Later, she and Mulder sat in a restaurant near Boston Common. It
was a quasi-Italian bistro that had apparently been something
different and better when Mulder was young. Even in
midafternoon the place was kept very dim. Candles in teardrop-
shaped glass holders sat on every table, giving off a dull yellow
glow.
Mulder seemed particularly quiet and morose. Scully let him be,
as much from fatigue as consideration. Few non-pathologists
appreciated the amount of mental and physical energy it took to
perform an autopsy under even optimal conditions, and that day's
conditions had been far from optimal. Her greatest desire was to
finish eating and take a very long nap.
"I visited my parents' graves this morning," Mulder said. "Both
of them, on opposite sides of the city. Just the way they would
have wanted it."
"I guess it's been a hard day," she said.
"I'd never visited my dad's before," he said.
"You're kidding," she said, then regretted how insensitive that
sounded. He didn't seem to notice.
"I never saw the point of going. I met my father's spirit in the
New Mexico desert . . . or maybe it was a hallucination. I don't
know. In any case my dad's out *there* . . ." he gestured at
some indeterminate location in the distance. "Wherever
semi-reformed Men In Black go when they die. He's not under a
stone in Parkway Cemetery."
Scully repressed her urge to lecture him on filial duty. "I
think he'd be glad you went," she said.
"Maybe," he said. An awkward silence of several seconds passed.
Scully poked at the too-oily vegetable penne she didn't intend to
finish. Since it was Lent she was avoiding meat, but she didn't
seem to be benefiting from it spiritually. Maybe it was because
Easter was so late this year that it didn't feel like Lent.
Maybe it was because she was living in sin with her partner.
Mulder gazed down at the table. Actually he seemed to be gazing
through it at some distant image she could not see. "Albert
Hosteen called the vision I had 'the origin place.' I saw my father
there, and I asked him whether Samantha was with him. He said,
'No.'" Mulder shook his head. "Why didn't they tell me?"
Scully thought Alex Krycek had answered that question in the most
violent and cruel way possible, but she didn't say so. It wasn't
the answer to the question Mulder was really asking anyway. "I
don't know," she said. "Mulder . . . do you want to go out to
Martha's Vineyard? Do you need to see Kristie's family and Joe
Luce? They seem to care about you." She thought that at the
moment, he could use all the family he could get.
"My sister is the JonBenet Ramsey of Dukes County," Mulder said.
"You know what that means? None of us was ever shown to be
guilty of what happened to her, but we'll never be innocent --
not to the people out there."
"Joe seemed to regret ever thinking you were guilty," Scully
said.
"If so, he's a pretty lonely voice," Mulder said.
They were both silent while he poked at his pasta marinara.
The piped-in muzak was some cheerful tune played on a wheezy
accordion. Scully avoided looking him in the eye as she
said, "I think you'd feel better if you helped."
He released a long breath, and some of the tension seemed to
leave his shoulders. "Kristie was a cute little baby, you know?
I didn't give a damn about babies at the time, but I could tell
she was cute. Or maybe I just thought so because I had a
thing for her mother. I don't know."
She nodded, then glanced up at him. This time he looked away.
She'd known him long enough to understand that he sometimes cast
her in the role of his spiritual counselor. Taking a page from
his own list of psychological techniques, she kept her expression
as blank as possible, knowing he'd read into it whatever he needed
to see.
He rubbed at his eyes, as if very tired. "I should go out there.
If nothing else, I owe it to the Island people for letting Roche
loose on them. Kristie didn't meet with some ghost out in those
woods. It was a flesh-and-blood guy that I should help put away
if I can."
Scully remembered the results of the autopsy and didn't quite
know how to reply. The investigator in her wanted to tell Mulder
all the ugly details; the lover and friend in her wanted to
protect him as much as possible.
Apparently misreading her reticence, he said, "I'm sorry. I was
going to show you around Boston."
"No -- it's not that." She hesitated, but in the end she could
keep nothing from him. "Mulder . . . Kristie miscarried at
some point in the last several months. The internal damage was
considerable, though there's some evidence of medical
intervention, which probably saved her life. I found pitting
typical of parturition scars on her pelvic bones. That means she
was at least into her second trimester when it happened. The
fetus might have been viable, at least at first."
Mulder looked puzzled. "She lost a child?"
"I think Kristie suffered from placenta abrupta, the sudden
detachment of the umbilical cord from the uterine wall.
It's a common complication in pregnancy among women who abuse
cocaine," Scully said.
She could tell the moment he remembered the faxed letter from Irv
Stuckey. His expression became one of deep compassion. He
quoted Irv, "'What happened in Boston.'"
"Joe Luce said she'd been drug-free six months. The scarring
looked more recent than that, but people who've badly abused
themselves heal slowly. She'd damaged her heart, her arteries .
. . it's amazing that she survived the birth, given the amount of
hemorrhaging that was apparent. A child born under those
conditions would have a very poor chance of survival," she said.
"And the first thing that comes to his mind is the South Road
Ghost story. What a bastard," Mulder said.
"He may not have been the first to think of the story," Scully said.
"If Kristie knew it as well, someone could have used it to
frighten or confuse her. She must have been emotionally fragile
as it was. Panic is as good an explanation as any for how she
fell off the cliff, barring some undiscovered evidence that she
was pushed."
Mulder nodded. He seemed lost in thought. Scully continued, "If
we do go out to Martha's Vineyard we'll have to remember to be
particularly sensitive around the family on the subject of the
child. Since Irv Stuckey knew about the pregnancy I expect
Kristie's relatives know too, but it's possible they don't. Irv
could have abused his access to hospital records or simply heard
rumors. Actually he's seemed entirely too involved with this
case from the beginning."
"Irv gets the dirt on everyone in town and repeats it to make them
sound as bad as possible. Since he has no good qualities, it's the
only way to make himself look better," Mulder said.
"Everybody has some good qualities," Scully said.
He gave her a look that made it plain she could keep her comments
on forgiveness and redemption to herself. "Sorry," she said.
Every so often she found herself turning into her mother, who was
relentless in her pursuit of finding something pleasant to say about
everybody. She even liked Mulder, which for one of Scully's
relatives was saying something.
"At least I can tell Kristie's family that she was drug-free when
she died. All the blood tests were negative," Scully said.
"Ironic, really," Mulder said. "It's like the guy who gives up
smoking and then gets hit by a speeding bus."
Scully wasn't about to argue with him when he was in this frame
of mind. "Are we going out to Martha's Vineyard?" she
asked.
He appeared to consider for a moment, and then said, "Yes."
"All right," she said.
The rest of their meal was quiet. Whatever was behind Mulder's
silence was hidden from her.
********
A couple of hours later Mulder sat behind the wheel of his parked
car, one of the few vehicles on the deck of the Woods-Hole-to-
Vineyard-Haven ferry. Scully was asleep in the tilted-back
passenger seat.
Rain ran steadily down the windows and Mulder didn't bother
running the wipers to dispel it. The glass had misted over
inside from their breath, anyway. Car motors had to be turned
off during the crossing so turning on the heater was out of the
question. The ferry boasted a glassed-in shelter with padded
bench seats, which were good for sightseeing but bad for napping.
Scully had chosen the chilly crampedness of the car without
reservation.
Mulder fidgeted. The forced inactivity worsened the restless
ache inside him. He wanted to turn on the radio. He wanted to
wake Scully up so he would have someone to talk to. He felt a
dull sense of . . . what? Dread. Dread lay in his soul like a
block of lead as they approached the Island.
The rocking of the waves in Vineyard Sound and the slow chugging
of the steam ship were too familiar, like an unwelcome caress.
He had an eerie sense of the past overlaying the present.
He hoped this wasn't a seizure aura. Ever since Dr. Goldstein had
drilled holes in his head as an aid to repressed memory recovery,
Mulder had sometimes experienced near-hallucinatory flashbacks of
his past. Not all the flashbacks were of traumatic events, but
the experience itself was disturbing. Stress made the problem
worse. Scully was of the opinion that he suffered from minor
seizure activity due to brain lesions.
Whatever the ultimate cause was, Mulder felt that if he shut his
eyes he might open them to find himself sitting behind the wheel
of the rustbucket Nova he drove back in '78 and '79. On the
way to the Vineyard to visit Dad.
Mulder had always felt a certain dread when returning to the
Island after his sister disappeared. He'd associated it with his
father, with whom he had a conflicted relationship at best. But
Dad wasn't out there anymore, and the dread remained. It must be
something else then. Mulder tried to focus on the present
moment: the sensation of his fingers pressing against the
plastic of the steering wheel, Scully's soft breathing in the
seat next to him.
He rubbed a hole in the windshield fog and turned on the car's
electricity so he could run the wipers. Cold air rushed in
through the vents, and Scully stirred. Mulder shut the useless
heater off. The outdoors was visible now, an endless expanse of
iron-colored water beyond the ferry's white railing. It might
have been November rather than April. A good day to stay
indoors.
**
The flashback came on like a blow to the stomach.
The car around him receded to dim awareness. He was ten years
old, maybe eleven, lying on the floor of Mrs. Luce's back room
in Chilmark. Rain fell from a leaden sky and ran down the windows.
The Luces had baseboard heat, which made even the thin, hard carpet
a cozy haven.
The air smelled like warm crayons. The Mulder and Luce children
lay sprawled on the floor, drawing pictures on the backs of old
forms Joey's uncle brought over from the police station. Mrs.
Luce was in the kitchen, talking to herself. Really she was
talking to Mr. Luce, who was in heaven. That's why Joey and
Cheryl had an uncle instead of a dad. Sometimes Cheryl talked to
her daddy in heaven, too. Joey didn't. Instead he drew pictures
of Jesus.
Fox looked over at Joey's drawing. It was of Jesus deflecting
bullets with his hand like Superman. He was protecting a group
of cops from some bad guys. Everybody in the picture was
frowning and looking mad. Crosses hemmed the drawing like a
fence. Fox sensed that Joey's SuperJesus pictures were about
being scared. They were about Mrs. Luce talking to the air in
the kitchen, about what was on the front side of some of the
forms they drew on.
The children liked the murder scene investigation forms the best
because there was a body outline you could color in and draw
clothes on. Cheryl and Samantha cut the paper bodies out for
dolls for a while, but that bothered Mrs. Luce for some reason
and she told her bother-in-law to quit bringing those over. Fox
and Samantha's mom said that was just as well.
Fox was drawing a picture of the tree fort he and Joey were
building out in the woods by the little cemetery along South
Road. Fox had told his mom they were going to spend the night in
it, but she said no. Samantha said she would be too scared to
stay there all night because of ghosts, which just showed what a
baby she was. There was no such thing as ghosts, and anyway if
dead people started to scare you, you could just talk to them
like Mrs. Luce talked to Joey's dad.
Samantha was doing one of her usual dumb rainbows-and-flowers
drawings, but this was worse because she was copying off of
Cheryl. Or maybe it was the other way around. "Do your own
drawing," Fox told her.
"This *is* my own drawing," Samantha said.
"You're copying off of her," Fox said, pointing at Cheryl.
"We wanted to draw the same thing," Samantha said. She glanced
up and he saw the flash of anger in her pale green eyes. (Had he
forgotten that there was something in her as hard as gemstone)?
"Kids, be nice," Mrs. Luce called from the kitchen.
Fox stifled his resentment at his sister's unoriginality because
you had to act better in other people's houses. He added a
picture of a stupid-looking girl to his drawing.
Joey was clearly concentrating hard as he drew details on the
police cars, right down to the whip antennas. Fox never
questioned why a boy without a father in the house should feel
afraid. On nights when his dad was gone, which was a lot, his
mom would pull the curtains closed on every window in the house.
Sometimes she took the phone off the hook, and no matter how many
times her kids hung it up again, she'd take it back off. Somehow
it was not something Fox or Samantha ever asked about. Once,
Fox's dad had shown him how to use the revolver he kept up high
on a shelf. Dad said he should never try to use guns until he
was older, but he showed him how it worked anyway. Fox was glad.
He believed in bad guys like in Joey's picture, but he wasn't too
sure he believed in SuperJesus.
The flashback was over as quickly as it began. In its aftermath
Mulder felt weak and sick. Somehow the present still seemed
unreal. The weight and mass of his adult body felt wrong. The
opening of "Slaughterhouse Five" floated up from the dark well of
his brain: "Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time."
Scully stirred. Had he spoken aloud? He reached out and took
her hand. Her small, manicured fingers felt very warm against
his palm. Her eyes fluttered open at the touch. "Mulder? My
God, your hands are icy . . . are you all right?" Whatever she
saw in his face made her sit up straight. She hooked an errant
strand of her hair behind her ear as if to smooth away the
vulnerability revealed by sleep. She looked intently into his
eyes -- a doctor now rather than a lover, probably checking the
relative size of his pupils.
"I'm all right," he mumbled. In a few minutes that would be
true. He knew the sense of dull shock, the faint unfamiliarity
about her would fade, and with that knowledge came a sense of
loss. Perhaps the worst thing about being periodically thrust
into the past was his reluctance to return. He turned away from
her and gazed at the fogged-over windshield.
"You need to see a neurologist," Scully said. She'd never
articulated the accusation that underlay her words, but Mulder
heard it. She still hadn't forgiven him for drilling holes in
his head in the first place.
"I don't need a neurologist. It's emotional," he said. If he
really was having seizures, the Bureau would park him at a desk
and the state would suspend his driver's license. He'd rather
be considered neurotic.
"See a psychiatrist, then," she said. "When you come out of one
of those . . . trance states you look horrible, like you're going
to pass out."
"I'm not going to pass out."
"What if that happened while you were driving? You could kill
someone."
"I'm fine," he said.
"Mulder, an altered state of consciousness with nausea and
weakness is not fine," she said.
"I said I'm all right. Would you drop it?"
He saw hurt on her face, and then the shield of
anger went up. "Whatever," she said. She turned to the
passenger window, shrugging into the seat. After a few seconds
she dug a stack of papers out of her bag in the back seat and
flipped through them as if looking for something. Mulder could
tell she wasn't reading.
His hands slid down the sides of the steering wheel. He'd told
her once that the night she slipped beneath the covers of his bed
and kissed him awake was the happiest of his life. For days
afterward he'd lived in a cloud of bewildered euphoria, expecting
to wake up from the dream at any moment -- probably in a cell
somewhere with wires running out of his brain.
How long had he waited for her to come to him? He'd been like a
man who sits motionless with his arm outstretched, hoping a
little wild bird would hop into his hand.
Of all times, why had she picked now to fall in love with him?
Now, when he'd lost everything else that made life worth living?
There were days when he barely felt like a man. She deserved so
much better. He looked over at her and saw she was still
ignoring him. Good. All the more excuse to stare.
There was almost no trace left of the fresh-faced girl in the
ugly blazer he'd first met -- the supposed spy sent by The
Powers That Be to discredit him. She was thinner now, sparer.
It was as if the cancer had worn away everything but the
essential. At times she seemed almost translucent, like an
ivory comb after much use.
He'd noticed the ugly blazers vanished after her sister died.
That happened sometimes in families, where one sister was
beautiful and the other went out of her way to be plain.
Although Scully still grieved for Melissa, she'd bloomed when she
was no longer in her sister's shadow. Would something like that
have happened to Samantha if Mulder had been taken instead? Had
she left qualities for him to inherit?
The tightness in his throat was painful. "She was happy.
Happier than I ever was," he said.
Scully looked over at him. "Who?" she asked.
"Samantha. There wasn't a lot in our lives to be happy about,
even before . . ." He did not say the words. Let that memory
sleep. He swallowed past the tightness and tried again, "She
enjoyed little things I missed."
Samantha's dusty and water-stained diary was the most harrowing
book he had ever read. In it she described how she practiced
loving things to make sure she remembered how: a blue willow
beetle, a dandelion, fuchsia nail polish dried to the side of
its glass bottle. A kid's treasures. Junk. She seemed
afraid of loving anything bigger than she could hold in her
hand. Who could blame her?
"In my memories she seems so real to me," he said. "More real
than she did when we were growing up. It's as if I know her
better now than I ever have."
For a few moments the only sounds were their own breathing and
the hypnotic humming of the ferry engines. Scully reached over
and touched his shoulder. She knew what he meant about the dead
being more present than the living. She'd had that feeling after
her father and Melissa died, but it was strongest after she lost
Emily. For months afterward, Scully met the child everywhere: in
a church, in a car, in the faces of strangers' children. Her
sense of Emily's presence was so strong that sometimes she felt
sure the girl would be there waiting for her when she turned the
next corner. Scully believed in heaven but not in ghosts. She
considered her experience phantom pain, like that of a man who
still feels the wounds in his amputated leg.
What could she say to Mulder? "It will pass?" Part of him
wouldn't want it to pass. Of course he'd want to hold onto that
emotional connection -- what else did he have? He didn't even
have a faith to turn to. All she could think to say was, "You'll
be all right." She reached up and ran her hand over his hair.
"You'll be all right."
*****
Scully's first impression of the town of Vineyard Haven was of
its eclecticness. Modern glass-and-steel structures stood across
the street from Victorian houses with an embarrassment of
gingerbread carving along their eaves. Old and new, commercial
and residential, all seemed to have been mixed together. Easter
decorations were displayed on many doors, and here and there were
a Hebrew Passover inscriptions in silver cardboard.
On a less gloomy day the place was probably charming. Still,
Scully felt a faint sense of letdown. She thought it was
probably because "the Vineyard," as residents called it, had
acquired such a mystique of power and tragedy, first through its
link to the Kennedy family, and then reinforced for her
personally by her association with Mulder. But in reality
Vineyard Haven was quite like what she had seen of Cape Cod.
Just a nice New England town in the rain.
She watched the buildings: brick; stone; clapboard and concrete;
as they passed, and tried to imagine how the town looked when
Mulder was a boy -- the Vineyard Haven Samantha had last seen.
Images from her own childhood came to her: little girls in pink
swing coats and shiny black shoes led by the hand up the steps to
church; blue-suited boys purposely stepping in the puddles that
formed on the worn risers and being scolded in a whisper by their
parents. That was Easter as Scully had known it.
It seemed quite natural when they passed a church bulletin board
that read, "Look, your king is coming to you: humble, and mounted
on a donkey." They had traveled most of a block before the
context of that Bible quote sunk in.
"Oh, God, Holy Week starts tomorrow," Scully said. She dug for
her planner among the junk in the back seat and confirmed what
she'd just realized -- tomorrow was Palm Sunday.
"Is that a problem?" Mulder asked, glancing over at her.
"No. Yes. I don't know," she said. Her family only demanded
her presence on Easter Sunday, a full week away. What really
alarmed her was that Holy Week had snuck up on her. Had it
really been so long since she attended Mass? She'd obviously
given up the wrong thing for Lent. Had she given up, say, her
cell phone, she'd have been counting the days until Easter. "Do
they have a Catholic church out here?" she asked. She'd made no
arrangements, no inquiries.
"Only when the Kennedys are in town. The rest of the time it's
the high school gym," Mulder said. He must have caught her look
of panic because he added, "Of course they have Catholic churches
out here. Relax."
She leaned back against the seat, but could not relax. Faith had
meant so much more to her since she lost Emily. During the worst
of her grief she had attended Mass nearly every day. Perhaps it
was an exaggeration to call it a balm to her soul. It was more
like a tourniquet, something to slow the massive internal
bleeding.
Was she going to toss that faith aside now that things were going
better? She didn't want to be that kind of Christian. In the
dark days of early 1998, she had practiced a religious orthodoxy
that was totally foreign to her former life. She'd even dug out
the ruby-glass and silver rosary her great aunt had given her on
her Confirmation, a gift that had been reverently packed away in
tissue paper and never used.
She couldn't help glancing sidelong at Mulder. Sleeping with
your sort-of-atheist, angry-at-God partner was not compatible
with Thursday night Mass and confession every first Saturday of
the month. When push came to shove, it was the Church she edged
out of her life.
In her heart of hearts, Scully was not convinced that God
condemned everyone who bought a package of condoms or that the
Blessed Virgin really needed prayers to undo the damage of
affronts to her Immaculate Heart. But she felt a need for
connection to a wise, benevolent Being, and she was too much a
Catholic to worship in isolation. For her, history and tradition
forged the connection between man and God. She seemed to be
slowly relinquishing that connection, and it frightened her.
One obvious solution was simply to get married to Mulder.
Presuming she truly repented her prior behavior, she would be a
Catholic in good standing again. She felt little doubt that
Mulder *would* agree to marry her, at least once he regained his
emotional balance -- or whatever passed for balance in his
peculiar psyche. Yet something in her sensed that rushing into
marriage was not the best way to serve Mulder or God.
Perhaps her problem was that she had never given all of herself
to anything or anyone -- except Emily, who had left Scully's life
almost as soon as she entered it.
In her current situation she could use Mulder to distance herself
from God and God to distance herself from Mulder. How convenient.
How safe.
Jesus had not held back anything. This week marked the
anniversary of the day he gave his life, and she was afraid to
give even her whole heart? But she was a human woman, not God.
She looked on emotional self-immolation with terror.
She sighed deeply and lifted one of Mulder's hands from the
steering wheel, pressed his knuckles to her lips.
"You all right?" he asked, probably surprised at the
uncharacteristic impulsiveness of her act.
"I'm fine," she said softly. Lies like that kept him from
getting too close.
*****
was a quasi-Italian bistro that had apparently been something
different and better when Mulder was young. Even in
midafternoon the place was kept very dim. Candles in teardrop-
shaped glass holders sat on every table, giving off a dull yellow
glow.
Mulder seemed particularly quiet and morose. Scully let him be,
as much from fatigue as consideration. Few non-pathologists
appreciated the amount of mental and physical energy it took to
perform an autopsy under even optimal conditions, and that day's
conditions had been far from optimal. Her greatest desire was to
finish eating and take a very long nap.
"I visited my parents' graves this morning," Mulder said. "Both
of them, on opposite sides of the city. Just the way they would
have wanted it."
"I guess it's been a hard day," she said.
"I'd never visited my dad's before," he said.
"You're kidding," she said, then regretted how insensitive that
sounded. He didn't seem to notice.
"I never saw the point of going. I met my father's spirit in the
New Mexico desert . . . or maybe it was a hallucination. I don't
know. In any case my dad's out *there* . . ." he gestured at
some indeterminate location in the distance. "Wherever
semi-reformed Men In Black go when they die. He's not under a
stone in Parkway Cemetery."
Scully repressed her urge to lecture him on filial duty. "I
think he'd be glad you went," she said.
"Maybe," he said. An awkward silence of several seconds passed.
Scully poked at the too-oily vegetable penne she didn't intend to
finish. Since it was Lent she was avoiding meat, but she didn't
seem to be benefiting from it spiritually. Maybe it was because
Easter was so late this year that it didn't feel like Lent.
Maybe it was because she was living in sin with her partner.
Mulder gazed down at the table. Actually he seemed to be gazing
through it at some distant image she could not see. "Albert
Hosteen called the vision I had 'the origin place.' I saw my father
there, and I asked him whether Samantha was with him. He said,
'No.'" Mulder shook his head. "Why didn't they tell me?"
Scully thought Alex Krycek had answered that question in the most
violent and cruel way possible, but she didn't say so. It wasn't
the answer to the question Mulder was really asking anyway. "I
don't know," she said. "Mulder . . . do you want to go out to
Martha's Vineyard? Do you need to see Kristie's family and Joe
Luce? They seem to care about you." She thought that at the
moment, he could use all the family he could get.
"My sister is the JonBenet Ramsey of Dukes County," Mulder said.
"You know what that means? None of us was ever shown to be
guilty of what happened to her, but we'll never be innocent --
not to the people out there."
"Joe seemed to regret ever thinking you were guilty," Scully
said.
"If so, he's a pretty lonely voice," Mulder said.
They were both silent while he poked at his pasta marinara.
The piped-in muzak was some cheerful tune played on a wheezy
accordion. Scully avoided looking him in the eye as she
said, "I think you'd feel better if you helped."
He released a long breath, and some of the tension seemed to
leave his shoulders. "Kristie was a cute little baby, you know?
I didn't give a damn about babies at the time, but I could tell
she was cute. Or maybe I just thought so because I had a
thing for her mother. I don't know."
She nodded, then glanced up at him. This time he looked away.
She'd known him long enough to understand that he sometimes cast
her in the role of his spiritual counselor. Taking a page from
his own list of psychological techniques, she kept her expression
as blank as possible, knowing he'd read into it whatever he needed
to see.
He rubbed at his eyes, as if very tired. "I should go out there.
If nothing else, I owe it to the Island people for letting Roche
loose on them. Kristie didn't meet with some ghost out in those
woods. It was a flesh-and-blood guy that I should help put away
if I can."
Scully remembered the results of the autopsy and didn't quite
know how to reply. The investigator in her wanted to tell Mulder
all the ugly details; the lover and friend in her wanted to
protect him as much as possible.
Apparently misreading her reticence, he said, "I'm sorry. I was
going to show you around Boston."
"No -- it's not that." She hesitated, but in the end she could
keep nothing from him. "Mulder . . . Kristie miscarried at
some point in the last several months. The internal damage was
considerable, though there's some evidence of medical
intervention, which probably saved her life. I found pitting
typical of parturition scars on her pelvic bones. That means she
was at least into her second trimester when it happened. The
fetus might have been viable, at least at first."
Mulder looked puzzled. "She lost a child?"
"I think Kristie suffered from placenta abrupta, the sudden
detachment of the umbilical cord from the uterine wall.
It's a common complication in pregnancy among women who abuse
cocaine," Scully said.
She could tell the moment he remembered the faxed letter from Irv
Stuckey. His expression became one of deep compassion. He
quoted Irv, "'What happened in Boston.'"
"Joe Luce said she'd been drug-free six months. The scarring
looked more recent than that, but people who've badly abused
themselves heal slowly. She'd damaged her heart, her arteries .
. . it's amazing that she survived the birth, given the amount of
hemorrhaging that was apparent. A child born under those
conditions would have a very poor chance of survival," she said.
"And the first thing that comes to his mind is the South Road
Ghost story. What a bastard," Mulder said.
"He may not have been the first to think of the story," Scully said.
"If Kristie knew it as well, someone could have used it to
frighten or confuse her. She must have been emotionally fragile
as it was. Panic is as good an explanation as any for how she
fell off the cliff, barring some undiscovered evidence that she
was pushed."
Mulder nodded. He seemed lost in thought. Scully continued, "If
we do go out to Martha's Vineyard we'll have to remember to be
particularly sensitive around the family on the subject of the
child. Since Irv Stuckey knew about the pregnancy I expect
Kristie's relatives know too, but it's possible they don't. Irv
could have abused his access to hospital records or simply heard
rumors. Actually he's seemed entirely too involved with this
case from the beginning."
"Irv gets the dirt on everyone in town and repeats it to make them
sound as bad as possible. Since he has no good qualities, it's the
only way to make himself look better," Mulder said.
"Everybody has some good qualities," Scully said.
He gave her a look that made it plain she could keep her comments
on forgiveness and redemption to herself. "Sorry," she said.
Every so often she found herself turning into her mother, who was
relentless in her pursuit of finding something pleasant to say about
everybody. She even liked Mulder, which for one of Scully's
relatives was saying something.
"At least I can tell Kristie's family that she was drug-free when
she died. All the blood tests were negative," Scully said.
"Ironic, really," Mulder said. "It's like the guy who gives up
smoking and then gets hit by a speeding bus."
Scully wasn't about to argue with him when he was in this frame
of mind. "Are we going out to Martha's Vineyard?" she
asked.
He appeared to consider for a moment, and then said, "Yes."
"All right," she said.
The rest of their meal was quiet. Whatever was behind Mulder's
silence was hidden from her.
********
A couple of hours later Mulder sat behind the wheel of his parked
car, one of the few vehicles on the deck of the Woods-Hole-to-
Vineyard-Haven ferry. Scully was asleep in the tilted-back
passenger seat.
Rain ran steadily down the windows and Mulder didn't bother
running the wipers to dispel it. The glass had misted over
inside from their breath, anyway. Car motors had to be turned
off during the crossing so turning on the heater was out of the
question. The ferry boasted a glassed-in shelter with padded
bench seats, which were good for sightseeing but bad for napping.
Scully had chosen the chilly crampedness of the car without
reservation.
Mulder fidgeted. The forced inactivity worsened the restless
ache inside him. He wanted to turn on the radio. He wanted to
wake Scully up so he would have someone to talk to. He felt a
dull sense of . . . what? Dread. Dread lay in his soul like a
block of lead as they approached the Island.
The rocking of the waves in Vineyard Sound and the slow chugging
of the steam ship were too familiar, like an unwelcome caress.
He had an eerie sense of the past overlaying the present.
He hoped this wasn't a seizure aura. Ever since Dr. Goldstein had
drilled holes in his head as an aid to repressed memory recovery,
Mulder had sometimes experienced near-hallucinatory flashbacks of
his past. Not all the flashbacks were of traumatic events, but
the experience itself was disturbing. Stress made the problem
worse. Scully was of the opinion that he suffered from minor
seizure activity due to brain lesions.
Whatever the ultimate cause was, Mulder felt that if he shut his
eyes he might open them to find himself sitting behind the wheel
of the rustbucket Nova he drove back in '78 and '79. On the
way to the Vineyard to visit Dad.
Mulder had always felt a certain dread when returning to the
Island after his sister disappeared. He'd associated it with his
father, with whom he had a conflicted relationship at best. But
Dad wasn't out there anymore, and the dread remained. It must be
something else then. Mulder tried to focus on the present
moment: the sensation of his fingers pressing against the
plastic of the steering wheel, Scully's soft breathing in the
seat next to him.
He rubbed a hole in the windshield fog and turned on the car's
electricity so he could run the wipers. Cold air rushed in
through the vents, and Scully stirred. Mulder shut the useless
heater off. The outdoors was visible now, an endless expanse of
iron-colored water beyond the ferry's white railing. It might
have been November rather than April. A good day to stay
indoors.
**
The flashback came on like a blow to the stomach.
The car around him receded to dim awareness. He was ten years
old, maybe eleven, lying on the floor of Mrs. Luce's back room
in Chilmark. Rain fell from a leaden sky and ran down the windows.
The Luces had baseboard heat, which made even the thin, hard carpet
a cozy haven.
The air smelled like warm crayons. The Mulder and Luce children
lay sprawled on the floor, drawing pictures on the backs of old
forms Joey's uncle brought over from the police station. Mrs.
Luce was in the kitchen, talking to herself. Really she was
talking to Mr. Luce, who was in heaven. That's why Joey and
Cheryl had an uncle instead of a dad. Sometimes Cheryl talked to
her daddy in heaven, too. Joey didn't. Instead he drew pictures
of Jesus.
Fox looked over at Joey's drawing. It was of Jesus deflecting
bullets with his hand like Superman. He was protecting a group
of cops from some bad guys. Everybody in the picture was
frowning and looking mad. Crosses hemmed the drawing like a
fence. Fox sensed that Joey's SuperJesus pictures were about
being scared. They were about Mrs. Luce talking to the air in
the kitchen, about what was on the front side of some of the
forms they drew on.
The children liked the murder scene investigation forms the best
because there was a body outline you could color in and draw
clothes on. Cheryl and Samantha cut the paper bodies out for
dolls for a while, but that bothered Mrs. Luce for some reason
and she told her bother-in-law to quit bringing those over. Fox
and Samantha's mom said that was just as well.
Fox was drawing a picture of the tree fort he and Joey were
building out in the woods by the little cemetery along South
Road. Fox had told his mom they were going to spend the night in
it, but she said no. Samantha said she would be too scared to
stay there all night because of ghosts, which just showed what a
baby she was. There was no such thing as ghosts, and anyway if
dead people started to scare you, you could just talk to them
like Mrs. Luce talked to Joey's dad.
Samantha was doing one of her usual dumb rainbows-and-flowers
drawings, but this was worse because she was copying off of
Cheryl. Or maybe it was the other way around. "Do your own
drawing," Fox told her.
"This *is* my own drawing," Samantha said.
"You're copying off of her," Fox said, pointing at Cheryl.
"We wanted to draw the same thing," Samantha said. She glanced
up and he saw the flash of anger in her pale green eyes. (Had he
forgotten that there was something in her as hard as gemstone)?
"Kids, be nice," Mrs. Luce called from the kitchen.
Fox stifled his resentment at his sister's unoriginality because
you had to act better in other people's houses. He added a
picture of a stupid-looking girl to his drawing.
Joey was clearly concentrating hard as he drew details on the
police cars, right down to the whip antennas. Fox never
questioned why a boy without a father in the house should feel
afraid. On nights when his dad was gone, which was a lot, his
mom would pull the curtains closed on every window in the house.
Sometimes she took the phone off the hook, and no matter how many
times her kids hung it up again, she'd take it back off. Somehow
it was not something Fox or Samantha ever asked about. Once,
Fox's dad had shown him how to use the revolver he kept up high
on a shelf. Dad said he should never try to use guns until he
was older, but he showed him how it worked anyway. Fox was glad.
He believed in bad guys like in Joey's picture, but he wasn't too
sure he believed in SuperJesus.
The flashback was over as quickly as it began. In its aftermath
Mulder felt weak and sick. Somehow the present still seemed
unreal. The weight and mass of his adult body felt wrong. The
opening of "Slaughterhouse Five" floated up from the dark well of
his brain: "Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time."
Scully stirred. Had he spoken aloud? He reached out and took
her hand. Her small, manicured fingers felt very warm against
his palm. Her eyes fluttered open at the touch. "Mulder? My
God, your hands are icy . . . are you all right?" Whatever she
saw in his face made her sit up straight. She hooked an errant
strand of her hair behind her ear as if to smooth away the
vulnerability revealed by sleep. She looked intently into his
eyes -- a doctor now rather than a lover, probably checking the
relative size of his pupils.
"I'm all right," he mumbled. In a few minutes that would be
true. He knew the sense of dull shock, the faint unfamiliarity
about her would fade, and with that knowledge came a sense of
loss. Perhaps the worst thing about being periodically thrust
into the past was his reluctance to return. He turned away from
her and gazed at the fogged-over windshield.
"You need to see a neurologist," Scully said. She'd never
articulated the accusation that underlay her words, but Mulder
heard it. She still hadn't forgiven him for drilling holes in
his head in the first place.
"I don't need a neurologist. It's emotional," he said. If he
really was having seizures, the Bureau would park him at a desk
and the state would suspend his driver's license. He'd rather
be considered neurotic.
"See a psychiatrist, then," she said. "When you come out of one
of those . . . trance states you look horrible, like you're going
to pass out."
"I'm not going to pass out."
"What if that happened while you were driving? You could kill
someone."
"I'm fine," he said.
"Mulder, an altered state of consciousness with nausea and
weakness is not fine," she said.
"I said I'm all right. Would you drop it?"
He saw hurt on her face, and then the shield of
anger went up. "Whatever," she said. She turned to the
passenger window, shrugging into the seat. After a few seconds
she dug a stack of papers out of her bag in the back seat and
flipped through them as if looking for something. Mulder could
tell she wasn't reading.
His hands slid down the sides of the steering wheel. He'd told
her once that the night she slipped beneath the covers of his bed
and kissed him awake was the happiest of his life. For days
afterward he'd lived in a cloud of bewildered euphoria, expecting
to wake up from the dream at any moment -- probably in a cell
somewhere with wires running out of his brain.
How long had he waited for her to come to him? He'd been like a
man who sits motionless with his arm outstretched, hoping a
little wild bird would hop into his hand.
Of all times, why had she picked now to fall in love with him?
Now, when he'd lost everything else that made life worth living?
There were days when he barely felt like a man. She deserved so
much better. He looked over at her and saw she was still
ignoring him. Good. All the more excuse to stare.
There was almost no trace left of the fresh-faced girl in the
ugly blazer he'd first met -- the supposed spy sent by The
Powers That Be to discredit him. She was thinner now, sparer.
It was as if the cancer had worn away everything but the
essential. At times she seemed almost translucent, like an
ivory comb after much use.
He'd noticed the ugly blazers vanished after her sister died.
That happened sometimes in families, where one sister was
beautiful and the other went out of her way to be plain.
Although Scully still grieved for Melissa, she'd bloomed when she
was no longer in her sister's shadow. Would something like that
have happened to Samantha if Mulder had been taken instead? Had
she left qualities for him to inherit?
The tightness in his throat was painful. "She was happy.
Happier than I ever was," he said.
Scully looked over at him. "Who?" she asked.
"Samantha. There wasn't a lot in our lives to be happy about,
even before . . ." He did not say the words. Let that memory
sleep. He swallowed past the tightness and tried again, "She
enjoyed little things I missed."
Samantha's dusty and water-stained diary was the most harrowing
book he had ever read. In it she described how she practiced
loving things to make sure she remembered how: a blue willow
beetle, a dandelion, fuchsia nail polish dried to the side of
its glass bottle. A kid's treasures. Junk. She seemed
afraid of loving anything bigger than she could hold in her
hand. Who could blame her?
"In my memories she seems so real to me," he said. "More real
than she did when we were growing up. It's as if I know her
better now than I ever have."
For a few moments the only sounds were their own breathing and
the hypnotic humming of the ferry engines. Scully reached over
and touched his shoulder. She knew what he meant about the dead
being more present than the living. She'd had that feeling after
her father and Melissa died, but it was strongest after she lost
Emily. For months afterward, Scully met the child everywhere: in
a church, in a car, in the faces of strangers' children. Her
sense of Emily's presence was so strong that sometimes she felt
sure the girl would be there waiting for her when she turned the
next corner. Scully believed in heaven but not in ghosts. She
considered her experience phantom pain, like that of a man who
still feels the wounds in his amputated leg.
What could she say to Mulder? "It will pass?" Part of him
wouldn't want it to pass. Of course he'd want to hold onto that
emotional connection -- what else did he have? He didn't even
have a faith to turn to. All she could think to say was, "You'll
be all right." She reached up and ran her hand over his hair.
"You'll be all right."
*****
Scully's first impression of the town of Vineyard Haven was of
its eclecticness. Modern glass-and-steel structures stood across
the street from Victorian houses with an embarrassment of
gingerbread carving along their eaves. Old and new, commercial
and residential, all seemed to have been mixed together. Easter
decorations were displayed on many doors, and here and there were
a Hebrew Passover inscriptions in silver cardboard.
On a less gloomy day the place was probably charming. Still,
Scully felt a faint sense of letdown. She thought it was
probably because "the Vineyard," as residents called it, had
acquired such a mystique of power and tragedy, first through its
link to the Kennedy family, and then reinforced for her
personally by her association with Mulder. But in reality
Vineyard Haven was quite like what she had seen of Cape Cod.
Just a nice New England town in the rain.
She watched the buildings: brick; stone; clapboard and concrete;
as they passed, and tried to imagine how the town looked when
Mulder was a boy -- the Vineyard Haven Samantha had last seen.
Images from her own childhood came to her: little girls in pink
swing coats and shiny black shoes led by the hand up the steps to
church; blue-suited boys purposely stepping in the puddles that
formed on the worn risers and being scolded in a whisper by their
parents. That was Easter as Scully had known it.
It seemed quite natural when they passed a church bulletin board
that read, "Look, your king is coming to you: humble, and mounted
on a donkey." They had traveled most of a block before the
context of that Bible quote sunk in.
"Oh, God, Holy Week starts tomorrow," Scully said. She dug for
her planner among the junk in the back seat and confirmed what
she'd just realized -- tomorrow was Palm Sunday.
"Is that a problem?" Mulder asked, glancing over at her.
"No. Yes. I don't know," she said. Her family only demanded
her presence on Easter Sunday, a full week away. What really
alarmed her was that Holy Week had snuck up on her. Had it
really been so long since she attended Mass? She'd obviously
given up the wrong thing for Lent. Had she given up, say, her
cell phone, she'd have been counting the days until Easter. "Do
they have a Catholic church out here?" she asked. She'd made no
arrangements, no inquiries.
"Only when the Kennedys are in town. The rest of the time it's
the high school gym," Mulder said. He must have caught her look
of panic because he added, "Of course they have Catholic churches
out here. Relax."
She leaned back against the seat, but could not relax. Faith had
meant so much more to her since she lost Emily. During the worst
of her grief she had attended Mass nearly every day. Perhaps it
was an exaggeration to call it a balm to her soul. It was more
like a tourniquet, something to slow the massive internal
bleeding.
Was she going to toss that faith aside now that things were going
better? She didn't want to be that kind of Christian. In the
dark days of early 1998, she had practiced a religious orthodoxy
that was totally foreign to her former life. She'd even dug out
the ruby-glass and silver rosary her great aunt had given her on
her Confirmation, a gift that had been reverently packed away in
tissue paper and never used.
She couldn't help glancing sidelong at Mulder. Sleeping with
your sort-of-atheist, angry-at-God partner was not compatible
with Thursday night Mass and confession every first Saturday of
the month. When push came to shove, it was the Church she edged
out of her life.
In her heart of hearts, Scully was not convinced that God
condemned everyone who bought a package of condoms or that the
Blessed Virgin really needed prayers to undo the damage of
affronts to her Immaculate Heart. But she felt a need for
connection to a wise, benevolent Being, and she was too much a
Catholic to worship in isolation. For her, history and tradition
forged the connection between man and God. She seemed to be
slowly relinquishing that connection, and it frightened her.
One obvious solution was simply to get married to Mulder.
Presuming she truly repented her prior behavior, she would be a
Catholic in good standing again. She felt little doubt that
Mulder *would* agree to marry her, at least once he regained his
emotional balance -- or whatever passed for balance in his
peculiar psyche. Yet something in her sensed that rushing into
marriage was not the best way to serve Mulder or God.
Perhaps her problem was that she had never given all of herself
to anything or anyone -- except Emily, who had left Scully's life
almost as soon as she entered it.
In her current situation she could use Mulder to distance herself
from God and God to distance herself from Mulder. How convenient.
How safe.
Jesus had not held back anything. This week marked the
anniversary of the day he gave his life, and she was afraid to
give even her whole heart? But she was a human woman, not God.
She looked on emotional self-immolation with terror.
She sighed deeply and lifted one of Mulder's hands from the
steering wheel, pressed his knuckles to her lips.
"You all right?" he asked, probably surprised at the
uncharacteristic impulsiveness of her act.
"I'm fine," she said softly. Lies like that kept him from
getting too close.
*****