Chapter XI
Over the past weeks, Scully has been reading quite a few X-Files. The first one I gave her was the one to our first case in Bellefleur, Oregon. I've put together what I hope is a representative collection of our work, sparing her the most horrible cases, the ones with tortured victims or harmed children. Some make her laugh, some make her look at me with her eyebrow hitting her hairline, some clearly incite her scientific interest, some make her gasp, and some put an expression of terror and shock on her face.
What I don't like about this reading process is that she isn't talking to me about how she copes with all this crazy crap. Does is make any sense or is it all science fiction to her? Does she think that the work we were so dedicated to was nothing but a wild-goose chase? She probably doesn't remember that I once told her I hadn't made the world a happier place, and if she asked me now whether it was worth it, whether my obsession with the X-Files was worth all the pain, the grief, and the loss, I wouldn't know how to answer her.
She spends a lot of time in the huge wing chair by the fireplace these days, cross-legged, an X-File on her lap, her reading glasses on the tip of her nose, and a pot of tea on the coffee table. She sits there for hours, deeply buried in a file, unresponsive and ignorant to what's happening around her. There are days, I deliberately vacuum the living room and work extra extensively around the chair just to make her look up and interact with me, but I doubt she even notices what I'm doing. She'd said she wanted me to guide her through her getting re-acquainted with the X-Files but now she's doing it all alone, and I'm not convinced that this is the best way to do it.
The chair is empty now, after having been occupied by a reading Scully since breakfast. I'd put lunch on the table and she spoke maybe ten words with me during our otherwise silent meal. We never felt the urgency to fill the silence, to babble only to make a sound. We could sit in a car for hours without saying a word, each dwelling on their own thoughts, without feeling awkward for a second. But this silence doesn't feel comfortable, and it frightens me. After lunch, when she helped me clear the table and do the dishes, she was absentminded and again not very talkative. I even suggested she give her mom a call just to hear her voice but she shook her head and said she wanted to go for a walk. When I offered to join her, she explained that she needed some time to contemplate and rather go alone. I wasn't too happy about it but it was okay for me as I had planned to do some repairs around the house, fixing the loose contact of the living room floor lamp being one.
I'm just about to finish my job when I hear her open the screen door. I turn around, switch the light on and off and announce proudly, "I fixed the lamp."
Instead of patting me on the shoulder and congratulating me on my handicraft, she enters my personal space wordlessly, puts her hands on the back of my neck, and fondles my hair. When she leans in for a kiss I'm a bit surprised, but she tastes too good not to reciprocate adequately. So I let my tongue sweep the insides of her cheeks and my hands gently squeeze her waist.
"Mmmm, Scully," I mumble with my lips on hers, "I just fixed that cable. No big deal."
"I have something to tell you," she purrs into my ear after breaking the kiss which is obviously not meant as a reward for having fixed her reading lamp.
"Oh? Something good?"
I'm not sure. What did she need time alone to think about?
She looks at me, her eyes unreadable, and I decide not to try to imagine what she wants to say to me but just wait for her to start.
But she doesn't.
She presses her lips together and tucks her hair behind her ears. I'm glued to her lips, waiting for them to form some words, but all they do is wait to be licked once again. She clears her throat which makes me think she's about to talk, and her mouth does open but no sound emerges from it, instead, she closes it again and bites her lower lip.
C'mon, woman, don't let me starve here!
"Scully! Would you please say something!"
"I don't know how."
Her ribcage rises and falls vigorously now with her heavy breathing.
"Just spit it out! Are you leaving me?"
Has this been her farewell kiss?
"What? No! Why would I leave you?"
"I don't know. Because you still don't know who I am? Because you still can't remember us?"
I stare at her and can't keep my eyes from filling with fearful tears. Of course, our happiness wasn't meant to be for good, what have I been thinking? Of course, fate played a trick on us, taking away from us the only good thing that has remained a constant in our lives which is our relationship.
"But I do," she whispers.
I'm confused, and I bet my face is showing it.
"You do what?"
"Remember us. Us together."
I better make sure there's no misunderstanding here. I've kept my hopes low all this time, never allowed them to get out of hand, always reminding myself that her amnesia might remain permanent. I only wanted to keep myself from breaking apart completely should it ever become a reality we have to deal with. So when I hear her say she remembers something, anything, I want to be sure I'm not mishearing.
"You do?"
She nods.
I'm a bit worried because her face is so earnest despite the best of news she's sharing. She seems insecure about it, so I don't dare to rejoice over it yet. There must be a check. One way or another, my knees feel like Jell-O and I have to sit down. I lower myself to the backrest of the living room couch for support.
"You remember?" I ask cautiously.
Another nod.
"Since when?"
"Have you fallen back into the phase of two-word sentences?" she replies, grinning noncommittally.
"Don't do this to me, Scully," I beg her in more than two words. "Answer my question. Since when do you remember? What do you remember?"
"It started a few weeks ago. Shortly after I began reading the files you gave me."
"A few weeks ago? Why haven't you said anything? How could you keep that from me? My heart was breaking for you because of your memory loss and you don't deem it worthy to tell me when it's coming back?"
I guess I sound a bit worked-up, but I am! How could she do this to me?
"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to upset you. They were just single, incoherent flashbacks at the beginning. More like déjà-vues than real memories. I couldn't tell whether I remembered something or whether I'd read it or had been told."
Shit! That's exactly what Dr. Pratt predicted would happen if we fed her memory with input.
I told you I didn't want you to read those damn files, Scully!
"It took a while until things began to make sense to me, until I dared to believe in what I was remembering. If I had talked to you about it, it would've left me insecure yet again. I had to figure this out myself first."
"And? Have you figured it out?"
"Not all of it. I still miss a lot of memories, I guess, but I've got quite a few of them back."
She beams at me and I marvel what I am to make of her glowing face.
"So? What do you remember?" I ask, praying for her to remember mainly the good things that happened to her. Yes, there have been a few! Of course, there've been considerably more sad than happy moments, especially since she started hanging out with me. So, from a statistical point of view, it's much more likely that the horrible moments of her life creep back into her conscience than any of the rare joyful ones. But would she be beaming like she is right now if that were the case?
"What I mainly remember is..." She takes another step toward me and positions herself between my legs as I'm still sitting on the sofa's backrest. Her eyes are at level with mine and her glance is meaningful and also full of emotion. "Us," she says.
I swallow. "Us?"
"Yes, Mulder. Us." She moves yet a little closer and entangles her hands behind my neck. "I remember when we first met. How I rode the elevator all the way down to the basement of the Hoover Building, nervous to meet the infamous Fox Spooky Mulder."
I give a short laugh.
"I remember that when I saw you hunched over some of your beloved slides and you turned around to look at me, my first thought was 'Why hasn't anybody told me how cute he is?'"
"Oh, c'mon, Scully, you're making this up!"
"No, I swear it was my first thought. But, of course, my excitement quickly turned into bewilderment when you interrogated me about my beliefs in the extraterrestrial."
She smirks at me.
"That's more like it. What else do you remember?"
Her demeanor loses all of its playfulness in an instant. She stiffens, and to me, it's more than clear that she's not only recollected the fluffy moments.
"I remember having been abducted and left in a coma, and seeing immense relief in your eyes when I woke up. Relief and joy but also guilt. And I remember seeing the very same expression again when I told you that the cancer had gone into remission two years later."
"Ugh, yes. I had my difficulties coping with the diagnoses. Both times. I was afraid I'd lose you."
"That would explain the relief and the joy, but not the guilt."
"Scully, I was the root of what happened to you. If you hadn't accepted the assignment to work with me, you-"
She puts a finger to my mouth to stop me from finishing the sentence and shushes me. "I thought we'd already talked about my making choices and being responsible for my life."
"But-" I try again but am interrupted right away.
"No but. Don't reduce me to a tiny, brittle woman without the will nor the ability to determine her own life. I might not know everything about who or what I am, but I do know I'm no such person."
"No, definitely not. Tiny, yes, but definitely not brittle. You're the fiercest, toughest, and most strong-willed person I know, and that includes the male part of my acquaintances."
Her expression softens at the compliment. I guess she noticed my admiration was honest.
"You said you remembered 'us', Scully. What exactly did you mean by that?"
"That most of my memories circle around us. Us as partners, us as friends. As lovers. Parents." Her voice trails off. Its tone has changed within those few words from firm to insecure and finally sad. The way our relationship has evolved over the years couldn't be described any more pointedly.
"You remember us with William?"
She nods, then shakes her head. "There's something I really don't understand, Mulder."
She swallows away a lump that must be the size of a cantaloupe because of the extensive gulp she's taking to get rid of it.
I know exactly what's bothering her. "You're asking yourself why I'm not in the picture much."
She closes her eyes and frowns. I can see how digging out the memories deep down from her conscience is a physical exertion.
"I have recollections of us at Lamaze class, but not when I told you I was pregnant. I see you talking to the pediatric nurse at the hospital, but not beside me when I gave birth. Actually, I don't have any recollections of the delivery room whatsoever, but I just know you weren't there. I see you holding him between us and kissing me, I see you humming a lullaby to him, I see myself feeding him in his high chair or pushing him through the park in his stroller. There are images of him at an age he's able to hold his head up, to sit, to crawl, but there are none with him being old enough to speak his first words or take his first steps. I've never heard him call me mommy, have I?"
A tear emerges from her closed eyes. I'm transfixed by the wet path the drop takes down her cheek until it comes to a halt on her upper lip, followed by another one which makes its way much quicker for it's bigger and guided by the trail the first has left behind. She catches both tears which have formed one big drop close to her mole with her lower lip and sniffs. Eventually, she opens her eyes and with a gaze so pure she asks me, her voice barely above a whisper, "how have we been able to survive this, Mulder?"
Seeing her having understood everything, seeing her getting the whole picture of our short, painful parenthood, even if some details are still missing, tears me apart. My own hurt, which I'm able to lock up more often than I'm not, is pushing itself forward with a vengeance and I feel tears filling my own eyes. I have no words to say to her. She's asked the right question, but I don't have an answer for her other than that we haven't done so much more than keeping up our vitally important body functions. We have survived the loss of our child, yes, we have stayed alive, but we haven't been able to get over it. Not in the least. And we never will.
"We had each other, Scully," I say. "We depended on the other to give our lives a meaning. And it worked. They way we loved each other helped us to cope with the pain. We learned how to be happy without him. There were days we failed miserably, but more days we managed to be grateful for having us, and we enjoyed being together. I guess we got married to make exactly that statement, that we'd decided to pull through this together, to not let fate beat us."
"Sounds like a pretty symbiotic relationship," she says, her eyes scrutinizing my face.
I give a gentle chuckle. "It was symbiotic from the moment we met, Scully. I'm dependent on you in every respect. You're my elixir of life."
I hope I'm not overwhelming her with my confession, but I've always been the more feeble one in our relationship, always more dependent on her than she was on me.
She cups my face with her hands, locking eyes. Her thumbs stroke my cheeks tenderly and I see so much compassion in her face, I fear I'm going to drown in it.
"It must have been very difficult for you when I was gone."
"Difficult?" I chuckle again, but this time it sounds bitter. "Yeah, difficult would be an appropriate word."
I almost ceased to exist. Getting up in the morning, facing another day without knowing her whereabouts or condition, was an energy-sapping exertion. I felt so lost in my world. Deserted and alone, like a toddler in a supermarket who doesn't know which aisle their mother has vanished into. The boundless fear that she was abused or tormented somewhere by this freak made me picture the worst scenarios my profiler's mind was able to come up with. It was like hell on earth.
So, yes, I definitely had a difficult time.
I believe she's divined my thoughts, at least some of them, because she rests her forehead against mine and I feel her soft breath on my face. It's such an intimate posture. At the time we still held on to the platonic nature of our partnership so eagerly, putting our foreheads together had been the most intimate way we allowed ourselves to touch each other.
"Oh, Mulder, I'm so sorry," she whispers. She presses a kiss to my forehead before she pulls me into an embrace.
I rest my head against her chest and let her stroke my hair. The regular beating of her heart soothes me.
"I'm back," she reassures me, "maybe not completely yet, but I won't go anywhere, ever."