The overcrowded Dukes County Jail could spare no space for a
break room, but it did have two vending machines in a stairwell.
Mulder had gotten his first real meal of the day out of those.
He sat on the stairs, finishing off a soggy chicken salad
sandwich and a Pepsi. He hoped that the caffeine would help
nurse his adrenaline rush along for a little while longer. He
could already feel the bone-deep fatigue that would set in once
that energy wore off.
There was a fair chance that the interview he'd just done would
only be round one. If the polygraph poked holes in McBer's story
he might want to try and explain them away, and Mulder wouldn't
deny him the opportunity. In his experience, just about every
suspect who remained talkative after a bad polygraph convicted
himself.
He glanced at his watch and saw that it was after three. He
wondered what Scully was doing. The last time he'd seen her he'd
gotten the distinct impression she was trying to get rid of him.
His phone was in his jacket pocket, lying on the steps beside
him. He dug it out and dialed her cell number. After several
rings a cheerful voice told him, "The cellular unit you are
trying to reach is turned off or out of the service area."
Mulder punched the "off" button and told himself not to read too
much into that. Maybe she was sleeping. Probably Darkest
Chilmark didn't even have a cell tower. Still, he couldn't shake
the mental image of her wandering over some godforsaken up-island
ridge, her injured hands tucked into her pockets for warmth,
searching for something she didn't want to talk to him about.
He'd done similar things before.
It didn't mean he had to like it when she did them.
His thoughts were interrupted when Joe opened the door to the
stairwell. Mulder stood up, dusting crumbs off his lap. "How'd
it go?" he asked. He suspected that McBer and his accomplice
had plotted against Kristie but were prevented from carrying out
their plan by paranormal events. Conspiracy to commit murder
could still draw a life sentence in Massachusetts, however.
Joe seemed weary as he said, "McBer passed all the questions
about the homicide. The box said he was telling the truth when
he told us he didn't kill Kristie and didn't know who did."
Mulder nodded. That fit with his earlier assessment of paranormal
activity. "What about meeting her and making threats?"
"He flunked."
//Got the sonofabitch.// He felt a surge of energy, but the feeling
was more grim than satisfying. Vindication was always bittersweet
when you were a prophet of doom. "What about the contract part?
You get him on hiring a killer?"
The other man shook his head. "That one was inconclusive. What
we've got is good enough for a warrant -- when the State Police
go through his phone records maybe they can establish a
connection to somebody."
Mulder had his doubts, but he agreed it was worth a shot. "Does
McBer want to talk to me some more?"
"I think that's about that last thing he wants. When I left he
was asking to call his lawyer. I think Davis is done with you
for the day. Speaking of which, you know what time it is?" Joe
pulled his pager from the pocket of his borrowed uniform and
looked down at the screen as if it might bite.
"It's about quarter after three," Mulder told him.
"Oh, man . . ." Joe said, pushing the pager's display-change
button again and again. "I had this thing turned off in the
interview room. My sister's going to kill me. I'm supposed to
be home by now. Someone has to stay with my mom while Cheryl
goes to work."
"Your mom's not sick, is she?" Mulder asked. He had always liked
Mrs. Luce.
Joe gave him a strange look. "It's just the MS. The same thing
she'd had for 20 years."
Mulder hadn't known she had anything. He tried to recall what he
knew about multiple sclerosis, which wasn't much. "Is it bad?"
he asked.
"Your dad didn't tell you any of this?" Joe asked.
"My dad and I didn't talk much," Mulder said. For years Mulder
and his father saw each other only at weddings and funerals, and
then it was pretty much just funerals. It got so whenever Mulder
heard his father's voice on the phone he wondered who had died.
"That's too bad," Joe replied. He seemed about to ask a
question, but something in Mulder's expression must have made him
change his mind. He looked away. "Anyway . . . I need to give
Tom Brennan back his uniform. This thing is driving me crazy."
He tugged at the jail officer's too-tight shirt.
"Hey, Joe?"
"Yeah?"
"You think your mom would mind if I went out there? Just to see
her . . . you know. It's been a long time."
"No, she wouldn't mind." He looked surprised but not displeased
at the request. "She'd probably like that."
Mulder was glad. He hadn't gotten over his own mother deciding
that she never needed to see him again. He wanted somebody's
mother to be happy to see him.
*****
Later, the two of them sat in Joe's blue Mercury, driving west on
Rural Route 1 toward Chilmark. The first several minutes were
quiet and awkward. Somehow the close confines of the car made
all the things unsaid between them harder to ignore. Mulder
spent the time watching the familiar, oddly-named cross streets
go by: Quenomica; Old Purchase; Dark Woods Road.
He broke the silence as they passed Martha's Vineyard Airport,
roughly the halfway mark. "So, tell me about your mom," Mulder
said, looking over at Joe.
"Her health was really pretty good until recently," Joe said. He
kept his gaze on the road, which probably made talking about this
sort of thing easier. "Actually she used to drive a van a lot
like McBer's until her coordination got so bad she couldn't stop
at red lights anymore. That was scary as hell. She spun out on
bone-dry pavement and put the van into a ditch." Joe shook his
head. He had a slightly distant look in his eyes, as if he were
seeing the accident all over again. "Cher and I had this whole
care plan all worked out, but we were still thinking 'someday,'
not 'today.' It didn't matter -- none of it went the way we
thought it would, anyway. We both ended up moving back to the
old house again, if you can believe that."
Mulder tried to imagine himself moving back in with his mother at
the age of 38. The idea was sobering. Joe continued, "We're
lucky that Cheryl's a visiting nurse. Between me and her and her
co-workers at VNA, Mom's got pretty close to round-the-clock
care. Not that it always helps. The other week she accidentally
put her hand down on a hot burner. The whole thing is making her
nuts -- she's been on her own since my dad died in '66, and now
all of a sudden she's dependent. Sometimes I think she hates us
for trying to taking care of her. You know you try to prepare
yourself for the role reversal when your parents get older, but
until it happens to you, you have no idea."
"I guess not," Mulder said. His own mother had chosen to die
rather than reverse those particular roles with him.
Joe glanced over, seeming embarrassed. "I'm sorry -- I didn't
mean you personally had no idea. You just lost your mother. Of
course you do."
"No. My mother's death was kind of . . . sudden," Mulder said.
He was unable to keep the edge of bitterness out of his voice.
"Oh."
Awkwardness again. Mulder gave conversation another shot. "I
was wondering, how did you find out about me profiling James
Sproule?" he asked.
"Your dad told me," Joe said.
"You sure? I don't think I ever talked to him about that."
"Of course I'm sure. He showed me the guy's mug shot in the
paper. I said Sproule looked like a librarian, and he agreed
with me. I was sure I'd never have pegged him."
"My name didn't come up in the article, did it?" Mulder asked.
He didn't see why it would, since he hadn't made the actual
arrest. On the other hand, he didn't see how else his father
could have known -- at least not through legitimate news sources.
"To tell you the truth, I didn't read it. Your dad stopped by
the station while I was trying to do about five other things. I
looked at the picture, said the guy looked like a librarian, and
said good for you -- you caught a maniac."
"Did you and my dad talk often?" Mulder asked.
"Not all that often. Every now and then."
Mulder nodded. He preferred to think his dad never talked to
anybody except at funerals. He didn't want that treatment to be
especially for him.
"Is it a problem?" Joe asked.
Mulder turned to the window so his face wouldn't give anything
away. "He didn't talk to me."
They passed groves of tupelo trees and frost-covered cranberry
orchards without speaking. At last, Joe said, "I was worried
about that."
"About what?" Mulder asked.
"Sometimes I got the impression he hoped I would relay messages
so he wouldn't have to call you himself. I told him I wasn't the
person he should be talking to. I told him we weren't in
contact, but it didn't seem to make a difference."
Mulder kept his gaze focused on the landscape outside. With
studied nonchalance, he asked, "What did he say?"
"Different things. Positive things, mostly. He thought a lot of
you."
Mulder wanted to believe what Joe said was true. He wanted to
believe a lot of things about his father. Finally he asked, "You
still have a funny feeling about my dad and my sister's
disappearance?"
The question seemed to make Joe uncomfortable. "I don't know,
Fox . . ."
Mulder turned and glared him. "You 'don't know?' You guys
practically ran my family out of town, and you don't know?"
"I was ten years old when you lost your sister. I didn't know
what I thought about anything. We had that fight in what --
1978? It's been over longer than either of us was alive at the
time. Can't you drop it?"
"It's not over," Mulder said. He returned his gaze to the window
and added, "It will never be over." Not so long as he
remembered her.
"The part about me being a smartass fifteen-year-old is over,"
Joe said. "Thank God we don't have to stay the people we were 20
years ago."
The thought of two grown men, approaching middle age, scrapping
like schoolboys in a sandlot was ridiculous. Joe had a point.
Mulder glowered at the junction between earth and sky until he'd
convinced himself that he was angry at fate and not the man next
to him. Scully would tell him to relax: //Relax, Mulder. You
can go kick Fate's ass another day.// He felt some of the
tension leave his muscles. "Sorry."
"It's all right," Joe said. "And I'm not jerking you around. I
really don't know how to answer your question. None of it makes
sense to me. Logic tells me it's not real likely your sister
would vanish the way she did without your family being involved,
but I saw what happened to your parents after they lost her. It
was killing them. The police interviewed you guys separately,
together, the day after it happened, six months after . . . .
I know you've seen the interview transcripts because I'm the one
who mailed them to you after you wrote for them under FOIA. The
only story that changed was yours, and you went from remembering
nothing to talking about bright lights and who-knows-what. Even
that makes no sense at all. I can't explain any of it."
Mulder didn't want to argue anymore. Joe's words made him feel
very tired. "Welcome to my life," he said.
*****
The first several minutes at the Luce house were chaos -- Cheryl
had to get to work, her kids were supposed to be at their
father's, Joe offered to take them but didn't know who would stay
with his mother, and Mrs. Luce kept insisting she did not need a
babysitter. Mulder's offer to stay at the house was accepted
with a gratitude that surprised him. He wasn't sure if this
meant old grudges had truly been forgotten or if domestic turmoil
had driven the Luce family to acts of insanity.
At any rate, he and Mrs. Luce soon had the house to themselves.
The two of them sat at the scarred oak dining table, he in a
slat-backed chair, resting his chin in his hand, she in an
electric scooter, running purple chenille yarn through a tabletop
loom. Sam Cooke's "You Send Me" played faintly from a radio in
the kitchen.
"So what's that going to be?" he asked, gesturing at the purple
fabric that was taking shape.
She smiled as if the question amused her. "Maybe a placemat,
maybe a scarf. Depends on how quickly I get tired of weaving it.
Really it's just something to do with my hands." Despite Joe's
concerns, she looked perfectly healthy. Her blue eyes were clear
and alert, and she carried herself like a young pine: as if her
resiliency more than made up for any strength lost to lack of
straightness. Still, Mulder hadn't been quite prepared for her
white hair or the way the bones in her hands stood out. It
wasn't lost on him that the kitchen radio had a knitting needle
taped on as an antenna extender. He wondered when she'd given up
knitting.
"You know I still have those mittens you made me," he said.
Well, in a sense he still had them. He suspected they were in a
box buried in a storage unit in Greenwich, Connecticut.
She looked up at him. "Which ones?" Then she seemed to
remember. "Oh! The ones where I let you pick the colors." Five-
year-old Fox had picked every color she had, including the ones
he'd never heard of: sepia, saffron, vermilion, aubergine.
"They matched everything," he said.
"Except each other. That's right."
"I'm surprised you were so nice to me, considering," Mulder said.
At age five, he'd been just as fond of asking impossible
questions as he was at age thirty-eight, and he'd been less
tactful at the time.
"You were a good boy," said Mrs. Luce, as if laying to rest
persistent rumors to the contrary.
"Sure, good at driving you up a wall."
She spoke in a comfortably distracted way as she tapped the
newest row of yarn into place: "Mm -- you had an edge to you,
yes, but I always thought there was a lot of anxiety behind that.
Your mother seemed to be the same way: very intense, very --
anxious to please, maybe?"
Mulder smiled a little, remembering that side of her. "She had a
greater interest in conformity than I did. I used to embarrass
her." He remembered her reminding him to keep his inquisitive
streak in check as she zipped up his jacket: "Don't ask about the
accident or bother Mrs. Luce with questions. She has enough to
worry about as it is. Remember, you're there to be polite and to
help make Joey feel better. If he or Mrs. Luce wants to talk
about the funeral they'll let you know, so don't bring it up.
And Fox, do not ask questions about why God kills people before
taking them to heaven or what it's like to be dead." Budding
investigator that he was, the hush-hush treatment of death and
dying had merely obsessed him with the subject.
Trying to keep his voice as neutral as possible, he asked, "How
well did you know my mother?"
She paused in her work, perhaps hearing something significant in
the question. "Reasonably well, though I can't say we were
close. We never talked about much besides our children. Why do
you ask?"
"I guess . . ." He ran his fingertips over a dent in the table.
Somehow, it was easier to talk when he wasn't looking at her. "I
guess because lately I've been wondering how well I knew her."
He heard her set down her shuttle. "Has something happened?"
He hoped he'd said this enough times that he would stay calm when
talking about it. "I lost her recently." The tremor was minor,
but he could feel the telltale stillness inside of him, like
something was in free fall. He briefly considered not going on.
When he spoke again, his voice broke like glass: "She never told
me she was sick."
The pressure building in his chest was probably a sob, but he
never found out if he contained it. A seizure-vision kicked in
instead. The sensation of reality shifting was physical, like
falling onto a slab of concrete and passing straight through.
He was five years old, leaning with his back against the Luces'
front door. The house smelled like funeral flowers. Mr. Luce's
shoes, caked with dried mud, rested on a sheet of old newspaper
beside him. The shoes made Fox uneasy. He didn't think they
should be there.
Flowers were sitting in vases and jars all over the house, but he
couldn't talk about them because he wasn't supposed to say
"funeral." He wasn't supposed to say "dying" or "dead" or
"killed" either, but those words stayed in his head and worried
him. What if he got confused and said something bad by accident?
No, he should say 'by mistake' -- he wasn't supposed to talk
about accidents, either.
He had said and done some bad things at the funeral and his dad
had taken him out and smacked him. He was ashamed of that. He
hadn't been able to explain that the church was a bad place for
him to be and that staying there had been like not being able to
breathe. He thought Mr. Luce might feel the same way inside his
wooden box.
Fox heard grownup footsteps on the stairs and fought the urge to
suck his fingers like a baby. He wrapped his hand around the
doorknob instead. Mrs. Luce came downstairs, wearing jeans and a
ponytail like a teenager, but with a laundry basket balanced on
her hip like a mom.
She stopped on the last step and asked, "What's the matter?"
"Whose shoes are those?" Fox asked softly, although he was sure
he knew.
She looked at him a moment, then turned to look out the window at
the squirrels snatching seeds out of the birdfeeder. Fox worried
that she'd walk right by him without speaking. Sometimes his mom
did that after he asked a bad question. That hurt his feelings
worse than any spanking ever hurt.
Instead, Mrs. Luce put down the basket and sat on the stairs.
She looked like she might want to cry. "Those are Joey and
Cheryl's daddy's shoes," she said.
Fox's own daddy's shoes were in the same place at home. "Is he
here?" he asked, still very quiet.
She shook her head. "No." She spoke so softly it was almost not
a word.
"Then why are they here?" He didn't understand how a man could
line up his muddy shoes neatly by the door and then walk away
forever. How could there still be muddy shoes after a father had
died? How could everything look just the same?
"They bother you? You want me to get rid of them?" She seemed
to dislike him just then.
Fox nodded slowly. He did not want to make her angry. It was
only that a man who was dead and in a box should not have his
shoes waiting for him by the door. It was too sad to think
they'd wait and wait and he'd never come home to wear them.
"Fine." She got up and walked to the edge of the newspaper, but
then she just stood there. Fox got the idea she was thinking
about leaving the shoes there and sending him home instead.
Finally she picked them up, newspaper and all, and tossed them in
the closet. She shut the door as if there were a wild animal on
the other side. "Is that better?"
Fox was too upset to answer. He wished she would send him home.
This house had a crushing feeling in it even worse than at the
funeral. He gave in to his babyish desire and sucked the two
middle fingers of his left hand.
Mrs. Luce started to look less angry and more sad as she watched
him comfort himself. "Is this about your daddy?" Her voice
reminded him of the way a top jittered and shook just before it
fell down. "Are you scared your daddy will go away and not come
home?" Fox nodded.
Light footsteps sounded on the wooden floor. Joey had given up
playing alone in the back room and stood near the dining table,
twisting the hem of his shirt in his hands. "Come here," Mrs.
Luce said, holding her hands out to both children.
She sat on the stairs and pulled them into her lap. "It was an
accident. It was an accident with a little tiny boat out on the
big water. Joey's daddy didn't mean to leave us. He made a
mistake and took the little boat out farther than it could go. He
didn't do it on purpose." Fox curled into the hollow of her
shoulder and wondered why she kept saying that. It had never
occurred to him that a parent would die on purpose and leave his
child.
Mrs. Luce rocked them. "What happened to Joey's daddy isn't going
to happen to me, and it isn't going to happen to your mommy and
daddy, Fox. We're going to be here for a long, long time, until
you're all grown up and you don't need us so much anymore." It
would have been easier to believe if she wasn't crying when she
said it.
Mulder's awareness returned to the present-day in sections. The
sensation of his body hunched over the table came first. Mrs.
Luce's voice, reedier than he remembered but still soothing,
formed a bewildering bridge between the past and the present.
"Fox, what is it? What's the matter?"
At first he thought he was crying. Then he realized he wasn't --
he was trying not to be sick. He sat with his eyes closed, his
forehead resting on his balled fists. Sam Cooke was still
warbling in the background: " . . . you thrill me, honest you do,
honest you do." The flashback must have lasted only seconds.
This was not one of the waking nightmares of PTSD -- those
happened in real time. This was something electrochemical --
something deep. He could almost hear the thin whine of Goldman's
drill as he'd prepared to tunnel into Mulder's cerebral cortex,
rooting for memories. He'd found some, all right. He turned his
thoughts away from the vision of C.G.B. Spender pulling his
mother close.
Mulder knocked the chair over as he got up. "Sorry," he
muttered. He walked into the kitchen and turned on the tap,
rinsing the sick taste from his mouth with handful after cupped
handful of water.
Mrs. Luce's electric scooter buzzed as she came up behind him.
"Are you all right? I don't understand what's happening. Should
I call the hospital?"
He shook his head. He knew he owed her some kind of explanation.
Which one should he give her -- the holes in his head or the
alien virus that was slowly re-writing the genetic code in his
brain? No contest -- it was neither.
Between rinsing and spitting he said: "'S a head injury -- old
one. I'll be all right. Just gimme a minute."
"For God's sake, Fox, are you seeing a doctor?"
"Yeah." Since the beginning of March, actually. Oh, Scully's
God would put a big, black mark in the book next to his name for
that one.
When he was finally done washing his mouth out, he soaked a dish
towel in cold water, wrung it out and went to sit back down. He
placed the towel on the back of his neck. "I'm sorry," he said.
He was dimly aware that he'd been apologizing to her since the
seizure hit him.
"Don't be sorry. What can I do for you?" She positioned her
scooter next to him and sponged his neck and forehead with the
dishcloth.
He interrupted her by shaking his head. "Just tell me . . . did
she love us?"
"Did who love you -- your mother?"
He nodded.
Mrs. Luce sat back as if to better read his expression. Mulder
wondered what she saw there that seemed to concern her so much.
"Of course she loved you. Of course. Why would you even ask
that?"
"She had this whole other life . . ."
"A woman's life doesn't start when her children are born, you
know," she said.
"It's not that. There's this man, his name is C.G.B. Spender."
Mulder hesitated to tell her the rest. It seemed especially
wicked to impugn the character of a woman who was no longer alive
to defend herself. He remembered how his mother had slapped him
in her hurt and outrage. //"I am your mother and I will not stand
here and listen to your accusations."//
//I have to know,// Mulder thought, maybe making justifications
to himself, maybe to the spirit of his mother. "I know Spender
was around when I was young. I've seen pictures of him with my
parents. He told me . . . he came right out and told me he's my
father. He implied that he's Samantha's, too."
Mrs. Luce rested the damp rag in her lap. There was horror in
her expression, and compassion as well, but no shock, Mulder
thought. Definitely not shock. Perhaps Churchill had looked so
when Paris fell.
"Bill Mulder was your father." She spoke firmly, as if reminding
him of a duty he had forgotten. "He fed you. He clothed you.
He saw that you got an education."
"I'm not denying that. I'm not saying I'm not grateful. It's
just -- what if it's true? Forget not knowing who my father was,
I'd feel like I hardly knew who my mother was," Mulder said.
She looked at him hard. "Bill Mulder was your father." Her
words had a finality to them, like a door closing.
That front was clearly futile, and Mulder turned away from it.
"There's other things," he said. It was hard to talk while
looking into that steady blue gaze, so he got up and wandered
over to the door to the kitchen. The radio had started playing
that damn Shirelles song: "While I'm far away from you my baby,
I know it's hard for you my baby . . ." The last fucking thing he
was in the mood for.
"I think my mother knew what was going to happen to Samantha.
Not that she could have stopped it, but she knew. And she never
told me. She let me spend all those years looking." He kept his
gaze on the little window over the sink. The orange berries of
an ash tree growing outside were the only spot of color against
the late winter landscape.
He heard Mrs. Luce sigh. "The past is what you make it, Fox.
Why make it terrible?"
He spoke as if he hadn't heard. "The last thing she said to me
was, 'There's so much I've left unsaid, for reasons I hope one
day you'll understand.' Actually, she said it to my machine.
She didn't even wait for me to get home . . ." His disordered
mind offered up sensations: the smell of cold ashes, a leaky gas
line making his eyes water. He remembered the picture frames
lying around empty but not the tableau on the couch. //Please,
God, don't let me have seen that . . .// He knew she'd used a
plastic bag -- probably got that idea from "Final Exit." It was
always bad when they used plastic. He remembered what had been
left of Ed Paulsen when they finally caught up with him in that
cabin outside Marquette -- and what wasn't left. Plastic was
like a little greenhouse. //Dammit, Paulsen had been dead for
weeks. This is different.// He had a dim mental image of the
blue-and-white couch and felt sick. He'd probably seen. //Oh,
Scully . . . why didn't you keep me out of there?//
In tears, he turned to Mrs. Luce, hoping she'd distract him from
what he couldn't remember seeing and never wanted to see again.
"She'd -- she'd taken the pictures and things, you know? She
burned 'em in the trash basket. I mean, why would she do that?
Like . . . like s-she wanted to wipe out everything to do with
her life, or maybe just about Samantha and me . . ."
"Fox, slow down. I don't understand." Mrs. Luce held her hand
out to him, the way she had when he was five and afraid of Mr.
Luce's shoes.
He walked by her and sat down. She rubbed his shoulder in little
circles. When he felt calmer he continued, "My mother . . . she
committed suicide, Mrs. Luce. She had cancer, but that's not how
she wanted to die. I guess it was her right. Maybe I wouldv'e
seen it her way in time, I don't know. But she never told me.
She had the will and the papers all drawn up, she bought a
goddamn grave plot and she never told me. I didn't figure into
this carefully thought-out plan. I mean, we'd had some
arguments; I accused her of some things. But I thought it was
mostly okay between us. Now I don't know. Do you think . . . do
you think she'd do this to hurt me? Because I sure have a hard
time seeing it any other way."
"I wish I knew what to tell you." Mrs. Luce took his hand in her
free one, and Mulder noticed the brown burn marks on her fingers,
as Joe had described. He covered her fingers with his own. "I
just can't reconcile what you're telling me with what I knew of
your mother. She cherished you . . . . I didn't know anyone
who listened to her children the way your mother did. It
wasn't in fashion at the time. She'd point out things and ask,
'What is that, Fox? What do you think it does?' And she'd
really listen to your explanation, whether it was right or
not. I thought, 'That's really smart. She's teaching him to
think.' It sounds so obvious now, but it wasn't then.
"I suppose it sounds wrong to say you were in love, but mothers
and children are in love, in a very innocent way. The two of you
were obviously mad about each other."
Mulder bent his head, remembering a time when he and his mother
were in love, when she was the sunlight at the center of his
little universe. Then something had gotten in the way, whether
it was C.G.B. Spender or a multi-national abduction conspiracy or
just the mismatch of personalities that sometimes happened
between parents and children. But after a while Fox's questions
and hypotheses stopped being cute and became threatening, and his
mother didn't want to listen anymore. Maybe that was why he felt
so cheated by her death. Some people were able to recapture the
tenderness of their early years at the end of their parents'
lives, when the care-taking roles were reversed. His mother had
not been interested. Did she not trust him? Did she really not
love him?
Mulder looked up and said, "Mrs. Luce? Do your kids a favor and
let them take care of you. Maybe you don't need it, but they
do."
She drew breath as though she meant to argue with him, but then
her expression softened, as if something, maybe pity, had
persuaded her to let the dispute go. He hoped it wasn't pity.
Mulder's hair really wasn't long enough for her to brush it out
of his eyes, but she made the gesture anyway. "I'll keep that
in mind," she said.
For a while he leaned with his chin in his hand, done crying,
mostly, and just looked at her. The mushy 50's song on the radio
made him feel like they were two teenagers in a soda shop: "Life
can never be exactly like we want it to be. I can be satisfied
just knowing that you love me . . ."
On second thought, the goofy-teen feeling was different. He got
that sometimes with Scully. He and Mrs. Luce were more like a
mother and her four-year-old, almost-lovers for an afternoon.
Silly. Well, maybe not so silly. Perhaps long acquaintance with
this sensible, self-reliant lady had influenced his choice of a
woman who could take out a flesh-regenerating mutant with a
defibrillator. And Scully had done it in 4-inch heels, for God's
sake -- the thought still gave him cheap thrills.
He'd really been pretty fortunate in the women in his life;
maybe letting go with grace was one way to show appreciation.
"You remember telling me that you and my parents would still be
around until Joey and I didn't need you so much anymore?" Mulder
asked.
She blinked at him. "I said that?"
"So when exactly did you expect that to be?"
"I . . . suppose I assumed that you wouldn't remember it by the
time you were old enough to know what a lie that was."
Mulder broke into a rare laugh. "That's what I thought." He
began to feel, if not comforted, then at least a grief that was
closer to love than abandonment.
The Shirelles continued their mildly annoying lullaby: "Each
night before you go to bed my baby, Whisper a little prayer for
me my baby . . ."
Maybe it was time to start tying up the loose ends of his
mother's life. For instance, he hadn't gotten her a tombstone.
He didn't know what date to put on it. Scully had written
"February 6 or 7" on the death certificate. She was a
conservative pathologist who refused to go out on a limb with
time of death estimates, and in this instance her carefulness
irked him.
//Fine, I'll just put '2000.' Let 'em guess. 'Christina Mulder,
1941 - 2000.' No, wait, she had 'Teena' on her license. Did she
change it legally? I don't know. Hell.// Actually, he was
pretty sure the name had originally been Krystina, sister of
Katarin and Margrieta, who had quickly become Teena, Kathy and
Margie for the same reason their mother gave up the Jewish
religion in favor of a pale sort of Protestantism. Europe had
not been good to their family.
//So we've got the religion, the death date and the name all in
doubt. Phenomenal.// What *did* he know about the woman he'd
lived with for nearly eighteen years? Mrs. Luce said she'd
cherished him.
Maybe.
While he brooded, the Shirelles song, insubstantial as a kiss,
drew to its end: " . . . and tell all the stars above, This is
dedicated to the one I love."
It would have been funny, if only he hadn't started to cry.
*****
break room, but it did have two vending machines in a stairwell.
Mulder had gotten his first real meal of the day out of those.
He sat on the stairs, finishing off a soggy chicken salad
sandwich and a Pepsi. He hoped that the caffeine would help
nurse his adrenaline rush along for a little while longer. He
could already feel the bone-deep fatigue that would set in once
that energy wore off.
There was a fair chance that the interview he'd just done would
only be round one. If the polygraph poked holes in McBer's story
he might want to try and explain them away, and Mulder wouldn't
deny him the opportunity. In his experience, just about every
suspect who remained talkative after a bad polygraph convicted
himself.
He glanced at his watch and saw that it was after three. He
wondered what Scully was doing. The last time he'd seen her he'd
gotten the distinct impression she was trying to get rid of him.
His phone was in his jacket pocket, lying on the steps beside
him. He dug it out and dialed her cell number. After several
rings a cheerful voice told him, "The cellular unit you are
trying to reach is turned off or out of the service area."
Mulder punched the "off" button and told himself not to read too
much into that. Maybe she was sleeping. Probably Darkest
Chilmark didn't even have a cell tower. Still, he couldn't shake
the mental image of her wandering over some godforsaken up-island
ridge, her injured hands tucked into her pockets for warmth,
searching for something she didn't want to talk to him about.
He'd done similar things before.
It didn't mean he had to like it when she did them.
His thoughts were interrupted when Joe opened the door to the
stairwell. Mulder stood up, dusting crumbs off his lap. "How'd
it go?" he asked. He suspected that McBer and his accomplice
had plotted against Kristie but were prevented from carrying out
their plan by paranormal events. Conspiracy to commit murder
could still draw a life sentence in Massachusetts, however.
Joe seemed weary as he said, "McBer passed all the questions
about the homicide. The box said he was telling the truth when
he told us he didn't kill Kristie and didn't know who did."
Mulder nodded. That fit with his earlier assessment of paranormal
activity. "What about meeting her and making threats?"
"He flunked."
//Got the sonofabitch.// He felt a surge of energy, but the feeling
was more grim than satisfying. Vindication was always bittersweet
when you were a prophet of doom. "What about the contract part?
You get him on hiring a killer?"
The other man shook his head. "That one was inconclusive. What
we've got is good enough for a warrant -- when the State Police
go through his phone records maybe they can establish a
connection to somebody."
Mulder had his doubts, but he agreed it was worth a shot. "Does
McBer want to talk to me some more?"
"I think that's about that last thing he wants. When I left he
was asking to call his lawyer. I think Davis is done with you
for the day. Speaking of which, you know what time it is?" Joe
pulled his pager from the pocket of his borrowed uniform and
looked down at the screen as if it might bite.
"It's about quarter after three," Mulder told him.
"Oh, man . . ." Joe said, pushing the pager's display-change
button again and again. "I had this thing turned off in the
interview room. My sister's going to kill me. I'm supposed to
be home by now. Someone has to stay with my mom while Cheryl
goes to work."
"Your mom's not sick, is she?" Mulder asked. He had always liked
Mrs. Luce.
Joe gave him a strange look. "It's just the MS. The same thing
she'd had for 20 years."
Mulder hadn't known she had anything. He tried to recall what he
knew about multiple sclerosis, which wasn't much. "Is it bad?"
he asked.
"Your dad didn't tell you any of this?" Joe asked.
"My dad and I didn't talk much," Mulder said. For years Mulder
and his father saw each other only at weddings and funerals, and
then it was pretty much just funerals. It got so whenever Mulder
heard his father's voice on the phone he wondered who had died.
"That's too bad," Joe replied. He seemed about to ask a
question, but something in Mulder's expression must have made him
change his mind. He looked away. "Anyway . . . I need to give
Tom Brennan back his uniform. This thing is driving me crazy."
He tugged at the jail officer's too-tight shirt.
"Hey, Joe?"
"Yeah?"
"You think your mom would mind if I went out there? Just to see
her . . . you know. It's been a long time."
"No, she wouldn't mind." He looked surprised but not displeased
at the request. "She'd probably like that."
Mulder was glad. He hadn't gotten over his own mother deciding
that she never needed to see him again. He wanted somebody's
mother to be happy to see him.
*****
Later, the two of them sat in Joe's blue Mercury, driving west on
Rural Route 1 toward Chilmark. The first several minutes were
quiet and awkward. Somehow the close confines of the car made
all the things unsaid between them harder to ignore. Mulder
spent the time watching the familiar, oddly-named cross streets
go by: Quenomica; Old Purchase; Dark Woods Road.
He broke the silence as they passed Martha's Vineyard Airport,
roughly the halfway mark. "So, tell me about your mom," Mulder
said, looking over at Joe.
"Her health was really pretty good until recently," Joe said. He
kept his gaze on the road, which probably made talking about this
sort of thing easier. "Actually she used to drive a van a lot
like McBer's until her coordination got so bad she couldn't stop
at red lights anymore. That was scary as hell. She spun out on
bone-dry pavement and put the van into a ditch." Joe shook his
head. He had a slightly distant look in his eyes, as if he were
seeing the accident all over again. "Cher and I had this whole
care plan all worked out, but we were still thinking 'someday,'
not 'today.' It didn't matter -- none of it went the way we
thought it would, anyway. We both ended up moving back to the
old house again, if you can believe that."
Mulder tried to imagine himself moving back in with his mother at
the age of 38. The idea was sobering. Joe continued, "We're
lucky that Cheryl's a visiting nurse. Between me and her and her
co-workers at VNA, Mom's got pretty close to round-the-clock
care. Not that it always helps. The other week she accidentally
put her hand down on a hot burner. The whole thing is making her
nuts -- she's been on her own since my dad died in '66, and now
all of a sudden she's dependent. Sometimes I think she hates us
for trying to taking care of her. You know you try to prepare
yourself for the role reversal when your parents get older, but
until it happens to you, you have no idea."
"I guess not," Mulder said. His own mother had chosen to die
rather than reverse those particular roles with him.
Joe glanced over, seeming embarrassed. "I'm sorry -- I didn't
mean you personally had no idea. You just lost your mother. Of
course you do."
"No. My mother's death was kind of . . . sudden," Mulder said.
He was unable to keep the edge of bitterness out of his voice.
"Oh."
Awkwardness again. Mulder gave conversation another shot. "I
was wondering, how did you find out about me profiling James
Sproule?" he asked.
"Your dad told me," Joe said.
"You sure? I don't think I ever talked to him about that."
"Of course I'm sure. He showed me the guy's mug shot in the
paper. I said Sproule looked like a librarian, and he agreed
with me. I was sure I'd never have pegged him."
"My name didn't come up in the article, did it?" Mulder asked.
He didn't see why it would, since he hadn't made the actual
arrest. On the other hand, he didn't see how else his father
could have known -- at least not through legitimate news sources.
"To tell you the truth, I didn't read it. Your dad stopped by
the station while I was trying to do about five other things. I
looked at the picture, said the guy looked like a librarian, and
said good for you -- you caught a maniac."
"Did you and my dad talk often?" Mulder asked.
"Not all that often. Every now and then."
Mulder nodded. He preferred to think his dad never talked to
anybody except at funerals. He didn't want that treatment to be
especially for him.
"Is it a problem?" Joe asked.
Mulder turned to the window so his face wouldn't give anything
away. "He didn't talk to me."
They passed groves of tupelo trees and frost-covered cranberry
orchards without speaking. At last, Joe said, "I was worried
about that."
"About what?" Mulder asked.
"Sometimes I got the impression he hoped I would relay messages
so he wouldn't have to call you himself. I told him I wasn't the
person he should be talking to. I told him we weren't in
contact, but it didn't seem to make a difference."
Mulder kept his gaze focused on the landscape outside. With
studied nonchalance, he asked, "What did he say?"
"Different things. Positive things, mostly. He thought a lot of
you."
Mulder wanted to believe what Joe said was true. He wanted to
believe a lot of things about his father. Finally he asked, "You
still have a funny feeling about my dad and my sister's
disappearance?"
The question seemed to make Joe uncomfortable. "I don't know,
Fox . . ."
Mulder turned and glared him. "You 'don't know?' You guys
practically ran my family out of town, and you don't know?"
"I was ten years old when you lost your sister. I didn't know
what I thought about anything. We had that fight in what --
1978? It's been over longer than either of us was alive at the
time. Can't you drop it?"
"It's not over," Mulder said. He returned his gaze to the window
and added, "It will never be over." Not so long as he
remembered her.
"The part about me being a smartass fifteen-year-old is over,"
Joe said. "Thank God we don't have to stay the people we were 20
years ago."
The thought of two grown men, approaching middle age, scrapping
like schoolboys in a sandlot was ridiculous. Joe had a point.
Mulder glowered at the junction between earth and sky until he'd
convinced himself that he was angry at fate and not the man next
to him. Scully would tell him to relax: //Relax, Mulder. You
can go kick Fate's ass another day.// He felt some of the
tension leave his muscles. "Sorry."
"It's all right," Joe said. "And I'm not jerking you around. I
really don't know how to answer your question. None of it makes
sense to me. Logic tells me it's not real likely your sister
would vanish the way she did without your family being involved,
but I saw what happened to your parents after they lost her. It
was killing them. The police interviewed you guys separately,
together, the day after it happened, six months after . . . .
I know you've seen the interview transcripts because I'm the one
who mailed them to you after you wrote for them under FOIA. The
only story that changed was yours, and you went from remembering
nothing to talking about bright lights and who-knows-what. Even
that makes no sense at all. I can't explain any of it."
Mulder didn't want to argue anymore. Joe's words made him feel
very tired. "Welcome to my life," he said.
*****
The first several minutes at the Luce house were chaos -- Cheryl
had to get to work, her kids were supposed to be at their
father's, Joe offered to take them but didn't know who would stay
with his mother, and Mrs. Luce kept insisting she did not need a
babysitter. Mulder's offer to stay at the house was accepted
with a gratitude that surprised him. He wasn't sure if this
meant old grudges had truly been forgotten or if domestic turmoil
had driven the Luce family to acts of insanity.
At any rate, he and Mrs. Luce soon had the house to themselves.
The two of them sat at the scarred oak dining table, he in a
slat-backed chair, resting his chin in his hand, she in an
electric scooter, running purple chenille yarn through a tabletop
loom. Sam Cooke's "You Send Me" played faintly from a radio in
the kitchen.
"So what's that going to be?" he asked, gesturing at the purple
fabric that was taking shape.
She smiled as if the question amused her. "Maybe a placemat,
maybe a scarf. Depends on how quickly I get tired of weaving it.
Really it's just something to do with my hands." Despite Joe's
concerns, she looked perfectly healthy. Her blue eyes were clear
and alert, and she carried herself like a young pine: as if her
resiliency more than made up for any strength lost to lack of
straightness. Still, Mulder hadn't been quite prepared for her
white hair or the way the bones in her hands stood out. It
wasn't lost on him that the kitchen radio had a knitting needle
taped on as an antenna extender. He wondered when she'd given up
knitting.
"You know I still have those mittens you made me," he said.
Well, in a sense he still had them. He suspected they were in a
box buried in a storage unit in Greenwich, Connecticut.
She looked up at him. "Which ones?" Then she seemed to
remember. "Oh! The ones where I let you pick the colors." Five-
year-old Fox had picked every color she had, including the ones
he'd never heard of: sepia, saffron, vermilion, aubergine.
"They matched everything," he said.
"Except each other. That's right."
"I'm surprised you were so nice to me, considering," Mulder said.
At age five, he'd been just as fond of asking impossible
questions as he was at age thirty-eight, and he'd been less
tactful at the time.
"You were a good boy," said Mrs. Luce, as if laying to rest
persistent rumors to the contrary.
"Sure, good at driving you up a wall."
She spoke in a comfortably distracted way as she tapped the
newest row of yarn into place: "Mm -- you had an edge to you,
yes, but I always thought there was a lot of anxiety behind that.
Your mother seemed to be the same way: very intense, very --
anxious to please, maybe?"
Mulder smiled a little, remembering that side of her. "She had a
greater interest in conformity than I did. I used to embarrass
her." He remembered her reminding him to keep his inquisitive
streak in check as she zipped up his jacket: "Don't ask about the
accident or bother Mrs. Luce with questions. She has enough to
worry about as it is. Remember, you're there to be polite and to
help make Joey feel better. If he or Mrs. Luce wants to talk
about the funeral they'll let you know, so don't bring it up.
And Fox, do not ask questions about why God kills people before
taking them to heaven or what it's like to be dead." Budding
investigator that he was, the hush-hush treatment of death and
dying had merely obsessed him with the subject.
Trying to keep his voice as neutral as possible, he asked, "How
well did you know my mother?"
She paused in her work, perhaps hearing something significant in
the question. "Reasonably well, though I can't say we were
close. We never talked about much besides our children. Why do
you ask?"
"I guess . . ." He ran his fingertips over a dent in the table.
Somehow, it was easier to talk when he wasn't looking at her. "I
guess because lately I've been wondering how well I knew her."
He heard her set down her shuttle. "Has something happened?"
He hoped he'd said this enough times that he would stay calm when
talking about it. "I lost her recently." The tremor was minor,
but he could feel the telltale stillness inside of him, like
something was in free fall. He briefly considered not going on.
When he spoke again, his voice broke like glass: "She never told
me she was sick."
The pressure building in his chest was probably a sob, but he
never found out if he contained it. A seizure-vision kicked in
instead. The sensation of reality shifting was physical, like
falling onto a slab of concrete and passing straight through.
He was five years old, leaning with his back against the Luces'
front door. The house smelled like funeral flowers. Mr. Luce's
shoes, caked with dried mud, rested on a sheet of old newspaper
beside him. The shoes made Fox uneasy. He didn't think they
should be there.
Flowers were sitting in vases and jars all over the house, but he
couldn't talk about them because he wasn't supposed to say
"funeral." He wasn't supposed to say "dying" or "dead" or
"killed" either, but those words stayed in his head and worried
him. What if he got confused and said something bad by accident?
No, he should say 'by mistake' -- he wasn't supposed to talk
about accidents, either.
He had said and done some bad things at the funeral and his dad
had taken him out and smacked him. He was ashamed of that. He
hadn't been able to explain that the church was a bad place for
him to be and that staying there had been like not being able to
breathe. He thought Mr. Luce might feel the same way inside his
wooden box.
Fox heard grownup footsteps on the stairs and fought the urge to
suck his fingers like a baby. He wrapped his hand around the
doorknob instead. Mrs. Luce came downstairs, wearing jeans and a
ponytail like a teenager, but with a laundry basket balanced on
her hip like a mom.
She stopped on the last step and asked, "What's the matter?"
"Whose shoes are those?" Fox asked softly, although he was sure
he knew.
She looked at him a moment, then turned to look out the window at
the squirrels snatching seeds out of the birdfeeder. Fox worried
that she'd walk right by him without speaking. Sometimes his mom
did that after he asked a bad question. That hurt his feelings
worse than any spanking ever hurt.
Instead, Mrs. Luce put down the basket and sat on the stairs.
She looked like she might want to cry. "Those are Joey and
Cheryl's daddy's shoes," she said.
Fox's own daddy's shoes were in the same place at home. "Is he
here?" he asked, still very quiet.
She shook her head. "No." She spoke so softly it was almost not
a word.
"Then why are they here?" He didn't understand how a man could
line up his muddy shoes neatly by the door and then walk away
forever. How could there still be muddy shoes after a father had
died? How could everything look just the same?
"They bother you? You want me to get rid of them?" She seemed
to dislike him just then.
Fox nodded slowly. He did not want to make her angry. It was
only that a man who was dead and in a box should not have his
shoes waiting for him by the door. It was too sad to think
they'd wait and wait and he'd never come home to wear them.
"Fine." She got up and walked to the edge of the newspaper, but
then she just stood there. Fox got the idea she was thinking
about leaving the shoes there and sending him home instead.
Finally she picked them up, newspaper and all, and tossed them in
the closet. She shut the door as if there were a wild animal on
the other side. "Is that better?"
Fox was too upset to answer. He wished she would send him home.
This house had a crushing feeling in it even worse than at the
funeral. He gave in to his babyish desire and sucked the two
middle fingers of his left hand.
Mrs. Luce started to look less angry and more sad as she watched
him comfort himself. "Is this about your daddy?" Her voice
reminded him of the way a top jittered and shook just before it
fell down. "Are you scared your daddy will go away and not come
home?" Fox nodded.
Light footsteps sounded on the wooden floor. Joey had given up
playing alone in the back room and stood near the dining table,
twisting the hem of his shirt in his hands. "Come here," Mrs.
Luce said, holding her hands out to both children.
She sat on the stairs and pulled them into her lap. "It was an
accident. It was an accident with a little tiny boat out on the
big water. Joey's daddy didn't mean to leave us. He made a
mistake and took the little boat out farther than it could go. He
didn't do it on purpose." Fox curled into the hollow of her
shoulder and wondered why she kept saying that. It had never
occurred to him that a parent would die on purpose and leave his
child.
Mrs. Luce rocked them. "What happened to Joey's daddy isn't going
to happen to me, and it isn't going to happen to your mommy and
daddy, Fox. We're going to be here for a long, long time, until
you're all grown up and you don't need us so much anymore." It
would have been easier to believe if she wasn't crying when she
said it.
Mulder's awareness returned to the present-day in sections. The
sensation of his body hunched over the table came first. Mrs.
Luce's voice, reedier than he remembered but still soothing,
formed a bewildering bridge between the past and the present.
"Fox, what is it? What's the matter?"
At first he thought he was crying. Then he realized he wasn't --
he was trying not to be sick. He sat with his eyes closed, his
forehead resting on his balled fists. Sam Cooke was still
warbling in the background: " . . . you thrill me, honest you do,
honest you do." The flashback must have lasted only seconds.
This was not one of the waking nightmares of PTSD -- those
happened in real time. This was something electrochemical --
something deep. He could almost hear the thin whine of Goldman's
drill as he'd prepared to tunnel into Mulder's cerebral cortex,
rooting for memories. He'd found some, all right. He turned his
thoughts away from the vision of C.G.B. Spender pulling his
mother close.
Mulder knocked the chair over as he got up. "Sorry," he
muttered. He walked into the kitchen and turned on the tap,
rinsing the sick taste from his mouth with handful after cupped
handful of water.
Mrs. Luce's electric scooter buzzed as she came up behind him.
"Are you all right? I don't understand what's happening. Should
I call the hospital?"
He shook his head. He knew he owed her some kind of explanation.
Which one should he give her -- the holes in his head or the
alien virus that was slowly re-writing the genetic code in his
brain? No contest -- it was neither.
Between rinsing and spitting he said: "'S a head injury -- old
one. I'll be all right. Just gimme a minute."
"For God's sake, Fox, are you seeing a doctor?"
"Yeah." Since the beginning of March, actually. Oh, Scully's
God would put a big, black mark in the book next to his name for
that one.
When he was finally done washing his mouth out, he soaked a dish
towel in cold water, wrung it out and went to sit back down. He
placed the towel on the back of his neck. "I'm sorry," he said.
He was dimly aware that he'd been apologizing to her since the
seizure hit him.
"Don't be sorry. What can I do for you?" She positioned her
scooter next to him and sponged his neck and forehead with the
dishcloth.
He interrupted her by shaking his head. "Just tell me . . . did
she love us?"
"Did who love you -- your mother?"
He nodded.
Mrs. Luce sat back as if to better read his expression. Mulder
wondered what she saw there that seemed to concern her so much.
"Of course she loved you. Of course. Why would you even ask
that?"
"She had this whole other life . . ."
"A woman's life doesn't start when her children are born, you
know," she said.
"It's not that. There's this man, his name is C.G.B. Spender."
Mulder hesitated to tell her the rest. It seemed especially
wicked to impugn the character of a woman who was no longer alive
to defend herself. He remembered how his mother had slapped him
in her hurt and outrage. //"I am your mother and I will not stand
here and listen to your accusations."//
//I have to know,// Mulder thought, maybe making justifications
to himself, maybe to the spirit of his mother. "I know Spender
was around when I was young. I've seen pictures of him with my
parents. He told me . . . he came right out and told me he's my
father. He implied that he's Samantha's, too."
Mrs. Luce rested the damp rag in her lap. There was horror in
her expression, and compassion as well, but no shock, Mulder
thought. Definitely not shock. Perhaps Churchill had looked so
when Paris fell.
"Bill Mulder was your father." She spoke firmly, as if reminding
him of a duty he had forgotten. "He fed you. He clothed you.
He saw that you got an education."
"I'm not denying that. I'm not saying I'm not grateful. It's
just -- what if it's true? Forget not knowing who my father was,
I'd feel like I hardly knew who my mother was," Mulder said.
She looked at him hard. "Bill Mulder was your father." Her
words had a finality to them, like a door closing.
That front was clearly futile, and Mulder turned away from it.
"There's other things," he said. It was hard to talk while
looking into that steady blue gaze, so he got up and wandered
over to the door to the kitchen. The radio had started playing
that damn Shirelles song: "While I'm far away from you my baby,
I know it's hard for you my baby . . ." The last fucking thing he
was in the mood for.
"I think my mother knew what was going to happen to Samantha.
Not that she could have stopped it, but she knew. And she never
told me. She let me spend all those years looking." He kept his
gaze on the little window over the sink. The orange berries of
an ash tree growing outside were the only spot of color against
the late winter landscape.
He heard Mrs. Luce sigh. "The past is what you make it, Fox.
Why make it terrible?"
He spoke as if he hadn't heard. "The last thing she said to me
was, 'There's so much I've left unsaid, for reasons I hope one
day you'll understand.' Actually, she said it to my machine.
She didn't even wait for me to get home . . ." His disordered
mind offered up sensations: the smell of cold ashes, a leaky gas
line making his eyes water. He remembered the picture frames
lying around empty but not the tableau on the couch. //Please,
God, don't let me have seen that . . .// He knew she'd used a
plastic bag -- probably got that idea from "Final Exit." It was
always bad when they used plastic. He remembered what had been
left of Ed Paulsen when they finally caught up with him in that
cabin outside Marquette -- and what wasn't left. Plastic was
like a little greenhouse. //Dammit, Paulsen had been dead for
weeks. This is different.// He had a dim mental image of the
blue-and-white couch and felt sick. He'd probably seen. //Oh,
Scully . . . why didn't you keep me out of there?//
In tears, he turned to Mrs. Luce, hoping she'd distract him from
what he couldn't remember seeing and never wanted to see again.
"She'd -- she'd taken the pictures and things, you know? She
burned 'em in the trash basket. I mean, why would she do that?
Like . . . like s-she wanted to wipe out everything to do with
her life, or maybe just about Samantha and me . . ."
"Fox, slow down. I don't understand." Mrs. Luce held her hand
out to him, the way she had when he was five and afraid of Mr.
Luce's shoes.
He walked by her and sat down. She rubbed his shoulder in little
circles. When he felt calmer he continued, "My mother . . . she
committed suicide, Mrs. Luce. She had cancer, but that's not how
she wanted to die. I guess it was her right. Maybe I wouldv'e
seen it her way in time, I don't know. But she never told me.
She had the will and the papers all drawn up, she bought a
goddamn grave plot and she never told me. I didn't figure into
this carefully thought-out plan. I mean, we'd had some
arguments; I accused her of some things. But I thought it was
mostly okay between us. Now I don't know. Do you think . . . do
you think she'd do this to hurt me? Because I sure have a hard
time seeing it any other way."
"I wish I knew what to tell you." Mrs. Luce took his hand in her
free one, and Mulder noticed the brown burn marks on her fingers,
as Joe had described. He covered her fingers with his own. "I
just can't reconcile what you're telling me with what I knew of
your mother. She cherished you . . . . I didn't know anyone
who listened to her children the way your mother did. It
wasn't in fashion at the time. She'd point out things and ask,
'What is that, Fox? What do you think it does?' And she'd
really listen to your explanation, whether it was right or
not. I thought, 'That's really smart. She's teaching him to
think.' It sounds so obvious now, but it wasn't then.
"I suppose it sounds wrong to say you were in love, but mothers
and children are in love, in a very innocent way. The two of you
were obviously mad about each other."
Mulder bent his head, remembering a time when he and his mother
were in love, when she was the sunlight at the center of his
little universe. Then something had gotten in the way, whether
it was C.G.B. Spender or a multi-national abduction conspiracy or
just the mismatch of personalities that sometimes happened
between parents and children. But after a while Fox's questions
and hypotheses stopped being cute and became threatening, and his
mother didn't want to listen anymore. Maybe that was why he felt
so cheated by her death. Some people were able to recapture the
tenderness of their early years at the end of their parents'
lives, when the care-taking roles were reversed. His mother had
not been interested. Did she not trust him? Did she really not
love him?
Mulder looked up and said, "Mrs. Luce? Do your kids a favor and
let them take care of you. Maybe you don't need it, but they
do."
She drew breath as though she meant to argue with him, but then
her expression softened, as if something, maybe pity, had
persuaded her to let the dispute go. He hoped it wasn't pity.
Mulder's hair really wasn't long enough for her to brush it out
of his eyes, but she made the gesture anyway. "I'll keep that
in mind," she said.
For a while he leaned with his chin in his hand, done crying,
mostly, and just looked at her. The mushy 50's song on the radio
made him feel like they were two teenagers in a soda shop: "Life
can never be exactly like we want it to be. I can be satisfied
just knowing that you love me . . ."
On second thought, the goofy-teen feeling was different. He got
that sometimes with Scully. He and Mrs. Luce were more like a
mother and her four-year-old, almost-lovers for an afternoon.
Silly. Well, maybe not so silly. Perhaps long acquaintance with
this sensible, self-reliant lady had influenced his choice of a
woman who could take out a flesh-regenerating mutant with a
defibrillator. And Scully had done it in 4-inch heels, for God's
sake -- the thought still gave him cheap thrills.
He'd really been pretty fortunate in the women in his life;
maybe letting go with grace was one way to show appreciation.
"You remember telling me that you and my parents would still be
around until Joey and I didn't need you so much anymore?" Mulder
asked.
She blinked at him. "I said that?"
"So when exactly did you expect that to be?"
"I . . . suppose I assumed that you wouldn't remember it by the
time you were old enough to know what a lie that was."
Mulder broke into a rare laugh. "That's what I thought." He
began to feel, if not comforted, then at least a grief that was
closer to love than abandonment.
The Shirelles continued their mildly annoying lullaby: "Each
night before you go to bed my baby, Whisper a little prayer for
me my baby . . ."
Maybe it was time to start tying up the loose ends of his
mother's life. For instance, he hadn't gotten her a tombstone.
He didn't know what date to put on it. Scully had written
"February 6 or 7" on the death certificate. She was a
conservative pathologist who refused to go out on a limb with
time of death estimates, and in this instance her carefulness
irked him.
//Fine, I'll just put '2000.' Let 'em guess. 'Christina Mulder,
1941 - 2000.' No, wait, she had 'Teena' on her license. Did she
change it legally? I don't know. Hell.// Actually, he was
pretty sure the name had originally been Krystina, sister of
Katarin and Margrieta, who had quickly become Teena, Kathy and
Margie for the same reason their mother gave up the Jewish
religion in favor of a pale sort of Protestantism. Europe had
not been good to their family.
//So we've got the religion, the death date and the name all in
doubt. Phenomenal.// What *did* he know about the woman he'd
lived with for nearly eighteen years? Mrs. Luce said she'd
cherished him.
Maybe.
While he brooded, the Shirelles song, insubstantial as a kiss,
drew to its end: " . . . and tell all the stars above, This is
dedicated to the one I love."
It would have been funny, if only he hadn't started to cry.
*****