Survivor

I was sixteen when I moved in with Greg Sanders. Fresh from the system, and desperate to make a real home for myself, I set to work at making myself indispensable to him. I washed dishes, scrubbed the bathroom, did his laundry, picked up his dry cleaning. After discovering his taste for Blue Hawaiian coffee, I arranged for a distributor to make a monthly delivery to the house.

At first, Greg didn't talk to me much. He regarded me as a scientist would a specimen, peering at me over his glasses. Finally he told me that I didn't have to earn my keep, that I could stay with him until I wanted to leave. Only I'm thirty now, and I still live with Greg Sanders. Guess he really should have set an expiration date on his charity.

I'd arrived home from school late that day, having stayed till five to research a paper on euthanasia. By the time I got to the house, there were police cars everywhere. I threw my bike on the side of the driveway and ran into the house, past the startled uniforms, and into the living room. Men were leaning over the bodies of my parents, collecting blood and fibers and who knows what else. I screamed and screamed, thrashing out of the grasps of the clueless cops, trying to get to my mom and dad. Greg Sanders was the man who caught me and held on, telling me that he was very sorry and that I needed to stay back. He sounded genuinely sympathetic, and it made my resolve crumple as well as my knees.

The social worker assigned to me couldn't seem to find a foster home that wanted an angry sixteen-year-old, so I went into a group home. I'd been there for three months when Greg came to see me.

"Hi, Karen," he said mildly, sitting across from me. "Do you remember who I am?"

I rolled my eyes at him. "No, Greg Sanders, CSI Level Three, Age 47, Degree in Chemistry, I have no idea who you are."

He quirked an eyebrow at me. " You checking up on me?"

"Wouldn't have to if you were updating me on my parents' case," I shot back.

"We've hit a dead end," he said reluctantly. "I promise you, I've investigated every lead. Everyone who might have had a grudge against them."

"Obviously not everyone, or you would have found the guy." I clenched my jaw, remembering Sunday mornings with my parents. My dad reading the paper, my mom flipping pancakes.

"You're pretty smart, aren't you?"

I shrugged.

"Too smart to be flunking out of high school." He pushed a copy of my report card across the table, and I glared at him.

"What do you care?"

"I care," he said, and I wondered how many orphans he saw a week. What made me any different?

"This isn't the greatest learning environment," I told him, gesturing around me. "It's always noisy, and there's one computer for eleven of us to share. If I have trouble with my homework, there's no one around to ask for help. The nearest library is five miles away, and nobody wants to drive me. You try keeping your GPA up in a place like this."

He nodded, running his fingers through his graying hair. "What if you didn't have to live in a place like this?"

I met his gaze evenly. "What, are you going to take me in?"

"Maybe." Greg swallowed, studying my reaction.

"What about your wife?" I nodded to the band on his left hand. "What does she think about this?"

"She died a year ago," he said simply. "Breast cancer."

Sympathy broke through my armor, and I agreed to move into his house. It took us a while to learn how to deal with each other while battling our respective demons, but we managed. I picked up my grades and kept my room clean, and he remembered to buy me tampons and veggie burgers during his supermarket runs.

When I graduated from high school, Greg Sanders was there, waving and smiling like a proud father. When I got a degree from UNLV in biochemistry, he offered me a job as a CSI in the Las Vegas crime lab. It was hard at first, seeing the crime scenes, listening to the sobbing spouses and wailing children. But you learn to build a shell, like Greg did.

There were whispers in the hallway, of course. Eyebrows were raised at the fact that I'd gotten the job with no experience, that I lived with my supervisor - a man over thirty years my senior. But they didn't get it. Greg and I didn't kiss or touch. There were no grand declarations of love. There was just an ease, a deep understanding between us. We were survivors. And somewhere along the way we'd come to rely on each other.

We visited the cemetery each year, and I found out that my parents had been murdered on the anniversary of his wife's death. The walk between his wife's grave and my parents' took about ten minutes, and it was always a quiet stroll. He'd wipe away tears without shame, and I'd steel myself for seeing my family's name etched in marble.

It never got easier, that was the weird thing. There was always the initial panic upon seeing the headstone. The embarrassment at having a witness beside me. The heartbreaking yearning to talk to them again, to tell them about all the things they'd missed in my life. I wanted to hear my dad drone on about bugs while my mom smirked at me and turned on a Joni Mitchell CD. I wondered if their last thoughts were of me, of how much I would miss them.

"They were good people," Greg whispered to me every time we came to their grave. "They would be so proud of you, of what you've become."

He'd take my hand, then. Just once, every year, we'd hold hands, and stare at the marble, and wonder why the easy things were hard, and the hard things were so easy.