"Life's most urgent question is, what are you doing for others?" MLK, Jr.
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The guide had told me that I could leave, as long as I was careful. And he said that if I were with her, with Dr. Brennan, I was safe. I believed him. There was something about him that inspired comfort and trust.
But I was still nervous.
No. I was more than nervous. I was afraid. Going with her meant leaving my bones behind. For three years, they had tethered me to my grave. They were my link to the girl I had been.
That girl was gone. Forever. Seeing my face appear on Angela's glass wall made my death real in a way it hadn't been before.
So, I made up my mind. I would go with Dr. Brennan.
I stayed close to her for the rest of the day, afraid that if I wandered away I would come back and she would be gone and tomorrow, I might not be as brave.
It wasn't a hard task I had set myself, to stay with her. Angela left to get lunch for everyone and Dr. Brennan watched over the baby. She held him with the awkwardness of someone not used to holding infants but she still laughed and nibbled on his fingers and blew bubbles on his tummy and when Angela came back and opened her blouse to feed him, I caught a wistful expression on her face as she watched the mother and son.
After lunch, after Angela had gone home again, I followed Dr. Brennan down to the same room in which I'd passed the night, the room lined with the boxes of bones.
She counted down rows, looking for one in particular until she found it. When she placed it on the table in the middle of the room, I saw Josiah, the young cavalry soldier, standing behind her. I waved to him and wondered if those bones were his.
He tipped his hat at me but looked at her.
"Been a while since she looked at my old bones."
I guess my surprise showed on my face because he shook his head.
"She can't hear us," he reassured me as he came to stand beside me.
We watched as she picked up his skull and studied it carefully.
"Them Comanche got me good that day." She was taking measurements of something on the top of the white curve of his skull. "Cut my hair clean off. Lucky I was already dead."
I remembered the feel of the knife cutting into my scalp and realized she was comparing Josiah's wound to mine. I think Josiah realized it, too, because he gave me a funny look but he didn't say anything so I didn't either.
When Dr. Brennan was done, she put his bones away. Josiah gave me a funny little stiff bow as we left the room. When I turned around to say goodbye, he was already gone.
I didn't realize she was a genius until I spent the day following her around. She knew almost everything, and even if she had questions, they sounded more complicated than the answers she got in return. I'd always considered myself kind of smart. I got good grades in school and I always did okay on tests and I had planned to go to college. Watching Dr. Brennan, though, taught me the difference between smart and smart.
She spoke in an odd, formal way and used big words that reminded me of one of those word-a-day calendars. She was specific and literal and there was a rhythm to her slow, deliberate phrasing that captured everyone's attention. She was brilliant and I knew I was lucky to be one of hers.
At the end of the day, after Dr. Hodgins and Dr. Saroyan had left and she was alone in her office, Booth came back. She didn't notice him right away so he just stood in her doorway, watching her. I looked at him looking at her and for a moment, I was jealous because I knew no one would ever look at me like that. But then she saw him and smiled and he smiled back and their light was blinding and warm and my envy faded. I could see the love they shared. It was beautiful and I was grateful.
Dr. Brennan began to straighten the papers on her desk and close her computer.
"Were you able to find anything on Anne Duncan?"
"Yea." Booth put his hands in his pockets. I noticed he wasn't looking at her anymore.
She noticed, too.
"What did you find out?"
"I left the file in the car. I'll let you read it." He tried to smile as he put a hand on the small of her back to guide her through the door but it wasn't a very good smile.
She also noticed that.
"Why can't you just tell me what's in there?"
"You can read it," he said, and his tone discouraged her from asking again.
I remembered his car, a big black SUV, from their first trip to my hill. When he opened the door for her I slipped in as she picked up the folder lying on her seat. I hid in the back even though I knew they couldn't see me. Leaving my bones behind was the scary part and I couldn't help but worry as we left the museum. The guide had said I would be safe as long as I was with her, though, so I forced myself to put away my fears.
Dr. Brennan opened the folder as they drove away. I could see my photo clipped on one side, the same one Angela had given them. I heard her take a sharp breath.
"Three months? They waited three months before someone filed a missing persons report? Why would . . . Oh."
Booth was watching her, his glances sharp and quick as he drove. The light around him spiked in concern and where it connected with hers, the pattern undulated wildly.
"She was a foster child." Her jaw clenched and the air in the car rolled with her anger.
The paper snapped as she turned a page and then she looked at him, eyes wide.
"Her high school principal filed the missing persons report? Her foster mother didn't even notify the police that she was missing?"
She closed the file and left it lying shut on her lap as she stared out the window.
He reached for her hand.
"Hey."
"Three months, Booth. She was gone for three months and no one noticed." She sighed and closed her eyes and rested her head against the back of the seat.
I realized there was something else in the car with us now. Pain. I could see it seeping from her in a dark shadow that dampened the glow of the light around her. It came from Booth, too, as he watched her. He was hurting for her and beneath that hurt was anger and frustration that he couldn't help her.
"I'm digging into the foster mother," he said quietly. "Her name was Justine Stanford. She was convicted of fraud for not reporting Anne Duncan missing and collecting the payments from child services. She was sentenced to two years but she died in prison after only few months." He squeezed her hand. "It's possible she didn't report Anne missing because she was the one who killed her."
Dr. Brennan shook her head.
"No. The evidence suggests we are looking for a male. I found tool marks near the coronal suture that suggest scalping. A scalp is a trophy and that is more common with male assailants."
"Whoa." He was surprised. "She was scalped? Like, cowboys and Indians?"
She started giving him a lecture on the history of the practice among Native Americans. I found it fascinating but he interrupted her.
"Was that the cause of death?"
No. I had been alive when the big one took my hair. Those few minutes had lasted forever.
"By itself, scalping isn't necessarily fatal," Dr. Brennan told him. "The folklore of the American west is that Native American warriors removed all of their victim's hair but the reality is they usually cut away only a small section of scalp as proof of their victory in battle. Frequently, the victim was already dead but there are several recorded instances of survivors. White soldiers and settlers were also just as likely to engage in the practice, especially when government officials paid bounties for the scalps of Indians."
"So, how did our victim die?"
"Mr. Bray confirmed that the tool that caused the scraping we found on the left side of the frontal bone, extending back along the parietal bone also made the mark we found on the C4 vertebrae."
I didn't know what any of that meant but he did.
"Her throat was cut."
"Yes."
"And that's cause of death?"
I felt again the weight of the dirt they'd tossed on my body, the pressure of each shovelful falling over me. I remembered sitting on my grave, listening to the body lying beneath me struggle for air. I remembered not having the strength to claw away the earth that covered my lips and my nose. I remembered giving myself permission to stop trying.
"That type of injury would cause death within minutes."
Neither of them spoke for a long time.
"Was she alive when she was scalped?"
I saw Dr. Brennan look down at their joined hands.
"Based on the amount of hemorrhagic staining of the surrounding bone, I feel comfortable concluding that the injury was antemortem."
They were quiet again as he slowed down in front of a large apartment building and headed down a ramp that led to an underground parking garage. The nose of the car passed an electronic eye and the gate opened and he drove inside and found a spot next to a little silver sports coupe. He turned the car off and they both sat there in silence until she finally leaned over and laid her head against his shoulder for a few seconds. Then she straightened, picked up the file and opened her door.
He watched her closely and kept a hand on her when we stepped into an elevator. Little touches – a hand on her back or on her shoulder or a long slide down her arm to grasp her fingers in his. I understood why. She seemed . . . fragile. Wounded. She was stiff, like a boxer who'd taken an unexpected blow and didn't want you to see that it hurt. But it was there, if you really looked. He could see it.
And I could feel it.
I wanted to touch her, too. I wanted to squeeze her fingers in mine and tell her I was sorry. Sorry that helping me was hurting her. But I could only watch and share her pain.
When the door to their apartment closed behind them, he pulled her into his arms and held her, and she let him. She didn't cry, she just leaned against him and accepted the comfort he offered. They stood there together for a long time and then he kissed her cheek and put the length of his arms between them.
"You go change or shower or whatever, and I'll do something about dinner."
He pushed her a bit in the direction of a long hallway. She rolled her eyes but she went and while he busied himself in the kitchen, I wandered around the space they called home.
It was a lot like her office, I thought, warm and welcoming and once again, filled with objects from the past. But signs of Booth were here, too. Big shoes by a closet door. A jacket flung over a chair. Sports magazines and a racketball racquet lying casually in view and an empty shoulder holster hooked on the top of an open door. It felt like home.
When she came back, she'd changed into a loose, pale green blouse and black leggings. He had heated a big pot of soup from the refrigerator and served it in huge bowls with thick slices of bread.
They sat around the angle of a small square table in the kitchen. He ate like he was hungry but mostly, she just toyed with the food in front of her until she finally pushed the bowl away. He looked at how little she'd eaten and then, with one finger, slid the almost full bowl back in front of her.
"You should eat." His tone suggested that arguing was pointless.
Her lower jaw worked back and forth and I could tell she wanted to argue anyway, but in the end, she picked up her spoon and took another bite and then a few more. When she pushed the bowl away again several minutes later, he didn't complain.
Dr. Brennan propped her elbows on the table and cradled a glass of milk in both hands.
"There are times I forget," she said quietly.
As if he'd been waiting for her to speak, Booth slowly and very deliberately laid his spoon down and looked at her.
"What is it that you forget?" The light between them glowed brighter.
"That I'm one of the lucky ones." That fragile, wounded expression was back. "I was. I am. I had my parents and Russ for 15 years, and they loved me. They did," she insisted, although he wasn't arguing with her. "What they did was wrong but I understand now why they left. I didn't at the time, but now I do. Now I understand."
She put her glass down and laid one hand on the table between them, palm up. He rested his larger hand on hers and their fingers intertwined and the waves of light danced around and between them.
"I survived." She was almost whispering and I had to move closer so I could hear her. "I made it through mostly unhurt. When I think of the horrible things that could have happened to me . . . "
They looked at each other and I knew they were thinking of me and suddenly, I understood.
Dr. Brennan was one of us. Forgotten children, tucked away in homes that weren't ours, living in borrowed space, afraid to put down roots where they'd never be allowed to grow. She knew what it was like to belong to no one and have no one who belonged to you.
She was one of us, and that was why Booth was so worried about her. That was why he watched her so carefully. That's why my pain caused hers.
The truth of the sacrifice she was making for me was staggering.
I had the answer to the question I didn't know I should have asked. "To be lost is to be claimed by no one," my guide had said.
She took so much care with the dead because she knew what it was like to be one of them. She knew what it was like to be lost.
"My time in foster care didn't define me," she told him. "I made a future for myself. I went to college. I built a life of my own. I . . . I fell in love." Her thumb rubbed across his knuckles and the glow around them surged. "It could have been very different. I could have been Anne Duncan."
Booth leaned in close and when he spoke, his voice was low and husky.
"That's why we're going to find out what happened to her, so that who ever did this can't steal the future from anyone else."
Ah.
They humbled me, this man and this woman who fought the battles the dead couldn't. The two of them and the extraordinary people they had gathered together, working for those of us who were unable to say thank you, who couldn't tell them how much it meant, how grateful we were to have such champions on our side.
Yes, they humbled me.
I could tell she felt better after talking to him. The light around them was different. It was smoother, less tumultuous.
They cleared dishes and leftover food and the rest of the evening was spent quietly. She read the rest of my file and asked him about some of the notes he'd made. He had questions, too, about some of the details it gave about my time in foster care. They talked about a meeting he had arranged with Mrs. Clyde, my high school principal.
When Dr. Brennan turned back to the beginning of the file to read it again, Booth took it out of her hands.
"That's enough for tonight, Bones."
He got to his feet, reached for her hand and pulled her up in front of him, then he framed her face in his palms and pressed the sweetest kiss on her lips. I heard her sigh and saw her lean into him as she wrapped her arms around his neck. I smiled and turned away and drifted over to the window to watch the lights of the city spread out in the distance.
Some things should be private, I thought. Even from ghosts.
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Deep into the night, I peeked in to watch them sleep. He was lying on his back, his torso angled slightly away from her, and she was lying on her back, too, with her face turned to the window. In the space between their bodies, their fingers touched. I was charmed at the thought that even in sleep, they reached for each other.
Dr. Brennan's legs shifted restlessly beneath the covers. She bent her free arm over her forehead and opened her eyes and stared into the moonlight. After several long minutes, she pulled her hand away from his, swung her legs to the side of the bed and stood up. She was nude but that wasn't what caused me to slap my hand over my mouth as if she might hear my shocked gasp of air.
She was pregnant.
I had missed that, somehow. The loose lab coat or my selfish preoccupation with the work she did on my behalf . . . whatever the reason, I had missed it. While she slipped a robe over her shoulders and tied the belt loosely above the rounded curve of her belly, I scolded myself and promised that I would be more observant from now on, that I would be more deserving of her efforts.
She worked for the dead while she nourished new life in her body. There was a simple beauty there.
She carried her laptop to a small desk near the kitchen and turned it on. Looking over her shoulder, I noticed she'd opened the photo of me and kept it on top of the other documents and charts she worked with. It was an odd feeling, seeing myself looking out from the screen while I stood there, watching from the other side.
A little while later, Booth walked up. He didn't say anything but she knew he was there.
"I couldn't sleep." She swiveled in her chair to look at him. He wore only a loose pair of pajama pants and was bare-chested and handsome in the night-time shadows but she didn't seem to notice.
"Hmmm," was his only response.
She turned back to the computer but then abruptly pushed away from it again.
"I need to go to the lab." The look she gave him was defiant, as if she expected him to argue with her, but he just studied her for a moment. Then he nodded.
"Okay. I'll get dressed and drive you."
"I can drive myself," she told him. "You should go back to bed and sleep."
"I can sleep in your office." It was obvious he wasn't going to let her go alone.
She gave in.
"Thank you."
"Promise me you'll find time to take a nap later today." It wasn't a question.
"I won't allow myself to get overtired."
Even I knew that wasn't what he wanted to hear.
"That's not what I said."
"I know."
"Don't make me worry about you."
That was enough. She gave in with a grudging promise to have an early night if she wasn't able to nap and, hand in hand, they went back to their bedroom to get dressed.
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Thanks for reading. :-)