from a learned response to her father’s alcoholism, he also has no doubt that Detective Beckett prefers never to show weakness and that therefore this response was partly driven by her own reserved personality.

“So when you said your father had made amends,” Dr Burke asks, “had you at any time told him for what he needed to make amends?”

“I didn’t tell him the details. What would have been the point?  He was so fragile and so hurt and how could I push him back to the bottle?  He’s only ever one drink away.  He barely managed to stop himself after Julia Berowitz.  He went straight to his sponsor because he thought he was going to fall.  How could I do that to him?”

Dr Burke is appalled. Detective Beckett’s previous therapy has been utterly pointless.  He is severely unimpressed with the previous practitioner, who has failed in their duty to their patient on, it would appear, every possible count.  Detective Beckett should have been told clearly that, for both her and her father’s recovery, she must tell the whole truth.  That omission has led to this result: a serious breach between Detective Beckett and her father; five years of repression of her quite natural and justifiable feelings of hurt and resentment; and all of those issues becoming buried under a perceived – and wholly wrongly perceived – obligation to protect her father and keep him sober.

“Detective Beckett. You are fully aware of, and indeed you quoted to me, the so-called Three Cs of dealing with alcoholic family members.  You did not cause it; you cannot control it; and you cannot cure it.”  She nods, once.  Her face is stony.  “I should like you to consider, please, the second of these Cs.”  Dr Burke may as well take advantage of Detective Beckett’s painful silences in order to achieve a point at which the session can end on a positive note.  The end of the session is approaching, and whilst Dr Burke has scope to extend it, he is certain that Detective Beckett will, again, refuse.  It will not prevent him asking if she wishes to prolong the session, should that appear necessary.

Detective Beckett considers briefly.

“And?” she says.

“Please now consider whether your behaviour towards your father both whilst he was drinking and since he became sober is consistent with the second C.”

Detective Beckett considers, this time, for some moments. Dr Burke observes her expressions as she does.

She acquires a look of bitter – how odd, that is not realisation, but familiarity – which Dr Burke notes with an uncomfortable mixture of concern and satisfaction. She does not, naturally, say anything.

“Now, before we meet again, I should like you to reflect upon, in the light of those considerations, why you reacted as you did to Mr and Mrs Berowitz.” Dr Burke is quite clear that Detective Beckett had gone out of her way to help Mrs Berowitz in order to assuage her guilt at walking away from her father.  Detective Beckett has not realised this.  She must do so, in order to move past it.

“Okay.”

“Unless you would like to continue?”

“No. Thank you.”

Detective Beckett leaves at some speed. Dr Burke smiles in a satisfied manner.  His last request to her should allow her to believe that the point of this evening’s session was to allow her to explore her responses to meeting an alcoholic in the course of her work. 

Of course, that was one of the points. However, it was not by any means the main point.